In response to Tyler’s post about Mobil Payment

This is an interesting post and almost reminds me of the movie Surrogate. In a world where humans do not interact they just use surrogate robots to do everything for them. But I don't think we are anywhere close to that state yet but we certainly have been on the decline with human interaction. The main reason, I believe, is that human-to-human contact from an economic sense is very inefficient. It take a lot longer to deal with a low skilled worker, who is most likely unhappy with their job, than to click a single button on your phone to order and pay for your food. Its brilliant from a business sense because you have increased efficiency at a much lower cost. Does anyone think we have crossed the line of relying too much on technology? It would be interesting to see how different our lives would be without our common pieces of technology, even for one day.

Facebook IPO Gearing Up

As many of you know, Facebook, has been planning its IPO for the last couple months. This week they had just halted all private market sales of their stock. There are a couple ways to buy stock before it goes public but you have to know someone at one of the investment banks that is doing the underwriting for Facebook, or have a lot of money (to receive special treatment). For the most of us we have to wait for the IPO date that is supposed to be sometime in early May. The fact that Facebook has stopped all private sales means that they are getting ready for their IPO and may even happen a little earlier that anticipated.
The company shares have been soaring in the private market at around $44.10 per share. This gives the company a total market value of $103 billion. This means that investors are really expecting a huge increase of sales revenue in the next few years because this valuation is half the amount of Google's market share with only 1/10th of Google's revenue. This should be a very exciting IPO and could generate a lot of income for some people especially those who got in early with private sales of shares.
Does anyone think their IPO will flop? Do you think their shares are going to skyrocket?