Friday night means party time. But you probably don’t party like the older gent in this video. He opens his beers like a real man — by using a chainsaw. Because that’s just how he rolls.
The video has gone viral on YouTube since being posted Thursday, with more than a quarter million views at time of this writing. I’ve accounted for at least 10 of those.
More About: viral videos, YouTube
Mashable’s mRank is presented by Samsung’s SMART cameras. Simply shoot your image and share it instantly on your social sites, using built-in Wi-Fi. It’s the camera for how we share pictures today.
CBS’s hit show How I Met Your Mother not only brought in strong ratings this week for its season finale, it also raked in significant social buzz online in the first half of the week, according to mRank, Mashable’s social media chatter-tracker. However, buzz at the end of the week belonged to American Idol, which trimmed its contestant pool to the final two on Thursday.
With many TV series wrapping up their seasons with explosive finales this week, viewers have been turning to the social web to post reactions and discuss the latest plot advancements. Leading the pack in social buzz is How I Met Your Mother, whose season finale not only welcomed a new baby but also gave more details as to who Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris) will marry.
Other strong social buzz performers during the first half of the week included The Big Bang Theory, The Voice, Bones, Game of Thrones, WWE Raw and American Idol.
Mashable’s mRank leaderboards track the most buzzed-about TV shows across the social web. mRank’s technology analyzes certain terms — in this case TV show names or words associated with a certain title — and creates a leaderboard based on the volume of conversation around that show on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Mashable has leaderboards for various events and topics — from movies to music — and more will pop up for events, such as the Olympics, in the future.
Although reality TV show The Voice dropped from first last week to the sixth most-discussed earlier this week, its finale was held a week prior to many other finales. Fans of the show took to social networks to react to the crowning of Jermaine Paul, Alicia Keys’ former back-up singer and the mentee of country star Blake Shelton, as “the Voice.”
The top ten also featured Mad Men (despite its lack of a season finale), newcomer series The New Girl and perennial favorite Dancing with the Stars. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live — which is the 14th most-discussed show online — received a lot of buzz earlier in the week when former cast member Will Ferrell re-joined the team to host the season wrap-up. In addition, a clip of celebrities from the show’s digital shorts returned on Saturday night to celebrate the series’ 100th sketch, with the help of Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Natalie Portman and Michael Bolton. The video went viral and initiated a lot of online chatter.
Toward the end of the week, American Idol shot up to the top of the mRank list, pushing How I Met Your Mother down to the ninth spot. If early buzz for American Idol’s finale is any indication, we suspect it will be back on top yet again next week.
Other strong performers toward the end of the week include Bones, Criminal Minds, The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family and Game of Thrones.
mRank 5/16/2012
mRank 5/18/2012
Mashable’s mRank is presented by Samsung’s SMART cameras. Simply shoot your image and share it instantly on your social sites, using built-in Wi-Fi. It’s the camera for how we share pictures today.
More About: features, mashable, mrank, social tv, the-voice
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Comparing public user engagement suggests that Google+ is still a niche pursuit, despite Google claiming it has 170 million people signed up – while Pinterest’s attraction remains high
Away from all the hubbub over that other social network, how is Google+ – described by Larry Page and others as the new “social spine” of the company – doing?
As far as user numbers go, swimmingly: Page said that it has crossed the 100 million user mark. In April, Vic Gundotra said that “More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+”. That’s a lot. That’s more than Twitter claims as monthly active users (140 million).
But as far as user engagement goes, previous studies have said that it’s not a hit. What we don’t know is how many of those 170 million are active users of Google+ in the past 30 days. The suspicion, because Google has been evasive, is that the answer is: not many at all.
And now a new analysis from RJMetrics is reinforcing that suspicion. It says:
• The average Google+ post has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share.
• 30% of users who make a public post never make a second one. Even after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again.
• Among users who make publicly-viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post
• A cohort analysis reveals that, after a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts they make in each subsequent month declines steadily. This trend is not improving in newer cohorts.
The obvious question to ask of that analysis – which, as a caveat, is only made against public posts (because private posts are, well, private, and there’s no way of knowing how many of them there are) – is how it compares against other social networks, partciularly Facebook, Twitter and the new kid on the block, Pinterest.
Note too that these are averages. There will be significant extremes; this is unlikely to be a normal curve. Most likely at one end there is a colossal number who don’t do anything (and whose engagement may have been minimal – and perhaps nonexistent), while at the other is Robert Scoble, who never stops.
That would suggest the likely distribution of Google+ users is bathtub-shaped – high at both ends, very low in the middle. Because the people who like it really like it, as with any social network.
So how high are the ends and the middle?
The Google+ data analysing 40,000 randomly-chosen users, from RJMetrics, says that the chances are good that someone will make a second post – 70%. But, says Robert Moore, the author of the post, “after that, Google Plus does not perform as well as other social services that we have analysed. In charts like these, we typically expect to see the probability of repeat posts shoot up to well north of 90% by the time the user has made several posts. This is basically the ‘once you’re using it you’re hooked’ principle.”
But instead, he says, “with Google Plus, this number never crosses the 90% mark. Even after having made five such posts, the chance of making a sixth is only 85%. That means that 15% of people who have made five posts never came back to make a sixth.”
It’s possible of course that the sixth is made privately – but it seems counterintuitive for someone to post publicly five times in a row and then shift entirely to private sharing.
Moore also notes that Google+ users “are less and less likely to make additional posts even a few months after initially joining.”
In other words, Google+ just isn’t sticky. Or, alternatively, it’s attracting people who start and then go “periscope down”.
But is this a pattern that’s common to social networks? Not at all, he says, and contrasts it with Pinterest – which recently won an investment round valuing it at over $1bn.
RJMetrics did a similar analysis against Pinterest in February, and found completely different behaviour. “Pinterest’s traffic charts aren’t hockey sticks – they’re rocket ships,” Moore noted then.
It found that Pinterest was retaining and engaging users two to three times more efficiently than Twitter had been at a similar stage in its history. Over 80% of “pins” were re-pins from elsewhere on the site, indicating a lot of viral activity. (For Twitter at the same age, only 1.4% of tweets were retweets.)
But it was the user engagement that was surprising. By breaking people down into cohorts based on the months in which they joined, it could follow how active they were – with the expectation that they would drift away and become less active. But instead, the older cohort remained just as active.
“This either means that no one who starts using Pinterest ever stops or – more likely – that users who continue to use Pinterest become so much more engaged over time that their activities fully make up for those of any users who leave,” Moore noted.
Of course a key point about Pinterest compared to Google+ is that Google’s nascent social network is much larger, so you might not expect the same level of excitement on average. Another potential factor is that many new joiners are in effect co-opted in via their Gmail account, which “upgrades” them to Google+ whether they particularly want to or not. That’s always going to degrade the level of user interaction compared to something that people actively choose to join.
But Pinterest users look like a determined bunch. “Between 40% and 60% of [Pinterest] users are still actively pinning even as far out as week 8,” notes Moore. “This may seem like a steep dropoff, but for a consumer internet business it’s exceptionally good.”
And for comparison, he goes back to a Twitter analysis he did in 2009 – when the service was just three years old. I did ask Moore whether there have been any more recent analyses of Twitter; he doesn’t (though might run one now).
What he found then was that Twitter decay rate – how many unique tweeters were still at it 8 weeks ahead – was down around the 20-22% mark. And also: “Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%.” And: “If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user.” Remember that this was back in 2009, when it was still part of a comparatively tiny demographic, and by his estimate had about 49 million accounts. Now that’s up to 140 million, according to Twitter’s release earlier this week.
But here’s his conclusion on Pinterest in February: “Pinterest demonstrates some of the strongest user engagement, retention, and virality metrics I have ever seen in an online business. The company has found tremendous success among its core demographic”.
OK, and now how about Google+? Less good. In fact all the metrics are less good (apart from the user numbers). On average, a user waits 15 days between making their first public post and making their second. This number declines with each subsequent post, but not drastically. There is an average of 10 days between a user’s fifth and sixth public posts.
But we’ve already brought up the caveat about public posts, and it’s entirely possible that some people make their first post in public, but after that restrict themselves to private posts, or keep posting with a constant frequency but only make their posts public occasionally. (One challenge is that it’s hard, if you’re a Google+ user who’s in someone’s circle to which they post, to know whether that post is public or not. So Google+ users themselves aren’t in a great position to know this.)
Next, Moore looks at the much more public face of Google+: +1s, replies and sharing. He writes:
Of all the categories, we feel that this is the least likely to be biased by the fact that we only studied public posts. These public posts will still be visible to each member’s private networks, and actually could attract +1s, shares, and replies from external users as well. If anything, we would expect our numbers here to be higher than in the general population.
Nope. From 70,000 posts, he gets
• an average of 0.77 +1s per post (or, put another way, out of 10 posts, 3 won’t even get the equivalent of a Facebook “Like”)
• an average of 0.54 replies per post (ie, about 1 reply per two posts – no wonder people don’t post; it’s unrewarding)
• an average of 0.17 re-shares per post (or slightly less than 1 in 5)
I asked Moore what, of all the data about Google+, he found the most remarkable. “It’s not the absence of activity that we find noteworthy here, but the drop-off,” he responded. “You can speculate on the reasons why people stop posting publicly (in certain cases maybe it was a behavioural change from wanting to post publicly to wanting to post privately), but the drop-off is so consistent across the population we studied that we speculate there may be an underlying drop-off in overall activity.”
He added: “I would not expect our stats on likes, +1s, and re-shares to be biased downward. Activities like these on public posts are just as visible to private circles and also can be acted upon by members of the public.”
In a statement to Fast Company, which saw the study early, Google said: “By only tracking engagement on public posts, this study is flawed and not an accurate representation of all the sharing and activity taking place on Google+. As we’ve said before, more sharing occurs privately to circles and individuals than publicly on Google+. The beauty of Google+ is that it allows you to share privately – you don’t have to publicly share your thoughts, photos or videos with the world.”
It’s interesting to look back at what Steve Rubel, a PR expert, wrote back in June 2011 when Google+ started.
On the plus side, pun intended, the company has clearly rethought how people may want to share and they have learned. Google+ is basically what Google Buzz should have been. However, unlike its predecessor, there’s no easy way for consumers to pull in content from other networks – at least for now.
However, at least where we sit today, I believe that Google+ will leave consumers nonplussed – e.g. bewildered. While the interface is terrific and Circles and Hangouts both offer a strong value proposition, Google+ doesn’t solve a consumer problem that Facebook already hasn’t – or soon will – solve.
• Facebook breaks even in first day of trading
• IPO smashes record for trading volume with 565m shares
• Underwriters step in to shore up $38 offer price
• Launch delayed amid confusion at Nasdaq
• Follow our Facebook shareholder wealth tracker here
4.55pm ET/9.55pm BST: We’re going to wrap up our live blog coverage of the Facebook IPO. It wasn’t the fireworks display some investors expected to see.
This morning market watchers were discussing whether Facebook would post double-digit gains in its first day. Precedents such as LinkedIn, which jumped 107 percent in its May 2011 IPO, made it seem possible that Facebook could hit $50 or higher.
It has been a tough week for the markets in general – the worst week for stocks in all of 2012 so far, in fact. The Dow dropped 450 points this week, or 3.5 percent. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 were both down.
But the spectacle of the underwriting banks that set Facebook’s offer price of $38 having to buy shares for the final hour of trading to shore up that price made the offering feel flat.
Here’s a summary of what happened:
• Facebook ended the day virtually even. The stock opened at $38. The stock closed at $38.23 (up .61 percent).
• The company shattered the record for IPO volume, with 565 million shares changing hands. GM held the previous IPO volume record with 458 million shares.
• Because of a Nasdaq glitch, in which traders were unable to get confirmation of their trades early in the day, the IPO was rolled out about a half-hour later than expected. The first Facebook shares traded at 11.30am ET. The SEC has announced it is investigating.
• At today’s valuation, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook fortune tops $20 bn.
4.50pm ET/9.50pm BST: The Securities and Exchange Commission announces that it will investigate what caused the delay this morning in the Facebook rollout, CNBC is reporting.
The regulator will look into why it apparently was that not all traders had the same information at the expected time.
4.47pm ET/9.47pm BST: Heh.
My two cents: Whole lot of frantic for 38 penny advance in share price.
— david carr (@carr2n) May 18, 2012
4.10pm ET/9.10pm BST: It’s hard to see how the headlines now aren’t hard on Facebook. The market didn’t want the stock at that price.
Some schadenfreude on Twitter:
Currently lol’ing at the people who thought $FB would close at > $60 today.
— Ethan Klapper (@ethanklapper) May 18, 2012
After final trading volume of 565 million shares, an IPO record, the price didn’t move.
Hey, keep it on the down low, but I hear there is still a chance to get in on the Facebook IPO at the offering price!
— James Sununu (@jsununu) May 18, 2012
4.06pm ET/9.06pm BST: Here’s what the last hour of trading looked like for Facebook. Down to $38 and then flat, flat, flat. It’s almost as if there was an artificial floor holding it there.
4.00pm ET/9pm BST: And the close: Facebook shares end their first day of trading at $38.23 – up 23 cents a share on record volume.
3.54pm ET/8.54pm BST: And this, folks, is as good as financial TV gets.
EPIC: FACEBOOK UNDERWRITERS WAGING HUGE BATTLE HAPPENING RIGHT NOW TO HOLD THE $38 LEVEL read.bi/M24r5A
— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) May 18, 2012
3.50pm ET/8.50pm BST: Facebook shares seem to be trying their hardest to sink below the $38 offer price. The underwriting banks are in the market to shore up that price. And they’re dealing with a lot of volume: record volume, in fact.
The previous record for most shares traded on the day of an IPO was set by General Motors Co. (GM), at 458 million. With 10 minutes to go in the trading day, Facebook has already smashed the record with 532 million.
3.41pm ET/8.41pm BST: Facebook stock on the day of its IPO after four hours of trading: $38.
3.26pm ET/8.26pm BST: Here’s a eye-catching list from Heidi N. Moore, comparing Facebook to other big companies in terms of market value and revenue. She calls the list “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others: Facebook Edition.”
At $40/share, Facebook ranks 6 out of 10 in terms of market value ($112bn).
Guess where Facebook ranks in terms of revenue?
Google: Market value $200 billion; 2011 revenue $37.9 billion
JP Morgan Chase: Market value $127 billion; 2011 revenue $99.8 billion
Verizon: Market value $117 billion; 2011 revenue $110.9 billion
Merck: Market value $115 billion; 2011 sales $48 billion
GlaxoSmithKline: $112 billion; 2011 sales $44 billion
Facebook: Market value $112 billion; 2011 revenue $3.7 billion
Anheuser-Busch: Market value $111 billion; 2011 revenue $39 billion
PepsiCo: Market value $109 billion; 2011 revenue $66.5 billion
McDonald’s: Market value $91 billion; 2011 revenue $27 billion
Cisco Systems: Market value $89 billion; 2011 sales $10.4 billion
3.20pm ET/8.20pm BST: Has the Facebook IPO been a success? With 45 minutes to go until the closing bell, the stock is slowly sinking from around the $40/share range back to its opening price of $38. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy sees a party that fizzled:
At 11:30, the stock opened at $42, jumped up to $43, fell back $42—and kept falling, back to $40. “For market sentiment, this is not going to be positive,” said Simon Hobbs, the network’s resident Brit. Melissa Lee was equally crestfallen: “Forty minutes ago, I don’t think anybody thought $40,” she said. David Faber had been working the phones, and he reported that his sources had told him the stock might well fall below the issue price of $38, which would be a big embarrassment to the banks underwriting the deal, led by Morgan Stanley. “The big story is that Facebook, the social network, is now a public company,” he said. “The smaller story is that after five minutes, it’s only up six per cent.”
Henry Blodget, in contrast, congratulates the investment banks for rolling out a stock that was “perfectly priced”:
This price level was ideal for almost everyone involved–with the exception of short-term traders who bought the stock only to instantly flip it. (And no one should cry for them).
With such a modest pop, Facebook and its selling shareholders did not leave tens or hundreds of millions (or even billions) of dollars on the table–an expensive mistake that most companies make.
When LinkedIn went public, for example, the bankers underpriced the deal, and the company needlessly handed $100+ million to institutional investors.
Heidi N. Moore has been arguing that the failure of the stock to lift and hold above its initial offer price of $38 is making for a “rocky” debut.
What you’re not seeing right now is 33 banks all seeking to blame each other for why this stock is barely clinging to a decent open. $$ FB
— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 18, 2012
3.02pm ET/8.02pm BST: With an hour to go until the Nasdaq close, Facebook’s shares are at $39 a share and Mark Zuckerberg has outpaced several of the world’s richest men.
With wealth of over $21bn, Zuckerberg is now worth more than Jeff Bezos at Amazon or either of the Google founders, according to the Forbes list of billionaires. He was briefly richer than New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, but has now just slipped behind B’s $22bn pile. Poor thing.
2.59pm ET/7.59pm BST: One person we haven’t heard a lot from today is Sheryl Sandberg – but expect that to change. Here’s Dominic Rushe:
Sandberg is one of the most impressive execs in the US with a resume that includes the US Treasury, Google and McKinsey. You can read my profile of her here.
Sandberg was late to the Facebook party; she joined in 2007 when Zuckerberg poached her from Google. Back then Facebook had 70m users and no profits. How things change. She holds 1.9m shares and has made a small fortune today.
Sandberg stands to make a far larger fortune in the near future. She has 39m restricted stock units, most of which are tied to performance targets. If she hits them – and history suggests she will – Sandberg will become a billionaire, which is a rarity for employees. That kind of reward usually goes to the founders, not the help.
2.52pm ET/7.52pm BST: Dominic Rushe places the Facebook stock performance in the context of the lackluster Nasdaq showing this week:
“OK I admit it. I’ve had a bit of a downer on Facebook at $100bn plus. It’s an amazing company but I just don’t think it’s proven worthy of that kind of valuation yet. And maybe bankers are propping the share price up.
“Even so, today’s performance needs to be set against what has been happening to the rest of the Nasdaq companies this week. One look at this graph of the Nasdaq over the last five days shows, this wasn’t an easy week to launch.”
1.55pm ET/6.55pm BST: Bloomberg reports that Facebook underwriters did in fact start buying shares at $38 to keep the stock from falling below its offer price:
Facebook Inc. (FB) underwriters purchased the company’s stock to keep it from falling below $38 a share after debuting on the Nasdaq Stock Market, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The bankers supported the stock after Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. (NDAQ) faced difficulties delivering trade execution messages after the initial public offering, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the transactions are private.
1.42pm ET/6.42pm BST: If you haven’t checked out our live tracker of top Facebook shareholders’ wealth based on today’s fluctuations in the FB share price, you can have a look here. For the record, Mark Zuckerberg is currently “worth” more than $20 billio
1.22pm ET/6.22pm BST: Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur looks at what’s next for Facebook:
What to expect now? Don’t be surprised if the next big thing is a Facebook phone – running its own software and developed from top to bottom to involve you in the site all the time.
Zuckerberg’s team has been advised to do this directly, because it needs to reach the “next billion” internet users, and they are mainly going to be using mobile phones, not desktop or laptop computers. Selling its own phone would mean it could make itself the background hum of many peoples’ lives everywhere – and show adverts and collect data on its own terms.
Read Charles’ full analysis here.
1.16pm ET/6.16pm BST: Dominic Rushe checks in on the Internet gaming company Zynga, and what the poor performance of its stock today could mean for Facebook:
Facebook’s shares have recovered after dropping worryingly close to their $38 offer price. But over at Zynga there are still problems.
As we mentioned earlier, it looks likely that Facebook’s battalion of bankers moved to make sure FB didn’t drop below $38. Zynga had no such luck and was down more than 13% at one point. It’s now down nearly 6%.
Zynga is basically a way to trade Facebook, since nearly all of its business comes from the social network. So is this what FB’s share fall would look like if the bankers hadn’t piled in? Just sayin’.
1.09pm ET/6.09pm BST: Till death do us part – or your company doth go public. Will the Facebook IPO cause a spike in shareholder divorces as new millionaires are created and relationships become more liquid, as it were? The Financial Times has a morbidly droll (and paywall-protected) report:
“When Google went public, there was a wave of divorces. When Cisco went public there was a wave of divorces,” says Steve Cone, a divorce attorney based in Palo Alto, near the social network’s Menlo Park headquarters. “I expect a similar wave shortly after Facebook goes public.”
12.55pm ET/5.55pm BST: Facebook staffers have flocked to the social network to bask in the post-IPO glow, the Guardian’s Josh Halliday reports.
Lindsey Cochran, who works in marketing at Facebook, writes: “I vividly remember signing up for facebook in the upstairs quad of 508 Thurston … in April of 2004. I can’t believe I am now going to be a part of such a historic moment. Feeling incredibly lucky!”
Gabe Hernandez, another staffer, says: “While I won’t be in any of the Facebook offices to celebrate today, I am wearing my hoodie in solidarity. Thanks everyone for making my job far from the last place I ever want to be. Now stay focused and keep hacking!”
Meanwhile, Zuck has returned to his Facebook to note: “This is a pretty awesome hack.”
12.39pm ET/5.39pm BST: If you don’t own Facebook shares yet, are you currently missing an historic opportunity to get in on the ground level of a company that’s about to break all previous records for stock growth?
Warren Buffett apparently doesn’t think so. Here’s what the Oracle of Omaha has to say about IPOs in general:
It’s almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).
12.34pm ET/5.34pm BST: Have underwriters stepped in to hold Facebook shares above $38?
Business Insider gets a look at the order book, sent in by Twitter user @Bourbon_Meyer.
“It strongly appears that there’s a huge perma-bid at $38 on Facebook,” Joe Weisenthal writes. “Check out the big mass of yellow on the left column… all those bids at $38.”
12.18pm ET/5.18pm BST: Facebook stock has been out of the gate for 50 minutes. After opening at just above $42 the stock dropped to the break-even level of $38. But instead of continuing to fall, the stock staged a resolute recovery:
So what happened? Here’s Dominic Rushe:
Facebook’s shares came dangerously close to falling below $38, the offer price, and have now rallied. This chart shows what happened. The speculation is that the underwriters have piled in and supported the price that we are chasing now. If it’s true, they can’t support the price forever and you can expect FB’s shares to fall next week.
But – and it’s a big but – there have clearly been problems with the IPO at Nasdaq, orders for shares were backed up and may have caused these weird price movements.
There are however signs that investors are underwhelmed. Zynga shares were suspended after they crashed this morning – not a good sign as the game firm is largely dependent on Facebook for its business.
12.03pm ET/5.03pm BST: One stock that really doesn’t like what it’s seeing in the Facebook IPO: Zynga, the Internet gaming company.
Zynga, which depends on Facebook for a platform for its games, had an underwhelming IPO of its own in December, when it fell 5 percent in its first day of trading.
So far today Zynga is down 13 percent.
UPDATE 12.07pm ET: Trading in Zynga shares has now been halted.
11.56am ET/4.56pm BST: A look back at the hot tech IPO of 20 years ago:
Celebrating Facebook IPO today while reflecting on AOL IPO 20 years ago. Valuation was $70 million. Most thought Internet was a fad. #wrong
— Steve Case (@SteveCase) May 18, 2012
11.50am ET/4.50pm BST: As the Facebook share price settles back to $38, The Guardian’s Nils Pratley contributes his analysis of the pricing dynamics. If the stock goes too high, insiders who sold in advance of the IPO may resent the investment bank. A share price of around $41 would satisfy most everyone, Pratley writes:
A 10% pop should satisfy the IPO advisers. When you start getting to 20%-plus, the insiders who are selling feel short-changed and accuse the investment bank advisers of misjudging demand. 10% is ok – it meets the “leave something on the table for the next person” rule.
11.36am ET/4.36pm BST: How will Facebook shares perform in the first day of trading? Tell us what you think.
For extra credit, let us know in the comments what you think the high price and the low price of the day will be.
11.34am ET/4.34pm BST: How big is trader interest in Facebook? 82 million shares were traded in the first 30 seconds, according to Nasdaq.
The stock price is bumping along at the $40-$41 level. You can follow the stock price here.
11.30am ET/4.30pm BST: And they’re off. Facebook is now on sale – and the first shares cross at $42.05, a good deal higher than the $38/share rollout price.
For the time being, at least, the company has 100 billion reasons to cheer.
11.30am ET/4.30 pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues ringing the opening bell for Nasdaq at 9.30am ET.
Looks anticlimactic now.
11.27am ET/4.27pm BST: IPO delayed indefinitely by glitch in market: This isn’t the headline Facebook was looking for this morning.
Wow, Nasdaq found the only way possible to upstage the Facebook IPO.
— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 18, 2012
11.23am ET/4.23pm BST: Nasdaq has announced that there has been a delay in the start of Facebook trading. We’re reaching out to sources at Nasdaq to find out more about the holdup.
The latest delay is the third or fourth of the morning. Nasdaq itself puts out time call information. Meaning the market itself is failing to predict when the market will go to work.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that traders are having problems changing or canceling their orders ahead of the Facebook IPO.
Will Zuckerberg have to change his status again?
11.02am ET/4.02pm BST: Reuters is reporting that the opening of trading has been pushed back a bit:
RT @ProducerMatthew: Reuters: Facebook IPO extended by additional 5 minutes, to trade at 11:05 AM ET – NASDAQ
— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) May 18, 2012
10.46am ET/3.46pm BST: Facebook as a growing concern. Whatever happens with the stock price today, the immense market draw of the company is plain to see in a chart tracking users, from about 300 million in March 2009 to 900 million today (blue is all Internet users worldwide; brown/gray is FB users):
10.42am ET/ 3.42pm BST: T-minus three minutes and counting: Nasdaq has just announced that trading in Facebook shares will begin at 10.45am ET.
10.37am ET/3.37pm BST: A major status update for the Facebook cofounder: as Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell to open the Nasdaq exchange, his account automatically spread the news.
Zuckerberg tagged fellow executives Chris Cox, vice president of product; the chief finance officer David Ebersman; the vice president of finance Cipora Herman; and his trusted No 2, Sheryl Sandberg.
10.21am ET/3.21pm BST: Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin came in for a drubbing last week when it was revealed that he had disclaimed US citizenship in favor of residence in Singapore, which does not have a capital gains tax. Saverin responded to the criticism by saying that his move was not a tax dodge; he simply prefers Singapore.
Last night Saverin set the controversy aside to offer his former colleagues a hearty congratulations on his personal Facebook page. He misspelled his co-founder’s name – but it’s the thought that counts?
On the eve of the Facebook public float, 8-plus years in the making, I as co-founder wanted to look back and cherish Facebook’s early beginning. Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg [sic] on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.
10.10am ET/3.10pm BST: Facebook is summoning great spectacle in its rollout this morning – but will the stock price hold up? When the excitement dies, will the company warrant its $104 billion valuation, and the $38 share price?
One main place investors locate value in Facebook is its potential power as an advertiser. With 900 million users and counting – and a potentially vast market in China still waiting to be tapped – Facebook has an unparalleled capacity to put ads in front of eyes.
But earlier this week, US auto manufacturer GM decided that those ads weren’t worth it, ending its Facebook campaign. The company had been spending $10 million a year to advertise on the site, but none of the reports measuring those ads’ profitability came back positive. The Economist spoke with Chris Perry, marketing chief for GM’s brand Chevrolet, who confirmed that “a routine marketing review concluded that the site delivered ‘insufficient’ results.
Companies still believe that Facebook is an indispensable tool for spreading buzz about new products, however:
That viewpoint was echoed by the senior media buyer at a major Detroit ad agency, who asked not to be identified by name because he is not authorised to discuss strategy with the press. Based on clicks-throughs alone, he says, Facebook “doesn’t pay off.” His agency’s approach is to use the service as part of broader social media campaigns.
9.40am: One take on the big offering.
Wocka! Wocka! twitter.com/dmataconis/sta…
— Doug Mataconis (@dmataconis) May 18, 2012
9.39am: The scene at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park in the run-up to the IPO. The company is valued at $104 billion as shares go on sale to the public.
9.36am ET/2.36pm BST: The Guardian’s Dominic Rushe has been talking to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect – the only book written so far with Facebook’s cooperation – and a man who has spent many many hours with Mark Zuckerberg.
“His impact on the world will be as least as big as Bill Gates and probably already has been,” Kirkpatrick tells Rushe. “Like Gates I’m positive he is going to end up being one of the world’s great philanthropists. I believe he has a very strong social conscience.”
He says this will be a big day for Zuckerberg but that while the Facebook boss may party later, he’ll try to keep things as normal as possible once he has rung the bell.
Then the real work begins…
“I spoke to Peter Thiel [Silicon Valley investment legend and one of Facebook's early backers] and he said Facebook had this peculiar quality, it will either completely dominate or it will completely go away. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon though.”
Fitzpatrick predicts that Zuckerberg could soon be the world’s richest man.
9.30am ET/2.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg has just rung the bell opening the Nasdaq market. He did so from a stage at the company’s Menlo Park HQ. Then he hugged COO Sheryl Sandberg. The stage is full of other FB execs, with a sea of employees all around. A boom camera is capturing the action in the cheering, waving crowd. Looks like Bonnaroo. “A Woodstock event,” someone on CNBC just called it.
9.28am ET/2.28pm BST: Hackathon Update. It turns out there was one Facebook face who declined to participate in last night’s ritual of camamaderie and computer fun. Zuckerberg apparently called it a night early in the evening, Josh Halliday reports. He went home to his girlfriend Cilla and their Hungarian sheepdog, Beast.
When you’re the boss you get to do that.
9.23am ET/2.23pm BST: CNBC, which is tracking the Facebook IPO, is reporting on the overnight “hackathon” at the company’s Menlo Park, California, campus. In the run-up to today’s big splash, employees spent the night at their place of work writing computer code, over-caffeinating and giving their eyes a little extra practice staring at computer screens. The event reflects the company’s youthful, creative, spontaneous, creative culture.
Employees ordered Chinese food and there was talk of them making a run to In-n-Out Burger, CNBC reports. How does the news change your bet on what Facebook stock will do today? Let us know in the comments.
9.13am ET/2.13pm BST: The delayed debut of Facebook stock this morning affords us time for a walk down memory lane… back to 2004, when FB chief Mark Zuckerberg was still just a cocky college student bragging about his hacking exploits in instant messages to friends.
Those messages are now a matter of public record. The Guardian’s Josh Halliday writes:
Zuckerberg appears to confirm in one message that he secretly hacked into the website of the Harvard University newspaper, the Crimson, by guessing the emails and passwords of two people in the college database.
“So I want to read what they said about me before the article came out and after I complained,” he told a friend. “So I’m just like trying the email/passwords of everyone who put that they’re in the Crimson. I wonder if the school tracks stuff like that.”
In another message, Zuckerberg boasts about deactivating college students’ accounts on the internal Harvard social network, ConnectU. “I got bored so I started deactivating accounts on ConnectU haha,” the future cyber-grandee writes.
8.52am ET/1.52pm BST: Trading action on Facebook shares is not likely to commence until 10:30am ET at the earliest, as bankers work through the mechanics of the offer, market sources said.
8.30am ET/1.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq stock market at 9.30am as he kicks off a share sale that will value the company at $104bn.
We’ll be live blogging the day’s events here in New York, and you can see how the fortunes of Zuckerberg and the social network crew rise (or fall).
Not since Google’s initial public offering (IPO) has a share sale been as closely watched. It’s Super Bowl for social media: every commentator in the land has an opinion on whether the firm is really worth that sort of cash, and is lining up to share it.
At $104bn, Facebook is being valued at more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs. Last year Facebook had revenues of $3.7bn. Goldman’s were 10 times that.
But this is a company with massive potential. Facebook will have more than a billion people logging in to its service this year – that’s more than three times the populations of the US – and it hasn’t got started in China. Nearly 400 million people log on six days a week. In the first three months of this year those people “liked” or commented on Facebook items 3.2bn times a day.
Google added a verb to the lexicon; Facebook redefined “friend” and “like”. Now Zuckerberg has to find a way to make his social network live up to its massive promise.
8.30am ET/1.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq stock market at 9.30am as he kicks off a share sale that will value the company at $104bn.
We’ll be live blogging the day’s events here in New York, and you can see how the fortunes of Zuckerberg and the social network crew rise (or fall).
Not since Google’s initial public offering (IPO) has a share sale been as closely watched. It’s Super Bowl for social media: every commentator in the land has an opinion on whether the firm is really worth that sort of cash, and is lining up to share it.
At $104bn, Facebook is being valued at more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs. Last year Facebook had revenues of $3.7bn. Goldman’s were 10 times that.
But this is a company with massive potential. Facebook will have more than a billion people logging in to its service this year – that’s more than three times the populations of the US – and it hasn’t got started in China. Nearly 400 million people log on six days a week. In the first three months of this year those people “liked” or commented on Facebook items 3.2bn times a day.
Google added a verb to the lexicon; Facebook redefined “friend” and “like”. Now Zuckerberg has to find a way to make his social network live up to its massive promise.
• Facebook launched on the Nasdaq exchange in New York
• 80 million shares sold in first 30 seconds of trading
• But share price almost falls below $38 offer value
• Launch delayed amid confusion at Nasdaq
• Follow our Facebook shareholder wealth tracker here
3.02pm ET/8.02pm BST: With an hour to go until the Nasdaq close, Facebook’s shares are at $39 a share and Mark Zuckerberg has outpaced several of the world’s richest men.
With wealth of over $21bn, Zuckerberg is now worth more than Jeff Bezos at Amazon or either of the Google founders, according to the Forbes list of billionaires. He was briefly richer than New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, but has now just slipped behind B’s $22bn pile. Poor thing.
2.59pm ET/7.59pm BST: One person we haven’t heard a lot from today is Sheryl Sandberg – but expect that to change. Here’s Dominic Rushe:
Sandberg is one of the most impressive execs in the US with a resume that includes the US Treasury, Google and McKinsey. You can read my profile of her here.
Sandberg was late to the Facebook party; she joined in 2007 when Zuckerberg poached her from Google. Back then Facebook had 70m users and no profits. How things change. She holds 1.9m shares and has made a small fortune today.
Sandberg stands to make a far larger fortune in the near future. She has 39m restricted stock units, most of which are tied to performance targets. If she hits them – and history suggests she will – Sandberg will become a billionaire, which is a rarity for employees. That kind of reward usually goes to the founders, not the help.
2.52pm ET/7.52pm BST: Dominic Rushe places the Facebook stock performance in the context of the lackluster Nasdaq showing this week:
“OK I admit it. I’ve had a bit of a downer on Facebook at $100bn plus. It’s an amazing company but I just don’t think it’s proven worthy of that kind of valuation yet. And maybe bankers are propping the share price up.
“Even so, today’s performance needs to be set against what has been happening to the rest of the Nasdaq companies this week. One look at this graph of the Nasdaq over the last five days shows, this wasn’t an easy week to launch.”
1.55pm ET/6.55pm BST: Bloomberg reports that Facebook underwriters did in fact start buying shares at $38 to keep the stock from falling below its offer price:
Facebook Inc. (FB) underwriters purchased the company’s stock to keep it from falling below $38 a share after debuting on the Nasdaq Stock Market, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The bankers supported the stock after Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. (NDAQ) faced difficulties delivering trade execution messages after the initial public offering, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the transactions are private.
1.42pm ET/6.42pm BST: If you haven’t checked out our live tracker of top Facebook shareholders’ wealth based on today’s fluctuations in the FB share price, you can have a look here. For the record, Mark Zuckerberg is currently “worth” more than $20 billio
1.22pm ET/6.22pm BST: Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur looks at what’s next for Facebook:
What to expect now? Don’t be surprised if the next big thing is a Facebook phone – running its own software and developed from top to bottom to involve you in the site all the time.
Zuckerberg’s team has been advised to do this directly, because it needs to reach the “next billion” internet users, and they are mainly going to be using mobile phones, not desktop or laptop computers. Selling its own phone would mean it could make itself the background hum of many peoples’ lives everywhere – and show adverts and collect data on its own terms.
Read Charles’ full analysis here.
1.16pm ET/6.16pm BST: Dominic Rushe checks in on the Internet gaming company Zynga, and what the poor performance of its stock today could mean for Facebook:
Facebook’s shares have recovered after dropping worryingly close to their $38 offer price. But over at Zynga there are still problems.
As we mentioned earlier, it looks likely that Facebook’s battalion of bankers moved to make sure FB didn’t drop below $38. Zynga had no such luck and was down more than 13% at one point. It’s now down nearly 6%.
Zynga is basically a way to trade Facebook, since nearly all of its business comes from the social network. So is this what FB’s share fall would look like if the bankers hadn’t piled in? Just sayin’.
1.09pm ET/6.09pm BST: Till death do us part – or your company doth go public. Will the Facebook IPO cause a spike in shareholder divorces as new millionaires are created and relationships become more liquid, as it were? The Financial Times has a morbidly droll (and paywall-protected) report:
“When Google went public, there was a wave of divorces. When Cisco went public there was a wave of divorces,” says Steve Cone, a divorce attorney based in Palo Alto, near the social network’s Menlo Park headquarters. “I expect a similar wave shortly after Facebook goes public.”
12.55pm ET/5.55pm BST: Facebook staffers have flocked to the social network to bask in the post-IPO glow, the Guardian’s Josh Halliday reports.
Lindsey Cochran, who works in marketing at Facebook, writes: “I vividly remember signing up for facebook in the upstairs quad of 508 Thurston … in April of 2004. I can’t believe I am now going to be a part of such a historic moment. Feeling incredibly lucky!”
Gabe Hernandez, another staffer, says: “While I won’t be in any of the Facebook offices to celebrate today, I am wearing my hoodie in solidarity. Thanks everyone for making my job far from the last place I ever want to be. Now stay focused and keep hacking!”
Meanwhile, Zuck has returned to his Facebook to note: “This is a pretty awesome hack.”
12.39pm ET/5.39pm BST: If you don’t own Facebook shares yet, are you currently missing an historic opportunity to get in on the ground level of a company that’s about to break all previous records for stock growth?
Warren Buffett apparently doesn’t think so. Here’s what the Oracle of Omaha has to say about IPOs in general:
It’s almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).
12.34pm ET/5.34pm BST: Have underwriters stepped in to hold Facebook shares above $38?
Business Insider gets a look at the order book, sent in by Twitter user @Bourbon_Meyer.
“It strongly appears that there’s a huge perma-bid at $38 on Facebook,” Joe Weisenthal writes. “Check out the big mass of yellow on the left column… all those bids at $38.”
12.18pm ET/5.18pm BST: Facebook stock has been out of the gate for 50 minutes. After opening at just above $42 the stock dropped to the break-even level of $38. But instead of continuing to fall, the stock staged a resolute recovery:
So what happened? Here’s Dominic Rushe:
Facebook’s shares came dangerously close to falling below $38, the offer price, and have now rallied. This chart shows what happened. The speculation is that the underwriters have piled in and supported the price that we are chasing now. If it’s true, they can’t support the price forever and you can expect FB’s shares to fall next week.
But – and it’s a big but – there have clearly been problems with the IPO at Nasdaq, orders for shares were backed up and may have caused these weird price movements.
There are however signs that investors are underwhelmed. Zynga shares were suspended after they crashed this morning – not a good sign as the game firm is largely dependent on Facebook for its business.
12.03pm ET/5.03pm BST: One stock that really doesn’t like what it’s seeing in the Facebook IPO: Zynga, the Internet gaming company.
Zynga, which depends on Facebook for a platform for its games, had an underwhelming IPO of its own in December, when it fell 5 percent in its first day of trading.
So far today Zynga is down 13 percent.
UPDATE 12.07pm ET: Trading in Zynga shares has now been halted.
11.56am ET/4.56pm BST: A look back at the hot tech IPO of 20 years ago:
Celebrating Facebook IPO today while reflecting on AOL IPO 20 years ago. Valuation was $70 million. Most thought Internet was a fad. #wrong
— Steve Case (@SteveCase) May 18, 2012
11.50am ET/4.50pm BST: As the Facebook share price settles back to $38, The Guardian’s Nils Pratley contributes his analysis of the pricing dynamics. If the stock goes too high, insiders who sold in advance of the IPO may resent the investment bank. A share price of around $41 would satisfy most everyone, Pratley writes:
A 10% pop should satisfy the IPO advisers. When you start getting to 20%-plus, the insiders who are selling feel short-changed and accuse the investment bank advisers of misjudging demand. 10% is ok – it meets the “leave something on the table for the next person” rule.
11.36am ET/4.36pm BST: How will Facebook shares perform in the first day of trading? Tell us what you think.
For extra credit, let us know in the comments what you think the high price and the low price of the day will be.
11.34am ET/4.34pm BST: How big is trader interest in Facebook? 82 million shares were traded in the first 30 seconds, according to Nasdaq.
The stock price is bumping along at the $40-$41 level. You can follow the stock price here.
11.30am ET/4.30pm BST: And they’re off. Facebook is now on sale – and the first shares cross at $42.05, a good deal higher than the $38/share rollout price.
For the time being, at least, the company has 100 billion reasons to cheer.
11.30am ET/4.30 pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues ringing the opening bell for Nasdaq at 9.30am ET.
Looks anticlimactic now.
11.27am ET/4.27pm BST: IPO delayed indefinitely by glitch in market: This isn’t the headline Facebook was looking for this morning.
Wow, Nasdaq found the only way possible to upstage the Facebook IPO.
— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 18, 2012
11.23am ET/4.23pm BST: Nasdaq has announced that there has been a delay in the start of Facebook trading. We’re reaching out to sources at Nasdaq to find out more about the holdup.
The latest delay is the third or fourth of the morning. Nasdaq itself puts out time call information. Meaning the market itself is failing to predict when the market will go to work.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that traders are having problems changing or canceling their orders ahead of the Facebook IPO.
Will Zuckerberg have to change his status again?
11.02am ET/4.02pm BST: Reuters is reporting that the opening of trading has been pushed back a bit:
RT @ProducerMatthew: Reuters: Facebook IPO extended by additional 5 minutes, to trade at 11:05 AM ET – NASDAQ
— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) May 18, 2012
10.46am ET/3.46pm BST: Facebook as a growing concern. Whatever happens with the stock price today, the immense market draw of the company is plain to see in a chart tracking users, from about 300 million in March 2009 to 900 million today (blue is all Internet users worldwide; brown/gray is FB users):
10.42am ET/ 3.42pm BST: T-minus three minutes and counting: Nasdaq has just announced that trading in Facebook shares will begin at 10.45am ET.
10.37am ET/3.37pm BST: A major status update for the Facebook cofounder: as Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell to open the Nasdaq exchange, his account automatically spread the news.
Zuckerberg tagged fellow executives Chris Cox, vice president of product; the chief finance officer David Ebersman; the vice president of finance Cipora Herman; and his trusted No 2, Sheryl Sandberg.
10.21am ET/3.21pm BST: Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin came in for a drubbing last week when it was revealed that he had disclaimed US citizenship in favor of residence in Singapore, which does not have a capital gains tax. Saverin responded to the criticism by saying that his move was not a tax dodge; he simply prefers Singapore.
Last night Saverin set the controversy aside to offer his former colleagues a hearty congratulations on his personal Facebook page. He misspelled his co-founder’s name – but it’s the thought that counts?
On the eve of the Facebook public float, 8-plus years in the making, I as co-founder wanted to look back and cherish Facebook’s early beginning. Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg [sic] on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.
10.10am ET/3.10pm BST: Facebook is summoning great spectacle in its rollout this morning – but will the stock price hold up? When the excitement dies, will the company warrant its $104 billion valuation, and the $38 share price?
One main place investors locate value in Facebook is its potential power as an advertiser. With 900 million users and counting – and a potentially vast market in China still waiting to be tapped – Facebook has an unparalleled capacity to put ads in front of eyes.
But earlier this week, US auto manufacturer GM decided that those ads weren’t worth it, ending its Facebook campaign. The company had been spending $10 million a year to advertise on the site, but none of the reports measuring those ads’ profitability came back positive. The Economist spoke with Chris Perry, marketing chief for GM’s brand Chevrolet, who confirmed that “a routine marketing review concluded that the site delivered ‘insufficient’ results.
Companies still believe that Facebook is an indispensable tool for spreading buzz about new products, however:
That viewpoint was echoed by the senior media buyer at a major Detroit ad agency, who asked not to be identified by name because he is not authorised to discuss strategy with the press. Based on clicks-throughs alone, he says, Facebook “doesn’t pay off.” His agency’s approach is to use the service as part of broader social media campaigns.
9.40am: One take on the big offering.
Wocka! Wocka! twitter.com/dmataconis/sta…
— Doug Mataconis (@dmataconis) May 18, 2012
9.39am: The scene at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park in the run-up to the IPO. The company is valued at $104 billion as shares go on sale to the public.
9.36am ET/2.36pm BST: The Guardian’s Dominic Rushe has been talking to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect – the only book written so far with Facebook’s cooperation – and a man who has spent many many hours with Mark Zuckerberg.
“His impact on the world will be as least as big as Bill Gates and probably already has been,” Kirkpatrick tells Rushe. “Like Gates I’m positive he is going to end up being one of the world’s great philanthropists. I believe he has a very strong social conscience.”
He says this will be a big day for Zuckerberg but that while the Facebook boss may party later, he’ll try to keep things as normal as possible once he has rung the bell.
Then the real work begins…
“I spoke to Peter Thiel [Silicon Valley investment legend and one of Facebook's early backers] and he said Facebook had this peculiar quality, it will either completely dominate or it will completely go away. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon though.”
Fitzpatrick predicts that Zuckerberg could soon be the world’s richest man.
9.30am ET/2.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg has just rung the bell opening the Nasdaq market. He did so from a stage at the company’s Menlo Park HQ. Then he hugged COO Sheryl Sandberg. The stage is full of other FB execs, with a sea of employees all around. A boom camera is capturing the action in the cheering, waving crowd. Looks like Bonnaroo. “A Woodstock event,” someone on CNBC just called it.
9.28am ET/2.28pm BST: Hackathon Update. It turns out there was one Facebook face who declined to participate in last night’s ritual of camamaderie and computer fun. Zuckerberg apparently called it a night early in the evening, Josh Halliday reports. He went home to his girlfriend Cilla and their Hungarian sheepdog, Beast.
When you’re the boss you get to do that.
9.23am ET/2.23pm BST: CNBC, which is tracking the Facebook IPO, is reporting on the overnight “hackathon” at the company’s Menlo Park, California, campus. In the run-up to today’s big splash, employees spent the night at their place of work writing computer code, over-caffeinating and giving their eyes a little extra practice staring at computer screens. The event reflects the company’s youthful, creative, spontaneous, creative culture.
Employees ordered Chinese food and there was talk of them making a run to In-n-Out Burger, CNBC reports. How does the news change your bet on what Facebook stock will do today? Let us know in the comments.
9.13am ET/2.13pm BST: The delayed debut of Facebook stock this morning affords us time for a walk down memory lane… back to 2004, when FB chief Mark Zuckerberg was still just a cocky college student bragging about his hacking exploits in instant messages to friends.
Those messages are now a matter of public record. The Guardian’s Josh Halliday writes:
Zuckerberg appears to confirm in one message that he secretly hacked into the website of the Harvard University newspaper, the Crimson, by guessing the emails and passwords of two people in the college database.
“So I want to read what they said about me before the article came out and after I complained,” he told a friend. “So I’m just like trying the email/passwords of everyone who put that they’re in the Crimson. I wonder if the school tracks stuff like that.”
In another message, Zuckerberg boasts about deactivating college students’ accounts on the internal Harvard social network, ConnectU. “I got bored so I started deactivating accounts on ConnectU haha,” the future cyber-grandee writes.
8.52am ET/1.52pm BST: Trading action on Facebook shares is not likely to commence until 10:30am ET at the earliest, as bankers work through the mechanics of the offer, market sources said.
8.30am ET/1.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq stock market at 9.30am as he kicks off a share sale that will value the company at $104bn.
We’ll be live blogging the day’s events here in New York, and you can see how the fortunes of Zuckerberg and the social network crew rise (or fall).
Not since Google’s initial public offering (IPO) has a share sale been as closely watched. It’s Super Bowl for social media: every commentator in the land has an opinion on whether the firm is really worth that sort of cash, and is lining up to share it.
At $104bn, Facebook is being valued at more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs. Last year Facebook had revenues of $3.7bn. Goldman’s were 10 times that.
But this is a company with massive potential. Facebook will have more than a billion people logging in to its service this year – that’s more than three times the populations of the US – and it hasn’t got started in China. Nearly 400 million people log on six days a week. In the first three months of this year those people “liked” or commented on Facebook items 3.2bn times a day.
Google added a verb to the lexicon; Facebook redefined “friend” and “like”. Now Zuckerberg has to find a way to make his social network live up to its massive promise.
8.30am ET/1.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq stock market at 9.30am as he kicks off a share sale that will value the company at $104bn.
We’ll be live blogging the day’s events here in New York, and you can see how the fortunes of Zuckerberg and the social network crew rise (or fall).
Not since Google’s initial public offering (IPO) has a share sale been as closely watched. It’s Super Bowl for social media: every commentator in the land has an opinion on whether the firm is really worth that sort of cash, and is lining up to share it.
At $104bn, Facebook is being valued at more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs. Last year Facebook had revenues of $3.7bn. Goldman’s were 10 times that.
But this is a company with massive potential. Facebook will have more than a billion people logging in to its service this year – that’s more than three times the populations of the US – and it hasn’t got started in China. Nearly 400 million people log on six days a week. In the first three months of this year those people “liked” or commented on Facebook items 3.2bn times a day.
Google added a verb to the lexicon; Facebook redefined “friend” and “like”. Now Zuckerberg has to find a way to make his social network live up to its massive promise.
Legal LOLs as the LJ and QC turn MCs, plus three-year-old turns Dave Grohl in our rundown of the top online clips
It’s been a dramatic few weeks at the Leveson inquiry into press standards, with evidence from Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. The Poke website has mashed those appearances into a hip-hop extravaganza that also stars Sienna Miller, Kelvin MacKenzie, Steve Coogan and more. Most have their voices auto-tuned almost beyond recognition – although James Murdoch sounds surprisingly unchanged. Let’s hope Leveson himself doesn’t watch it and decide it’s time to clamp down on the intermet.
There’s more music this week as the web marks the sad death of US disco diva Donna Summer, with both slowie Last Dance and Giorgio Moroder masterpiece I Feel Love popping up in our chart.
By the way, if you’re wondering why an ancient Mr T rap about his mom and a touching tribute from Barack Obama appear this week, it’s because it was Mother’s Day in the US on Sunday.
Finally, there’s a couple on a car journey playing what looks at first like a cruel trick on their three-year-old by whacking on Nirvana at full volume. The kid’s reaction is a surprise. But is it all a setup? You decide…
Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and chopped around by Dugald.
1 Leveson: the Musical
Cameron should watch this on his mobile – or is he too busy texting?
2 How to wake up a kid – (Breed – Nirvana)
Drumming up a lot of plays – but is it a fake?
3 Mr. T Treat your mother right
Respect your mom, fool!
4 FAMILY GUY – Ultimate Chicken Fight-Tacular Preview from “Internal Affairs”
All-action teaser for the new Family Guy episode
5 asdfmovie5
Animated extravaganza – look out for the lama
6 DONNA SUMMER – LAST DANCE
Last tune in the great disco in the sky
7 Happy Mother’s Day
Obama hails the many women in his life
8 I Feel Love – Donna Summer
Truly hot stuff
9 True Blood Season 5: Trailer #1
Vampire drama bites back
10 Political Animals- first look, Sig. Weaver, Ciaran Hinds
Sigourney Weaver gets beastly in new US polittical drama
Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 1000 on 18 May 2012. The Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately 2m blogs, as well as Facebook and Twitter.
Tom Midlane is covering the north’s huge festival of ideas for the Guardian Northerner. He’s halfway through – and reeling with mind-expanding notions, new technology and a Buddhist urban meditation app
A mecca for creatives, media professionals and tech-geeks, FutureEverything has ballooned from modest origins into an internationally-acclaimed festival of ideas to rank alongside the likes of TEDx and SXSW. This year’s conference focuses on mass experience and participatory culture, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Mass Observation movement.
The twitterati are out in force at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, and it’s nice to be at a conference where you don’t feel self-conscious tapping on your laptop, since at least half the audience is swiping away on their iPads or feverishly tweeting their thoughts.
The breakfast session begins with a presentation by Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the urban meditation app Buddhify. Having first explored Buddhist practice when working in Manchester, Gunatillake is a firm believer in the idea that Buddhism is compatible with city living. This is Buddhism as filtered through modern marketing, with the jargon to boot – there’s lots of talk of Buddhism as an “industry of awakening” and an “innovation tradition”, as well as a desire to tackle Buddhism’s “pathological” attitude to money.
Gunatillake is an engaging performer though, casting Buddhism as “a punk movement of spiritual practitioners”, with Buddha as a proto-scientist using “inner technologies” to explore the nature of human experience and the mechanics of suffering. He’s particularly interesting in charting the migration of Buddhist practice, from austere and scholarly south-Asian Buddhism, moving east through China, Korea and Japan (zen), and on to Tibet. The hippies then brought Buddhism to the baby-boomers and creating a “western meditative tradition”.
He brings the timeline up-to-date with the birth of the “hipster meditator”, a postmodern Buddhist influenced by all three Buddhist traditions, as well as the science on the neurological effect of meditation and consumerism. As Gunatillake puts it:
It’s not about looking to the East, to the mountaintop in India or the zen garden in Japan or a monastery in Burma, it’s about making it work here.
And there’s plenty of evidence to show there are people doing exactly that, with groups like buddhistgeeks, an online community dedicated to modern Buddhist practitioners, and the #OMCru (that’s Online Meditation Crew for the uninitiated, a group who encourage meditation through Twitter) and Gunatillake’s own Buddhify app (tagline: “Modern meditation. To go.”) It’s even spreading to the corporate sector, with Google encouraging their employees to read Search Inside Yourself in a bid to improve their wellbeing and productivity.
There’s an interesting panel discussion on the relevance and future of Mass Observation, hosted by Fiona Courage, Special Collections Librarian & Mass Observation Archive Curator at University of Sussex. There’s a flurry of debate over the worth of social media as a historical archive – technology writer Bill Thompson claims Twitter and Facebook are self-aggrandising mediums, whereas the original Mass Observation came from a sense of public-spiritedness.
Nevertheless, Campbell tells us that he has saved his texts of the late 1990s into a database, goading us:
When the history of the text message is written, it’ll be me, because you’ve all deleted them!
Pauline McAdam, senior broadcast journalist for BBC Radio Merseyside, raises gasps of horror from the technophile audience when she describes social media as “cave painting but digital”, lacking the magic of archives, before suggesting: “Just shut up and have a cup of tea!”
Next up is Moritz Stefaner, a data visualisation expert with a very Keatsian focus (he styles himself as a “Truth and beauty operator”). Entitled Weltbilder (German for “world views”), Stefaner’s talk looks at how data visualisation helps us live in a complex world, giving us a birds-eye perspective on all kinds of worlds: finance, knowledge, relationships.
Some of his data works are stunning – beautiful tendrils sculpted from the data in Wikipedia page deletion discussions (including one on “Biscuits and human sexuality”). Stefaner talks of “the tension between order and chaos” and cites a natural correlation between the elegant solution in mathematics and beauty, quoting inventor Buckminster Fuller approvingly:
When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I’m finished, if it’s not beautiful, I know it’s wrong.
As well as discussing his work on the OECD Better Life Index, the Max Planck institute and a mail-order museli company, he gives us a peek of Emoto – an attempt to visualise in real-time the global emotional response as medals are lost and won at the London 2012 Olympics using all the social media data.
There’s a real diversity to the presentations at FutureEverything this year. There’s the BBC on their staggering quantity of digital coverage planned for London 2012, and a presentation from Adrian Hon, the brains behind Zombies, Run – a zombie-themed running app which features stories penned by Orange prizewinning novelist Naomi Alderman. He also shares the irresistible fact that apparently zombies tend to become more popular during socioeconomic downturns. Elsewhere composer Andrea Molino discusses Three Mile Island, his multimedia opera based on the work of an Austrian meteorologist who analysed the wind data after a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979.
There’s only so much innovation you can take in one day though, which perhaps explains the surprisingly small audience for Richard Ayers, Head of Digital at Manchester City FC, who’s here to talk about tribalism in football. The first shock is that he’s not actually a big football fan. Ayers discusses the volley of abuse he received after an ill-advised “Bluffer’s guide to being a City fan” was posted on the official City website. I also keep particularly quiet when he mentioned receiving a savaging from the Guardian‘s very own Scott Murray.
Ayers is persuasive in discussing modern football’s need for endless expansion because the financials are so cock-eyed, with clubs spending recklessly on transfer fees and wages. I also loved his discussion of football clubs as having ‘characters’ – Arsenal are, apparently, a starchy gent, while City are “a mysterious beauty who ensnared many lovers”. After last Sunday’s antics at Eastlands, I think there’s plenty of Mancunians in sky-blue who would agree.
Tom Midlane is a freelance journalist based in the north-west. He has written for Leeds Guide and DeHavilland, the parliamentary monitoring service, and is a regular contributor to Manchester-based news site Mancunian Matters. His blog is here and you can also contact him on Twitter @goldenlatrine
Plus smartphone installed base, more on Android fragmentation, web intents?, and more
A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, because apps are the future. Wait! Apps are doomed because HTML5 is the future. I see something almost every day saying one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.
Keep this in mind for a little lower down. Read Bray’s post first, though.
One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else’s permission – but up until now that hasn’t applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging W3C specification inspired by Android’s Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.
Here are some slides that explain the main concepts from a pervious talk.
Fabulous idea. Android Intents is a great concept.
France’s data protection watchdog has set up a meeting with Google to closely examine its controversial privacy policy.
The search giant consolidated 60 privacy policies into one single agreement in March. The EU expressed concern over the legality and impact of the change.
France’s information commission, the CNIL, said it was not yet “totally satisfied” with Google’s explanation of the amendments.
Evans works for Enders Analysis. Here’s a little bit from his latest report:
Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:
Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.
More to come today.
Roughly a year ago when we summarized the state of smartphones at the Appnation conference, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. had smartphones. Today, one in two mobile subscribers has a smartphone and that figure is moving steadily upwards.
By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web — about 10% more than last year.
Worth reading today, of all days.
Ahonen isn’t very happy about what’s happening to Nokia. (He used to work there.) Also has calculations for smartphone installed base by platform, which puts Android top at 328m, then Symbian (299m) and iOS (178m) from a total of just over 1bn.
And, that leads us to the number one issue cited as a problem: developer support. Developers claim the platform is too troublesome because of device specific variations, but the reality is that it’s just that developers don’t think they make enough money to justify that work. This could be because of the single listing and therefore single purchase of apps [for both phones and tablets], but it’s really just a vicious cycle where developers don’t put enough support into the ecosystem, and so the ecosystem doesn’t support developers.
Isn’t it more likely that the developers evaluate the opportunity cost of each platform, and cut their cloth accordingly? If they don’t find it worthwhile to test, say, Temple Run on 1,000+ devices, that’s not their “fault”. It’s their rational judgement of investment return. If you can’t make money, you won’t spend money. It’s the classic bootstrap challenge of every ecosystem. (Thanks @beardyweirdy666 for the link.)
You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on Pinboard. To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with @gdntech on the free Delicious service.
On LinkedIn’s blog today is a post about the top 10 most sought-after engineering startups in Silicon Valley. And no, Facebook and Google didn’t make the cut because this was a list of companies with fewer than 500 employees. (Pinterest was number 6.) To compile the list, the company looked at nearly a quarter million engineer profiles on its service and tracked where they were searching for jobs.
Four of the top 10 spots go to companies that are heavily involved in Big Data: Cloudera, Palantir Technologies, Hortonworks and Splunk. Two others, Arista Networks and Nicira, are doing new things with networking and virtualization infrastructure. And then there are Box.net, Pinterest and Square, the mobile payment processor. Most of the companies are clustered in the Santa Clara area, with a few located in San Francisco.
LinkedIn did its analysis by tracking people “visiting profiles of employees looking for common connections, checking out LinkedIn Company Pages, and following companies using the LinkedIn Company Follow button.” There aren’t many surprises here; these are some of the hottest, best-known new companies in the Valley. If you’re trying to hire engineers for your own startup, these companies are your competition. And of course, LinkedIn is looking to hire data scientists of its own.
On the eve of Facebook’s initial public offering, and two weeks after writing a five-part series that tried to answer the question of whether we’re in a social media bubble, the most striking thing to me is how divided people are on whether these astronomical values and this unlikely craze can be sustained.
Hundreds of tweets, comments, emails and more than the occasional accusations of being both a “Facebook naysayer” and “Facebook apologist” all at once leave me no closer to answering that question. But they do leave me with one important conclusion, no matter where you stand on the notion that we may or may not be in a social media bubble: We need Facebook’s IPO to work. We need what may be one of the biggest companies and biggest phenomena of our lifetimes to really be everything that those who don’t believe in the social media bubble say it is.
As someone who remembers the dot-com bubble (I was writing for Dow Jones at the time and got a front-row seat to the “irrational exuberance” Alan Greenspan warned us about) and believes we are overvaluing companies like Facebook, that’s hard for me to admit. But getting my pride dinged up would be worth not living through the catastrophe of what happens if Facebook’s IPO doesn’t live up to expectations.
This is what I wrote on the day Facebook filed its IPO, and this is what I still believe:
“Last year was marked by a string of disappointing IPOs in the social media sector – disappointments, in large part because those interests didn’t align as well as company executives had hoped… A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.”
If Facebook raises $16 billion, as it hopes to tomorrow, it doesn’t just unleash a new string of Mark Zuckerbergs; it also unleashes a new string of Kevin Systroms who have great ideas, but no clear-cut way to monetize them. Zuckerberg may have been motivated by fear when he paid $1 billion for Instagram, but he bought it. And $16 billion can buy an awful lot of good ideas and fuel even more dreams.
But if it fails, naysayers like me get to say “We told you so,” and not much else. A chilling effect on the IPO market means less money flows from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Fool us once, shame on the dot-commers who duped us more than a decade ago. Fool us twice, shame on everyone.
I’m going to leave predictions about where Facebook’s stock price will close on Friday to the sites that cater to investors. ReadWriteWeb is a site for people who use tech, and if we get too caught up in revenue projections, P/E ratios and and consensus analyst estimates, we miss what is important.
What is important is that if Zuckerberg remains true to his promise to not be driven by quarterly reports and share price, this ends up being a good thing for users. Yes, we will continue to complain about Facebook’s all-invasive service terms, and we will continue to hate on the world’s biggest social network. But most of us will continue to use it, if only because the people we need to keep in touch with need to use it.
By its sheer size, Facebook can generate enough revenue to keep moving forward as it has for the past eight years. As one analyst told me yesterday, if each of Facebook’s 500 million daily active users saw just one ad in their news feed each day, and Facebook collected two cents for that ad, the company would generate $3.5 billion in annual revenues.
Facebook can certainly do a lot more, and it hasn’t even tapped mobile revenue streams yet. Its growth may not live up to the pace that Wall Street investors want, but Zuckerberg has insisted he’s not going to be a slave to showing revenue growth each quarter. If he keeps that promise (and if the corporate structure he has selected gives him the power to keep it), users will, at the very least, not have to worry about shareholders or a board of directors messing up Facebook.
We may very well continue to bristle with every tweak and change Facebook makes to its design, and we may grow angry about privacy policy changes that serve to further erode privacy.
But at least we’ll know who to blame.
Social bookmarking site Pinterest has landed a $100 million round of funding on a $1.5 billion valuation today. The investment was led by Japanese e-commerce platform Rakuten. By taking money from a foreign technology company, Pinterest bucks the trend of U.S. startups clamoring for money from U.S. venture capital firms. Rakuten’s funding and partnership can help Pinterest grow in both domestic and foreign markets while increasing the site’s influence in e-commerce and online shopping.
Pinterest, which has grown quickly in 2012 to be the third largest U.S. social network behind Facebook and Twitter, is a service where people can “pin” photos and interesting Web artifacts to a digital board to share with their friends and online community. It is known to be popular among women on the Web and has gained several celebrity users, including Reese Witherspoon.
Rakuten is one of the top Internet companies in the world. Its flagship website is Rakuten Ichiba, an e-commerce platform that is the largest in Japan and one of the largest in the world. It owns various worldwide properties including Buy.com in the U.S., Priceminister in France, Ikeda in Brazil and Play.com in the United Kingdom.
“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world,” said Rakuten CEO Hiroshi “Micky” Mikitani in a press release.
“Initially, the partnership with Rakuten will help support Pinterest’s global expansion,” said Neel Grover, CEO of Rakuten’s Buy.com. “Rakuten’s global investment in e-commerce is illustrated by a presence in 17 countries and regions through 13 group companies. Longer term, there are a number of opportunities for meaningful partnerships between the two companies, as there are tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and our model for e-commerce where both retailers and consumers are more social, interactive and empowered.”
According to the technology blog AllThingsD, Pinterest CEO and cofounder Ben Silbermann was looking for a “global strategic investor” that can help the company grow internationally and help stave off foreign clones. There were no U.S. institutional investors and, “that is the way Pinterest’s quirky leadership wanted it,” according to AllThingsD.
Pinterest had raised about $37.5 million through its Series A, Series B and angel rounds before the large investment from Rakuten. Its previous funding came from large VC firms and individual investors such as Jack Abraham, Ron Conway, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital.
The future of Pinterest is likely tied to e-commerce in one fashion or another. With its high percentage of women users and focus on the “interest graph,” Pinterest is in the perfect position to become a recommendation engine for both online and offline purchases. In this regard, Rakuten is a perfect partner for Pinterest in that the social bookmarking site can help drive interest in Rakuten’s digital e-commerce properties.
“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal,” said Silbermann in a press release.
Today, Robyn and Jon were joined by the newest member of the ReadWriteWeb team, Taylor Hatmaker! The topic was games, specifically vast, immersive, whole-world adventures like Minecraft and the new Diablo III. Both Robyn and Taylor are accomplished gamers, and Jon is not, but he pretended to know what he was talking about.
Here are links to the posts and topics we talked about:
We hang out at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Thursdays, and you’re welcome to join us or just watch live. (Here’s the time for every time zone.) Make sure to follow +ReadWriteWeb on Google+ if you want to watch or participate. We’d love to have you!
Editor’s note: In the Summer 2012 issue of SAY Magazine, Dan Frommer chronicles the history of tech blogging. For the rest of this week, Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003, will be looking back on the early days.
Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is described as “studly” in Dan Frommer’s article Rise of the Tech Bandits. Pete is undoubtedly a very handsome man, but the funny thing is for a long time nobody knew what he looked like. He was jokingly referred to as the “Loch Ness Blogger,” because he was from Scotland and hadn’t been spotted in Silicon Valley. After Mashable started in July 2005, Pete and I swapped some emails. However, it wasn’t until January 2008 that I finally put a face to the Mashable brand. That’s when we met for coffee at the now-defunct Borders cafe on Post Street, San Francisco. Because he’d been so under the radar, I was expecting to meet a shy, awkward young man. He turned out to be a tall, skinny, overly caffeinated chatterbox.
An excerpt from Dan Frommer’s Rise of the Tech Bandits:
But it took a while for these publications about computers and the Internet to actually publish meaningful websites. (CNET, now owned by CBS, is one of the rare Web 1.0 media survivors.) In many cases, it was because parent companies split off the Web divisions as separate teams or even different companies.
“When I started out at MacUser, there was an Internet but nobody cared about it,” says Jason Snell, senior vice president and editorial director in charge of IDG’s Macworld and PCWorld titles. “Not from a coverage standpoint or us publishing on it. Which I found crazy. I was actually told by someone, ‘Our future is on CompuServe.’ But even there, there was a completely separate online division, and the print magazine had almost nothing to do with the online presence.”
Both Pete Cashmore and I started out as outsiders; he is from Scotland and I’m from New Zealand. I remember that cold January evening at Borders in 2008, talking with Pete about our shared interest in moving to Silicon Valley. I had some practical issues doing that at the time, but Pete was a 22-year-old, single man and seemingly had little to stop him. So I advised him to do it. Sure enough, four months later he emailed to say he had taken my advice and shifted to San Francisco. Nowadays he lives in New York.
Going to America turned out to be a great move. With his almost airbrushed looks and the kind of work ethic that makes a person skinny, Pete became a social media star. He is – literally – the face of Mashable. His stubbled visage still graces the Twitter profile for Mashable. A lot of tech blogs started out with their founder’s face on Twitter, but almost all of them switched to a branded logo by the end of 2010. But then, most of us don’t have the chiseled features of Pete Cashmore.
Mashable is a very popular site now, but it employed some dubious tactics in the early days in order to get traction. Artificially boosting its Feedburner subscriber numbers and re-purposing the content of other blogs helped lift Mashable into popularity. However, once Mashable got that initial popularity, it went from strength to strength, and Pete Cashmore proved himself to be a smart, fast-moving businessman. For example, Mashable was the first tech blog to put the spotlight on social networking, which led to it becoming a go-to source for news about MySpace, YouTube and more.
The last time I caught up with Pete was in New York last year. I met him for a drink at a Park Avenue bar near his Manhattan apartment in June. With bleached blond, wavy hair and a stylish white linen shirt, Pete Cashmore looked every bit the social media success story. Still only 25 at the time, he’d come a long way from being the anonymous blogger from Scotland.
Today’s theme is star power. We Earthlings think we’re pretty powerful. Sometimes it’s healthy to look around the galaxy (or at other nearby galaxies) and remember that we’re just riding the waves of vastly more powerful forces.
Let’s hope our own star stays calm for the time being.
Astronomers have recently observed superflares on sun-like stars, more than a million times more powerful than the ones our Sun spits out.
Here’s video of an intense solar flare our Sun shot at us today.
In just three days, the Sun will be eclipsed by the moon, and the west coast of the U.S. will have a great view.
Our solar system must be special. It might be harboring whole planets we still haven’t discovered.
But in the grand scheme of things, we’re still a speck. The most powerful black holes can shut down nearby star formation before solar systems even get a chance to develop.
We’re luckier than we realize. Look what happens when galaxies eat each other.
Image via Shutterstock.
Past entries from Read/Write Daily
Usually one good way to resolve a dispute among many parties is to have a mediator help everyone come to an agreement on something. But the disparity between the way governments work and the way the Internet operates has only widened in the last year. Now, the Internet Society’s lead policy spokesperson says that governments won’t be able to solve issues like piracy as long as they come at them from a standpoint of control.
Intellectual property theft, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has frequently declared, is theft. His theme would appear to indicate that, if we treated the issue plainly, the solution would be a plain and simple one. The problem is, plain and simple solutions applied to the Internet often have complex consequences and uncontrollable repercussions.
Newly reinstalled Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed what he perceives to be a plain and simple solution to a host of Internet problems, including piracy and freedom of accessibility. Essentially, Mr. Putin would redeclare the Internet a telecommunications medium like any other, and reassign its governance to the International Telecommunications Union – the multi-country standards and policy department of the United Nations, and an agency in existence since the 19th century. Putin’s response to critics thus far sounds a little like that of a not-so-distant predecessor: If you think you have a better solution, put it out there and let’s see if it works or if we will bury it.
One person whose job it is to respond to that specific challenge, is Sally Wentworth. Having served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President George W. Bush, and before that, eight years crafting Internet policy for the State Dept., perhaps no other person knows more about balancing the conflicting interests of the Internet’s multiple stakeholders, both in governments and the private sector. Now Wentworth serves as Senior Manager for Public Policy at the Internet Society (ISOC), the coalition of guidance and governance bodies that collectively – if often unofficially – determine how the Internet works and what it stands for. In a candid and exclusive interview with ReadWriteWeb, part 1 of which appears today, she states that the “plain and simple” solutions that governments like Russia and the U.S. have proposed thus far, are inadequate and incompatible with the way the Internet works. But she adds that whatever means the Internet develops to resolve such issues in the future may require us to accept some measure of compromise – perhaps even enough to bring a smile to a certain Russian president who never smiles.
Sally Wentworth, Regional Bureau Director for Public Policy, ISOC: I think we have never said that governments don’t have a role. Certainly, governments and policy makers could be considered stakeholders as part of a multi-stakeholder process. One challenge of the approach that Mr. Putin is suggesting is that the ITU itself is not a multi-stakeholder forum. There is no provision within the ITU context, for example, for civil society… for groups other than the telecom industry and member states. Perhaps there’s a long way to go before we get to true multi-stakeholder, but I think clearly that those impacted by the decisions need to have an opportunity to be heard and be part of the discussion, have access to the information, and have a voice. That has not been the case in the proposal that Mr. Putin is putting forward.
Scott Fulton, ReadWriteWeb: Well, certainly from the vantage point of someone who sees the business world from a fairly Russian perspective, it’s easier to imagine the telecommunications industry having closer ties with the government – almost the same way that the Postal Service has ties with our government… So it would seem that, if you’re going to involve the telecommunications industry, at some point you’re going to have to deal with government interests as they relate to the telecom industry in those countries, wouldn’t you agree?
SW: Well, I think there are two different questions there. In one dimension, certainly government policy makers have a role in the Internet policy space. They have obligations to their people to protect consumers, conduct law enforcement, protect free speech… But obviously, the telecom industry, throughout much of the world, has been privatized. We see this trend having emerged for many years, especially since the ITRs [International Telecommunication Regulations] were renegotiated. [In Russia], there is a close tie between the telecom industry and the government. I think that’s a true statement. That isn’t true throughout the world. In the Internet industry, it is almost exclusively privatized. So there are a lot of stakeholders, there’s a lot of diversity. And that has to be preserved in any discussion about Internet public policy.
RWW: I know that one of the metaphors Mr. Putin likes to use is that, as we emerge into a more virtual world, our rules about law and enforcement don’t really need to shift all that much. Just as we would expect to have law enforcement policing us in the real world, we should have a similar expectation about law enforcement policing us in the virtual world. He would go so far as to say, just as you’d expect a cop to pull you over on a highway, surely you’d expect law enforcement to be able to reroute you around something that’s wrong on the Internet superhighway. How would you respond to that, knowing that you and the Internet Society have to both represent the interests of major stakeholders like Russia, as well as those governments and private interests that would argue the converse, that the best Internet is a free Internet where no rerouting takes place at all?
- Sally Wentworth, Regional Bureau Director for Public Policy, The Internet Society
SW: I think Mr. Putin is suggesting that the Internet operates similarly or precisely like any other physical infrastructure – that traffic goes from point A to point B, and that somehow government as a gatekeeper would be both effective and efficient. The Internet architecture, when you step back and look at it, doesn’t work that way. Just from an architectural perspective, that would be inconsistent with basic fundamentals of routing, of moving traffic around a global network of networks. Clearly, then, we have the added concern with that approach, which is, what would that mean for the global Internet as a resource for global communications, for the free flow of information, for the ability of people to recognize their human rights as set forth in the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights – the ability to impart information regardless of frontiers?
I think Mr. Putin’s approach, at least as you’ve described it, would have real problems from an architectural perspective and the technical layer of the Internet, as well as from [the vantage point of] what the Internet really is: a medium for global communication.
RWW: We obviously had this same argument take place in the United States, at least to some extent, with respect to the SOPA legislation that failed Congress. Certainly, legislators felt they had an obligation as representatives of the public trust to be able to reroute traffic around anything that was either a known perpetrator or a suspected one – the argument against that being, the Internet architecture doesn’t work that way. So maybe we dodged that bullet. Then again, the problem does remain that we do have a tremendous amount of intellectual property theft taking place online, from relatively few sources. And there are congressmen who would ask, if you can’t just put a roadblock in front of them, what can we do?
SW: Again, I think we have to go back to the concept that the Internet is a global network of networks. It is not an architecture that confines itself to traditional, national boundaries. Part of the challenge, of course, with the SOPA legislation – and there were a host of challenges with it – was that the mechanism they were trying to put in place (essentially, fiddling with the DNS infrastructure) could not have achieved the goals they were trying to achieve. But it also was inconsistent with this notion that the Internet really is global. So by tinkering around the edges of something like this, you really wouldn’t be addressing the problem that you were trying to solve.
In an area like the topic of downloading of illegal content, I think one of the real solutions to that is in the area of international cooperation. We’re not going to solve this on a country-by-country level. We really do need to come together, both for the technical community, industries – there’s a wide swath of industries that have interest here – and also with law enforcement, to find ways to address this challenge without undermining the basic principles that make the Internet work.
RWW: I think most countries would agree that trafficking in illicit content is illegal under somebody’s national law. And I suppose the problem you’re pointing out here is that national law cannot apply, in a broad sense, to the Internet, which is a global entity. If that’s the case, if there really can be no “global law” that can effectively say, “If you are doing this trans-nationally, you are in violation of something,” then is there not some type of treaty that needs to be negotiated internationally? And shouldn’t that treaty look something like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?
SW: I think the challenge there is, if you’re looking at a technology like the Internet, it’s constantly evolving. There are new challenges, new opportunities, new innovations. But it is a technology that doesn’t stand still. So that kind of treaty-like approach tends to suggest that you can take a snapshot and apply the static approach, which is what a treaty is – a static approach to a constantly evolving technology. And I think that isn’t going to ultimately solve the problem.
Having said that, there is clearly room for cooperation, and actually, it’s happening to a considerable extent, between law enforcement agencies across the world. There is considerable technical industry-led collaboration that’s happening in real-time, to address real problems as they arise. So the challenge now is illegal downloading. Perhaps we’ll see another challenge in two years, and it’s hard to think that a treaty that’s a snapshot of a moment in time is going to allow that kind of evolution, in innovation and also in the problem-solving that needs to happen.
- Sally Wentworth
RWW: So in a sense, there’s kind of a technical fallacy for treaties to be able to apply to any type of evolving system of telecommunications, then. If I understand the way you’re explaining it to me, a treaty can only explain the current state of affairs – you used the term “snapshot.” And I know you’ve had experience at the State Dept., so you would have first-hand knowledge of how such snapshots are built. Would we need perhaps a kind of snapshot as an interim method, something that could take us through the next five years, to give a majority of law-abiding nations, and nations that respect each other’s laws and treaties, some time to hammer out more of a collective agreement on how they can better police each other’s citizens with respect to the use of each other’s intellectual property, in a way that’s more evolving and more capable of adapting to new modes of operation than ACTA?
SW: In some ways, we have that in the U.N. Declaration of Principles that came out of WCIT [World Conference on International Telecommunications], Phase I (2003) and Phase II (2005). If you go back and look at those, you’ll see a recognition of both the opportunities of the information society, but also some of the public policy challenges that were beginning to emerge then, but are still emerging today – intellectual property, the need to preserve cultural diversity, the need to protect freedom of expression, the need to address the integration of cybersecurity. You will see in there a framework for international cooperation with regard to these things, for both the opportunities and challenges.
That, in some ways, is perhaps what you’re talking about. That took a tremendous amount of time and energy to negotiate, as you might recall. The question is, do we need to do that all over again, or do we need to move forward with the actual cooperation? Because countries have agreed to do that. I’m just not sure that a treaty is the best mechanism to accomplish that end.
RWW: You’ve argued that there are proposals going on [emerging from] WCIT that would place further restrictions on Internet cooperation, and operations between Internet stakeholders. Could you explain those a bit, and perhaps distinguish them from the act of negotiating a treaty?
SW: If you step back and look at what the International Telecommunications Regulations are, dating back to 1988 and, in fact, much further than that, it’s a framework through which countries could exchange telecommunications traffic across borders. If you think of where we were in 1988, they are – as you would expect – a snapshot of the era. This is an era where you have traditional telecom operators – in many cases, government owned; in some cases, government operated. We didn’t have independent regulatory agencies, relatively little competition in terms of end user services and devices. But since then, obviously global communications has shifted dramatically, and countries, quite naturally, are trying to see how they can update the treaty.
One of the problems that has emerged is, there’s the perspective on the part of some countries that the Internet is simply another telecommunications service, and can therefore be regulated as such – that it can be regulated in the same way, and with much the same rules, as the telecommunications networks of 1988, in terms of numbering, routing, settlements of business relationships, security provisioning, etc. So when we look at some of the proposals that have come forward by governments, what we see is this tendency to say, “This is how we regulated point-to-point communications in the telecommunications era of 1988; we should just simply expand that approach to include the Internet.”
We see some proposals, for example, to simply apply the accounting rate regimes that have been governing the telecommunications space, to IP traffic. We’ve seen proposals to regulate routing of traffic for purposes of directing “security and fraud.” There are a host of proposals about numbering, which may or may not include IP addressing. There’s actually some 200 pages of proposals, which is quite a heavy read. But this is what has come forward from member states.
An alternative approach to this could be to say, what has worked in the area of telecommunications since 1988?… The things that have been effective have clearly been things like competition. We’ve seen privatization of services, tremendous innovations with respect to the role of regulators. We have independent regulators today; we have regulatory transparency. These are concepts that are not reflected in the treaty. So we’re trying to make sure we can put forward the vision of perhaps what could be included in a treaty. We’re also stating some fairly strong concerns about some of the proposals that have come forward already.
Whenever a new Web trend comes along, there are people who ask, “What is the point of this?” If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our What Is the Point of… series, we’ll explain it to you.
This week, we’re asking, What is the point of #hashtags?
The hashtag was invented as a label for groups and topics in IRC chat. By adding the ‘#’ sign before a string of text, users made that string easy to find in a search. But the hashtag went mainstream thanks to Twitter.
In 2007, as Twitter was just picking up steam, Chris Messina - an open-source software champion currently at Google – tweeted what is believed to be the original proposal that Twitter users adopt hashtags as well.
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007
Related: The First Hashtag Ever Tweeted on Twitter – They Sure Have Come a Long Way
It caught on. For a long time, it was just a hack; hashtags were simply plain text in a tweet that could show up easily in search. Twitter’s early-adopter crowd used hashtags like “#barcamp” (for BarCamp open-source conferences) or “#sxsw” (for South by Southwest) to filter their messages. Nate Ritter’s #sandiegofire hashtag became one of the first news topics to go viral during the October 2007 California wildfires.
By July 2009, Twitter had realized what an ingenious trick its users had invented, so it began to turn hashtags into links. When a Twitter user clicks on a hashtag, it goes to the stream of tweets containing that hashtag. You can also find hashtags using search. This is how you find things on Twitter by topic.
Related: How To #FollowFriday
In 2010, Twitter introduced Trending Topics, so Twitter users could see what the world was talking about right this minute. Hashtags that became popular quickly would shoot to the top.
Then something terrible happened.
Trending topics became completely full of stupid. As Twitter’s user base climbed into the hundreds of millions, the kinds of hashtags that won out were quite unlike the newsworthy or conference-centered ones that early adopters used. A trending hashtag in the past year or two was more likely to be something like “#ThingsISed2UrMamaLastNight” or “#ReplaceMovieTitlesWithPoop.”
But it’s getting better. As Twitter turns its new Discover section into its business, it has begun to do much more diligent filtering of trending topics, as well as better localization of the topics it shows to you. So hashtags are becoming useful for finding out what’s going on.
Joke hashtags can be fun when they’re popular, but remember that a hashtag is a search. They’re meant to label a topic or filter a conversation. In some Twitter apps, you can mute a hashtag to avoid seeing chatter you don’t want to see. So for instance, if you hate when people live-tweet sports games, you could mute #sports, so you wouldn’t have to see tweets containing that tag.
The problem is, everyone would have to include #sports in their sports tweets for that to work. If you’re tweeting a lot about a topic, you should probably include a good, general hashtag. That way, your followers can mute it if they don’t care, or they can explore it if they do.
(And if I may include a personal plea: PLEASE tag your sports tweets with #sports.)
Lead image via Shutterstock.
The Associated Press reports that millions of people are resisting pressure to sign up for Facebook, and a new study suggests that 93% of users “hate” the relatively new Timeline – with some even threatening to quit.
But before you call your broker and cancel your order in tomorrow’s initial public offering of Facebook shares, consider this: It doesn’t matter.
The slowing growth of user numbers and the fact that some people are holding out should not be surprising. At some point, Facebook will likely saturate all of the markets it enters, and without opening new markets like China, it will not see the rapid growth that marked its first eight years. And even as growth slows, Facebook still has about half of all Internet users signed up, and accounted for nearly one in 10 of all U.S. Internet visits last month.
The Timeline study by Attensity is more troubling at first glance. The company used its text analytics software to scan 138,572 Facebook posts about Timeline and found that 93% of them contained negative sentiment, ranging from “Timeline complaints” to the seemingly more damning “switch to another social network” and “will delete Facebook.”
Attensity did not give specific dates of when the study was conducted, saying only that the comments were analyzed over a six-week period that included March 31, when brands were required to switch over to Timeline. The study results also didn’t indicate whether users made good on their threats to leave Facebook.
That’s a crucial bit of information, because in the past Facebook has waited out initial criticism of changes; users eventually adopt and even embrace them. Indeed, when Facebook first started rolling out Timeline last fall, many complained about the loss of features that had been the target of complaints when Facebook did a major redesign in December 2010.
And even if people do quit, chance are good they will come back; by one estimate, as many as two-thirds of people who deactivate their Facebook accounts eventually rejoin the service.
The Attensity study, the Associated Press article and, frankly, this post are all doing the same thing: Taking advantage of the big buzz around Facebook’s IPO. But everyone knows Facebook is big and will remain big for the foreseeable future. The key, and the only story that really matters at this point, is whether Facebook can find a way to change those big user numbers into big revenue numbers.
Outsourcing is pretty much de rigueur for modern startups looking to conserve capital. But making outsourcing work for your startup isn’t always easy. One of the first steps is figuring out where to outsource.
There are a lot of choices. The first major decision is geographical. Should you outsource locally, nationally or internationally?
My company, GrowBiz Media, has outsourced Web design and development, both internationally and locally. Believe me when I tell you each comes with its own set of pros and cons.
Here’s a quick overview:
Outsourcing Internationally
When most people think of outsourcing, they envision coders in Southeast Asia working into the wee hours of (our) night. Turns out that many factors can make global outsourcing more difficult and expensive than it appears to be at first glance.
Pros: Low cost is the primary reason most companies outsource overseas. The time difference can also be a plus: You can send your changes to your team at the end of your business day, and have the code ready when you wake up the next morning.
Cons: The old adage “you get what you pay for” often holds true. Managing people thousands of miles away is difficult at best, so when calculating costs, consider that you may need to pay someone to oversee your overseas contractors. Language or cultural barriers can add to the complexity, and different time zones can cause as many problems as they solve.
Outsourcing Nationally
Outsourcing IT within the U.S. is gaining steam. Often called rural sourcing or near-sourcing, the movement is driven partly by companies’ dissatisfaction with the quality of overseas workers and partly by a desire to bring jobs back to the U.S.
The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals named near-sourcing one of its top trends for 2012. In places like Georgia, North Carolina and Arkansas, skilled tech workers can be found for a fraction of what you’d pay in Silicon Valley or New York, according to Rural Sourcing Inc., which matches companies with workers in “second- and third-tier” cities nationwide.
Pros: Lack of cultural and language barriers make communicating with U.S. workers easier and more convenient. The time zone differential may be a slight benefit, depending on where your business and your contractors are located.
Cons: You’ll pay more for outsourcing within America than you would overseas, and if your outsourced team is across the country, meeting in person will still take time, effort and money. Be aware that some American contractors will subcontract some or all of your projects to overseas workers. This can be fine, particularly if they’re familiar with them and their work. But when this happened with one contractor we dealt with, the results were not positive.
Outsourcing Locally
After our negative experiences with outsourcing overseas, GrowBiz Media turned to a local Southern California business when it came time to rebuild our SmallBizDaily.com website.
Pros: Face time is the major advantage of working with a local company. While most of our communication still takes place by email and conference calls, when we undertake big projects or major changes, we can meet in person to brainstorm ideas and sketch out plans. Another advantage: If you do end up hiring full-time in the future, good contractors often turn into good employees.
Cons: By outsourcing to workers in your area, you’ll have to pay the going rate – which can wipe out most of the cost benefits. As with national contractors, some local firms may outsource all or part of your work overseas.
Key Questions
Since all three options come with pros and cons, how do you decide what’s best for your situation? Consider these issues:
Timeliness: Is this a rush project that simply can’t be late? If deadlines are essential, having the team accountable and close at hand could trump all other considerations.
Complexity: A simple project that doesn’t require much direction, has some “wiggle” time built into the schedule and has a bit of room for error may be most economically handled by an overseas team.
Personality: If you don’t have a problem with a more impersonal relationship with your team, overseas contractors could be fine for you. But if you’re a people person who needs face-to-face interaction, you may want to stick with local, or perhaps national, contractors.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Music just isn’t the same without a host of flashing colors to go with it, right? iHome, at least, seems to think so. Its first Glowtunes speaker tower, the new iP76, comes packed with LEDs in seven different hues that can fade, pulse or strobe as your playlist requires. The three-foot iP76 sports a dock for your iPhone or iPod and packs four speakers with Reson8 technology. There’s also Bluetooth for streaming from other devices. The iP76 will go on sale for $200 in July. Already dreaming about all the sonic light shows you’ll host? Jump past the break for some press info to tide you over.
Continue reading iHome iP76 LED color-changing speaker indulges your love for pretty colors
iHome iP76 LED color-changing speaker indulges your love for pretty colors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 18:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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VIA is planning to get some serious mileage out of its Eden X2 processor — in the most literal sense possible. It’s now producing the AMOS-3002, a Pico-ITX-sized PC intended for in-car infotainment and other situations where an embedded PC needs to have a little more juice for media tasks. The Eden X2 in question comes in a dual-core 1GHz flavor that’s completely fanless, but it’s fast enough to show 1080p video (when your car is parked, we hope) and can handle more intensive work like dual gigabit Ethernet jacks, optional 3G and even a 2.5-inch hard drive. That breadbox-sized shell can also take a lot of abuse, surviving temperatures between -4F and 140F as well as 50 Gs’ worth of shock. You’ll have to wait until your favorite car designer or digital sign maker uses the AMOS-3002 to see it in action, but until then, you can get the full details after the break.
VIA unveils fanless, Eden X2-packing AMOS-3002, promises tiny dual-core PC in your car originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 18:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
CSI: Waterloo? We’re not sure how compelling that spin-off would be (inexplicable popularity of the David Caruso-headlined Miami version aside). So, you’ll excuse us for scratching our collective tech head over this recently surfaced patent application filed by RIM in November of 2010. The claims of this bizarre USPTO doc describe an apparatus containing some form of a “display element” attached to a portable electronic device that would generate light on nearby objects, snap photographs and then display results indicating potential contamination. Sounds a lot like those UV wands forensics researchers use on crime scenes, non? Well, whatever it is Heins and co. may have brewing in their Canadian R&D labs, we just pray this isn’t BB 10′s killer feature. Hit up the source below to peruse the legalese for yourself.
RIM patent application shines a light on unseen filth, might make forensics mobile originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 17:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’ve received a boatload of tips that folks who have pre-ordered the EVO 4G LTE at Best Buy are now seeing a new release date of May 23rd. Does this mean Sprint’s flagship handset is getting close to leaving those dreaded customs halls? Here’s HTC’s take on the matter:
HTC is working closely with U.S. Customs to secure approval for shipments of the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE. We have not made any announcements about a new launch date and will provide an update on availability as soon as we can do so confidently.
While it’s quite possible Best Buy knows something we don’t, perhaps it’s best to take this new release date with a grain of salt. Let us know what you think in the comments and hit the break for a screenshot of an updated pre-order.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Continue reading Best Buy expects EVO 4G LTE to land May 23rd, HTC remains cautious
Best Buy expects EVO 4G LTE to land May 23rd, HTC remains cautious originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 17:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Last February, Apple came clean about its efforts to clean up the environment, detailing intentions to make its Maiden, NC data facility a greener place. That site, already home to one solar farm, is now set to host a second 20 megawatt photovoltaic array spanning 100 acres, a one-two power punch that’ll jointly generate 84 million kWh annually. Combined with the company’s in-development biofuel cell plant, scheduled for opening later this year, that theoretic yield should hit the 124 million kWh mark — an amount sufficient to power nearly 11,000 households — providing 60 percent of the center’s electric demands. Still, that’s not enough to adequately keep operations afloat, so for that very necessary, leftover 40 percent, the house that Jobs built plans to purchase similar clean energy from outside local sources. When all is finally up and running smoothly, the southern facility will earn the distinction of “most environmentally sound data center ever built.” Or, at least until another well-heeled competitor comes along to contest that title. Now that’s a friendly competition we can get behind.
Apple breaks ground on second solar farm for North Carolina data center originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 17:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The FCC has been making a big push towards freeing up the airwaves for medical uses, and it just took one of its biggest steps on that front by proposing to clear space for wireless body area networks. Agency officials want to let devices operate in the 2.36GHz to 2.4GHz space so that patients can stay at home or at least move freely, instead of being fenced in at the hospital or tethered to a bed by wires. Devices would still need the FDA’s green light, but they could both let patients go home sooner as well as open the door wider for preventative care. Voting on the proposal takes place May 24, which leaves our tech-minded hearts beating faster — and if the proposal takes effect, we’ll know just how much faster.
FCC wants to set aside wireless spectrum for medical body area devices, our hearts are literally aflutter originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 17:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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There’s a trend starting to emerge of judges wanting Apple to talk settlements with others rather than duke it out in the courtroom. Just two weeks after Apple and Samsung were steered towards talking about a potential deal, a Delaware court has ordered Apple and HTC to meet on August 28th in the hopes that they could shake hands and put an end to an increasingly hectic legal battle under the eyes of a mediating judge. Whether or not that happens is very much up in the air. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said he’s not a fan of lawsuits, but he hasn’t showed indications that he would take legal action off the table just yet. Likewise, HTC is no doubt eager to eliminate phone shipping delays stemming from Apple’s court wins, but the lack of immediate pressure and the hopes of winning countersuits might lead it to hold off. Still, if the court’s ideal vision of the world comes to pass, you could see HTC’s Cher Wang shopping in an Apple Store without staff giving her the evil eye.
[Image credit: mobile01]
Apple, HTC ordered by judge to sit down, try and make nice on August 28th originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 16:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
