By Alexandra Reid
Last Saturday, I experienced one of the greatest excursions of my life: dog sledding down hills, through forests and over a frozen lake for an entire afternoon. It was a very cold day with heavy snowfall, so my boyfriend and I bundled up accordingly in balaclavas, long johns, layered shirts, snow pants, heavy jackets, double socks, high boots, thick mitts and scarves. All prepared and tucky-warm, we ventured out into the rolling, snow-covered hills of Quebec’s backcountry.
It was here that we experienced our first roadblock. Our car is rear-wheel drive and struggled to get up the hills. We spun out, slid side-to-side and nearly ended up in a ditch before we made it to the final and steepest hill before our destination. We looked up the hill and admitted our defeat. I called the folks at Nordik Adventures to tell them we couldn’t make it.
“That’s not a problem at all,” said France Robertson, co-owner of the business along with her husband, Eric. “I’ll come and pick you up in my truck. Be there in five.”
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By Francis Moran
I really don’t know what I think about the recent editing of Mark Twain’s classic American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to replace the offensive word “nigger” with the more prosaic “slave.” The objectionable word was common parlance when Twain wrote this masterpiece of life along the Mississippi River in the southern United States in the mid-1880s and I am loath to see anyone tamper with an original work of such brilliance.
I do know that when I shared Huck with my then-tweenaged boys as part of our long-standing nighttime story-reading ritual, that I felt just as uncomfortable as Michael Chabon, although, unlike Chabon, I opted not to substitute something softer. I had ploughed through the far fewer iterations of the word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, albeit with some trepidation, and I saw no reason to do otherwise with the sequel. Equally difficult were references to the character “Injun Joe” and the persistent use of vernacular speech that made Jim sound very much like the social and intellectual inferior he was held to be at the time. But I read aloud every word that Twain wrote.
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By Leo Valiquette
The verdict is still out as to whether Goldman Sachs’ investment in Facebook heralds an IPO, but the $50 billion valuation it places on the popular social media platform is nonetheless a scary portent.
While Alex blogged last week about what this deal could mean for those who use Facebook and other social media tools for work and play, I couldn’t help but think that history may be repeating itself.
Late last week, CFRA’s John Budden and Rob Snow discussed the logistics around Goldman Sachs’ “special purpose vehicle” intended to skirt around the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s 500-shareholder rule. Rob characterized the US$500 million being put into Facebook by Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as a venture capital round, for lack of a better term.
“It’s just a staggering multiple for a private company,” Budden said of the lofty valuation the investment places on Facebook. Consider that $50 billion against the hard numbers: For 2009, Facebook had revenues of around US$777 million and net income of around $200 million.
“It has the feelings of the bubble that we experienced in year 2000, but it is different in character,” Budden said.
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By Alexandra Reid
Facebook has raised US$500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, according to the New York Times.
The injection of cash values Facebook at about $50 billion. The social network now has a bigger capitalization than Boeing, at $48.7 billion, and Time Warner, at about $36 billion. The deal has reportedly fueled the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s examination of the growing trade of privately held shares of well-known social networking sites. The concern is that Goldman is planning to craft a “special purpose vehicle” that may be able to dodge the 500-shareholder rule, which requires a company to disclose certain financial information to the public, even if it hasn’t filed for an initial public offering. Through this vehicle, the investment would be managed solely by Goldman and therefore would be considered just one investment, even though it could potentially pool investments from thousands of clients.
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By Linda Forrest
That title alone is probably enough to put me in the crosshairs of many a critic of Time Magazine‘s selection of Facebook’s inventor and leader as its person of the year for 2010. But personally, I think that the selection is merited and that the vitriol detractors have spewed in light of his naming reflects more sour grapes than anything else.
Here’s why I agree with this recognition:
1. Zuckerberg’s creation is an influential force in more than a 12th of the world’s population’s daily lives. He’s responsible for changing the modern communications paradigm. Period.
The scope of his achievement is truly unparalleled. According to the Time profile, Facebook recently signed up its “550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for one out of four American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day.”
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Last Saturday, I experienced one of the greatest excursions of my life: dog sledding down hills, through forests and over a frozen lake for an entire afternoon. It was a very cold day with heavy snowfall, so my boyfriend and I bundled up accordingly in balaclavas, long johns, layered shirts, snow pants, heavy jackets, double socks, high boots, thick mitts and scarves. All prepared and tucky-warm, we ventured out into the rolling, snow-covered hills of Quebec’s backcountry.
