Facebook IPO underwhelms Web, too - CNN.com

(CNN) — As the stock market opened Friday with a ring of the bell by Mark Zuckerberg, all eyes were on Facebook — the social media Megalodon he nursed from a dorm-room project to one of Wall Street’s hottest prospects ever.

Facebook, or “FB” as it’s now known to investors, may have made amateur analysts on the Web go wild. But on the Nasdaq, it was a less exciting ride — ending the day at a price pretty much exactly where it began.

Friends may be priceless. But ‘friending’ both started and ended the day at just over $38 a share.

Facebook’s was the biggest opening ever for a tech company and the third-largest IPO in U.S. history, behind only Visa and General Motors.

On the Web, reactions ran the gamut from deliriously hopeful to harshly negative for the social-media giant’s Wall Street potential.

“A $104 billion market capitalization puts Facebook at more than 100 times its trailing earnings,” wrote John Constine and Kim-Mai Cutler for technology blog TechCrunch. “That’s a big multiple to live up to, and it will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation.”
And it wasn’t just the pros weighing in. In fact, it seemed like everyone on the Internet had an opinion.
Business Insider posted a poll (obviously not scientific) asking readers where they thought the $38 stock would be by the end of the day Friday.
Early Friday, a pessimistic 15% said under $35. But the biggest cluster of respondents had guessed somewhere between $40 and 55. (15% said $40 to 45, another 13% said $45 to 50 and, yes, yet another 12% said $50-55).
A hopeful 10% predicted the stock would skyrocket at otherworldly levels, winding up over $90 a share.
Facebook’s new billionaires
Results were similar on another site that sprung up, Facebook IPO Day Closing Price. Its graph showed the biggest number of predictions clustering around what ultimately would be an overly optimistic $50 mark.
On rival network Twitter, many observers seemed to be rooting against Facebook and its early investors, finding a measure of glee in the fact that the price didn’t skyrocket as some had predicted.
“Facebook stock has already started to tank,” wrote user Jen Misty (yes, with a healthy dose of hyperbole). “In my best Nelson voice from Simpsons — “HA! HA!”
There was this swipe at youthful startup culture from tweeter Ross Heart: “Harder? Keeping $FB over 38 or trying to get hired at Facebook being over 38?”
And then there was this sports metaphor, which referenced a certain polarizing NBA star.
“Rooting against Facebook stock price > [is greater than] rooting against LeBron,” wrote a user named Jay Kang.
More sober-minded watchers, however, noted that on Wall Street, when an opening stock sticks close to where it started, it means it was probably priced correctly to begin with.
“Few hours into trading and Facebook’s stocks maintain a $40 value,” wrote Giuseppe D’Antonio. “No drop, no frenzy behaviour, no wild fluctuations. Serious matter!”
While opinions in the business and tech communities have differed on whether the massive social network is a good investment, analysts have largely been bullish on the stock. There’s been heavy demand, leading Facebook on Wednesday to announce it will sell about 25% more shares than it had originally planned, bringing its total to 421 million shares.
At CNN content partner Mashable, a blog that got its start focusing exclusively on social media and saw its popularity rise as Facebook’s did, the staff geared up by creating an IPO-inspired playlist on music site Spotify (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is accessible only through a Facebook account).
Making the list? “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” by The Notorious B.I.G., “Rich” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” “Money (That’s What I Want) by Barrett Strong and “If I Had $1,000,000” by Barenaked Ladies, among others.
CNNMoney and CNN’s Brandon Griggs contributed to this report.

Google-Branded Tablet to Land in April

Google's Nexus tablet could be the company's next hardware device. Jon Snyder/Wired.com
The long-awaited Android-running, Google-branded tablet reportedly arrives in April.

The device is aimed squarely at the dominant, and cheap, Amazon Kindle Fire, which is the world’s leading 7-inch Android device. The tablet, which former CEO Eric Schmidt first mentioned in December, also would advance Google’s plan to create a unified software and hardware ecosystem — just like that company in Cupertino.

Richard Shim, an analyst with DisplaySearch, told CNET the Google tablet is on track for production in April and is expected to cost $199. It will sport a 7-inch, 1280×800 display and run Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). Those specs, if they pan out, one-up the Kindle Fire, which also costs $199 but has a 1024×600 display and runs on a modified version of Gingerbread (Android 2.3).

Should the tablet actually materialize, it would be yet another entry in Google’s sweeping hardware initiative. Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility will give the search company a ready-to-go hardware division. The tablet also would follow the rumored music-streaming entertainment device that would take advantage of the proposed Android@Home initiative announced at Google I/O.

This week The New York Times reported that Google is working on HUD glasses that could be formally announced by the end of the year.

Beyond its internal hardware initiatives, Google has partnered with HTC and Samsung for its Nexus-branded smartphones. The current crop of Nexus flagship phones were the first Android phones powered by Ice Cream Sandwich.

Indeed, all the rumored hardware and the Motorola Mobility acquisition suggest Google is positioning itself as a company that owns the entire “product stack,” from operating system to app ecosystem to hardware. This, of course, is the strategy employed by Google’s main rival in the mobile market, Apple.

Should Google continue down this path, it may be the next company, to “own the whole widget,” as Steve Jobs would say.

The 5 Reasons Why Facebook Is Worth So Much Money | TechCrunch

By Josh Constine

How did Facebook become worth so much money that it could file for the biggest IPO in tech history? By building a highly defensible product, platform, and advertising business on top of brilliant talent and valuable data. It now has several competitive advantages that protect it from disruption and could give it a long life as the primary online identity provider. Here are the 5 components that make Facebook a smart long-term bet for investors, regardless of its exact IPO pricing.

Network Effect

Displacing Facebook as the mainstream online social network would be next to impossible. It brought authenticated identity to the internet –a crucial utility that compelled users to join. No other service may be able to add on top of Facebook something as valuable as what Facebook added to Myspace, friendster, and other services where you didn’t have to be yourself.

Facebook’s ingenius distribution strategy, detailed in The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, allowed the service to capitalize on this value-add and spread to the farthest reaches of the globe. Eventually the network effect took hold, with Facebook’s ever-growing user base making it ever-more valuable and attractive to new users.

And now inertia has set in. Users have invested considerable time into Facebook building their profiles, walls, interest graphs, and most importantly, their social graphs. As Facebook handles a wide range of use cases and a critical mass of any person’s friends already using it, a competing social network can’t just be as good or better, it would need to be massive improvement to lead users astray. The insulation to competition provided by the network effect makes it a safe long-term bet for investors.

The News Feed’s EdgeRank Algorithm

For five years, Facebook has been collecting data and refining its EdgeRank algorithm, which determines what of all the content your friends share ends up in your news feed, and how prominently. By using Likes, comments, and shares to determine what’s most relevant, Facebook had developed arguably the best automated content curation engine in the world. The news feed also gets to draw on the web’s largest database of photos, and the friend tags they feature which helped Facebook go viral.

For new users without tons of data points, Facebook can still predict what they might be interested in seeing. For existing users, especially veterans of the site that actively use its feedback mechanisms, the news feed consistently surfaces relevant content. EdgeRank creates that the highly addicting experience that drives Facebook’s enormous time on site, return visit rate, and engagement. Even if Twitter or Google+ had all the content of Facebook, it could take them years to develop an algorithm that produces such a relevant feed.

Talent

Mark Zuckerberg sees the future. His product vision allows Facebook to release features that users grow into rather than out of. Zuckerberg has integrated progressive home brewed ideas as well as those that couldn’t reach their full potential when launched elsewhere. He has pushed the service to constantly reinvent itself, allowing it to stay cool and relevant 8 years after launch.

Zuck’s dedication to making the world a better place through interconnection and openness has also attracted other visionaries. COO Sheryl Sandberg‘s efficiency has made the company very profitable, and her willingness to experiment means Facebook will continue to revolutionize advertising through behavioral targeting and social content-infused ads. VP of Product Chris Coxhas led Facebook’s social design movement, where 1st and 3rd party products are made to leverage Facebook’s data and community from the start, rather than bolting them on.

With the promise of changing the world and a lean, fun-loving company culture, Facebook has been pulling top engineering, product, and business talent away from larger companies like Google that are saddled with product bloat and bureaucracy. It’s also been aggressively acquiring disruptive startups such as Paul Bucheit and Brett Taylor’s FriendFeed, Blake Ross’ Parakey, Sam Lessin’s Drop.io, and Josh Williams’ Gowalla. The rockstar product designers and executives ensures innovation will continue to flow from within Facebook.

The IPO will provide Facebook more cash for acquisitions and give its talent the liquidity they deserve. Though there’s always the chance they could cash out and leave, the ability to sell a little stock and upgrade their lifestyle might keep employees happy enough to stick around.

The Apps and Games Platform

Facebook has created a gaming platform proven to offer viral growth. While the service has curtailed some of loudest viral channels, organic growth opportunities remain and on-site advertising for games has produced high returns on investment for companies like Zynga. Facebook has fostered an enormous community of developers that pay while populating the site with engaging apps and content, and that won’t ever disappear overnight.

Facebook games are often infinite building simulations or twitch puzzlers, have long session lengths, and let users make vanity purchases so they can show off while simultaneously hooking them deeper into a game. They readily produce “whales”, or people who spend orders of magnitude more than the average player. Mobile is emerging as a lucrative platform for Apple and Google, and Facebook is just getting started there, but it does have an enormous install base to work from.

By attracting developers early with free growth, clamping down once they had invested, and then taxing them 30% through its virtual currency Credits, Facebook has turned its games platform into a consistent money maker. Now some developers are experimenting with digital media sales and rentals, pay-per-view, as well as offering virtual currency microincentives, showing potential for platform monetization beyond games.

Ad Targeting

Age, gender, current city, hometown, employers, education, friends, interests, and now in-app activity and ecommerce habits. When users share this data with friends, they’re also sharing with Facebook. This gives Facebook possibly the most accurate and robust set of ad targeting data in the world. With both an self-serve tool and ad reps handling premium accounts, Facebook can provide effective advertising solutions to both local business and international brands.

Facebook has developed eye-catching ads by combining this targeting with social-content infused ad creative. Viewers see the names and faces of friends who Like an advertised brand. Interactions between their friends and brands, such as Likes, app usage, and checkins, can become the ads themselves through Sponsored Stories. These trump, and are increasingly pulling spend away from more cookie-cutter display and search ads targeted through cookies and keywords.

Facebook has only begun to monetize through ads. The sidebars where ads primarily appear have been kept small and unobtrusive. Facebook is now mixing ads back into the web version of the news feed, where they’re sure to be seen between organic social content. Facebook has yet to show ads to its hundreds of millions of daily mobile users, but Sponsored Stories could show up there soon too. Finally, it could one day create an ad network that allows other sites to pay to show logged-in Facebook users the same highly targeted social ads they see on Facebook.com.

5 mexicanas integran el top 10 minorista - Negocios - CNNExpansion.com

Por: Jesús Ugarte

En el ranking de Deloitte, Soriana es la cadena mejor ubicada en AL y Oxxo subió un par de peldaños; pese al entorno, los planes a meses sin intereses permitieron elevar ventas a tasa de doble dígito.

Con su plan de contar con 11,000 tiendas en 2014, Oxxo será el segundo grupo comercial

que más facture en México en los siguientes años. (Foto: Cortesía Oxxo)

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (CNNExpansión) — Cinco grupos comerciales mexicanos figuran entre las 10 compañías delsector de ventas al menudeo (retail) que más facturan en América Latina, revela el estudio 'Global Powers of Retailing' (Potencias Mundiales de la Industria Minorista) que cada año elaboran la consultora Deloitte y la revista estadounidense STORES.

Según el reporte, con base en cifras de 2010 el primer lugar lo ocupó la brasileña Pao de Acúcar con un nivel de venta de 18,318 millones de dólares (mdd), seguido de las chilenas Cencosud y Falabella con 11,791 mdd y 7,473 mdd, respectivamente.

Soriana, en el cuarto lugar, es la mejor ubicada de las mexicanas en el ranking con una facturación de 7,425 mdd, le sigue en quinto lugar la brasileña Lojas Americanas con 5,359 mdd, al tiempo que Oxxo (subsidiaria de Femsa),Comercial Mexicana, Grupo Comercial Chedraui y El Puerto de Liverpool, ocuparon los sitios 6,7,8 y 9, al alcanzar ingresos de 4,933, 4,348, 4,142 y 3,845 mdd en el mismo orden.

Cabe señalar que Oxxo subió dos peldaños y superó aComercial Mexicana como reflejo de la combinación de su agresivo programa de expansión de los últimos años y la tasa de doble dígito en ventas a tiendas comparables (con más de un año en operación). Analistas de Credit Suisse han anticipado que en un plazo no lejano, la subsidiaria de Oxxo se convertirá en el segundo grupo comercial con el mayor volumen de ventas en México.

Según el 'Global Powers of Retailing', la empresa número 10 que más factura en América Latina es Signet Jewelers, cadena comercial de Bermuda con un nivel de 3,437 mdd.

A nivel mundial, la americana Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. lidera las compañías que más venden en el sector minorista, seguida de la francesa Carrefour, Tesco PLC de Reino Unido, la alemana Metro AG y la estadounidense The Kroger Co.

Meses sin intereses apoyan posición de mexicanas

Pese al entorno adverso que presentaron las economías global y local, varias de las grandes cadenas comerciales mexicanas lograron reportar crecimientos de dos dígitos en ventas en 2010 gracias a sus promociones de pago a meses sin intereses y los modelos de financiamiento utilizados en general, comenta Omar Camacho Martínez, socio de la industria de Consumo de Deloitte México.

El estudio elaborado analiza el desempeño de las 250 cadenas de autoservicio más importantes del mundo, sobre los niveles de ventas registrados en un periodo de tiempo determinado y destaca que, de las cinco empresas mexicanas incluidas en la lista (Soriana, Oxxo, Comercial Mexicana, Chedraui y Liverpool), cuatro obtuvieron crecimiento a tasa de dos cifras en sus ventas y mejoraron su posición en el ranking, destacando los casos de Oxxo y Liverpool, las cuales se ubicaron en la posición 26 y 29 del listado respectivamente.

"Tanto Oxxo como Liverpool (la empresa número 39 de 'Las 500' de Expansión) han seguido estrategias de expansión exitosas. Por una parte, Oxxo se convirtió en un competidor importante para las cadenas de supermercados debido al crecimiento exponencial en el número de tiendas, al modelo de cercanía con el usuario y conveniencia para la adquisición de productos básicos, así como a la oferta para el pago de servicios. Por otro lado, Liverpool ha hecho inversiones importantes en diferentes regiones del país", menciona Camacho Martínez.

A la fecha, Oxxo opera más de 9,000 tiendas y con base en lo señalado por directivos de FEMSA, el objetivo es alcanzar 11,000 unidades hacia finales de 2014. En octubre pasado, Juan Fonseca, director de Relación con Inversionistas de FEMSA, reveló que tan sólo en México se puede llegar a tener hasta 15,000 tiendas.

Por su parte, José Antonio Diego, de Liverpool, consideró que pese al agresivo programa de crecimiento que ha observado la departamental, el mercado todavía ofrece grandes oportunidades, por lo que en el quinquenio 2011-2015 abrirá de 8 a 10 tiendas para agregar de 40 a 50 en ese lapso.

"Gracias a la estabilidad del mercado interno, estas compañías han logrado aumentar sus ventas y conseguir crecimientos de esta magnitud. Otro factor importante es el impulso en el crédito al consumo soportado por los bancos y el modelo de financiamiento de estas tiendas detallistas", dice el socio de la industria de Consumo de Deloitte México.

"La promoción de meses sin intereses fue la más poderosa estrategia para fomentar el consumo interno en la población, como ejemplo se presenta el ‘Buen Fin', temporada que impulsó el crecimiento de la cartera activa de las tarjetas de crédito en el país".

De las compañías mexicanas mencionadas, sólo Oxxo y Chedraui tienen operaciones fuera del país.

BBC News - Facebook 'to go public with $10bn share offering'

Facebook 'to go public with $10bn share offering'

Continue reading the main story

Facebook will begin the process of becoming a publicly-listed company this week, valuing the social networking site at between $75bn and $100bn, reports suggest.

Facebook makes most of its money through advertising

The company plans to file papers with the US financial watchdog on Wednesday, according to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The flotation later this year would raise about $10bn, they reported.

This would be one of the biggest share sales seen on Wall Street.

It would dwarf the $1.9bn raised by Google when it went public in 2004.

It would still, however, be some way short of the $20bn raised by carmaker General Motors in November 2010.

'Brilliant achievement'

The reports suggest that Morgan Stanley will be the lead underwriter for the sale, with Goldman Sachs also expected to be heavily involved.

Rumours of Facebook's so-called initial public offering (IPO) have circulated for many months, and the company has maintained it will not comment on the subject.

The reported valuation would make Facebook one of the world's biggest companies by market capitalisation.

"Facebook a brilliant achievement, but $75-$100bn? Would make Apple look really cheap," said Rupert Murdoch on Twitter.

The company was started by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow students at Harvard University in 2004 and has quickly grown to become one of the world's most popular websites.

It makes most of its money through advertising.

As a private company, Facebook does not have to publish its accounts, but reports in January last year suggested a document sent by Goldman Sachs to its clients showed the firm made a net profit of $355m on revenues of $1.2bn in the first nine months of 2010.

Quantum dots could increase fiber optic bandwidth up to 10 times (video) -- Engadget

By Mat Smith

Nothing screams World of Tomorrow quite like quantum dots. Alongside the possibility of paint-on solar cells, the technology could also multiply optic fiber bandwidth by up to ten times. The Photonic Network Research Institute at NICT has been able to crank up the capacity of the data transmission system by combining a light source and photonic crystal fiber. The quantum dots act as the light source, and via the NICT's new "sandwiched sub-nano separator structure" [above], they can be tweaked to work at 70THz -- far in excess of the 10THz frequencies typically used. Aside from optical communications, the potency of these high frequencies allow it to pass beyond skin, opening up the use of quantum dots to medical scanning and high resolution cell imaging. Is there anything these dots can't do? Catch a slightly more technical explanation in the video right after the break.

Apple's First Quarter Earnings: The Unbelievable Numbers

Apple's First Quarter Earnings: The Unbelievable Numbers:

Todd Wasserman

Apple‘s blowout first quarter was notable for many reasons, not least of which was the company’s record revenues of $46.3 billion.

But the quarter was remarkable for several other reasons as well. Apple, which is known for keeping its affairs close to the vest, released a raft of information on Tuesday. Here are some of the highlights:

• Apple sold 37 million iPhones in the quarter, a 128% jump over the comparable quarter in 2010.
• iPad sales hit 15.4 million, a rise of 111%.
• Mac sales were 5.2 million, an increase of 26%.
• Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a number which is down 21% as the iPhone cannibalizes sales of more limited-function devices.
• Apple now has $97.6 billion in cash on hand.
• Revenues from iTunes hit $1.7 billion. More than 140 million apps and pieces of content were downloaded on Dec. 25.
• There are 1.5 million iPads being used by educational institutions.
• iCloud has 85 million users. There are now 550,000 apps available. Developers of such apps have earned more than $4 billion, $700 million in Q1.
• Apple Stores produced $6.1 billion in revenues for the quarter. The average revenue per store was $17.1 million vs. $12 million last year. There are about 22,000 visitors per store per week.
• Apple’s revenues for the quarter were higher than the company’s revenues for its entire fiscal 2009.

Image courtesy of Flickr, nechbi