* Posts by Ray Anderson

8 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2007

Facebook says it's LOSING money in the UK ... pays hardly any tax

Ray Anderson

Share Based Payments - Basic Accounting - not a Fiddle

Basic accounting I'm afraid. IFRS 2, Share-based Payment requires compliant companies to measure the fair value of the employee stock options granted to employees and to recognise this amount as an expense in the year in which options are granted.

The valuation of an option, as a "one way bet" is based on the amount of the option and also the volatility of the share price. The infanous "Black Scholes" model is often used for that.

Of course there is no "real expense" but the idea is that companies that do cash compensation should not be disadvantaged.

On the basis that Facebook will have had a generous share option scheme and the share price is volatile, the "Share Based Payments" will have been high value.

Note that if the options are exercised there will be either income tax or capital gains tax paid by the individuals and potentially NI paid by the company - but thats if the shares become more valuabe than the price they were granted at.

Enough with the Apple App Store apathy

Ray Anderson
Jobs Horns

Apple App Store is a Prison Garden

The key factors to remember about Apple's approach are:

(1) Apple prevents the download of Apps that they do not "vet" through their App store - therefore there is no channel to users that is not moderated by Apple. Its not just paying for apps - its any apps.

(2) Apple has castrated the Safari web browser on iOS to prevent users downloading content such as music, videos, podcats, once again forcing users through the iTures / AppStore "Checkpint Charlie". Of course they will not permit download of another browser with such capabilities.

Its surprisieng how few people realise these - especially (2).

iPad media apps: Stealthed hobbits thwart Google's flaming Eye

Ray Anderson
FAIL

The others have probably said it all..

You can cloak your content as much as you want on a web browser: Stop spiders, use Captchas etc etc.

You can decide on ads or no ads on a web page or an app.

Its the apps that have the problem, they can't expose content easily, they can't embed content easily, they can't share content to multipl edevices, and they are a mega fail when it comes to "tweeting" or "liking"

Its Google that must be feeling comfortable looking at the way apps are struggling to mimic web capabilities, and knowing that the browser developers are waking up to embrace and extend all teh app capability that becomes important to users.

Wheels come off O2's data network

Ray Anderson
Thumb Up

O2 data problem is not very widespread

At Bango we monitor traffic across thousands of mobile sites. Hourly mobile web traffic levels are about 4-9% less than the same period last week so there may be a problem but it is not widespread.

Canon PowerShot G10

Ray Anderson
Thumb Up

G10 is great

My main camera is a Canon 1Ds MkIII with various lenses - kit price around £4,500, but I got the G10 for less than a tenth of that price and I've found I carry it with me almost everywhere. Low light without flash can be tricky, but the G10 really excells in environments where the size factor is a benefit - i.e. almost anywhere!

Also I recently invested in its waterproof case - which has opened up a whole new world of photography and fun.

Twitter falls silent in the UK

Ray Anderson

Twitter shuts down SMS service world-wide, except for 3 remaining countries.

I think you may have missed the point. Although Twitter talks about its "UK number", that is in fact the gateway to the whole world.

The announcement should really be "Twitter shuts down sms sending worldwide - except to users in three countries where they can send SMS for free: USA, India and Canada.

The fact they send via a UK gateway is a red herring.

Vodafone and China Mobile team to build mobile Web 2.0

Ray Anderson

Adjusting websites to work on small screens is easier

"Mobile web browsing is something of a dead end."

- I don't think so, mobile browsing is taking off fast. 100 fold growth in UK in last 4 years, everybody in Japan and Korea does it. iPhone seems popular for browsing.

"No matter how great your scaling technology, most websites won't work properly on the smallest screen. So operators, manufacturers, and pundits are betting that mobile widgets will be the vehicle that brings the mobile internet to the masses."

Thankfully, operators, manufacturers and "pundits" don't write mobile websites. Those who do write them are adapting them to work on small screens. Yahoo, Google, ebay,facebook, myspace, bebo, bbc, cnn, usatoday, sun, flickr, times, even nokia. (But not apple yet) all have small screen sites that work fine.

iPhone tops mobile browsing charts

Ray Anderson

Vegetarians outnumber omnivores 100 to 1

This is really misleading.

Hitslink produced this report by using dat afrom their analytics customers. These people operate HTML/PC websites. They say: "You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on".

The 300 million or so mobile phone browser users (say 50million S60) can't or don't browse HTML sites. They browse mobile friendly sites (WAP or XHTML or iMode) which will not have this HTML code in.

Considering that organizations like Bango, Admob, Peperonity, Vodafone report mobile browser traffic in the billions of pages per day, most of thse being S40 or S60 its clear that by ignoring non-HTML sites these stats are misleading and mistaken.

The other headline would be "iPhone users not not seen visiting the web" becuase the providers of web sites that serve mobile phones never see them.

It like a survey from Cranks wholefood revealling that a survey of people eating meals served in their restaurants revealed 99% were vegetarian.

Larry