Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt plans to sell off approximately 42 percent of his shares in the company in 2013, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Google’s stock is at an all-time high, making it a good time for the company’s former chief executive to cash out while co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page continue to run the company.
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Tweets No Longer Posting on LinkedIn (AllTwitter)
Do you post your tweets on LinkedIn? Well, not anymore you don’t. LinkedIn has announced that regardless of whether you sync all of your tweets with the professional networking behemoth or only those designated with the #in hashtag, you will no longer be able to share your 140 character posts. PC Magazine LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky pointed to a blog post from Twitter product team director Michael Sippey, in which Sippey said Twitter is focused on “providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools.” LinkedIn’s Roslansky wrote in his own blog post: “Consistent with Twitter’s evolving platform efforts, tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn … ” Bloomberg Businessweek Twitter has been increasing its focus on getting more users to look at tweets through its own website and on mobile applications, as it seeks to boost advertising revenue. The company expects to generate at least $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014, two people familiar with the forecast said this month. San Francisco Chronicle The move probably hurts LinkedIn more than it does Twitter. Expanded tweets, for example, “gives developers and publishers a way to tell richer stories on Twitter, directly within tweets and drive traffic back to their sites,” said a post on Twitter’s blog for third-party developers. AllThingsD So, who’s next? Flipboard, for one, comes to mind. After users authenticate their social profiles with Flipboard, the app pulls content from disparate sources across the Web — Facebook, RSS, Google+ and, yes, Twitter — in the form of URLs and repaginates the information in Flipboard’s own custom layout. While the result is a rather attractive social magazine, it displays third-party content in a very distinctive, very Flipboard way. And it looks nothing like tweets that show up on Twitter.com. Read more
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Facebook Faces Shareholder Lawsuits (AP)
Facebook’s fourth day of trading as a public company saw an increase in the company’s stock price and shareholder lawsuits related to the social network’s botched initial public offering. Several shareholders who bought stock in the IPO have filed lawsuits against Facebook, its executives and Morgan Stanley, the IPO’s lead underwriter. Reuters Meanwhile, Facebook is considering a stock-listing proposal put forward by the New York Stock Exchange, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, in the wake of a disappointing initial public offering last week on the rival NASDAQ bourse. Facebook has exchanged phone calls and emails with NYSE Euronext and are considering their pitch, the source said without elaborating on specifics. CNET Facebook plans to open its first Middle East office in Dubai next week, according to the Associated Press. This United Arab Emirates city is considered the Silicon Valley of the region, so it makes sense that the social network would put its Persian Gulf hub here. The Hill Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday began to look into the debacle of what was supposed to be the social networking company’s crowning achievement. Lawmakers want to know whether institutional investors got a sneak peek at an updated analysis, written just before the initial public offering, that gave a more pessimistic assessment of Facebook’s future revenues. AllFacebook Some Facebook page administrators are seeing messages in the top-right-hand corners of their timeline pages urging them to create Facebook ads and containing a “promote your page” button. Have you seen similar messages on Facebook pages you manage? Mashable A Facebook page and a six-minute video tell the story of a 12-year-old girl whose mother died when she was 3 years old, grew up being abused by her father and bullied on her Facebook page. Eventually, the girl commits suicide. There’s just one problem: this is all fake. Read more
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Zuckerberg Weds Longtime Girlfriend, No Word on Prenup (Reuters)
Details of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise wedding trickled out on Sunday, but mysteries remained, not least whether there was a prenuptial agreement in place that could affect Zuckerberg’s large stake in the company. Zuckerberg wed his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, on Saturday in the backyard of their modest home in Palo Alto, Calif., with fewer than 100 people in attendance, a Facebook spokesman authorized to speak on behalf of the couple said. CNET However, a woman in India is reportedly divorcing her husband because he committed the cardinal 21st century crime: he didn’t change his Facebook status when they got married. How can a woman trust a man who doesn’t whip out his cell phone the minute the marriage ceremony is over and declare himself to the world? VentureBeat NASDAQ chief executive Robert Greifeld admitted Sunday that the exchange was at fault for some glitches in early trading of Facebook’s IPO but said it had nothing to do with the stock’s uninspired performance. Facebook expected trading to begin at 11 a.m. on Friday, but it did not begin until about 11:30. GigaOM Catching the last five minutes of the Boston University commencement speech by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on WBUR, I was struck by the veiled swipes (pokes?) he took at Facebook. You know, the company that last week launched the most anticipated IPO in years, and that despite NASDAQ glitches and a disappointing finish, wiped Google out of the record books? Yes, that Facebook. CNET A mother wanted to share a picture of her son on Facebook. He lived only eight hours. Facebook removed the image, deeming it “too graphic.” Much later, the company offered an apology and admitted it erred. Read more
President Barack Obama’s claim as the first “Web 2.0 president,” along with his ties to the tech industry, may be getting a little deeper with rumors of two impending personnel moves between his presidency and Silicon Valley.
Google returned Apple’s serve from Tuesday, except that Apple has the dominant tablet behind its serve in the iPad, while Google is relying on recently introduced Android devices.
Chairman Eric Schmidt introduced Google One Pass, its answer to the App Store subscription model announced by Apple Tuesday.
The two major differences: Google will keep 10 percent of revenue from sales, as opposed to 30 percent for Apple; and, as reported by TechCrunch, information collected by Google will be shared with publishers, unlike Apple.
Google and CEO Eric Schmidt were hot topics this week once it was announced that Schmidt will step down as CEO in April to be replaced by Larry Page, one of the search engine giant’s two founders. But the media attention is nothing new for Schmidt, although in the past it’s more often been for the controversial and bold statements he’s made about online privacy than anything else. What has Schmidt said, and will the debate over online privacy change once he’s gone?
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is a cover boy — specifically, the cover of Fortune, as he was named the magazine’s 2010 Business Person of the Year.
Other tech and media movers and shakers to crack the list of 50 included Apple CEO Steve Jobs (No. 3), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (No. 4), Baidu CEO Robin Li (No. 6), Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (No. 7), Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos (No. 10), Google CEO Eric Schmidt (No. 11), Zynga CEO Mark Pincus (No. 12), IBM CEO Sam Palmisano (No. 15), salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (No. 18), Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen (No. 19), Disney CEO Bob Iger (No. 22), Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (No. 24), Pandora founder Tim Westergren (No. 26), Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes (No. 27), DirecTV CEO Michael White (No. 32), Samsung Electronics CEO Geesung Choi (No. 39), Comcast CEO Brian Roberts (No. 43), and Mail.ru Group CEO Yuri Milner (No. 46).
Fortune reporter Peter Newcomb wrote on Hastings:
What does it take to be at the top of business in 2010? We searched for leaders who didn’t just crawl from the wreckage of the Great Recession, but sprinted from it. This year, Hastings has thrown his company’s muscle behind delivering television and movies over the Internet, risking his $2 billion-in-sales DVD-by-mail business. The result: a company that has grown from a gnat to a giant. Now when deals are made in media, the increasingly important question is, “What’s the Netflix piece?”
And Hastings told Fortune:
We are in a new race, and we are a player with some very large and substantial firms. Just to be in that league is an amazing place from where we were.
The Web 2.0 Summit, taking place at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco Monday-Wednesday, will offer live coverage for streaming and embedding free-of-charge, the conference’s organizers, O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb, announced Monday.
Speakers at the three-day event will include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, The Chernin Group founder Peter Chernin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment co-CEO Ariel Emanuel, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Gilt Groupe chairman Susan Lyne, Digital Sky Technologies CEO Yuri Milner, and Qatalyst Partners founder and head of merchant banking Frank Quattrone.
The Diamond Sponsor of the Web 2.0 Summit is Comcast. Platinum Sponsors are Bing, BlackBerry, Dell, and Yahoo!. Silver Sponsors of the event are Canaan Partners, iStockphoto, Ixaris, Meebo, Quova, TokBox, Unity Medical, and Visa. And Supporting Sponsors are Aperture, Ask.com, Omidyar Network, SendGrid, TriNet HR, and Wyse Technology.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has an interesting solution for teens who may regret posting that questionable picture on Facebook or tweeting about their bad romance: just change your name once you hit adulthood.
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt predicts that all young people will one day be ‘entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood’ to protect their youthful indiscretions forever embedded on social media sites.
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