Figuring out your Facebook worth is not as easy as creating a hypothetical price per tweet, though I am going to borrow liberally from Esquire’s price-per-tweet equation. Compared with Twitter and it’s one platform offering, Facebook users compete with 900 million apps, games and business pages.

Since there are 800 million Facebook users, adding that to the 900 million other entities, and dividing it by the valuation, we can estimate the value of each page is on average: $58.82.

Of course, the valuation is what Facebook expects to earn in the future from advertising dollars, but one can argue that the valuation wouldn’t exist if not for all the status updates, photos and links we’ve shared. Sp. I’m going back to see how much cash Facebook has made off of me over time. Here’s what I did to get my rough guesstimate:

1. Check my profile page and eyeball how many status updates, photos and comments I’ve made on the site this past week and multiple that by 4 (to find out how many updates per month). (For me, I’ve updated or commented 6 times this week. Most about my hair. So I’ll guess an average of 24 times this month.)

2. Multiply that by the number of months I’ve been a member on the site. (To find out how long you’ve been a member, find your first profile picture and use the upload date as a gauge. I joined in March 2008, so 45 months x 24 updates = 1,080 Updates Over Time (UOT).)

3. Divide that by the value of each page. ($58.82)

via Facebook IPO: How much is your Facebook page worth? – BlogPost – The Washington Post.

If the crowdfunding bill becomes law, all of the foregoing prohibitions and requirements will be lifted, and a startup will be permitted to sell securities via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and/or social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook so long as the company (and its intermediary, if applicable) complies with the bill, including these key provisions:

The company may only raise a maximum of $1 million (or $2 million if the company provides potential investors with audited financial statements);

Each investor is limited to investing an amount equal to the lesser of (i) $10,000 or (ii) 10% of his or her annual income; and

The issuer or the intermediary, if applicable, must take a number of steps to limit the risk to investors, including (i) warning them of the speculative nature of the investment and the limitations on resale, (ii) requiring them to answer questions demonstrating their understanding of the risks, and (iii) providing notice to the SEC of the offering, including certain prescribed information.

Are There Any Downsides to Crowdfunding for Startups?

Yes, there are several significant downsides that startups should be aware of:

First, startups must understand that minority stockholders have certain key rights under State law, including voting rights, the right to inspect the company’s books and records, the right to bring a derivative claim on behalf of the company and certain protections against oppression by the controlling stockholders.  Indeed, the more stockholders a startup has, the greater the likelihood that a disgruntled stockholder will cause problems, including filing lawsuits.

Second, having hundreds of stockholders is an administrative nightmare and will be time-consuming and costly.  Presumably, each stockholder will be required to execute a subscription agreement and/or stockholders’ agreement to address key issues such as transfer restrictions, rights of first refusal, drag-along rights, etc.  There will also be administrative issues relating to voting and stock transfer issues.

Third, startups will likely have difficulty raising funds from VC’s and other sophisticated investors if they have hundreds of unsophisticated stockholders.  Needless to say, few sophisticated investors will want to sit on the Board of Directors of such a company due to the risks of lawsuits relating to director liability, and D&O insurance rates will presumably sky-rocket for these companies.

What’s Next?

The bill now moves to the U.S. Senate, which hopefully will quickly pass a similar bill.  The White House supports the bill, so upon reconciliation, it will be signed into law, whereupon the SEC will be required to promulgate applicable rules within 90 days.

via House Passes Crowdfunding Bill: FAQ’s for Entrepreneurs | WALKER CORPORATE LAW GROUP, PLLC.

PayPal shopping specialist Claudia Lombana revealed PayPal’s news in a company blog, in which she stated that there were six-fold mobile payment increases for smartphones and tablets for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Lombana said that between 1pm and 2pm PST was the busiest mobile shopping hour on Black Friday, and added that the global mobile payment volume on the day itself was up by 148% compared to an average Friday.

PayPal, a division of e-commerce giant eBay, saw a four-fold (371%) increase in the number of customers shopping through mobile on Black Friday, when compared to last year and shoppers in New York, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago made the most mobile purchases.

It was a similar story with Cyber Monday, with mobile sales having increased by 514% year-on-year by just 11am PST. As of this time, PayPal had seen a 6% increase in global mobile payment volume, compared to the same time period on Black Friday.

eBay’s PayPal payment service also enjoyed a strong surge in mobile payments, with the service’s global mobile payment volume rising by 511% YoY on Thanksgiving.

eBay reported a 350% increase in the number of customers shopping through PayPal mobile and, like PayPal, found New York to be in first position for number of purchased items and dollar volume. The other top cities included Los Angeles, Chicago, Casa Grande (Arizona), Houston and Miami.

The e-commerce company said shoppers in the US purchased nearly two and a half times as many items via eBay Mobile this Black Friday compared to 2010, and revealed that its iPad 2 sale ($50 off a white 16GB model) resulted in around four sales every minute. The most searched items on eBay.com were iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone 4S.

via eBay and PayPal discover huge rise in mobile payments over holiday period | TabTimes.

via BeyondChron: San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily News » Avalos, City Officials, Community Voices Discuss Municipal Banking Alternatives.

via NFC Mobile Payments Gain Momentum With New Partnership, Standards – Mobile and Wireless – News & Reviews – eWeek.com.

via Don Tapscott: Cutting Out the Banker Middleman.

via Don Tapscott: Cutting Out the Banker Middleman.

via Don Tapscott: Cutting Out the Banker Middleman.

This parasitic perspective caused commercial lenders to issue sub-prime mortgages beginning in the late nineties and continuing until the housing credit bubble burst in 2007. In 2005 the majority of housing loans made by lenders such as Countrywide Financial and Washington Mutual were “interest only” back by little or no documentation — so called NINJA loans. Accountants advised financial-industry executives they could improve profitability by selling sub-prime (adjustable rate) mortgages and bundling them into mortgage-backed securities. Later the same parasites told executives they could further improve profitability by decreasing the loan documentation requirements.

In one industry after another we find examples where nearsighted pursuit of profits has trumped common sense and devastated the common good. Most California private timberland is owned by Sierra Pacific Industries that advocates clearcutting where all trees in a given area are cut down, the valuable timber hauled away, the residue burned, and the ground scraped bare and sprayed with herbicides. This process makes more money for SIERRA PACIFIC but it passes on environmental damage to the public and drastically diminishes the amount and quality of the watershed.

Most public utilities have a similar narrow focus on profits at the expense of the common good. For example, TECO Energy operates the massively polluting Big Bend power plant in Apollo Beach, Florida, because it has low operating costs due to its construction before modern standards for pollution control.

The advent of accounting parasites is the ultimate triumph of the nerd: hundreds of thousands of corporate finance people who care more about numbers than they do humanity. A culture of parasites who think nothing of firing workers, or stripping them of their benefits, in the name of profitability,

Accounting parasites have neutered our entrepreneurs, sucked the humanity out of corporate culture and ruined the economy. They don’t understand that the U.S. consumer economy will not function properly unless there is full employment.

Fixing the U.S. economy doesn’t mean replacing capitalism with socialism — that would bring another set of equally dire problems. The solution first requires taking parasitic accountants out of the corporate driver seat and replacing them with entrepreneurs — like the late Steve Jobs. And second, replacing the current corporate ethics and the relentless emphasis on profitability, with values that consider both workers and the environment; an ethical system that recognizes the American economy won’t function unless we all have a stake in it.

via Bob Burnett: Who Killed the Economy? Accounting Parasites.

via The Revolution at Home – Nilofer Merchant – Harvard Business Review.

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES | ABC News

Long before Steve Jobs became the CEO of Apple and one of the most recognizable figures on the planet, he took an unconventional route to find himself — a spiritual journey that influenced every step of an unconventional career.

Steve Jobs’ Mantra Rooted in Buddhism: Focus and Simplicity (ABC News)

Jobs, who died Wednesday at the age of 56 of pancreatic cancer, was the biological child of two unmarried academics who only consented to signing the papers if the adoptive parents sent him to college.

His adoptive parents sent a young Jobs off to Reed College, an expensive liberal arts school in Oregon, but he dropped out and went to India in the 1973 in search of enlightenment.

Jobs and his college friend Daniel Kottke, who later worked for him at Apple, visited Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram.  He returned home to California a Buddhist, complete with a shaved head and traditional Indian clothing and a philosophy that may have shaped much of his corporate values.

Later, he was often seen walking barefoot in his trademark blue jeans around the office and reportedly often said that those around him didn’t fully understand his way of thinking.

“I wouldn’t say Steve Jobs was a practicing Buddhist,” said Robert Thurman, a professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, who met Jobs and his “Tibetan buddies” in the 1980s in San Francisco.

“But he was just as creative and generous and went outside the box in the way that he looked to Eastern mental discipline and the Zen vision, which is a compelling one.”

“He was a real explorer and very much to be mourned and too young at 56,” said Thurman. “We will remember the design simplicity of his products. That simplicity is a Zen idea.”

Thurman met Jobs in San Francisco in the 1980s with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and actor Richard Gere. The discussion was about Tibet.

“It was before the Dalai Lama, and he was very sympathetic and had advice for the Tibetans,” he said. “But he was into his own thing and didn’t become a major player.”

Jobs used Dalai Lama in one of Apple’s most famous ad campaigns: “Think Different.”

“He put them up all over Hong Kong,” Thurman said of the computer ads. “But then the Chinese communists squawked very violently and as my son says, ‘He had to think again.’”

Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa married Jobs and his now widow, Laurene Powell, in 1991.  Jobs could have just as easily taken his philosophy from the hippie movement of the 1960s.  The Whole Earth Catalogue was his bible, with founder Stewart Brand’s cry, “We are as gods.”

The catalogue offered an integrated and complex world view with a leftist political calling.  Jobs later adopted the catalogue’s mantra: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

Buddhism a Wake-Up Call for  Steve Jobs ?

The catalogue also delved into spirituality.  In one 1974 article, author Rick Fields wrote that Buddhism is “a tool, like an alarm-clock for waking up.”

That may have been the case for Jobs.  He said in his now-famous 2005 Commencement speech at Stanford that he lived each day as if it were his last, admonishing graduates not to “live someone else’s life.”

“Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking,” Jobs said.  ”Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

In that speech he told students to relish the time to follow their passions, recounting the time after he dropped out, but continued to audit non-credit classes like calligraphy.  The elegant typefaces — serif and sans serif — were later introduced for the first time in the Macintosh.

“I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple,” he said. “I loved it.”

Jobs was also influenced by Richard Baker, who was head of the Zen Center in San Francisco from 1971 until 1984, when Baker resigned after a scandalous affair with a wife of one of the center’s benefactors.  But Baker helped the center grow to one of the most successful in the United States.

Jobs was receptive to Baker’s message of change, “helping the environment and empowering the individual.”

Jobs admitted to experimenting with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which he has said was “one of the two or three most important things” in his life.

In an unauthorized biography by Alan Deutschman, a college friend said that Jobs had even been a lover of folk singer Joan Baez, who was 41 at the time, and the attraction was largely because she had also been intimate with another ’60s icon, Bob Dylan.

He was a fan of the Beatles, who also embraced spirituality and made a similar pilgrimage to India.  Jobs told television’s “60 Minutes” he modeled his own business after the rock group.

“They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other,” he said.  ”And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.  Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”

Jobs said that “focus and simplicity” were the foundation of Apple’s ethic.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple,” he told Businessweek in 1998.  ”But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Even the minimalist design of his products — from the first Macintosh to the sleek iPad have a “aesthetic simplicity and keenness of line” that smacks of Japanese Zen, according to Columbia’s Thurman.

Former Pepsico President John Sculley, who eventually fired Jobs, said walking into Jobs’ apartment had the same design feel.

“I remember going into Steve’s house, and he had almost no furniture in it,” Sculley said in a 2010 interview with Businessweek.”He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed.  He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful in what he selected.”

Jobs reportedly convinced Sculley to work for Apple when he asked, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Jobs Gave People Computer Power

Thurman contends Jobs’ greatest success was not necessarily financial.

“It was his initial role in making the PC available to individuals to give them computer power,” said Thurman.  ”He was democratizing computer power.  It was his own inspiration of things and not accepting the status quo and breaking through the power of the people.”

Though Jobs may not have been a devout practitioner of Buddhism, his personal and corporate vision certainly struck the same tone — “wisdom and compassion,” he said.

“Zen vision is that human beings can understand reality if they focus their mind on it and develop wisdom,” said Thurman. “When you do, you have the greater capacity to arrange the nature of things and to help people.”

But the irony of Jobs’ spirituality was that as much as it reflected the most beautiful aspects of the products he made, those very “machines” have in some ways enslaved a generation of users, according to John Lardas Modern, a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

Jobs made computers and hand held devices that have allowed people to become “disembodied” on a certain level — “to escape and transcend the mundane reality of bodily existence,” according to Modern.

Such spirituality begs for freedom from the trappings of tradition, he said, but they have a down side.

“These machines are amazing,” said Modern. “For the last 12 hours, I have been seeing people on Facebook and Twitter in praise of how the devices he made allow ease and convenience and empowerment.”

“I love my iPad, precisely because it feels like an extension of my mind and I can’t live without it,” said Modern. “The irony is, these products ground us in a chair behind a desk, behind a computer and in a sense they have pushed us inward? and you don’t have physical connections with others.”

“It cuts both ways,” he said.

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http://news.yahoo.com/steve-jobs-mantra-rooted-buddhism-focus-simplicity-161250480.html;_ylc=X3oDMTNuczV2YmJmBF9TAzIxNDU0ODA3NjIEYWN0A21haWxfY2IEY3QDYQRpbnRsA3VzBGxhbmcDZW4tVVMEcGtnAzMzZTU1NjRlLWFiOWYtMzNkYy1hOTllLWViODgyZWYzZWNjOARzZWMDbWl0X3NoYXJlBHNsawNtYWlsBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3

To try to bring some clarity and structure to the critical decision of when to raise capital, I have attempted to boil down the basics of what constitutes a “fundable” company in today’s market.  In a nutshell, the main factors are:

1.  The “Big Idea.”  A good first filter is to honestly and objectively assess whether your startup is doing something truly novel.  Novelty and originality are surprisingly rare traits; many startups are highly derivative– a slightly better mousetrap or an incremental improvement over what’s being done today (think: Groupon clones).  While a better mousetrap can certainly be the basis for a profitable niche business, it is not usually venture fundable (or at least, not easily fundable—it becomes more so, with #3 below).

By contrast, pitching something truly unique, big, and audacious—what Mike Maples calls the “thunder lizard” startup—creates an entirely different response from investors.  I’ve worked with startups doing something interesting but not game-changing, and I’ve worked with startups with ideas that seemed crazy—but if they worked, they’d be huge.

The latter situation is much preferred, and makes the tiring work of raising capital exponentially easier. A really cool technology with the “wow” factor or a big, audacious, disruptive concept is almost magical in the way it can cut through the noise and generate buzz amongst jaded investors. At a minimum, VCs will take a meeting to hear what the hell you’re talking about.

2.  A Story, Well Told.  While the Big Idea is the cornerstone of the foundation, the pitch is what gets people to stop and take a closer look.  Investors are pitched by literally thousands of good companies each year; an outstanding pitch will break through the noise and set your company apart from the unwashed masses.

A solid pitch neatly packages the company, vision, and deal in a compelling manner (typically via your slide deck, exec sum, and model), with a narrative crafted to appeal to the nuances of what investors are looking for.  It involves telling a clear and exceedingly simple story, so the message is frictionless and can be circulated among the partners at the VC firm and among other VCs in a syndicate.  In other words, the pitch is portable (and often somewhat “viral”).

A solid pitch also includes polished and practiced Q&A, and an overall story that strikes both rational (how do I make a return on my investment?) and emotional (why do I want to be part of this vision?) chords.  Bringing all these elements together is surprisingly difficult, but when done well it is a beautiful thing.

3.  Supporting Evidence.  This is the clincher, and the one most startups miss.  VCs fund businesses, not concepts.

via When Is A Startup “Venture Fundable?” | VentureArchetypes Blog: Seed Stage Capital.