So it's finally happened, Facebook's IPO. It's been talked about for months with an estimate value of anywhere from $23 per share and up. The actual price came out at $38, valuing the company at $104 billion! Not bad, but is it worth it?

In 2011 Facebook took home just over $1 billion in profit. I agree that's a lot of profit but no matter what way you look at it, valuing the company at 100 times their operating profit just seems wrong. I'm sure everyone remembers the last time Internet companies were so highly valued, it was only a little over a decade ago and it didn't end well. Those companies couldn't live up to the hype or create the profit that their value promised. Facebook has huge potential but it's such a new company, in an entirely new market, with so many users and so much information. It's all unchartered territory and at the moment Facebook has stumbled in the right direction. Now, after the IPO, they need to be steered to further profit.

And that's really the bottom line, you put your company on the markets and they'll expect you to make money for them. If you're not doing that then your share price will drop. Facebook is valued high because it's popular, as simple as that. Maybe some think that it's a good bet and that Facebook will keep churning out more and more profit. That hardly seems like sage advice considering, by Facebook's own admission, that they expect a fall in profit. Combine that with the actual figures for the first quarter of 2012; rising revenue, falling profit. Does it still seem like a $104 billion company? 

Despite all the news and even Facebook warning of trouble ahead, the market hunger for the IPO remained unaffected. The crazed blood hungry traders want those shares at any cost and that's just what they got. What's interesting is that other early private investors were actually cutting their shares by much greater margins at the last minute. It doesn't seem to say much about their confidence in the stocks. If you expected the stocks to perform well then you wouldn't sell half of them. If you thought you could get a good price now and wanted to hedge your bets, then you would sell. Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global Management, who originally decided to off load 23% and 7% of their shares, suddenly upped it to as much as 50%. Obviously admitting to sell 50% from the start could have negatively affected the share price, although probably not since the markets have ignored all the other snippets of bad news.

So far we have falling profits, rising revenue, high share prices, bailing private investors and an unrelenting market. BubblejQuery1520010906498180702329_1337332560782 But it doesn't end there. Facebook need to turn the company into more profit. So far that's been the standard Internet advertisement modal. Selling adverts in little blocks on their website. Yawn! Generally that means around the 3-5% click through rate. If Facebook has the estimate 900 million daily users then that equates to roughly 36 million clicks a day. But does it work for sales? GM doesn't seem to think so, completely abandoning their $10 million advertising campaign on Facebook.

Facebook need to adopt a new modal. The problem is it doesn't exist yet. Now the IPO has passed the pressure is on to find that modal quickly and to make it work. Time will tell but at the moment all the signs point to an over-inflated market price. Facebook obviously isn't going anywhere any time soon, it's too big, but the markets prices needs to accurately reflect its value and a $1 billion yearly profit would take quite a while to generate the $100 billion price tag. Which means a lot of the price is built purely on expectations.

Chrome OS is maturing quickly these days. Techcrunch.com has a short article about the latest release of Chrome OS and it certainly does look promising as an OS. The OS is slowly migrating away from the Chrome browser and the extra functionality means it no longer has the look or feel of just being a browser. 

In some ways this is a good thing, it makes Chrome OS a better system. But in another way, I have to wonder if Google are missing out a little here. After all, they do have a very capable OS already. The Android OS may have been developed with phones in mind and it has since expanded to incorporate tablets and other mobile devices. So why not grow it further for desktops?

Google is one of the main jaugenauts in technology. They always have multiple projects going on, from small changes to big dreams. In this case it seems like two projects are starting to converge. An OS for phones is expanding to other devices and what was initially a browser is expanding to become a fully functional OS. 

There are, of course, many problems with integrating the two projects but imagine the ultimate goal, a universal OS. Familiar to users across desktops, tablets and mobiles. In terms of OS it's the holy grail.

Maybe Google have something in the works further down the line. I would be very surprised if they haven't at least considered trying to merge the projects or to slowly integrate both. Only time will tell.

Late last year, October 2010, Michael Mace posted a great article about his views on RIM. It is definitely worth reading, even more so now that pretty much everything he suggested is coming to pass. It makes for sad news for RIM but I think most, at this stage, would agree that Blackberry is on the way out. There's a lot of room in the mobile market for a few companies to successfully compete. After all, Android, Apple and RIM were all doing nicely. But it's hard to argue with the facts and then throw in Microsoft's promising Windows 7.5 phones and it's looking increasingly unlikely that there will be a way back for RIM.

That got me thinking about 3D. It was pushed a lot in 2011 yet it really got no where. Sure, it was great for a while. The first decent 3D film was amazing to look at for a few minutes but then you pretty much forgot it was in 3D (provided it was a good film with a good story). The next 3D film you saw was probably nice but you could take it or leave it. By the time you sitting down to watch a 3D, do you really care anymore? I doubt it. But yet we're still being sold 3D movies at the cinema, 3D TVs for our home and 3D TV broadcasts. Obviously these can be sold at a premium so is it any wonder why film studios and TV manufacturers are telling us it's the future?

Perhaps it's not the same fall from grace as Blackberry. It's a different situation. Blackberry is technology that once ruled, never moved with the times and is now getting left behind. 3D technology is something that sounds great, sounds like it should rule, yet it never has, and now it's getting left behind. Not surpassed by something better, the gimmick has just lost its shine.

A great example is the Nintendo 3DS. Sales of the Wii and DS have reached saturation. Believe it or not, the Wii is now five years old and the DS is seven, almost archaic in technology terms. It's great to see Nintendo innovate and that approach certainly paid off for them in recent years. But not even Nintendo could make 3D work, not even without glasses and at very reasonable prices. Nintendo posted substantial loses for the last few months. The 3DS is great to play, at first, in 3D. But the more I played the more I found that the 3D just didn't matter. Eventually switching back to full 2D just for a cleaner image.

3D has nothing to offer. I said last year it would grow and it has. It's also slowly moving to glasses less technology. But it needs more. Immersive 3D is it's only possible saving grace.

There's not much more that can be said about Steve Jobs. He managed to build up Apple not once but twice and the product of that has changed the world for the better, both directly and indirectly through competition. Whether you agreed with him or not there is no denying that he was the ultimate tech entrepreneur. A true inspiration which was clearly shown during his famous speech at Stanford in 2005. Enjoy.

I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last-minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: 'We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?' They said: 'Of course.' My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5c deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.' It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumour. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

This afternoon Amazon unveiled a host of new Kindle's to a flurry of Internet buzz and activity. Ranging from bargain $79 Kindle and $99 Kindle Touch to the disruptive $199 Kindle Fire.

The Kindle has been hugely successful for Amazon and while a new device was expected today, I don't think anyone expect this much news. But the really important news here is the Kindle Fire. The device is basically a tablet running Android with its own user interface. The good part is that it makes use of Amazons enormous cloud computing capabilities and Amazon EC2. The Fire may not be as powerful as the iPad and its hardware may be severely lacking but, if reports are true, then that will be made up with by the amount of computing power that can be done in the cloud.

The result means that regular pages are cached and any hard processing such as Flash and images are all pre-rendered before hitting the Fire giving the user a much smoother experience with the hardware available and this is exactly what Amazon are pushing; Service rather than hardware.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a replacement for the iPad and it's not a better tablet that the iPad. But then, does the average user actually make the most of the hardware in the iPad? Is it needed? Probably not. What I really like about this announcement from Amazon today is that it means we, the consumers, are finally starting to see some real benefit from cloud computing. The whole concept is still in its infancy when it comes to the masses and Amazon has been heavily building up the cloud presence. This device will now give something to test and see how well it will work in some real world tests.

It was a long time coming. Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and taken up a position as Chairman. Apple stocks took a nose dive after the news and rightly so. Apple was a failing company after Jobs left before and then his return catapulted them to one of the leading global brands. He’ll be missed, if not for his technical knowledge and understanding of the industry then he will for the effect he has on the media. Will the yearly Apple announcements be the same with someone else giving the speech? I think not.

Jobs has been battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer for years now so one would imagine that has something to do with his decision. As much as I may not agree with where Apple has brought the industry, and I certainly don’t agree with the entire closed systems, but there is no denying that Jobs has made Apple a big game changer and spurned on competition from others (ignoring their current anti-competitive tactics).

Yes, that’s right. Apple have tried to patent the rectangle, convinced that in their own superiority they haveinvented a new shape and hell bent on stopping anyone else from using the rectangle in any design. We can only hope that Steve Jobs doesn’t discover that other shapes exist are waiting to be invented by Apple.

So, once Apple happily convinced themselves that the owned the rights to anything rectangular they then set about suing someone. The name out of the hat… Samsung! Those lucky devils. Just one quick check to ensure that Samsung have rectangular shaped devices… yes, yes they do. Begin the motion!

I know, I know, more patents, more suing, more handbags. But what’s interesting is the defence the Samsung are using. Part of their opposition brief argues that the iPad had already been designed as a futuristic device that appeared in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey! If you can’t quite remember it then here’s a clip to remind you…

This is great for the Patent Wars. There’s a vast supply of Sci-fi video footage that could be used to quell the ever advancing Patent suing culture that, right now, seems to be the main goal among all the big players. If the US courts did rule with Samsung then this could be exactly what we need to force competition companies to focus on their own product improvements, innovations and technology rather than trying to beat down devices that are a clear and positive threat.

Everyone loves Ticketmaster, that's why we all use it, right? yeah, maybe not. Ignoring the annoying monopoly issues, Ticketmaster now has a new feature that allows you to see what seats your Facebook friends have bought and you can then decide to sit beside them or at the other side of the venue depending on how much you like them.

Maybe Ticketmaster should just bring all the name of people seats?

The patent war is the latest in a string of spats between the big corporations but is it anything new? The answer is no. Companies have been suing and counter suing over patents for as long as they have existed. What is interesting about it is this time is the race to acquire the patents; as many and as quickly as possible.

Google recently bought Motorola Mobility for approximately $12.5 billion and with it the 17,000 or so patents that Motorola Mobility held. Top dollar was paid for the acquisition, a 63 percent premium on the closing stock value.

What’s clear is that Google wanted this company and the aggressive way they went about it shows clear signs that something has got their goat.

If we look back a few months, you might have heard (although it wasn’t quite as loud in the press as Google purchase) that Apple and Microsoft had teamed up with an Alliance to buy Nortel Networks along with their 6,000+ patents. The alliance also included companies such as Research in Motion, Sony Ericsson and EMC so clearly the big mobile corporations are eager to safe guard their futures. Did you also hear that Google acquired another 1,000 patents from IBM? The cold war may be over but now we have the corporate equivalent.

Having said that… it’s pretty hot in some areas. Microsoft has made more money from Android than it has from Windows Mobile, some $60 million at the last count. And there is the reason for the patent hunting. Whoever holds the patents will reap the rewards.

Obviously, the more patents that the corporations hold then the better for them but at what cost to the consumer and at what cost to the advancement of technology?

Apple ripped the market wide open with the iPhone back in 2007. Android cause more disruption once it took off.

Competition has shown evolution in action. The weak are being left behind (remember Nokia?) and the strong are

thriving; mainly the closed iPhone system and the open Android system.

As for trying to track who is suing who, it’s a relative spider web of actions and counter actions. Combine that with the stock piling of patents are you can be guaranteed that there will be more to come. It’s difficult to see how this culture can be stopped and any outcome can only be damaging to competition and ultimately to the consumer. At the moment, thanks to Androids open source approach, I’m hoping that Google come out on top. Innovation is what makes our lives easier and openness/competition is the best force for driving innovation. I’m all for inventors getting paid their fair share for an idea they came up with, after all that is what patents were originally created for, but the Patent War is the beginning of a darker side to the mobile sector and sooner or later someone is going to build their own Death Star.

Dublin Web Submit announced that founders from LinkedIn and Youtube will speak that this years web summit. Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim and LinkedIn co-founder Eric Ly.