I just need $100 million to start this new social network. Trust me, it’s going to be worth billions!

Did you happen to read the amazing interview in Monday’s Wall Street Journal with Jeff Horing, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners, a New York private-equity firm that was the lead investor in Twitter’s third and latest fund-raising round?

These are the geezers who just pumped in $100 million in funding to the 140 character wunderkindt, to give it a valuation of over ONE BILLION F******G DOLLARS. This for a company that to date, generates not one penny in revenue.

When asked about this amazing number, Horing said… “When we modeled it, we were looking at revenue somewhere between Google and Facebook. Google monetizes at $30 a user and Facebook is about $2 a user. If you look at Twitter’s user community and make some fairly conservative assumptions about revenue, we thought you could make a healthy exit at a multiple of a $1 billion.”

Hey, pardon me, but based on the Google and Facebook numbers, and the fact the Twitter's founders have made no bones about how at this stage, they don’t have a bloody clue how they’re going to start making money… For this guy to claim they are making conservative assumptions about revenue, smacks of either pig-headed bravado, or pig headed stupidity.

Remember, it was just three short years ago that Rupert Murdoch paid over half a billion dollars for MySpace, and all the pundit's said it was a steal? Now after massive layoffs, it’s leaking money like a sieve, and in all the happy chat about social media, it hardly ever gets mentioned.

In the Social-Sphere, three years is an eternity.

Something smells like Boo.Com to me.

Wow… How the mighty have fallen, only to get up, then fall again.

When I first worked on the Dell account, back in San Francisco, in the early eighties, they were severely kicking everyone else's arse. Not only did they offer a superior product for a superior price… They overlaid this great sales model with the kind of service which guaranteed, not just that the average punter would keep sniffing around and buying because they were so happy with both the product and the service, but also, Corporate America, which was constantly worried about both the bottom line and the continuity of service and reduced costs, would keep coming back for more.

At the same time Ross Perot was launching an effort to win the Presidency. And he could have won it too, with a combination of his home spun philosophy, and his perceived honesty. Anyway, it didn’t work out for several weird reasons that would take too long to go into.

So, to read today that Dell is buying Perot systems for a mere $3.9 billion, leaves me wondering what the hell is going on? Is this an indication of the final transmogrification of the increasingly failing current American business model? Who the hell knows, everyone from IBM, to Microsoft, to Oracle is convinced that selling services is the future, rather than selling products. I don’t know. At the end of the day, I have this nagging feeling that if you don’t actually make something… You have *** all to sell. But, then again, what the hell do I know?

Old celebrities never die, they simply appear in bad TV spots!

With the news today in the US that the latest Burger King gross out campaign from the frat boys in Boulder is once again relying on the use of celebrities to push stuff that will probably kill you, only serves to make me once again wonder if this stuff really works.

The new Burger King effort has has NASCAR driver Tony Stewart professing his love for “Whoppers.” No surprise there as the average NASCAR fan is certainly a whopper, if not a gargantuan, and that includes his misses. Apparently the TV features Stewart teaching other celebrities how to endorse products. One of them is Eric Estrada!!! That’s right, the guy with five hundred teeth that used to be in CHIPS five hundred years ago when your box had an eight inch screen, and everything was in green and black.

Still, every time I’m over in the UK, when I put the telly on as I empty the hotel mini-bar, I see people I thought had died in the eighteenth century, and they’re endorsing everything from knickers to knick-knacks. I’ll bet “Our Enery” is still flogging stuff. The only person I know older than him is Sir Cliff. But he’s got that picture in the attic you're not allowed to see!