Was Facebook’s IPO a flop? Following the social networking company’s rollercoaster week of trading, that was the question at the heart of much of the debate with tech commentators.
When Ayush Agarwal decided to look for love, he thought carefully about his likes and dislikes. The 28-year-old product manager at Google, who lives in San Francisco, loves Apple products. So he signed up to Cupidtino, a dating website for Apple fanboys and fangirls.
“The idea of pivoting my dating life around Mac ladies was intriguing,” he says. “It’s definitely a solid conversation starter. Also, having a Mac girlfriend would mean that I wouldn’t end up becoming [her] tech support”.
©Pascal PerichWhen Josh Silverman received a call last year asking if he would like to work for American Express, he was surprised.
The 43-year-old technology entrepreneur’s life had always revolved around Silicon Valley start-ups. He had been chief executive of Skype and before that held a senior role at eBay. In the late 1990s he had cofounded Evite, the internet invitations company, and sold it in 2001. The thought of working for a 162-year-old blue-chip corporation was alien.
Rakuten CEO on why Pinterest is worth $1.5bn
Rakuten has led a $100m funding round into Pinterest, which values the online “curation” community at around $1.5bn.
The Japanese ecommerce giant won out over major US venture capital firms who were vying for a piece of Silicon Valley’s new sweetheart, which lets users clip images to a virtual pinboard.
The FT spoke to Hiroshi Mikitani, chief executive of Rakuten, about how social discovery can boost ecommerce and the growing importance of images over text on the web.
Stress balls, breath mints, cupcakes and a sponsored “oxygen bar”: yes, it’s Internet Week in New York, the annual feast of branded freebies, parties and panels for the city’s digital media and marketing set.
Today a Yahoo presentation drew the biggest crowd at the warehouse-like SoHo venue. Some were clearly there for an address on “big data” by Billy Beane, the number-crunching general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character in Moneyball.
Judith Masthoff, a Dutch researcher in artificial intelligence, was a doctoral student in the mid-1990s when she came up with her first invention.
The outline of the idea – a way of “enabling a user to fetch a specific information item from a set of information items” – hardly hinted at the starring role her brainwave would play in the legal battles sweeping through the technology industry.
Short-term investors need not apply. That’s the key message in a newly released video Facebook produced for its investor road show, which is expected to begin next week.
The highly-produced video stars Facebook’s top executives, explaining the technical details of the platform with fast-paced cinematography, and describing its advertising model with guest appearances from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and American Express.
But the most pointed message to investors comes toward the end from David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer: we want investors who believe in our mission and are excited about our long-term potential.
Flattr brings social micropayments to DailyMotion
One of the more innovative approaches in the plethora of efforts to persuade more people to pay for more content online is “social micropayment” firm Flattr.
Acting something like an online tip jar, Flattr reverses the usual payment process by giving people a way to pay for content after they’ve consumed it, rather than before they know what they are getting.
iPhone powers Apple March quarter, June will suffer
Apple has announced another stunning quarter, with revenues of $39.2bn earning net profits of $11.6bn or $12.30 per share. That compares with analyst expectations of $36.5bn in sales and $9.94 a share in profits.
The company sold 35.1m iPhones -up 88 per cent on the year-earlier quarter – but is expected to sell fewer in the current quarter, with revenues declining 13 per cent sequentially. Tim Cook, chief executive, and Peter Oppenheimer, chief financial officer, spoke to analysts after the announcement – our live blog is after the jump.
Google quietly shutters One Pass, its Apple Newsstand competitor
Fourteen months ago, to some fanfare, Google launched One Pass – its way to help publishers charge for digital content on the web, mobile and tablets.
Coming just a day after Apple announced plans for a 30 per cent tax on all app subscriptions, Google’s gambit caused quite a stir. With a more generous 10 per cent split and promises to share more subscriber data with publishers, at a time when many were spitting feathers about Apple’s diktat, One Pass was seen as a bold challenge and a tempting proposition from a company many publishers still felt was a parasite.
Yet last week, on a sunny Friday afternoon, Google quietly snuffed One Pass, whose homepage now returns only a 404 error.
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