Facebook innovators win funding, settle for jobs
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First came the dot-com gold miners. For those who stayed on after the bust, there was still some silver to be found. But for latecomers and recent graduates seeking to cash in on the latest Silicon Valley craze, it's mostly decent paid salary work that's left.
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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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Following Facebook's lead, the social networking site plans within the next few months to make an API for its platform available for anyone looking to build applications to run atop the site.
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College parties met business e-mail on Wednesday as Facebook Inc. said it is adding its social-networking platform to Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices.
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A blog reports that a trio of German brothers have invested in Facebook through their firm, the European Founders Fund. No more details are available at the moment.
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Social networking site Facebook has bought internet start-up Parakey.
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Slide, the maker of applications for social networks, has raised another round of financing Â $50 million from the private equity funds at Fidelity and T-Rowe Price.
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It looks like the social-networking world has moved on from Google's yet-to-launch developer initiative, but top engineers and partners say give it time.
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The rise of social networks such as Facebook and wireless gadgets such as the iPhone has set off a small stampede of companies hoping to build on or replicate their success. Many are counting on advertising to pay the bills.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has approached FacebookÂ in recent weeks proposing an investment that would give Microsoft a stake of up to 5 percent in the popular social-networking company, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. With Microsoft willing to invest between $300 million and $500 million, the deal would value Facebook at $10 billion or more, the Journal reported, quoting anonymous sources. Google has also expressed an interest in acquiring a Facebook stake recently, according to the Journal. Thus, Microsoft could find itself competing for Facebook's attention with Google. However, Facebook's discussions with Google and Microsoft are in the early stages and could end up with no agreement with either suitor, according to the Journal. IDG News Service's requests for comment from Facebook, Microsoft, and Google weren't immediately answered. Founded in February 2004, Facebook is one of the world's most popular social-networking sites with about 42 million active users. Facebook has been growing strongly in the past 12 months. In December, it had about 12 million active users. The site initially only admitted students, but last September it lifted that restriction. In May of this year, itÂ opened up to third-party developersÂ to create applications for the site, which has also added to its popularity with users. Along the way, it has caught the attention of big Internet playersÂ such asÂ Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. The latter reportedly tried to buy Facebook last year for $1 billion. Facebook's attractiveness is that it builds very strong and deep relationships with its users.Â More thanÂ half of its active members return to the site daily, and Facebook knows a lot about them, thanks to all the personal information people disclose on their site profiles and interactions with other members. This, in turn, offers a desirable audience to advertisers and to ad sellers and distributorsÂ such asÂ Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. A little more than a year ago,Â Facebook chose Microsoft to display banner adsÂ on the site. Facebook would be interested in using the cash raised from selling a stake for buying other companies, increasing its staff of about 300, and beefing up its technical infrastructure, the Journal reported. Facebook is also weighing the option of raising funds from financial investors, the Journal said.
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Facebook Inc., the owner of the Internet's second most popular social networking site, said Thursday that it bought Parakey, a startup run by two of the engineers that helped build Firefox's popular Web browser.
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Slide, the maker of applications for social networks, has raised another round of funding Â $50 million from the private equity funds at Fidelity and T-Rowe Price.
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Microsoft prevailed in a high-profile technology industry battle with Google and Yahoo to invest in the social networking upstart.
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Social network will allow individual creators to put a price on their content.
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Some companies can battle Google head-on and survive. Facebook can't.
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By Barbara Grady  Facebook, the Palo Alto-based social networking site popular with college students, on Thursday said it is heading in a new direction to give its 24 million users more to do on its site.  Facebook Inc.
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Social-networking site to unveil a set of developer tools for potentially converting existing Facebook applications.