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How To Buy Facebook Stock

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:30:00 +0000

Facebook goes public tomorrow. It could be worth well over $100 billion dollars. Want to get a piece of that? It’s going to be very tricky for mere mortals to get Facebook stock in the IPO. If you want shares, here’s what you have to do.

“First, get a ton of money. Like tons. I am talking gazillions.”

Man City Football Club furthers digital engagement as it partners with Foursquare

Jamillah Knowles — Thu, 17 May 2012 07:13:30 +0000

Manchester City Football club has never been afraid to push digital boundaries to engage its fans. Today the club has announced a partnership with the location-based social network Foursquare.

City supporters can now check into Foursquare at the Etihad Stadium, City Square, City Stores and official Heart of the City venues to take advantage of special Club offers on merchandise, food and drink.

As you might expect, users can also share photos, tips and lists with fellow fans on where best to catch City in action on televised away-days.

The club has already set up arrangements with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to offer fans a rounded service online. It’s a great way to reward loyalty in the places where people gather naturally.

City’s Foursquare page has already attracted over 16,000 followers, a strong presence that reflects the fact that the club has a pre-formed audience just waiting to take part in new ways to engage.

Commenting on the deal, Richard Ayers from City’s digital team said,

“Innovating with digital media has been a huge focus for us over the last year. We’re constantly striving to build more meaningful and rewarding relationships with fans, wherever they are in the world, and this deal is a fantastic addition to the City services. Foursquare’s a great company to work with and we’re delighted to be the first in football to offer our fans this service.”

Manchester City and its fans are already celebrating its Premier League title, but of course the more important question now has to be, who will be its Mayor on Foursquare?

Still Smiling, Eduardo? Senators Schumer, Casey Want To Collect Your $67M In Facebook Taxes Anyway

Ingrid Lunden — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:58:12 +0000

Another development in the ongoing story of how Eduardo Saverin has given up his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying $67 million in taxes related to Facebook’s IPO: the U.S. government doesn’t want him get away with it quite so fast.

Today, Senators Charles Schumer and Bob Casey are expected to announce a plan they have to re-impose the taxes on Saverin, part of a bigger scheme to go after expatriates who give up citizenship in order to avoid taxes. On top of that, they want to make it official that people who do avoid paying their taxes by renouncing citizenship are unable from ever re-entering the country again.

The plan, the offices of the two Senators said, will be announced today at 11am Eastern in a press conference at the Senate Radio-TV Gallery in the U.S. Capitol building.

Called the “Ex-Patriot” act (short for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy”, according to ABC News), the act proposes to re-impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anyone who renounces citizenship — even if they are no longer resident in the U.S.

In Singapore, where Saverin currently resides, individuals do not need to pay capital gains taxes, so it’s thought that Saverin is using his residency there to avoid paying a minimum $67 million tax bill — more if the share price rises — on shares that he sells in Facebook after the company is expected to IPO tomorrow. He is expected to make $3.84 billion once Facebook goes public. Saverin has lived in Singapore since 2009 and renounced his citizenship in September 2011.

It’s not clear how many other ex-pats might be liable for such hefty bills if the act gets passed. Facebook, which is expected to raise at least $16 billion in the IPO, is one of the biggest IPOs of all time and is getting an extra level of scrutiny as a result, with the debate ranging from accusations of being plain wrong in his approach and others, if not exactly supporting him, pointing out the other side of the debate and how he’s just being a good old, gambling capitalist.

Well, Schumer (D-NY) and Casey (D-PA) are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. They will call Saverin’s $67 million tax “duck” an “outrage” today in their press conference, and detail the rest of the Ex-Patriot act.

The Weather Channel Beautifies And Socializes Its iPhone App

Jordan Crook — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:30:16 +0000

In an effort to streamline its digital offerings, The Weather Channel has today announced that its popular iPhone app has undergone a major redesign. It started with the launch of the iPad app, and just a few weeks ago The Weather Channel followed suit on the web. But the iPhone marks a major portal between TWC and its consumers, in that mobile and weather undoubtedly go hand in hand.

The redesign reminds me a bit of HTC’s Sense 3, with the home screen offering up a weather-themed background based on the weather outside. The user interface seems much more navigable, but the features themselves are getting a bump as well.

The revamp streamlines the TWC app in a big way, in that you can have as much or as little weather as you’d like when you hop in the app. You’ll obviously get automatic weather updates, but the ability to save more locations or expand more detailed information within the app makes it a much more friendly user experience.

It’s clear that The Weather Channel is trying to unify its digital products. The company added social sharing features to the web site, which will also be available on the iPhone app. This includes the ability to upload a photo of your local weather and publish it to iWitness, Facebook, or Twitter.

We spoke with EVP of digital products at The Weather Channel Cameron Clayton about the direction in which these products are headed.

While this release represents possibly the biggest improvement in The Weather Channel App for iPhone to date, it’s just the start of what we’re setting out to accomplish. Yes, we’ve staked a claim with the accuracy of our weather forecasting with our TruPoint technology, but soon we’ll take that to the next level and tell users when rain will start and stop, as we do on the new weather.com. But we also plan to expand the social functionality during severe weather events and beyond to allow people to connect through weather at all times. Additionally, we’re in the infancy of our global expansion on mobile, which we will rolling out over the coming months and years.

According to that, sounds like quite a lot of work has yet to be done, but either way the new TWC iPhone app is a huge improvement over the last version. So if you’re interested in downloading the app, head on over to the Apple App Store and check it out.

Click to view slideshow.

Can the Go Daddy Girls Convince You They’re Serious?

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:30:00 +0000

Go Daddy wants to be known for more than domain names and racy Superbowl ads. The company has built large businesses around Web hosting and other services for companies of all sizes. But can it really have it both ways?

At a recent meeting in ReadWriteWeb’s San Francisco headquarters, new Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman delighted in reeling off the company’s impressive numbers: almost $1.4 billion in sales, 53 million domains registered, 5 million websites hosted, and so on. Go Daddy is as big as the next eight competitors combined, Adleman said, and gets more than half of all new domain registrations.

But the company, which was bought by private equity firms for $2.25 billion last year has even bigger aspirations. “We don’t want to move away from that,” Adelman said, but “we think we can do more than serve that segment.”

Servers or Celebrities?

“People think we’re a bunch of guys down in Arizona” with domain names and Super Bowls ads, he said, but there are “sections of the site to address the needs of different communities… We have offerings for the tech community, for the developer community.”

Overcoming those perceptions among seasoned techies won’t be easy, though. Questions like “you’re still using Go Daddy?” are often posed to tech start ups. And really, it’s Go Daddy’s own fault.

No matter what its actual technology credentials, the company spent millions of dollars promoting Go Daddy Girls, not cloud infrastructure (4GH Cloud Hosting) or online storage. Even companies that use those services might think twice about explaining why to the CEO. And that’s especially true the larger, and more sophisticated the company.

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman visits RWW HQ.

Adelman acknowledges “some amount of polarization” around the Go Daddy brand, but believes that the company’s scale more than makes up for any negative perceptions. Go Daddy is big enough to enjoy massive economies of scale, and to create a full suite of add-on products for all kinds of customers. Domian names, website hosting and site-building tools, SSL certificates, marketing tools like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing and social media. “It’s like selling hot dogs at the ballpark,” Adelman said. Sixty six percent of Go Daddy customers have a product in addition to a domain name, he said.

An App Threat?

Why the tech push now? Although Adelman says it kept growing through the recession, the reason for the push could be the gradual move to mobile apps instead of websites, a transition that threatens Go Daddy’s core business. But Adleman says he’s not worried. “The Web will die a slower death than predicted,” he said, adding that given the hype cycle and the rise of HTML5, it might not be long before you start hearing that “the App World is dead.”

UK Facebook account hacker hit with 12-month prison sentence

Jamillah Knowles — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:14:08 +0000

Following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police Service’s Central e-Crime unit, 21-year-old Gareth Cross of West Sussex was sentenced to twelve months after hacking into a private Facebook account.

In January 2011, Crosskey gained unauthorised access to the Facebook account of an individual including the private email function. The breach was reported to the FBI who traced the source back to the UK.

The case was then passed to the Met’s e-Crime unit which traced it back to Crosskey and arrested him at home in July. Crosskey pleaded guilty to offences under the Computer Misuse Act.

We don’t know the purpose of Crosskey’s breach, whether it was an act of malicious intent or to test his own capabilities, but a twelve month sentence looks as though it will be a deterrent to others planning the same action. If the e-Crime unit and the FBI got involved, it’s a fair guess that something serious was going on.

Computer Misuse Act in action

It’s interesting to see how the Computer Misuse Act is used in cases like this. There are not many to reference, but they are the forerunners of how the law will work in future, based on past examples.

Crosskey was charged with the following:

Section 1 Computer Misuse Act 1990 caused computer to perform function to secure unauthorised access to a program/data. Between 07/01/2011 and 14/07/2011 within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court caused a computer to perform a function with intent to secure unauthorised access to a program or data relating to a client held in a computer belonging to Facebook.

Section 3 Computer Misuse Act 1990 unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of or prevent/hinder access to a computer. Between 07/01/2011 and 14/07/2011 within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court did an unauthorised act at a time when you knew that it was unauthorised either intending by doing the act or being reckless as to whether the act would enable the operation of a computer to be impaired, access to a program or data held in a computer to be prevented or hindered, or the operation of a program or the reliability of data held in a computer to be impaired.

Basically this is a wordy way of saying ‘you knew what you were doing when you gained access to someone else’s account and that it would mess up that service for the owner’. For what it would take to access anyone’s account, it would be hard to imagine a way to perform this act without realising.

The Police Central e-Crime Unit is a national unit in the UK and forms part of the government’s response to online threats, under the National Cyber Security Programme.

The Unit usually works to reduce harm caused by organised criminals online and in this case, to track down apparently lone hackers who have worked out ways into a Facebook account. Though some hacks are performed simply to see how they can be done, this looks as though law enforcement is willing to take such acts seriously. Hacker beware.

Rise of the Tech Bandits: Jason Calacanis, the Shapeshifter

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Editor’s note: In the Summer 2012 issue of SAY Magazine, Dan Frommer’s cover story Rise of the Tech Bandits chronicles the history of tech blogging. For the rest of this week, Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003, will be looking back on the early days.

Blog network Weblogs, Inc. sold to AOL in October 2005, for a reported $25 million. I was in San Francisco when it happened, at the Web 2.0 Conference. The morning the deal went public, I remember founder Jason Calacanis arriving at the conference with a smile as wide as the Cheshire Cat himself. He positively glowed, while basking in the congratulations and praise from fellow entrepreneurs at the event. Come to think of it, I’ve rarely seen Jason Calacanis without a smile on his face. It’s usually a mischievous one too, because he likes to be the center of attention.

An excerpt from Dan Frommer’s Rise of the Tech Bandits:

“After the crash, the Web 2.0 boom in the mid-2000s gave birth to a new batch of media startups running cheap publishing software and network ads. Free of expenses like copy editors, design staffs or Midtown offices, they told Silicon Valley’s inside story, started breaking big news and quickly caught on.
The most famous, of course, is TechCrunch, the site founded in 2005 by former attorney Mike Arrington and operated for years out of his house in Silicon Valley. (AOL bought TechCrunch in 2010 for more than $25 million.) Mashable also launched in 2005, the creation of 19-year-old Scottish kid Pete Cashmore, now drawing more readers than TechCrunch and, reportedly, with acquisition interest from CNN.[...]
The Web was finally covering itself better than its print counterparts — and independently.”

The Weblogs, Inc. sale was the first high profile acquisition of a blogging business, setting the scene for future blog acquisitions like The Huffington Post, Ars Technica, TechCrunch and PaidContent. Calacanis wasn’t even a pro blogger. Rather, he was the CEO of a wide-ranging network of blogs that began in September 2003. The most high profile blog under his stewardship was Engadget.

I’ve met Jason several times over the years and two of those times stand out. Both show aspects of Jason that I believe contributed greatly to his success as an entrepreneur.

The first instance was at a Web 2.0 Conference a few years ago. I don’t recall the exact year, but it was during the time Calacanis was running his post-AOL venture Mahalo. I was at an official conference dinner, along with Sean Ammirati (before he became COO of ReadWriteWeb). The table Sean and I were seated at had about 10-12 people. Everyone picked at their starch-heavy plates of food, while engaging in the usual conference chit-chat. Which meant asking or answering these two questions: “And what do you do?”, closely followed by “What’s been the highlight of the conference for you so far?”. This typical, rather placid, conference dinner scene was playing out, when out of nowhere a grinning Jason Calacanis approached the table. He immediately began to regale Sean and I with several funny stories, delivered rapid fire one after the other in his broad Brooklyn accent. It was highly entertaining, but it wasn’t a conversation as such… more of a comedy routine. Before either Sean or I had a chance to get a word in, Jason had moved down the table to entertain another group of people. Soon he gravitated to the next table – and all we heard then was appreciative laughter from his new audience.

That’s an uncommon skill, to be able to get and hold the attention of multiple groups of people at a social event.

The second story of Jason I have is when he spoke at ReadWriteWeb’s 2WAY Summit in New York City, in June last year. Jason had been scheduled to have a debate with his long-standing rival, Gawker CEO Nick Denton. It was a mouth watering prospect, because both men are opinionated and successful media entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, Denton pulled out at the last minute. Jason not only turned up, but turned his one-man interview with our Managing Editor Abraham Hyatt into a highlight of the event. It was entertaining, opinionated and highly quotable (“There are a lot of stupid people out there … and stupid people shouldn’t write.”).

The Internet industry often takes itself too seriously. It feels good to have someone brighten up your dinner table every now and then.

SAY Media is ReadWriteWeb’s parent company.

AppHarbor Launches Its Azure Competitor In Europe

Mike Butcher — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:31:32 +0000

Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog, dotCloud. Then last year AppHarbor, a ‘Heroku for .NET’ out of Y Combinator launched.

And today AppHarbor has extended its service to European developers. EU applications will still run on Amazon’s infrastructure, but they’ll be running out of the EU-West region (Dublin) instead of US-East, where all current locations are located.

The startup raised $1.4m last year though the amount was not announced at the time. Backers include Accel, Ignition, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Quest, Start Fund and Salesforce and there are plans to raise a Series A soon.

“We have spent a lot of time making sure the AppHarbor platform is modular and scalable and this paid dividends when time came to spin up our new EU location. New applications are created in either the US or EU and existing applications cannot be moved, but we’re already thinking about how to turn this up another notch to make AppHarbor a zero-configuration, multi-region, geo-load-balanced application platform,” cofounder and CEO Rune Sørensen told us.

Add-ons in the the AppHarbor add-on catalog will work with EU-based applications. Some (such as SQL Server) will provision resources based on where your application is located. For add-ons that do not currently support the EU, a warning will be displayed when they’re provisioned to an EU application.

AppHarbor is designed to address Microsoft Azure limitations such as being locked into Microsoft’s own database, and its non-support of Git.

They now claim to be 15-20% of Azure’s size in terms of number of users – not bad for a six person startup. Offices are in Copenhagen and San Francisco.

In terms of competition Meerkatalyst claimed to be doing similar bett never appeared while and Moncai has yet to launch.

Disassembling Android: Chinks in Google’s Mobile Armor

Thu, 17 May 2012 05:30:00 +0000

This is Part One of a two-part series on Disassembling Android.

Rakuten CEO On The $100M Pinterest Round: We Want Pinterest Users To Pin Images And Buy Using Our ID

Ingrid Lunden — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:16:21 +0000

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model.

First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes Rakuten’s CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, in an interview with TechCrunch. He wants Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site.

There are already some building blocks in place for this. First of all, Rakuten already pins on Pinterest through at least a couple of official accounts: Rakuten Commerce and Rakuten Travel.

On the other hand, there is Rakuten’s existing e-commerce presence in the country. Mikitani notes that 75 percent of Japan’s internet population — equivalent to about 80 million people — already have a Rakuten ID — this is similar to an Apple ID, or an Amazon ID, in that there are payment details associated with it.

It is this ID that will pontentially become the lynchpin of a commercial service on Pinterest: “We want to enable our users to pin their own images with our ID,” he says. “Users can click and buy with it, and in the future we can create more new services.” He notes that the “rich, graphic social network” can be used for “so many interesting ideas using the Rakuten ID.” One other area, TechCrunch understands, is for users logged in with Rakuten IDs to pin images and then use those pins to buy items away from Pinterest, on Rakuten’s own Rakuten Ichiba site.

And because Pinterest is so buzzy right now, it can be used as a way of reigniting some of Rakuten’s legacy business. The company has a lot of “sleeping customers,” as Mikitani calls them. These are people who have IDs but are not regular users of Rakuten’s services. “This is a good way of getting them to start using those Rakuten IDs again.”

The other area where he would like to see more development is in the area of mobile commerce. Mikitani tells me that already, 25 percent of all Rakuten sales in Japan originate on a mobile device, and that proportion is growing. “There should be a huge synergy with Pinterest there,” he says. “We are going to promote their app using our presence here in Japan.”

International growth. The $100 million investment, which was led by Rakuten with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, as well as a number of angel investors, will also give Pinterest the financial muscle to extend its service into new international markets. Pinterest, perhaps above all social networks, has a lot of potential as an international product — one that can work across borders– because while sites like Facebook and Twitter are text-led, Pinterest is focused around images, and therefore less limited by language barriers.

Of course, a lot of Pinterest’s growth today and in the future will be non-commercial, but the potential for commerce is very much there, too. (We wrote just the other day about another example, Curalate, which has created a social marketing service for brands to visually track how and where their images are getting used across the site.) Within that trend, Rakuten is looking at how to leverage its Pinterest investment in its international business outside of Japan, as well.

Mikitani points out that while Facebook is an “extremely powerful social network”, when it comes to shopping and e-commerce, Pinterest’s image-led service “has stronger potential.”

Facebook and Twitter, he says, are about connecting you with your friends and contacts, while Pinterest is about connecting people with the same interests via graphic images. Apart from the fact that products are put right there for you to see, you can also imagine how that social set-up can be developed into a commercial model (group buying is one that comes to mind here).

Rakuten has holdings that extend well beyond Japan, and include properties like Buy.com in the U.S., Kobo e-reader and e-books, Priceminister in France — in all, operations based in 10 countries and extending to 17 countries in total. Mikitani says that he is hopeful that the kinds of groundwork it wants to lay in Japan will also be extended to the rest of its footprint.

For example, Mikitani points out that Kobo already has a “great partnership” with Facebook to encourage people to post excerpts and read more using Kobo, which it would like to extend to Pinterest, too: “Facebook is why Kobo is growing so fast right now,” he says. “We will see more of Kobo in Pinterest, too, I think.” And buy.com — which is slowly, gradually, getting rebranded as Rakuten — is another site you could imagine could get linked up more closely with Pinterest.

But this is not to rule out other partnerships with other e-commerce players. “We are totally open to other e-commerce partnerships,” he says. “Pinterest should work with them.”