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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg marries sweetheart

admin — Sun, 20 May 2012 10:04:11 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his status to “married” on Saturday. Zuckerberg and 27-year-old Priscilla Chan tied the knot at a small ceremony at his Palo Alto, Calif., home, capping a busy week for the couple, according to a guest authorized to speak for the couple. The person spoke only on the condition of anonymity. Zuckerberg took his company public in one of the most anticipated stock offerings in Wall Street history Friday. And Chan graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, on Monday, the same day Zuckerberg turned 28, the person said. The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years, the person said. Zuckerberg designed the ring featuring “a very simple ruby,” according to the person. The ceremony took place in Zuckerberg’s backyard before fewer than 100 guests, including Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. The guests all thought they were coming to celebrate Chan’s graduation but were told after they arrived that the event was in fact a wedding. “Everybody was shocked,” the guest said. Rather than his trademark hoodie, Zuckerberg wore a suit for the ceremony, while his bride wore a traditional wedding dress. Food was served family-style and included dishes from the couple’s favorite Palo Alto sushi restaurant. The two had been planning the marriage for months but were waiting until Chan had graduated to hold the wedding, the guest said. The timing wasn’t tied to the IPO, since the date the company planned to go public was a “moving target,” the guest said. Even after the IPO, Zuckerberg remains Facebook’s single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. And he controls the company with 56 percent of its voting stock. The site, which was born in a dorm room eight years ago, has grown into a worldwide network of almost a billion people. Zuckerberg founded Facebook at Harvard in 2004. He was selected as Time’s Person of the Year in 2010, at age 26. Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg marries sweetheart

Google gets China OK for Motorola deal

vahe — Sun, 20 May 2012 03:11:23 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Authorities in China have approved Google Inc. ‘s bid to buy phone maker Motorola Mobility , clearing the way for the $12.5 billion deal to close early next week. But Chinese regulators attached a big condition: That Google ‘s Android operating system for mobile devices remain available to all at no cost for the next five years. The approval brings the Internet search giant closer to sealing its biggest acquisition ever. Buying Motorola allows Google to expand into manufacturing phones, tablet computers and other consumer devices for the first time. The deal also gives Google access to more than 17,000 Motorola patents. The Chinese government approved the deal on Saturday, Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said. “We look forward to closing the deal,” she said. The deal was announced last August and had received all necessary regulatory approvals except in China, where Google’s government relations have been strained since it moved its search engine out of the country two years ago in a dispute over censorship and computer security. Google’s Android software powers more than 250 million mobile devices made by a variety of manufacturers, including Motorola Mobility. The latest versions must be made available free of charge for the next five years, apparently in response to concerns that competition could be hurt if Google gives updated versions to Motorola Mobility and withholds them from others. Google doesn’t currently charge for Android. Google earlier had pledged to make Android available to all its mobile partners. Even if Google were to discriminate, cellphone makers still could rely on mobile software from Microsoft Corp. , Research in Motion and Hewlett-Packard Co. , among others. Google prizes Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. ‘s patents as a crucial weapon in the intellectual arms race with Apple, Microsoft and other rivals maneuvering to gain more control over smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Earlier, the U.S. Justice Department found no evidence that Google’s ownership of Motorola Mobility would lessen competition in a mobile device market that is becoming increasingly important as more people connect to the Internet on smartphones and tablet computers instead of desktop and laptop computers. The union with Motorola Mobility will open new opportunities and pose potentially troublesome challenges for a management team that so far has concentrated on Internet search , ad sales and other software-driven online services. Motorola Mobility’s expertise in mobile devices and set-top boxes for cable TV will allow Google to play an even more influential role in shaping the future of hand-held computing and home entertainment. The $12.5 billion price paid by Google is more than the combined amount that Google has paid for the 185 other acquisitions that it has completed since going public in 2004. Google is based in Mountain View, California, while Motorola Mobility has its headquarters in Libertyville, Illinois. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Google gets China OK for Motorola deal

Facebook stock finishes flat in debut

vahe — Sat, 19 May 2012 11:05:32 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — In the hours before Facebook ‘s stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reminded the company’s 3,500 employees not to get caught up in the hoopla surrounding its long-awaited initial public offering. “Right now this all seems like a big deal,” Zuckerberg said before he pushed a button that rang Nasdaq’s opening bell from company headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, Calif. “Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing, our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.” Facebook ‘s IPO, it turns out, wasn’t as big a deal as expected. One of the most anticipated IPOs in Wall Street history ended on a flat note Friday, with Facebook ‘s stock closing at $38.23, up 23 cents from Thursday night’s pricing. That means the company founded in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room has a market value of about $105 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonald’s and Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco. It also gave 28-year-old Zuckerberg a stake worth $19,252,698,725.50. But for many seeking a big first-day pop in Facebook ‘s share price, the increase of six-tenths of one percent was a letdown. “This is like kissing your sister,” said John Fitzgibbon, founder of IPO Scoop, a research firm. “With all the drumbeats and hype, I don’t think there’ll be barroom bragging tonight.” Added Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital: “It wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been. But I don’t think we should view it as a failure.” Indeed, the small jump in price could be seen as an indication that Facebook and the investment banks that arranged the IPO priced the stock in an appropriate range. It was also good for ordinary investors, who are mostly shut out from the IPO price and have to buy the stock in the open market on day one. They got a chance to buy all day at a price not much above $38. And it was good for early investors in the company, who owned more than half the 421 million shares made available in the IPO. Had the stock shot to $60 Friday morning, those early investors would have felt they hadn’t gotten enough money for their stakes. The 421 million shares that were sold fetched $16 billion and represented 15 percent of the company’s stock. Facebook got $7 billion, and the early investors $9 billion. The other 85 percent of Facebook ‘s stock is owned by Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, employees and early investors. In comparison, Google offered just 7.2 percent of its stock when it went public in 2004. Its stock rose 18 percent on day one. Here was Facebook ‘s “timeline” Friday, trading under the symbol “FB” on the Nasdaq Stock Market: The stock opened at 11:30 a.m. at $42.05, but soon dipped to $38.01. It briefly traded as high as $45 and by noon was at $40.40. It fluttered throughout the afternoon and hugged the $38 mark for much of the final hour, before closing at $38.23. By the end of the day, about 570 million shares had changed hands, a huge trading volume for any company. TD Ameritrade reported that in the first 45 minutes of trading, Facebook accounted for a record 24 percent of trades executed by its customers. By comparison, on its first day back on the stock market, in November 2010, General Motors represented 7 percent of trades on the online brokerage. Steve Quirk, who oversees trading strategy at TD Ameritrade, said that about 60,000 orders were lined up before Facebook opened. Technical glitches delayed the start of Facebook ‘s trading by a half-hour. The Securities and Exchange Commission also is investigating problems traders encountered in changing and canceling their orders. Other social media companies, most of which have gone public in the last year, saw their shares plummet when it became clear what kind of reception Facebook was getting in the public market. Shares of game-maker Zynga Inc. and reviews site Yelp Inc. both hit all-time lows. The stock market will now begin assigning a dollar value to Facebook based primarily on its financial performance. If Facebook can continue to increase its revenue and profit at the rate it has the past few years, the stock should rise. Google reported strong earnings after it became a public company, and its stock price more than tripled the first year, from $85 to $280. Facebook’s stock price will also depend somewhat on broad economic forces, as well as the whims of investors. Facebook is one of those rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting its 900 million users around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts. Most tech companies going public want a big rise in their debut to show they’re “strong, dynamic companies standing out in the crowd,” said Francis Gaskins, president of researcher IPOdesktop, but Facebook already has that image, and so may not care. Few of the Internet companies to go public recently have been profitable. But Facebook had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In 2011, it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, up from earnings of $606 million and revenue of $2 billion a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and had revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as “FarmVille.” Facebook’s public debut marked a milestone in the history of the Internet. In 1995, Netscape Communications’ IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom. That explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had hatched a “new economy.” It took Google Inc.’s IPO in 2004 to prove that an Internet company with a revolutionary idea could be profitable. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection. Facebook’s IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company’s cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to bring in other talented engineers and promising technology. That’s what Google has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don’t include Google’s pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China. Zuckerberg’s biggest deal so far came when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion in April. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on Facebook’s current share price, Instagram is in line to receive about $1.2 billion. Friday’s debut, though, resulted in deals worth much less. Alper Aydinoglu, a DePaul University student who got 50 shares via Etrade at $38, said he was “disappointed with the first day of trading.” His gain on paper: $11.50, but that was before Etrade’s standard commission of $9.99. Aydinoglu still called it an excellent learning opportunity. “On top of everything, I now have the bragging rights that I participated in one of the most popular IPOs of all time.” ___ AP Technology Writers Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and Peter Svensson in New York, Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in Menlo Park, Calif., and AP Business Writers Bernard Condon, Pallavi Gogoi and Joseph Pisani in New York contributed to this story. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Facebook stock finishes flat in debut

Microsoft opines: Vista was ‘cheesy’; drops Aero

alain — Sat, 19 May 2012 09:56:37 +0000

Microsoft has ditched Aero Glass for the Windows 8 desktop.

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Microsoft opines: Vista was ‘cheesy’; drops Aero

Microsoft opines: Vista was ‘cheesy’; three devices too many

vahe — Sat, 19 May 2012 09:56:37 +0000

The evolution of Windows wasn’t alway graceful.

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Microsoft opines: Vista was ‘cheesy’; three devices too many

Historic Facebook debut falls flat

vahe — Sat, 19 May 2012 07:53:38 +0000

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO | Fri May 18, 2012 8:53pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The historic initial public offering of Facebook Inc did not go as planned on Friday, as the social networking company’s sky-high valuation combined with trading glitches left the stock languishing near its offering price at the market close. Facebook shares began trading late Friday morning and opened 11 percent above the $38 offering price, but after peaking at about $45 slid rapidly at the end of the day to close at $38.23. The IPO was the third-largest in U.S. history and valued eight-year-old Facebook at $104 billion. The surprisingly weak debut of a stock that analysts had predicted would climb between 10 and 50 percent is not likely to dent the business prospects of Facebook, which boasts 900 million users and is upending business practices and social relationships around the world. But the unexpected developments were a clear setback for Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter on the deal, which sources said was forced to defend the $38 price level by buying shares on the open market. Many market participants said they expected the stock to remain under pressure next week. The offering also proved an embarrassment for the NASDAQ: the opening was delayed as the exchange struggled with a huge volume of orders, and for much of the day there were long delays in order confirmation. The SEC said late Friday that it was reviewing the situation. Social media companies and Internet companies that had hoped to benefit from a Facebook halo effect were instead dragged down Friday, with social gaming giant Zynga dropping almost 15 percent. Analysts said Facebook may simply have over-reached in raising the IPO price range, pricing at the top of the range and increasing the size of the offering earlier in the week. “The underwriters got greedy on behalf of selling shareholders and bumped the price high enough that they didn’t get much of a bump on the first day,” said Bill Smead, chief investment officer at Smead Capital Management, which did not buy Facebook shares in the IPO. “They increased the size of the deal and that really did a number on it.” Skeptics have argued all along that a valuation of more than $100 billion — about equivalent to Amazon.com Inc and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined — was far too high for a company that posted $1 billion in profit and $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011. Concerns about Facebook’s earnings potential were highlighted by General Motors’ announcement this week that it would no longer buy paid advertising on Facebook. “You don’t need more than a small pencil and napkin to do a valuation on this, to say there are heroic assumptions in earnings growth to keep this at $100 billion, much less $115 billion or $120 billion,” said Dave Rolfe, fund manager at River Park Wedgewood Fund, which does not own shares in Facebook. “I know there’s a lot of excitement and exuberance, but it seemed today that the market is starting to do some hard valuation math early on.” Facebook’s opening day on Wall Street does not bode well for the stock’s performance in the days ahead, said Channing Smith, portfolio manager at Capital Advisors Growth, which does not own shares in Facebook. “If you’re an investment banker or if you’re long the stock, I would definitely be a bit worried as we walk away to the weekend,” he said. The weak IPO may also give pause to private investors in Silicon Valley who have been pouring money into next-generation Internet companies at very high valuations in the hope of eventually taking them public. MEDIA CIRCUS At Facebook’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the day began with company founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, 28, symbolically ringing the opening bell for stock trading on Friday morning. Wearing his trademark black hoodie, Zuckerberg, whose shares are worth nearly $20 billion and who retains voting control over the company, hugged and high-fived Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, who is credited with bringing crucial business discipline to a company founded in a Harvard dorm room. The area outside Facebook’s offices was packed with photographers, more than a dozen television trucks, and a TV news helicopter hovering overhead. Outside Nasdaq headquarters in New York, crowds also gathered, even as exchange officials struggled to sort out trading problems that left investors guessing whether their buy and sell orders had actually been executed. The IPO minted thousands of new paper millionaires among Facebook’s 3,500 employees — and a handful of billionaires among its founders and early investors. More than half of the proceeds of the IPO will go to existing shareholders, including early backers such as Accel Partners and Russia’s DST Global. In the run-up to the IPO, demand from institutional investors was strong, and many analysts had expected an influx of retail investors keen on owning a slice of a cultural phenomenon regardless of price. But that did not materialize. “Flippers who waited all day for a pop that did not come decided to throw in the towel and get out,” said Mohannad Aama, managing director at Beam Capital Management LLC in New York. “That group also includes people who over-extended themselves in getting more shares than they can afford to hold — whether they got it from the syndicate or from the open market once it opened around noon.” Still, from Facebook’s perspective, the stock performance could be seen as reflecting smart pricing: Zuckerberg and early investors pocketed maximum gains and left little of the easy money on the table. “You want to price the offering correctly. Institutional buyers get a little bump and the company raises the right amount of money,” said Kevin Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, an online ticketing startup that is integrated with Facebook’s platform. “If the stock has a massive bump on day one, that means you misread market demand and the company could have raised more money with the same amount of dilution, or could have raised the same amount of money with less dilution.” BATTLE OF THE GIANTS Facebook faces many challenges as it takes its place beside Google, Apple and Amazon as one of the giant public companies defining the next-generation Internet economy. Google in particular views Facebook as a mortal threat and is moving aggressively to integrate social networking features across its products. At the same time, scores of young companies are building new products and services, in some cases on top of the Facebook platform and in some cases in competition with it, and attracting huge amounts of investment capital. A handful of such so-called Web 2.0 companies, including Zynga Inc, LinkedIn Corp, Yelp Inc and Groupon Inc, have already gone public, and others have been acquired by the industry giants. All of those stocks fell on Friday in sympathy with Facebook’s weaker-than-expected debut. In an indication of the land grab now under way in the Internet world, Facebook in April spent $1 billion to acquire Instagram, a tiny photo-sharing company with lots of users but no revenue. A Facebook rival, social scrap-booking site Pinterest, raised money earlier this week at a valuation of $1.5 billion in a sign that venture capitalists and other private investors still see enormous potential in Web 2.0 companies. Many of Facebook’s users spend hours a day on the site and share enormous amounts of personal information. That in turn enables Facebook to target its advertising to people’s specific interests, and many analysts believe the huge store of personal information gives Facebook an advantage that Google and other cannot match. “Literally everything you see on the Internet, you could see inside Facebook — but done with much more of the social graph built into it,” said Siva Kumar, CEO of e-commerce company TheFind. “In a way, they operate the mall, and everybody in the mall will pay some way or the other to Facebook.” Analysts say the company has vast untapped opportunities in mobile computing, where it has been weak thus far, and potentially in other Internet services such as email and search. Zuckerberg, though unproven as a public company CEO, is widely admired as a product visionary who has done a masterful job in continually improving the Facebook experience. Skeptics, though, note that only a small percentage of Facebook users respond to advertising on the site. Google retains a big advantage in that regard, because advertising related to specific Internet searches is by nature far more relevant and thus more valuable. In Silicon Valley, though, the conventional wisdom is that Facebook and its social media brethren will be an increasingly important force in the business world for many years to come. And no matter how the industry dynamics unfold over the long term, the influx of wealth arising from Facebook’s extraordinary growth has already helped drive a mini-boom in San Francisco Bay Area real estate. Income tax revenues related to the IPO will cut the state of California’s budget deficit by an estimated $2 billion. (Additional reporting by Alistair Barr , Noel Randewich , Sarah McBride , Gerry Shih and Edwin Chan in San Francisco, Jennifer Hoyt Cummings, Jessica Toonkel, John McCrank , David Gaffen , Liana Baker, Yinka Adegoke , Ed Krudy and Olivia Oran in New York; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Steve Orlofsky and Tiffany Wu ; Editing by Gary Hill) Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Historic Facebook debut falls flat

Facebook stock closes nearly flat in debut

admin — Sat, 19 May 2012 06:38:07 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — It was barely a “like” and definitely not a “love” from Facebook investors as the online social network’s stock failed to live up to the hype in its trading debut Friday. One of the most anticipated IPOs in Wall Street history ended on a flat note, with Facebook ‘s stock closing at $38.23, up 23 cents from Thursday night’s pricing. That meant the company founded in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room has a market value of about $105 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonald’s and Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco. It also gave 28-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg a stake worth $19,252,698,725.50. “Going public is an important milestone in our history,” Zuckerberg said before he pushed a button that rang Nasdaq’s opening bell from company headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, Calif. “But here’s the thing: Our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.” But for many seeking a big first-day pop in Facebook ‘s share price, the increase of six-tenths of one percent was a letdown. “This is like kissing your sister,” said John Fitzgibbon, founder of IPO Scoop, a research firm. “With all the drumbeats and hype, I don’t think there’ll be barroom bragging tonight.” Added Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital: “It wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been. But I don’t think we should view it as a failure.” Indeed, the small jump in price could be seen as an indication that Facebook and the investment banks that arranged the IPO priced the stock in an appropriate range. It was also good for ordinary investors, who are mostly shut out from the IPO price and have to buy the stock in the open market on day one. They got a chance to buy all day at a price not much above $38. And it was good for early investors in the company, who owned more than half the 421 million shares made available in the IPO. Had the stock shot to $60 Friday morning, those early investors would have felt they hadn’t gotten enough money for their stakes. The 421 million shares that were sold fetched $16 billion and represented 15 percent of the company’s stock. Facebook got $7 billion, and the early investors $9 billion. The other 85 percent of Facebook ‘s stock is owned by Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, employees and early investors. In comparison, Google offered just 7.2 percent of its stock when it went public in 2004. Its stock rose 18 percent on day one. Here was Facebook ‘s “timeline” Friday, trading under the symbol “FB” on the Nasdaq Stock Market: The stock opened at 11:30 a.m. at $42.05, but soon dipped to $38.01. It briefly traded as high as $45 and by noon was at $40.40. It fluttered throughout the afternoon and hugged the $38 mark for much of the final hour, before closing at $38.23. By the end of the day, about 570 million shares had changed hands, a huge trading volume for any company. TD Ameritrade reported that in the first 45 minutes of trading, Facebook accounted for a record 24 percent of trades executed by its customers. By comparison, on its first day back on the stock market, in November 2010, General Motors represented 7 percent of trades on the online brokerage. Steve Quirk, who oversees trading strategy at TD Ameritrade, said that about 60,000 orders were lined up before Facebook opened. Technical glitches delayed the start of Facebook ‘s trading by a half-hour. The Securities and Exchange Commission also is investigating problems traders encountered in changing and canceling their orders. Other social media companies, most of which have gone public in the last year, saw their shares plummet when it became clear what kind of reception Facebook was getting in the public market. Shares of game-maker Zynga Inc. and reviews site Yelp Inc. both hit all-time lows. The stock market will now begin assigning a dollar value to Facebook based primarily on its financial performance. If Facebook can continue to increase its revenue and profit at the rate it has the past few years, the stock should rise. Google reported strong earnings after it became a public company, and its stock price more than tripled the first year, from $85 to $280. Facebook’s stock price will also depend somewhat on broad economic forces, as well as the whims of investors. Facebook is one of those rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting its 900 million users around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts. Most tech companies going public want a big rise in their debut to show they’re “strong, dynamic companies standing out in the crowd,” said Francis Gaskins, president of researcher IPOdesktop, but Facebook already has that image, and so may not care. Few of the Internet companies to go public recently have been profitable. But Facebook had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In 2011, it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, up from earnings of $606 million and revenue of $2 billion a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and had revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as “FarmVille.” Facebook’s public debut marked a milestone in the history of the Internet. In 1995, Netscape Communications’ IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom. That explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had hatched a “new economy.” It took Google Inc.’s IPO in 2004 to prove that an Internet company with a revolutionary idea could be profitable. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection. Facebook’s IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company’s cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to bring in other talented engineers and promising technology. That’s what Google has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don’t include Google’s pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China. Zuckerberg’s biggest deal so far came when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion in April. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on Facebook’s current share price, Instagram is in line to receive about $1.2 billion. Friday’s debut, though, resulted in deals worth much less. Alper Aydinoglu, a DePaul University student who got 50 shares via Etrade at $38, said he was “disappointed with the first day of trading.” His gain on paper: $11.50, but that was before Etrade’s standard commission of $9.99. Aydinoglu still called it an excellent learning opportunity. “On top of everything, I now have the bragging rights that I participated in one of the most popular IPOs of all time.” ___ AP Technology Writers Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and Peter Svensson in New York, Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in Menlo Park, Calif., and AP Business Writers Bernard Condon, Pallavi Gogoi and Joseph Pisani in New York contributed to this story. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Facebook stock closes nearly flat in debut

Sudden wealth part of Silicon Valley’s everyday

admin — Sat, 19 May 2012 05:11:59 +0000

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — In Silicon Valley , where sudden wealth is hardly something new and CEOs favor hoodies over bespoke blazers, Facebook ‘s IPO on Friday didn’t bring everyday life to a halt. Employees weren’t popping champagne corks at company headquarters , at least not where anyone outside could see them. And locals had plenty to do —from finding a job to locating the next Facebook. The company’s sprawling headquarters along the southern edge of San Francisco Bay was quiet except for security guards walking the parking lots, a dozen TV satellite trucks and an onslaught of reporters who were not allowed inside. The morning began with a ceremony attended by a few dozen people in a courtyard in the center of campus known as Hack Square. Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell to start the Nasdaq Stock Market’s daily trading as chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Nasdaq executives and other employees looked on. Afterward, employees tried to get back to business as usual. That is, building a company under immense pressure to meet shareholders’ expectations. To remind everyone not to get caught up in the hoopla, Facebook’s 2,000 employees were given t-shirts that read “Stay focused & keep hacking.” As is standard at large tech companies in Silicon Valley, employees were told not to talk to the press. In the parking lot, venture capitalist Mark Siegel had come down to take a longing look at one that got away. Like many of his fellow technology startup investors with offices a short drive from Facebook on Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road, Siegel said he had chances to back Facebook early on but didn’t. He said at the time, when competing social networks like Friendster and MySpace still had clout, it wasn’t clear that Facebook would come out on top. “In hindsight, any price would have been a good price to pay,” said Siegel, a managing director at Menlo Ventures. To avoid a similar fate in the future, Siegel’s firm is invested heavily in Internet and social media companies, including popular blogging service Tumblr. As for the viability of Facebook as an investment now that it’s public, Siegel said he expects the stock to be in for a bumpy ride in the near future. “I might buy a little, but I would buy it as a long-term hold,” he said. “It’s very fully valued, so I think in the short-term there’s going to be a lot of ups and downs.” At a strip mall that includes the closest Starbucks to Facebook, the company’s stock was not the first thing on everyone’s minds. (Not that anyone at Facebook needs to come across the highway to Starbucks — gourmet coffee is just one of the company’s many meal perks.) Ann House, 49, an education researcher at a nearby nonprofit, said the IPO would obviously mean more rich people in the area, but she’s been pleasantly surprised so far that the company’s recent move to its new headquarters hasn’t yet led to a big uptick in street traffic. Though not a heavy Facebook user, she said the ads on the social network’s site have started to annoy her more. She expects the IPO won’t help. “It probably means there’s going to be more advertising on the site, so I’ll use it less,” she said. Claire Bonnar, 22, of Pacifica became a teenager shortly before Facebook first went online, but she doesn’t count herself among the Facebook generation. She has an account, but she said she only logs on once every few months. She said she communicates with her friends by text message and phone to avoid the headaches she witnessed among former co-workers who were heavy users. “They’d always be in each others’ business,” she said. “I don’t want that kind of drama.” Facebook’s IPO was also far from Bonnar’s mind as she focused on more pressing concerns. Laid off from her job at a San Diego hospital a few months ago, she came north to be with family. She works as a cashier at a San Francisco barbecue restaurant to make ends meet while she plots her next move. An aspiring pharmacist, she had traveled the 30 miles from Pacifica to a job training center in Menlo Park that, by coincidence, receives money from Facebook. The company does community outreach since moving into its new headquarters, which borders on neighborhoods that are far from wealthy. Bonnar said she doesn’t find it weird that Mark Zuckerberg, also in his 20s, has become one of the world’s richest men thanks to an online service she doesn’t even like. “I think that it’s really awesome, actually. It sucks I’m not in his position.” Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Sudden wealth part of Silicon Valley’s everyday

Microsoft wins import ban on some Motorola phones

admin — Sat, 19 May 2012 04:34:28 +0000

The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that the handset maker infringed on a Microsoft patent and blocked the import of relevant Moto phones.

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Microsoft wins import ban on some Motorola phones

Oracle-Google: Another juror falls as impasse looms (again)

alain — Sat, 19 May 2012 03:33:11 +0000

Verdict deliberations in Oracle v. Google have been mixed up as the jury looks like it might be stuck on the question of infringement once again.

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Oracle-Google: Another juror falls as impasse looms (again)