Finally! a formula for valuing internet startups

At last we have the formula for valuing internet startups! Here it is:

"In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (RSS subscribers + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)2 and then doubles if it they use Ruby on Rails or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before. Bhatnagar admits the math is mostly a guess but points out that “the press eats it up.”

Thanks to Jason Freid for his priceless sense of humor.

PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT - (37signals)

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web meetings on my iPhone

Image via Wikipedia

I just got a new iPhone - and my first use will be a Virtual Visuals test using the Webex meeting app. View the video for a taste.

to Tweet or not to Tweet

Image via CrunchBase

I am not a Twitterer and I have resisted the pressure to join the mob - since I was first introduced to Twitter over two years ago by the biggest Twit of them all - Robert Scoble Thoughts Illustrated: Lunching with Scoble and by my then working colleague Critt Jarvis.

So I was enlightened by this recent "study" Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results - 40% is "Pointless Babble" | Pear Analytics and downloaded the Pear Analytics White Paper pdf from this link. If you are the least bit interested in Twitter - get the White Paper for yourself.

This all started up again this morning by a tweet from Critt, whom I have been mostly out of contact with, and a link to his blog Why Scoble's Twitter valuation is correct... | Critt Jarvis where I get Critt's "i told you so!" treatment.

The upshot of all this Twittering is the recognition, seldom revealed to infrequent Twitter users, that the combination of a tweet with a link to a more in-depth post of some consequence to the recipient of the tweet does have value - as I mentioned here a year ago Thoughts Illustrated: from twitter to youtube - nice segue from Garr Reynolds

All of which once againn proves that you can eat up a lot of time on Twitter even if you rarely use it. Preparing this post which resulted from Critt's tweet has taken me back to my TI archives and an elapsed time of 23 minutes stolen from my continuous partial attention stream this morning.

Did I learn anything useful in reading the Twitter Study? Did you? Was it Pointless Babble or a weird extension of a dangling conversation that started more than two years ago? What it did do is make me review my blog "memory" to recall the thread on Twitter started in March of 2007 during my lunch with Scoble.

Scoble, Critt and I have gone our separate ways since then, but this morning's tweet brought it all back - and presented me with a reason to reconsider Twitter as a social media tool of value.