Blackberry - Accomplishments during First Stage of Transition

“I assure you that every employee in BlackBerry understands the level of commitment and work that is needed to get us into the next stage of our transformation”.

Let me start recapping what Blackberry accomplished in the past year during the first stage of their transition, which took the company from losses and burning cash at the start of the year to a sound liquidity position in the fourth quarter at the end of that very fiscal year. 

Changes last year started at the top, as Blackberry implemented significant changes at the Board level, adding three outside members with extensive mobile communications industry and business experience and also made senior management changes in BlackBerry.

They hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, a new Chief Operating Officer, a new Chief Legal Officer, and a new Executive Vice President to lead Global Human Resources Group and Department; all of them have extensive international experience in the mobile communications industry. This new executive team responded quickly to focusing on delivering strong BlackBerry 10 platform to the market and implementing personnel changes throughout the global organization, reducing layers of management and reducing complexity in Blackberry.

Promoting a high-performance culture throughout the entire organization has been a high-priority of Thorsten Heins, CEO of Blackberry throughout the first year. “We know who BlackBerry is and we know it’s driven by its people and we will continue to invest in all those activities that reinvigorate this competitive culture of the company” says Thorsten.

Blackberry also implemented significant and major changes throughout the organization and significantly reduced their cost base with CORE programs and saved $1 billion within one year. They launched the program actually at the start of the year and achieved their savings target of full quarter ahead of the schedule. Not only did the benefits from this cost reduction program show up in terms of better financial results, but they also put Blackberry in a position to reinvest in the new platform in this coming year.

Additionally, the CORE program helped also to create a new attitude and a new culture shift in the company where teams continually look at how to innovate faster but also how to do things much more efficiently than in the past. Collaboration between their teams and supplier base also resulted in a much more efficient supply chain. Over the past year, Blackberry moved from four manufacturing partners down to two and reduced their manufacturing sites from ten to four and also outsourced global repair operations.

Now because of all these significant changes, at present Blackberry’s costs are lower, working capital performance is strong, they see way better production yields and established a much more robust supply chain that is resulting in a much more efficient way of building products. While they’ve reduced cost and drove efficiency in the company, Blackberry has also invested significantly in this huge transformation of their application ecosystem. At launch of BlackBerry 10, they had the higher number of apps available compared to any mobile ecosystem at platform launch.

Thorsten Heins added, “We started with 70,000 global BlackBerry 10 apps at launch and as of today, we have reached a number of over 120,000. And also over the past year, we reestablished credibility with our carrier and distribution partners with the introduction of BlackBerry 10 and BES 10. While we are satisfied with the reception of BlackBerry 10 in various regions, we fully understand as the management team that we still have a way to go in the U.S. market as the most ferocious and the most competitive market in our industry”.

See Also: Blackberry Limited Three-Phase Transformation Plan and Vision

Blackberry delivered their new devices, Z10, Q10, Q5, and also delivered on BES 10 Enterprise Management Service which have been designed to give enterprise and consumers more features, more flexibility and the ability to do things smarter and faster.

Talking about financial strength, Blackberry established a strong balance sheet. Last year at this time, they had $2 billion in cash and no debt on the company. By year end, cash flow was up to $2.9 billion and this was accomplished despite incurring restructuring cost of $220 million, as well as supplying other funding commitments. BlackBerry delivered on significant change in the past year and importantly, delivered on their commitment in the areas that they said they would deliver.

“Let me be very clear while we have made all this great progress and while we are proud of what we achieved in the first phase of our transition, we are still in the midst of a major complex transition of this company” said Heins. And as you may understand like most of these major transformations of companies, progress can be volatile and it can be volatile in the short-term basis.

Thorsten Heins further added, “I assure you that every employee in BlackBerry understands the level of commitment and work that is needed to get us into the next stage of our transformation. While this year, we are all embarking on the second stage of this very transformation and it will involve additional investment and it will also involve a continued drive for efficiency throughout our organization”.

BlackBerry Limited Three-Phase Transformation Plan & Vision

In Thorsten Heins’ own words explaining Blackberry’s three-phase transformation plan:

"I told you that the company would undergo significant change at all levels of the company because we needed to change. BlackBerry 10 was late. Our cost structure was too high. We needed management changes, our application development was low and the corporate culture needed to go through a necessary change in order to adapt for the new BlackBerry acting in a very, very competitive market.

So to address these challenges, we implemented and established the three-phase transformation plan for BlackBerry and we understood we had to work quickly, but we were also realistic and knew that to ensure a sustainable improvement, it would take more than a few quarters to get where we want to be.

First Phase was really the survive stage for the company and we needed to refocus the organization to deliver on commitments to reduce cost, to deliver BlackBerry 10, to maintain a strong liquidity position, to ensure our products where relevant and change the company’s sentiment out there in the public.

Second Phase of our transformation, which we’re just starting now, is to build and to invest into the future, primarily around four key value drivers that are our BES 10 Enterprise Service platform which would include secure cross platform, data and voice capabilities.

Our BlackBerry 10 devices, including targeting vertical specific opportunities as well, unlocking the opportunity with BlackBerry Messenger with the view of BBM for everyone and developing opportunities for our BlackBerry global data network beyond our traditional users.

This stage the second phase is all about building scale for our products and solutions, and we are working hard to move our installed base to BlackBerry 10 and BES 10 as we speak, and also to make BBM the mobile social networking platform of choice.

Third Phase is about benefiting from those massive changes and a significant investment we will have made in Phase 1 and 2.

In this phase, we will focus on returning the company back to profitability and establishing a leadership position in mobile computing with new services and new industries.

In Phase 3, we anticipate BlackBerry 10 becoming a leading secure mobile computing platform for a variety of endpoints, such as smartphones, but you can also think CORE, you can think machine to machine or what people just call the internet of things.

Devices and customers will be connected through a global secure and reliable BlackBerry data network. It’s one of the largest secure data networks out there. It connects 175 countries with 654 carriers connected to that network".

Check out: Waiting Eagerly, Troublesome Blackberry

Vision:

So with this vision, Blackberry moved from mobile communication to mobile computing. So all of these endpoints, not just smartphones, all the mobile computing endpoints that are out there can be managed as a service by BES 10 across platform and this will make BES 10 the leading Mobile Enterprise Services platform.

The company also anticipates that BlackBerry Messenger will have achieved an even larger scale than today and serve as a consumer messaging and communications platform.

Blackberry also anticipates that secure corporate collaboration will also be key in the future mobile computing environment as corporation’s being led by technology-savvy generation goes social in managing their business and servicing their customers.

Blackberry’s transformation is ongoing and it is in no way easy as many challenges are still remaining in front of them, but “We are realistic about what is required to move our transformation forward in a timely manner towards the success” says Thorsten Heins.

A Speech to Remember – Best & Worst

Best Speech Ever: Barack Obama, is the most powerful man in the world and one of the best orators ever. This was the speech he delivered before he won the elections in 2008. The then Senator Mr. Barack Obama rattled the audiences all over the world with this exhilarating speech. This speech is like something that we would expect straight out of a Hollywood movie, and it also represents why he won the elections twice. One of the best speeches I have ever heard, got the audiences on their feet and he won the world over.

Transcript of the first 4 mins from his speech is given below:

“…but understand this argument that words don’t matter, the most important thing that we can do right now is to re-engage the American people in the process of governments to get them excited and interested again in what works and what can work in our government to make politics cool again, and important again and relevant again. Don't tell me words don't matter, I have a dream, just words. We always chose to be self-evident, where all men are created equal, just words. We have nothing to fear but fear itself, just words, just speeches. Its true that speeches don’t solve all problems, but what is also true is if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, then it doesn't matter how many policies and plans we have and that is why I'm running for President of United States of America and that’s why we just won 8 elections straight because the American people want to believe in change again, don’t tell me words don’t matter.  Don’t tell me ideals and inspirations don’t matter, don’t tell me hope doesn’t matter its fascinating to me to see, that lately my campaign has been criticized because I talk about hope too much, ah, he’s talking about hope again, he’s so naïve, he’s so idealistic his head’s in the clouds, he’s a hope monger, he needs a reality check, he’s peddling false hopes.

 False hopes, the notion is apparently that if you talk about hope, you must not have a clear view of reality that you must just be you know going around happy as can be, ignorant of those mean republicans out there all the barriers that stand in your way. Its true I talk about hope a lot, I talk about hope because its very likely that I am standing on this stage here tonight. I was born to a teenage mom, my father left when I was 2. I was raised by a single mother and my grandparents. They didn’t have money and they didn’t have wealth. They had no status. They gave me love, they gave me an education, and they gave me hope and so I do talk about hope, we put hope on our side.

 I delivered a speech in Boston about hope, I wrote a book called the audacity of hope, but this notion that somehow hopes are false, that implies that hope is blind optimism, that you’re passive and you’re waiting and you’re shirking from a fight, that’s not what hope is, hope is not blind optimism, hope is not ignoring the challenges that stand in your way. I know how hard it will be to bring about change in this country. I know how hard its going to be to deliver on universal health care, if it was easy it would already have been done. I know how difficult it would be to bring about a sensible energy policy in this country. Exxon Mobil made eleven billion dollars this past quarter, they don’t want to give up their profits easily. I know how hard it will be to alleviate poverty in places like Intercity Milwaukee or the South Side of Chicago. That poverty has built up over generations, over centuries, same thing in the reservations. There's a long history there that we’ve never fully accounted for, I know how hard it will be to fix our schools…”

Worst political speech in history: Phil Davidson delivers one of the most terrible speeches during the nominations of candidates for GOP from Stark County. This candidate looks like he is freaking out and is probably going to take out a shotgun and start shooting. He is pumped up about the elections alright. While introducing himself as a nominee, he says that he has a ‘Masters in Communications’, really. One of the most hilarious speeches I have ever seen. This guy seriously needs to get himself some anti-depressants, and by the way, he LOST.  

Best Oscar Acceptance Speech ever: One of the best Oscar acceptance speeches was from Russell Crowe, when he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor in Gladiator. It was just so concise, delivered with all his grace, yet it was so heartfelt. The speech was just ordinary until the last 20 seconds that just stole the show for me, undoubtedly, one of the best Oscar Acceptance speeches of all time.

Check out: Eminem Quotes at its Best



Most Ecstatic Oscar Speech: When I hear ecstatic and speech together, one name that always comes up is Cuba Gooding JR, when he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Jerry Maguire. The surprise and genuinity of the speech was clearly understood by his emotions which he couldn’t control. He wasn’t trying to fake sophistication; the man was just happy and couldn’t control his emotions. It was rather funny.

 

Worst Oscar Speech ever: Mellissa Leo won the Oscar for Best Supporting actress for her role in ‘The Fighter’ (2010). These guys are professional performers, who woo millions of people on screen, but on the grandest stage of them all, they cannot handle a 3-minute speech. This is one of the most irritating speeches; Mellissa thinks she is still on screen acting. Mellissa Leo just starts acting freakily that she’s nervous and showing off every time she gets the chance to. It was just awful, and unpleasant to the eyes and ears. I hope she never wins again, so that I don’t have to watch something like that again.

Oracle Corporation Q2 Guidance & Oracle OpenWorld Highlights

Guidance for Q2 2014

New software license and cloud subscription revenue growth is expected to range from negative four to positive six in constant currency and negative six to positive four in recorded dollars.

Hardware product revenue is expected to range from negative 9% to positive 1% in constant dollar and negative 11% to negative 1% in reported dollar. As a result total revenue growth on both GAAP and non-GAAP basis is expected to range from 1% to 4% in constant dollars and negative one to positive two in U.S. dollars. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be somewhere between $0.65 and $0.70 on constant dollar $0.64 and $0.69 in reported dollars.

GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.51 to $0.66 in constant dollar and $0.60 to $0.55 in reported dollars. I want to remind you that last year Oracle had the benefit of $145 million acquisition related benefit for the pillar earn out. So excluding that benefit GAAP EPS last year would have been $0.61. This guidance assumes a tax rate of 23.5% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 24%. Of course it may end up being very different.

Check Out: Oracle Corporation Q1 2014 Financials and Operations 

Oracle OpenWorld

Starting next week, Oracle plans to have roughly 60,000 people at the event in San Francisco from 145 countries. They expect to have 2 million attendees online. So this is going to be the biggest one yet. They’ve got a great lineup of speakers; EMC, Dell, Fujitsu, Deloitte, Intel will be there.

They’ve got customers: LinkedIn, AT&T, Facebook, Electronics Arts, Thomson Reuters, New York Stock Exchange, Tesco, and Deutsche Telekom. I could just go on. It's going to be a great set of people from the industry, as well as customers, a very large attendee base.

And Oracle will make some significant product announcements at the event as well they’ll be introducing Oracle 12c in-memory database. Oracle will be talking about it being able to deliver 100x faster application performance using their new architectural approach. Oracle will also be talking about existing Oracle apps that can now run in the Oracle Database functionality without change when using this in-memory capability.

Oracle will have some releases in cloud and will talk about some releases in HCM and talent management, and also talk about database as a service, Java as a service that will be available to their customers.

So there'll be a whole slew of product announcements there that Larry Ellison will be talking about Sunday night and will continue on through the week. So we're excited about the upcoming activities at Oracle OpenWorld.

Oracle Corporation Q1 2014 Operations and Financials

Financials:

Safra A. Catz, President and Chief Financial Officer said, ‘We are committed to returning the value to our shareholders through earnings growth, share repurchases, and dividend’.

Currency in Q1 gave Oracle a 2% headwind for new software license and total revenue which was more than Safra’s guidance last quarter. Q1 for Oracle was really solid overall and quite strong in the Americas.

Software results were outstanding as total software revenues were 6.1 billion up 8% from last year. Software update and product support revenues were more than half of the total revenue at nearly 4.4 billion, up 8% from last year. Attach rate and renewal rate remain at their usual high level and software update and product support continue to power earnings and cash flow. New software license revenues were 1.7 billion, up 6% from last year.

Looking at GAAP results by region. Oracle saw excellent results in the Americas with growth of 15%; Asia-Pac saw solid growth of 5% while EMEA declined 5%. Expedited software was up over 15%, GoldenGate in-memory software was up 30%; BI Technology and Foundation Suite were up around 10%; also strong was retailing, CRM sales and applications in North America generally. The quarter wasn't dependent on any one large deal, anything like that, it was just a very solid quarter. Hardware systems product revenue was $669 million, as older products like the older M-series and Netra saw significant declines.

Storage was more a mixed story with TAPE down a bit, SAN down significantly, while network attached storage was up. The engineered systems customer base continues to expand nicely Exadata booking was very good revenues from Exalytics SuperCluster and the Oracle database appliance all grew over 100%. So the company total revenue for the quarter was 8.4 billion up 4% from last year. Oracle’s non-GAAP operating income was 3.7 billion, which was 6% higher than last year and operating margin expanded to 45%.

Oracle still believes there remains ample leverage in the business model. The non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 21.8%; EPS for the quarter grew 12% in U.S. dollars to $0.59 on a non-GAAP basis; the GAAP tax rate was 17.7 which were lower than Safra’s guidance for last quarter due to some one-time events and the mix of earnings. On a GAAP basis, EPS for the quarter was U.S $0.47 in U.S. dollars, which was up 14%.

Free cash flow increased to a record 14.2 billion over the last four quarters and to an all-time high of 6.1 billion for Q1, up 11% from last year. Oracle is now on the verge of generating more free cash flow than IBM and now has over $39 billion in cash and marketable securities.

Oracle repurchased 92.8 million shares for a total of $3 billion. Over the last 12 months, Oracle repurchased nearly 335 million shares for a total of $10.9 billion paid out dividend of nearly 1.7 billion for total nearly 90% of their free cash flow. And the Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share.

Check Out: OracleCorporation Q2 Guidance & Oracle OpenWorld Highlights

Operations:

Database continues to be very strong, double-digit growth again this quarter. Now, while customer activity on 12c was excellent, it really is the traditional products; Database Options, Enterprise Manager that drove this double-digit growth.

Cloud right now had a strong quarter. It's really started to hit stride, with great wins at A&A, LinkedIn, SIRIUS XM Radio, Telus, Barclays Bank, and Oracle is also really excited about their Sales Automation Release 7.

In HCM, Oracle’s Taleo product had a very strong quarter with key wins at Honeywell, Emerson, Humana, Xilinx and DIRECTV. Oracle announced the deal with Microsoft enabling customers to run Java in the Oracle Database on the user cloud and they would also be partnering with NetSuite on HCM. And lastly, Oracle also announced a comprehensive partnership with Salesforce where they've chosen to power their cloud with the Oracle 12c database and Exadata amongst other Oracle products.

Moving to Engineered Systems, Oracle had great wins at Eton, Telecom Italia, China Mobile, SunGard, Ingersoll Rand and Hitachi. In the last two quarters, they have shipped almost 2,000 systems. And this quarter, Oracle saw great unit growth north of 60% as they shipped nearly 800 systems. Nearly 40% of Exadata Systems were sold to new customers, and Oracle expects to grow their business with these customers overtime. Oracle is gaining a material amount of unit market share. Exalytics, SPARC SuperCluster, the Oracle Database Appliance all had growth in excess of 100%.

Facebook: Building Knowledge Economy & Thoughts about Second Half of 2013

Building the Knowledge Economy:

Let’s talk about building the knowledge economy and what that means for Facebook’s core business. A lot of new businesses have signed up to advertise with Facebook, so they now have more than a million active advertisers. Their newsfeed ads products are working well for advertisers. One of the things, Facebook likes to watch most closely is the quality of their ads and people sentiment around them.

Right now, ads on average make up about 5% or 120 stories in newsfeed, they haven't measured a meaningful drop in satisfaction when they ask people about their experience with Facebook. Mark says, ‘We are comparing that to the result we get when asked the same question to people using a version of Facebook with no feed ads at all’.

Now that said in recent studies people have been telling that they notice ads more, so Facebook is going to invest more in improving the quality. Their top priority is to expand the number of marketers and overall demand in their system rather than just increasing the number of ads that they show.

See Also: Facebook: Progress Report

Thoughts about the Second Half of 2013:

Facebook expects newsfeed ads to remain the main driver of revenue growth in the second half of the year and believes to have a great opportunity to continue to drive long-term growth by improving the quality and relevance of ads. However, remember that newsfeed ads really began to contribute to Facebook’s revenue in the third and fourth quarters last year which will make more difficult year-over-year comparisons in Q3 and Q4 relative to Q2.

Looking at expenses, consistent with what was said previously, Facebook plans to invest in their business and continue to expect that total non-GAAP expenses including cost of revenue but excluding stock comp will likely grow in the neighborhood of 50% for the full year 2013 compared to 2012. And they also continue to expect that this full year-over-full year expense growth rate will be faster than their year-over-year revenue growth rate for the full year 2013 compared to 2012.

In terms of Facebook’s tax rate, they expect that Q3 and full year non-GAAP tax rate will be a few percentage points higher than their Q2 rate. And finally, they expect 2013 CapEx to be in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion. This is down from Facebook’s prior estimate of $1.8 billion due to a combination of the efficiency gains and changes in timing of purchases.

See Also: Facebook: Operations and Financials as of Today

Facebook: Operations & Financials as of Today.

Operations:

Facebook’s advertising business gained significant momentum past quarter, growing 61% year-over-year to $1.6 billion. Mobile ad revenue grew significantly as well and is now approximately 41% of total ad revenue up from about 30% in Q1. Overall ad impressions were up 43% and the average price per ad was up 13% compared to last year.

This is because Facebook’s ad products are delivering impressive ROI for each of these types of marketers. Direct response marketers including e-commerce companies increased spend significantly; year-over-year ad revenue from e-commerce companies doubled in the second quarter. Direct response marketers are taking advantage of a high click rates and competitive CPCs to grow their businesses. These marketers are typically very measurement focused and may quickly increase budgets as Facebook delivers compelling ROI.

Local businesses also grew spend significantly, Facebook surpassed 1 million active advertisers this quarter more than double the number they had only a year ago. The time people are spending on mobile devices is increasing dramatically that yet mobile represents just 2% of ad spend globally and 3% in U.S.

On an average day in June, 699 million people used Facebook, up 27% from last year. This represents 61% of the 1.15 billion people who accessed Facebook at any point during the month of June.

Additionally, time spent per person on Facebook continues to increase. In aggregate across everyone in their network, time spent on Facebook exceeded 20 billion minutes each day in June. Separately Instagram continues to grow rapidly with impressive engagement and Facebook announced last month, they had over 130 million actives using the service.

See Also: Facebook’s Progress Report

Financials:

Total revenue was 1.81 billion up 53% or 54% when adjusted for constant exchange rates. Ad revenue was $1.6 billion up 61% in the quarter or 63% when adjusted for constant exchange rates. This was Facebook’s strongest quarter in terms of advertising revenue growth since the third quarter of 2011. The performance was strong throughout the world with ad revenue in each of their geographic regions strong by greater than 50%.

Total payments and other fees revenue was $214 million in Q2, an increase of 11% versus last year. Payments revenue from gains specifically was up 7% but we believe 11% represents the best apples-to-apples comparison.

Overall ARPU increased 25% compared to last year to $1.60 per user for the quarter, including a 35% increase in the United States and Canada as well as 30 plus percent gain in all their other regions.

In Q2, GAAP total expenses were $1.25 billion, excluding stock compensation. Non-GAAP total expenses increased 52% to $1.02 billion primarily driven by headcount and infrastructure. Facebook ended the quarter just shy of 5,300 employees up 33% from last year and continue with their success in attracting talents. Q2 GAAP operating income was $562 million representing a 31% operating margin.

Excluding stock comp, non-GAAP operating income was $794 million, 44% non-GAAP operating margin. GAAP tax rate for Q2 was 39% and non-GAAP tax rate was 37%. GAAP net income was $333 million or $0.13 per share and non-GAAP net income was $488 million or $0.19 per share.

Facebook spent $268 million on CapEx in Q2 as they continue to invest in datacenters and facilities. Of note free cash flow in Q2 was over $1 billion, this is much higher than we expect in coming quarters as Q2 free cash flow benefited from $419 million tax refund and light quarterly spend on CapEx but still a $1 billion in free cash flow is a nice milestone for Facebook against an important financial metric.

Facebook has repurchased approximately $153 million worth of shares in the Q2 and ended Q2 with $10.3 billion in cash and investments.

See Also: Facebook:Building Knowledge Economy & Thoughts about Second Half of 2013

Facebook: Progress Report

What are the big changes Facebook wants to make in the world over the next five or 10 years?

Facebook made some really good progress this Q2 with the growth and engagement of their community, the release of new products like Instagram Video and advertising growth especially on mobile.

Facebook now has more daily actives on mobiles and on desktops, nearly half a billion people use Facebook on their phones every day and soon Facebook will have more revenue on mobiles and on desktop as well.

Now that Facebook has connected a billion people, what are the next big ambitions?

There are three main goals Facebook would like to achieve: connect everyone, understand the world and help build the knowledge economy. Connecting everyone is about growing their community to reach the next five billion people.

Facebook’s mission is to give all people the power to share and make the world more open and connected and that means everyone, not just people in developed countries. Most people in the world don't yet have smartphones or data access but Facebook knows they want to be connected. So Facebook is focused on making this possible, while also strengthening engagement within their existing community.

Understanding the world is that helping people share not just day-to-day updates like text messages and photos but also building up long-term knowledge about the world about what people are interested in; which restaurants are good, which hotels your friends have stayed at and so on. Facebook should be able to build intelligent services that help user network to answer lots of questions for people that no other service can.

And Facebook wants to lead the community to create a graph of all that understanding to power this intelligence. Building the knowledge economy is about helping people create companies and jobs using information.

 

The way Mark Zuckerberg sees advertising products, Facebook isn’t just building a strong monetization engine for itself, but also creating tools to enable new growth, jobs and businesses, door platform and to support a larger economic shift in the world based on knowledge and information.

‘I am proud of the work we are doing here to help developers to create apps to help local businesses find customers, to help great brands tell their stories and this is a core part of our mission’ says Mark.

Now let's talk about the progress Facebook has made in each of these areas, starting with connecting everyone.

The Facebook community has grown steadily this quarter adding 45 million new monthly actives and the number of monthly actives is steadier, increasing across demographics in the countries. Now 61% of monthly actives are daily actives and now the ratio has just continued to increase.

In Facebook’s most penetrated markets like the U.S. more than 70% of monthly actives use their services daily and now more than 700 million people worldwide use daily as of today.

See Also: Facebook: Operations & Financials as of Today.

     

As more social services get created, one question is How that Affects the Sharing and Time that People Spend on Facebook?

You could naively assume that more new services mean people spend less time on Facebook but that isn't happening, in fact people on average are spending more time on Facebook than ever before. It's possible that because the market is expanding due to mobile even the time spent per person increases on Facebook maybe their market share could decrease, but that doesn't seem to be happening either.

According to third-party metrics by comScore and Nielsen, Facebook’s share of time spent in the U.S. is either steady or increasing and we believe it's either steady or increasing everywhere else as well.

Some product like video fit into the flow of what people are doing and they take off quickly. Others like graph searching home are completely new kinds of product and they are just going to take a longer to develop. I think it's the right strategy to have a balance of long-term foundational new products ones that fit immediate demand. Facebook is committed to building all of those in to market leading products.

See Also: Facebook:Building Knowledge Economy & Thoughts about Second Half of 2013

Instagram:

Instagram is growing quickly as well, so if you combine the two services together we believe the engagement and share time spent are likely growing quickly throughout the world.

The newest product that Facebook is most excited about from their last quarter is Instagram Video, adding video fits really naturally with the Instagram mission of capturing and sharing the world's moments. It's off to a great start. People are already uploading hours of video to Instagram every minute.

Instagram has always been about helping people capture moments in the way they're proud of, filters were necessary for photos and when Instagram started most phone cameras weren't good enough to take high quality photos. Separately Instagram continues to grow rapidly with impressive engagement and Facebook announced last month, they had over 130 million actives using the service.

Eminem Quotes at its Best

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity. To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment. Would you capture it or just let it slip.

I don't care if you're black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Simple as that.

Love, when spelled backwards and read phonetically, reads EVIL.

Don’t do drugs, don’t have unprotected sex, don’t be violent. Leave that to me.

Cause sometimes, you just feel tired. Feel weak. And when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up. But you gotta search within you. You gotta find that inner strength, and just pull that shit out of you. And get that motivation to NOT give up and NOT be a quitter. No matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse.

Behind every successful person lies a pack of haters.

If you have enemies, good that means you stood up for something.

Love is just a word, but you bring it definition.

Damn. How much damage can you do with a pen?

If there's not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something. 

When I say I'll murder my baby's mother, maybe I wanted to but I didn't. Anybody who takes it literally is 10 times sicker than I am.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They're only powerful when you got your back turned.

The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

I have the right to remain violent. Everything I say can and will be used against you.

You can try and read my lyrics off of this paper before I lay 'em,
But you won't take the sting out these words before I say 'em.

Now I don't ask nobody to share my beliefs, to be involved in my beefs, I'm a man, I can stand on my feet, So if you don't wanna be in 'em all I ask is that you don't open your mouth for an opinion ‘coz I won't put you in 'em.

Twitter tweets about Confidential IPO

Twitter in its most recent tweet mentioned that ‘We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale’.

Twitter, which has a user base of over 200 million, is undoubtedly the most awaited consumer Internet IPO. The hype around Twitter IPO will be in full swing since Facebook went public. While Twitter has many lessons to learn from Facebook’s IPO, as $FB stock price fell soon after its public debut, however Facebook stock has crossed its IPO price recently.

What does this Confidential IPO indicate?

According to JOBS Act which was passed last year, under established SEC rules states that companies that are termed as ‘emerging growth companies’ can be allowed to file their S-1’s confidentially provided that their annual revenue is less than $1 billion.

Yes, Twitter’s revenue is quite less than a billion dollars.

Twitter does not intend to disclose its details as the provision also states that Companies do not have to make their documents public until 21 days before the company goes on the ‘road show’ to pitch the company to big investors on Wall Street for the IPO. As per estimates, under present situation Twitter can have a valuation of between $11 billion to $15 billion, which is subject to change.

PrivCo which gathers information on private companies, its Chief Executive, Sam Hamadeh, has predicted, ‘Unlike Facebook, which waited too long to IPO, Twitter will IPO at just the right inflection point, while revenue grows in triple digits’.

Dell's Savior: Enterprise Solutions Group

Dell Inc. (DELL) world’s third-largest personal computer maker and Silver Lake Management LLC have secured enough votes for approval of their proposed $24.9 billion leveraged buyout.

After Corporate Raider, Carl Icahn dropped his opposition to the deal, opposing for almost seven months, Michael Dell seems to have won more than half of the battle. The voting results will be disclosed at September 12th meeting at Dell’s Round Rock, Texas, headquarters. Previously three attempts were made to hold this meeting, but were adjourned as CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake were falling short of the votes they needed to secure this approval. 

The present proposal stands at $13.75 a share, plus a 13% special dividend and guaranteed payment of the company’s third-quarter dividend.

 Let's take a quick look at Dell's performance in the recent quarter, and also a look at their Enterprise Solutions Group or ESG, which they've been successful in.

Also check out Dell Inc.: Things You Ought To Know

Q1 2014 highlights:

· Delivered revenue of $14.1 billion, down 2%; the Enterprise Solution Services and Software Business was up 12% to $5.5 billion.

· Announced and closed the acquisition of Enstratius which improves their end-to-end solutions capabilities by enabling customers to more effectively manage and integrate their cloud environments.

·         Gross margin was $2.9 billion at $20.6 of revenue which was down 40 basis points sequentially when adjusting for last quarter's vendor settlements.

· SG&A increased 4% and as a percentage of revenue increased 20 basis points sequentially to 14.2%.

· R&D spending increased 33% and as a percent of revenue increased 10 basis points sequentially to 2.2%. Of note there were almost $90 million in expenses related to the pending go private transaction that were excluded from their non-GAAP results.

· Operating income was $590 million or 4.2% of revenue and non-GAAP tax rate of 28.7% is driven by a greater portion of their business and higher tax jurisdictions during the quarter.

· Earnings per share were $0.21 declining 51%, cash used in operations in the quarter was $39 million as the first quarter is typically a seasonal low for cash flow.

· On a trailing 12 month basis, cash flow from operations was $3.4 billion down 31%. Cash investments balance ended at $13.2 billion and they repaid approximately $2 billion in debt during the quarter.

Highlights of Enterprise Solutions Group or ESG:

· This business includes Servers, Networking, Storage and ESG related peripherals. Dell continue to see strong growth in ESG of 10% on revenue of $3.1 billion and operating income of $136 million or 4.4% of revenue. Within ESG, Server, Networking and Enterprise Peripheral Business delivered revenue of $2.7 billion which equates to 14% growth.

· It was driven by strong growth in hyper-scale data center servers, in this stage Dell servers power Four of the Top Five Search Engines and 75% of the top Social Media Sites worldwide.

· Networking Business increased 24%.

· Dell storage revenue was down 10% to $424 million, and is focused on continuing to more effectively position the right solutions based on customer needs and optimizing its selling motion to improve revenue momentum.

· The great example of this was a win with Statoil Norway as Dell’s global capabilities and convert solution displays legacy vendors in each of the traditional product sets.

· The services business includes a broad range of IT and business services including support and deployment services and infrastructure, Cloud, Security Services applications and Business Software Services, this business was up 2% to 2.1 billion.

· Paying for this business increased 370 million or 17.6% of revenue up 16.3% of revenue in the first quarter of the last year.

Dell’s software business includes systems management, security software solutions and information management. This business delivered revenue of 295 million and an operating loss of 85 million for the quarter. Consistent with prior communication and business plan, it remains confident that the Quest acquisition will be accretive in the first quarter of fiscal year '15 as it invests to grow the business. Michael Dell added, ‘We are enhancing our software capabilities and increasing our investment in this business with additional sales capacity in R&D’.