Facebook IPO - Huge Gain for California & Huge Loss for Massachusetts

[note: I live in Massachusetts and was originally going to title this "Why States Must Keep Their Startups" or something like that]

Lots of news about Facebook's Initial Public Offerring (IPO) with the company filing  papers this afternoon to raise at least $5 billion and begin to sell stock in the spring. Facebook has about 3,000 employees in Silicon Valley and with the IPO many will become millionaires. Good news all around - good for the employees, good for surrounding businesses that they frequent and really good for the entire state of California. More of this in a minute.

Most know that Facebook was started (and first incorporated as Thefacebook) by Mark Zuckerberg and some classmates when he was a student at Harvard in February 2004. Shortly after the company was started though, Zuckerberg moved it to Palo Alto, California. At the time I was on the Massachusetts Networking and Communications Council Board and I clearly remember members lamenting the loss.  Nobody knew how huge the company would eventually become but member guts were telling them it was going to be big.

California's Silicon Valley is a magnet for tech companies and they've done well over the years. As an example - in 2006 - Google went public, resulting in huge tax filings. To give you an idea how much money we're talking about - in 2006, sixteen (yes only 16 people!) high-level Google employees cashed in 9 million shares valued at $3.7 billion which meant they owed the state (again just 16 people) around $380 million in taxes. Resulting Google tax money was huge for the state allowing the Governator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to spend big bucks on roads, schools, etc and help him get re-elected.

That Google IPO was massive in 2006 and Facebook's will be a lot bigger. On that first day in 2006 Google's market capitalization closed around $27 billion. Facebook's could be up to 4 times as large putting it over $100 billion. 

Simply put - we (Massachusetts) lost it. We had Facebook in our state and we lost it. We lost the employees, we lost their business and we lost the tax revenue. Am I oversimplifying - perhaps. Can't deny though - huge gain for California, huge loss for Massachusetts.

Kindle SDK Released

It looks like the upcoming Apple Tablet release (rumored to be happening next Wednesday), with (also rumored) reader features including e-books, may be giving Amazon a little bit of a push. Today, the company will announce the opening up of the Kindle to outside software developers. Here's a New York Times piece quote from Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle at Amazon:

We knew from the earliest days of the Kindle that invention was not all going to take place within the walls of Amazon. We wanted to open this up to a wide range of creative people, from developers to publishers to authors, to build whatever they like.

Here's more details on the Amazon announcement from Silicon Alley Insider:

• Several partners, including Electronic Arts and Handmark/Zagat Guide, are already playing with the app development kits.
• Apps will be able to be free, carry a one-time cost, or a monthly subscription fee.
• Apps will be available "later this year."
• Access to the wireless Web is expensive. Developers will have to pay a steep $0.15 per megabyte of data transferred over the Internet, to compensate for the fact that consumers don't pay for wireless Internet access on their Kindles.
• "On the forbidden list: Internet voice-calling software, advertising, offensive materials, the collecting of customer information without consent, and the use of the Amazon and Kindle brands."

I'm a huge Kindle fan having purchased one of the first generation devices and am excited about this announcement. The Kindle runs on the Linux operating system and uses a number of open source software components. It's a great development platform. On the hardware side, the device uses an e-ink screen which is slow to refresh so we won't see a lot of fast action type games.

What will we likely see for apps? In the same New York Times piece Freed predicts publishers will begin selling a new breed of e-books, like searchable travel books and restaurant guides that can be tailored to the Kindle owner’s location; textbooks with interactive quizzes; and novels that combine text and audio.

When will an e-textbook become "better" than a traditional textbook? If the publishers really embrace and leverage this technology (still a big if) - I'm thinking very soon.