All posts tagged ‘Facebook’
by Dan Kois, Staff Writer, New York Magazine
Aaron Sorkin, a man whose discomfort with the Internet goes way, way back to the days he got angry at the Television Without Pity message boards, is writing a movie about the founding of Facebook. Sorkin has created a Facebook group for “Aaron Sorkin & the Facebook Movie” on which Sorkin (or is it his assistant?) (or is it someone pretending to be his assistant?) writes: “I’ve just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented.”
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by Ben Kunz, Director of Strategic Planning, Mediassociates
Investors and marketers have been agog over the potential for Twitter–unlike other social media properties, such as Facebook and MySpace–to crack the code, finally, on wringing revenue from millions of users. But the optimists better brace for disappointment.
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by Clare Bates, Staff Writer, Daily Mail
Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social-networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.
The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the Web site after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.
Although Mrs. Bean currently only has nine Facebook friends, she said she “loves being online” and is hoping for many more.
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by Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
U.S. cable operator Cablevision’s (CVC) announcement this morning that it will pay a quarterly dividend of 10 cents a share does not preclude the company from doing a large share buyback, says Collins Stewart analyst Thomas Eagan in a note to clients this morning.
As [fellow Tech Trader Daily writer] Eric Savitz noted yesterday, the Dolan family that controls Cablevision has taken what some consider a more “shareholder-friendly” stance of late, perhaps because activist investor Harbinger has taken a 5 percent stake in the company.
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Posted at 12:46 PM PT
Sphere
Tagged: Apple, Barron's, Cablevision, Collins Stewart, Dolan, Facebook, Google, Harbinger, Tech Trader Daily, Thomas Eagan, Tiernan Ray, Voices, frontpage | permalink
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron\'s, Tech Trader Daily
Amazon.com (AMZN) shares are sharply higher today, aided by a bullish note this morning from Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney focused on the company’s Kindle e-book reader.
Mahaney today doubled his 2008 unit estimate on Kindle sales to 380,000 from 190,000. He notes that 380,000 is exactly how many iPods Apple (AAPL) sold in the first year. “Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world,” he writes.
Mahaney thinks the Kindle could turn out to be one of the top “gadget” gifts of this year’s holiday gift season. He thinks the company can sell 150,000 Kindles this holiday season.
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Posted at 9:45 AM PT
Sphere
Tagged: Amazon, Amazon.com, Apple, Barron's, Citigroup, Eric Savitz, Facebook, Google, Kindle, Mark Mahaney, Tech Trader Daily, Voices, Yahoo, e-book, frontpage, gadget, holiday gift season, iPods | permalink
by Spencer E. Ante, Computers Department Editor, BusinessWeek
Insiders at Facebook are selling stock in the social networking company, and the prices they’re getting for their shares suggest the sky-high valuation backers once placed on the company may prove unrealistic. Just a few months ago, Facebook was widely viewed as the next Google in Silicon Valley. Microsoft bought a small equity stake last October that implied a valuation of $15 billion for the whole company. Shareholders in the still-private company appeared to be setting themselves up for a blockbuster initial public offering.
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by Caroline McCarthy, Editor, The Social, CNET
Recent rumors of Intel employees signing up for Facebook accounts en masse might not have been totally unfounded: Facebook has chosen to use Intel’s Xeon 5400 processor-based servers to deal with its hardware and software demands. Additionally, the two companies have signed an agreement so that Intel can continue to assess how Facebook can stay stable and improve performance.
Facebook will have “thousands” of Xeon servers, a release said.
It’s not an earth-shattering announcement by any means, but Intel’s pretty psyched. “Intel is excited to engage with Facebook as they are a dynamic force in the evolution of the Internet,” Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group, said in Thursday’s release.
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by Simon Dumenco, Columnist, Ad Age, The Media Guy
Bill Gates doesn’t get a lot of credit these days for being a visionary. But when it comes to his relationship with Facebook, he may still be a step ahead of the rest of us. The Sun, a British tabloid, reported this year that Gates had quit his half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, partly because he was getting more than 8,000 “friend” requests daily but also because he was finding “weird fan sites about him.” A Microsoft representative confirms that the boss has gone cold turkey but wouldn’t disclose whether Gates knew of a Facebook group called “Would you have sex with Bill Gates for half of his money?”
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by Eric Eldon, Editor, Digital Media, VentureBeat
Tech bloggers and investors have come up with a new parlor game: Guessing Facebook’s “real” valuation. Nobody seems to believe the company’s official $15 billion valuation that it announced when it raised its most recent, not-yet-closed round from Microsoft and others.
The latest guess: A new study out today by VC Experts pegs the valuation at $12.5 billion, a number derived from the firm’s proprietary valuation-calculation methodology and based on numbers from numerous public documents. Take a look. This is perhaps the most well-researched guess yet, and includes lots of details like stock prices on the dates of various funding rounds.
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by Therese Poletti, Senior Columnist, MarketWatch, Tech Tales
A year ago, when Facebook opened up its social networking site to software developers, it was Silicon Valley’s hot new young thing. … But what a difference a year makes. As Facebook gears up to host its first big developer conference this Wednesday and introduce a major revamp to its site, it is going through some growing pains. I also think Facebook has lost some of its buzz factor in the valley. Some also believe that its valuation on paper, once pegged at $15 billion, has notably declined.
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by Eric Eldon, Blogger, VentureBeat
Facebook has finally started integrating its new redesign into its main site. The company is betting that what users want to do is publish more information about themselves, and see more about their friends activities. The thing is, do most Facebook users actually want to do those things?
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by David Carr, Columnist, New York Times, The Media Equation
Not that long ago, I needed some advice on the book business and thought to ask my friend Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights” and “A Prayer for the City.” The only sticking point was, we’d never met.
Although he used to be a reporter, we are not what I would call peers. He wrote one of the greatest sports books ever, and oh, one of the best books about city government ever. “Friday Night Lights” became a movie and then a television series, and apart from me being a hopeless fanboy of the show, we have nothing in common.
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by Eric Tucker, Associated Press Writer
Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”
In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case.
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by Tim Barker, Reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A week or so ago, I sat down at my desk to find a look of panic on the face of one of my coworkers. “They’re blocking Facebook,” she said. They, of course, are the mysterious men and women who make up our tech support department. Oh no, I thought. This can’t be. I opened my browser and tried to get into Facebook. Nothing.
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by Owen Thomas, Managing Editor, Valleywag
Can a PR guy run an operating system? Silicon Valley’s gut reaction: No way. And yet that’s what Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has done in appointing Elliot Schrage, her handpicked flack, to run Facebook’s platform. The platform, when it launched a year ago, was hailed as the world’s next Windows. … But in one very short year–or a very long one, rather–Facebook’s platform has gone from selling point to PR headache.
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