Visionaries are what we look for when seeking companies to invest in. Long-term vision for expansion, impact, and, of course, profit all contribute to good investments.
Tech and telecommunications is a sector that is constantly evolving and even branching into other sectors such as health care and energy. Although we love the advances in technical hardware, the real tech and telecomm gems may be a bit softer. Social media has crept into our lives to take an important and essential role in our everyday experiences and is proving to be the next luxury and necessity for our communications needs.
Facebook and Internet expansion
After Facebook (META 3.70%) made the huge $19 billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp a few weeks ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the big stage at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain last week and spoke on Facebook's plans for the future. Zuckerberg defended his investment with key points of the initial success of the WhatsApp's userbase being at 500 million and that amount of usership is hard to come by.
Mark isn't stopping with the WhatsApp acquisition when it comes to his core mission to connect the world. His long-term vision is already coming into view with Internet.org, which is "a global partnership between technology leaders, nonprofits, local communities and experts who are working together to bring the Internet to the two thirds of the world's population that doesn't have it." The plan is to develop free Internet access for all at one point, with basic Internet and messaging services available for free in order to maintain connectivity with or without data carriers and plans.
Internet.org's efficiency plan includes three "pillars":
- Decrease the overall cost of infrastructure and utilize more open source technologies - Develop technologies (hardware and software) that cost less to produce.
- Decrease the amount of data used by apps - Encourage more efficient apps that use less data, thus saving on data charges and hardware battery-life efficiency.
- Increase the efficiency of upsells - Cheap subscription fees -- easily added to data plan bills -- like those offered by WhatsApp bring in revenue to increase profits and return on investment.
Source: Wikipedia Commons
We want to digitally map the global economy, identifying the connections between people, companies, jobs, skills, and professional knowledge, thus allowing all forms of capital – intellectual, working, and human –to flow to where it can best be leveraged.
