100 Million Facebook Shares Sold In Under Five Minutes : The Worst Android Phones : Beware Of Snooping Softwear : Fiat Pranks Volkswagen : aforadio.com
Posted in G-News on 19. May, 2012
Ringing in the riches:
The moment Mark Zuckerberg became $19 BILLION wealthier as he rang opening bell to launch IPO… and 100million Facebook shares were sold in under FIVE minutes
- Share price could soar by as much as 50% on the first day of trading
- 82million shares traded in first 30 seconds on market
- Zuckerberg’s stake is valued at $19.1billion
- Critics have said $38 share price is too high – and it is FOUR times bigger than Google’s $25bn when it launched as a public company in 2004
- 420million shares will be available which could bring in as much as $16bn
- Mr Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook HQ, flocked by dozens of his employees and COO Sheryl Sandberg
- Began trading under ‘FB’ at $42 a share- 10% higher than expected
A staggering 82million Facebook shares were sold within the first 30 seconds of trading today as the social network giant launched on the stock market with a value of $104billion.
Mark Zuckerberg rang the morning bell at 9:30 EST from Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to launch the second-largest IPO in U.S. history – and to instantly increase his personal wealth by as much as $20billion.
When trading began, shares were selling around 10 per cent higher than anticipated, around $42 per share, with 100million sold within the first five minutes.
But by noon, trading had leveled out to the expected $38.
The $104billion valuation makes the company bigger than online rival Amazon, and far ahead of well-known institutions like Disney and Kraft.
Zuckerberg was perched on a stage at 6:30am local time outside of Facebook headquarters in what employees call ‘Hacker Square,’ and was joined by Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, as well as dozens of other employees.
Appropriately, he turned to his creation to share the news, posting a status update that read: ‘Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on Nasdaq.’
He tagged Sandberg, as well as VP of Product Chris Cox, Cipora Herman, Dave Kling, and David Ebersman in the post.
Trading, which was slated to begin at 11am EST was delayed by nearly a half hour as traders were having problems placing and cancelling orders for Facebook stocks.
But by 11:30am EST, shares were officially on the market and opened at $42, a ten per cent increase from the estimated $38 opening.
According to Mercury News, Facebook’s main campus was swarmed with news crews and their TV trucks as they awaited the historic moment.
Before the 6:30am morning bell, some employees could be seen blowing off steam on the treadmills, while others were continuing work or snacking.
Mercury News noted that the parking lot was full of both sports and luxury cars, and was being meticulously patrolled by private security guards.
Across the country, onlookers in New York gathered outside of Nasdaq’s sign in Times Square to watch Zuckerberg remotely ring the bell.
Some were pictured capturing the moment on their smartphones, while others were happy to commit the event only to memory.
Zuckerberg, who created the website in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004, will have a stake worth an estimated $19.1billion – making him the 23rd richest person in the world at the age of 28.
As of this afternoon, his wealth is estimated at $20.76billion.
However, critics have questioned whether the valuation is too high for a company which had a turnover of $3.7billion last year and made profits of $1billion.
In contrast, Google had a market value of nearly $25 billion in 2004 when mainstream investors got their first chance to buy stock in the Internet search leader.
Now, the stock market will assign a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims.
It will be subject to broad economic forces and held accountable for profit it earns -or loses- from one quarter to the next.
But Facebook is one a rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust.
It is a cultural touchstone for the way technology reshapes our lives.
Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.
According to CNBC, There is a record-breaking demand for shares by small investors over any other IPO on record.
Before the initial trading, the business news channel predicted that individuals had the chance of obtaining as much as 20 per cent of Facebook’s public offering.
The IPO, expected to mint more than a thousand paper millionaires at the company, has received wall-to-wall media coverage and sparked hopes of a boom in sales of everything from San Francisco Bay Area real estate to automobiles.
Facebook employees marked the event with an all-night ‘hackathon’ at the company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters starting on Thursday evening, a tradition in which programmers work on side projects that sometimes turn into mainstream offerings.
The $104billion valuation could rise by as much as 50 per cent in the first day of trading today.
The investment banks orchestrating the offering will sell the stock to their clients for a price of $38 per share, on the higher end of the expected offerings.
Facebook’s stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol ‘FB’.
At $16billion, the size of the IPO is the second-largest for a U.S. company, behind Visa, which raised $17.86billion in 2008. Around 420billion shares have been made available today.
It will bring in many millions of dollars for Facebook’s earliest employees, such as Mr Zuckerberg and co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
Mr Saverin, who has courted controversy with the announcement that he is to give up his U.S. citizenship and settle in Singapore, defended his decision on Thursday.
He insisted in a statement: ‘I have paid and will continue to pay any taxes due on everything I earned while a U.S. citizen.
‘It is unfortunate that my personal choice has led to a public debate, based not on the facts, but entirely on speculation and misinformation.’
The IPO will also make U2 front man Bono, who owns 2.3 per cent of Facebook’s shares, the wealthiest musician in the world – even over Sir Paul McCartney.
Music website NME reported that Bono’s share worth in the company hovers around $1.5billion, in addition to his existing wealth.
Sir McCartney is worth an estimated $1.05billion.
For the Harvard dorm-born social network that re imagined how people communicate online, the stock sale means more money to operate the data centres that hold the trove of status updates, photos and videos shared by Facebook’s 900million users.
It also means more money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling headquarters in Menlo Park, California, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year.
And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards.
Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company back in 2004.
He is selling nearly 17million of his shares in the IPO, bringing him around $640million.
The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7billion, at as much as $104 billion. Google, whose revenue stood at $38billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207billion.
There are a few reasons for the exuberance.
One is the IPO’s sheer size.
Investor appetite for the stock will probably propel Facebook’s valuation above some of America’s most venerable firms.
Secondly, it’s personal.
‘It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,’ says analyst Brian Blau.
While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company.
And then there is Mr Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds.
Although Mr Zuckerberg is selling about 30 million shares, he will remain Facebook’s largest shareholder.
He set up two classes of Facebook stock, building on the model Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created as part of the online search leader’s 2004 IPO.
The dual class structure helps to ensure that he and other executives keep control as the demands of Wall Street exert new pressures on the company.
As a result, with the help of early investors who have promised to vote their stock his way, Mr Zuckerberg will have the final say on how nearly 56 per cent of Facebook’s stock votes.
True to form, Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook’s engineers are ringing in the IPO on their own terms.
The company held an overnight ‘hackathon’ last night, where engineers stayed up writing programming code to come up with new features for the site.
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Top 5 worst Android phones
Android’s charge to the top of the smartphone tree has been driven by some genuinely stellar smartphones.
But for every belting blower running the OS, there’s been a fair few flops that brought shame and dishonour on the platform. Here’s our very idiosyncratic guide to the worst Android phones of all time.
1 T-Mobile G1
Tech types often dub the T-Mobile G1 ‘the O.G of Android phones’. That’s purely because it was the first one. In no sense does that bad-ass sobriquet reflect that the phone is a bad-ass bit of kit.
Glitchy and laggy, it wasn’t much fun to use. Then there was the way it rinsed the battery. And that’s before you even get to its trifling 192MB of internal storage space that meant that getting OS updates was a no-no very early on the handset’s lifecycle.
But sealing the deal was that because G1 featured a physical QWERTY keyboard and racked up a million or so sales, it paved the way for a slew of similar phones – despite the fact that Android is optimised for touchscreen handsets.
All those keyboards did was cut back on screen real estate that would have made for a much better user experience. And held Android back from becoming a viable challenger to Apple a lot sooner.
2 Sharp Aquos Hybrid
Back in the early 2000’s Motorola’s clamshell RAZR phones were the last word in cutting-edge cool. That was then, though.
Fast forward to 2011 and Aquos attempted to revive the form factor with the Hybrid.
You couldn’t fault the specs. It shipped with the at-the-time latest 2.3 version of Android and rocked a 16-megapixel camera.
But we just couldn’t get past the fact that it was so fugly. And much more importantly, pointlessly cut back on screen space.
By choosing the clamshell design, Aquos ruined what would otherwise have been a very welcome addition to the Android line-up.
3 Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro
The Xperia Mini Pro was another keyboard-toting Android phone, whose chief apparent virtue was that it was also very compact indeed.
Except that it wasn’t actually a virtue at all.
In hindsight, the idea of shrinking Android phones as though they were old-fashioned feature handsets seems absurd in the era of the Galaxy Note and the growing number of smarties with ever-increasing display sizes.
But no phone proved that more decisively than the incredibly fiddly to use Mini, which featured a screen that was too pokey for comfort and a keyboard that was stiff and unresponsive. That meant both input methods were a failure. And that’s not good enough.
4 Kyocera Echo
This two-screen number was another attempt to turn the big book of Android phone design upside down. Unfortunately, it was stymied because the second display was little more than a novelty and added nothing to the Echo other than extra bulk.
Add to that low-grade specs (think: single core processor and five-megapixel camera) and it’s hard to see what Kyocera thought it was bringing to the party.
5 Sony Xperia Play
For years before the so-called PlayStation phone arrived, it was the subject of excitable chatter from tech types and gamers alike.
That eagerness evaporated within minutes of the handset landing in a blaze of publicity at lavish Sony Ericsson launch events.
With controls that were unresponsive and plasticky, a selection of creaky, dusty PSOne games and shoddy build quality, the Play was rotten as a console.
Much worse for its fortunes, though, was that it was a gadget that showed that Sony Ericsson fundamentally misunderstood why people are ditching complex console titles for throwaway mobile games.
The result? A flop on a scale not seen since the Gizmondo.
CREDIT & THANKS : http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/news/2012/04/top_5_worst_android_phones/
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Beware of iCloud!
Snooping software /lets police read everything on your iPhone in real-time without you ever knowing
Police – or anyone with a piece of spying software – can track everything you do on your iPhone without needing physical access to your phone.
The software, called Phone Password Breaker, can download all of the data from Apple’s iCloud service – which backs up all of your pictures, text messages, emails, calendar appointments, call logs, website you have visited, and contacts.
As iPhones sync nearly instantaneously with iCloud, anyone who is listening will have near-instantaneous access to your phone – without the owner noticing a thing.
ElcomSoft chief executive Vladimir Katalov said: ‘While other methods require the presence of the actual iPhone device being analysed or at least an access to device backups, this is not the case with iCloud.
‘In a sense, Phone Password Breaker becomes an alternative way to get access to iOS devices’ content.
‘With avalid Apple ID and a password, investigators can not only retrieve backups to seized devices, but access that information in real-time while the phone is still in the hands of a suspect’.
The majority of iPhone and iPad users use iCloud to back up all of their data, apps and media – with an estimated 125million people using the software as of April.
As long as investigators or anyone with the software has the correct email address and password for the machine they want to crack, they can download all the information from iCloud with the user knowing.
And as iPhones sync with iCloud in near-real-time, they can keep up with you where-ever you are.
The researchers at ElcomSoft studied the communication protocol connecting iPhone users with the iCloud, and were able to figure out the right commands to retrieve data stored on the servers.
Their job was made even easier as the data is received in an unencrypted format.
The only way to protect yourself is to either not back up your phone, or do local ‘offline’ backups on your home computer via iTunes.
credit & thanks : : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2145908/Beware-iCloud-Snooping-software-lets-police-read-iPhone-real-time-knowing.html#ixzz1vF1fLEQj
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Could a plastic-eating fungi save world from biggest man-made environmental catastrophe?
The world’s addiction to plastic packaging and products threatens to choke many of the eco-systems that life relies on for survival.
The usually synthetic material, which is most commonly made from petrochemicals, degrades very slowly because it’s complex chemical bonds make it resistant to natural processes of decomposition.
Since the 1950s, one billion tons of plastic are thought to have been discarded – and the waste may persist for hundreds or even thousands of years.
However, U.S. researchers now believe that a fungus could be used to break down plastic, and so rescue the world from one of its biggest man-made environmental threats.
A group of students from Yale University, Connecticut, have found a fungus in the Amazon rainforest that can break down the common plastic polyurethane.
One of the most widely used plastics, the global consumption of polyurethane raw materials in 2007 was above 12million tons, with an average annual growth rate in its use of about 5 per cent.
As part of Yale’s Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory educational programme, the researchers scoured the Ecuadorian rainforest for plants and cultured the micro-organisms within their tissue.
Writing in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, they say: ‘Endophytes were isolated from plant stems collected in the Ecuadorian rainforest.
‘A subset of these organisms was screened for their ability to degrade polyurethane. Several active organisms were identified, including two distinct isolates of Pestalotiopsis microspora with the ability to efficiently degrade and utilize PUR as the sole carbon source when grown anaerobically.’
Endophytes are micro-organisms that live within the inner tissues of plants, but do not cause any noticeable disease symptoms in their hosts.
They often play a key role in the decomposition of the plants after death, but never before have they been tested for their ability to degrade synthetic materials.
The authors of the study hold out hope that further exploration of properties of endophytes could reveal more miracle metabolisers that could potentially be used to degrade other kinds of plastics.
‘Each of the more than 300,000 land plant species on Earth potentially hosts multiple endophyte species,’ they write.
‘Only a small sampling of plants have been examined for their endophytic associations, yet many of these organisms can be readily cultured.
‘Endophytes reach their greatest diversity in tropical forests. Individual trees can harbor hundreds of endophytic species, some of which are known but many of which are new to science.’
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That’s one hell of a deep end:
The 24th floor swimming pool with nothing but glass underneath (not great if you have a fear of heights)
If you have a fear of heights, you won’t want to dive into this remarkable hotel swimming pool.
The 24th storey pool in Shanghai, China, has nothing underneath it apart from a pane of toughened glass – and a huge drop.
Fortunately for those terrified of the drop, the majority of it is inside the building – although you will probably want to stay in the shallow end.
Guests using the pool can feel like they are swimming over the air say hotel bosses, although many won’t dare look down.
The unique swimming baths, in the Holiday Inn hotel, Shanghai Pudong Kangqiao, are 30 metres long.
Unique:
The swimming pool is at the luxury Shanghai Pudong Kanggiao holiday inn hotel (left) which has recently opened. The pool, has been well-received
CREDIT & THANKS :: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146335/Thats-hell-deep-end-The-24th-floor-swimming-pool-glass-underneath-great-fear-heights.html#ixzz1vFHGSzTd
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Photobombed!
How Fiat played prank on car rival VW by parking new model outside HQ as Google Street View camera car drives by
It has caught many people out in embarrassing situations – capturing a naked woman outside her home in Brazil, a man urinating in France and a seagull stealing a chip in Britain.
And now cheeky staff at Fiat headquarters in Sweden have used Google Street View to get one over on their arch rivals Volkswagen.
Fiats workers spotted the Google Street view car, which captures panoramic views of locations around the world with a roof camera, driving past its offices and quickly drove to Södertälje 45 minutes away to Volkswagen’s head office.
A staff member driving a red Fiat 500 car – its latest model – then parked right in front of the Volkswagen’s Swedish headquarters’ front entrance just as the Google street view car drove past.
If you now Google street view the Södertälje Volkswagen headquarters, you will see the red Fiat parked directly under the Volkswagen sign, with the staff inside completely unaware of what is happening.
The Fiat 500 can be seen driving up the road in various street view scenes but then suddenly disappears – reappearing right outside Volkswagen’s main entrance.
The car can then be spotted making a hasty getaway – driving away from the building and up the road.
Volkswagen will now have to put up with its new role as a virtual Fiat showroom for at least a year – the usual period it takes for Google to update its street views.
Its images are recorded from a fleet of specially-equipped vehicles and Where roads are inaccessible, such as fields or pedestrianised streets, the online visual map uses Google Trikes and snowmobiles.
