July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Business social network LinkedIn just posted its Q1 2013 earnings, and while the results trumped expectations, investors seem a bit spooked because it issued weak guidance.

LinkedIn’s shares are down more than 10 percent in after-hours trading. The price is sitting at about $179.70 as of this report.

Analysts expected the company to post earnings per share of $0.31 on revenue of $318 million. LinkedIn trumped that with Q1 revenue of $324.7 million, an increase of 72 percent versus the the first quarter of 2012. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.45.

Additionally, analysts thought that revenue guidance would come in at about $359 million for the next quarter, but the company expects less with a number between $342 million and $347 million. The company said:

Q2 2013 Guidance: Revenue is expected to range between $342 million and $347 million. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to range between $77 million and $79 million. The company expects depreciation and amortization to be between $30 million and $32 million, and stock-based compensation to be between $49 million and $51 million.

Full Year 2013 Guidance: Revenue is revised upward by $20 million to range between $1.430 billion and $1.460 billion. Adjusted EBITDA is revised upward by $15 million to range between $330 million and $345 million. The company expects depreciation and amortization to be between $130 million and $135 million, and stock-based compensation to be between $190 million and $195 million.

Photo via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Social media skills aren’t just nice to have — they correlate strongly with your company’s performance in the stock market.

According to a study of the FTSE 100 by social media consultancy Sociagility, companies’ social media savvy is correlated with market capitalization. No surprise there: The bigger a company is, the more resources it has to engage with the public via Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

But the company also found that doing social media well correlated to rises in the companies’ share prices, at least for the three weeks in November addressed by the study.

“Higher social media performance scores were associated with positive changes in share price,” Sociagility said in a statement.

“Of course, many more data points would be required to determine whether or not this represents a real or consistent lead indicator,” the report cautions. “However, the presence of any such statistically significant correlations between social media performance and share price movements should certainly embolden corporate communications directors to go to their CEOs and CFOs and say: ‘Look, this matters, and I need more resources to do it properly.’”

Interestingly, pharmaceutical and biotech companies seem to lead other industries in engagement and awareness through social media, followed closely by oil and gas companies, general retailers, and food and drug retailers.

The top-scoring company was Royal Dutch Shell, with a social performance index of 996 — far above the average score across all sectors, which was 100.

See below for the top 20 companies and industry sectors as measured by Sociagility’s study.

The FTSE 100 Social Performance Index – Top 20

The FTSE 100 Social Performance Index – Sectors

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple’s stock moved beyond $700 a share today in after-hours trading, proving that all you really need to have a successful business is a new iPhone. Good luck to everyone else.

The new share price is the highest Apple’s stock has ever reached, and the iPhone 5 isn’t even in consumer’s hands yet. Last week, Apple released the newcomer to its iPhone line, which sports with a new form factor with a longer screen. Apple customers are loyal, excitable folks, who snapped up two million of Apple’s iPhone inventory in the first 24 hours of preordering.

And Apple is already drawing a crowd in front of its New York store on Fifth avenue, though, some of those fans are actually just lining up to promote their startups and bands.

On the same day, Apple also updated and released both the iPod Touch and the Nano, which now comes with a 2.5 inch touchscreen. It also showed off its latest mobile operating system iOS 6, a revamped iTunes, and released new earphones called “EarPods.”

The company hit its previous all-time high of $696.98 on September 14 and hit its newest high of $700.68 a share after the markets closed today. Apple already holds the title of most valuable company in the world, overtaking Exxon Mobile.

Tim Cook image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

eBay met high expectations for its second quarter earnings today with revenue, net income, and user growth up double digits from last year.

The company reported a revenue of $3.4 billion, up 23% compared to the same period in 2011. eBay also brought in $692 million in net income, with share prices coming in at $.53 per share, up from the $.22 per share last year.

“This was eBay’s strongest quarter of year over year organic … growth since 2006,” said eBay CEO John Donahoe on the earnings call. “eBay is revitalized.”

PayPal was a major driver of this performance, reporting that its revenue increased 26% year over year to around $1.4 billion and 113.2 million active accounts. That’s nearly 42 percent of eBay’s overall revenue. eBay attributes this to the fact that PayPal now appears in more places on the website, and that buyers are using the “Bill Me Later” function more, which is based on PayPal. PayPal also announced today that it is rolling out a point-of-sale service for retailers to use in stores. In just over four weeks, Abercrombie & Fitch beta-tested and began rolling out PayPal at more than 900 locations across the U.S.

Mobile was a major contributor to the growth with 600,000 new customers making their first purchase through eBay’s mobile apps. PayPal Here, eBay’s answer to Square’s mobile payments dongle has also been doing well. PayPal Here is officially open to all markets for anyone interested in signing up. Though it doesn’t affect the second quarter, PayPal announced yesterday that it acquired Card.io, a mobile app that reads credit card information using a smartphone’s camera.

“Mobile is impacting a significant portion of eBay’s business,” said Donahoe. “Mobile shoppers and mobile payers are three to four times more valuable than Web only.”

Another factor is the recent partnership between PayPal and major Japanese venture capital firm Softbank to create “PayPal Japan.” This new focus on Japan is intended to help the adoption of e-payments in Asia, and hopefully grow small businesses in the region.

Despite analyst expectations of low profits this quarter, due to the issues engulfing Europe and a slow downing the Asian market, the outlook for eBay was high after eBay stock hit a five-year high in April. eBay has long been the world’s largest online marketplace, with millions of buyers and sellers operating through the website. eBay products and companies include eBay Marketplace, Media Marketplace, PayPal, Half.com, MicroPlace, Shopping.com, Rent.com, Stubhub and various online classifieds.

For its third quarter, eBay expected to bring up to $3.4 billion in revenue, and a diluted share estimate of $0.42 – $0.44 a share. For 2012 overall, the company expects revenue to sit between $13.8 billion to $14.1 billion.

Firewall security company Palo Alto Networks priced the shares for its initial public offering today, setting the range at $34 to $37 a share.

Palo Alto filed to go public in April this year, with expectations of raising $175 million in the offering. That is now bumped up to $263,810,000 if its shares sell at the maximum $37 per share price, according to its amended filing. The company will sell 6.2 million shares, around 1.5 of which will come from existing stock holders. Forbes notes that two of its investors — Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital — will hold onto their stakes.

The New York Stock Exchange will host the stock under the ticker symbol PANW.

The company provides a unique firewall that caters to the idea of “bringing your own device,” or BYOD. That is, as IT departments become more fearful of people using personal technology in the workplace, they will use solutions such as firewalls to block certain services such as Dropbox and Facebook. Some of these services, however, can add to the productivity of an employees, and business recognize this. Thus Palo Alto Networks came up with a firewall that is able to block specific parts of an application, as determined by the IT manager.

So your company can allow access to Facebook’s status sharing feature to promote content but can block the chatting feature if they think it’s too distracting. They can also block things like attachments in e-mails or photo-sharing in order to keep proprietary information secret.

In 2011, Palo Alto Networks made $118.6 million in revenue, 143 percent higher than revenue for 2010.

Wall on fire image via Shutterstock

Back in September 2011, Saverin decided to renounce his  U.S. citizenship for permanent residence in Singapore, which has no capital gains tax. It was said that Saverin would save upwards of $100 million in U.S. taxes because of the move.

According to PrivCo, a data analysis firm that ran a bunch of potential estimates, the $100 million Saverin would have saved was based on a fixed cost-per-share of around $30.  Since the Facebook share price has since dropped, it is estimated Saverin will owe the U.S. Treasury for every dollar below that fixed cost. With Facebook hovering around $27 per share, down nearly 30% in two weeks, he could owe around $43 million. If that share price goes up past the $30 mark, then the taxes owed changes. The calculation only applies to where the share price current sits.

Saverin has been bashed by the American media for skipping out on his obligations to Uncle Sam as soon as Facebook went public, but he countered that he had filed the citizenship paperwork back in January 2011 and only just got approved in September.

It’s worth noting that Saverin hasn’t exactly taken all of his money and run. He’s been active in the startup ecosystem as an investor and has put money into several startups, including Jumio, ShopSavvy, Qwiki, and CrowdMob.

Remember that time in the 1990′s when Apple was almost bankrupt and in disrepair? Take note, Yahoo, Apple just hit a $600 billion market cap today, the second company in the world to reach the milestone.

Apple reached a high of $644 per share, reaching a market cap that continues to put space between it and the second largest company in the world, Exxon Mobile. Recently, Apple’s stock made news when it met up with Google’s at around $632 per share. Google has notoriously had a higher stock price than Apple, despite the fact that the latter company is nearly three times Google’s size. Indeed, Apple stock is continuing an upward climb.

After its famed co-founder Steve Jobs passed away in October, the company’s share price dipped. Stockholders feared, and continue to fear, that the company had lost its only visionary. Critics, including our own Jolie O’Dell, criticized the company for losing some of its marketing prowess. The concern is understandable. After all, it was the return of Jobs as (interim) CEO in 1997 that brought Apple back from the brink.

Soon after, reports about poor working conditions in Apple’s Foxconn factories surfaced, which sparked protests against Apple and carved a hole in its traditionally secretive operations. Despite the smudge on its reputation, however, Apple shares retained an upward trajectory — even breaking $600 per share the day before its latest iPad went on sale in stores.

Apple is the second company overall to hit a $600 billion market cap, following Microsoft’s $604 billion market cap milestone in 1999.

hat tip All Things D; Tim Cook photo via Heather Kelly

Tim Cook and Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer will be hosting the call, which will take place at 9am Eastern time. They will discuss the cash balance only, nothing else. In addition to the call-in number, a live audio stream of the call will be available on all computers or mobile devices running QuickTime 6 or later.

At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in February, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the very expensive elephant in the room, saying “I only ask for a bit of patience so we can do this in a deliberate way and do it in a way that’s best for shareholders.”

“We’re judicious, we’re deliberate, we spend our money like it’s our last penny … We’re not going to go have a toga party or do something outlandish,” he said at the time.

When a company is sitting on a huge pile of cash, as Apple is, it is expected to shell out a dividend to investors, issue a stock buyback, or spend the money on things that will make it even more money. Cook said that, so far, the company has spent billions of dollars on its supply chain, intellectual property, acquisitions, retail, and the Apple infrastructure.

Apple’s share price hit $600 for the first time on March 15 and has since fallen back a bit to $585 a share.

What do you think Apple will do with the cash? What do you think Apple should do with it?

Zynga’s stock closed on Friday at $9.50 a share, down 50 cents from its IPO price of $10 a share. The weak performance came after a strange combination of hype and criticism for the gaming company, which raised $1 billion at an $8.9 billion valuation with options included.

At the end of trading Monday, Zynga’s share price closed at $9.05. The stock hit a low in mid-day trading at $8.75 a share. In added context, the entire Nasdaq exchange ended the day in red with a loss of 32 points, or down 1.26 percent from Friday’s close.

PrivCo, a private market research firm headed by Sam Hamadeh, told us at the end of last week that Zynga made several missteps with its IPO that will likely continue to dog the stock. PrivCo’s chief complaint was that the percentage of shares offered by Zynga in its IPO was not restricted to less than 10 percent as LinkedIn and Groupon’s were for their IPOs. PrivCo also felt that Zynga’s long-term commitment to Facebook, which saps 30 percent of Zynga’s revenues on virtual goods, is another flaw in the Zynga business model.

Another Zynga critic is Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. He told VentureBeat: ”I truly think that the underwriters did a poor job of placing the issue with long-term investors. The volume traded was over 100 million shares, telling me that a substantial percentage of the buyers were in there to flip the stock rather than to invest. There were likely 20 percent or more of the shares placed with these guys, who took a quick profit at the open and left even weaker traders holding the stock as it went down. The guys who bought after the market opened panicked, and the stock took a long while to stabilize.”

Among the things that will help stabilize the stock include better research, Pachter said.

“You only thought [Zynga] was worth $10 because Morgan Stanley told you so,” Pachter said. “If they priced the deal at $9 and placed all of it with mutual funds, it likely would have traded up to $9.50 or higher, and your question to me would have been different.”

This post was updated with final numbers at the end of trading on Monday.

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LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner warned that the new service has altered the social landscape and that users don’t have much time left for additional social networking. Something will have to go.

LinkedIn was one of the first major tech players to go public this year and its share price on the New York Stock Exchange sits above $100 per share after an initial offering of $45 a share. Now that the company is public, how it characterizes other companies in the same space will be worth noting.

Weiner briefly issued his thoughts on the state of social networking and Google+ when he sat down for a fireside chat with superstar agent Ari Emanuel and AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, at an event organized by the Churchill Club.

Looking at the broad social landscape, Weiner said LinkedIn was for professionals, Facebook for family and friends, and Twitter for broadcasting short thoughts and information. He noted that these three networks coexisting made for an “understandable landscape,” but when Google+ gets added to the mix, people have less time and will have to start making choices about where to spend that time.

“All of a sudden, you say ‘Where am I going to spend that next minute or hour of my discretionary time?’ and at some point, you don’t have any more time to make choices,” Weiner said.

Later in the talk, Weiner said Google+ could follow Twitter in attracting celebrities and other well-known figures to help it become a more competitive service.

“[With Google+,] you see the power of Google as a platform and then you see how the power of machine learning and algorithms become very human and social,” Weiner said.

At this point, we have no idea if Google+ intends to start grasping for the professional territory that LinkedIn already occupies. But at the very least, we can see how companies like LinkedIn evolve and develop in the face of a new potential competitor. Surely Weiner already knows that Google likes to have a service for everything and will be constantly watching to see how it grows and changes as more users seek it out.