In an audacious move to minimise the risk of mobile social disruption, Facebook is to acquire leading messaging app Whatsapp for up to $19 billion, or $42 per user, or 11% of Facebook’s current market cap

Messaging platforms are becoming the new social media, particularly for younger demographics, and while Facebook/WhatsApp will be huge in mobile, other services could still side-step into Facebook’s territory

 

The price for WhatsApp may be justifiable to counter the threat, but Facebook has only bought one of many, and paying a full price may encourage the others; expensively buying every competitor does not feel like a long-term strategy

Explosive growth in take-up of smartphones and tablets means that the effective size of the internet will increase by several multiples within the next few years. This transformation in scale comes with a major change in character and operating dynamics, creating new opportunities and revenue streams.

Twitter is unique amongst social apps: it gives new users a blank canvas in which they can (and must) create their own social network reflecting their own interests, hence building an ‘Interest Graph’, but onboarding new users remains a challenge.

Revenue at Twitter is now on a $600 million annual run-rate, scaling rapidly since the introduction of ‘native ads’, and seems set for further growth: the key question is whether it can achieve breakout user growth and mass market scale.

Vodafone UK’s new broadband product is not very competitively priced compared to the offers from Carphone Warehouse and Orange, costing £5-10 a month more than the nearest equivalent packages

Ten years of fierce and implacable rivalry between Canal+ Group and TPS, the two French pay-TV operators, is expected to end in November 2006, when they close their merger deal and Canal+ France emerges. This report examines the strategic rationale for pay-TV consolidation in the French TV market, where digital terrestrial TV has recently launched and where TV-over-DSL is rapidly being deployed, as well as the potential for the currently low pay-TV margins to rise

Vivendi Q1 2006 quarterly results show solid underlying improvement in earnings, but disappointing subscription figures, which fell by 40,000 in the quarter 

We regard meeting even this extended deadline as difficult given their slowing growth, churn problems and the increasing network costs associated with their network outsourcing deals, and furthermore EBITDA is unlikely to improve significantly from 2007 onwards 

Carphone Warehouse (CPW) has launched a broadband/telephony bundle which effectively offers free broadband to non-cable customers in urban areas 

O2’s purchase of Be may only have cost £50 million but its entry into UK broadband may ultimately prove an expensive distraction