Was reading Techcrunch this morning and saw the terrible news regarding the passing of Rob Williams. My thoughts go out to his family and friends. On top of this, I've been intently following the developing story of the four football players who were lost at sea (one rescued so far). I'm hoping for a good outcome there.
 
A friend of mine, Maurice, is an avid sailor and he suggested carrying an emergency homing GPS when embarking on any slightly adventurous trip. These things cost about $750-$1,000 but allow search and rescue teams to know exactly where you're at within a 50-75 foot radius, anywhere in the world. And Maurice definitely knows a thing or two about search and rescue - check out the video below.
 

I'm reading the Techcrunch post re: Twitter and it's Series C round of $35M. Congrats to them. In reading the comments, I noticed there was a fair amount of hate re: why anyone would continue to fund a company that doesn't have a revenue generating strategy in place. That's a legit stance. Still, I don't have as much pessimism about Twitter than I do about say, Facebook. For one, Twitter hasn't unveiled its revenue generating products yet. For all we know, it could hit a monster homerun. Facebook on the other hand has made several attempts at generating revenue with some success (and some failures - Beacon anyone?). Still, I'll reserve judgement until after they roll out those proposed revenue generating products.
 
One comment in particular was from a guy named Nathan:

Useless is a bit much. The service is useful to millions of people who use it multiple times every day. The issue isn't the usefulness of the service, it's the fact that it doesn't generate revenue. A big difference. Also, it seems that Nathan is a little bitter that his revenue generating start-up can't get funding. On that point, I feel for him. Fundraising is not easy. You'd be lucky to get one second meeting out of ten first meetings with investors. We've been fundraising for about a month and had to hear a lot of no's before we got to the handful of promising second/third meetings we are entering into now. Our business, like Nathan's, is not that sexy though we do generate revenue and have very strong growth projections.
 
The analogy I like to use is this. Someone comes up to you and asks for a million dollars to open a couple of Denny's franchises. The person provides solid sales numbers, tons of historical data, etc. and tells you that you'll most likely make back your money in 3-5 years and then receive a nice 10% dividend each year. Then another person comes and tells you they need a million dollars to open a new concept high-end restaurant with a new chef who has worked under the best chefs in the country. Who would you fund? My answer would be the Denny's franchise, but that's because I'm not rich and like the stability of a safe investment. For investors who already have money, the idea of a nice solid investment throwing off 10% just doesn't excite them. They need the next billion dollar payout - the next YouTube, Yahoo, or Google. Otherwise, they'd just go buy bonds and commodities.

I've posted before about Facebook and its valuation ... not always in the most optimistic light. I'm reading a post today about rumors that Bebo is being actively shopped by AOL. Now I'm doing some very very rough calculations based on some very very vague assumptions, but I think I might have undervalued Facebook.
 
My take has always been that Facebook should be valued at about 5 times revenue. I still hold to that value and have said I would revise my numbers should I get more detail into Facebook's real revenues. Well based on the TechCrunch post, Bebo is rumored to be valued at about $200 million which supposedly is two times its current annual revenues (or $100 million). I pulled some traffic numbers from QuantCast for both these guys:

Making a very simple assumption of traffic = revenue, I'll assume that Facebook has 11.47 times the revenue of Bebo or $1.147 billion. Based on that, my new valuation for them is about $5.735 billion. Still a far cry from the $15 billion valuation they raised their last round with but not too shabby. Again, this is a very rough estimate and who knows whether I'm still above or below their true revenue number. My hope is that Facebook is doing well and that they can still grow. We all know the Bay Area could use a big employer nowadays.

Valleywag is "reporting" that Steve Jobs is undergoing surgery today. There's speculation as to whether this is true or not. Michael Arrington wrote a post that Steve was actually in the office today (according to his source). My position on this doesn't center around whether the information is true or not. If it is true, then we should respect Steve's privacy and give him the time he and his family needs to recuperate. If not, people are just writing gossip for the sake of gossip and the report doesn't deserve another second of thought.
 
After reading the Valleywag article, I couldn't help but feel dirty. Has the technology industry reporting become like the tabloids? What next? Are we going to start hearing about high tech executives on x17online.com? Oh wait, too late. Every Jobs rumor overheard at a party or bar or toilet seems to be getting airtime. And to make matters worse, we're not reporting on the usual brainless tabloid topics - this is a person's health not what shoes they're wearing or who they're sleeping with. This goes beyond journalism's fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and borders on harassment. I know nobody reads my blog but just so I don't sound like a hypocrite, this will be the last item I write about Steve's health except to welcome him back in six months.