That was President Kennedy’s mission statement for the NASA missions to the Moon. I’ve used it on project management training courses as an example of a clear objective for a project, but I’ve been reminded of it by all the news coverage of the 40th anniversary. How much better is that objective for the bit after the “and”? And how many projects have I seen where the important bit of the objective was missed out?

It would’ve been easy to fire an astronaut at the Moon and land him on a parachute. Getting them back was the hard part!

Normal companies

The idea behind the valuation of a normal company is that it will be around for a long time, and will mostly make a profit most years. The sum of all those future profits turns into a value for the company. The value gets influenced by short term factors, but it’s essentially that long term profit stream that determines the value of a company. That makes tremendous sense if the company is going to be around for a long time.

Internet companies

Internet companies almost never make profits. Facebook has never made a profit, and nobody can really be confident they every will. Yet they’re worth billions, apparently. Why is that? The answer lies in who’s buying at those wild valuations. To them, the investment is great value for money, but not because of anything intrinsically valuable about the companies. Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook to underpin its own share price. Faced with criticism of their Internet strategy, their online advertising revenues, whether they really got the web, an investment of $240 million to protect their own market valuation of $50 billion plus is a very good deal. It headed off some of their biggest critics. For a while. The Russians have bought their shares because they’re portfolio risk-takers. This will be a relatively big investment for them, but one of many, and they will not expect every one of their investments to be a success. So Facebook is a bet for them, and one of many. Their plan, I assume, will be to sell their stake on to someone else at some point in the future, for a profit. If Facebook turns out to be one of those rare profitable Internet businesses, that will be easier.

The critical things about making lots of money selling your Internet business would therefore seem to be telling a good story that makes you one of the bets worth taking, or finding someone who will get some synergy from buying a stake, like Microsoft and Facebook. That’s quite a contrast from the traditional approach of growing a normal business.

The interesting fact about the News International launch is that it’s going to be a property search engine, as opposed to a property listing site. Traditional websites which list property for sale or rent do it on a listing basis, where people pay to advertise (Rightmove), or pay to view (Loot). You therefore only see a partial view of what’s on offer at each of those sites. The anecdotal evidence is that people using traditional sites have to visit 6 websites to get a fair view of everything that’s on offer, each with its own interface foibles, and keeping an eye on the property market in your area is therefore very hard to do ongoing.

Property search engines, on the other hand, crawl the Internet like Google does, sucking in details of all the properties they can find, pulling them into a standard structure of prices, addresses, number of bedrooms and such like, so you can see a huge range in one place. They make their money in a variety of ways, but mostly by selling increased prominence in their listings to specific estate agents, or to other companies like mortgage lenders who want to sell to people interested in property.

For users the advantages are clear: you visit one site instead of six, you get one user interface onto all that property, and it’s really easy to check every day what’s going on. Zoomf even has a mobile site where you can check on your saved searches on the bus home. Given the likelihood of users switching to this more convenient model, estate agents and other advertisers will increasingly switch their advertising spend away from traditional listing-based sites to next generation vertical search sites.

So the News International development is a very interesting one, which is likely to accelerate the disruption of property selling considerably.

If I had equity at Facebook, I think I’d be selling it to Microsoft before they read the Nielsen report.

I found this article from Microsoft really helpful, if a little serious, on the subject of how and when to use them. It explains that “emoticons are sideways faces that express emotion”

Lots of people will already know that a lot of spam is sent from machines (sometimes called zombies, but mostly people using them are quite unaware) that have had a virus installed on them. This is common because it makes it harder for anti-spam software to spot which machines are sending what spam, and because sending lots of spam takes lots of computing power. Writing viruses that create zombies that send spam is a lot cheaper than buying lots of machines.

Lots of people are probably also aware that much spam is concentrated on the sale of drugs that help with sexual performance, including the famous Viagra tablet. For some reason, cheap viagra (which is mostly fake anyway, I’ve read) sells better than other things that spam emails are promoting.

Viagra is made by Pfizer, and a report just out (thanks to the Register for the story) has shown that a lot of the Viagra spam is coming from zombie machines inside Pfizer. They don’t even know they’re sending it, apparently. Though I guess they do by now. So the guys that make Viagra, have had their machines taken over by criminals, who are using them to sell Viagra

The Internet really is all about unintended consequences, isn’t it?

My friends at Zoomf.com are looking for people who can talk about how they use the Internet, especially to search for things like property, to help them identify and prioritise new features for their website. Anyone who does help will get paid a bit, and it should be fun. All the details are here.

I don’t really know where to start with this. The serious and comic potential are both so great.

Has he used it to search for bad guys in Afghanistan? Does he know it’s not real-time?

“One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.”

Surely he doesn’t need to use Google’s satellite to look at stuff – he has quite a few of his own. Or perhaps he’s using it to plan his future military campaigns. That’d be pretty disturbing. Maybe he needs this too.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is over 200 comments in under 24 hours on the story, including some excellent suggestions on what GW should Google next.