Microsoft and Facebook: The $240 million poke
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The two companies confirm their partnership, with Microsoft taking a $240 million stake in Facebook as well as gaining the right to sell ads for Facebook internationally.
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BREAKING NEWS - This afternoon, Microsoft won the apparent battle for an equity stake in social networking applications provider Facebook, making a $240 million equity investment in the company. In exchange, Microsoft will become the exclusive third-party supplier of Facebook's advertising platform.
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There's no doubt that 2008 will go down in history as the end of the first Microsoft era.  This year, Bill Gates will finally hang up his Microsoft mouse and leave the company he cofounded over 30 years ago.  Most people know that he's going off to spend the very large sums of money he has acquired from those Microsoft years, most of which has been used to set up the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation with $37.6 billion in assets.  But what will that really mean for free software? read more
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Microsoft Corp is planning to invest  up to $250 million for a minority stake in social networking  site Facebook.com, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web  site on Wednesday.
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Microsoft Corp. has approached Facebook Inc. in recent weeks proposing an investment that would give Microsoft a 5% stake in the popular social-networking company, The Wall Street Journal reported.
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Microsoft Corp is talking to Facebook about an investment in the company that could value the fast-growing social network at $10 billion or more, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Monday.
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PALO ALTO, Calif. - Mark Zuckerberg is considered the founder of Facebook, the popular social networking website estimated to be worth $1 billion or more.
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InfoWorld - Facebook will sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which as part of the deal will also expand the advertising services it provides to the social networking phenom, the companies said Wednesday in a statement.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.
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NEW YORK When Microsoft released its much-awaited MSN Search to compete with category leader Google in early 2005, it did so with the kind of fanfare expected from its marketing machine: a wide-ranging TV, print, outdoor and online campaign, including Super Bowl spots, with an estimated budget of $150 million. Yet afterwards, Microsoft was left in a familiar position: distantly trailing Google, and even losing ground.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has approached Facebook&#160;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.
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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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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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Microsoft will take a 240-million-dollar stake in the wildly popular social networking website Facebook as part of an expansion of the two firms' strategic alliance, the companies said Wednesday.
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Microsoft is rumored to be interested in investing in Facebook, in a deal that would value the social network at $10 billion or more. Just what else could you buy with $10 billion? It's the GDP of Bolivia, for starters.
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Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday it would pay $240 million for a minority equity stake in Facebook in a deal that values the social networking Web site at $15 billion.
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Yahoo has been trying to buy Facebook for a good while now, with the most recent rumored amount being for $1.62 billion. TechCrunch has obtained documents on Yahoo&#8217;s valuation of Facebook, and expected advertising revenue growth over the next 10 years. From TechCrunch: Leaked documents in our possession state that an early offer was $37.5 million for [...]