VentureBeat

Confirmed: Facebook to let employees sell some stock

Facebook has confirmed that its letting its employees sell some stock, specifically to provide a “financial cushion” as the company stays private and continues to grow. Here’s the text of what the company sent over.

“Facebook is committed to achieving its mission – to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected – over the long-term. To provide employees with a financial cushion while we continue to build the company,… Continue Reading

LinkedIn, like Facebook, is letting employees sell some stock early

LinkedIn is letting employees sell up to twenty percent of their vested stock options at a $500 million valuation, I’ve learned from a source. Another source tells me that the plan was announced at a recent company meeting, but they didn’t give me the details.

Incidentally, Facebook is letting its employees sell off a portion of their vested stock, we heard earlier today.

This moves comes at a time when private companies are finding it more… Continue Reading

Sarah Lacy claims New York Times book review unfairly slammed her Web 2.0 book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good”

A while back, I finished reading Sarah Lacy’s book on Web 2.0’s rise in Silicon Valley, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good.” I let my thoughts percolate on it until I saw the New York Times review of the book by tech journalist Katie Hafner. The NY Times reviewer was critical and Lacy herself feels like it was more like a review of herself than her book. Some of the criticism of the book is… Continue Reading

ComScore’s June US numbers: Facebook still gaining on MySpace while blog platforms, news aggregators, niche social networks also grow

Facebook gained nearly two million new US users from May to June of this year, while MySpace lost about a million, according to the latest data from comScore. MySpace is still nearly twice the size, though, at 72.8 million national users versus Facebook’s 37.4 million. Facebook has, meanwhile, grown 34 percent since June 2007, while MySpace has grown only two percent. A range of smaller, niche social networks — and related social web sites —… Continue Reading

Roundup: Amazon Web services go down, MySpace to join OpenID and more

Here’s the latest action:

Amazon Web services go down over the weekend — The problems crippled messaging service Twitter and many other sites.

MySpace to join OpenID? — TechCrunch’s sources say the social networking site will join the OpenID initiative, which allows one login to work across multiple sites, later this week. If so, it would be the second-largest OpenID implementation ever, second only to Yahoo.

The New York Times and LinkedIn forge a content partnership — Users of the business-oriented… Continue Reading

Roundup: Digg sending more traffic to print media, rogue SF IT admin holds city computers hostage, and more

Hitwise: Digg has been sending more traffic to mainstream media web sites lately — Take a look at the graph below, and read what the web research company has to say, here. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks recently published his own report anecdotally noticing the changes; he speculates that Digg may be looking to sell to a mainstream news company.

Intel announces a second-quarter record of $9.5 billion in revenue — More here.

San Francisco government computer system compromised –… Continue Reading

Germany’s GameDuell raises round for skill-based games

German skill-games site GameDuell has raised $17 million in a second round of funding from Wellington Partners.

The Berlin-based company has more than 10 million registered members and claims to be the No. 1 game community in Germany. It plans to use the money for an international expansion, including a move into the U.S. which is already under way.

Kai Bolik, chief executive, said in a statement that results in France and Spain show that the company’s… Continue Reading

Roundup: Broadcom backdating, games at work, and more

Former Broadcom executive Henry Samueli to plead guilty in backdating case — The Broadcom flameout saga continues, with former chief technology officer Samueli admitting that he previously lied to SEC investigators about whether or not he had illegally back-dated stock options.  Among Broadcom’s two founding Henrys, Samueli was the good cop. That’s why it was surprising that Samueli pleaded guilty to avoid jail time. But the other Henry, former CEO Henry Nicholas, is up for a… Continue Reading

From MySpace to Facebook to Flickr to LinkedIn, here’s looking at you

Rapleaf, a company that provides people-focused search services to corporate clients, spends a lot of time mining social networking data. It has just released a survey studying the social networking habits of the 49.3 million people it has information about, divided by age. Sample sites include MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr.

Here’s some of the findings, lifted directly from the survey:

- 120 million social network profiles (total) were found, with each person averaging 2-3 social networks

-… Continue Reading

Minggl ports social networks into your browser

FriendFeed has garnered a lot of popularity within the tech community for its ability to aggregate information across a wide range of social networks, and layer a new conversation on top of that. Minggl is a new service attempting to do something similar, only via the browser rather than a web page.

I sat down with Minggl founder Dewey Gaedcke and marketing director Brian Buser to go over the service and have them show me what… Continue Reading

LinkedIn may — and should — use its new funding to go after the business software market

Over the weekend, we heard that LinkedIn has big news in store, that was likely not an acquisition by the most prominent interested buyer, News Corp. After we published the story on Sunday evening, we heard from two sources that LinkedIn was instead working on raising a new funding round — this is a company that also claims to be making $100 million in revenue this year. More on that in a moment.

Additional details have… Continue Reading

What’s happening at LinkedIn? Is it getting bought? [Update 3: Or getting funded?]

Updated three times: After I published the initial version of the story last night, two sources have told us they’ve heard that LinkedIn has raised or is raising a new round of funding. Techcrunch now says it has been hearing similarly. More details below.

Something’s up at business social network LinkedIn. The Mountain View, Calif. company’s board meeting last week went way over its scheduled time, and sources tell us there’s some “good” news coming. The details… Continue Reading

Meeting people is easy, in business: Venture Hacks’ social network, LinkedIn’s company pages

LinkedIn wants to be the center of business networking and data, but can it do everything, or will competing startups carve out their own niches? Latest example: LinkedIn is introducing new pages (LinkedIn’s own, left) that detail information about companies, partially by aggregating information about its users. Meanwhile, for the fund-raising focused, there’s a new sort of investment social network created by San Francisco-based Venture Hacks.

Venture Hacks, formerly a blog comprised of veteran entrepreneurs and… Continue Reading

Roundup: Smaller social networks growing, Stage6, Sandvine and more

1. Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off
2. Startup employees headed to big companies?
3. Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one
4. Sprint’s fate unclear
5. Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble
6. Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once

Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off — Web metrics service Compete reports that leading social networks MySpace and Facebook saw traffic plateau in the US… Continue Reading

Roundup: Wikileaks judge slaps own wrist, AllPeers unpeers, Saudis developing solar, and more

Here’s the latest action:
1) Wikileaks judge restores restores site, slaps self on wrist
2) AllPeers’ peer-to-peer scheme fails to capture users
3) Chevron, Weyerhaeuser join up for cellulosic ethanol
4) Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech
5) Akamai wins patent fight, but not happy with ruling
6) Woz points out flaws in Apple’s latest products
7) Global warming, now with double the lethality
LinkedIn’s new features look a little more like Facebook
9) Fastcompany.tv launches with Robert Scoble
10) Fortune tops… Continue Reading

LinkedIn launches redesign, makes itself easier to use

LinkedIn, the site for professional contacts, has just launched a new homepage designed to make the site more navigable (the full redesign will roll out tomorrow). The company has been has been privately testing the new design since last December — we previewed many of the changes in detail then.

Suffice to say, it’s about time that LinkedIn got an upgrade. With this new design, the company has made a point of separating out information about… Continue Reading

LinkedIn to launch new research network

LinkedIn, the businessperson’s social network, is offering a new way for companies to gather valuable background information when they’re making decisions. It’s mining the data in its own network to identify people who are experts on trends, companies and people related to financial markets, and pairing them with customers.

It’s “a Web 2.0 version of the Gerson-Lehman Group’s expert network,” Tim O’Reilly calls it. GLG puts together networks of experts to provide feedback on any topic,… Continue Reading

Friendster, Bebo, LinkedIn all opening — aren’t waiting for OpenSocial

Friendster and Bebo are joining LinkedIn as the latest large social networks to throw open their web sites to outside developers.

Like Facebook, and a recent effort led by Google to do something similar with its “OpenSocial” project, these sites are letting third parties build applications for their pages. By recruiting other developers, the social networks are hoping to stimulate a barrage of activity — letting developers access data about users to create helpful services.

This, in… Continue Reading

LinkedIn launches platform — a better business social network

updated
LinkedIn has just launched its own developer platform and a new design that promises to make it more useful to its millions of business users.

Earlier this year, many wondered if social network Facebook would overtake LinkedIn as a business network destination. Many professionals have started to use Facebook for networking — enjoying its more social features.

LinkedIn’s new features now put it a step ahead of the competition. You’ll start finding connections to people on LinkedIn… Continue Reading

Visible Path said to be bought

updated
Visible Path, a Silicon Valley start-up that offers companies a way for their employees to how their personal contacts are linked to others in their organization and elsewhere, has been bought by a multibillion, international company, according to this CNET article.

Visible Path has remained focused on serving companies — even as more popular consumer-focused networks such as LinkedIn, and now Facebook, have grabbed attention. It’s not clear whether Visibile Path was making money (we wrote… Continue Reading