Facebook's user base is nearly as large as the U.S. population and, for the first time, the site has turned a profit.
The Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies has begun a tender offer to purchase up to $100 million of common stock from current and former Facebook employees, according to sources close to the company. The investment boutique has agreed to pay $14.77 per share, putting the valuation of the company at $6.5 billion.
Ben Horowitz was toiling as an unheralded product strategist at Netscape Communications when he opened a scathing e-mail from his boss, Marc Andreessen. It was the winter of 1996; Netscape's public offering, several months earlier, had ignited the dotcom craze, and co-founder Andreessen had just appeared on Time's cover, sitting on a throne, feet bare -- the very portrait of a cocky 24-year-old tech wunderkind.
Back in April, I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg as part of my research for Wired's Great Wall of Facebook piece.
Best-selling author Ben Mezrich is the first to concede he doesn't know exactly what happened between Mark Zuckerberg and the Victoria's Secret model at that San Francisco club in the summer of 2005. He tells the story just as sources reported it to him: a touch on the leg. A grasp of the hand. The pair leaving the club. That's it. Any inference from there is your own.
Shia LaBeouf and Michael Cera are both being sought to play CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Even before the official kickoff of the seventh annual annual "D: All Things Digital" conference, Facebook was making waves at the event: Hours after the company announced a $200 million cash infusion from Digital Sky Technologies that values the social media site at $10 billion, Digital Sky partner Alexander Tamas was making the rounds at the Four Seasons Aviara resort and talking up his latest deal.
Facebook said Tuesday that it received $200 million from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies in exchange for a 2% stake.
It's been a busy couple of months for social networking site Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the cover of FORTUNE (dressed in a tie, no less) and shared with us his plans to turn Facebook into the next digital communications platform. Soon thereafter he landed on Oprah Winfrey's couch to offer a tutorial on the site he'd initially built four years ago. In March the company launched a redesign that a vocal group of users roundly criticized. A few weeks after that chief financial officer Gideon Yu resigned unexpectedly, prompting bloggers to speculate that the company must be readying itself for a public offering.
We knew Facebook was about to hit 200 million active users, but now it's official, per a post Wednesday by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the company's official blog.
Facebook's user base is nearly as large as the U.S. population and, for the first time, the site has turned a profit.
The Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies has begun a tender offer to purchase up to $100 million of common stock from current and former Facebook employees, according to sources close to the company. The investment boutique has agreed to pay $14.77 per share, putting the valuation of the company at $6.5 billion.
Ben Horowitz was toiling as an unheralded product strategist at Netscape Communications when he opened a scathing e-mail from his boss, Marc Andreessen. It was the winter of 1996; Netscape's public offering, several months earlier, had ignited the dotcom craze, and co-founder Andreessen had just appeared on Time's cover, sitting on a throne, feet bare -- the very portrait of a cocky 24-year-old tech wunderkind.
Back in April, I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg as part of my research for Wired's Great Wall of Facebook piece.
Best-selling author Ben Mezrich is the first to concede he doesn't know exactly what happened between Mark Zuckerberg and the Victoria's Secret model at that San Francisco club in the summer of 2005. He tells the story just as sources reported it to him: a touch on the leg. A grasp of the hand. The pair leaving the club. That's it. Any inference from there is your own.
Shia LaBeouf and Michael Cera are both being sought to play CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Even before the official kickoff of the seventh annual annual "D: All Things Digital" conference, Facebook was making waves at the event: Hours after the company announced a $200 million cash infusion from Digital Sky Technologies that values the social media site at $10 billion, Digital Sky partner Alexander Tamas was making the rounds at the Four Seasons Aviara resort and talking up his latest deal.
Facebook said Tuesday that it received $200 million from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies in exchange for a 2% stake.
It's been a busy couple of months for social networking site Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the cover of FORTUNE (dressed in a tie, no less) and shared with us his plans to turn Facebook into the next digital communications platform. Soon thereafter he landed on Oprah Winfrey's couch to offer a tutorial on the site he'd initially built four years ago. In March the company launched a redesign that a vocal group of users roundly criticized. A few weeks after that chief financial officer Gideon Yu resigned unexpectedly, prompting bloggers to speculate that the company must be readying itself for a public offering.
We knew Facebook was about to hit 200 million active users, but now it's official, per a post Wednesday by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the company's official blog.
Anybody tuning in to Oprah Winfrey on Friday afternoon, March 13 learned at least three things about Mark Zuckerberg, 24 year-old founder and CEO of Facebook: He looks a lot like his father (the bearded man in the audience close-up). He's not interested in dating Gayle King's daughter, a 22 year-old Stanford grad (King: "She's smart!"). And he can take a poke or two - virtually and otherwise.
Facebook held no appeal for Peter Lichtenstein. The New Paltz, N.Y., resident had checked out so-called social networking sites before, and he wasn't impressed. ("MySpace," he recalls, "was ridiculous.")
On an otherwise placid holiday weekend, one blog's commentary on a change to Facebook's terms of service created a firestorm of banter on the Web: does the social network claim ownership to any user content on the site, even if the user deletes it?
Most companies judge their success based on how high they can rank on a Google search. An entire industry of search engine optimizers has sprung up to help businesses rise to the top. But not every person or company wants their information to be found by search engines. Here are three sites that make a business out of helping its clients fly below Google's radar.
A Web site started by a student as a way of staying in touch with friends celebrated its fifth birthday Wednesday as a billion-dollar business and a global phenomenon.
The clock has just struck seven on a Thursday night, and Sheryl Sandberg is networking furiously. Not on Facebook, the site she joined in March as COO and where she boasts 1,114 "friends." No, she's doing it the old-fashioned way, in her Atherton, Calif., living room. She hosts her Silicon Valley soirees a few times a year, and it's always the A-list crowd. On this particular evening the group includes the new head of eBay North America, the manager of Google's ad-selling platforms, and well-known tech bankers and venture capitalists. It's a high-wattage, high-powered group. Oh, and there's one other thing: All those attending are women.
Financially speaking, Web 2.0 has been a total bust.
Anytime you tinker with something that millions of people use daily, you're going to upset some folks. Remember those redesigned $20 bills a decade ago -- the ones people said looked like Monopoly money?
Since he started Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has learned that he can't make significant changes to the popular online hangout without triggering an uproar among indignant users who preferred the status quo
This is my farewell column. Fast Forward has been a weekly labor of love, mostly, since early 2002. Now I'm taking an extended leave from Fortune to write my book, The Facebook Effect.
At the company's annual conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had lofty words for the mission of his social network. But Facebook still has one thing on its mind: advertising
Matt Cohler, one of the key members of Facebook's original management team, is taking a job at a venture capital firm
As many surveys have suggested, fear of public speaking is one of our strongest anxieties, often ranking above the fear of dying.
Apple, Google and Facebook all want to build the next great platform. Inside the struggle for Web supremacy
Having nearly tripled its audience and added about 20,000 new applications over the past year, Facebook Inc.'s popular online hangout is about to undergo a housecleaning
Late last year Mark Zuckerberg, the 24-year-old CEO of social-networking phenomenon Facebook, got onstage before a Madison Avenue crowd and declared that he was leading a once-in-a-century media revolution. Long story short: The revolution hasn't panned out. Six months later, advertisers could be forgiven for mistaking Facebook for a smaller MySpace or a much larger Friendster (remember them?). And far from changing media as we know it, the virtual home of Superpokes, Funwalls, and other such time wasters is showing cracks in its foundation.
When Microsoft walked away from its blockbuster bid for Yahoo, the media sought desperately to keep the news coming even when there wasn't much left to say. That seems to be how The Wall Street Journal came up with the notion that Microsoft had approached Facebook about an acquisition. It's not true.
This is only day 13 on the job for Sheryl Sandberg, so forgive her if she doesn't have everything figured out just yet. She pulls her legs up beneath her into a white Eames chair.
We've all been there: the dull business conference. A half-empty room of half-asleep attendees answer their e-mail on laptops and BlackBerries, while some hapless speaker lumbers through a PowerPoint speech.
Forbes' list of the world's wealthy has named Warren Buffett the richest person on the planet, surpassing his friend and philanthropic partner Bill Gates who had held the title for 13 consecutive years.
Mark Zuckerberg, 23, emerges on Forbes magazine's list of world's richest
Facebook Inc. has raided Google Inc. to hire a new chief operating officer, providing the popular online social network with more seasoned management and advertising savvy as it strives to make more money without alienating its audience
"The press rarely grants an autumn reprise for those it loved in the spring," once wrote the great New York Times columnist Russell Baker. How true in the case of Internet-darling-turned-reviled-evildoer Facebook.
Let's try an experiment. Like most people these days, you've probably spent too much time in front of your computer today. So, quick -- name three brands you saw in online display ads within the past 24 hours.
With its $240 million equity investment announced Wednesday, along with a commitment to expand its pre-existing relationship as exclusive third-party representative for advertising on Facebook, Microsoft has cemented its connection to the company Silicon Valley is obsessed with.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was spotted Tuesday in Seattle, headed for meetings with executives at Microsoft. That lends credence to the unattributed reports in various papers this week that Microsoft was contemplating a major investment in the fast-growing social network.
As MySpace hooks up with MTV (whose parent Viacom once tried to buy it) and Facebook makes the cover of Newsweek, it's clear that social networking is only getting hotter. (But couldn't Newsweek find Mark Zuckerberg anecdotes that hadn't already appeared in Fortune?)
Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.
The owners of a rival social networking Web site are trying to shut down Facebook.com, charging in a federal lawsuit that Facebook's founder stole their ideas while they were students at Harvard
A U.S. judge Wednesday gave a group of former Harvard students two weeks to finalize and back up their claim that Facebook Inc.'s founder stole their ideas to create the fast-growing social networking Web site.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about the web giant's plans for expansion and clears up those IPO rumors
Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked. Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found).
Facebook may turn out to be a lot more important than any of us thought. It has just launched a major change in its strategy that will transform its role in the Internet ecosystem and could create a raft of new opportunities for companies of all sizes.
When I tell Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg he seems like a natural CEO, he acts insulted. I guess at 22 it's just not the way he envisions himself. But Zuckerberg is a strategic thinker. Listening to him talk, it becomes apparent that the company he co-founded is a deeply considered enterprise. It's also more important than most observers realize. That's not just because it has already amassed almost 10 million members.
Morgan Wields the Ax
MySpace isn't the only startup to turn a Gen Y-based network into a moneymaking business. Mark Zuckerberg, a computer science major at Harvard, last year created a Web version of the freshman faceb...
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