Ian Rogers

[Andrew Orlowski doesn’t support feedback through the normal El Reg comments system, only by private email (I wonder why), so I’ll reproduce my response to him here]

“So who’ll pay for Internet 3.0, then?”

All server hosting companies - and, therefore, the websites run on them - have to pay a network operator for their fat connection to the Internet. The BBC is no exception: though it may have its own data-centre it will have to pay for its pipe to Linx or wherever.

How that upload fee gets distributed to the last-mile, end-user providers is the real question.

According to The Register, Nokia is in talks to acquire a stake in Facebook with a view to “porting the social network on to Nokia handsets in a major way”. The key point of surprise is that while Nokia has close to a Billion paying customers and Facebook has only 50 million (who hardly pay a bean) Nokia is likely to pay Facebook for the privilege!

So why is Facebook worth so much?

The answer, of course, is that it’s not - the large valuations on Facebook are complete nonsense.

Microsoft paid $240M for a 1.6% share of Facebook to keep Google out and nothing more!

But that’s quite a business model for Facebook - keep finding major players in other markets willing to sign up “exclusive” deals. 240 mil here, another 150 mil there would be enough to keep the Z boy in business cards for life.

So Nokia is either being very clever or very stupid, it’s a shame it’s not clear which.

But I wonder if Zuckerberg understands the irony of running a social website funded my companies who just want to exclude each other.

Back in a previous life I was a Research Fellow in User Interface Design at Sussex University.

At the time I remember being totally in awe of, and humbled by, the work of Randy Pausch on Virtual Reality on 5 dollars a day amongst other things and home much energy and enthusiasm that team had.

So it’s enourmously sad to learn that he has an untreatable form of cancer which will take his life in the next few months…

But he recently gave a lecture on “How to achieve your childhood dreams” which should be an inspiration to all. Make sure you watch out for the “mind fake” at the end…