At the exact same time Facebook filed for its IPO last week, Burning Man, the iconic counter-culture art festival held annually in the Nevada desert, began announcing the results of its first-ever, ill-fated ticket lottery system.
Designed to overcome the computer glitches and server crashes that beleaguered the 2011 ticket sale, the 2012 random lottery system succeeded mainly in infuriating long-time Burning Man participants, about 70 per cent of whom did not get tickets.
Facebook’s deal with Bango points to new mobile app payments
Listen carefully in the City of London and, very faintly, you may be able to hear the bell ringing for round two of Facebook’s simmering battle with Apple over mobile apps.
Bango, a small mobile payments firm, quietly announced to the stock market on Wednesday that it has “signed an agreement to provide payment services to Facebook”.
Samsung, Instagram and Twitter score at Super Bowl
Tech news from around the web, Super Bowl edition:
Although automotive companies were the most prolific advertisers during Sunday’s Super Bowl, many of the $7m-a-minute spots also involved tech companies – large and small.
This week, Facebook’s much-anticipated IPO filing gave a glimpse into the company’s financials and the thinking of its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
For many commentators, the filing raised questions about whether Facebook can continue this pace of accelerated growth.
At long last Facebook has filed for its initial public offering, the most eagerly awaited event in Silicon Valley since Google went public in 2004. Having read the prospectus, with its details of how profitable and cash-rich the social networking enterprise is, may I suggest it calls the whole thing off.
There is still time to cancel its IPO and the filing provides plenty of reasons why it ought to, and why Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, would probably be happier if it did. He could carry on running Facebook as a private company and would not have to justify himself to outsiders.
The force is with digital, mobile games
Two trends clear in Facebook’s IPO filing on Wednesday were the inexorable rise in importance of digital-based gaming revenues and the growth in mobile – we learned Zynga was a key revenue-generator for Facebook and half of Facebook’s members were now users of its mobile products .
Earnings and data from Electronic Arts, THQ and Japan’s Gree over the past 24 hours further emphasise that the old order of disc-based console gaming will have a declining share of consumers’ attention, as consoles become more general entertainment boxes and smartphones and tablets proliferate.
Facebook filing flags privacy risks
Getty Images
One thing Facebook’s IPO filing documents make clear is that the company is taking privacy risks seriously. Privacy is mentioned 35 times, mainly as a risk factor.
The company acknowledges that media coverage of privacy lapses, for example, could affect profits.
Facebook’s conundrum over mobile ads
One of the more eye-catching elements of Facebook’s obligatory rundown of “risk factors” in Wednesday’s IPO filing was the section on mobile.
Facebook has huge scale on mobile. Half of Facebook’s monthly active users – 425m people – use its mobile products, as of December.
Facebook files – all you need to know
Facebook has finally filed to go public, with plans to raise at least $5bn. The 845m-strong social network’s S-1 registration statement appeared on the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s website on Wednesday afternoon.
Some key facts from the IPO filing: founder Mark Zuckerberg has a 28.4 per cent stake worth $22.7bn, based on a $80bn valuation for the company. Facebook made $1bn on $3.7bn in revenues in 2011. It will trade under the symbol FB and Morgan Stanley is the lead broker.
After the jump, a breakdown of the contents of the 192-page filing and reaction from around the web as reported in our live blog.
WikiLeaks could set servers afloat, Fox News reports
Tech news from around the web:
WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, is investigating the possibility of taking its hosting infrastructure offshore to avoid the long arm of the law, reports Fox News. The suggestion is that this would be more than just an island out of the reach of the taxman – WikiLeaks has explored floating its infrastructure on a barge in international waters, Fox claims. Julian Assange is in London’s supreme court this week fighting his extradition to Sweden, while a new legal challenge has also emerged from FSI, his former lawyers, who accuse the WikiLeaks founder of failing to pay his legal fees.
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Older entries
