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On the afternoon of Thursday, May 3rd, Facebook set its expected price range for its initial public offering at $28 to $35. The news is being reported by all major media and news outlets, from the standard networks such as FOX, ABCand CNN; Financial reports like Forbes, Wall Street Journaland Yahoo! Finance; and, of course, countless tech companies, pundits and blogs. If the price were $31, Facebook would raise $10.6 billion, giving the social network an overall value os $86 billion. Once the prospectus is finalized, they will meet investos in major cities before Friday when Facebook executives meet in New York city with the underwriters of the company. The I.P.O. presentation will be briefed to the sales force so they can reach out to possible investors.
The date that Facebook begins trading publicly on the Nasdaq, under the symbol “FB” is not set, but it is expected to happen around May 17 or 18, given a nine day roadshow for investors. There is lots of excitement surrounding this event as it has the potential to be the I.P.O of Internet company. The current record holder is is Google in 2004.
Facebook is on track to reach 1 billion users by August or September of this year with a user base of over 700 million and 526 million of them being active daily. User growth and engagement is one of the most heavily measured and weighed metrics of successful for social networks.
Facebook’s financial growth has continued to grow, but proft margin shrank in the first quarter as Facebook’s technological growth required a large amount of expenses. They are expenses that are far from one-time, but also not nearly recurring. The need to grow is only a good sign.
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Apple announced that their yearly Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 11-15 this year. The five day event is most well known for the keynote speech held on the opening day each year. Historically, the keynote (done by Steve Jobs every year until now) is where they would announce the newest iPhone model. Last year, it was all about iOS 5 (since the iPhone 4S was delayed until October for a variety of reasons). The keynote lasts about an hour, but the conference goes on for a total of 5 days.
The week long event gives an in-depth look at everything that’s new in iOS and OS X. There are many workshops for developers or aspiring developers. It is an opportunity to work with Apple’s own engineers and get questions answered and learn new techniques. It is also a great place to make new friends, meet other developer’s and build connections within the Apple development ecosystem. Aside from all the sessions and hands-on labs there will be speakers and events, a competition with the Apple experts and the WWDC bash.
There are two problems. The first is that tickets do not come cheap. Getting into the event will cost $1,599, which leads to problem number two - tickets sold out in just two hours this year. With each passing year, the event has been gaining popularity and tickets have been selling out in less itme. Two hours seems to be a record.
It is interesting this year because there has been no announcement about a new version of iOS. Any speculation is based on prior years. More than likely, workshops will focus on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. This will also be the first year for Tim Cook to kick off the event with the keynote address. Tim was panned for his announcement of the iPhone 4S only for the world to find out that Steve Jobs lay on his deathbed at the time, causing pundits to withhold judgment. He proved to be an engaging speaker at the announcement of the new iPad.
What will be announced at WWDC is anybody’s guess at the moment. If previous years are any indication, Apple’s slogan “It’s the week we’ve all been waiting for” will certainly hold true.
Just earlier this month Microsoft spent $1 billion on on 800 patents and 125 patent applications that belonged to AOL. AOL only kept 300 patents for itself that represented its core businesses and technologies. That sell took place on April 9, 2012. It was a tremendous weight lifted off of Facebook, who has just been sued by Yahoo! and feared AOL may do the same. Facebook and Microsoft have always had a wonderful relationship.
In a big move this morning, Facebook bought 650 of those same patents from Microsoft for $550 million. Facebook will likely use this to defend itself in the litigation from Yahoo! that is still pending. Facebook and Microsoft have also agreed on cross-licensing. The end result of the deal is that Facebook purchased 650 patents with license to use the remaining 275 that Microsoft held onto. Microsoft has recouped more than half of its initial outlay of money to AOL and still has 275 patents for its own use. Additionally, Microsoft has the rights to use the patents it has sold to Facebook. A similar cross-licensing deal was reached between Microsoft and AOL earlier this month during the initial sale. Microsoft has rights to use the 300 patents it did not purchase from AOL and AOL retained rights to use the ones it did sell.
The strange love triangle of patents positions Microsoft perfectly in the middle of all of it. It owns some patents outright, but has the right to use the rest owned by both AOL and Facebook. Microsoft put out a press release earlier today
REDMOND, Wash. and MENLO PARK, Calif. — April 23, 2012 —Microsoft Corp. and Facebook announced today a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will assign to Facebook the right to purchase a portion of the patent portfolio it recently agreed to acquire from AOL Inc. Facebook has agreed to purchase this portion for $550 million in cash.
In the initial AOL auction, Microsoft secured the ability to own or assign approximately 925 U.S. patents and patent applications plus a license to AOL’s remaining patent portfolio, which contains approximately 300 additional patents that were not for sale.As a result of today’s agreement, Facebook will obtain ownership of approximately 650 AOL patents and patent applications, plus a license to the AOL patents and applications that Microsoft will purchase and own.
Upon closing of this transaction with Facebook, Microsoft will retain ownership of approximately 275 AOL patents and applications; a license to the approximately 650 AOL patents and applications that will now be owned by Facebook; and a license to approximately 300 patents that AOL did not sell in its auction.
“Today’s agreement with Facebook enables us to recoup over half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction,” said Brad Smith, executive vice president and general counsel, Microsoft. “As we said earlier this month, we had submitted the winning AOL bid in order to obtain a durable license to the full AOL portfolio and ownership of certain patents that complement our existing portfolio.”
“Today’s agreement with Microsoft represents an important acquisition for Facebook,” said Ted Ullyot, general counsel, Facebook. “This is another significant step in our ongoing process of building an intellectual property portfolio to protect Facebook’s interests over the long term.”The parties are evaluating the accounting treatment for these transactions. These transactions are also subject to customary closing conditions, including clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended.
IPv6 is the next generation of IP addressing that will be used across the Internet. We currently use IPv4 and it is what we have been using for a very long time. An IP address is simply the way your computer is addressed so other computers and network devices can find and speak to it. It consists of four numbers that range between 1 and 255, all separate by dots. Your home router will likely have an IP address of 192.168.1.1. IPv4 has about 4.3 billion addresses, which may sound like a lot, but it isn’t when every computer on the globe needs one. There are tricks in networking to extend the life of IPv4, but they aren’t enough. Plus, we have come up with new features that IPv4 just will not support. There is not and will not be a version 5. It was looked at and planned, but the amount of time it will take to transition the world would not make IPv5 worthwhile, so we jumped to IPv6, which will have 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses available (that is rounded down by a bit actually).
As the next generation IP addressing scheme, IPv6 is very important and it is paramount that developers and network administrations create a smooth transition from version 4 to version 6 to avoid interruption of service for users. The official date, called World IPv6 Day, when ISPs around the world will enable IPv6. The companies involved will amount to only 1% of the residential population having the new standards.
Facebook is giving its developers access to IPv6 three weeks early. This will give them time to ensure their applications will work and properly parse data using the new structure for addresses. While IPv4 addresses are written in dotted decimal notation, like 192.168.1.1, IPv6 has what we call hexquads and look like 1553:58E0:0246:93BF:47E4:AC25:C000:95DB/128.
As of May 18, 2012 Facebook will open IPv6 to developers to work out any issues that may arise before it goes live to users on World IPv6 Day. Facebook has already participated in World IPv6 day on June 8, 2011, which was just a 24 hour test. This year’s will function as a permanent move for the enabled users if all goes according to plan.
From the Facebook Developer Blog:
IPv6 Access
With the World IPv6 Launch coming on June 6th 2012, Facebook has committed to enabling IPv6 access for our users on most of our HTTP and HTTPS endpoints. Based on the results of last year’s IPv6 test on June 8th 2011, we are confident that enabling IPv6 on our platform will be a success. On May 18th, we will be enabling IPv6 on beta.facebook.com ahead of World IPv6 Launch to give our developer community time to discover issues and report bugs back to us.
IPv6 is vital because the Internet’s original addressing system (IPv4) has run out of free space. Since every device on the Internet relies on a unique address to communicate, we must transition to IPv6 which provides over 4 billion times more addresses than IPv4. IPv6 will ensure everyone (users, ISPs, governments, and companies) have direct and open access to the Internet.