BOSTON BUSINESS JOURNAL - May 24 - Eons.com, a social networking site aimed at baby boomers originally launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, has been down for a week, causing scores of users to take to Facebook to speculate about what's going on. CEO Lori Bitter said that work is ongoing to restore the site. "We have a business/technological issue to solve and I am working at this as hard as I can for you," Bitter wrote. Taylor launched the site in 2006, and it had attracted funding from investors including General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital and Charles River Ventures. The site was acquired for undisclosed terms by Continuum Crew.
TurnTo Networks Announces New Marquee Customers
PRESS RELEASE - May 24 - TurnTo is adding three new marquee brands to its customer list, Quidsi, L’Oreal USA, and Vitamin Shoppe. TurnTo provides Q&A system for online merchants, enabling shoppers to get advice directly from stores' real customers. TurnTo increases conversion rates, generates fresh content for SEO, builds customer loyalty, and reduces call center load.
MySpace Relaunching By End Of 2012
TOM'S GUIDE - May 24 - MySpace is expected to undergo a complete brand relaunch by the end of 2012. MySpace is currently talking with ad agencies about promoting the relaunch later this year. Currently MySpace is trying to pull away from focusing on pure social media, and connect people with the artists and their content. Timberlake is reportedly playing a major role in developing the site's creative direction and strategy.
by Kevin Parrish
See full article at Tom's Guide
WhosHere App Launches Video Chat
MARKETWIRE - May 24 - WhosHere, the location-based mobile social discovery app, launches video chat so its members can verify that they are talking to the person they expect to be talking to. WhosHere with video chat is now available for download at http://whoshere.net/download/ on iOS devices and will be coming soon to Android.
How Catherine & Geoff Cook Founded myYearbook
INC MAGAZINE - May 24 - myYearbook is one of the 25 most-trafficked site in US. It was founded in 2005 by siblings Catherine and Geoff Cook. In 1997 Geoff started two sites EssayEdge.com and ResumeEdge.com. He sold the sites to Thomson Corp. in 2002. At that time Catherine came up with her idea putting school's yearbooks online. Geoff left Thomson, invested 250K and became myYearbook's CEO. After the launch, 400 people signed up in 1 week. They started thinking of ways to engage users with games and quizzes that appeal to teenagers. By mid-2006 myYearbook had one million users, mostly due to viral growth, but they weren't making any money at all. They raised $4.1M in 2007. In 2010, myYearbook generated $23M revenue, but 85% of users were in North America. Winners tend to be global brands, so they started looking for ways that myYearbook could span the world. In 2011, they we were approached by Quepasa to be merged with myYearbook. It was a $100M deal - $18M in cash, the rest in stock. Geoff is now Quepasa's COO. Since yearbooks don't matter much outside of the U.S., they just announced a new name: MeetMe.
by Liz Welch
See full article at Inc Magazine
See all posts on myYearbook
See all posts on Quepasa
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Facebook, Morgan Stanley Face Class-action Suit Over IPO
LA TIMES - May 23 - A class-action lawsuit was filed Wednesday against Facebook, Morgan Stanley & Co., and the other Wall Street banks that underwrote the Facebook's IPO, alleging they misled most shareholders about revenue projections for the social network. Many people who bought Facebook stock when it began trading Friday lost money as the price of the shares tumbled in recent days. Facebook stock was up about 3% in early trading Wednesday. But its price of about $32 a share was well below its initial offering price of $38. Morgan Stanley said that after Facebook released a revised securities filing on May 9 "providing additional guidance with respect to business trends," a copy was forwarded to all of the bank's institutional and retail investors and "was widely publicized in the press at the time."
OoVoo Introduced Multi-Person Video Chat On Facebook
MASHABLE - May 22 - Video chat company ooVoo has rolled out its service to Facebook, allowing up to 12 friends to chat face-to-face at once. It is similar to Google Hangouts, which allows users to video chat in groups of 10 on Google+. ooVoo quietly rolled it out on Facebook over the past few months. Since then, ~350K people have been using the service. ooVoo boasts ~46M users, up from 19M in 2010.
Faceporn A Trademark Infringer? Facebook Has No Case
CNET NEWS - May 22 - Facebook claims that Norwegian site Faceporn infringed on its good name. However, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White declared that there was no evidence that Faceporn has attempted to corrupt anyone in California with its product. Therefore, he said, Facebook had no case. Facebook pleaded that Faceporn should simply give its good name to Facebook and pay all of the company's attorney fees. Facebook hasn't been entirely successful in restraining companies around the world from using two of the English language's most common words. Teachbook and Shagbook appear still to be going strong.
‘My Last Wish’ Is A Social Network Based On Death
MASHABLE - May 22 - Called My Last Wish, the app encourages users to post wishes on a ‘Wish Wall’ and then befriend others who might share their dreams. While definitely a little morbid, and certainly out of the ordinary, the app already has a little bit of a following. Posted wishes range from things such as traveling the world to writing a book.
Facebook Down 12% In Early Morning Trading
MASHABLE - May 21 - Facebook’s stock was down ~4.5% in pre-market trading, dipped below $37 and then fell about 8% below $36 upon opening and then fell as much as 12% later in the morning. Not surprisingly, the stock is also the most active on the Nasdaq. Facebook’s sluggish performance seems to be dragging down other social media stocks as well. Before the opening bell, stock prices for Zynga, LinkedIn, Renren and Yelp were all down.
Microsoft's So.cl Now Open To All Users
COMPUTERWORLD - May 21 - So.cl is however still viewed as an experimental project targeted at students. It combines social networking and search to promote learning. The site is now accepting all users interested in joining the site. So.cl helps users find and share web pages of interest as students do when they work together, Microsoft said.
Facebook Buys Up Social Gifting App 'Karma'
AFTERDAWN - May 21 - Facebook has purchased the social gifting app "Karma." Karma does not do all too much except let users connect to the network via the app and send others gifts.
by Andre Yoskowitz
See full article at Afterdawn
Google Plus Beginning To Lose Steam?
IMEDIA MONKEY - May 21 - Google+ has been branded a “virtual ghost town” with nearly a third of users only ever making one public post, then never posting again. Users logging onto Google+ typically wait 12 days between making posts, and when they do, it gets on average less than one share, less than one reply and even less than a single +1, which is the Google equivalent of Facebooks Like system. Google+ claims 170M users, but has declined to provide data to back the number up. Facebook now has 900M users worldwide.
by Nick Barnes
See full article at iMediaMonkey
Facebook’s IPO: Who Got Rich
- Mark Zuckerberg - 503.6M shares - worth $19.14 billion
- Accel Partners/Jim Breyer - $7.7 billion (invested $12.2M in Facebook in 2005)
- Peter Thiel - an early investor, $1.7 billion
- Yuri Milner (DST) - $1.7 billion in cash, paper value $3.3 billion
- Sheryl Sandberg - paper value of $72.2M
- Sean Parker - paper value $2.65 billion
- Eduardo Saverin - Facebook co-founder has an estimated net worth of $2.7 billion
- Greylock Partners - 1.5% of Facebook, a stake now worth ~$1.6 billion
- Bono - no one knows what Bono will make from the IPO, but Elevation Partners, his investment firm, made $1.5 billion
- Choe, a graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook's first offices in Palo Alto, was paid in 3.77M shares, which are now worth $144.2M.
A Facebook Drop for Zynga, Other Social Stocks
NY TIMES - May 20 - Facebook’s peers are getting punished in the stock market. The hardest hit is Zynga. Its stock is down 9%. LinkedIn is down 3%. Amazon, Pandora and Google are down slightly too. Some investors might be disappointed that Facebook’s shares, which are currently up 7% from their debut price, didn’t pop more and believe it’s a bad sign for other social networking stocks. Another theory is that some portion of the people who had bought stock in other social stocks, especially Zynga, were doing so as a proxy for Facebook. Because they couldn’t buy Facebook shares on the public market until today, they could participate in the growth of the social networking business by buying into Zynga.
by Nick Wingfield
See full article at NY Times
See all posts on Facebook See all posts on LinkedIn
See all posts on Zynga See all posts on Pandora
See all posts on Google
Facebook Class Action Lawsuit Seeks $15 Billion
EWEEK - May 20 - A class action lawsuit filed against Facebook is seeking $15 billion in damages for privacy violations tied to the tracking of Web users. The suit combines 21 privacy lawsuits. The $15 billion figure was arrived at using statutory damages set by the federal Wiretap Act, which allows for damages of $100 per day per violation for each user, up to a maximum of $10K. The lawsuit also claims Facebook violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California statutes and California common law.
Facebook IPO: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Buy Yet
MASHABLE - May 18 - Facebook is currently valued at ~$100 billion, though it made less than $4 billion in revenue last year. Should you buy Facebook stock while it’s hot? Multiple financial experts told us no. At $38 per share, the stock is overpriced. The current excitement doesn’t guarantee long-term interest or success. Facebook success or failure may lie in its ability to conquer the mobile space which is growing faster than the company is adapting. Facebook will have to ramp up its mobile ads to push profits.
Mark Brooks
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