May 18, 2012

Charts: Facebook’s IPO In Historical Context And Its Share Price Over Time

Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise about $16 billion at the final price of $38 a share. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. Here’s how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data.

Then here’s how it compares to how much Google and Microsoft each raised in their respective IPOs.

We also have historical price data from SecondMarket, which is a private secondary market that became popular among former Facebook employees who wanted to offload part of their stake in the company. Here’s more data from them:

Facebook has outperformed many of the largest tech companies in the world over last few years. (That’s not totally surprising though since they started from a much lower base.)

Here’s how the number of transactions has scaled up on SecondMarket over the last few years.

techcrunch.com/facebook

May 18, 2012

European Activists Could Force Facebook’s New Privacy Changes To A Worldwide Vote

The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.

Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific Time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history).

The signatures are potentially a milestone moment in a campaign that began about a year ago, when the activist group filed 22 complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (Facebook’s international HQ is in Ireland). Those complaints in part led to the DPC issuing a report in December with some suggested changes to its privacy policy — largely aimed at making it more transparent and for users to be able to more clearly access all their data and delete it if they choose — but the activists believe that the changes in fact “worsened many issues and did not comply with the Irish conditions.” The Irish DPC and its German counterpart, the German Data Protection Agency, have put in more suggestions for changes since then.

Europe-v-facebook.org has been trying to drum up support for its campaign and says that after an appearance on a German TV show “Stern TV,” it resulted in a wave of responses — 30,000 on the German version of the privacy proposal page, and over 7,000 on the English page (although if you look at that page you can see that there are a lot of German comments there, too).

What happens next? It’s an unprecedented situation but Facebook says in its own “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” that it will take any proposed changes to its wider user base, currently at 901 million active users, for a vote, and if 30 percent of them vote in favor or against, their decision will be binding:

If more than 7,000 users comment on the proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives. The vote shall be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote.

It’s been a hot topic, but it’s anyone’s guess whether 300 million people will actually make the effort to weigh in on privacy. And according to europe-v-facebook.org, Facebook is still looking at the comments to decide whether they are applicable to this rule. Indeed, there’s scope for duplicates and fake comments, so that is one vetting that will likely be done first.

We have also reached out to Facebook ourselves for a comment and will update this as we learn more.

techcrunch.com/facebook

May 18, 2012

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.

It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years.

The poster wasn’t officially produced by Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, which made the company’s famous “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping” and “Move Fast Break Things” posters. It’s a 8.5 x 11 inch printout, according to Sachin Monga of Facebook’s Toronto platform strategy team who snapped the photo above. But it’s still being widely Liked and shared by employees, showing the words resonate with them as they watch Facebook IPO later this morning.

Facebook’s mission is “making the world more open and connected”. Sometimes that means making people uncomfortable at first. You don’t have to agree with how Mark Zuckerberg does things, and you can hate if you want to. But remember, Facebook’s just the messenger. The message is the future.

techcrunch.com/facebook

May 18, 2012

Eurocom Monster 1.0: Clevo’s Little Monster

When Alienware announced the Ivy Bridge refresh for its gaming notebook lineup, one model was conspicuously absent. Word filtered out that the smallest member of the range, the 11.6” M11x, would not be refreshed and that Dell was preparing to discontinue the line. For ultramobile gamers, the loss of the M11x is a huge blow, because it was one of the more unique notebooks out there—a near ultraportable with legitimate gaming aspirations, backed up by gaming performance that lit the class standards on fire. It was a truly standout notebook, and it will be sorely missed.

But now, a spiritual successor emerges in the form of Clevo’s W110ER. We have this unit courtesy of Eurocom, who are calling it the Monster 1.0, but other boutiques selling the W110ER include AVADirect, OriginPC, Sager, and XoticPC amongst others. We typically see this with larger notebooks from Clevo and Compal, but it hasn’t been as prominent with smaller notebooks until now, with the exception of some ASUS models from years past.

The W110ER spec sheet actually reads like a pipe dream, something that you would come up with if things like thermal limits didn’t exist. The performance-class GPU is present and accounted for—Clevo ships every W110ER whitebook with a Kepler-based GT 650M (2GB DDR3, 384 CUDA cores, Optimus). But the most impressive thing here is that the W110ER has support for Intel’s new IVB 35W quad-core CPUs. Yeah seriously, a quad-core 11.6” notebook. Just to refresh your memory, the M11x made use of Intel’s low voltage dual-core parts, so this is a significant step up in CPU performance. It’s a ridiculous amount of performance stuffed into a tiny notebook. Interested? Read on.

www.anandtech.com

May 18, 2012

Want Facebook Shares? HK’s 8 Securities Offers $200 Worth If You Join Its Trading Platform

With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.

The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China.

Mikaal Abdulla, the CEO of 8 Securities (a TC Disrupt Beijing Finalist in October 2011), says it will work like this: An individual opens an investing account for 8 Securities’ trading platform, for a minimum of HK$10,000 ($1,290). His company will then purchase Facebook stock on the open market and deposit directly into that customer’s account. “Once a customer’s account is opened, we will purchase the stock on a rolling and daily basis. The customer need not worry as we will always purchase at least $200 USD of stock and round up for them.”

Making U.S. stocks more accessible to non-U.S. investors, specifically in Asia, is what 8 Securities is about: ”Until now, access to the US stock market has not been widely accessible to individual investors across Asia,” Abdulla said in the release announcing the offer. “Old technology, high pricing and poor local customer service has made US trading difficult for investors.” The company offers 15,000 U.S.- and Hong Kong-listed stocks from a single account and charges a US$8.88 flat fee per U.S. trade with no other fees.

Abdulla tells me that the most active stocks so far on its platform have been Apple, Google and Sina. “I am certain Facebook will take the top spot today,” he says. The company will be running the Facebook promotion for the next month, starting today.

8 Securities, founded by ex-E*TRADE employees, has only been live for the last three weeks, so this will be a profile-raising exercise for the company, which otherwise says it promotes itself exclusively via social and online in Asia. Before launch, 8 Securities had raised $8 million from VCs Velocity Capital in the Netherlands and Full Global in Hong Kong. On the back of “very strong” early results — Abdulla notes that Alexa data puts 8 Securities already as the most-visited brokerage in Hong Kong (there are over 150 there) — the pair of VCs have just invested an additional round of $1.5 million in the company, Abdulla tells me. He says the top geographies for account opening is Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore.

The funding will be used to expand the company’s operations further in Asia, specifically Mainland China and Japan, he says. Not a precursor, necessarily, to Facebook itself expanding in these markets, but definitely one way its profile will rise.

In its latest S-1, Facebook noted that it had 230 million monthly active users in Asia. It notes that in countries like Japan and South Korea it has less than 15 percent of the market.

Perhaps more significantly, it has no official market share in the biggest market of all, China, where it is banned from official use — although there have been workarounds created using private networks. Some speculate that when Facebook finally does something in China it might be via an acquisition rather than an organic operation. Among the local social networks, RenRen currently has a market valuation of $2.4 billion and Tencent has one of $54.3 billion, and some believe that could make RenRen a target.

techcrunch.com/facebook