What if’s

I really like to follow the tech world and all the valuations of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square, and many other companies.  It always gives me enjoyment to know that companies that I use on a day to day business are worth great deals of money while providing a legitimate service to all of us.  Today I was listening to a story on TechCrunch about Facebook and how they are getting an outrageous valuation.

This incredible valuation really got me to thinking why Facebook is valued above $50 Billion Dollars?  I believe that they made $2 billion last quarter, so they have a 10 year multiple on their earnings for the valuation of their company.  Then it snapped.  They are innovating so fast that it helps that number grow. They have branded themselves to become a leader.  They have a trusted name where if they put something infront of someone they’ll buy it (example would be Facebook ads).  They can raise a company from the ground as with FarmVille, CityVille, Mafia, FamilyLink, Zynga, and several other companies and brands.  They changed the way business do business online, now everyone has a Fan page, if you don’t you should really get one.  As part of this trusted brand, I came up with a list of things that I feel could make Facebook a ton of money.  I like to refer to them as my “What If’s”

What if Facebook launched it’s own cell phone? 

I’d be willing to bet that if Facebook launched their own phone service and phone (much like the iPhone) that they’d get 50 million people to buy their phone the first day that they put it out there.  At $25/month.  That’s $1.25 Billion a month, $15 billion a year that they’d be bringing in.

What if in addition to the phone, they launched an email system that rivaled Google?

So imagine an email address that was attached to your social graph that was put together by Facebook.  People had to be in your “finals club” in order to be able to send you an email.  If email addresses were attached to REAL PEOPLE with picture, faces, real history and a rating score.  What is your email was attached to your personal history and in order to inbox you had to have a certain trust rating based on all your interactions.  Facebook knows everything about you.  I would love to say people can’t contact me unless they are personally friends with me or have a trust rating of 80%+.  Anyone else goes into my Less than 80% trust box to which I would disregard them.  Think how much this would change our world. Would you be willing to pay $10/month for a service like that?  If you are, let’s say 5 Million people out there are.  There is another 600 Million profit for Facebook a year.  Add that onto your phone every month.

What if in addition to the Facebook Phone, email system, they added cloud music into the mix?

The new craze is cloud, cloud music, free cloud hosting, cloud servers, cloud everything.  People love their music, hence services like iTunes have done so well. What if all your music was attached to you personally online?  What if this helped your social acceptance?   What if you could access every song that has ever been created in the world legally for a small monthly fee and be able to access if anywhere in the world at any time?  Would you be willing to pay $10/month for that?  I sure would and know millions of people would love that.  If Facebook did something like this would you trust them enough to use the service?

What if in addition to Facebook Phone, email, cloud music, they had a national “Do not call list”?

Ever have people call you like telemarketers.  With a company like Facebook you could make it so that companies have to build up their social graph in order to call people.  A phone number won’t be able to call you unless you have a ranking.  Companies would be forced to comply and be accountable for their actions.  If they screw up, they’ll lose their rankings and won’t be able to call people.  I know this would piss a lot of companies off but would force the bad companies out and help the good companies thrive.  Also, at anytime you could blog someone and they would no longer be able to contact you mush like the “block list” Facebook currently has.  This would eliminate many of the cell phone problems that we have in today’s world and let us control more the people that are contacting us.

Why do I say all this?  I think that if you and your company want to grow you have to do amazing things.  I’m pretty sure that Facebook has thought about a majority of these things, if they haven’t they should What if they did all these things and charged $100/month for all of them. They protected you online and in essence forced everyone to comply?  I know the FCC would totally go after them, but wouldn’t it make for an awesome world?  I love the world that we live in and everything around us.  Anything we can do to make it a better place to live in will be awesome.  Keep innovating your business, build it into something that will change the world and help people.  You have a great company, keep up the good work!