Tech stocks Not so live

Livedoor’s implosion has smacked Tokyo markets. Yet the hyperbolic rise of Tokyo’s favourite internet stock to a market capitalisation of $6.1bn has spooky parallels with those of Softbank and Hikari Tsushin in the late 1990s. The unwinding of Softbank and Hikari signalled the end of the last tech bubble. So what do Livedoor’s problems say about internet 2.0? There is striking superficial similarity between all three firms. Each was founded by an iconoclast willing to take on the Japanese estab...