In the wake of Facebook‘s recent multi-billion dollar valuation by Goldman Sachs and its accompanying $450 million investment, IPO’s have suddenly become passe. Long gone are the days where companies saw IPO’s as a rite of passage that earned them respectability in the public eye. Even entrepreneur’s of today’s emerging tech startups across the Big [...]
If someone was keeping score this time, would it be Facebook 1 and Foursquare 0? Call it strategic smarts or sweet revenge (especially since Foursquare is way cooler than Facebook Places), but the growing location-based check-in site has just lost a valuable member of its team to the leading social network in the world. Foursquare [...]
Trouble seems to be on the horizon with news of a fresh patent grant to Facebook leaking across the blogosphere. The bone of contention seems to be the patent itself, “Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social networking members”, which is the technology behind Facebook’s newly launched Facebook Places. The problem is the software was [...]
Some pundits actually coined the word “acq-hired” to describe Facebook’s “late stage negotiations” to buy Hot Potato, a barely year-old startup founded by entrepreneur Justin Shaffer. Hot Potato grew to be pretty hot by simply allowing its users to message each other about a real-time event they were in, be it a concert, a football [...]
For most folks, Facebook is less about work and more about play (Farmville, anyone?). Some companies though think otherwise and are tapping the world’s biggest social network by using it as a recruitment platform. We’ve all seen those ads in Facebook that want you to work for such-and-such or the random Wall post of a [...]
David Pakman is a partner at Venrock focused on the areas of digital media and mobile. Here’s his viewpoint on Facebook and Twitter: http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-the-next-google-facebook-and-maybe-twitter-2009-9. There are a number of interesting comments in the discussion board, including many who highlight a number of high-growth internet properties that never ended up “making it”. With 400M users on [...]