Conventional wisdom among many of the people I know — regardless of how they feel about President Obama’s social agenda — is that his economic agenda is pretty tough on business.
As reported by Stacy Blackman at bnet.com, Dr. Robert Frank at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management and a New York Times columnist, feels othewise. I’m especially intrigued by his view on universal health care.
When I heard about the college kids who are making money by advertising products with temporary tattoos on their foreheads, I knew it wouldn’t be long before something like Wrapmail came along. As reported in Inc. magazine, 
Wrapmail is a service that puts an ad in every outbound e-mail sent from your place of business. Inc’s example was pretty benign: a guy who sells copiers is using the service to promote his own products on e-mails sent out by his employees. I can’t really see very much wrong with that.
But it’s not really welcome, either. And how long will it be before the matchmakers step in — paying individuals and small companies to advertise national brands in their outbound e-mails? My guess: within the next 10 minutes, if it hasnt already started.
We all know: The Internet tends toward cesspool. Every time there is an uplifting addition to the amazing things this medium can achieve, there is someone who finds a way to just as quickly coat it with a certain amount of stink. I’ve learned to live with that, even embrace and enjoy it.
Which is why I’m writing about Wrapmail (which, incidentally uses equally intrusive pop-up chat technology as soon as you open their website). I’m impressed someone thought of it. I’m also depressed someone thought of it.
And if they want to get the word out, they might consider tattooing it on someone’s forehead. Because on principle I’ll delete the e-mail I will undoubtedly receive from Wrapmail after writing this post.
UPDATE: Entrepreneur magazine, being sued for publishing information in its “Top 100” list of entrepreneurial companies about a CEO who was subsequently arrested and charged with running a Ponzi scheme, has now asked that the suit be dismissed.
The original suit, for $178 million by a group of 87 investors, alleged that, by printing information about the company Agape World (this was covered in more detail in my previous blog entry, Are Magazines Really That Important?), Entrepreneur magazine played a role in their making a bad investment.
Entrepreneur‘s motion for dismissal strikes me as pretty fair and on-target. I have no sympathy for investors dumb enough to bet millions of dollars on information taken from Entrepreneur magazine.
The strange thing is that’s pretty much Entrepreneur‘s defense. According to Folio:, the magazine cites New York law in stating: “A publisher is under no duty of care to its readers to ensure the accuracy of published information unless it constitutes a breach of contract, obligation, or trust, or amounts to deceit, libel or slander… A publisher, even those who maintain a paid subscription service, such as Entrepreneur, owes its readers no duty to ensure the accuracy of its publications, and thus, cannot incur liability for an allegedly inaccurate statement.”
OK, I agree that magazines make mistakes and shouldn’t be held accountable for the cost to someone who uses that information to make a business decision. But does Entrepreneur really want to be on record saying that it doesn’t need to worry whether the information it prints is accurate?
Is it possible to have two deja vus at the same time? Or is that simply schizophrenia?
According to Venturebeat, Facebook is raising money to buy back stock from its employees. It hopes to borrow $150 million to buy back 15 million shares at $10 each. These shares have been given to employees of the private company 
over the past few years, and those employees have the right to sell up to 20% of their holdings, according to the article.
And now that the market for IPOs is so rotten, this is apparently the only way the company can help them cash in anytime soon.
That’s where the first case of deja vu comes in. Just 10 years ago, during the first Internet boom, people couldn’t cash in quickly enough on their foundation-free stock. Yes, Facebook has an astounding number of users, but I’m not so sure about its business plan. The company will undoubtedly go public some day, but I simply don’t believe it’s monetizable to the same extent as Amazon, eBay and Google.
Facebook really has only one asset: a bigazillion eyeballs. Which is impressive in itself, and there ought to be a way to make money from it. But with ad markets drying up and Facebook’s genuine incompetence when it comes to figuring out how to let businesses participate in a way justifies their spending money, I don’t know what the company is going to do to pay back this next $150 million that it borrows — let alone the previous $460 million it’s raised, according to PaidContent.org.
Facebook is undoubtedly an 800-pound gorilla in the white-hot social networking arena. But there were scores of 800-pound gorillas a decade ago, whose names I can no longer recall, that went bust because they couldn’t figure out how to turn eyeballs into cash.
I’m not predicting Facebook is going to go under anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure it will be around to cash in on an improved IPO market sometime next year. But if I were an employee and could get $10 a share for stock that I hadn’t paid for, I would sell as much as I was allowed at the first possible moment.
Here’s another deja vu-inducing part of the story: Facebook can’t get the money from its usual investors, so according to the reports already cited above, some portion of the money is coming from Asia. I remember when Japanese investors bought (and overpaid for) Rockefeller Center in the late ’80s. At the time, it was assumed to be a disheartening sign that U.S. economic dominance was ending.
It’s clear to me that, no matter how strong and innovative the U.S. may be, the world is becoming a more competitive place; any perception that we are falling probably has more to do with the fact that others are rising. Still, do we need to make it easy for them?
It’s always bothered me when people complain that we’re losing our mojo as a world power, but they don’t seem to make a conneciton between that observation and our willingness to let Asia — China in particular — lend us the money to finance our foreign wars and deficit spending.
If China comes to own a third or more of Facebook, do you think these people will notice? Do you think they’ll care?