Great comments on Groupon's IPO today - comparing it with a fertilizer company that had its IPO today as well. Who has the stronger fertilizer?
Groupon's IPO may have surged today, but like most other big tech IPOs, the chances of it staying at that price are slim.
Rentech Nitrogen Partners L.P., a nitrogen fertilizer company, also launched its IPO at today at $20 per share. It probably has a better chance at sustaining its model than Groupon and subsequent daily deal copycats ever will. Says The Wall Street Journal:
Rentech has a lot of alluring attributes. Its chief competitors' stocks are up 50% for 2011. It's riding a wave of positive cyclical attributes such as high product pricing and low feedstock costs. And it plans to pay out a dividend that could yield between 11% and 12% over its next fiscal year, based on the midpoint of its expected $19 to $21 price range, a great draw for income-starved investors.
Groupon's bling is fake. Says the New Yorker, eloquently:
Most big tech I.P.O.s surge and then drop. And, with its decreasing profit margins, fishy accounting, massive marketing expenses, floundering innovations, massive insider payouts, and surging competitors, Groupon is surely not worth thirteen billion dollars, or whatever its market cap is at this very moment.
If merchants start pulling out of the daily deals space because they're losing money on Groupons, the gold will start chipping away, revealing nothing but a cheap trick, a flimsy tin.
- ReadWrite
Application Voice (AV) headquartered in Clearwater, FL USA is a technology company with an emphasis on telecommunications, voice, and data. AV has a focus on open source and cloud computing based solutions. Peter Weyant, President & CEO of AV contributes to this blog along with other AV staff.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
A Guide to Open Source Licensing
A Guide to Open Source Licensing: "
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If you're working on or launching an open source project, one of the most basic decisions you must make is which license the project will be released under, and choosing the perfect license is more complex than ever. Over the years, we've provided many free guidelines on this topic, but it's a moving target. In this post, you'll find our updeated collection of all the things you need to know to make an informed open source license decision.
The Free Software Foundation is the principal organizer of the GNU Project, and you can find the FSF's guidelines on choosing an open source license in this post. The guidelines cover how to choose an overall license for a project, and also cover making decisions on licensing modified versions of an existing project.
Through the FSF guidelines, you can gain knowledge about what Copyleft is, and it's wise to learn more about the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). t's also worth looking into our post on the Software Freedom Law Center's Legal Issue Primer. It contains a very thorough discussion of most popular open source licenses. And you can find much more introductory material on open source licenses in this post.
These posts also provide much good background on licenses:
The Unlicense: A License For No License
FSFE and GPL-Violations.org on Reporting (and Avoiding) Licensing Issues
Thwarting Threats: Free OSS Legal Primer Boasts Big Authors
One reason to know about open source licenses is to keep things legal, and we have covered a number of legal resources that can help keep open source projects and developers out of harm's way. In this post, you'll find a discussion of a journal focused on open source law called International Free and Open Source Software Law Review. In the journal's archives, you'll find extremely informed discussions of licensing and patent practices, among other topics.
A little bit of homework can mean a lot when evaluating open source licenses. Hopefully some of the guidelines above will be of help to you.
Image courtesy of The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.
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Saturday, July 23, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Lync Takes Center Stage at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference
One of the common themes here at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles this week is the emergence of Microsoft Lync, the software company's unified corporate IM, presence and collaboration tool as a major part of Microsoft’s business.In a Wednesday-morning keynote to the 15,000-plus Microsoft partners in attendance at the Staples Center here, Jon Roskill, Microsoft’s worldwide channel chief, told partners that unified communications—i.e., Lync--represents Microsoft’s next billion-dollar business opportunity, and that it's a business ripe with opportunity for partner services and value-add.
Monday, June 27, 2011
9 Steps to Consider When Valuing Your Startup
9 Steps to Consider When Valuing Your Startup
Determining your startup’s worth is one of the hardest parts of the fundraising process. There is no magic formula that will spit out a valuation, namely because the number is highly subjective. The entrepreneur, for example, anticipates huge potential and may therefore put a high valuation on his company. The investor, on the other hand sees a company that needs capital to grow and may fail without it, so he may set a low valuation. To help the process, we’ve devised a few considerations to help value your company.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Microsoft Windows Phone Beats Android - April Fools
Pyramid Points - Why Windows Phone Will Beat Android http://t.co/AlwoyOu via @AddThis (April Fools) Funny, Microsoft is history, no impact. Amazing attempt at analysis.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Two Asterisk Security Advisories, Including One Critical Remote Vulnerability
Two Asterisk Security Advisories, Including One Critical Remote Vulnerability:
The Digium security team issued two security advisories this week for Asterisk:
The second one, AST-2011-004, is the far more concerning because it indicates that a remote attacker could connect to an Asterisk system and cause it to crash. The solution, in both cases, is to upgrade to the latest Asterisk releases.
The Digium security team issued two security advisories this week for Asterisk:
The second one, AST-2011-004, is the far more concerning because it indicates that a remote attacker could connect to an Asterisk system and cause it to crash. The solution, in both cases, is to upgrade to the latest Asterisk releases.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP (Dan York/Disruptive Telephony)
Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP (Dan York/Disruptive Telephony): "
Dan York / Disruptive Telephony:
Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP — Wouldn't it be great if you could call a Google Voice number directly via SIP? So that you could bypass the PSTN when calling a GV number and go directly over IP? With potentially all the advanced capabilities that could give? …
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
No Jitter | blog | Frost & Sullivan Research: Telephony Equipment Implementation and Management Services Markets
10.7% decline year over year in implementation and management services.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
14 Google Code Projects for Android, iPhone, SIP and Asterisk - Denphone
An interesting list from Japan of Google Android and Asterisk integration activities being working on and tracked by the Google development teams.
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