Facebook, Digg next takeover targets?… SMS spam… Labour and capital balance shifts… Quote of the day

• Digg, Facebook next takeover targets?
• SMS spam
• Labour vs capital
• Quote of the Day

Digg, Facebook the next big takeover targets?

Jay Meattle, the in-house blogger for online metrics company Compete, says the frenetic growth of leading web 2.0 social media sites Facebook and Digg could see them become the next big dot-com acquisition targets.

These sites have recently passed 20 million unique visitors – in Digg’s case by achieving a phenomenal 1400% growth over the past year, according to research by Compete.

The 20 million figure could be magic. Meattle writes: “The first time I wrote about YouTube, it had just crossed 20 million visitors in the US. Just four days after my post, YouTube was scooped up by Google for $US1.65 billion in Google stock. At today’s stock price, the deal is worth over $US2 billion.”

Digg and Facebook still have a way to go before they catch up with the market leaders. MySpace continues to head the pack with 67,654,880 unique visitors between May 2006 and May 2007, followed by YouTube with 43,798,702.

See news briefing on MySpace adding classifieds

Rising complaints on SMS spam

Mobile phone media company Splash Mobile has been ordered to pay $11,000 in fines for sending SMS spam. The company sent more than one million messages that did not allow recipients to stop receiving SMS advertisements – in breach of the anti-spam laws.

The communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, says that there has been a substantial escalation in complaints about spam SMS messages over the past two years. SMS spam now accounts for 20% of all complaints filed under the Spam Act with ACMA.

Many complaints relate to premium SMS services. Typically costing $5 a week or more, these services are heavily promoted to the youth market and include mobile phone ringtones based on top 20 pop songs to wallpaper and risqué video clips of celebrities.

Labour vs capital: the balance shifts

The entry into the global markets of hundreds of millions of workers in China, India and the former Soviet states has shifted the balance between labour and capital, writes David Uren in The Australian newspaper today.

OECD figures issued last week show that the low unemployment and low inflation Australia is enjoying is happening all over the world – as is the rising share of national income going to profit rather than wages.

Is this a trend carrying the seeds of social tension, as Amy Auster, ANZ Bank’s chief international economist, says? And where is this heading? Chris Richardson from Access Economics suggests that in the long run globalisation will be bad for company profits.

Uren writes: “Globalisation implies greater levels of competition, with an ever larger slice of the business community forced to become price takers.” The new battle for business will not be with labour over its share of national income – it will be with consumers over its share of national spending.

SmartCompany Quote of the Day

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Warren Buffett