That said, how much of our idea of valuations come from web apps? I was thinking about the number $215M and realized the only reason that it seems small is because Facebook is valued at $6B, or YouTube was bought for $1.6B. Outside of software, I can't think of companies that are really valued at these amounts, unless they make power plants or airplanes or some other giant necessity.
Is this how much companies are actually worth and we're all just in such a ridiculous bubble that we can't see it, or did these guys get desperate and cash out?
Facebook has a user base of ~200 million active users. They have an income of $300 million and only 700 employees. When you consider companies that have a fraction of their customer base, selling for $6B is pathetic. Ford, despite losing money like an alcoholic loses body fluids, has a revenue of ~$150 billion with only 5.5 million customers. Ford gets an average of $27,000 per customer 'per year' (this is based off their revenue divided by their customers, I'm trusting that with a company so old these numbers average out the money you'll give to Ford later in your vehicles life through parts, etc; so essentially the average person pays $27,000 through a vehicles lifetime), Facebook gets a total of $1.50 per customer per year. Compare Facebook to Google, who get roughly $58 per customer per year. So even by internet standards, Facebook is worthless for its user base, it hasn't capitalized at all on its potential market like Google has.
Companies like E Ink only have a handful of 'customers' and deal with large shipments. They're probably more comparable to a regional meat distributor than an online industry. They ship their product to only a handful of companies and then it's out of their hands.
The only reason so many of us know who E Ink is, is because it's used in products we care about. I believe the type of ePaper that will get a company worth into the billions will be manufacturers of color ePaper like used in the FLEPia. This offers instant conversion into low cost computers, cell phones and mp3 players.
The problem is that we don't know what's coming next. Will E Ink be supplanted by something better?
That dev kit is very cool! Anyone have it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n2xxqMQyfY
It's a wonder that this hasn't been submitted here before.
Seems like they'll be capable of real-time animation. I wonder what that does to their power consumption and screen life?