Apple decides that a $100bn cash balance is a minimum

Apple's grand plan to use its huge cash balance: Not to touch it!

Currently, Apple has $98bn cash; that's around $105 per share (941.6m diluted shares at Q1).

During its call on March 19th, Apple announced that around $45bn will be spent over the next 3 years (Apple Press Release and call transcript).

However, as the company generates so much cash (like $16bn in the quarter from Sept to Dec alone), the balance will actually continue to grow; probably to around $200bn (considering 50bn cash flow a year... which is actually very conservative) by the end of the program.

In details of the plan, there will be

• a $2.65 quarterly dividend, from Q4 2012, ie. the quarter from July to September, that's $2.5bn per quarter, and a 1.8% yield on current $600 stock price.
• a 3-year $10bn shares repurchase program, to start in fiscal year 2013, ie. from October 1, 2012. The main goal of this program is to neutralise dilution from employee. At today's stock price of $600, that's around 16.6m shares, 1.7% of the company's shares.

A reason mentioned for not distributing more is that $64bn of the cash is outside of the US (and significant part of the future generated cash will be outside of the US too), hence significant tax impact should it be brought back for distribution.

Talking about the impact of visualisation and the future of online travel

Hundreds of representatives of airlines and hotel chains were in Singapore last month for the Travel Distribution World conference ... and I was there too!!

That's because I was invited to speak about what we do at Flocations.com. You can find the slides below.

The main points were about the misfit between current online travel agencies and leisure travellers and how the travel planning process can be made much better for such travellers. One of the reason of the current offer in online travel planning is due to historical reason. As Ric at GottaGetaway puts it, the travel industry spent the past 2 decades putting the travel inventories online, allowing to search and book flights and travel related stuffs.

Now is time to bring personalisation and fun into the process.

It also includes screenshots from HipMunk which is also doing an awesome job at visualisation flights (on a timeline for time sensitive travellers) and hotels (to avoid getting an hotel kilometers away from where you want to go).

The travel planning process to inspire travellers  

Facebook and its impact on government

I like Marc Zuckerberg's letter included in the Facebook IPO registration document : after a 1 page description of the Hacker Way, he has a full paragraph on his current and expected impact on governments!
(bolding of text is mine, not Marc's)

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions. 

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time. 

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few. 

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them. 

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Hackers make it into a SEC filing: Facebook IPO document

I had never seen so many references to the word "hacker" in a SEC filing: 12 times in the Facebook registration document.


Marc Zuckerberg's letter includes one full page on what he calls the "Hacker Way", on which I bolded my favorite sentences below:

The Hacker Way 

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way. 

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. 

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. 

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping. 

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.” 

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people. 

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler. 

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.