Facebook's Growth Since IPO In 12 Big Numbers
Facebook still hasn't clawed its way back up to its $38 IPO price, but it's made steady progress since going public a year ago. Daily users up 26%, mobile monthly users up 56%, and revenue up 38% are some highlights. It's running out of people to sign up in the developed world, but with this growth and no serious competitor in sight, it's curious that the share price hasn't improved.
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Facebook's Longtime Communications Director Larry Yu Departs To Join Upstart PR Firm Pramana
Larry Yu, the public relations executive who has headed up Facebook's corporate communications operation for five years and helped steer the company through the publicity blitz surrounding its IPO, is leaving the social networking company. He announced his departure this morning in a post on Facebook, writing: "Nearly five years ago, I joined some friends at a privately-held company called Facebook to help a small team scale and expand upon the company’s story. That journey was, in a word, crazy. And fun. Terrifying. And gratifying. So I'm off to do it again. I’m joining my friends Brandee, Brian and Sean to help build The Pramana Collective, a project-focused communications consultancy that works with cool companies."
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Yext Launches Sync, An Easy Way For Local Businesses Their Many Facebook Pages
While Foursquare has been the most hyped location startup out of New York, there is actually another startup that is growing a real business from serving merchants with about 150,000 locations globally. Yext has quietly grown to 200 employees through a platform that makes it easy for brands and small businesses to manage their location data across more than 50 search engines, mapping companies and on Facebook. They’ve raised more than $65 million to date after spinning out and selling an older pay-per-call business to IAC, in favor of going after this opportunity. CEO Howard Lerman thinks of his company as the “quiet location giant,” which could eventually become one of the New York tech scene’s serious IPO candidates. They’re making their connection to the Facebook platform even more seamless today with the launch of Yext Sync. Through a mobile app, businesses can manage their Facebook Pages, whether they have one or one thousand of them. It’s designed so that a local employee ...
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Sina Weibo, China's Equivalent of Facebook and Twitter, Gets $586M Investment From Alibaba
Sina Weibo, the micro-blogging platform that took root among China’s white-collar class, may be worth more than $3 billion today after Alibaba agreed to pay $586 million to buy preferred and ordinary shares in the company. The deal creates a strategic alliance between Alibaba, which runs the eBay of China, and Sina Weibo, which is kind of like a Facebook-Twitter hybrid. Weibo grew to 46 million daily users and earned $50 million in advertising revenue last year, according to an SEC filing last week from parent company Sina. It was 12 percent of parent company Sina’s total advertising revenue. Like Twitter and Facebook, Sina Weibo has gotten a lot more aggressive about pushing in-stream or news feed advertising. Last week, they announced a new product called “Window Recommendations” in partnership with Alibaba’s Taobao. In that integration, about 3 to 5 ads featuring Taobao goods get pushed into a Weibo stream. The two companies say the deal happened so that both companies could ...
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Benchmark's Bill Gurley: Late-Stage Market Is “Most Frothy” Since The Late 1990s
Bill Gurley, a general partner at one of Silicon Valley’s top tier venture firms Benchmark Capital, said that the late-stage market is the “most frothy” he’s ever seen since the late 1990s. Even though Facebook, Groupon and Zynga shares are still all underperforming relative to where they debuted at in their IPOs, growth-stage investors are still pouring capital into later-stage companies. “The late-stage private market continues to be the most frothy thing I’ve seen since the late 1990s,” he said on-stage in an interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. “I thought it was going to go away when you had these IPOs trading at fractions of the opening price, but if you have a company that people have selected as the ‘chosen one,’ you’ve got people knocking on your door.” Gurley said this has more to do with the supply of capital than the supply of companies. Basically, a lot of new participants like hedge funds have moved into late-stage funding, while other ...
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