Height of Social Network Data Mining!!!

This is typical example of relying too much on Social Media Data Mining and let Computers and Algorithms act on their own without human intervention.

In case you haven't caught up.. yesterday Dow lost almost 250 points in matter of few minutes wiping out almost 200 billion USD worth Market Cap. For some reasons, there wasn't enough liquidity in market (I can't understand this.. please review link from WSJ below) so it couldn't go further down. Otherwise, it could have easily triggered chain reaction and invoked all Computer Algorithms supposedly designed to safeguard respective portfolios.

The tweet responsible for this came from hacked twitter account of AP. As per tweet, there were some 2 bomb blasts in white house and President Obama was hurt.. Just one fake.. fraud tweet can clean up $200B!!!

I think, given the relative immaturity of Social Media Mining and associated Business Intelligence.. it was bound to happen.. However, it will be matter of time when algorithms will become even more mature and resilient to such actions.. at the same time hackers will also.. so this cat-mouse game is going to continue forever..  Only new angle we need to be aware is that this new area of reliance on Social Media for news and security breach.

All this may not effect your inbox or add new fraud credit card charges but it may impact you in your retirement accounts or brokerage accounts.. The added cost of securing and building defense against such attacks is definitely going to impact you in some form or other for sure..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323735604578441201605193488.html

Love focus of this Company

I am yet to see LinkedIn doing something else than their core business. Simply, one pony trick but they are doing it well. As long as our technology or intellectual property based jobs are there, LinkedIn will be there. Yet to see any other better business model..

Biggest threat to LinkedIn is still gorilla's of Social side which are FB and Google++. But for them to come into this area which is more or less niche will be tough.. Moreover, trust is really low on these guys (FB & Google++) when it comes sharing or accessing your personal information for commercial advantage.. LinkedIn has still maintained that trust level with their customers.

LinkedIn thriving by being less social 

Revenue, profit, share price surge as others struggle

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com 

MOUNTAIN VIEW — One of the most successful social networking companies in Silicon Valley saw tremendous growth last year, primarily because it’s not a place for posting vacation photos, rating restaurants or playing online games with friends.

While Facebook and other “social” companies struggled with uneven stock performance and other challenges in 2012, LinkedIn saw its revenue, profit and share price surge by 80 percent, thanks to its membership of 200 million professionals and the prospective employers who pay to reach them.

LinkedIn’s “main product is selling access to talent,” explained Michael Pachter, an Internet business analyst at Wedbush Securities.

And by doing so, experts say, the networking site has turned the world of recruiting and hiring on its head. As more people post their resumes on LinkedIn, corporate headhunters are increasingly using the site to identify potential employment candidates — including people who aren’t actively looking to change jobs — rather than wait for them to submit an application. 

“It has absolutely changed the way that we do everything,” said Martin Millington, senior vice president for human resources at Quantros, a Milpitas-based health care technology company. Instead of just posting openings and hoping for a response, he said, recruiters use LinkedIn to search for prospects who meet their criteria, view their professional connections and even contact them discretely. 

Went public in 2011 

LinkedIn, which started 10 years ago and went public in 2011, promotes itself as an online network for people who want to post their resumes and maintain professional contacts in a more business-oriented format than Facebook or other social sites. 

The company makes some of its money from showing ads and selling premium features to members. But more than half its nearly $1 billion in annual revenue comes from employers and recruiters who pay for what LinkedIn calls its “Talent Solutions,” including job listings, corporate pages and online software that can perform sophisticated searches of LinkedIn’s member database. 

LinkedIn recently upgraded that software, adding algorithms that “recommend” potential job candidates — based on such factors as experience, recent promotions and even where they have lived — and other tools to help hiring executives keep tabs on prospects they may want to recruit in the future. 

Those changes won’t be apparent to most LinkedIn members, who are more likely to notice the recent redesign of individual profile pages and new features that let members “follow” well-known business leaders and other public figures. But the recruiting tools are a key to the company’s future. 

“Talent Solutions is our largest and fastest-growing business,” according to Parker Barrile, a LinkedIn senior product director, who said more than 16,000 companies currently use the tools. While declining to discuss growth targets, he added, “We think we have a tremendous amount of headroom to reinvent the way people hire.” 

Added 1,340 workers 

LinkedIn did some hiring of its own last year: The Mountain View company added 1,340 workers, bringing its payroll to 3,458. Along with a planned second campus in Sunnyvale, CEO Jeff Weiner recently told analysts the company is expanding in Hong Kong, Brazil and Europe. 

Weiner, a former Yahoo executive recruited in 2008 by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, has also pushed the company into new lines of business and beefed up its service for smartphones and tablets. 

LinkedIn recently began offering additional content to members, including business news and expert blogs. It’s experimenting with a subscription service to help salespeople find customers through their contacts at other companies. LinkedIn is introducing that service slowly to make sure it doesn’t come across as too “spammy” or annoying to members, according to Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia. 

That’s been a concern with another new program that aggressively encourages LinkedIn members to endorse each other’s skills. While it spurs activity on the network, said Macquarie Securities analyst Tom White, the program risks diluting credibility by encouraging people to give endorsements too freely. 

LinkedIn had some growing pains in June when it confronted a data breach and theft of 6.5 million member passwords. The company said it contained the breach and increased security before members suffered any major harm. 

Analysts say the biggest threat to LinkedIn’s future is the prospect of a larger company, such as Facebook or Google, launching a competing service. But as LinkedIn continues to grow, White said rivals may face difficulty convincing people to move their resumes and contacts onto a new platform. 

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, many people don’t see a need to visit LinkedIn every day, Pachter noted. But in a world where no job is guaranteed forever, he added, “a lot of us value being on LinkedIn, just in case we need to be.” Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey 

“ Talent Solutions is our largest and fastest-growing business. We think we have a tremendous amount of headroom to reinvent the way people hire.” 

— Parker Barrile, LinkedIn 

Microsoft going Social..

Seems okay step to me. Microsoft seems to be doing okay on strategy and execution. Interesting thing will be on how well they assimilate these different components in their core office and share point suits.

Enterprise Social Networking is a big area and in my view still very much under developed. All these Enterprise Collaboration Management (ECM) vendors are trying their best to copy and mimic Facebook while navigating with myriad rules and complexities of enterprise relationships within and outside of company and partners. They all seems to be okay but still need more ease of use and more importantly transfer of ownership of content and pages from one individual to another as people move on to different places and roles. I think rationalization of this without any complex administration is going to be key for success of any of these ECMs. Rest all things can be easily copied from FB.

Biggest threat to these guys is again their biggest gorilla Facebook.. Right now, FB is on fringe of ECM. It will be interesting when and if ever they get into ECM.

Lastly, good job Yammer guys.. Keep on bringing more money and do proud to Silicon Valley!!!

Cheers!!




Yammer CEO David Sacks, left, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shake hands after officially announcing Monday that Microsoft will acquire Yammer for $1.2 billion cash.

MICROSOFT’S $1.2 BILLION ACQUISITION

Yammer deal lifts eyebrows

Analyst says software giant’s foray into social realm too late; others say it aids other products

By Peter Delevett

pdelevett@mercurynews.com 

Confirming rumors that had been swirling for weeks, Microsoft on Monday said it will buy San Francisco social-networking startup Yammer for $1.2 billion in cash.

Yammer, founded in 2008, lets business customers set up private, Facebook-style networks among employees and clients. It boasts 5 million users from such companies as Deloitte, 7-Eleven and Ford, CEO David Sacks said Monday.“We had a vision for how social networking could fundamentally change the way people work,” said Sacks, the former chief operating officer of PayPal. He will continue to lead Yammer as it joins Microsoft’s Office division, which also includes SharePoint and Skype. Sacks said linking up with such “household name” business applications will help Yammer grow even more rapidly.

But Microsoft is still lagging rivals such as Salesforce and Oracle, which already have made big-money moves into the social-networking realm. 

San Francisco-based Salesforce offers a socialnetworking tool called Chatter and this month bought cloud-based socialmedia company Buddy Media for nearly $700 million. Redwood City’s Oracle recently snapped up two software companies in the social-media sector, Vitrue and Collective Intellect, as part of its push into cloud computing. 

“Microsoft is too late to the social party,” Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry wrote in an email Monday. “Imitation is not a strategy.” 

Still, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Monday said he was intrigued to learn more about Yammer’s “freemium” sales model, which relies on individual users inside a company to adopt the product at no cost, then gives that company’s IT department an option to pay for more advanced security and support after a critical mass of users has developed. 

“They were pretty unique in the viral adoption model,” Ballmer said of Yammer. 

Constellation Research co-founder Ray Wang said Monday that Yammer’s ability to convert about 19 percent of its free users to paid customers is at least double the industry average. He generally praised the deal, while adding that Microsoft’s own failure to develop new products has forced it to become more reliant on acquisitions. 

Tony Zingale — CEO of Yammer rival Jive Software, which went public last year — predicted that Yammer will struggle to remain innovative as part of the Redmond, Wash., behemoth. “At Microsoft, ‘move really fast’ is not in their vocabulary,” he quipped. 

Zingale said Palo Altobased Jive is already making plans to woo away Yammer customers, and he predicted Salesforce will do the same. 

On the other hand, Zingale said, the deal “once and for all validates that the social enterprise software space is here to stay. When somebody like Microsoft says they’ve got to have it, I think we’re heading for a very vibrant market.” 

Karl Keirstead, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets who follows Jive’s stock, agreed with that assessment, noting that Jive’s shares have risen about 18 percent in the two weeks since rumors of Microsoft’s interest in Yammer surfaced. (Jive closed trading Monday slightly down at $19.75, while Microsoft finished at $29.86 — a decline of 2.7 percent.) Keirstead — whose firm helped underwrite Jive’s December IPO — estimated Yammer’s yearly revenue at about $25 million to $30 million, which would mean Microsoft paid a multiple of 50 times revenue for the company. Yammer had reportedly amassed $142 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya , among others. 

With Jive recently trading at 10 to 12 times revenue, and with hefty numbers being shelled out for Yammer and Buddy Media, Keirstead predicted it won’t be long until another big suitor such as SAP makes a bid for Jive. “It just feels like there’s an M&A frenzy around anything that says social enterprise,” he said. 

Microsoft did not say when it expects the deal to close. 

While Ballmer predicted his army of sales reps could boost the number of Yammer customers who agree to pay for the product, Keirstead thinks the merger might ultimately be less about bolstering Yammer as a stand-alone product and more about integrating its features into Share-Point. The cloud-based enterprise offering includes email, file sharing and the Microsoft Office suite of applications. 

“Microsoft, in an effort to protect its SharePoint franchise, needs to make it more social and do so fast,” Keirstead said. The $1.2 billion layout for a company with modest revenues, he added, is “a little bit of a defensive move.” 

Staff writer Jeremy C. 

Owens contributed to this report. Contact Peter Delevett at 408-271-3638.