Teen Traders' Blog

Sulaiman Abdul Kareem Mohammad Al-Fahim,the Abu Dhabi based billionaire told Arabian Business that he plans to complete the deal to buy English Premier League team Portsmouth within two weeks.

Al-Fahim, a board member of Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment told Reuters that negotiations for Portsmouth were still ongoing and that he hoped to conclude the deal by July.

The CEO of the Abu Dhabi based Hydra Properties shall be speaking to fans at the Portsmouth Football Supporters Club in London on July 11 regarding his future plans for the club.

Recently there were concerns over capital availibility concerning over the takeover of Portsmouth. But still he confirmed that the investment shall be taken care of by investors outside of the real-estate fraternity as the real estate market in Abu Dhabi has been widely affected by the global Real Estate woes. He told, ”Let me be very clear in saying that my involvement in ­Portsmouth has nothing to do with Hydra. The money for the Portsmouth Football Club acquisition and the needed future investment has been raised through the network of Falcon Equity from Asian and Middle Eastern investors. None of these investors are from the real estate sector or part of a royal family.”

Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment of which Al-Fahim is a member as told above, had bought Manchester City last year. The middle east is gaining a lot of interest in the now very glamorous Soccer world. Recent enhancements indicate further involvement in world sports from the Middle East . Areas such as the distressed F1 racing and NFL should be on the cards for the Sheikhs.

Hello guys,

‘m Sorry to be posting after some time now. Anyways ‘ve been looking at all these social networks. Most of us use social networks and many are there on the three largest social networks viz. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter. I ‘m (Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fahimkazi. Twitter: https://twitter.com/fahimkazi).

But what do you use the most. Facebook, yeah, Twitter, hell yeah, Myspace somewhat. even though i am not much fond of Myspace, my friends who were, now don’t sit much on Myspace. But whatever, day after day, we keep on loosing interest on a particular site and keeping on moving with whatever’s the best or more exciting then the other. How many of you remember Orkut? Yeah i know it sucks now. But once when there wasn’t much fame around Facebook, Orkut was the rage. Let me tell i was one crazy guy after Orkut. I LOVED it. Why? I Already had Yahoo with me, i did like making friends on Yahoo Chat, I use to chat with my friendson Yahoo. Then what drove me to Orkut. ‘m not sure myself. Maybe integration of everything(communities, friends and later apps). I used to sit on Orkut before i left for school(9th grade then) after i returned from school then after I returned from classes then finally before i went to sleep.

Then what drove me OFF from Orkut. Nothing really. Just got BORED. Scrapping was good, but it was enough. Communities were good but not as interesting as they used to be. I then moved to Facebook. Let me tell you again i still like Facebook. But i can feel it in me now that i ‘m starting to loose interest from Facebook. even though Facebook caught hold of me more than Orkut could due to its Apps, but still I just dont find the apps “exciting” and “happening” anymore.

I’m now starting to like Twitter now. I know that i ‘m late to Twitter, but still “Better Late then Never.”

And about Myspace. well, it attracted a huge crowd in the beginning(and still does) but it has also seen a drop in monthly visitors to 70.24 million in May. I know that number is huge but if action isn’t taken to revive the site, the numbers hall keep on falling. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg once told in an interview that in three years Facebook shall have a stern business plan. Given the huge audience, Facebook can surely do something.

Not to forget,  the two Social Networks, Facebook and Myspace are loss making. News Corp reported an $89 million loss in the unit that includes MySpace in its most recent quarterly report. Facebook’s numbers are not sure but it is also believed to be loss making. And talking about Twitter, well it just doesn’t have a Revenue model yet and hasn’t made any money(after 11.7 million users).

But still they are the talk of the Internet world, referred everywhere, constantly in the news. That gets the founders the funding.  Myspace’s parent company Intermix Media was bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by News Corp out of which US$327 million is believed to be for Myspace. Facebook has received a total funding of $716M accordingto CrunchBase. Whereas Twitter which does not have a Revenue model yet has received a total funding of $55M.

While these businesses have remained unprofitable, businesses around these businesses have raked in the moolah. There are hundreds of companies making apps to integrate them in Facebook(I shall soon have my own app company). Many Twitter based companies are providing third party applications for Twitter and having fine businesses.

So in the end what gets the high valuations for these companies? The surge in users. The hope from investors that a huge audience might somehow convert into profits whereas the founders are still searching for revenue models to make money.

Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs chief economist had coined the word in 2001 while exploring the countries’ impact as emerging economic powerhouses. For the first time now BRIC- Brazil, Russia, India, China- had a summit for the first time this week to discuss the global economy and their role in it.

Fortune interviewed Mr.BRIC and he seems to be overwhelmed by the impact the word has caused. After 9/11, he understood that globalisation shall have to thrive but on a more complex basis and with larger involvement of the BRIC nations. He had written a paper called “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.”  which revealed that if the world was to function properly, you had to involve these people.

The BRIC now constitues of about 15% of the world GDP.

They had found out that in 2050, specifically 2037, the combined GDP of those four countries could become bigger than the G7.

Fortune:

When did it break out of the corporate world into the mainstream lexicon?

It started post-2003. It’s just grown and grown. These days, obviously on a day like this, I’m sort of proud in a strange way that these guys are meeting together. People think that my job now is being Mr. BRIC. I must get invited to go and speak at things around the world anywhere from one to eight times a day.

Source Fortune

Twitter which has fast grown to be the third most popular social network on the planet just got a little more famous. The microblogging service is now also used for organizing political dissent. Twitter’s administers realised about Twitters political powers on Monday.

 All this happened when Twitter was going to offline for upgrades and have a 90 minutes of downtime at 9:45 PDT . when it was announced in the afternoon that Twitter shall be off for a 90 minute period, the thousands of Iranian dissidents protesting alleged fraud in the national election- who were using the service flooded the thousands of requests to Twiiter to delay the maintenance downtime.

A Twitterer named “tinyi”(even i’ll look forward to following him) wrote “Twitter, do not condemn the people of Iran to silence.”  “Upgrades can wait. The people dying in Iran cannot,” pleaded a Twitterer by the name of hoopiest_frood.  ”Democracy needs you, Twitter!” -temp09.

“Our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran,” Biz Stone twitter co-founder wrote on his blog.  And he wrote that Twitter had worked out a deal with its network provider, NTT America, to delay the maintenance.

Boeing, the largest aerospace and defense contractor in the world is facing a huge challenge against its the strategy it embarked during the 1990s to offset jetliner-sales cycles with more stable military revenue. This is mainly because military hardware spending is slowing down throughout the world and at the same time commercial orders are also taking a hit due to a steep fall in global air travellers.

The company is still going strong as it has years’ worth of orders to fill and robust profits. Jim Albaugh, chief executive of Boeing’s defense business says that the company has profited throughout the years and now it has studied how the companies have successfully navigated the last defense downturn,and he told that Boeing plans to invest and make relative acquisitions accordingly. “Jim McNerney(Boeing CEO) is not looking to me to shrink the business and to hunker down,” said Mr. Albaugh.

Boeing has largely been in the public eye ever since it acquired defence major McDonnell Douglas in 1997 and since then has come to count on roughly $32 billion a year in defense sales.

Its European EADS (European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co) rival has been following a similar path and has been aggressively expanding its defence business. “The crisis is confirming that our strategy is more valid than ever,” said EADS Chief Executive Louis Gallois on Saturday.

Taking a cue from Boeing , EADS(EADS is the parent company of  Airbus) is converting its passenger planes into mid air refuelling planes. Currently both the giants are competing for a $40 billion contract from the U.S. Air Force to supply aerial refueling planes.

Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia’s Sabse has acquired Jaxtr, the ad supported VoIP startup. The amount paid by Bhatia hasn’t been disclosed but sources say that Bhatia just paid “Peanuts” to buy the troubled startup, Jaxtr. But still Jaxtr has till date received venture funding of about $21.5 million and its investors include the original 3 investors of Skype. Jaxtr was founded by Phillip Mobin and Touraj Parang in October 2005.

According to the deal Jaxtr will continue to work under its own brand name. The company can be a big beneficiary to Bhatia’s Sabse which was started in January 2008 and help Bhatia access and provide Sabse’s services to the huge number Jaxtr users.

Jaxtr, the Menlo Park,CA based start-up is reported to have 10 million users in 220 countries(2008). Jaxtr provides local Phone numbers in numerous countries around the world by contracting with wholesale Direct Inward Dialing (DID) exchanges. In 2008, Jaxtr launched FreeConnect allowing free calling to mobile phones worldwide.

Recently Jaxtr was having little problems and it laid of 13 employees in October. It now has a total of 30 employees. Soon after its high profile CEO  Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn co-founder, stepped down or was fired.

Sabeer Bhatia got in the news when he sold the free e-mailing service , Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. He was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Draper Fisher Jurvertson in 1998 and was noted by TIME as one of the “People to Watch” in international business in 2002.

Sorry people as i could not post in the last week.  Had some engagements. But now ‘ll see to it that I post everyday just like before.

WSJ on Friday reported that Steve Jobs health wasn’t as it was portrayed by Apple last time when he left for a 6 month leave in January.

An unnamed guy reported Journal , “He was one Real Sick Guy.” The guy told WSJ that he was fundamentally starving to death over a 9 month period and took a corrective action. He also reported that Apple’s board gets a weekly update on Jobs health, sure they do.

Jobs is said to be recovering and should be able to return to work before the end of June, as scheduled.