This weekend brings the much anticipated China and the Future of the World conference here on UChicago's campus. The students organizing the event have brought some really great speakers to the event, including Theodore Schaffner, SVP of Corporate Development for Motorola.

After listening to him speak about some very mildly interesting things dealing with Chinese and American business relationships, it occurred to me that there's one very unintentional -- and not often talked about -- benefit of the shift towards Software as a Service (SaaS): The abolishment of software piracy.

Microsoft's piracy rate in China is 90% (and higher in other countries). They just invested a billion dollars to "win over officials it believes can crack down on piracy." A billion dollars!

Google, on the other hand, has a 0% piracy rate in China. 0%! All because their apps are web-based. Salesforce.com has a 0% piracy rate in China! All because their apps are web-based.

Running software in a web browser places control in the hands of the software company, not in the physical media (read: CD-ROMs) of the software. There is no longer a need to find ways to enforce Product Keys while installing software -- the only necessary item is a valid credit card. And, while credit card theft is a large problem, the fact is it's much tougher for the people distributing pirated software for $1-$5 to distribute stolen credit cards. Stealing credit cards effectively doesn't scale the way stealing software does (crack product key once, burn infinitely)

If the SaaS trend continues as it has, this unintentional benefit may be as or more valuable to software companies as all the other benefits.

Tags: IP, intellectual property, piracy, software, Microsoft, Google, China

This is a question Google (ironic, no?) couldn't answer for me: What's an msnbot doing at Google?

I often set the tail of our log files as my background because it's really interesting and makes for a good distraction. Every once in a while I see abnormal lines out of the corner of my eye (I've learned that your brain is very good at seeing abnormalities quickly). Today I saw this:

64.233.178.136 - - [28/Apr/2006:15:35:44 -0500] 
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 4732 "-" 
"msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm),gzip(gfe) 
(via translate.google.com)" 4732 4940 -

At first I didn't understand why MSN would be writing something about Google and their translation service in their User Agent string.

I did an ARIN WHOIS for the IP and it returned:

  Search results for: 64.233.178.136
    OrgName:    Google Inc. 
    OrgID:      GOGL
    Address:    1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
    City:       Mountain View
    StateProv:  CA
    PostalCode: 94043
    Country:    US

Okay, so, who's going to tell me: What's the msnbot doing at Google? Scoble, do you know anything about this? Matt Cutts?

Tags: msnbot, googlebot, msn, Google

I was just playing around and noticed that Google Calendar is live. I haven't played around much, but from what I've seen, it definitely doesn't change the game like Gmail did.

Personally, I think 30boxes is a much better implementation of calendaring online. 30boxes has the whole one-box entering thing down to a science (enter a full event into a small box and it just works), and their AJAX is perfect. Not to mention the whole fill the screen with a month view is awesome.

Google Calendar, on the other hand, has a little pop up to enter an event on the week view. Not bad, but not nearly as nice. Plus, the one thing I was expecting -- integration with Gmail -- doesn't seem to be there. :(

Without further ado, screenshots:






I'll play with this tomorrow and have more reactions, but I thought I'd show some screenshots first. For now, I'm sticking to 30boxes.

As has been noted elsewhere, Wikipedia died for a bit today. Maurice and I also noticed this while doing some research earlier.

The error message that was given by Wikipedia was particularly nice. It even included a link to a Google search for the URL you were looking for, telling you to check out the Google Cache of the page.

This is great if you've already found the page on Wikipedia's site that you want to look up, but if you don't know what you're looking for, here's a quick way to use Wikipedia all through Google (most of you probably know most of this, but it's worth noting again).

1. Instead of searching for something from Wikipedia's web site, search for it from Google's, asking only for Wikipedia pages. If you want english pages only, this would look something like so (notice how this uses the 'site:en.wikipedia.org' notation to only search within en.wikipedia.org).
2. Then, instead of clicking on the actual link, just click the link for the cached version of whatever result you wanted to check out.

Voila, Wikipedia through Google. Obviously, the chances of both Google and Wikipedia being down at once is unbelievably small so this is likely to keep Wikipedia up virtually 100%. Plus, Google maintains a really great index of Wikipedia, so you're likely to find most of the content is available to you.

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Google, lifehack, lifehacks, tips

Last week, Facebook made headlines throughout the blogosphere by attempting to value itself at $2 billion.

The blogosphere quickly took over with a debate about whether or not it was worth it. Most of the posts have been light on data (see: SiliconBeat or Umair's Bubblegeneration) with Om Malik using just a little bit of data in his assessment. Yesterday, Kevin Efrusy -- the Facebook VC -- stood by their $2b valuation in the WSJ.

I wanted to take a closer look at the valuation, by the numbers. More just because I thought it'd be fun than for any other reason. :-P

---

Overview: My goal was to decide whether the Facebook valuation at $2b is justifiable based on the MySpace valuation (at the time of sale) of $580m (or, at least, just to compare the two valuations). Every number I took was the closest number to the time of valuation (for Facebook this was the most recent number I could find and for MySpace this was the closest number to July, 2005 I could find). I also attempted to get numbers from either the same source (i.e. comScore Media Metrix), the site itself (e.g. spokesmen, etc.), or a very reliable source (e.g. BusinessWeek, Newsweek, etc.).

Disclaimer: I still don't claim these data are very good, so take everything with a grain of salt. Also, there are no growth stats involved here, which is clearly dumb. :) I also clearly made up the CPM costs -- if anyone has better data on that, let me know.

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Assumptions:

• Total Number of Users:
• Facebook: 7 million (Source: Newsweek, March, 2006)
• MySpace: 22 million (Source: BusinessWeek, July, 2005)
• Valuation:
• Facebook: $2 billion (Source: BusinessWeek)
• MySpace: $580 million (Source: sale price to News Corp)
• Page Views / Month:
• Facebook: 5.5 billion (Source: WSJ, April, 2006)
• MySpace: 7.8 billion - for all Intermix online properties in May, 2005 (Source: Intermix SEC Filing)
• Cost / CPM:
• Facebook: $2 (estimated)
• MySpace: $2 (estimated)

---

Analysis:

• Acquisition Cost / User [Valuation / # of users]:
• Facebook: $285.71
• MySpace: $26.36
• (Page Views / Month) / User:
• Facebook: 785.7
• MySpace: 354.55
• Time For Average User (in months) To View 1000 pages [1000 / (Page Views / Month / User)]:
• Facebook: 1.27
• MySpace: 2.82
• (Page Views / User) Required To Recover Acquisition Cost [($CPM/1000pv) = ($Acq. Cost/Xpv)]
• Facebook: 142,855
• MySpace: 13,180
• Time (in months) For Average User To View Required Number Of Pages [(1000pv/#months for user to make 1000pv) = (#pv to recover cost/Xmonths)]
• Facebook: 181.43
• MySpace: 37.17

---

Conclusion:
Wow. First, it really surprised me how many more pages a Facebook user views per month compared to a MySpace user (the average Facebook user is 2.2x as addicted to Facebook than the average MySpace user is to MySpace). Honestly, I expected the opposite.

Second, I couldn't believe my numbers (and I still don't, so someone please check them!) that Facebook would legitimately ask for $285.71 per user, especially given that MySpace only received $26.36 per user (10.8x the cost!).

At those prices, it would take Facebook 4.9x as many months to recover the acquisition costs as it did for MySpace. And in real terms, that's over 15 years of use per user (compared to MySpace's 3 years and change)! This is on a site that many, including Paul Kedrosky, think has a huge turnover rate because of the whole 'graduation' pest.

All in all, I think it's fairly clear to see that 1) Facebook is absurdly valued, and 2) this analysis is probably just as absurd given the lack of growth, constant CPM, etc. :)