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Zynga Moves to Gambling

Finance, Tech Comments Off

Dec 112012

Like Facebook, Zynga has had a very embarrassing year following its IPO. Share prices have tumbled beyond belief from around $15 to $2.45; it’s painful to read I know. Social gaming was 2012′s fastest bubble; people saw money, they flooded the market and now we’re left with a bunch of rubbish games and no one to play them. Consumers have lost faith in social games; they’re wising up to the quasi-brainwashing that was passive aggressively forcing gamers to part with millions of dollars a year.

But Zynga (ZNGA) is onto a potentially huge break. If you’re not familiar with the poker market then all you need to know is that it has been effectively outlawed in the US for 2 years. But with the US government eager to grab more precious tax money, a new regulated type of poker may be hitting the market very shortly. And poker regulation means one thing – Zynga (with an already hugely popular free-to-play poker platform) – will be there. So people who are looking for where to play poker in the US (featured on pokerisrigged.com) may find licensed operators as soon as late 2013.

But where does this leave Zynga’s waining share price? Even if poker is opened up in America, isn’t there every chance that another company will beat them to it? Well Zynga has recently been speaking with Nevada officials to obtain a gambling license; and the value of Zynga to them is enormous. Zynga has millions of poker players on their current free software; that’s millions of highly qualified and highly valuable players who would chomp at the bit to play for real money on Zynga. Poker players are a loyal people, if Zynga gets the license then they’ll instantly convert free players into paying ones, and their stock price could quadruple very quickly.

For us, ZNGA is as low as it can get and the taste of gambling has already seen big stock price jumps of 5-10; but can we expect more?

Big Movers in Tech: FB, ZNGA & AAPL

Finance, Tech Comments Off

Dec 112012

The last few months have been record breaking for a number of reasons. We’ve seen one of the most anticipated IPOs backfire enormously, we’ve seen a market come and go in the form of social gaming; and now we’re sat helplessly as one of the greats – Apple – has a stock price catastrophe! This week we’re going to start by examining Facebook, and our thoughts might surprise you.

Facebook

Facebook opened its shares to the public in early 2012 at a price of $40; 6 months later the stock was trading at an all time low of nearly $17. What happened here was overeagerness; Facebook was a miracle company and that was reflected by its miracle valuation. Traders wanted a piece of the 21st Century’s most anticipated stock, they wanted to ride that expected rally all the way to $1,000 per share and reap the rewards of being an early adopter. Unfortunately for them, that didn’t happen.

In the first few weeks of IPO, FortuneSpreads.com listed Facebook as the most traded stock across all of the spread betting companies that they deal with. But FortuneSpreads have also released a statement that in as many words says ‘BUY NOW‘, and at Sixxac – we’re inclined to agree.

You see, we think that Facebook is undervalued. The reality is that Facebook has 1,000,000,000 human beings using it… that’s… enormous – unprecedented – unimaginable… they have a growing ad network and a social platform that could one day provide real money gambling. And Facebook’s ad platform is only really starting to take off, we spoke to Nick Pateman – marketer and founder of the Leicester web design company, Inbound Digital Marketing. He’s confident that Facebook’s new ad serving network is onto a winner:

“[Facebook] are integrating ads more and more effectively. It’s reminiscent of AdWords in that we’re seeing huge ROIs in its early stages; and these returns are just going to attract tens of thousands more marketers.”

For us, Facebook is a stock that those who didn’t invest will look back in 5 years and say “that was so damn obvious!”. At the end of the day, we’re looking at a company with an enormous amount of power who is trading at $27 per share. And we believe that the skepticism surrounding the value of social is totally misplaced and unjustified.

Of course this is just our opinion, and we could be completely wrong…

Space Tourism: Fact or Fiction?

Featured, Tech Comments Off

Apr 202012

Throughout history mankind has been fascinated with space and the stars and planets. From the early astronomers of the ancient world in Egypt and Greece to the space race of the 20th century, there has been an obsession with the night skies and what they contain.

The need to travel and explore has shaped human history, and educational websites like planets.org.uk are a testament to the changing desire to explore space. Exploration has led to the formation of the modern world as people journeyed across the world, colonised new lands and created empires. Undoubtedly, the next step is to voyage beyond the confines of Earth and into space. But will space travel ever become commonplace? When will we be able to get on a spaceship and go on holiday to the moon?

In the mid 20th century, many optimistic futurologists predicted that the average family would be jetting off to space for a holiday by the year 2000. While space holidays remain far from the norm, since 2001 there have been seven space tourists, of various nationalities, all travelling with the company ‘Space Adventures’ on journeys averaging 11 days. However, these trips into space cost each person an average of twenty million dollars and involved lengthy periods of training.

Now, however, several companies are offering trips into space that will – although still expensive – be available to many more people. The average space adventurer in future can expect several days’ training at a space centre followed by an adrenaline-charged take-off from Earth. Once in low-earth orbit they will have stunning views of the planet and will be able to perhaps perform a few zero-gravity somersaults (dubbed ‘astrobatics’). There will then be a relatively gentle ‘glide’ home. The whole trip will take about two and a half hours. This is significantly shorter than the average ‘holiday’ but it will certainly be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

To date, 410 people have booked a trip into space with Virgin Galactic. With flights from Canada, New Mexico and Sweden and with plans for hotels aboard space shuttles in development, it seems likely that space travel will certainly become available, at least to the wealthy, within this generation. Whether it ever becomes accessible to all – and indeed whether it ever should be – remains to be seen. Given the pattern of human history, however and people’s unquenchable thirst to explore the unknown, it seems probable that at some point in the future mass space tourism will become a reality.

This article was Authored by Jack Rasmussen, keen astronomer and self-confessed nerd.

Virtualisation: Calculating your ROI

Tech Comments Off

Mar 212012

Virtualisation is becoming a huge trend for IT companies across the globe. Being able to manage all of your administrative tasks from one centralised virtual server is scalable, efficient and money saving – but your ROI will really depend on a number of things. First of all, you should take a look at this virtualisation calculator and read the following about different types of virtualisation:

Desktop Virtualisation

This type of virtualisation is a ‘kind of’ hardware virtualisation. With a normal desktop, you interact using a mouse and keyboard that directly inputs into the physical desktop infront of you. With a virtual desktop, the desktop is hosted on a server elsewhere and your interactions are made across the internet or LAN. This type of virtualisation is incredibly useful for IT support companies where a remote desktop is made available through virtualisation.

Software Virtualisation

You may have heard of an IT company that is heavily adopting virtualisation or ‘cloud computing’. That company is called Google and their new Google Chromebook is almost entirely virtual. All of the software or ‘apps’ that you use on a Chromebook are actually being hosted on a server elsewhere and you are accessing them through the internet. Software virtualisation has serious benefits although the security and viability of this has been criticised.

Bitcoin: Revolutionising the way we do Business?

Featured, Finance Comments Off

Dec 142011

bitcoin

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is digital ‘crypto-currency’ that allows users to transfer money from one wallet to another with little no transaction fee. It is essentially an open source currency that is available to anyone and can be transferred to anyone. Bitcoin is secure and anonymous, transactions are public but parties involved in the transaction are not identified. For this reason, bitcoin has been the subject of much controversy and has led to the open purchase of drugs and weapons online with absolutely no regulation.

How does bitcoin affect how we do business?

Currently the answer is that it doesn’t. Not enough people have adopted this new ‘currency’ for it to reach a point where people need to use it. Some of the benefits of using bitcoin to purchase and sell goods or services are:

1. Transactions are either low cost or completely free.
2. Transactions are completely anonymous.
3. The supply of bitcoin is fixed and predictable.

There are a few main benefits to using bitcoin; however the anonymity has tarnished bitcoin’s legitimacy as it is now almost entirely associated with drugs and firearms. So do the negatives outweigh the positives for businesses looking to adopt bitcoin?

Well besides from the terrible reputation there are a few things that could go wrong:

1. Governments put a ban on bitcoin due to black market issues.
2. Bitcoin is highly volatile and will almost always be highly volatile until it is backed by something of inherent value (possibly gold).
3. While bitcoin is incredibly secure from an encryption point of view, your wallet is stored on your harddrive and can therefore be completely erased. You can also have all of your BTC (bitcoin) stolen if someone is able to login to your account.

At this moment in time it is implausible for a business to take on such a risk. However in some instances bitcoin opens access to markets that were otherwise blocked. Bitcoinpoker.org has listed various bitcoin poker sites that have popped up over the last year or so; and this particular bitcoin market has seen a surge of growth in the US as the currency provides a convenient a ‘loophole’ to gambling online. Of course the legality of such a loophole is not entirely clear, but it pales in comparison to some of the more immoral uses of bitcoin (anonymously purchasing guns/drugs and money laundering!). But bitcoin poker in particular has sparked a lot of debate, with conversations appearing on many message boards along the lines of “what poker sites accept US players?”

While bitcoin is certainly an interesting development and is clearly showing moderate success, it is still too hard to say whether it will gain credibility and become popular enough to change the way we do business.

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