The Gold is in the Rest of the World

• Be International from Day 1
• Unifying platform from the get go
• Cultural and demographic data is Holy Grail

Be international from day one. Ask yourself the following:

• Why would Fox buy a small German Facebook lookalike for $90M?
• Why is Mixxi valued at $1B?
• What drives Orkut to No 1 in Brazil and No 2 in India? (same traffic stats as MySpace)

There is an international land grab going on by media companies for international social media sites. They see the “land” i.e. registered members, as almost free today but worth a phenomenal amount in the future. This drives valuations which only appear to be sky high but we all know the value of the international market from previous lives.  The US market already has over 850 sites for dating alone!

Build a unifying platform from day 1 using front and back end modules.

You must allow for smart ads, e.g. location, gender, language, interest based advertising today. Every “site” or “skin” feeds all data to one intelligent data base. This is a business flaw for all the media giants who buy disparate sites. At what cost will it take to unify all their data after a buy? Can they even do it after the fact? We think not in a  re-usable form. Build it right at the start. Build to beat competition in all locales, not to buy regionally. Build in data migration tools “just in case”. Thus our data grows hourly from 28 sites in 17 languages as does its value.
Data is the Holy Grail and it drives everything

• The increasing valuation of Google, why they bought YouTube and considered it a bargain
• Purchases of sites for large sums by FOX, CBS other media giants
• Aggregation by Google and Yahoo of ad companies like Doubleclick

So how much does Coke pay today to know the interests and buying habits of a 30 yr old Caucasian male in Northern German, how many there are like him, the languages they speak,  and what they like or dislike today? Do they have it in real time? Even daily? Monthly? Tailored ads based on location, and recent interests can now be served up on GPS aware mobile phones, laptops, Blackberrys.  What would a major vendor pay to know this, to do this? “Sanitized ” data about you exists now. eg your Air Miles or Costco card profile tracks all your purchases for internal use, repackaging and resale. So what else makes Airmiles worth so valuable as a company?

Next: Company purpose is the community purpose