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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Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.
Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline. → Read More
Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago.
Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel, your answer is probably, “No, not really.” → Read More
If there’s something on Facebook that won’t stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook’s new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Facebook.com homepage’s globe icon drop-down and click the ‘x’ for the option to turn off notifications from that app, group, event, or post you commented on. The whole drop-down has a slick new look, and you can scroll down to much older notifications too.
Previously you had to dig your way to the dedicated Notifications Settings page to make these changes, and there was no way to turn off a specific source of alerts — you had to silence all your events or all your posts. Facebook has confirmed with me that most of the changes to notifications will be rolled out to everyone by tonight, except for app alert controls which are still in testing.
As we accumulate more friends and apps, Facebook’s notifications can turn from delightful pointers to annoying distractions that interrupt our lives. These new controls mean if you want a more zen Facebook experience, you can make it so. → Read More
Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April.
That’s a nice little bump, but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to a lock-up period. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.
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Although introduced in 2009, we’ve only seen glimpses of what Facebook Credits will become when it grows up, and Facebook is about to kick off the training wheels.
So far, Facebook has done little to promote the virtual currency of Facebook Credits and it’s been used almost entirely in social gaming. But even with this limited exposure and promotion, Facebook Credits’ fees already represents $557 Million in revenue or 15 percent of Facebook’s entire 2011 revenue. Even more remarkable is that less than two percent of Facebook users bought virtual goods with Facebook Credits in 2011, yet it still represented 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue, primarily from just one vertical – social gaming. One vertical and two percent of members represented 15 percent of Facebook’s 2011 revenue! → Read More
Angel investor and all-around web magnate Chris Sacca wrote a quick tweet early yesterday about how it’d be cool if there was a website where people could predict where Facebook’s stock will end up at the end of its first day as a publicly traded company.
Well, ask and ye shall receive.
A programmer named James Proud answered the call, hacking together FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com, a fun little website that keeps a running tally of people’s bets on where Facebook’s stock will close on IPO day. → Read More
Facebook shares will start trading at $38 tomorrow, the company confirmed in a release, giving it a valuation of $104.12 billion. Facebook and its early shareholders will raise just over $16 billion in tomorrow’s much anticipated IPO.
At a $104 billion valuation, Facebook is worth more than any other tech IPO candidate at the time of its offering. It also perfectly matches what Facebook shares have been trading at in secondary markets over the last several months. Google was worth $23 billion at the time of its very unusual Dutch auction IPO back in 2004. As of tomorrow Facebook will be worth about half of what Google is worth now. → Read More
Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren’t going to cut it. If Facebook wants to live up to a $104 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams. An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads, and payments for physical goods are a few ways it could boost its average revenue per user far beyond the puny $4.34 a year it earns today.
Facebook has a tough decision to make now that’s going public. It will have to strike a new balance between the good of its users, advertisers, app developers, and investors. If it refuses to explore new business models, its share price could sink. But if it strays too far in favor of making money, Facebook could lose its addictiveness and the faith of its users. Here’s the four aces Mark Zuckerberg could have up his sleeve. → Read More
“In the Studio” hosts a Silicon Valley technology veteran this week, someone who has been around tech since 1977, in venture since 1995, an early investor in Twitter, Yammer, and Millennial Media, a former executive in the gaming console industry, and while in college, took an interest in economics where his thesis advisor just happened to be Nobel Laureate Franco Modigliani.
It’s become fashionable for certain breeds of celebrity tech pundits to sound the alarm bell for their audiences about the impending bubble we are in, or have been in, or will be in. It all reminds me of one of Gordon Gecko’s lines in Wall Street II, “like a rooster taking credit for the dawn.” Economic bubbles come and go, they are natural cycles that humans have lived through for centuries. A more interesting question to ask is: What phase are we in relative to the current economic cycle? This is exactly what George Zachary of Charles River Ventures dissects in this fascinating conversation. → Read More
Charles Schumer and Bob Casey, the two U.S. Senators behind the Ex-PATRIOT act — a proposal to go after early Facebook backer Eduardo Saverin and others like him that have renounced U.S. citizenship and are getting out of paying capital gains tax on stock windfalls — have now revealed the details of their plan. We first wrote about it earlier today when the offices of the two senators first announced their intentions.
It’s pretty big: any ex-pat with either a net worth of over $2 million, or an average income tax liability of at least $148,000 over the last five years, “will be presumed to have renounced their citizenship for tax avoidance purposes.” The ex-pat will have to demonstrate to the IRS that this is not the case if it is not. If there is a “legitimate reason” for that person living outside the U.S. no penalties will apply. But if the IRS finds that someone gave up their passport for tax purposes, they will impose a tax on that individual’s investment gains “no matter where he or she resides.”
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Video curation platform Shortform is launching a few new features that will make it easier for its video jockeys (VJs) to curate and share content with friends and followers. The hope is that by introducing a browser bookmarklet, as well as implementing Facebook Open Graph, the startup will be able to continue its hockey stick-like growth in video minutes consumed.
Shortform is introducing a bookmarklet for adding videos to their channels. The bookmarklet will work with all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), making it easier for VJs to instantly update their playlists without having to open a new tab, copy and paste the URL, etc. In addition to adding videos to their channels, the bookmarklet will also find all videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and CollegeHumor that are on a given page so that users can choose between them. → Read More
Facebook says that it generated half of its revenues outside of the U.S. and Canada in the first quarter of 2012, and some numbers out today underscore just how extensive its reach is in different markets, with active usage in some countries outstripping that of Facebook in its home market.
According to figures from Nielsen — some of the latest numbers to come out in the battery of data that is being fired out in the final day before Facebook goes public – Brazil has the highest active reach of Internet consumers using the social network from home/work computers. Some 38.1 million Brazilians visited Facebook during March 2012, equivalent to 76.7 percent of all people who were active online that month from home and work computers in the market.
When you take into account people accessing Facebook from other sources like tablets and mobiles, Nielsen says New Zealand has the highest active reach, with nearly 80 percent of all consumers accessing Facebook in one format or another.
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Facebook’s IPO story is a lot about mobile, international growth and Asia.
I am not Asian by birth but have been living there for a dozen years and researching key Asian markets since before Facebook was created. Here are my views on Facebook’s prospects.
From Facebook’s S-1 filing:
“In countries such as Japan, Russia, and South Korea we estimate that we have penetration rates of less than 15%; and in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near 0% penetration”
While that sounds like a lot of room for growth, let’s look at the reality of it. → Read More
Another development in the ongoing story of how Eduardo Saverin has given up his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying $67 million in taxes related to Facebook’s IPO: the U.S. government doesn’t want him get away with it quite so fast.
Today, Senators Charles Schumer and Bob Casey are expected to announce a plan they have to re-impose the taxes on Saverin, part of a bigger scheme to go after expatriates who give up citizenship in order to avoid taxes. On top of that, they want to make it official that people who avoid paying their taxes by renouncing citizenship will be permanently denied re-entry into the U.S.
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Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ahead of the company’s much, much, much anticipated IPO.
There is an internal event page for the big day that has about a thousand Facebook employees RSVP-ing for the bell ringing early on Friday morning. We can’t tell if there are any other big festivities prepared ahead of time. It’s all up in the air. Some people may dress up though. We don’t know if the gong will be used. Zuck will probably give some remarks as he has ahead of other hackathons. → Read More
It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the NASDAQ bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an Internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.
Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm? → Read More
Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market.
Here’s a countdown of the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world. → Read More
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