Phillip Toledano
Ashlee VanceAs a 23-year-old mathematical genius one year of Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher came to Facebook to the when the company was still in its infancy. It was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher - one of the first 100 employees of Facebook - the noble title of researcher and to do analyze how people use the social networking service. Specifically, he received the assignment to discover why Facebook took off to some universities and placed others. The company also wanted to follow the differences in behavior between high-school-age children and older students, drunker. "I was there to answer these questions of high level, and they really not all the tools to do this again," he said.
Over the next two years, Hammerbacher has assembled a team to build a new class of analytical technology. His crew met the enormous amounts of data, discussed with and learned much about the relations of the people, trends, and desires. Facebook has transformed since these overviews of the accuracy of advertising, the foundation of its business. It offers businesses access to a pool in captivity of the people who actually volunteered to have their actions monitored as laboratory rats. The hope - as signified by the value of Facebook, now at $ 65 billion, - according to a study of Nyppex society is that more data translate into better ads and sales.
After a few years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He understood that a large part of the revolutionary computer had been made. Something else eaten him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley companies such as his own, Google (GOOG) and Twitter and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking on how to do click ads," he said. "That sucks."
You say Hammerbacher is a objector conscience for the advertising-based business model and the culture of marketing that permeates now Tech online ads. have been around since the dawn of the Web, but only in recent years if they have become the dream of enthusiastic life of Silicon Valley. Coming on the heels of Facebook have been blockbusters such as Zynga game manufacturer and Groupon coupon Peddler. These companies have engaged in a war frenzy, expensive to hire the best executives and engineers they can find. Investors have joined in, throwing money at the stars of the Web and sending assessments in the stratosphere. Inevitably, imitators have arrived, and investors are pushing and shoving to get early on this action, too. Once more, 11 years after the Summit of dot-com-era of the Nasdaq, Silicon Valley is reached the point of saturation with business plans that depend on the fingers crossed as something other. "We are certainly in another bubble," said Matthew Cowan, co-founder of Bridgescale Partners tech investment company. "And it is driven by social media and consumer-oriented applications.
There is always someone out bubble there crying, seems. the trick is to determine when it is easy money - and when it is a shell game. A few bubbles are really good, even if they do not end happy. In the 1980s, the rise of Microsoft (MSFT), Compaq (HPQ) and Intel (INTC) pushed personal computers - in millions of homes and businesses, and these companies stocks soared. Tech stumbled in the 1980s, and the Valley has been left with a lot of theories and markets good microprocessors on what to do with them. The bubble was built on the craze with what anyone linked to the Web. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporization approximately 6 billion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure who came to the benefit of businesses and consumers.
