Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true. At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy. The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the ... Continue reading →

Generation X and the Narrowing Career Path 10:25 AM Wednesday May 23, 2012 | Comments Melissa, a talented Gen X'er, is given a promotion that puts her in direct contention for a key senior spot. Although her Boomer colleagues are offering their congratulations, Melissa finds herself feeling vaguely uneasy. She is reaching a point in her career where the path seems to be narrowing suddenly and precipitously. There look to be very few options for the next possible step. Her enthusiastic and supportive Boomer boss has presented the promotion as the next step on an inevitable path — her "final hurdle" before taking on his job. "I'd better be cautious," she mused. Why does Melissa feel uneasy? I suspect her concerns stem from a desire ... Continue reading →

\ The trailer for upcoming film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" was released, giving fans a taste of the A-list cast in Baz Luhrmann's indulgently opulent movie. With Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, the trailer sets a modern tone with the help of Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild" and Jack White's cover of U2's "Love is Blindness." What do you think of Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" trailer? About Movie Nation Movie news, reviews, and more. Contributors Ty Burr is a film critic with The Boston Globe. Wesley Morris is a film critic with The Boston Globe. Mark Feeney is an arts writer for The Boston Globe. ... Continue reading →

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's already starting. General Motors(GM) decides to pull advertising from Facebook(FB) and the bears begin to question both the social media monster's effectiveness and ability to grow and sustain revenues. It must be flattering for Mark Zuckerberg to already have a whole peanut gallery full of bears before his company's ticker even crosses CNBC for the first time. As I explained last week on TheStreet, it looks as if Zuckerberg is cut out of the mold of Amazon.com(AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos. Both men see the future before it takes place; in fact they vision and enact it. For goodness sake, Bezos invented e-commerce and Zuck created social media, this thing we all seem to take for granted now. We're just along ... Continue reading →

NEW YORK (TheStreet) - Angry emails continue to pour in from readers who wish to voice their "dislike" in reference to my recent bearish articles on Facebook(FB) which is due to commence trading for the first time on Friday with an estimated price range of $34 to $38 as part of its highly anticipated IPO. Facebook estimates that it will generate approximately $6.4 billion from its offering -- essentially reaching a market cap as high $110 billion. As remarkable as this accomplishment may be, it looks grossly perverse when one considers that upon its IPO it will immediately surpass the value of technology bellwethers in Cisco(CSCO) and Amazon(AMZN) -- two companies with proven effective businesses that generate plenty of money. What has Facebook proven other ... Continue reading →

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- Craft beer geeks and mainstream beer drinkers usually don't mix, but summer has a way of getting everybody to the same bar. By necessity, beer drinkers tend to shift to lighter, more refreshing brews as temperatures rise. They also tend to drink a lot more of it than at any other time of the year. The Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau's statistics show that brewers produced roughly 17 million barrels last may and 18 million barrels a month from June through August. That's well up from the 14 million to 15 million a month they generally crank out during the rest of the year. Considering that uptick in volume, is there any way to buy beer during ... Continue reading →

I have nothing against Cisco (CSCO), the company or its products for that matter. I do have a problem with the stock still being a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, however. It would be nice if the 30 stocks in the Dow were kept a little more current and reflective of today's economy. If that were the case, maybe the Dow would be a lot higher than 13,000 at the current time. It is bad enough that Cisco is so widely held and talked about in the financial press so often, but does it have to continue to be representative of the state of our nation's economy? I suppose most money managers like me would like to see duds like Cisco and Alcoa ... Continue reading →

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