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Google buys Nest for $3.2 BILLION!!! (Page 3)
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mindwaves
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Jan 27, 2014, 03:20 AM
 
I still don't get the point of thermostats. I mean I know why they are useful, but they are a huge waste of money. Heating and cooling should only be done on a room-to-room basis where the people are. If a thermostat can do that (along with the ducts in the house), I might be inclined to buy one. But if the central air cools all of the rooms including where the people are not inside, then it is a total waste of energy and money to me.

edit: I suppose if you have a small house it is ok, but a larger one, no.
     
Shaddim
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Jan 27, 2014, 05:01 AM
 
At one point we considered closing off parts of the house in the winter, but zoned thermostats that are centrally controlled is the answer. Parts of the house we don't enter very often can be kept at 60F, while living areas stay at 68F, and one way to ensure that is to have each zone on each floor individually insulated. This year, which has been cold as ****, all we've run are the fuel cells, a wood stove, and a few fireplaces. Total utility power used, zero. Those breakers are switched off and the only reason I still have the service at all is as a back up. We actually have an excess of electricity at times, but they won't let us give it back to the grid. There's a whole long story about my battle with the area power company over us going electrically independent, they honestly view it as subversive activity.
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ShortcutToMoncton
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Jan 27, 2014, 10:17 AM
 
Originally Posted by mindwaves View Post
I still don't get the point of thermostats. I mean I know why they are useful, but they are a huge waste of money. Heating and cooling should only be done on a room-to-room basis where the people are. If a thermostat can do that (along with the ducts in the house), I might be inclined to buy one. But if the central air cools all of the rooms including where the people are not inside, then it is a total waste of energy and money to me.

edit: I suppose if you have a small house it is ok, but a larger one, no.
1. Depends on where you live. It's a balmy 23 F here today with windchill of 5 F. You don't have an area of your house that does not have any heat until you walk in and turn on the heat; that is a recipe for frozen pipes.

2. As Shaddim mentioned, the easy answer is zone heating and programmable thermostats. In the winter our bedrooms automatically heat up from 6am-9am and 9pm-11pm; otherwise they're maintained at a cooler temperature, because we're not in them. The main living areas heat up 7am-9am and then 5pm-10:30pm during M-F; they're warmer all day on the weekend.

We only have those two zones because it's an old house with radiator heating; if we wanted each bedroom or room controlled individually we would need to do a lot of plumbing. People with electric heat or newer houses around here have a programmable thermostat in almost every room.

You are right that with forced air, it takes a little more planning and expense to regulate individual rooms or areas without heating up unwanted areas as well.
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Phileas
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Jan 27, 2014, 11:26 AM
 
We have temperature sensors in different zones of the house, heating and cooling them as needed.
     
subego
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Jan 27, 2014, 05:16 PM
 
One issue is the invention of central AC radically changed architecture.

Previous to its invention, the primary design pattern used for cooling was the courtyard. Courtyards allow the maximum surface area in which to put windows for cooling, but are obviously quite space inefficient. You've got this big open thing in the center.

Central air ushered in the era of buildings which are big square blocks. You need central air for this type of design because there are significant portions of your house which have no window access.

I'm in an unusual situation, and I'm positive my place isn't up to code, but my bedroom has no windows. It needs central air. Trust me on this.
     
ort888
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Jan 29, 2014, 07:02 PM
 
And Google sells Motorla for 2.9 Billion...

What the heck is going on over there? It's like they acquire a new company per week.

Google is blowing through money like a 22 year old rapper.

What, robots and s***? 2 billion, buy it! Thermostats? Buy it! Some barges? F*** yeah, I need some barges. I'm a big money playa, I needs me some barges....

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subego
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Jan 29, 2014, 07:27 PM
 
Barges are cool.
     
OAW
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Jan 29, 2014, 07:28 PM
 
Originally Posted by ort888 View Post
And Google sells Motorla for 2.9 Billion...

What the heck is going on over there? It's like they acquire a new company per week.

Google is blowing through money like a 22 year old rapper.

What, robots and s***? 2 billion, buy it! Thermostats? Buy it! Some barges? F*** yeah, I need some barges. I'm a big money playa, I needs me some barges....
Given your observation it should be noted that Google paid 12.5 billion for Motorola in 2011. I imagine Google shareholder will be none too pleased.

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Phileas
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Jan 29, 2014, 07:39 PM
 
Google paid that money for the patents, which they are keeping. They were never interested in the manufacturing business and said as much at the time of purchase. Having said that, they did overpay for Motorola as the patents in question turned out to be far less valuable than anticipated.

I'd say google's shareholders will be pleased that they're retaining/regaining focus as well as getting rid of a loss making operation. Hopefully it'll be a learning experience for Page etc. google just isn't any good at actually making things and should leave that to partners.

They already made more than $2 billion from the sale of the set-top box unit and they're holding on to some of Motorola's R&R specialists, so it wasn't a complete loss.
( Last edited by Phileas; Jan 29, 2014 at 07:49 PM. )
     
mindwaves
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Jan 29, 2014, 10:13 PM
 
I was quite surprised here with the sale and the loss that they are taking on it (around 7 billion excluding the value of the patents).

Which, if approved, kind of makes Lenovo the next big (scary) player in town. They have IBM's computer business, x86 server business, and now a viable cellphone business.

And yes, Google is blowing through money like crazy.
     
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Jan 30, 2014, 08:05 AM
 
I wonder where Lenovo is getting the cash from. That's some $5 billion and change cash money going out the door for Moto and the IBM x86 servers, as it doesn't seem to be stock purchases. When Google or MS does that (or potentially if Apple were to do it) I can understand it, because they have cash cows to milk, but Lenovo is mostly in businesses with thin margins.

I wonder if this was part of the deal with Sammy?
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ort888
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Jan 30, 2014, 12:51 PM
 
Yeah, Google stock is going up.

Fluch away 12.5 Billion on basically nothing? YAY! BUY!
Post your best quarter ever and the 4th best quarter in the history of the planet? SELL! BOO!

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Jan 30, 2014, 03:37 PM
 
There are a bunch of people doing the math on this, and basically if you add up all the bits Google has sold off before this, the operating losses and the cash pile Moto had, Google paid about 5 billion for the patent pile (which they keep). Which is high, but not insane compared to the 4.5 billion that the Rockstar consortium paid for the Nortel patents.
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subego
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Jan 30, 2014, 03:50 PM
 
One could say maintaining parity in the mutually assured destruction environment of patent law is priceless.
     
OAW
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Jan 30, 2014, 04:31 PM
 
It is true that Google gets to keep a pile of Motorola patents. A lot of good that's done them so far though ...

Google’s romance with Motorola was star-crossed from the start. With the $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola it wasn’t just taking on an ailing manufacturer — challenge enough — but simultaneously competing with Google’s own hardware partners in the Android ecosystem, meaning it had to tread carefully. The payoff for all that heartache? Motorola’s impressive collection of 24,000 patents and patent applications. Unfortunately for Google, the much-ballyhooed war chest of intellectual property didn’t hold up in the courtroom.

Google’s initial motivation for buying Motorola was extremely simple: Motorola’s patent portfolio included core pieces of standard technologies like Wi-Fi and GSM. At the height of the patent battles between Apple and Android phone manufacturers like Samsung, governments around the world were undecided on whether those "standards-essential" patents could be used to completely block products from the market — and Motorola had already filed several lawsuits attempting to block the iPhone from sale in courts across the US.

If Google had succeeded in using Motorola’s patents to block the iPhone, gain Congressional interest, and force Apple to the negotiating table, it would have been the smartest $12.5 billion ever spent.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work that way. Court after court rejected Motorola’s patent claims — the influential Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit completely threw out the case after deciding neither Apple nor Motorola had even demonstrated any reason to be in court — and trade agencies in the US and Europe took a hard line against using standards patents to block products. In the US, Google settled a Federal Trade Commission investigation into its improper use of standards patents by agreeing that those patents would not be used to block products from market but instead be licensed fairly. And the value of a fair license plummeted: the court in Motorola’s case against Microsoft’s Xbox 360 found that Microsoft owed just $1.7M in royalties per year, far less than the $4 billion Motorola had demanded.

Motorola’s patent portfolio was essentially rendered worthless; an anemic licensing business compared to Google’s other massive revenue streams.
The Motorola gambit: what Google really got by selling an American icon | The Verge

OAW
     
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Jan 30, 2014, 06:00 PM
 
There is one point, though: Motorola was apparently close to filing lawsuits against fellow Android manufacturers with those same patents when Google bought them. That was something Google could not afford - with three big well-known American companies all suing Android OEMs, the risk was that the public would see the OS as just a bunch of stolen tech, and indicate to other OEMs that they'd better find another option because this was never-ending. By buying Motorola, they stopped that from happening, which may have been worth $5 billion.
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ort888
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Feb 19, 2014, 06:46 PM
 
$16 BILLION for Whatsapp?

Whatsapp-ening here? Is this real life?

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mindwaves
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Feb 19, 2014, 07:16 PM
 
Yeah, that was way overpriced, even more so than Nest and Motorola. This buying company thing is weird. I may leave whatsapp. I don't use FB and don't want to have to use FB to use whatsapp if it ever came to that.
     
turtle777
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Feb 19, 2014, 07:18 PM
 
This acquisition values each Whatsapp customer at $50.

WTF ?

For the iOS app, you pay $1 for life.

This has gotten beyond ridiculous. We are so in the Dotcom Bubble 2.0

-t
     
Phileas
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Feb 19, 2014, 10:54 PM
 
The value of a user is not in the price they pay for the app.

Facebook is shoring up against the inevitable drop-off in subscribers while they still can.
     
Shaddim
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Feb 20, 2014, 05:53 AM
 
Makes Nest look like a bargain. If the little tech company I helped fund (we have a 1/4 stake in) is bought by a much larger rival, which they're trying to do, it could be big, but it's chump change compared to this (<10% of the amount paid for Whatsapp). Social software is bigger than e-commerce, right now, unfortunately. Our patents aren't worth what theirs are, apparently.

Wow, this is just staggering.
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The Final Dakar
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Feb 20, 2014, 10:21 AM
 
They paid $16 billion because a messaging service managed to outperform them. That is absurd.
     
osiris
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Feb 20, 2014, 01:14 PM
 
Some friends in South America told me that Spanish speaking nations are obsessed with the app. I was confounded ( I literally slapped my knee, took a sip of a mint julip, and said "well well, now I've seen everything.")

But all that user data Facebook will gain = shitload of money. I still believe it's idiotic, for chrissake, people are starving.
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The Final Dakar
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Feb 20, 2014, 01:16 PM
 
It's idiotic because people are moving away from facebook because it sucks, not because, as in this case, in doesn't have a messenger app. This acquisition does not solve the underlying problem.
     
turtle777
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Feb 20, 2014, 02:38 PM
 
Originally Posted by Phileas View Post
The value of a user is not in the price they pay for the app.
The value of a user is in future revenue streams.

As of right now, for all current iOS WhatsApp users, that value is 0.

Should they change their model and start making it a subscription based model even on iOS, they wil lose a lot of users. Like me.

No matter how you look at it, this is an absolutely ridiculous valuation.

-t
     
ort888
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Feb 20, 2014, 02:58 PM
 
At some point it starts to feel like these guys aren't playing with real money, they're playing with crazy silicon valley funny-money or something.

Has one of these mega acquisitions ever really worked out great for the buyer? NeXT I suppose. And maybe YouTube. But those both look like peanuts compared to the kind o stuff that's going on now.

I guess you can never really know, but it all feels so ridiculous.

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The Final Dakar
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Feb 20, 2014, 03:12 PM
 
Originally Posted by ort888 View Post
At some point it starts to feel like these guys aren't playing with real money, they're playing with crazy silicon valley funny-money or something.

Has one of these mega acquisitions ever really worked out great for the buyer? NeXT I suppose. And maybe YouTube. But those both look like peanuts compared to the kind o stuff that's going on now.

I guess you can never really know, but it all feels so ridiculous.
Youtube did something different and well. And hilariously, I imagine its cost compared to todays acquisitions must look like a steal.
     
turtle777
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Feb 20, 2014, 03:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by ort888 View Post
At some point it starts to feel like these guys aren't playing with real money, they're playing with crazy silicon valley funny-money or something.

Has one of these mega acquisitions ever really worked out great for the buyer? NeXT I suppose. And maybe YouTube. But those both look like peanuts compared to the kind o stuff that's going on now.

I guess you can never really know, but it all feels so ridiculous.
None of this is different than 1999. They just found a new bunch of idiots buying those tech stocks and bidding them to the moon.

It will come down. People are going to lose trillions.
And we will have another recession that will make 2008 look like a small hickup.

F*&% you Ben Bernanke (and Janet Yellen). Your easy money causes this bullsh!t.

-t
     
ort888
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Feb 20, 2014, 03:50 PM
 
The crazy thing is that if we look back at the last few... Motorola, Skype, Instagram, Whatsapp, Nokia, Nest, uh, Waze...

I'm sure I'm forgetting some...

Anyway, none of those companies were even making money. None of the internet companies had every turned a profit and the phone manufacturers were bleeding money and in trouble.
( Last edited by ort888; Feb 21, 2014 at 12:02 PM. )

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Spheric Harlot
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Feb 21, 2014, 11:51 AM
 
Originally Posted by turtle777 View Post
The value of a user is in future revenue streams.

As of right now, for all current iOS WhatsApp users, that value is 0.
Your calculations don't include competitor lock-out.

Facebook buying WhatsApp means Google didn't (and they tried) which makes the future messaging market a completely different scenario.

What I find curious is that, at least in Germany, there were a slew of articles and posts shared on Facebook about how WhatsApp was a security nightmare etc., and hyping up Threema as an alternative - just days BEFORE Facebook's intention to buy WhatsApp was announced.
This cannot be coincidental.
     
turtle777
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Feb 21, 2014, 01:49 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Your calculations don't include competitor lock-out.

Facebook buying WhatsApp means Google didn't (and they tried) which makes the future messaging market a completely different scenario.
Actually, no. It doesn't matter what dotcom 2.0 company would buy WhatsApp for an absolutely riduculous price.

If it had been Google buying it for $15B, nothing would be different.
NO company will ever get a return on investment on that kind if valuation.

-t
     
ort888
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Feb 21, 2014, 03:12 PM
 
Here's some companies that are worth less than whatsapp. (based on market cap)


Activison-Blizzard – $13.9B
Alcoa – $12.2B
American Airlines – $12.3B
Akamai – $10.9B
AmerisourceBergen – $15.9
Blackstone Group – $17.8B
Campbell Soup – $13.6
Chesapeake Energy – $17.2B
Chipotle – $17.1B
Citrix Systems – $10.7B
Coach – $13.5B
Consolidated Edison (ConEd) – $16.2B
Discovery Communicatons – $19.1B
Dr. Pepper Snapple Group – $10.2B
Expedia -$10.2B
The Gap – $19B
Fidelity – $15.8B
Harley-Davidson – $14.1B
Hertz – $11.5B
Icahn Enterprises -$13.1B
The J.M. Smucker Company – $10B
Kohl’s – $11.1B
Kroger – $19.4
Loews – $17B
Macy’s – $19.6B
Marriott International – $15.4B
Mattel – $12B
MGM Resorts – $12.7
Monster Beverage – $12B
Moody’s – $17.08B
News Corp – $10.27B
Nielsen – $17.6B
Nordstrom – $11.4B
Progressive – $14.3B
Ralph Lauren – $14.2B
Red Hat – $11.1B
Royal Caribbean Cruises – $11.4B
Ryanair – $15.5B
Sherwin-Williams – $19.4B
Southwest Airlines – $14.7B
Starwood Hotels & Resorts – $14.9B
Symantec – $14.4B
TD Ameritrade – $18.4B
The Carlyle Group – $11.1B
Tiffany & Co. – $11.4B
Tyson Foods – $13.1B
Under Armour – $11.4B
Whole Foods Market – $19.3B
Workday – $17B
Xerox – $13.2B

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/a...l&sf23043972=1

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The Final Dakar
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Feb 21, 2014, 03:24 PM
 
I'd like the list better if it was limited to tech companies like Activision and citrix.
     
Phileas
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Feb 21, 2014, 05:46 PM
 
     
 
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