Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, Blogger, etc.:

Having a large number of users and the inability to monetize them is a non-existent problem. People talk about it all the time, but it doesn’t really happen—at least it doesn’t happen in today’s world. I’m not even sure it ever did. Sure, there were Internet companies that went out of business because they were losing too much money, but I think usually they didn’t *really* have a lot of users (just a lot of hype) or they had out of control costs.

That’s a rather bold and quite surprising statement coming out from Evan. Hopefully he gave it proper thought.

[h/t @daveg]

Kevin Kelleher on Facebook, Zuckerberg, and the company’s disastrous IPO:

There has never been a tech company that built so much fortune from the exploitation of ordinary people while giving so little in return.

Yes, Microsoft was vilified – and rightly so – for crushing competitors and forcing customers into an inferior operating-system software, but its iron-fisted dominance helped shape an immature and inchoate computer-software industry into a single standard that made PCs everyday devices in offices and homes. Microsoft’s brutal strong-arm tactics were directed at rivals. Its sin against its customers was that its software, for decades, just wasn’t that good.

Facebook, by contrast, built the best social network of its time, so good it left rivals like MySpace in the dust. And that should have been enough to make Facebook a Silicon Valley success story. Once it came time to make money, Facebook exploited its users’ personal data to a degree that no company had ever achieved before.

Ouch.

Public companies aren’t going to disappear, but we are witnessing a significant shift in power from shareholders to entrepreneurs and managers, one that may make the stock market less central to American capitalism.

Felix Salmon has more here.

Great op-ed by Joe Nocera published in the New York Times yesterday. He is totally on point by stating that the main problem with initial public offerings nowadays is the short term thinking of investors:

What [the current Facebook stock price] doesn’t reflect is where Facebook will be 5 or 10 years from now. I could easily make a bullish case for Facebook — with its 900 million users, and its wise-beyond-his-years chief executive. I could just as easily make a bearish case: Maybe Facebook will never figure out mobile. Maybe its moment will pass before it ever becomes the kind of technology juggernaut that Microsoft once was, or Google is. But being either bullish or bearish requires making a judgment that is years away from being revealed. For bullish investors, it means holding the stock patiently, waiting for the judgment to pay off. That’s what good investors do.

Boom.. right on.

Just.. wow. Stunning.

Photo credit: Ellen Rogers, via Flickr.

Possibly the best magazine cover I’ve seen in a long, long time. And yeah.. BusinessWeek is the only magazine I find worth reading each and every week.

Photo credit: NA, Wikipedia

Consider any major finance disaster of the past 30 years, and what you will invariably see is the result of trying to spin dross into gold. The magic of finance is that this can work for a while. The reality of finance is simple mathematics. Eventually, the probabilities play themselves out and the dice come up snake eyes.

JPMorgan’s debacle, and its parallels to AIG [WaPo]

I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939 but civilized people don’t buy gold – they invest in productive businesses.

[via]

The chart above shows how the stock of Monster Beverage Corporation (MNST) performed yesterday (April 30, 2012). Moral of the story? Trading on unconfirmed rumors or third party tips is dangerous, irresponsible, and — in most cases — downright stupid. More info on what happened here.

No position.

Photo credit N/A.

So true, isn’t it?

ITALY, 1971

Directed by Sergio Martino and starring Edwige Fenech, Cristina Airoldi, Carlo Alighiero, Manuel Gill, George Hilton and others, Lo Strano Vizio della Signora Wardh (aka Blade Of The Ripper) is one of my favorite Giallo movies. The real bomb here is the soundtrack by Nora Orlandi. I finally managed to hunt down a reasonably priced vinyl copy recently, so yeah, happiness all around.

IMDB / DVD

Photo credit: Sara Morrison, via Flickr.

Stock up for nuclear winter, by Joshua Miels.

Pretty badass, isn’t it?

Photo credit: N/A

File under: rational explanation needed.

5/5. Just… WOW. Movies like this put Hollywood to shame. I can’t even describe how powerful and disturbing the conclusion to the story is. Honestly, I won’t be able to shake off the ending for a while. Definitely one of the best foreign movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. So powerful – you have to see it.