Tech blog

The only way to justify Facebook’s sky-high valuation is to look to its growth in the longer term and ignore the next couple of years. That is the view that has been taking hold in the financial world as the IPO of the decade finally comes into sight.

Want to test your own assumptions about Facebook’s growth rate and profit margins – and what these will mean for its share price? The FT’s new interactive calculator lets you do just that. Click below to try it.

It was an “inadvertent error”. That was Yahoo’s response today to the revelation that new CEO Scott Thompson hasn’t got a computer science degree after all, whatever his official biography may say.

(Late in the day on Thursday, Yahoo issued a second statement striking a very different tone from this casual attempt at a brush-off. Faced with a  serious ethical question involving its CEO, the company’s board is now at least taking the matter seriously. See update at the bottom of this post.)

For Google, missing the online storage and syncing market would be as damaging as missing social networking: much of the personal information that is most important to its users would sit on some other company’s servers, beyond the reach of its search crawlers.

That makes Google Drive its most important new service since Google+.

Facebook won’t be the only new internet stock that will soon be turning heads on Wall Street. Google has just come up with a new twist of its own: a new “C” class of non-voting shares that will trade in their own right.

One intriguing question this raises: what kind ofdiscount should investors put on the new, non-voting flavour of GOOG?