Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is still looking for funding at the $15 billion valuation Microsoft set purchasing 1.6% of the company for $240 million in the company in Fall 2007*, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch:
[Zuckerberg] confirmed that Facebook’s $15 billion valuation round was still open and that CFO Gideon Yu was open to new investors at that price. But he denied that Facebook was pitching for new money at a lower valuation. ‘We’re not actively going around trying to raise money from a lot of different people. It’s more just a follow on to that [previous round].’
Considering Facebook had to cancel an employee stock sale program because it couldn’t find buyers for its employees’ shares at a $4 billion valuation, Yu’s quest to keep the $15 billion round open seems ambitious if not downright quixotic as he travels to locations as remote as Dubai…
Read it at CNN
A new virus is spreading through Facebook. The Koobface — a worm designed specifically to spread over social-networking sites — is blasting spam messages out to Facebook members. The motive is to enable hijacking and click fraud.
The messages offer subject lines like “You look so funny on our new video” and offer a link to a video site that pretends to have a movie clip. When the user follows the link, they are redirected to one of many different compromised hosts, according to McAfee Avert Labs. Finally, the user is urged to download or open a file named flash_player.exe. That file is a new Koobface variant…
Read it at NewsFactor
Social networking company Facebook is delaying a previously announced plan to let employees sell part of their stocks, due to difficult global economy, the Wall Street Journal said.
In an email to employees on Thursday Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the stock sale plan, which was proposed in August, was not proceeding as scheduled, the report said.
“After carefully considering the current environment, we’ve decided to establish an open-ended time table for an employee stock sale program,” the newspaper quoted the email as saying.
The privately-held company plans to revisit whether to go ahead based on market conditions, the Journal said citing a person familiar with the matter…
Read it at Yahoo!
Google and Facebook have launched rival technology platforms that can be used to infuse websites with trendy social-networking features.
A Facebook Connect service that was tested for months with selected partners is now available to anyone interested in transforming static websites into interactive communities of users.
Internet colossus Google picked the same day to unveil a beta, or test, version of Friend Connect software aimed at “any webmaster looking to add a dash of social to his or her site.”
Online communities and user-contributed content are core aspects of the evolution of life on the Internet and the superstar California companies are evidently jockeying to be the preferred platform for websites…
Read it at Yahoo!
Facebook launched its Web-wide sign-on system, Facebook Connect, on Thursday — and let me tell you, this thing has the potential to simplify and enrich social networking in a revolutionary way.
The Comparisons
Facebook Connect lets you use your Facebook ID and password to sign-in to third-party sites. It’s kind of like another Web-wide sign-on protocol called OpenID in that regard, but Facebook strikes me as having far greater potential of taking off on a large scale.
The reason? It’s easy to use, understand, and control — and users won’t have to do any extra work to find it or make it function. OpenID, if you’re not familiar with it, lets you use a single username and password to sign-on to numerous sites. But let’s be honest: How many average, non-techie-type Web users are even aware OpenID exists? Odds are, most people have an OpenID-linked account somewhere. But does the typical Internet surfer even know what it is or how it’d be used?…
Read it at PCWorld
Go on the Internet to make friends — and world peace. That was the message Thursday from a New York conference on the potential power of Internet social networking tools like Facebook to counter terrorism and repressive governments.
“New technology gives the United States and other free nations a significant advantage over terrorists,” US Undersecretary of State James Glassman told Web entrepreneurs and human rights activists at New York’s Columbia University Law School.
An extraordinary example of e-power was the success on February 5 this year of a grassroots march organized on the Internet against Colombia’s FARC leftist guerrillas…
Read it at Yahoo!
An Australian father who made his 5-year-old son walk 13 km (8 miles) to school every day to discipline him has inspired an appreciation group on social networking site Facebook.
Sam Burt made headlines last week when Australian media reported that he and his son Jack woke up at dawn each day to walk from their home in a remote town in the Northern Territory to school.
The punishment was meted out because Jack had been kicked off the school bus for hitting the driver in the head with an apple core.
Fellow Northern Territory resident Renee Elliott was so impressed with Burt’s approach she set up “The Sam Burt Tough Love Appreciation and Support Group” on Facebook, the world’s largest online social network…
Read it at Yahoo!
A social-media giant that has been wooed by the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft is now looking at an emerging social-networking play. Facebook recently held acquisition talks with micro-blogging phenom Twitter, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The Times cited people familiar with the matter who confirmed that Facebook offered to acquire Twitter in an all-stock deal.
Twitter is a service that lets users stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one question: What are you doing? It’s a real-time messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices, including PCs and smartphones. And Facebook would reportedly love to add it to its social-networking services.
Last year, Microsoft offered Facebook $15 billion to become part of Redmond’s growing Web 2.0 assets. Facebook declined, and now it appears that Twitter is offering the same response to its social-networking elder.
The Valuation Question
Despite the rebuff, there is lingering conversation over Twitter’s value. Twitter isn’t reporting any revenue just yet. The two-year-old company is still building its user base, yet this darling of Silicon Valley has reportedly been valued at $500 million…
Read it at Yahoo!
For each Internet social network effort that thrives, there are dozens that fail to generate any interest from the surfing masses.
An early dud was BountyQuest.com, launched in 2000 with financial backing from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The premise was simple: Posters to the site would highlight a patent they wanted to see blown out of the water, and visitors could receive up to $50,000 for presenting evidence that the patent wasn’t, in fact, the first document to describe the invention in question. BountyQuest’s problem was that too few got involved in the action. It fizzled within three years…
Read it at Forbes
Facebook, the fast-growing social network, offered to purchase micro-blogging service Twitter for 500 million dollars in stock but the talks broke down over price, AllThingsD.com reported Monday.
“Several weeks of serious talks” about a purchase of Twitter by privately held Facebook began in mid-October but broke down about three weeks ago, said the website which covers technology, media and the Internet.
AllThingsD quoted “sources on both sides” as saying the 500 million dollar bid was an all-stock offer based on the 15-billion-dollar valuation of Facebook from Microsoft’s purchase of a 1.6-percent stake in the company for 240 million dollars in October 2007…
Read it at Yahoo!
