Slide takes $50 mln in funding amid Facebook craze
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Social network software maker  Slide Inc said on Friday it had closed a $50 million  institutional financing round, marking the rising valuations of  start-ups riding fast-growing Facebook's wave of popularity.
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Facebook has become such a popular social networking site that some companies are betting their businesses on it.Participants in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco Thursday cited the impact of Facebook."We looked at the Facebook platform before it launched and came away with the conclusion that this could be the greatest paradigm shift in technology since the Internet itself," said panelist Ali Partovi, CEO of the iLike music discovery service.iLike bet close to 100 percent of its business on Facebook, he said."We made a very big bet. We basically decided to halt work on our own Web site and spent the next [several] weeks that we had building a Facebook application," Partovi said. iLike's own Web site, meanwhile, is used to drive traffic to the Facebook application, he said."Literally, within the first 24 hours, our Facebook registrations exceeded the rest of our Web site," by a dramatic amount, he said. In the first 12 hours, iLike signed up 10,000 users, followed by 10,000 more in the next three hours and 10,000 more in the next two hours, he said.Facebook application developer Slide is probably allocating 35 percent of its efforts to the site, said Slide Vice President Keith Rabois. Slide decided to invest in Facebook because it created an open environment that encouraged developers to make money for the first time."That has been a sea change," Rabois said.Facebook opened the floodgates for a raft of innovations, said Seth Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of SocialMedia, which also has developed applications for Facebook. Facebook has 2 million users, half of whom use it daily, he said."There's a level of engagement," inside the Facebook platform, he said.Another panelist noted Facebook widgets. "The neat thing about the Facebook platform is you can actually talk to friends through widgets, thorough the APIs," said Lance Tokuda, CEO of the RockYou photo-sharing site.
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In the wake of Microsoft's pricey investment, analysts are remarkably sunny about the future of Facebook's new advertising initiative--even though it hasn't even launched or been fully explained yet.
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Microsoft's $240 million investment is much smaller than the rumored $750 million that Facebook sought. Why the difference? Epicenter's Terrence Russell analyzes the deal.
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Apple&#39;s iPhone may be big  news, but in Silicon Valley all eyes are on Facebook. The  all-ages private Internet club that began as a college student  hangout has become the tech industry&#39;s hottest ticket.
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To justify its $15 billion valuation, Facebook has its work cut out for it. Step 1: Try to figure out how to make money from its 50 million users. A lot hangs on a new ad network, expected Nov. 6.
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Microsoft is mulling an investment of up to 5.0 percent in the social networking site Facebook, a move that could set the stage for confrontation with rival Google, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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One drag on Googleâs earnings in the fourth quarter was the payments it was required to make to social networks, especially MySpace. The money it made didnât cover the guarantees.
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TechWeb - Company founders point to the rising valuations of start-ups riding fast-growing Facebook's wave of popularity.
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Facebook is on the block and bidders can't flunk out this time.
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Online social network Facebook is  close to reaching a deal with Google Inc  or Microsoft  Corp  for an investment that would value the company as  high as $15 billion, according to media reports on Wednesday.
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Gullible time-rich polyglot? Facebook wants you! Facebook is headed for a problem. In the wacky innovation-lite and revenue-poor world of web 2.0, you have to be able to show your investors and the hordes of "I want to believe" journalists some sort of growth.â¦
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Eurekster, Inc., which wasone of the first community based social search engines, has secured $5.5 million in a Series B financing. The funding, from Technology Venture Partners (TVP) of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan with the participation of the private investors who provided the company&#8217;s initial Series A financing, will enable Eurekster to accelerate [...]
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Facebook is the latest entrant into the online video battle -- an effort to gain ground on social networking rivals.
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Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have been boons for teenagers looking for new friends and people trying to find dates. Now the technology, which lets liked-minded people find each other online, is trickling into investing.
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By PETER SHERIDAN  It takes nerves of steel  or voracious greed  for a 23-year-old university drop out to turn down 810million for his internet company, but that's exactly what Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, right, did last year.
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Setting the stage for a possible bidding battle, Microsoft Corp. is mulling an investment in Facebook Inc. that would value the rapidly growing online hangout at $10 billion or more, according to a report published Monday