There are lots of different approaches to the amorphous market of ‘e-learning’ but only a handful ever feel much like fun. I think amongst the best of these are sites like MangaHigh which teaches Math, or Moshi Monsters which has subtle learning tasks for kids.
Another which works well is Quipper, which, in a Q&A format, helps people learn things in a sort of game format. Today it’s announced that it has raised $3.6m (£2.3m) of Series A funding led by Globis, the Japanese VC. The round has been two other investors: Atomico, the London-based VC firm led by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and Benesse, a major Japanese education and publishing company. → Read More
How timely. After launching a year ago at Disrupt NYC 2011, Tracks is today releasing one of its biggest updates to date. The service is much like Color, but without the creepy factor as any and all members of a specific photo-sharing group must be invited. I like to think of it as the place where Color and Google+ Circles intersect, but I far prefer Tracks than either of the former.
Thus far Tracks has offered iOS, web- and real-world versions of your tracks (the collection of photos shared with a specific social network, which can be both geo-temporal or last forever). Today, however, the service gets much more beefy, with the ability to shoot and send real-time video and the addition of new filters, Instagram-style. There are now ten filter options on the app, and they’ll all work on both photos and videos.
But that’s not all. → Read More
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Why is there nothing but Facebook IPO news today, you (Facebook haters) may be asking? Well, outside of the obvious – people are obsessed, this is a historic event, it’s the biggest tech IPO over, etc., etc. – there’s another reason why all the news outlets are publishing Facebook this and Facebook that today. It’s because everyone else is holding their news for a later date….the result of which has led to a historic event of my own: inbox zero.
So this is what it’s like not being a tech blogger? → Read More
Zynga’s share price plummeted 11.4 percent from $8.09 to $7.19 in the eight minutes after Facebook’s IPO went live, and down 13.3 percent since yesterday. Trading has been halted to stem further losses.
While we can’t know the exact reason why this happened, I’d bet that investors expected Zynga shares to pop alongside Facebook’s during the IPO. But when they didn’t pop at all and instead stayed flat, those short-term investors sold off the social gaming company’s shares.
Many tech stocks have traded downward following Facebook’s open. Chinese social network Renren, professional network LinkedIn, and some other related tech stocks are also down. → Read More
Facebook shares opened at $42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $38. Shares are actually currently almost flat at $39.16, which is 3.6 percent higher than $38 the price that underwriters settled on last night. While it may not be as juicy a story, it’s a signal that Facebook’s IPO was priced pretty efficiently and that the company didn’t leave too much money on the table.
Right now, retail investors are getting their hands on the shares. The company’s first trade was actually delayed by 30 minutes on NASDAQ as market makers had issues settling on an opening price. They kept delaying the opening in five-minute increments, which isn’t all that uncommon in popular offerings, according to a conversation we had with Bruce Aust, who is NASDAQ’s executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group, earlier today.
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Facebook’s opening trade on NASDAQ has been delayed. We don’t know why, but we’re hearing mixed reports involving both unexpectedly high demand from retail investors and problems with canceling orders. As we explained in a post about 20 minutes ago, the underwriters of the deal are meeting and trying to set an opening price.
But because of unexpected changes in demand, it seems market makers are having issues settling on an opening price. They have the option of delaying the offering in five-minute increments until they can find a final price. → Read More
Today’s Facebook IPO is a momentous, historical occasion. It’s set to be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the third largest IPO in U.S. history, second only to Visa and General Motors. The company that was once just a glimmer in the eye of a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg raised over $16 billion yesterday as shares were gobbled up by hungry investors, and that $38 share price point is expected to increase as the stock starts trading around 11am today.
Do you know how much money that is? → Read More
Facebook shares are supposed to go live on the NASDAQ market in about 20 minutes. But what happens in the next crucial 15?
We caught up with NASDAQ’s Bruce Aust, who is the executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group there. After several years of carefully courting the company’s management, NASDAQ beat out rival New York Stock Exchange for Facebook’s hand. NASDAQ is usually is the exchange of choice for most tech companies like Google and Apple, but NYSE has snuck away with a company or two in the last year like LinkedIn.
Companies generally go live after market opening at around 10:30 or 11 a.m. Eastern, he said. About 15 minutes before shares start trading (e.g. right now!), the underwriters of Facebook’s offering like the offering’s lead Morgan Stanley get together and discuss current market orders, he said. → Read More
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Another startup cashing in (figuratively speaking) on the FB IPO: StockTwits. Earlier this week, the social network for investors added Facebook to its StockTwits Social Heatmap, a feature on the site that provides a visualization of what the StockTwits some 200,000 investors and traders are talking about. Usually, the heatmap looks looks like a bunch of little squares – the bigger the square means more conversation.
But today, Facebook ($FB) is dominating, even pushing fan favorite $AAPL aside. → Read More
The Hackathon is one of the best parts of Disrupt. Granted, it’s not quite as emotional as watching the Battlefield rounds play out, but there’s something sort of inspiring about the idea that you may be building the start of a company during a 24-hour beer/pizza/Red Bull-fest.
Success stories like Group.me and Docracy were born at our Hackathon, but they’d be the first to tell you that none of it is possible without our awesome API sponsors. These include foursquare, The Echo Nest, metaLayer, Twilio, bitly, Tumblr, Spotify, Mobli and more. But one has gone above and beyond when it comes to teasing out the event, with the promise to offer “one thousand dolla dolla bills” to the hacker who makes the best use of their API.
Knodes, who is offering up a context API which maps users’ social graphs, has made a movie-type trailer ahead of the Hackathon and posted it to YouTube. → Read More
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn’t travel to New York’s Times Square for the company’s big day. He did it unconventionally like you’d expect a hacker would. He opened the bell remotely from the company’s Menlo Park Headquarters after Facebook employees had just finished a long, all-night Hackathon — their 31st. They played midnight hockey and worked on extra projects, as you can see from photos we re-posted here.
Just ahead of the 6:30 PST open, the company’s employees got together again in the main headquarters “Hacker Square” in front of a big stage where he rang the bell. Unlike Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in last December’s IPO, Zuckerberg didn’t give any remarks. He was flanked by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of product Chris Cox and Elliot Schrage, who is Facebook’s vice president of public policy and communications. A Facebook engineer named David Garcia had hacked the NASDAQ button to auto-post the bell opening to Zuckerberg’s Timeline (and we have the inside scoop on how he did it!) → Read More
Editor’s note: Some savvy Facebook engineers rigged the NASDAQ button to automatically post “Mark Zuckerberg has listed a company on NASDAQ – FB” to the CEO’s Timeline as he rung the bell to open the NASDAQ’s day of trading. David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook, explains how they turned the NASDAQ on to Open Graph.
It was a normal Monday. Nothing out of the ordinary other than that Facebook was set to go public at the end of the week. Camera crews were beginning to appear and NASDAQ was coming to campus so we could ring the opening bell together. Other than that, it was like any other Monday. → Read More
Social finance site TradingView, which launched in September of last year, is rolling out a new feature just in time for the Facebook IPO (c’mon, you knew there would have to be at least one story about “just in time for the Facebook IPO” today, right?). But anyway, this one seems relevant at least: TradingView is launching interactive real-time chatting on its site, which lets users talk about stocks in a slightly more private forum than Twitter.
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Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise $16 billion. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. We’ve made a couple of charts to show how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data. Then we also have historical price data from SecondMarket, which is a private secondary market that became popular among former Facebook employees who wanted to offload some shares.
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You can watch here on TechCrunch or on the NASDAQ website as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made history this morning ringing the bell to open the day’s trading on the NASDAQ from Facebook’s headquarters just before his company’s IPO. The ceremony didn’t include Zuckerberg giving a speech or any remarks. However, he did sign the NASDAQ bell’s touchscreen “To a more open and connected world”. Facebook stock won’t actually begin trading until 8am PST / 11am EST so investors will have a few more hours to salivate.
Employees have been at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park for an all-night hackathon that’s about to culminate with Zuck’s bell-ringing ceremony. → Read More
I don’t understand Klout. I’ve convinced myself that it’s best that way. I just avoid it, really. Grading a person’s social media influence on a scale of 100 seems like something popular girls would do in high school.
Like Alexia said last year, nobody gives a damn about your Klout score. I honestly didn’t give a damn about my Klout score until I heard about the deals with airlines. That said, free perks do not outweigh worrying about a seemingly arbitrary scoring system. Today’s XKCD comic nails it. Please, Internet, if I ever write about Klout in any way, punch me square in the face. → Read More
The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.
Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history).
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Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.
It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years. → Read More
With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.
The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China.
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Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They developed a portable, flexible alternative: An inexpensive, “instant” plastic board that weighs less than two pounds and adheres to any surface without screws.
Wilk tells us that WhiteyPaint has since found an eager audience, leading to the fortunate problem of demand quickly outpacing supply. Struggling to finance demand on a bootstrapped budget, the founders reached out to Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and HDNet Co-founder Mark Cuban. Seeing a billion-dollar market dominated by a few bloated players, Wilk said, Cuban believed WhiteyBoard was onto something. → Read More
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