All Things D
Facebook IPO Halo Boosts Social Media Stocks
1 hour 4 minutes ago
Facebook’s imminent IPO is might mint a mess of millionaires in Silicon Valley by Friday, but in the meantime it’s driving wealth in a few newly public Internet companies as well.
With the social networking company’s offering reportedly oversubscribed, some investors are looking ancillary ways to profit from it and seem to be turning to Facebook’s already public social networking peers.
As Arvind Bhatia, a financial analyst who covers Facebook for Sterne Agee, observed: “I do sense some ‘temporary’ momentum for these related social media stocks.”
Consider: Shares of LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora, and Yelp have all been trading up in advance ...
Sony's New Interchangeable-Lens Cameras Focus on Portraits, Action
7 hours 5 minutes ago
Nowadays, more and more people are turning to their phones instead of digital cameras for their picture-taking needs. For one thing, it’s convenient (you always have your phone with you), and two, the cameras on smartphones are getting better. However, there are still some great advantages to having a dedicated digital camera, and Sony today introduced two new cameras designed to deliver better-looking portraits and actions shots.
First up is the Sony Alpha NEX-F3. The 16.1-megapixel camera features a pocket-size body with interchangeable lenses, so it’s ideal for consumers who desire a compact body size akin to point-and-shoot cameras but want ...
Exclusive: Japan's Rakuten Wins the Heart of Pinterest Founder in Funding Race
Yesterday
Rakuten, the largest e-commerce site in Japan, is expected to be the lead investor in the much-contested next round of funding for Silicon Valley’s hottest start-up, Pinterest.
The funding is expected to be announced tomorrow morning.
The Tokyo-based Internet giant will invest upwards of $50 million in a $120 million round that values the social commerce phenom at $1.5 billion.
There are other investors in the new round, but those were still to be determined tonight by Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silvermann.
While the latest round of funding for Pinterest has been the mostly hotly contested of late in tech circles, one ...
Dish's Ads to End All Ads
Yesterday
Dish Network Corp. plans to promote its new ad-skipping feature with, ironically enough, a television ad — that is, if broadcast TV networks agree to run the spot.
Amid mounting anger about the capability, at least two are resisting. Fox and NBC both said Wednesday they won’t accept ads promoting the satellite-TV operator’s new digital video recorder that contains the ad-skipping capability.
Read the rest of this post on the original site »
The Era of AppNation Has Arrived
Yesterday
Judging by two of the most hyped deals in recent Silicon Valley history — Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion and Zynga’s acquisition of Draw Something for $200 million — it seems like a foregone conclusion that the era of the app has arrived.
And some new numbers from Nielsen that chronicle the rise of “AppNation” on Android and iOS between March 2011 and March 2012 back up that notion. The study shows the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped from 32 apps to 41, and growth in time spent on app usage outpacing the growth in mobile ...
Even as Settlement Hopes Appear, Facebook Blames Shoddy Checking in Answer to Yahoo Patent Fraud Claim
Yesterday
When last we tuned in in the ongoing drama that is the patent infringement lawsuit that Yahoo aimed at Facebook, Yahoo had a CEO — Scott Thompson — who was full steam ahead in pressing the controversial legal action.
Now, multiple sources said, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has got a new one — interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — who is already reaching out to top execs at the social networking giant in hopes of finding a settlement.
Still, until peace reigns in the digital kingdom, the legal wrangling grinds on and, today, Facebook has answered Yahoo’s most recent claim of inequitable ...
How Will Facebook Ring in the IPO? With a Hackathon, of Course.
Yesterday
Just like Hoodiegate, Facebook isn’t going to bring in its first day as a public company in the typical bell-ringing fashion.
The social giant is doing things its own way: With a hackathon, of course.
Sources close to Facebook say that on Thursday night, Facebook will hold a company-wide hackathon at its Menlo Park campus, another one of many in the company’s long history of all-night coding parties.
Facebook knows that going public is a huge moment for the company. But just as its roadshow video was wildly different than any other pre-IPO company presentations, Facebook wants to celebrate in its ...
What to Expect When Facebook Is Expecting: Five Predictions for Facebook’s First Public Year
Yesterday
Mark Zuckerberg’s baby will be coming of age in a few days, just eight years after it was born in a Harvard dorm room. We’ve been there for the first steps, and the first missteps. But do any of us know what Facebook-all-grown-up-as-a-public-company will look like?
I have five predictions of how Facebook will be maturing in the first year after its IPO:
1. Search
Facebook has become home base for users in many ways. But when it comes to search, Facebook makes you take a bus transfer at Google every time you want to leave the house.
And that’s a shame, because Google ...
Verizon CFO: Arrival of Shared Data Plans This Summer Is a Game Changer
Yesterday
Despite the convenience of having a tablet with a built-in cellular connection, most customers so far have opted to stick with Wi-Fi. One of the big reasons t has been that, for the most part, such devices have required smartphone customers to sign up for another data plan.
The industry’s answer to that — shared data plans that spread a pool of gigabytes across devices — has been promised for a while now. Though France Telecom and a few others have tried them outside the U.S., the domestic carriers have taken their time in readying such plans.
Now, however, Verizon Wireless says ...
HP Fires Back at Oracle With a Document Drop of Its Own
Yesterday
Hewlett-Packard responded to today’s juicy document drop from Oracle with some documents of its own stemming from their lawsuit over the Intel chip known as Itanium.
They’re not quite as juicy — Oracle has always had the better flair for the dramatic in this case — but in releasing them, HP clearly intends to paint Oracle, the new owner of Sun Microsystems, as out to hurt HP by kicking it straight in the teeth by damaging its Business Critical Server operation.
The first of the batch is an instant message exchange between some Oracle sales guys, who happen to use salty language ...
Samsung Rides Android Past Nokia to Take Sales Lead
Yesterday
A two percent decline in mobile phone shipments during the first quarter of 2012 may have hurt some handset vendors, but it did little to slow Samsung, which was the world’s largest mobile handset vendor for the first three months of the year.
According to the latest metrics from Gartner — which measure sales of handsets to customers, not shipments into the channel — Samsung sold 86.6 million mobile phones in the first quarter, 25.9 percent more than it sold during the same period a year ago. That was enough to give it a 20.7 percent share of the market ...
Harvey Geller, Universal Music Group's Top Lawyer, Is Out
Yesterday
Harvey Geller, Universal Music Group’s longtime lawyer, left the company earlier this week. A person familiar with Universal said he was now headed for another job but didn’t have other details. Geller’s name will be familiar to many digital media companies, since he often led fierce and sustained battles against them on behalf of the world’s biggest music label.
Google Gets Semantic, Launches Knowledge Graph Starting Today
Yesterday
Google today formally launches some anticipated and previously glimpsed semantic features for its core English search engine on Google.com accessed through computers, phones and tablets.
This “Knowledge Graph” is a two-year-old project that evolved in part out of Google’s acquisition of Metaweb in 2010. Google now says it understands 500 million entities and 3.5 billion attributes and connections.
When users search for a term that triggers the Knowledge Graph, they’ll see a box of information on the right-hand side of the search results page.
The boxes contain all sorts of information that’s specifically relevant to the search term. For instance, a results box ...
iPhone Engineer and Gmail Designer Team Up on Electric Imp to Connect Devices
Yesterday
A new start-up called Electric Imp promises to turn almost any product into a connected device with the addition of a tiny card in a slot.
Former iPhone engineering manager Hugo Fiennes, former Gmail designer Kevin Fox and long-time firmware engineer Peter Hartley co-founded the start-up, which is intended to help users monitor, control and get alerted by their devices.
Electric Imp founders Peter Hartley, Hugo Fiennes and Kevin Fox
Some potential applications are a laundry machine that texts a user when the wash is done or a power charger that turns on when the price of electricity goes down.
The premise is that ...
iSwifter's New App Brings All Flash-Based Facebook Games to the iPad
Yesterday
Most games on Facebook are built using Adobe Flash, and therefore, don’t work on the iPad.
While Facebook is slowly working out the kinks to bring more games to mobile, there’s a small company in Menlo Park, Calif. that has beat them to it.
iSwifter is announcing a new iPad app today called theWorx for Facebook, which gives users the full Facebook experience — social games and all.
That means users can check their crops, maintain their cities and feed their fish without having to boot up their computer.
iSwifter is a small of 20 employees is almost entirely bootstrapped, having generated $10 million ...
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