LinkedIn membership surpasses 200 million

This number may seem really small as compared to Billion+ of FB.. but there is one very clear difference.. Business Model.. and consequently revenue generation as well.

LinkedIn is

• default site for professional networking
• default site for head hunters who pay small monthly subscription fees to get access to so called premium features
• default site for job seekers who are more or less willing to pay small amount as monthly subscription for premium services offered by linkedIn

Further..

• There are lot of amazing communities around variety of professions
• Mobile app works like charm.. in-fact I feel it is somewhat better than to go thru their full desktop/browser based portal
• Though I do like their summary of professional news on their portal. Which obviously is way to the mark based on your professional career as they have pretty good profile of yours.. 

There is no overhead of managing huge amount of image or videos or millions and billions of updates/likes as FB has to handle.. Which should result in really low cost of ownership or operations for linkedin as compared to FaceBook..

I think from stock performance basis I would be much more longer on LinkedIn as compared to FB. Though as of now I don't own either of them nor I have any plans in near future...


Let me know your thoughts..

LinkedIn membership surpasses 200 million

By Jeremy C. Owens

jowens@mercurynews.com 

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Professional networking service LinkedIn announced Wednesday that its membership rolls now surpass 200 million people, as international expansion has helped the company double its user base in less than two years. The new tally is “an important and exciting milestone for the company,” Deep Nishar, senior vice president for products and user experience at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post.

“This milestone is more than just a metric — it’s a reminder of the global footprint and the scale of impact our network has each day,” Nishar wrote.

LinkedIn passed 100 million users in March 2011, and has focused on other countries to grow that number, adding 13 new languages in the interim. Now offering its service in 19 different languages, LinkedIn says that more than 64 percent of its users live outside the United States.

India has proved to be the best source for growth, as the country’s 18 million LinkedIn user base ranks second behind the 74 million in the United States, the Mountain View company said Wednesday.

Turkey and Colombia have provided the fastest year-over-year growth for membership, while China and Brazil have experienced the greatest rise in mobile usage of the social network, LinkedIn reported.

The total members LinkedIn claims seems to rank it fourth among U.S.based social networks, behind Silicon Valley cohorts Facebook and Twitter. Comparisons are not simple because the sites use different standards and can release information sparingly, but Facebook is known to have more than a billion users, making it the largest social network.

How do we make these Social sites Green?

Long time back (Couple of years..) one of my colleague mentioned to me that every search on google generates enough heat that you can boil water for your cup of a tea.. I thought that he was joking or at least exaggerating..  but reading all this news.. doesn't surprise me that it was right information.

Worldwide.. Data Centers now consume around 30,000 MW at any point of time... Just for comparison, India's total power generation capacity must be around 200,000 MW.. California's total power generation capacity is around 70,000 MW (give and take 5-10K MW here and there..)..

Google alone consumes 300MW for their Data Centers(DC)/Server farms.. Poor Facebook.. just 60MW.

One MW is Mega Watt and equals to One Million Watts. Your iPhone charger consumes 5W when charging your iPhone. MW or Mega Watt is common terminology for utility industry to calculate generation capacity or consumption capacity.. either way they are more or less same as you really can't store electricity at this level. Now a days we have started using GW (Giga Watts) which is equal to 1000 MW or one Billion Watts. that means.. that you can charge 200 Million iPhones in 1000MW :-)

Okay.. back to main topic.. Agreed that Facebook, Gmail or Google search are as necessary as "Roti", Kapda" & "Makaan" (Food, cloth and house). and this is the reason.. all these big data center monsters are not only consuming 30K MW all the time but also wasting almost 90% of their capacity in anticipation of surge in demand or in anticipation that grid will fail and there will be power outage which will make their site down.. Mostly for user's like you and mine's satisfaction!!! or in other words to protect their reputation!! Nobody wants news that their web site was down for this many hours or slow today.. etc..

First of all, I think, this claim of 90% wastage.. I think it is way to exaggerated.. I agree.. There is lot of wastage but I don't think that it will be close to 90%.. Still.. there is no smoke without fire.. so let us assume that there is 50-60% wastage.. Which is still huge.. 15,000 MW!!!

Then secondly, can we do something to cut down this wastage. As per these Data Center / Server Farm Monsters.. all this wastage is for me.. and bad news is that these guys have made me addicted to instant web/information so much that I can't live without it.. I can try to cut it down or go on web diet.. That will make some dent or not.. not known.. but definitely.. if every one decides.. then it will.. I will be boiling lesser number of tea pots.. Honestly, I don't think that it will be possible to cut my Google/Facebook usage... they have become more or less my lifelines.. (that was too much..). but I can try..

Lastly, major reason for all this high level of consumption and this alleged wastage is that service level expectations for me as an user are really high.. do I care if Google returns search results in some 0.0003 seconds (just kidding) or whatever number they show.. or do I care if FB page loads slightly slower or shows my friend's updates in 10 minutes instead of 0.0000000004 seconds (again just kidding..).. What will happen if Google or FB or other such  monsters give me option of being "Green User" I get classified for most of my work in Green category which could have SLA issues here and there and instead of returning search results in 0.0003 seconds can return results in 0.3 or even 3 seconds... or at least wait for me to completely type my search request instead of searching for each and every letter I type and thus boiling a whole barrel of water instead of a tea pot..

I won't mind these SLAs.. I waste enough time all around here and there and I could be fine.. If I am under pressure to perform.. rarely but possible.. then I should be able to change my profile from Green to Red Hot user who would like super fast response like I get today..

They can give me some kind of special green badge (the kind of green ranger badge kids get in yosemite national park for attending some environmental session by rangers ;-) ) in lieu and I can proudly use it in my email signature to let the world know about it.. so that the world would stop expecting immediate email response or immediate FB like or comment on their post!!!

Let me know what all you guys think about it.. I was thinking about this article for couple of days and wanted to write it so it comes out effective. I tried my best to keep it simple and humorous where possible..

depending upon the response from web (It is okay if we boil few more barrels of water.. we will save some tankers later on..), I was thinking that we can start some Google+ or FB+ page for this cause and start some awareness.. so we can get some kind of petition for Google and FB and other web monsters to start some kind of "Green User" concept who will not complain of average or below average SLAs for their services as long as this user is not part of this wasteful Data Center (DC) or Server Farm.

I will be happy on some kind of green and energy efficient server farm or data center, where electricity is consumed to serve but wastage is significant lower.. I will take little bit of performance hit on my side.. I am sure.. with technological advancements.. this will be a short lived  process.. Very soon DC technologies will improve significantly where they can add or reduce computing capacity on demand without significant hit on performance SLA.

But for the time being.. I am ready to take this hit.. are you joining me in this?

DATA CENTERS’ DIRTY SECRET

Wasting electricity 24/7

Server farms run full-bore even when demand is low

By James Glanz

New York Times

SANTA CLARA — Jeff Rothschild’s machines at Facebook had a problem he knew he had to solve immediately. They were about to melt.

The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.

Thinking fast, Rothschild, the company’s engineering chief, took some employees on an expedition to buy every fan they could find — “We cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area,” he said — to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the website from going down. 

---

The number of data centers is surging.

Google alone uses 300 million watts.

RICHARD PERRY/ NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
=========================================================================

That was in early 2006, when Facebook had a quaint 10 million or so users and just the one main server site. Today, the information generated by nearly 1 billion users requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems. 

They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances on Visa’s website, send Yahoo email with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online. A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness. 

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, the Times found. 

To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters. 

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for the Times. Data centers in the United States account for onequarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show. 

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.” 

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of the Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations. 

A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data. The study sampled some 20,000 servers in about 70 large data centers spanning the commercial gamut: drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies and government agencies. 

“This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa,” said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his company’s reputation. “If we were a manufacturing industry, we’d be out of business straightaway.” 

These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the “virtual” world and all manner of memory is stored in “the cloud.” 

The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation. 

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers. 

“It’s a waste,” said Dennis Symanski, a senior researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group. “It’s too many insurance policies.” At least a dozen major data centers have been cited for violations of air quality regulations in Virginia and Illinois alone, according to state records. Amazon was cited with more than 24 violations over a three-year period in Northern Virginia, including running some of its generators without a basic environmental permit. A few companies say they are using extensively re-engineered software and cooling systems to decrease wasted power. Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware. Still, according to recent disclosures, Google’s data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and Facebook’s about 60 million watts. 

Many of these solutions are readily available, but in a risk-averse industry, most companies have been reluctant to make wholesale change, according to industry experts. Improving or even assessing the field is complicated by the secretive nature of an industry that is largely built around accessing other people’s personal data. 

For security reasons, companies typically do not even reveal the locations of their data centers, which are housed in anonymous buildings and vigilantly protected. Companies also guard their technology for competitive reasons, said Michael Manos, a longtime industry executive. “All of those things play into each other to foster this closed, members-only kind of group,” said Manos, now a senior vice president for technologies at AOL. 

That secrecy often extends to energy use. To further complicate any assessment, no single government agency has the authority to track the industry. In fact, the federal government was unable to determine how much energy its own data centers consume, according to officials involved in a survey completed last year. The survey did discover that the number of federal data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to 2,094 in 2010. 

To investigate the industry, the Times obtained thousands of pages of local, state and federal records, some through freedom of information laws, that are kept on industrial facilities that use large amounts of energy. Copies of permits for generators and information about their emissions were obtained from environmental agencies, which helped pinpoint some data center locations and details of their operations. In addition to reviewing records from electrical utilities, the Times also visited data centers across the country and conducted hundreds of interviews with current and former employees and contractors. 

Some analysts warn that as the amount of data and energy use continue to rise, companies that do not alter their practices could eventually face a shake-up in an industry that has been prone to major upheavals, including the bursting of the first Internet bubble in the late 1990s. “It’s just not sustainable,” said Mark Bramfitt, a former utility executive who now consults for the power and information technology industries. “They’re going to hit a brick wall.” 



STEVE DYKES/NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES 

A row of backup generators, inside the white housings, line the back exterior of the Facebook data center in Prineville, Ore. They’ll keep servers on in a power outage. 

Is this the only way left for Facebook to make money?

Initially, I was kind of surprised to see this news. but then later on realized.. what else to expect from FB. To prep up their stock prices they can resort to anything. Bingo is just beginning.. This is where I feel Google as much better company.. at least for now.. there is no pressure from Google founders to really make stock go super north.. where as we can see here in Facebook, that they will do anything and everything to make stock go up.

I am fine with it.. there is nothing wrong legally or for that morally.. who we are to decide what is moral and what is not.. It is just that.. this thing is not aligned with my values. I personally am great fan of facebook as platform and had much higher hopes of its usage and applications.. may be I was wrong.. may be not.. time will tell..

Facebook debuts bingo game played for real cash in U.K.

By Salvador Rodriguez

Los Angeles Times

When it comes to the U.K., most people are getting into the Olympic Games, but not Facebook. It’s getting into a different type of gaming in the U.K. — gambling to be exact. The 955 million-member social network began allowing users in the U.K. to play a new bingo game using real money.

The game, called Bingo & Slots Friendzy, lets users 18 and older ditch Facebook Credits and play with their real money while Facebook takes in 30 percent of the money collected by the app, as it does with all other apps.

“Gambling is very popular and well regulated in the U.K. ... For millions of bingo users it’s already a social experience so it makes sense for us to offer that as well,” said Julien Codorniou, Facebook’s head of gaming for Europe, Middle East and Africa, according to the Financial Times.

The decision to allow this type of gaming in the U.K., where gambling is more accepted than in the U.S., is seen as a test by Facebook to determine if it may want to bring the practice stateside.

“Facebook is a place that allows people to connect and share,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Real money gaming is a popular and well-regulated activity in the U.K. and we are allowing a partner to offer their games to adult users on the Facebook platform in a safe and controlled manner.”

Business Insider says, quoting an “industry insider,” online gambling would turn Facebook into a $100 billion-revenue company. That number seems a bit high, but Facebook likely would stand to see its revenue grow drastically.

Currently, its Facebook Credits revenue stream has been growing at a snail’s pace, growing by only $6 million between its last two quarters. The infusion of gambling could change that.

I think investors are over-reacting on FB stock

I think investors are way too much over reacting on this. This concept of watching quarterly results every quarter will eventually hurt them only.. at least in this case.. or may be benefit them by letting them buy FB dirt cheap now..

You have to understand one thing, Facebook controls biggest and most significant and most strategic information about consumers. There is no denying about it. Even Google or any other company doesn't have that detailed and accurate information about customers. FB just needs to figure out how and where to use this power properly without annoying there very customer as well sourcing base of this immense wealth. Nobody can do better or more accurate advertising than FB.  However, they have not been able to do it properly or I should say, show it off to investors. FB's privacy policies are always in news.. Let us see what they come up with now.. Pressure is high, my hope is that they won't try to squeeze their user base with something totally ridiculous policy change or something like that.

Having said that, I don't know the fact that how much of it is already analysts have taken into account. In my view, FB pricing was based on this fact only, but subsequently they were not able to keep this idea in brains of analysts and investors.

All this Zynga fallout etc.. is non-sense. It was a very small piece of the pie for FB any how. In long term, this Zynga shinga is not going to matter for FB. This will definitely matter in Quarter to Quarter earnings and that is one reason, I really don't like them and definitely won't react much to them. They do indicate your operational health but that is very very tactical and unless totally botched, they are not going to impact long term growth of the company.

Final disclaimer, I don't have FB stock neither do I have any plans to acquire or short them in any short/medium term.

COMPANY HURT BY EARNINGS, ZYNGA FALLOUT

Investors pummel Facebook

Social media giant’s bad week ends with 12 percent drop in stock

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com 

MENLO PARK — Facebook continued taking a pounding on Wall Street Friday, as its stock price hit a new low, wiping out billions in shareholder value after a week of bad news for the social networking giant.

Facebook’s market value is now close to half the record $104 billion valuation that the company set when it began selling shares in May. Other social media companies are also struggling, despite early excitement over what was expected to be a new “hot” industry. Zynga, Pandora and Groupon are all trading far below their initial public offering price.

Shares in Facebook fell 12 percent on Friday, closing at $23.70, after heavy trading in the wake of an earnings report Thursday that showed the company’s revenue growth is slowing. While some Wall Street analysts stood by their earlier conclusions that Facebook has significant earnings potential, they said investors are worried about rising operating costs and the company’s unwillingness to predict future revenue.

“We acknowledge that it is difficult to determine the true value of Facebook,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter wrote in a note to investors Friday. Although he said he expects Facebook’s business to grow, Pachter said this week’s earnings report, coming after the company’s “messy” stock market debut in May, “will likely keep some investors away from the stock.” 

Adding to investor worries is the bombshell dropped Wednesday by Zynga, the online gaming company whose business is closely tied to Facebook. Zynga’s stock fell nearly 40 percent over two days, closing Friday at $3.09, after the company reported earnings far short of estimates and lowered its forecast for the year. 

Facebook executives did not speak directly about Zynga’s troubles during a conference call Thursday, but they reported that Facebook saw virtually no growth over the past three quarters in its revenue from fees for processing online payments. 

Zynga’s games are a major source of those Facebook fees, although Facebook recently introduced a new online “App Center” that’s expected to help diversify its revenue base by helping users find games and apps from other developers besides Zynga. 

Analysts generally gave good marks to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his presentation during the company’s conference call Thursday. The 29-year-old company co-founder answered questions and outlined the company’s strategy for increasing revenue by developing new forms of mobile advertising and by serving as a platform for other companies to base a variety of online businesses. But as Facebook seeks to build its own business, the company is increasing its spending on hiring, marketing, research and facilities. That drove the company’s operating margin, a measure of profitability, down to 43 percent from 53 percent a year ago. 

Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman reported the company has grown from 3,200 employees to nearly 4,000 in the past six months. “At this early stage of our growth,” he told analysts, the company is focused on “investment” to expand rather than on managing its costs. 

Ebersman declined to give a revenue forecast for future quarters, but he warned analysts that spending will grow even more in the second half of 2012. That worries many investors, according to Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter, who blamed “a general unease about revenue visibility” among reasons for the plunging stock price. 

Also in the back of shareholders’ minds, Schachter said in a research note, is the looming expiration of a regulatory “lockup period” that barred employees and early investors from selling stock. If enough of those shares go on the market next month, that could drive the price down further. 

The value of Facebook shares has fallen 38 percent since the company’s initial public offering, when the stock was priced at $38. Estimates of the company’s total market value vary according to the number of shares used to calculate the value. 

As the company’s biggest shareholder, Zuckerberg saw the value of his holdings drop more than $2.8 billion in the past two days, although his 503.6 million shares are still worth nearly $12 billion. 

Analysts who are bullish about Facebook said its falling stock price represents a buying opportunity for new investors. Needham’s Laura Martin argued in a report Friday that Facebook has enormous potential to increase its revenue from advertising and e-commerce — in part because the social network is heavily used by women, who Martin said have more influence over consumer purchasing than men. 

But analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research, who has consistently criticized Facebook for setting its IPO price too high, advised investors to “remain on the sidelines for now.” 

Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/ BrandonBailey. 

Microsoft going Social..

Seems okay step to me. Microsoft seems to be doing okay on strategy and execution. Interesting thing will be on how well they assimilate these different components in their core office and share point suits.

Enterprise Social Networking is a big area and in my view still very much under developed. All these Enterprise Collaboration Management (ECM) vendors are trying their best to copy and mimic Facebook while navigating with myriad rules and complexities of enterprise relationships within and outside of company and partners. They all seems to be okay but still need more ease of use and more importantly transfer of ownership of content and pages from one individual to another as people move on to different places and roles. I think rationalization of this without any complex administration is going to be key for success of any of these ECMs. Rest all things can be easily copied from FB.

Biggest threat to these guys is again their biggest gorilla Facebook.. Right now, FB is on fringe of ECM. It will be interesting when and if ever they get into ECM.

Lastly, good job Yammer guys.. Keep on bringing more money and do proud to Silicon Valley!!!

Cheers!!




Yammer CEO David Sacks, left, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shake hands after officially announcing Monday that Microsoft will acquire Yammer for $1.2 billion cash.

MICROSOFT’S $1.2 BILLION ACQUISITION

Yammer deal lifts eyebrows

Analyst says software giant’s foray into social realm too late; others say it aids other products

By Peter Delevett

pdelevett@mercurynews.com 

Confirming rumors that had been swirling for weeks, Microsoft on Monday said it will buy San Francisco social-networking startup Yammer for $1.2 billion in cash.

Yammer, founded in 2008, lets business customers set up private, Facebook-style networks among employees and clients. It boasts 5 million users from such companies as Deloitte, 7-Eleven and Ford, CEO David Sacks said Monday.“We had a vision for how social networking could fundamentally change the way people work,” said Sacks, the former chief operating officer of PayPal. He will continue to lead Yammer as it joins Microsoft’s Office division, which also includes SharePoint and Skype. Sacks said linking up with such “household name” business applications will help Yammer grow even more rapidly.

But Microsoft is still lagging rivals such as Salesforce and Oracle, which already have made big-money moves into the social-networking realm. 

San Francisco-based Salesforce offers a socialnetworking tool called Chatter and this month bought cloud-based socialmedia company Buddy Media for nearly $700 million. Redwood City’s Oracle recently snapped up two software companies in the social-media sector, Vitrue and Collective Intellect, as part of its push into cloud computing. 

“Microsoft is too late to the social party,” Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry wrote in an email Monday. “Imitation is not a strategy.” 

Still, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Monday said he was intrigued to learn more about Yammer’s “freemium” sales model, which relies on individual users inside a company to adopt the product at no cost, then gives that company’s IT department an option to pay for more advanced security and support after a critical mass of users has developed. 

“They were pretty unique in the viral adoption model,” Ballmer said of Yammer. 

Constellation Research co-founder Ray Wang said Monday that Yammer’s ability to convert about 19 percent of its free users to paid customers is at least double the industry average. He generally praised the deal, while adding that Microsoft’s own failure to develop new products has forced it to become more reliant on acquisitions. 

Tony Zingale — CEO of Yammer rival Jive Software, which went public last year — predicted that Yammer will struggle to remain innovative as part of the Redmond, Wash., behemoth. “At Microsoft, ‘move really fast’ is not in their vocabulary,” he quipped. 

Zingale said Palo Altobased Jive is already making plans to woo away Yammer customers, and he predicted Salesforce will do the same. 

On the other hand, Zingale said, the deal “once and for all validates that the social enterprise software space is here to stay. When somebody like Microsoft says they’ve got to have it, I think we’re heading for a very vibrant market.” 

Karl Keirstead, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets who follows Jive’s stock, agreed with that assessment, noting that Jive’s shares have risen about 18 percent in the two weeks since rumors of Microsoft’s interest in Yammer surfaced. (Jive closed trading Monday slightly down at $19.75, while Microsoft finished at $29.86 — a decline of 2.7 percent.) Keirstead — whose firm helped underwrite Jive’s December IPO — estimated Yammer’s yearly revenue at about $25 million to $30 million, which would mean Microsoft paid a multiple of 50 times revenue for the company. Yammer had reportedly amassed $142 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya , among others. 

With Jive recently trading at 10 to 12 times revenue, and with hefty numbers being shelled out for Yammer and Buddy Media, Keirstead predicted it won’t be long until another big suitor such as SAP makes a bid for Jive. “It just feels like there’s an M&A frenzy around anything that says social enterprise,” he said. 

Microsoft did not say when it expects the deal to close. 

While Ballmer predicted his army of sales reps could boost the number of Yammer customers who agree to pay for the product, Keirstead thinks the merger might ultimately be less about bolstering Yammer as a stand-alone product and more about integrating its features into Share-Point. The cloud-based enterprise offering includes email, file sharing and the Microsoft Office suite of applications. 

“Microsoft, in an effort to protect its SharePoint franchise, needs to make it more social and do so fast,” Keirstead said. The $1.2 billion layout for a company with modest revenues, he added, is “a little bit of a defensive move.” 

Staff writer Jeremy C. 

Owens contributed to this report. Contact Peter Delevett at 408-271-3638. 

Facebook Phone with fOS or Fboid?

Seems that we might have new competitor for iPhone and our beloved Samsung and other Android phones.. There could be fOS or FABoid or  something like that coming soon. or Blackberries or blueberries could be become Face-berries or book-berries :-)  or even Nokia could be Fokia.. Just kidding..

 I am in lighter mood today so all this crap.. But there is some reality to this news and it does make sense from one angle...

FB is getting hit hard by their mobile strategy where they are felling little lonely.. lot or most of the users access their FB account thru their smart phones which are currently being controlled by apples, oranges, berries and goggles of the world.. Poor FB is left with free service on them without any revenue gain.. They can hardly show anything to users on these fruit ninja phones..

So here they come back.. armed with 16 Billion dollars in their bank account.. they go for investment cum shopping spree.. Off course, their senior leadership has to take bigger risks and make better futuristic strategies.. You never know.. they may hit jackpot or just blow off all the IPO money and relegate FB to Yahoo status.. problem is, that if they don't act now and act totally differently, they will be Yahoo in next 5-7 years any how (or may be faster)..

Some how I don't buy into all this crap of mobile issue.. I would rather work on making it more easy to use on mobile and even on tablets so users can more easily access and enjoy their tool. Also, they need to come up with something like Google's ad-sense platform where even user benefits if user creates content and they try to sell users targeted adds based on the content users have created.

But for now, If I could, I would be short on FB stock.. I may be wrong (many times I have been wrong, otherwise, I would have been writing blogs full time instead working for someone else)..

Enjoy the news or I should say rumor..  you never know it may change the face of the world again....

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_20728939/facebook-hoping-release-smartphone-by-next-year

HIGH-TECH CROSSOVER

Facebook may revive smartphone

Social network has hired former iPhone engineers as it explores future in hardware, sources say

By Nick Bilton

New York Times

Can a software company build its own smartphone? We may well find out soon.

In the past week, Google completed its acquisition of the hardware maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which could lead to the search giant making its own smartphone. And another software titan might be getting into the hardware game as well: Facebook.

Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook.

The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said.

This would be Facebook’s third effort at building a smartphone, said one person briefed on the plans and one who was recruited. In 2010, the blog TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a smartphone. The project crumbled after the company realized the difficulties involved, according to people who had worked on it. The website AllThingsD reported last year that Facebook and HTC had entered a partnership to create a smartphone, code-named “Buffy,” which is still in the works. 

Now the company has been going deeper into the process, by expanding the group working on “Buffy,” and exploring other smartphone projects, too, creating a team of seasoned hardware engineers who have built the devices before. 

Meeting with chief 

One engineer who formerly worked at Apple and worked on the iPhone said he met with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smartphones. It did not sound like idle intellectual curiosity, the engineer said; Zuckerberg asked about intricate details, including the types of chips used, he said. Another former Apple hardware engineer was recruited by a Facebook executive and was told about the company’s hardware explorations. When asked Friday, Facebook did not deny or confirm that a project to build a smartphone existed, but pointed to a previous statement it gave to AllThingsD last year that said in part, “We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers and application developers.” 

For Facebook, the motivation is clear: As a newly public company, it must find new sources of revenue, and it fears being left behind in mobile, one of the most promising areas for growth. “Mark is worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms,” a Facebook employee said. 

Facebook is going to great lengths to keep the phone project a secret, specifically not posting job listings on the company’s job website, but instead going door-to-door to find the right talent for the project. 

But can a company that is wired as a social network learn how to build hardware? Mixing the cultures of hardware and software designers is akin to mixing oil and water. With the rare exception of Apple, other phone makers aren’t very good at this. 

The biggest names in consumer electronics have struggled with phone hardware. Hewlett-Packard tried and failed. So did Dell. Sony has never done very well making phones. 

“Building isn’t something you can just jump into,” explained Hugo Fiennes, a former Apple hardware manager for the first four iPhones who has since left Apple and is starting a new hardware company, Electric Imp. “You change the smallest thing on a smartphone and you can completely change how all the antennas work. You don’t learn this unless you’ve been doing it for a while.” 

He added, “Going into the phone business is incredibly complex.” 

Facebook also faces hurdles, often of its own making, on mobile. Twitter, for example, is fully integrated into the Apple iPhone and allows people to seamlessly send Twitter messages with photos or article links. Facebook, which has had a contentious relationship with Apple, is still not integrated into iOS. 

One Facebook employee said the phone project had been rebooted several times because Facebook originally thought it could figure out hardware on its own. The company has since learned that it needed to bring in people with previous phonemaking experience, several people said. So it is hiring hardware engineers to work with a phone manufacturer and design the shape, style and inner workings of a Facebook phone. 

Easy market entry? 

Despite the difficulties, Facebook seems well positioned in certain ways to enter the smartphone market. It already has an entire operating system complete with messaging, calendar, contacts and video, and an immense app store is on its way, with thousands of highly popular apps. There’s also that billion-dollar camera app, in the form of Instagram. If Facebook fails with its own team of engineers, it could buy a smartphone maker. The company took in $16 billion from its bumpy IPO. It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research In Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones. HTC is upset with Google for buying Motorola, which is worth about $11.8 billion and becoming cheaper by the day. Facebook would not necessarily challenge Apple if it enters the smartphone marketplace. Instead, it could be Facebook vs. Google, which makes the Android operating system, with both companies going after a huge number of buyers of lowerpriced smartphones. 

For Facebook, the motivation is clear: It must find new sources of revenue, and it fears being left behind in mobi le . 

FB Bloodbath continues..

Sad but there is no stopping to bloodbath stemming out of FB IPO fiasco...These type of smaller losses are going to come up more in next couple of days or weeks..

I hope FB is able to recover from this and continues to growth part..

FACEBOOK

Citigroup reportedly loses $20M on IPO

Citigroup’s Automated Trading Desk had trading losses of about $20 million stemming from Facebook’s botched initial public offering on Nasdaq OMX’s U.S.

exchange, a source with knowledge of the situation said Friday.

ATD’s losses come on top of claims at market makers Knight Capital and Citadel Securities of $30 million to $35 million each in losses. UBS was the other large market maker involved in the Facebook IPO on May 18.

FB IPO - Illustrates fundamental Character differences between Mark & Larry/Sergey

Though it is too early to predict about long-term future of Facebook but the way IPO was handled clearly shows extreme greed as the key driver in Facebook founder/s. This is simply case of extreme greed. Which is fine but definitely buy a big question mark on future of FB. It is truly great product and I have personally love it. But as Investor, I would be seriously skeptical of investing in it even if they consistently perform well on stock market.

I think there is way too much personal ambitions and pride in top management of FB, there should be some but at the same time there has to be due respect for others. It is important to treat average investor as now perception is big thing.

Whereas if we look at Google's IPO, they were the first one to open up IPO to general public and now looking back, it was fairly prices. They didn't kept on raising offering price till the last moment and kept on off-loading founder's stocks..

I am not expert in Finance or legal matters.. but this definitely leaves bad taste and will result in further cutting of my Facebook's face time :-(

Here is the link for full story..


http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_20705548/facebook-could-face-huge-damage-claims-from-ipo

FACEBOOK STOCK SALE

Tipoff at root of IPO uproar

Social media giant could be at risk if its bankers got alert that others didn’t

By Troy Wolverton and John Boudreau

Staff writers

Facebook could be on the hook for $1 billion or more in damages if plaintiffs lawyers can prove allegations that the company and its bankers misled investors in its initial public offering.

The Menlo Park-based social networking company and its banking partners face a slew of lawsuits in the aftermath of its bungled IPO last week, which raised $16 billion for Facebook and company insiders.

The suits accuse the company of misleading investors by failing to share with them information it passed on to select Wall Street analysts — a warning that its current quarter financial results weren’t going to be as rosy as expected.


“There appears to be a good argument that it is misleading,” said Mercer Bullard, a securities law professor at the University of Mississippi. “That’s definitely a potential problem for Facebook and the underwriters.”

If plaintiff’s lawyers can show that the warning wasn’t included in the offering documents Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and that it was “material” — meaning it could have a significant impact on a company’s stock price — then Facebook could face huge damages, said John Coffee, a securities law professor at Columbia University.

Securities experts say the company could be liable for investors’ losses on the stock after it plunged on the second and third days of trading. One of the lawsuits asks for damages of $1 billion or more, but the potential payout could be much bigger.

“Facebook has plenty to fear,” Coffee said. “It’s up to a jury to determine what’s material, (but) if the case survives a motion to dismiss, it’s likely to settle — and to settle at a dear price.”

Facebook has vowed to defend itself against the charges. Morgan Stanley, its lead underwriter in the IPO, also denies any wrongdoing.

At the heart of the controversy are alleged discrepancies between what Facebook said in a document filed May 9 with the SEC and what company officials told select analysts soon afterward.

Buried deep within that filing was a warning to potential investors that Facebook’s number of average daily users was continuing to outpace the number of advertisements it was delivering to them.

That potential revenue problem had first come up in the previous quarter’s results and was due in part to a growing number of users accessing Facebook through its mobile site and applications, which generally don’t include ads. Elsewhere in the document Facebook vaguely warned that the shift in usage to mobile devices might “negatively affect” its financial results, but didn’t acknowledge that it already was affecting revenues or say by how much.

After Facebook published the document, one or more company officials contacted a select number of Wall Street analysts, according to published reports. According to those reports, the officials warned analysts, including at least some who worked for the banks underwriting Facebook’s offering, that they needed to cut their forecasts for the company’s current quarter.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley and those from at least three of the other underwriters of Facebook’s IPO followed that advice, according to Reuters. It’s highly unusual for a company’s underwriters to cut their forecasts in the run-up to an IPO, and apparently that information was shared with only a small number of their major clients.

The updated forecasts led at least some of those in the know either to not participate in the IPO or to dramatically scale back their purchases, according to the reports.

Despite the flagging demand from some big investors, the IPO not only went forward, but the initial price and the number of shares sold were raised in the days immediately before the offering, reportedly on strong demand from individual investors.

Under a regulation that was put in place during the dot-com boom, public companies are generally prohibited from sharing material information with some investors but not others. However, there’s a loophole in the regulations for nonpublic companies, even those that are about to go public, securities law experts said. So even though investors may feel mistreated, such selective disclosure probably wasn’t illegal.

“In every roadshow there tends to be information revealed that’s likely material but that does not get given to the ordinary investor,” Coffee said.

The key question for Facebook, the banks and its investors is whether the information company officials shared with the Wall Street analysts was significantly different from what the company was telling investors in the documents, securities law experts said.

Under the securities laws, companies don’t always have to disclose material information to investors or potential investors, Bullard said, but they do have to make sure that what’s in their regulatory documents isn’t misleading.

Facebook and its partners could face other problems as well. Congress, the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority have all said they plan to investigate the IPO, which was also marred by glitches in the Nasdaq’s trading system. Such investigations could lead to civil charges by the SEC. Although the SEC tends to levy only minor fines against security law violators, a settlement with the SEC can often aid plaintiffs who have filed private lawsuits.

“Given the high-profile nature of Facebook, and given the massive number of small retail investors investing in it, the regulators would like nothing more than to make a high-profile example out of Facebook” should they find wrongdoing, said Andrew Stoltmann, a securities attorney.
Contact Troy Wolverton at twolverton@mercurynews.

com or at 408-840-4285.

“Facebook has plenty to fear. … If the case survives a motion to dismiss, it’s likely to settle — and to settle at a dear price.”

— JohnCoffee, securities law professor, Columbia University