Biggs is the East Cost Editor of TechCrunch.
Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com.
Facebook just posted a fith amendment to its IPO filing, confirming the price range for its stock at IPO, how much it will raise, and noting the future threat of patent lawsuits from Yahoo over hardware in Facebook’s Open Compute Project. The company is selling 180,000,000 shares of Class A common stock and is pricing them at $28-$35. That means they’re raising between $5 billion and $6.3 billion. On top of that, existing shareholders are selling 157,415,352 shares.
Here’s the excerpt:
Facebook, Inc. is offering 180,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 157,415,352 shares of Class A common stock. We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders. This is our initial public offering and no public market currently exists for our shares of Class A common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $28.00 and $35.00 per share.
This confirms the earlier pricing that we posted about today. We had a more specific range than The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, saying the price was at $27-$35. We were off by a dollar, but they said ‘high 20s to mid 30s’ in their original stories. → Read More
BeClose is a small but interesting start-up in Tysons Corner, Virginia. They make home monitoring systems for the elderly, allowing them to stay at home even when they may be fragile or lack motility. The system consists of a number of motion sensors as well as a weight pad (to see when they’re sleeping) and a panic button that notifies the authorities and kin if there’s something wrong.
The new update to the UI creates a dashboard experience for caregivers. They can see, at a glance, sleep patterns, movement, and even weight. If something is amiss – like they’re not getting out of bed after a certain time or whether they’re leaving the house too little or too much – you can either call in to see what’s up or go visit. Anyway, would it kill you to maybe go visit your mother? Hmm? → Read More
Betterment, the better investment app, launched at Disrupt in 2010 and went on to manage approximately $50 million in two years.
The site is essentially an investment engine. Seamless automatic deposits ensure that you drag cash over to your investment account every month and the UI is clean, readable, and eminently simple – a gauge tells you how much you’re investing in various buckets of stocks and bonds, and a built-in advisor tells you where to keep your money in order to reach a certain goal.
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To: john@techcrunch.com
From: AOL HR
CC: AOL IT/Networking, AOL Legal, eldon@techcrunch.com, alexia@techcrunch.com
Subject: ACTIONABLE OFFENSE: Pornography/Adult Content Viewing On Company Property
Mr. Biggs,
Our network administrators in AOL’s Broadway office have consistently flagged you on your assigned computer for repeatedly and openly viewing a pornographic website, sex.com, that currently bills itself as a Pinterest for sex. → Read More
While the use case for these glasses can quickly become quite dubious, the YouGen.tv glasses by Vergence Lab are pretty cool. Not only do they instantly change from sunglasses to clear Buddy-Holly-style specs they also record your life as it happens.
Created by Jon Rodriguez and Erick Miller, the glasses will go for a $199 pledge (they’ll retail for $299) and the creators expect these things to become more powerful over time by including HUD features in future versions. → Read More
Electronic Freedom Fighters and knee-jerk reactionaries: prepare your big drums because here comes the cause of the week. We learned about Gatekeeper, Apple’s app signing solution that ensures “rogue” apps can’t infect your computer, a few months ago when the company announced the coming of a new OS, Mountain Lion. Developers recently received a note reminding them to begin implementing Gatekeeper features or, well, nothing bad will happen:
Reuters is reporting that Nokia is exploring selling the Vertu phone line to holding company Permira for $264.26 million, freeing itself from the difficult process of selling phones no one wants to people who should know better. Nokia called Vertu a “non-core asset.”
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Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn saw its profits fall to $509 million from $1.19 billion last quarter. Chairman Terry Gou said this quarter was particularly affected by Foxconn’s recent image problem. Improvements in wages, worker benefits, and education accounted for some of the loss, although new iPad and iPhone 4S manufacturing bolstered income last quarter.
As a reaction to recent popular criticism on various fronts, the company increased wages by 25 percent this year and is planning to open a hospital and language schools for its employees. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt is all about start-ups but we often give short shrift to hardware-based companies. Well, that’s about to change because we’re now running Hardware Alley, a one day exhibition of some of the coolest hardware start-ups in NY and beyond.
Running a Kickstarter project? Building a better mousetrap? Creating something cool out of scrap metal and wires? Register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get admission on the last day of Disrupt, May 23, a table to show off your goods, and access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you. → Read More
If you spent any time in high school thinking about ley lines and bio-implants, you were probably a Shadowrun player. The game, which petered out after a disastrous run as a PC/Xbox game in 2007, brought the high-tech of William Gibson to the magical realms of Mr. Gygax. It was, in short, pretty cool.
A Kickstarter project aims to bring back all that fun in video game form, adding lots of what you missed about Shadowrun back to the PC. This new version will be a RPG involving the Shadowrun world complete with various character types – elves, samurai, humans – and, although this is discouraged, deals with dragons. $15 gets you a copy of the game while $60 gets you a t-shirt and some in-game perks. → Read More
With the announcement that the Kindle Fire has grabbed 54.4% of the Android Tablet market, it’s clear to see that Amazon’s Trojan Horse strategy paid off. As I wrote back in December, the Fire is Amazon’s way of making all of their offerings “real.” Movies, books, and games were Amazon’s core competency back when all of that stuff was on disks and on paper and that core competency is repurposed now for the Information Age.
That’s what all of the other Android tablet makers missed: people don’t want general-purpose devices anymore or at least general-purpose devices in tablet form. There is little need to be “productive” on a tablet when consumption is why most people buy them. Sure someone out there is SSHing into their servers and editing documents in Pages, but the average user plops down on the couch with the iPad and calls up some IMDB or some NSFW Reddit, not a text editor.
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This is a few days old but it’s well worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s by English rapper Dan Bull and it’s about everyone’s favorite time-waster, TheFacebook. The best part?
He also does a Twitter one. Give it a listen and then download it for free to help Bull hit the record books.
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Sure there are services to sell tickets to arenas and event spaces (not to mention parties and the like) but thus far there hasn’t been a good way to allow customers to pick their seats. TicketLeap, a ticketing website, has solved that problem.
Wedding planners don’t get too excited yet: the system is mostly for folks who run bigger event spaces like halls and arenas. You can lay out your space using TicketLeap’s browser-based tools and add various features like bathrooms, Wi-Fi points, and handicapped access spots.
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Don’t copy that pole vault! According to the London 2012 Olympic “conditions for ticket holders,” you are not allowed to take pictures or video of the events nor are you allowed to “exploit” any video on social networks.
This is so illegal that we can probably expect to see it fold in a matter of hours, but if you’re really hankering for some Russian or German TV right now – or some hott sexxxy Penthouse action – iOSLiveTV has you covered.
The site is formatted for iOS and Android and features a number of live TV channels including some adult selections. → Read More
Citing poor sales of the Nintendo 3DS and “the stronger yen against the euro was also another reason,” Nintendo posted its first-ever loss – $534.6 million on revenue of $8 billion. This is down from $12.6 billion in revenue last year with $960 million in profit.
But, as they say, it’s dangerous to invest alone. Here, take this: the company is predicting a profit of $429 million next year. → Read More
Every time I see a photo sharing app come across the transom, the same question crosses my mind: what about trolls and porn? A game we saw yesterday, Pictorious, asks you to take pictures of items in order to get likes from friends and strangers. Additionally, sites like Pinterest have to act like Soviet censors in order to prevent dirty hot porn from taking over. The threat of someone ruining a good thing is everywhere, and in a world of socially connected apps, trolling is the norm.
If you haven’t played online video games recently, you’ll notice that trolling is arguably more virulent and nasty than even a Goatse pic popping up on Instagram. The folks at Penny Arcade along with some major players in the gaming industry have released a video detailing various ways to stop trolling and if you’re a community manager or programmer, it deserves a look.op trolling and if you’re a community manager or programmer, it deserves a look. → Read More
While I often prefer to watch analysts hoist themselves with their own petard, it’s not often that one dumps out a bit of drivel so short-sighted as George Colony at Forrester. In short, Colony believes that Apple is the next Sony – a desiccated organization that has nothing new to offer the world. While he’s right about Sony, he’s wrong about Apple.
Analysts, to be fair, do know a thing or two about a thing or two. I’m sure he’s great at plumbing financial data and picking expensive steaks. But in this Forbes piece he cites Max Weber’s Theory of Social And Economic Organization, a book that I read in college but haven’t had the time to peruse of late. Weber, writing in 1947, breaks organizations down into legal/bureaucratic, traditional, and charismatic. Weber probably knew from charismatic, considering his demi monde, but I doubt his version of a charismatic leader – “he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” – is applicable in any case in our modern business climate. → Read More
You’d never think that the world of Nerf guns and dart shooters was so intense, but Hasbro apparently sued a blogger for leaking information about unreleased Nerf products he found on Chinese marketplace Taobao using the sweetest bait imaginable: free Nerf guns.
Urban Taggers is a blog about “assault blasters” for “kidults.” Essentially they cover Nerf guns and the like and are fairly popular in the space. The lead blogger, Pocket, ran a review of an unreleased gun. A few days later, he received a note from Hasbro offering some guns to giveaway to his readers. Eager to share the blaster love, he agreed and sent his address. That’s when his troubles began. → Read More
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