Top Tech Companies of 2013 Part Two

tail end of twelve um. It was written by one Megan Rose of Dickey and Um using statistics from Glassdoor dot com YEP, which was that job search site we talked about earlier. Let's employees leave comments about the company they work for so that prospective employees can get an idea of what it's like to be there before they send it an application. Right. The ranks are on a one to five, with one being the lowest and five being the highest, and there's pretty stiff competition in this year.

The lowest ranked in our top ten orbits was a four point one on that scale, and the highest drank on our on our top on on that first one was a four point three. So the four point one to four point three range. That shows you that we we're talking serious competition. So the company that comes in at number five is one that it's a fairly obscure little company that maybe one or two of you have heard about. Yeah, I mean, we had to do a lot of research on some of these because we just

had never even heard the name before. The hardest part about doing research on this one is it just kept making me go to this one's thing. We're talking about Google. Yah. Yeah, so every time I wanted to research Google, I just got a search engine about Google. It's just I don't know, man, it's like recursive or something. No. Obviously Google, we all are familiar with it. But it's interesting because it's one of the few major, huge, enormous companies that consumers are

aware of that made this top ten list. Yeah. There, there's not the only one. But you know, a lot of the other ones we've talked about are these enterprise based companies that are you know, their customers are other companies. Uh. And Google technically is as well, but it's also obviously a search engine company. It's also a an ad company. That's where they get their revenue, more and more an ad company than a search Engine company. They do have

a lot of products. I mean, obviously they do uh YouTube and email and yep, they've got and then they've got some interests that are outside of you know, the web as well, like those weird Google X projects, the Loon project that we talked about recently, automated cars. They've got their Google X stuff that's also designed to be philanthropic, um, you know, and obviously smartphones and things of that nature. A lot of the stuff they have Chromebook, yeah, Chrome

cast Um. I own most of these things. Google Glass got one of those. Um, don't have an automated car yet. They don't seem to be willing to let me have one. They haven't called you about that yet. No, I would love it. Strange I'm sure. I'm sure your call got lost in the mail. Yeah, well, I'm I'm I keep on. Hey, hey, Sarah Gay, give me a call. So. Um, that would be Saragay Sarah Gay Brand, who was the co founder of the company along with Larry Page. Yep, yep. The

company's headquarters is in Mountain View, California. Now you may remember that of course Page and Brand they went to college together and at first kind of had a little bit of a contentious relationship, kind of thought that each one thought the other one was a jerk face. I mean, I'm putting words into their mouths. I'm just reading between the lines based upon all the information I've ever read

about the biographies. But eventually they began to work together and thus was Google born, and um, yeah, you know it's a it's seen some success a little bit um after it's I p O in two thousand four. Um, what's the stock price as of this? Were recording on December way and so in the middle of the day on December five, I looked at the stock price and it was at one thousand and fifty five dollars and

nine sins per share. Not bad, No, not when you were looking at like a share price that started in the seventy dollar range and now is over a thousand dollars per share. I mean it's it's they're doing okay. Yeah, part part of the reasons they're doing so okay. So so the company rating according to glass Door is four point three on that five point scale, and their CEO approval rating of Larry Pages on Page again being a co founder. Remember before Page the CEO was Eric Schmidt.

Who had, so there was some controversy about some of the things he did and his He was very much business oriented and Paige and Brenner considered more engineering oriented. In fact, there was a lot of questions about whether or not Paige would be able to handle the role of CEO effectively. Not that he didn't care about the company, but rather that did he have the skill set necessary. Clear, really, the company is doing very well. Yes, so I don't think we have to shed any tears. But why why

did the company rates so high on this list? What is it that the employees like about Google? Well, like we talked about with the assass Institute in our first part of this episode of this two parter um, Google is is probably the industry leader in that workspace as life space kind of concept. Yeah. The Google Plex, their headquarters in Mountain View, is famous for some of the amenities that are on campus. They make it really difficult

to not make Google working for Google your life. Yeah, and and I think I think that that's very much. I mean, you know, it's it's it's a little bit further out, it's in the suburb. A lot of people are commuting out there, so they eat all their meals on campus because they are free. UM. And and you know all kinds of work in place space and and life space exists there. Yeah, it's you know, it benefits Google because it keeps people at the the head quarters

more frequently, which means they're doing more work. It benefits the employees who are getting some amazing experience and they're working with some of the most intelligent people in that field on a variety of projects. And if you are, you know, taking advantage of the twenty percent time one day all the week, you're working on something super awesome that may or may not ever see the light of day. But it's definitely going to stretch you as an employee. Absolutely, um.

But you know, kind of an exchange for that, you have to work really hard. It's one of those those if you like it, keep up kind of things, right. Yeah, it's one of those, uh, you know, it reminds me of a way in a way of a college here in Atlanta, Georgia Tech. UM. I have a lot of friends who went to Georgia Tech. Despite the fact that they went to Georgia Tech, they remain my friends. I of course, I'm a graduate of the University of Georgia

and bulldogs hate the jackets. But apart from that, the phrase I always hear is that it's it's not that hard to get in, but it's really hard to stay in because you know, you have to have a certain level to get in, and they assume that if you meet that level, that you are able to do everything that is required of you, and if you're not, then that's a problem. So it's another one of those great power,

great responsibility issues. Um. And you know, if you're able to to keep up with it, then you could have a really good career there according to most employees. Yeah, um. And and employees are are liking it more even than they did last year. They they were only four point percent last year and pages up three percent in approval. Yeah, four point oh points right, sorry, excellent, thank you a mejoric rise. Yeah, they scored four point oh and now they're up to four point three um and other news.

Recent news, in September, Google launched a spin off company called Calico that's going to focus on health and well being, specifically on on on topics that relate to disease and age. Is UM like aging the actual like finding ways to help people deal with that, and who knows with Google, maybe reverse it. Who you never know, right, like maybe people who have Android phones just live longer. I'm iPhone people.

I wouldn't put it past him. And also I'm watching and yeah, and the company also has plans for a new office in London. Yeah, yeah, yeah office uh a k A monolith. It's supposed to be one million square feet in size, which is about ninety three thousand square meters. According to what I read, it will be one of the if not the largest, uh workspace acquisition of a company in the city of London. I don't know if you know this, Lauren, but real estate in London's a

little dear. Yeah. However, if anyone can afford to do that kind of thing, it's Google. Yeah. No, Google definitely has the cash. So anyway, Yeah, that's one that we're all familiar with. The next one on the list is one that I'm sure some of our listeners are familiar with. Even though and I'm familiar with their product, I did not know that they were the company that made it though. Yeah, and it's very much smaller. It only has about a

thousand employees worldwide. We are talking about Riot Games yea, and they came up with a specific computer game called the League of Legends, which I have played. I have it on my computer at home. I have not actually, but um, but it's a it's a multiplayer battle arena. Yeah, multiplayer online battle arena game, also known as a mobile was. I was glad to finally see that spelled out because I've heard people say mobile and I didn't know what

they meant. I listened to other podcasts and they're like, oh, it's a great mobile Like I don't know what that is and find and I always would forget to search for it by the time I would, you know, get to some place where I was able to search. So, multiplayer online battle arena game. There are a lot of different versions of this, but League of Legends is a big one. In fact, it's probably the most popular video

game in the world. Supposedly has around thirty two million players logging in every month, making it the most popular one. So I'm not not shabby for something that was released in two thousand nine. Yeah. Yeah, this is something that went into development in two thousand and six was released in two thousand nine. Really, I was not aware of this game until maybe late last year early this year. So I was amazed they had been around that long and it just was one of those things that was

gaining traction. Uh. They it is a free to play game, so the way they generate revenue is through micro transactions, and um, apparently they do it in such a way where people don't feel like that's a bad thing. Yeah, yeah, but I mean it's a really tricky thing to have the micro transaction model work for you where gamers don't feel like they are being taken advantage of. It's a

delicate but apparently they do it pretty well. I know that their fans are rapid fans, you know, like that there are entire channels online that are dedicated to showing League of Legends games where players who are highly ranked, like people who are are just known for being some of the best players in the game, go up against each other. In fact, they're even professional League of Legends players.

We'll talk about that in a second. Um. Before we get into that, though, let's talk a little bit about, you know, how the company is viewed. Well, okay, so so the company calls calls itself a meritocracy that foster's teams on the prefers action parentheses, kicking ass over process and bureaucracy parentheses, taking names. I mean, it's it's a

company of gamers. Everyone who works their games. They are given three d bucks to spend on games, to increase their gaming skills and learn what else is going on in the industry. Um, they have you know, giant show and tell presentations with beer. And are they showing the beer and talking about it or or its show and tell presentation and beer is also provided yes, um, and uh, I mean, and and all of the kind of goofy parks, the snacks they've got like weekly massus visits. Um, they

sponsored hackathon. I love that they have hackathons where it's just like, all right, guys, you know, I know you've got got crazy programming skills. We're just gonna do a marathon session of hacking and see what people can come up with within a given amount of time. That's always if even Chris never did an episode on that, we should totally do. Yeah. There's also there's one we can talk about with sid Meyer that was pretty cool. Yeah.

I remember watching that video. Um yeah neat um, but yeah, I mean, it seems like a really loud really crowded kind of culture that places a huge amount of emphasis on playfulness and extremely hard work at the same time. So their their company rating on this particular surveyans of being four point four four point four you and their CEO approval rating of Mr Brandon Beck is on yep, Mr Beck, he's one of the co founders of the company. H Now, what's interesting to me is this is a

company that has only one game so far. League of Legends is the only game that they have produced since they started. However, it is evolving and it's and it's obviously hugely successful, so it's not like they've been resting on their laurels ever since they've launched it in two thousand nine. But it's, um, it's interesting to me because I wonder when we'll see or if we'll see another game come out. It could be that they nurture this one.

Mostly they've got one in development. Okay. Uh. They have what on their website what they call the Riot Manifesto, which sounds terrifying but actually actually a pretty uplifting kind of list of of of things that they hold important, which includes player experience first. So in other words, everything they do needs to be done with the player experience in mind. They want to challenge convention, so just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean

that that's the best way to do it. They want to focus on talent and teams. They want to take play seriously, which I love. This is kind of the oxymoron type thing, and stay hungry, stay humble, Like, yeah, we've got the most popular game in the world, but you can't keep it together. Yeah you can't just sit there and you know, strut around and say that, because

that's not necessarily always going to be the case. And you've got to make sure that you are always is working, you know, to get that next level or else people forget about you. Their their standards are so high that supposedly there's a really high employee turnover and you know, just just some people aren't cut out for it and don't don't make it through. Yea, and uh, recent news

has a little bit of controversy and that. So we talked about how there's some professional League of Legends players.

Ryan actually employs some professional gamers and they are in the League Championship League, which you know, seems like the evil League of Evil to me, but the League Championship League has people who are under salary with Riot who are professional gamers, but part of their contracts that um, something that got released, you know, kind of leaked to the public recently, says that they are not supposed to stream any other games, specifically games that are direct competitors

to League of Legends, but also some that are a little more like like Fat Princess, things that are not direct, um competitors, competitors. But they said that no, if you're if you're working for us, if you're making money playing video games for us, and that part of that is because you're streaming this content so that people can watch it, you are not allowed you you're not allowed to be

seen in public drinking coke. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's same, same sort of approach, And so there's been some backlash from the gaming community to this. I've seen points on both sides of this debate. And obviously, you know, you're talking about contract negotiations. That doesn't you know, mean that that's always going to be the case. It could be that the players are able to negotiate that to mean

less than what it says right now. So that's really interesting though, I've never heard of any I never honestly thought about professional gaming contracts, and although I know that that talent in many other areas has similar retrictions placed upon them. Yeah. Yeah, the non compete clauses where you can't just go to someone else and work for them while you're still under contract with another company, like classic

movie movie studio kind of content. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean that's it's it's pretty common across lots of different industries, not just with talent, but with other areas as well. All right, so let's move on to or three. Yes, uh, this is riverbed technology. This is another one I had to look up. Yeah, they do lots of networking applications and traffic optimization. Yeah, for wide area networks, right, most

of their work is in wide area Yeah. So this is stuff like it's not necessarily Internet based, although it can be, but can be intrannet based. So if you if you're part of a huge company that has its own intranet where you are able to connect with all the different parts of your company, that and that's you know, it might be that there are portals out to the Internet as well. You need to be able to manage that intranet traffic, and depending upon your I T department,

that may or may not be easy to do. So this is a company that ends up optimizing that sort of stuff. They have some products that you can use.

Some of them are physical products that you can hook up to our router that will help manage traffic so that you don't have huge bottlenecks, so that you know when when Finance is sending out a big data request, it doesn't effect HR or some other department or sales or whatever, so that you can end up having your entire business operates smoothly without anyone like upsetting the Apple cart. That's generally what they do. They ship their first product

in two thousand four. They were founded in two thousand two in San Francisco. First product they shipped in two thousand four, so two years for them to actually develop a product that they could ship, and then they had their i PO in two thousand six. Yep. So this is another publicly traded company. Uh and uh. You know lots of different products here, including things like machine virtualization. Long time listeners of tech stuff know what that is.

That's the idea that you can create virtual machines on a physical machine, and by doing that you can end up reducing the number of actual physical machines you need. Um. You know, it all depends on what kind of hardware you have, like if it's if it's sufficient to be able to do all the work you as you're dividing it up more and more and more, and obviously you

get you know, diminishing returns if you keep going. But it does mean that you can actually reduce the number of servers you need if if you do it the right way. So this company helps other companies do that also, like application acceleration, so that if you are designing apps, this company will help optimize them so that they will operate more quickly and smoothly, so you're not waiting forty

five minutes for something to happen that you know. So these are you know, if you if you're describing it as someone who is strictly a consumer, they may seem kind of dull and mundane, but they're incredibly important. Oh yeah, yeah. And some of some of the bigger name competitors in this industry are are stuff like US Tricks or Cisco. Yeah. Yeah, these are big companies that do the same sort of thing.

So what is it about Riverbed that makes it different? Well, okay, so, I mean, so it's got a company rating of four point four, which is pretty impressive, and in a CEO approval rating of Mr Jerry M. Kennelly of Kennely being one of the co founders of the company. Um, And I mean, I don't know, Like, like what I was reading from employees is that it sounds slightly traditional. That people were talking a lot about a good work life balance and having the independence to to really do their

their work. They said that it kind of straddles that line. Right. It still feels like it's nimble from a startup kind of perspective, but it also has some more traditional elements to it too. Um. Also, they the rigid management structure can go either way, right. You can either have that be a benefit because it means that perhaps the company has a very clear vision and is able to act upon it and can go and do what they want

to do and what they need to do. But it also can sometimes mean that it restricts your options as an employee. Yeah, that sometimes upward mobility is going to be difficult. So for recent news, Riverbed Technology announced that it would implement a shareholder rights plan, which is also known as a poison pill. I had heard this term several times before and really wasn't entirely clear on what

it meant. So I actually did some digging so I can learn, because I mean, finance world is something that frightens and confuses me and we go back into my corner of safety zone. So so a poison pill is interesting.

So the idea is that if you have an entity coming into your company and buying up shares, and you figure out that maybe this entity is trying to do a hostile takeover where they're trying to buy up enough shares to have controlling voting power to vote their own applicant up to the board of directors and thus start to make changes to the company. This is like an economic cyanide pill. Yeah, it's well, it's kind of you know, it's they call it a poison pill because it's supposed

to be like the spies have in there. You know, you flip your tooth up and you've got the old sanide pill and you bite down on and you croak.

But it's not really killing off the company. Instead, what it's meant to do is dilute the stock because what what a company will do is they'll say, if any entity buys up a certain percentage of our stock, and usually it's somewhere between ten and then that will trigger this plan where other shareholders who have less than ten percent of the stock will be able to buy additional

share is at a incredibly reduced cost. So, in other words, it ends up diluting the ability of a company to buy up enough to to be able to really mess with things. And because that company, the one that bought ten, is not eligible for this reduced rate, So all of a sudden, you've got all these people who can just kind of buy buy the shares out from under them, right, Yeah, So they end up buying more shares, and it ends up making it less likely that one, any single entity

will be able to get a kind of controlling interest. Now, this is a practice that rose to prominence in the nineteen eighties. People who watch Wall Street are like, I totally get this, um, but uh, you know both Wall Street the entity and Wall Street the film. Uh, greed is good Gordon Gecko anyway, So anyone who is familiar with that already already knows all this stuff. But I thought I found it really interesting. It's also something that's

considered to be fairly controversial. There's some parts of the world where yeah, this is totally not something you are allowed to do, kind of underhanded and and or illegal. Um. And it was it was responsive to a particular news item,

wasn't it. Yeah, there's a there's an investment group, um the the Elliott Associates company that purchased nine percent of the stocks and actually had made the comments saying that the reason why they had made that purchase was they felt that the stocks were undervalued and soon would reflect the true value of the company, and that actually gave

a boost to the stock price. And there the market responded by saying, you know, maybe this company is undervalued considering the number of loyal customers Riverbed has, perhaps the stock price should reflect that better. And the number of oil employees. Yeah so yeah, so the number. So that stock price started to creep up. But the on the flip side of the board directors was like, well, that's awesome.

We do want to see our company value increase. At the same time, I'm a little nervous about this, this one entity buying up nine percent of our shares, so that it looks like that may have been the impetus to go in and say, let's go ahead and propose this this, uh, this plan, this um this shareholder rights plans. So it'll be interesting to see how that turns out because this is still an ongoing story right now. Well, we still have some a couple of companies to talk

about numbers one and two, if I'm not mistaken. But before we do that, let's, uh, how about we take a quick break and thank our sponsor. All right, we're down to the final two. So number two this is, you know, again a company that when I saw it, I was like that, what huh what do they do? This is guide Wire. Yeah, it's a computer software and hardware company founded in two thousand one, started in Foster City, California,

and they have very specific customers. Yeah, it's mostly insurance carriers, specifically property and casualty insurance. Yeah. So again here's another company that that the average consumer would have no knowledge of because they are dealing with companies that you deal with. So your insurance carrier might be a customer of guide Wire, and guide Wire creates these software systems that allow insurance carriers to manage their products and also their customers. It

includes everything that insurance companies do. Yeah yeah, the underwriting, the policy, administration, billing, claims, claims resources. Yeah yeah. All of this stuff is you know, obviously the meat and potatoes of what insurance companies have to do in order to do business. And so, uh, they're the way they position themselves as they said, Look, we are a software company that knows how to make software inside and out, and we are also incredibly knowledgeable with the insurance industry

in particular. When this happens across many different sectors of software, you know, people will specify in systems management for one particular type of company just because it's it's I mean, it's easier to get recommendations, um, word of mouth, and and be it's easier to design a product if everyone is working towards the same goals exactly right, And if you make a one size fits all management software thing, it's it's going to be the least of all worlds, right,

because you want to try and cast as wide a net as you possibly can to try and take care of all the potential issues that a company might need. But it waters down the effectiveness of that product for specific cases whereas if you are catering to a very specific industry, then you can really focus and provide stuff that only matters to them. Y. Yeah, so that's kind

of where they came from. And uh you know, the like I said, they were founded in two thousand one, and they held their I p O in two thousand twelve and now are publicly treated and as much as we had never heard of them, they rank on a lot of lists as one of the top best places to work. It was actually number one on this Business Insider list on in both twelve. Yeah. So they've slipped, yes,

slipped down from one to two. Um. Yeah. Their company rating is currently four point six and their CEO approval of Mr Marcus Riu is. What's interesting to me is that last year they had a rating of four point four, so the rating actually went up, and yet they slipped down in the rankings, teasing what number one might possibly be.

Uh So, Yeah, it's it's pretty interesting that the quality of working at these places has increased over the past year to the point where even when number one gets even better than it was the year before, it's still now number two. Uh So it's it's interesting what employees said about working at this place that they again they felt that they their work was actually valued and that their input was taken into account, that they were no

matter what you're at, Yeah, which is fantastic. I mean, you know, anyone who's ever worked for a company where you feel like what you do doesn't really seem to matter to the overall company, job satisfaction just plummets. So that's always a good thing. And yeah, you know, just just talking about about engineers getting to work alongside upper management on projects. Yeah, that's obviously you know, if you're if you know, it's you're not distancing the upper management

from everyone else. It's not like they they inhabit a floor that no ordinary employees ever allowed to go to. That's also really cool. And no shadowy figures behind curtains. Yeah, however, all of that does come with with the caveat that. Again, um, work life balance can be a little bit of an issue working here, right, And then there were some employees who said that the four oh one K programs not all it could be and that the benefits aren't necessarily

in line what's what some other companies offer. So you know, again it's one of those things where some aspects of the job might be amazing and others you might find a little lacking. It depends on what you're looking for in your place of employment. Um. So, as far as news goes, the company had a net loss per share in the most recent quarter. However, that loss was smaller than what analysts thought it was going to be, So

so that's good news. Like like they analysts predicted that there was going to be a loss, but it ended up not being as drastic as they thought it was gonna be the factive you know, minor in comparison, and so the bright side of that is that perhaps this is just a show that the things are going to

turn around and be more optimistic in the future. So, um, that takes us to our number one company, which is one that I think most of our listening audience is really familiar with, probably probably on a daily, if not hourly, if not minutely basis. Yes, we're talking about Facebook. Now. This actually surprised me to see Facebook as the number one company. Yeah, company rating of four point seven and uh CEO approval of of Mark Zuckerberg at very surprising.

I guess, uh, I guess that that that biopic film didn't really hurt him so much. Huh. Yeah, he's up nine percent approval from last year and um and the company as a whole is up from four point three, right, So that's that's a big jump. Four point three to four point seven is huge. So obviously, I mean you're familiar with This company is founded in two thousand four by Mark Zuckerberg, uh, somewhat controversially depending upon who you

talked to, and it's headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Also had a controversial initial public offering in two thousand twelve. There was a little bit of a kerfuffle there where there was the allegations that Facebook had let some players know that they were not going to perform up to the projections they had made and that would affect the

stock price. But other people, as in me and you, weren't alerted to this fact, and so when we went in good faith to purchase stock price at a certain amount, we did so not knowing that the company wasn't really worth what we thought it was worth. That was the allegation. Um, messy, messy, But that's all still kind of Yeah, the stock price hasn't exactly blown all the other companies out of the water. It's performed fairly well. I mean it's not like it's

it's not like it's plummeted down to tiny levels. At last I looked, I think it was in the forty dollar range, which it's not from from its initial dive. Yeah, and it's and it's even up from what it was initially offered at. But not like not like an astronomer. It's not a Google. It's not a Google. Um. But yeah, so they they obviously social network everyone's familiar with. They've got like the whole uh revenue generation model of having

advertising as well as promoted things. We'll talk about some of the promotion stuff in a second, because that that's an interesting story. That's that's breaking right now. Um. And and people say that working there, I mean, I mean, I think that everyone has heard stories about working at Facebook, where you know, it's just so much energy, which you

can either be really good or really bad. Yeah. I can either be incredibly energizing like energy as in the way of who, let's all get the work on this, or it could be exhausted right right for the right people at the right time. It's it's excellent. Um My my favorite employee quote from from the company is uh, I never knew a company could move so fast and

get so much done while still being kind about of control. Yes, that that to me says that Facebook, even though it's reached this huge size, and I mean we're talking billions of dollars in revenue every year. Uh, it's a it's an enormous thing. They have more than a billion users. So when you have more than a billion users, that's

it's it's unfathomable to me. But it's still operating at at some levels anyway, like a little internet startup, which is kind of it's it's you wonder how long a company can do that because, uh, in some ways it needs to be able to do that because the Internet is so change you know, it's so chaotic, it changes so quickly, so you have to be able to adapt that. But at the same time, when you get that big, it's hard to have a company operate that way and

maintain any semblance of sanity. You know, it's it's a challenge. I'm not sure if that's if sanity is ever what they've been going for. I don't know. I'm sure if I said, would you like your work to be saying i'd get a lot of Facebook employees hitting the like button. But yeah, it's um, you know, it's also supposed to be a really supportive environment. They talk a lot about innovation and that that's much more important than doing things the way it's always been done, and that they say

that the work is challenging and engaging. So it's not you know, it's not just that it's fun to do, but it's challenging to do, and I think for a lot of people that is really important. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a part of what they call flow and yeah, that's pretty yep. Yeah, and critical part of of anything that you are engaging yourself and yep. And so some news from recent months, Facebook recently suffered a security breach, with more than two million accounts compromised. They were not

the only entity to have that happened. Google also was victim to that, and uh it we're still seeing people become aware of that. Usually if you if you received a message that said you need to change your password, then you may have been affected by this. So far, I haven't. The lesson to take from this is don't use the same password across multiple use a different one. I know, it's a pain. But if you get a password management application that you know for a fact is

a good one, use that. I highly recommend you check those out. There are a lot of them out there. Um, I use one myself, the one I used just so you know, and in film there's just just one of many, but I like it as dash Lane. But use something like that so that you can prevent this from happening to you, or at least if it does happen to you, it only happens to one account as opposed to everything. Yeah. Um, they've also there's also been in the news a little

bit of controversy about their system. For if you don't have a page, like a brand page on Facebook, then then you're probably less aware of what percentage of your followers are reading your posts than otherwise. But this is a big deal to people who have pages and tech stuff and a common criticism of Facebook is that they artificially reduced the number of readers who see your posts in order to encourage you to to buy ad space

or to to to promote to promote an entry. So for example, over at tech Stuff, we have several a few thousand people who like our page, and we might post something that might reach one fifth of all the people who have liked it, and that's a really good day. Yeah, so you're talking about like, just of everyone who likes your page has a chance of seeing it. It's going to show up on their news feed. Otherwise it just for everyone else. For the other percent, it doesn't show

up at all. And that's and that's how it's always been, and it's it can be frustrating. Um And and Facebook announced that um that that organic reach was going to become even more limited. Yeah. And from Facebook standpoint, I mean, I understand what they're saying. They say they want their users to have well, I understand what they're saying from two aspects. Right. What they say is they want their

users to have a satisfying experience where they're not constantly bombarded. However, keep in mind, this is stuff that Facebook users have gone out to like, meaning that they had an interested in the first place, So they can also unlike things if they were being bombarded and felt that it wasn't, you know, a good experience. So I don't know how like that seems a little disingenuous to me. Now, granted I'm biased, I have I have cards on this table, in this and and this is a thing that that

the new social media how stuff works. Lady Sherry and I have have had kind of private freakout sessions about so. But you know what Facebook says is like, we want our users to have a good experience, but if you want to have more of a reach, you can pay and you will have more of a reach. I'm like, well, how much of a good user experience do you want if you're also trying to cash in on people who want to quote unquote ruined I could experience by by

inundating everyone with their content. Um. So yeah, I question the sincerity of that whole user experience part, but I totally understand from a business perspective why they're doing what

they're doing. It is their platform. When when you've got some nearer billion users, they say it's over a billion, but that's a billion accounts, which is different from a billion actual people humans, right, Um, and uh, you know, when you've got that much traffic to your site, then you have to do something to manage to manage it unless you start making everyone pay. Exactly, So, I'm going to stop being better now, even though I make incredible content that only gets seen by a few of you.

So you should actually go and visit the tech stuff Facebook page some time and just see some of the stuff that you're not seeing because Facebook won 'll show it to you. Yeah, you can, you can. There's a little drop down menu where you can check off how much of our content you want to see. You want all of it, all of the content, just I mean, just if you want to. I mean, just no big, no, no big. My bonus depends on it. Um. That's a joke. That's a joke. It's it's not entirely a joke. It's

mostly a joke. Let's talk about some honorable mention. Let's see that. So Facebook was our number one, but there are some companies that were listed because this was a top twenty five in the armble And like I said, you should go and check that out. Here's some companies that you have heard of that also made that top list. Yeah, some things that perhaps you would have expected to have heard on our top ten that didn't quite make it. Adobe a number twenty, down from sixteen last year. Yep.

Apple was number nineteen, which was a bit of a drop right way down from seven last year. Yeah, So Google was number five, Apples number nineteen. I'm just saying I'm an entroprod user, alright. So LinkedIn was number fifteen, way down again from number three last year, and Intel was number eleven, which is up from eighteen last year.

So actually that's interesting because some of these companies play into you know, we did We do this every year where we make the predictions of what the next twelve months are going to be like in the world of tech, and then at the end of the year we have to grade ourselves. So our next episode is actually going to be the roundup of what our predictions were, and

some of these companies factor into that. Who to funk it? Well, guys, if you have any suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future, whether it's a company, a technology, just the concept that kind of fits in with tech that you've always wanted to know more about, let us know, send us a message. You can write us our email addresses tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on the mini social media platforms that we dominate on that allow us our organic reach. That would

be Twitter, Facebook, and Tumbler. Our handle is tech Stuff hs W Lauren It will continue to giggle, and I will talk to you less snarkily. Releasing for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how staff works. Dot com