LinkedIn | IPO | LinkedIn Ipo | Google IPO

LinkedIn IPO Is Biggest Since Google's--But Is It Too Big?

UPDATE: LinkedIn shares, under the symbol LNKD, increased 84 percent when trading started Thursday morning on the New York Stock Exchange, debuting at $83 a share and hitting $90 a share. That places LinkedIn's value at around $7.5 billion.

PREVIOUSLY: The initial public offering for LinkedIn, a career-oriented social networking site, marks the biggest Internet company IPO since Google went public in 2004.

Shares of the eight year-old company, which made just $15.4 million in 2010, were priced at $45 apiece, bringing the company's total estimated market value to around $4.25 billion, around $1 billion higher than initial estimates. The valuation makes LinkedIn worth more than well-heeled companies such as Kodak and RiteAid.

Previously derided as a "Facebook for losers," LinkedIn's sky-high valuation suggests founder Reid Hoffman--now reportedly worth over $800 million--may be having the last laugh. At the same time however, it raises questions about the sustainability of these web businesses, and whether the bubble could burst.

So are investors paying far too much for LinkedIn--essentially a modern Rolodex--and will the company come to look less like Google, which continues to rake in cash, and more like the failed web firms of the 1990s?

AOL to buy Huffington Post in $315m media merger

AOL to buy Huffington Post in $315m media merger

US internet firm AOL has agreed to a buyout of the Huffington Post online newspaper.

The $315m (£222m) deal will create an internet media group with 270 million users, including 117 million in the US.

The purchase price - $300m of which will be in cash - will be paid to co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer and a few minority shareholders.

Ms Huffington - currently editor of her namesake news service - will head the combined firm's content division.

This means she will take on responsibility for AOL sites such as Engadget and Techcrunch, as well as retaining her current role at the intellectual centre-left website she helped set up in 2005.
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"The Huffington Post will continue on the same path we have been on for the last six years - though now at light speed - by combining with AOL," said Ms Huffington in a joint statement.

AOL expects the purchase to help boost its flagging advertising revenues in a year that chief executive Tim Armstrong maintains will mark a turnaround for the company that divorced from Time Warner in 2009.

The Huffington Post is expected to contribute an additional 25 million users to the internet giant.

"The combination of AOL's infrastructure and scale with the Huffington Post's pioneering approach to news and innovative community-building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement," said the two companies in their statement.

The transaction is expected to be completed in March or April and will need regulatory approval in the US.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12379623

5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Arianna Huffington

5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Arianna Huffington

AOL’s recent acquisition of The Huffington Post took the Internet world by storm. The new editor-in-chief of the media conglomerate, Arianna Huffington, completely stole attention from the recently concluded Super Bowl XLV on many popular news websites and now, we here at TNW want to share some interesting facts about the woman behind it all.

1. Arianna Stassinopoulos was born in Athens, Greece in a family of four with one sister. At sixteen, she moved to England to attend Girton College at Cambridge University where she got an M.A. degree in Economics. In 1971, she became the President of the Cambridge Union Society, a highly-recognized debating society. She is now a naturalized US citizen.

2. She met oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a family friend of the Bushes, at a 1985 party hosted by Anne Getty in San Francisco. They got married one year later at a wedding party paid for by Getty.  In 1997, the couple got divorced after 11 years of marriage, and in 1998 Michael Huffington revealed that he was bisexual.

3. In 1981, she wrote a biography of Maria Callas, Maria Callas — The Woman Behind the Legend, and in 1989, a biography of Pablo Picasso, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. Both of these works were accused of plagiarism. One of them ended in a court settlement where Gerald Fitzgerald, Callas’ biographer, was paid “in the low five figures.”

4. Huffington was an independent candidate to recall California governor Gray Davis in the 2003 recall election. She described her candidacy against front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger as “the hybrid versus the Hummer.” The two would continue to have a high-profile clash during the electoral debate, where both candidates were criticized for making personal attacks.

5. Huffington first hosted a website called Ariannaonline.com, which now redirects to The Huffington Post. Her first foray into the Internet was a website called Resignation.com, a rallying place for conservatives opposing Clinton. In 2005, she became the co-founder of The Huffington Post, one of the biggest news websites in the Internet today, with more than 3,000 contributing bloggers.




http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/07/5-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-arianna-huffington/

Google Threatened Pay Royalties to Oracle

Google Threatened Pay Royalties to Oracle

Google have to face patent lawsuit related to Oracle’s, largest Java code’s software company in the world.

Google threatened guilty of copying Android code from Java Source Code Oracle. If the allegations are proved right then Google would have to pay royalties to Oracle.

“In the future royalties paid shall be in accordance with the number of devices equipped with the Android software 2.2. We have evidence that the Android types have been copied from the Oracle Java source code,” says founder NoSoftwarePatents, Florian Muller.

Android 2.2 itself is Google’s operating system is released for free. The distribution of the software has been embedded into several brands of smartphones, including Motorola Droid Pro, LG Optimus and Ally, as well as Samsung Galaxy series.

“All the phones are operated with the operating system (OS), Android, and has a code that we have patented,” says Mueller.

Mueller added, although it does not include code that violates the patent in the version of the device, its presence in the mobile market itself is not illegal.

In October, Oracle has filed a lawsuit directly to Google. Now Mueller admitted that Oracle believed capable of winning this lawsuit because they already have six extra copies of the file Android.

If proven guilty, not only have to pay royalties based on the number of devices that have been scattered but Google also will be forced to change the code used.

In addition to Oracle, Google is also facing a similar lawsuit from Apple and Microsoft.

Look At You New Phishing Trap on Facebook

Beware New Phishing Trap on Facebook

Facebook users should be more careful in using the most well loved social networking site. New phishing trap is now stalking the user by using wall posts ‘Look at You ‘.

Users will receive post a link labeled “Check it out here, Look at you haha: p” and an image of public events. Messages such as this, where actors curiosity harass users, is often used to trick the users of social networking sites and messenger applications.

After clicking on the link, the user as if it will be brought into the domain apps.facebook.com. The interface is very similar to the Facebook login page, so users will reckon they have accidentally logged out and having to login again.

Of course, when the user logs in again, the perpetrators easily hijack your account and use it for spamming.

Now has approximately 600 million users, Facebook has become a very attractive area for the perpetrators of phishing. In fact, the less convincing phishing traps were able to fool thousands of victims.

Based on the analysis of Kaspersky Lab, last October, every 20 minutes, three thousand victims of a new phishing is on Facebook.

The World’s IP Address Quota Exhausted

The World’s IP Address Quota Exhausted

Vint Cerf, one of the first to make the internet by connecting a computer to use your Internet Protocol (IP), felt guilty about 4.3 billion IP addresses that he has made is now nearly gone.

Vint Cerf, says if all it is his fault that he made in 1977. The reason, he reasoned, when he found his first web-only trial and error.

“At first it was an experiment. And I reckon if the amount of 4.3 billion IP addresses that will be enough for an experiment,” said Cerf, who now serves as vice-president at Google.

“Who knows how many IP addresses needed by the world?” Cerf added.

In 1977, Vincent Cerf make web IPv4 protocol, which connects the global computer as an experiment when he worked at the U.S. Defense Department.

Cerf said that he would never have guessed before that his experiment was not going to stop. Cerf also said that if the IP address of the world’s quota will be exhausted within the next few weeks.

Your IP address is a unique number that is on every computer and other devices that connect to the Internet. Massive amount of devices connected to the internet today, making the IP address dwindling rations.

To solve this problem, an internet protocol that has been updated, IPv6, is being plotted by the industry, which will make trillions of new IP addresses.