Mark Zuckerberg rings the ceremonial bell from the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., launching the largest Internet IPO in history. Here are some recent photos posted to his Facebook Timeline.

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Scenes from Facebook’s IPO (photos)

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook updated its status to “public company” on Friday. After an anxiety-filled half-hour delay, its stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first time as investors were finally able to put a dollar value on the company that turned online social networking into a global cultural phenomenon. By early afternoon, the stock was trading at around $41, an 8 percent increase for the day. That means Facebook is worth about $112 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonalds and storied Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco. But as many people looked for a big first-day pop in Facebook ‘s share price, the single-digit increase was somewhat of a letdown. “It wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been,” said Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital. “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 initial public offering priced the stock in an appropriate range. It’s also a supply and demand issue. Facebook offered nearly 20 percent of its available stock in the IPO, so there was enough to meet demand. In comparison, Google offered just 7.2 percent of its stock when it went public in 2004. To IPOdesktop’s Francis Gaskins, it means mom-and-pop investors are becoming “much more educated and careful” about not buying into hype. And he said that the banks taking Facebook public have learned from the 10 IPOs of social media companies in the past year and are better able to gauge how much stock to make available in an initial offering. He said a rise of 5 percent to 8 percent in this “tough market” is a success. It might not have been possible for the social network to live up to the hype that led up to its IPO. It’s Facebook , after all, a place where people are emotionally invested in endless online diversions and rekindled friendships, an endless depository of baby photos, favorite songs and fleeting memories. “It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,” said Gartner analyst Brian Blau. While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company. Earlier Friday, the company’s 28-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, smiled as he rang the opening bell from Facebook ‘s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Surrounded by cheering Facebook employees and wearing his signature hoodie, he pushed the button that signals the opening of the stock market in New York. The morning’s events followed an all-night “hackathon” at the company, where engineers stayed up coding software and conjuring up new ideas for Facebook and its 900 million users. “Right now this all seems like a big deal. 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,” Zuckerberg said. “In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you guys all do going forward.” Afterward, employees tried to get back to business as usual, building the company under immense new 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.” On Thursday, Facebook and the investment bankers settled on a price of $38 per share. The company and its early investors raised $16 billion in the offering, which valued Facebook at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public. Now, the stock market will assign a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces and held accountable for profit it earns —or loses— from one quarter to the next. But Facebook is one a rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust. It is a cultural touchstone for the way technology reshapes our lives. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts. It has done so while becoming one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and 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 marks a new 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 disruptive 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 heralds a new phase of the Internet’s evolution. This social era makes connections among people as important as Google’s massive index of Web links. Still, the IPO will raise new pressures for Facebook to generate more revenue, perhaps by digging further into the trove of revealing information that people share on the network to sell even more targeted ads. 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 being in other talented engineers and promising technology. That’s what 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 still-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. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on Facebook’s IPO price of $38 per share, Instagram is in line to receive nearly $1.2 billion. Though Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from California, people outside the stock market in Times Square snapped photos of a big blue Facebook sign that lit up the building. Some of them used their smart phones to check in to the Nasdaq on Facebook. Frederick Nolde, who was visiting from Richmond, Va., said he bought 100 shares through the online brokerage eTrade. He thinks the company is worth $100 billion. “I think Google is a good comparison and it’s worth $200 to 300 billion. The real question is how they do in mobile. If they can figure that out they’ll do well.” ___ AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco, Associated Press Reporter Marcus Wohlsen in Menlo Park, AP Business Writers Bernard Condon and Joseph Pisani in New York contributed to this story. 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Facebook stock climbs in public debut

week in review Shares in the social network have a rocky trading start, while resumegate spells the end of Yahoo CEO’s term. Also: HTC phone imports held up by Customs.

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Facebook IPO more fizz than pop

The IPO went off a bit later than expected after Nasdaq’s systems reportedly had trouble informing traders and firms that their orders had been placed.

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Nasdaq hitch mars Facebook’s big day

PaaS got its start as purely hosted offerings. But we’re starting to see a lot more discussion about transplanting the approach into the enterprise data center.

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Platform as a service moves into the data center

The company, which provides application delivery networking solutions, announces the resignation of former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson in an SEC filing today.

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Ex-Yahoo CEO Thompson resigns from F5 Networks board

EDITOR’S NOTE — Facebook begins selling stock to the public Friday in the most talked-about market debut in years. Two Associated Press business writers are debating whether the stock is a smart buy. PRESS THE ‘LIKE’ BUTTON, SOON By MICHAEL LIEDTKE AP Technology Writer SAN FRANCISCO — I doubted Mark Zuckerberg when I met him more than five years ago, shortly after he rebuffed several chances to sell Facebook for what was a fortune even then. He seemed confident to the point of being cocky about his ability to turn what started as an online hangout for college students into a digital commune for the entire world. Facebook had about 20 million users at the time. While listening to Zuckerberg pontificate on Facebook ‘s potential to become a more important communication channel than long-established media outlets, I wondered whether this then-22-year-old kid was deluded. Had he screwed up by not accepting one of those buyout bids ranging from $800 million to $1.5 billion that were dangled before him during 2005 and 2006? Clearly not. Now I think investors who don’t buy some Facebook stock within the next month will regret it in five years, when the Internet’s largest social network will have more users than the population of China. As it is, Facebook has more than 900 million users and will have an initial market value of $104 billion — more than twice as much as the combined value of two former suitors, Yahoo and Viacom. Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday, pulled off the initial public offering just eight years after starting Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Just imagine what he might be able to accomplish by the time he turns 35, now that Facebook has raised $6.8 billion in its IPO. But don’t wait too long to find out. At some point in the next few days or weeks, seize on the IPO as a rare opportunity to prosper from the ingenuity of a headstrong visionary in the mold of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There is one difference: None of them was named Time magazine’s person of the year in his mid-20s, as Zuckerberg was in 2010. Apple, Microsoft and Google, of course, all changed the world with their innovations and built steadily growing businesses that enriched investors. Collectively, the three technology titans have created more than $1 trillion in shareholder wealth since their respective IPOs. The returns on a post-IPO investment in Facebook aren’t likely to be as big because the company is starting with such a lofty valuation. Apple debuted with a market value of less than $2 billion in 1980, while Microsoft took its bow in 1986 with a market value of less than $1 billion. More recently, Google had a market value of nearly $25 billion in 2004 when mainstream investors got their first chance to buy stock in the Internet search leader. Just because Facebook ‘s upside isn’t as great doesn’t mean it can’t be a great investment. The chances of Facebook ‘s stock doubling or tripling during the next five years look promising, given that the company is sitting on a gold mine of personal data prized by advertisers looking to sell products and services to the people most likely to buy them. It’s an advantage that Google also enjoyed as it figured out how to match ads with the preferences signaled by Internet search requests. Google’s market value surpassed $200 billion less than 3½ years after its IPO, and Facebook knows even more about its users’ preferences because it doesn’t have to make educated guesses about them. Facebook users explicitly tell the company by pressing “like” buttons all over the Web and sharing revealing details about their lives in status updates. The trickiest part about Facebook’s IPO is deciding when to buy some shares. It’s probably unwise to invest Friday, when Facebook’s shares will begin trading amid a delirious fervor likely to inflate the stock price, at least temporarily. Consider what happened after last year’s IPO of LinkedIn, an online professional networking service that is probably the closest thing Wall Street has seen to Facebook’s social network. LinkedIn’s shares rocketed from $45 in its IPO pricing to $122.70 within the first few hours of trading. A year later, the stock hasn’t touched that price again. But a month after the IPO, patient investors were able to snap up LinkedIn’s shares for under $64. The stock has bounced back above $100, now that LinkedIn has proved it can be more profitable than analysts anticipated. Skeptics believe LinkedIn is grossly overvalued, just as the doubters are harrumphing about Facebook. Both companies are expensive by traditional benchmarks. LinkedIn trades at about 12 times its projected revenue this year, while Facebook is going for 20 times its projected 2012 revenue, based on its IPO price of $38. Google, by comparison, is trading at about six times its projected revenue for this year. But Facebook hasn’t been as aggressive as it could have been about selling ads or finding other ways to make money where its visitors, on average, dwell for an average of 6½ hours per month, according to comScore Inc. Instead of ramping up revenue, Facebook has concentrated on attracting users — an emphasis that is bound to pay off. One of the main reasons Facebook is likely to figure this all out is that Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as the company’s chief operating officer in 2008. Sandberg played a key role in expanding Google’s advertising system during its first few years as a publicly held company, a period when the company’s stock hit its peak so far. Sandberg brought not only her own expertise to Facebook but also hundreds of other former Google employees who defected to the social network in search of the next big thing. They found it, and it’s still not too late to get a piece of the action. ___ STEER CLEAR OF THE HYPE By BERNARD CONDON AP Business Writer NEW YORK — First, forget the numbers and go with your gut: Given the breathless press coverage, the ubiquity of its product, the Oscar-winning film about its unlikely success and the rock-star status of its 28-year-old founder, do you really believe the smart folks on Wall Street coming up with a stock price for Facebook resisted the temptation to wring every cent out of buyers? In investing, hype is the enemy. I was skeptical from the start. The company listed a range of possible prices for its initial public offering of stock, then raised it, then told us that insiders and early investors would be selling even more of their shares in the offering than they had planned. Now I’m convinced: Don’t touch this stock. The banks helping take Facebook public want us to value this 8-year-old upstart at as much as $104 billion, more than Disney or Kraft Foods, though those companies earn three and four times more. That top valuation is also more than 100 times Facebook’s earnings last year, versus 13 times for the average company. At such a high price, it will take years for this so-called earnings multiple to fall to a more reasonable level, and that’s assuming the company can maintain its torrid earnings growth. To make money in Facebook, you’re betting that other buyers will be just as willing as you to hold their nose at the valuation, and keep doing so for years. Facebook grew its earnings 65 percent last year, faster than at most companies, so you should pay more for it than you would the typical company. But how much more? Profits at Apple grew 85 percent last year. Its stock is trading at 13 times earnings per share. And while the big profit growth for Facebook is impressive, it’s slowing, and has been for three years. Last quarter, the growth turned negative, meaning it fell — down 12 percent from the first three months a year earlier. I think Facebook is one of the best things to happen in America in years. It’s an unlikely, brazen success that makes you believe that the nation’s best days may still be ahead. A college kid starts an online bulletin board for his classmates in 2004, and now one-seventh of the world’s population is using it. And the company is not just profitable, but incredibly so. Whereas most big, publicly-traded companies have to content themselves with pulling 13 cents of earnings out of every dollar of sales before paying taxes, Facebook gets to keep a seemingly impossible 46 cents. And therein lies another problem: No company can sustain margins that high for long. If you believe America is a place that gives rise to destructive, capitalistic forces like Mark Zuckerberg, you know those margins are going to collapse, and fast. They are too high not to attract competitors. What Facebook did to MySpace, a rival yet unknown can do to it. Or a rival suddenly known, like Pinterest. Not familiar with that company? I wasn’t until earlier this year. A sort of online scrapbook, Pinterest now has 10 million monthly visitors, even though its site was launched just in 2009. That early growth is faster than even Facebook’s was, according to comScore, a tracker of Internet traffic. The fact is, the social media industry is too open to competition for comfort. It lacks what Warren Buffett calls a “deep moat” protecting it from rivals. Scoff if you want, but how many college kids can build a rival to Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, a Buffett holding? Where would they get the steel for the lines, much less the men to lay them? Another problem with Facebook is that the very qualities that made it so successful as a private firm could sink it as a public one. Facebook says in its IPO papers that it’s not about to rein in the sort of rebel culture at the company that has encouraged “innovation” just to deliver “short-term” profits that please Wall Street investors. If only “short-term” profits were the only demand. When you go public, you are promising investors that your profits will not only rise, but do so consistently, quarter after quarter, in predictable increments. It’s a fiction. The nature of many businesses is such that profits come in messy lumps. But companies exploit loose accounting rules, as Wall Street expects them to do, to make their profits seem smoother than they really are. Is Facebook not going play this game, either? That would be admirable. And disastrous for investors. I suspect what’s got people in a lather about Facebook is that they think it could become the next Google or Amazon. Those stocks went public at high earnings multiples, and still managed to reward investors handsomely. But the bulls forget the big role played by happenstance and luck in business success, and how difficult it is to separate winners from clunkers ahead of time. And there have been a lot of clunkers: ICG, Priceline.com, Pets.com, Netscape and, more recently, Pandora Media, Demand Media and Groupon. The stocks of those latter three are down more than a third from their IPOs last year. Maybe this is just a matter of taste. I prefer the dowdy and obscure over the hot and well-known. But I think there’s another distinction here. Facebook is a gamble, a fun fling, like buying a lottery ticket. The valuation is just too high, the unknowns too many, to call it an investment. If you’re going to sink money into the company, recognize that much at least. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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A debate: Should you jump in on Facebook debut?

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is about to find out just how much status updates, puppy photos and billions of “likes” are worth on Wall Street, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing the Nasdaq Stock Market opening bell Friday morning from company headquarters a continent away. Trading of Facebook’s shares has been delayed, but the company’s stock was set to begin moving on the Nasdaq a day after the world’s definitive online social network raised $16 billion in an initial public offering that valued the company at $104 billion. The company’s valuation is more than Amazon.com’s and that of other well-known companies such as Kraft, Walt Disney and McDonald’s. It’s a big windfall for a company that began eight years ago with no way to make money. Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the top of expectations. Now, regular investors will have a chance to buy stock in Facebook for the first time. The stock will trade under ticker symbol will be FB. Facebook has come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts. It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. “They could have gone public in 2009 at a much lower price,” said Nick Einhorn, research analyst at IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital. “They waited as long as they could to go public, so it makes sense that it’s a very large offering.” Facebook Inc.’s valuation is the third-highest in an IPO, according to Dealogic, a provider of financial data. Only two Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China in 2010 and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in 2006, have been worth more. They were worth $133 billion and $132 billion, respectively. By another measure —the amount raised— Facebook ranks third among U.S. IPOs. The largest was Visa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008. No. 2 was Enel, a power company, and No. 4 was General Motors, according to Renaissance Capital. The $38 share price is the price at which the investment banks arranging the offering will sell the stock to their clients. In an IPO, the banks buy the stock first from the company and the early investors and then sell to the public. If extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold as part of the transaction, Facebook and its early investors stand to reap as much as $18.4 billion. For a company that was born in a Harvard dormitory and went on to reimagine online communication, the stock sale means more money to build on the features and services it offers users. It means an infusion of money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling California headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year. And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company in 2004. He’s selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he’ll get some $640 million. He will hold on to about 28 million shares, worth $1.06 billion. The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104 billion. The sky-high valuation has its skeptics, who worry about signs of a slowdown and Facebook’s ability to grow in the mobile space when it was created with desktop computers in mind. Rival Google Inc., whose revenue stood at $38 billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207 billion. “There seems to be somewhat of a hype around the stock offering,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau. That may be an understatement. Facebook’s IPO dominated media coverage in the weeks and days leading up to the event. Zuckerberg’s hoodie made headlines when he wore it to a meeting with investors as did General Motors’ decision this week to stop advertising on the site —and rival Ford’s affirmation that its Facebook ads have been effective. There are more than a few reasons for the exuberance. First, there’s Facebook’s sheer size and high profile. The company grew from a college-only social network to an Internet phenomenon embraced by legions of people, from teenagers to grandmothers to pro-democracy activists in the Middle East. Secondly, it’s personal. “It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,” Blau says. While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company. And then there’s Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds. He counted the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs among his mentors, and he became one of the world’s youngest billionaires — at least on paper — well before Facebook went public. A dramatized and less-than-flattering version of Facebook’s founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie that won three Academy Awards last year, propelling Zuckerberg even further into the public spotlight. Though Zuckerberg is selling about 30 million shares, he will remain Facebook’s largest shareholder. Even after the IPO, he will own 503.6 million shares, or 32 percent of Facebook’s total shares. At the $38 share price, his stake in the company is worth $19.1 billion. Zuckerberg will control the company with 56 percent of its voting stock as a result of agreements he has with other shareholders who promise to vote his way. __ Follow Barbara Ortutay on Twitter at http://twitter.com/BarbaraOrtutay Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin WordPress | Android Forums | WordPress Tutorials

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Facebook set to begin trading after $16B offering

The world’s largest social network starts trading on the Nasdaq and when all’s said and done, the stock price ends pretty much where it started.

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Facebook shares jump, then fall, then close flat

The world’s largest social network starts trading on the Nasdaq and, hiccup aside, gets off to a mostly favorable start.

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Facebook shares jump, then fall, then rise again