Those three words broadly sum up the attitude of the broadcast TV network chiefs regarding the encroachment on their turf by digital media companies, as they conducted their traditional springtime dog and pony shows for advertisers in New York this week.

With Harry Potter fan site and e-bookstore Pottermore.com now using watermarkinginstead of heavyweight DRM on all the Harry Potter e-books, anti-DRM arguments are growing louder. Now the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the organization that oversees the EPUB e-book format, hopes to create an industry standard for “lightweight content protection” — something “occupying a middle ground between strong DRM and DRM-free.”

The IDPF is taking the first steps toward creating this standard by launching a discovery process — though it acknowledges the outcome of this process could be “that no feasible standardized solution would be sufficiently useful or accepted, or that no solution is forthcoming that will sufficiently address critical requirements.” Nevertheless, copyright expert Bill Rosenblatt writes, there’s “a growing recognition among publishers that DRM has aspects that work against their interests, including its lack of user-friendliness and eBook distributors’ use of the technology to ‘lock in’ consumers.”

The lightweight DRM Rosenblatt proposes would look something like this:

• Books are watermarked and users can share them, but “unlike watermarking alone, cracks would be considered definitively illegal.”
• The DRM would include a password option that “could be used to discourage ‘over-sharing’ by requiring passwords that contain personal information, such as an e-mail address or credit card number.”
• There are limits on modification, copying and printing “in a matter similar to the encryption incorporated in PDF.”
• It would work for libraries and could be made stricter for library lending.
• It wouldn’t require network connectivity and a reader could still access his or her files if a company goes out of business.
• It wouldn’t impose “excessive restrictions on user behavior, such as prohibiting uses that could well be permissible under copyright law” like reading an e-book on a different device.

Overall, Rosenblatt writes, “a standard method of protecting eBook content that becomes broadly adopted would materially increase interoperability, ameliorate some of the ease-of-use limitations in current DRMs, and may promote broader adoption of digital reading.”

IDPF is taking comments through June 8.

via paidcontent

Classroom training isn’t dead, but it also isn’t the answer for every training need. Social tools are changing the game when it comes to employee learning. Organizations can create collaborative workplaces where employees can learn from each other instead of only learning in a formal setting or from the proverbial “company expert.”

For training programs to be effective, companies must use the right methods and medium for their training sessions and their audience. Given the popularity of social media, it only seems logical to explore how social media tools can have a positive impact on the learning experience.

What It Means

While the practice of social learning has been around for ages, we need a better definition of it for today’s workplace. Most of us have a vision for what formal classroom training looks like, so here’s one way to view the basic difference between informal learning and social learning:

• Informal learning is a term used to describe anything not learned in a formal program or class. It can take place within groups or alone using activities such as reading or search.
• Social learning is learning with and from others. It happens at conferences, cafes or online — with or without social media tools.

In the book Social Media at Work, written by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr and Mary Ellen Kassotakis, the authors share case studies of companies using social and informal learning for business success. For example, Oracle uses a key tool called Connect to give employees the information they need at the moment they need it. The tool is about more than just answering questions -– it’s teaching people how to make smart decisions about the business.

One thing is certain about social learning: It’s not a replacement for traditional classroom training. “There will always be some kinds of training that must be done in a classroom setting because of the requirements of the training or skill mastery demands,” Bingham explains. “Examples include certification, compliance, and deep learning -– this is happening in the classroom.”

Social Learning Benefits

Surveys of CEOs continue to report that recruiting and developing talent are their top concerns. In addition,ASTD Research notes that by 2020, nearly half (46%) of all U.S. workers will be Millennials.

Organizations have to gain an understanding of how a new generation of workers likes to learn, how they use technology and their preferred means of communication. This will be essential in creating training curriculum, development programs and succession plans.

Bingham says it’s possible to calculate the return on social learning, but it’s not the traditional return-on-investment (ROI) formula: “It requires alignment to what’s important to the organization, and often that includes retaining institutional knowledge, solving complex problems collaboratively and attracting people to your organization.”

Maria Ogneva, director of community at Yammer, says, “If your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, perhaps the impact metric you are looking for is the increase of speed of a response to a customer, and how collaboration helps you do that. For any social effort to be successful, it has to tie to a business objective.”

Barriers to Social Learning

Bingham adds that he sees a concern that the use of social media tools may compromise proprietary informaion, or that issues related to intellectual property, company secrets or business strategy may be divulged by a workforce given social media tools. His recommendation?

“Organizations should have an intellectual property policy in place that outlines clear expectations -– and consequences for inappropriate activity. This policy should consider the multitude of possibilities for the use of an organization’s intellectual property.”

Once guidelines are in place, clearly communicate those throughout the entire organization. The goal isn’t to create obstacles to learning but a respectful, effective means to using social tools.

Implementing Social Learning within Your Organization

Any time a company is testing the new territory, it’s beneficial to start small. Find a program or an initiative that would be well-served by employing social technologies and let the people involved with it experiment and find what works. “Social learning has an organic nature to it, it can’t be forced,” Bingham says.

After using a new technology, evaluate the success of the program. Get feedback on three levels:

• From the participants who used the social tool. How did it help or hinder the learning experience?
• From the administrators of the social tool. Was it easy or difficult to use, explain to others and get participant involvement?
• From the management team. What was their perception of the results gained from using a social tool within their work teams?

This feedback will help refine the best social learning methods to incorporate for future activities.

Social media platforms will continue to develop and evolve. More and more individuals will start using them for their personal brands and professional lives. Employees will demand simplicity and expect workplace training to incorporate the tools they use on a regular basis.

Would you like to see more social in your training programs? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

When a privately built rocket aborted its launch attempt at the very last second today (May 19), it was likely a familiar sight to the booster’s builders: the California-based company SpaceX.

SpaceX’s unmanned Falcon 9 rocket aborted its launchattempt this morning just as the countdown reached T minus 0.5 seconds and the rocket’s nine main engines ignited, apparently due to an unexpectedly high engine pressure reading. The rocket will now have to wait until at least Tuesday (May 22) to attempt to launch SpaceX’s first robotic Dragon space capsule flight to the International Space Station.

The launch abort, while a delay, isn’t a surprising turn of events for SpaceX. The company repeatedly pushed back the launch in recent months to allow extra time to review the rocket and Dragon capsule’s flight software. The goal, SpaceX and NASA officials said at the time, was to make sure the rocket was as ready to fly as possible.

As recently as April 30, SpaceX pushed the launch back when the Falcon 9 rocket experienced a hiccup during an engine test atop the launch pad. A second engine test later proved everything was ready for launch.  [Photos: SpaceX Poised for Historic Launch]

No guarantees

SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract to provide 12 Dragon capsule cargo flights to the space station for NASA, with this mission aimed at proving the space capsule’s capabilities. With NASA’s space shuttle fleet retired, the agency is depending on SpaceX and other commercial spaceship builders to provide much needed robotic cargo and manned vehicles to fill the void left by the shuttle program’s end.

But SpaceX has repeatedly stated that the Falcon 9 and Dragon launch to the space station is an unprecedented test flight, one in which success is never guaranteed.

“This mission is important, although I wouldn’t want to place too much emphasis on the success of this mission, because it is a first time effort,” SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk told SPACE.com in a recent interview. “If there’s any danger or concern with respect to the space station, then we will have to abort and try again on a different flight.”

Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of the Internet payment service Paypal. He founded the Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp.,  in 2002 with the intention of developing a manned spacecraft capable of orbital and deep space flight.

The Falcon 9 rocket stands 157 feet tall (48 meters) and is a two-stage booster fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene.

The challenge of private spaceflight

On Friday (May 18), SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell acknowledged the company’s challenges in hitting liftoff at launch time on the first try.

“We have not hit a T-Zero yet,” Shotwell said, adding that she felt SpaceX had a better than 50-50 chance of launching today.

The current Falcon 9 mission is SpaceX’s third mission for the rocket design, which made its debut in June 2010. A second flight successfully launched a Dragon capsule prototype into orbit in December 2010. The earlier Falcon 9 launches also saw delays or aborts, Shotwell said.

The Falcon 9 rocket’s successful track record marked a major step forward for SpaceX, which launched three of its smaller Falcon 1 rockets before achieving a successful flight on the fourth try.

SpaceX’s next chance to launch the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule toward the space station comes before dawn on Tuesday, with Wednesday (May 23) available as a backup day if it is needed, NASA officials said.

After standing down from today’s launch attempt, Shotwell stressed that there’s a big difference between a launch abort and an outright launch failure.

“This is not a failure,” Shotwelll said. “We aborted with purpose. It would have been a failure if we had lifted off with an engine trending in this situation.”

via  mashable

4:13 p.m. ET: Facebook’s stock came full circle on its first day as a public company, ending the day at $38.23 with more than 500 million shares traded. That’s barely up from its opening price of $38, but shows that Facebook priced the IPO well, although the company may have had some help from underwriters propping up the stock in the closing hours. But with a market cap of $104 billion (according to Yahoo Finance), Facebook is staked with a lot of capital to build on its growth.

3:52 p.m. ET: Facebook’s share price is back where it started at $38. The much anticipated pop is not happening. There’s still time for the stock to dip below its opening price. Facebook priced this well for itself but it won’t get the buzz that comes from a big first day.

3:00 p.m. ET: Facebook’s share price has slipped below $40 to about $39 putting it up about 3 percent on the day. The same can’t be said of Zynga, whose share price continued to drop after trading on the stock was halted a couple of times. The shares are down about 12 percent now.

2:11 p.m. ET: Doesn’t look like we’re going to get a Facebook pop today, unless things heat up later: we’re still hovering between $40 and $41. 386 million shares have changed hands so far today, and speculation is now turning toward what went wrong at the Nasdaq this morning: some traders apparently weren’t sure if their orders had been processed.

1:06 p.m. ET: Not much change in Facebook’s price, which is now at about $41 a share. Interestingly, shares of LinkedIn, Yelp and Pandora are down today. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that underwriters stepped in to ensure Facebook’s stock didn’t dip below itss opening price of $38.

12:48 p.m. ET: Facebook shares continue to float around a bit, hovering around $40 to $41 dollars a share. Meanwhile, Zynga has taken a hit today with its stock price falling by 13 percent following Facebook’s debut. Zynga’s stock, which was halted for a time, is off about 5.68 percent.

12:04 p.m. ET: So far, no big pop for Facebook. Shares seem to be holding strong in the $38-$40 range, just barely above its offer price. The stock price is about $39.51 right now.  At least it’s not pulling a Zynga, and falling below the opening price on the first day. ButLinkedIn, Groupon, Zillow and other recent tech IPOs saw at least a 30 percent pop on the first day of trading.

11:31 a.m. ET: And we’re off! As had been reported earlier this morning, Facebook started trading around $42. Shares are currently at about $40.90, about 7.6 percent above the original price of $38. According to Reuters, 82 million shares changed hands in the first 30 seconds.

11:20  a.m. ET: Alright already, NASDAQ. Trading was supposed to start at 11:05 a.m. But, here we are 15 minutes, still waiting… We’ll keep you updated.

Earlier: The time for talking has passed, and the time for buying has begun. Later today shares of Facebook will begin trading on the NASDAQ stock market in an initial public offering that could set records for the tech industry and rank among the most valuable IPOs in American history.

We’ll track the price of Facebook’s stock below, updating this post throughout the day with news and information about the event. The NASDAQ opens for trading at 9:30 a.m. ET, and closes at 4:00 p.m. ET. Facebook won’t go live immediately — the exchange saves IPO trades so they get their own special boost: we’re expecting Facebook trades to start at 11.

In the meantime, please check out our Facebook IPO coverage up until this point as well as our chart listing recent digital media IPOs, none of which have been as impressive as Facebook’s IPO is expected to be. And if you need some light relief or director’s commentary, check out our links to what the rest of the web is saying.

via gigaom

In many ways Facebook is a very American success: forged at Harvard, warmed up in the crucible of Silicon Valley, and now reaching boiling point by becoming one of the nation’s most valuable companies. But it’s also a very international business, too, with 900 million users spread all around the world.

The company has made no secret of its ambition to make sure every person on the planet is connected to its service. What might seem like hubris, however, is actually necessity: with Wall Street now breathing down its neck, overseas growth is important — investors want to see that however big it has become, Facebook still has headroom left. (Check out our chart of five countries outside the U.S. that could provide Facebook with a lot more users.)

So how will it manage?

First, use its headstart

To understand Facebook’s approach to international growth, it’s worth looking back at the way the company became so global quickly.

From very early on, Facebook had a strong foreign user base. In fact, unlike most companies, it was not really the company’s home success that drove its foreign expansion — it was foreign expansion that fueled its meteoric rise and underpinned its blockbuster flotation.

As early as 2007, the vast international potential was becoming very clear, when London became the single most popular city on Facebook. But then came perhaps its smartest move of all: instead of spending months deciding which markets to target, building local sales teams and internationalizing its product accordingly, Facebook designed a tool that let users translate the service into their own language — effectively crowdsourcing what is usually a slow, labor-intensive job.

And it proved a stunning success: in less than 24 hours, for example, 90 percent of the site had been translated into French. Former Facebooker Andy Johns has called it “the greatest lever” the company had for growth:

It made Facebook a platform capable of supporting everyone on the planet… Growth was not about hiring 10 people per country and putting them in the 20 most important countries and expecting it to grow. Growth was about [engineering] systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.

It was an inspired, engineering-led approach that allowed Facebook to rapidly scale out into dozens of new territories without ever targeting or investing in them specifically. Take Turkey, a fast-growing internet market with its own language. Without any member of the team ever targeting the country as a business prospect, Facebook became the country’s number 1 social site — and now boasts 92 percent market penetration.

This has all given the company huge reachat relatively little cost, and brought in a ton of revenue too: this year is likely to be the first in which Facebook will make more money outside the United States than in them (U.S. revenue fell from 62 percent in 2010 to 56 percent in 2011).

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of that number. But for some context, compare that with Google, where international revenue only outstripped U.S. revenue for the first time in 2008 — four years after it went public.

Continued international progress is massively important, not least because it’s where new users are coming from.

Pingdom, which found Facebook’s six-month U.S. user growth at just 0.86 percent compared with Brazil’s 54 percent, says: “It seems evident that Facebook needs an expansion plan that involves all corners of the world, but that focuses on certain regions, like Africa and Asia.”

Facebook acknowledges the problem, and the opportunity. Alongside mobile and advertising, it has sold investors on hoped-for international growth. “There are more than two billion global internet users, according to an IDC report dated August 2011,” its S-1 read. “And we aim to connect all of them.”

Now it just has to deliver on that promise.

So where next?

The omens for continued expansion may be good. Thanks to its translation success, Facebook has already unseated eight dominant local-language competitors in the last two years, according to comScore – most recently, Orkut in Brazil and Poland’s Nasa Klasa.pl.

Recent data from Pingdom shows strong gains in other countries, leaving just a handful of nations where Facebook is not the top dog: China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Russia.

“Now there are only five markets where Facebook is not the #1 social networking site,” a comScore spokesperson told us. “What’s interesting here is that Vietnam, Japan and South Korea are amongst the top four fastest growing markets, with year-over-year growth rates of 80 to 270 percent.”

But these remaining countries are also the toughest nuts to crack. And the biggest prize of all, China, may need a sledge hammer — after all Facebook is blocked by the country’s Great Firewall.

If it can piggyback China’s explosive broadband and mobile internet adoption, Facebook’s own growth may surge even further. But this will be anything but a walk in the park.

Investors have been warned. Facebook’s s-1 filing cautioned:

“We do not know if we will be able to find an approach to managing content and information that will be acceptable to us and to the Chinese government.

“In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.”

China’s state authorities grant spartan online operating licenses to overseas players, especially powerhouses, leaving the market to indigenous networks, which themselves are allowed to operate only under a strict regime of monitoring and censorship by the government.

That is a controversial and technically difficult task for any social network. But, if it’s good enough for China’s own, it may be a move that Facebook, too, has to consider if it wants to break in.

But it’s not just China that could prove tricky. Google can attest to the difficulties of launching in unfriendly countries. Its $140 million acquisition of the Rambler portal’s Begun contextual ad agency was blocked in 2008 because of what Russian competition authorities said was insufficient paperwork.

And, while trying to make inroads to its five target nations, Facebook must also be on its guard to make sure it protects its leading position in other markets, many of which are small enough that launches or improvements from indigenous competitors could have profound impact.

The revenue question

Even if the company can push growth numbers by securing a dominant position in every single one of the world’s countries, there is another big question: how to keep revenue going up internationally too.

This is a very important problem it faces: during its IPO roadshow, executives explained that while an American user with high disposable income was worth $9.51 in Facebook ad revenue last year, Europe was worth considerably less at $4.86. Asia, meanwhile, came in at $1.79 and the rest of the world made Facebook just $1.42 per user.

So while international growth may be large, the granular detail on income is less impressive. These are not figures that will please Facebook’s investors if they do not rise — and, asThomas Crampton of Social@Ogilvy & Mather’s Asia-Pacific unit has pointed out, users in lower-income countries like India are going to be hard to monetize more effectively.

Getting average revenues up could mean international users seeing more ads; working more partnerships outside the U.S.; using its scale to push revenue strategies that go way beyond advertising (such as a Facebook credit card). It could even require the company ditching a reliance on engineering solutions in favor of pushing harder at the drearier but tried-and-trusted approach of building large local sales teams.

Whatever the case, you can be sure Facebook will be trying everything it can to increase its international audience — and make it as valuable as possible.

via gigaom

But as monthly video data released by comScore shows, both companies have managed to significantly increase the amount of time viewers spend watching video on their respective channels.

Also read: TV nets wrap upfront week: “The biz still goes through us”

According to comScore, viewers spent an average of 434.8 minutes in April watching video on Google channels, a grouping the mainly includes the assets of YouTube. That represents an uptick of 55 percent over April 2011.

On Yahoo channels, meanwhile, viewers spent an average of 73.7 minutes in April watching video, nearly double the 37.5 minutes they averaged in April 2011.

While time spent viewing these leading digital channel operators has increased dramatically, total unique viewers watching them has not.

Tabulating 157.7 million unique video users in April, Google sites experienced only an 11 percent increase over April 2011′s tally of 142.7 million.

Yahoo, meanwhile, was virtually flat, counting 53.6 million uniques in April compared to 53.2 million during the same period last year.

These year-over-year benchmarks for the leading internet video providers follow trend lines of the broader online video industry.

For the entire online video universe, comScore tabulated 180.8 million unique viewers in April, up just 5 percent over April 2011. However, total minutes spent watching online video increased 46 percent to an average of 1,307.7 (I know, who are the people with all this time who are top-weighting these averages?).

Even with the uptick in consumption, YouTube and Yahoo’s rise in usage has come at a cost to others.

Vevo traffic continues to slide

Music video giant Vevo, for example, saw its unique viewers plummet 10 percent to 49.5 million over the same period, while its average viewership time declined by 41 percent to 57.9 minutes. (The comScore report doesn’t track mobile usage, so it’s hard to tell how many viewers are migrating to mobile platforms.)

Also, Viacom digital, the leader among traditional media companies in the digital video realm, saw its average viewer time drop 27 percent to 58.9 minutes (unique viewers were flat year over year at 41.2 million).

via paidcontent

Big Idea: Raspberry Pi is a small, lightweight computer that runs on Linux and costs next to nothing — the Model A retails at $35, while the forthcoming Model B will be priced at $25.

Why It’s Working: By far the cheapest computer on the market, the creator of Raspberry Pi hopes to get the gadget in the hands of children all over the world.

“Many [kids] just don’t have computers at all,” Upton explains. “If they do, it’s a family computer, and you don’t want to mess with it.”

So, he began the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Registered as an official UK charity, the organization had a single goal in mind: to put cheap computers in the hands of youth and encourage them to expand their programming horizons. Upton says that the first Raspberry Pi computer had the capacity similar to the original computer he learned to code on, but he decided through multiple iterations that it would be more attractive with a modern spin and a Linux OS. And in order to keep production costs low, Upton says that the hardware for the flashcard-sized Raspberry Pi is decidedly no-frills — simply a core computer running on a mobile phone chipset developed and provided by Upton’s employer, Broadcom. The results of many prototypes were the Raspberry Pi Model A and Model B.

“What we’ve ended up with is something that’s very powerful from a multimedia level,” Upton explains. “We’ve styled the user experience to a recognizably modern thing while staying at the same price point.”

And that price point is shockingly low. Cost-efficient parts and minimal overhead contributed to the Model B’s jaw-dropping $35 MSRP — and sent geeks from all over clamoring to get their hands on it. Upton says that even as early as January, the organization only expected to sell 10,000 units. Instead, the Model B’s February launch on Leap Day of this year crashed the websites of the vendors who sold out in minutes.

“I think the numbers that are kicking around now are well over a quarter of a million units ordered so far,” Upton says of the Model B’s sales. “We’re very pleased.”

And it’s not just geeks looking to get a piece of the action. Upton says that the foundation has been approached by commercial companies, hospitals, museums and others looking to integrate the Raspberry Pi’s low-cost computing systems into their own everyday services. He adds that while the company is maintaining a strict role as a distributor of materials, the foundation has given special consideration to orgs looking to do good with the tiny computer.

“We’ve been helping people by making sure they get early access to boards and making sure that they’re getting a little support to put them in the right direction,” Upton adds.

But this is just the first step toward Upton’s larger goals. He says he hopes to debut the even cheaper Model A, which will be priced at $25, sometime before the end of the summer. Looking ahead, Upton says he’s excited to implement specialized software, tutorials and sample codes to encourage kids (and adults) to tackle the world of home programming.

“We’re trying to put the fun back into the computing,” Upton explains. “So now we have things going out the door. The goal is to refocus and make a polished educational offering around the device.”

Well, that was anticlimactic.

After all the hullabaloo about Facebook’s IPO, this is how it ends, with a mere $0.23 jump in share price? That kind of movement is what happens after Procter & Gamble announces a more absorbent type of Pampers.

Yet it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Facebook’s opening day on the NASDAQ had all the excitement of a Matlockrerun. While no one knows exactly why Facebook landed with such a thud, there are a handful of good reasons that the company got poked by Wall Street. Among them:

1. It Was Priced Just Right

That, however, depends on what your definition of “accurately” is. James Brau, professor of finance at Brigham Young University, says that over the past 40 years of IPOs, the average first-day pop is 18%.

So, if Facebook was looking to perform along those lines, it should have priced its shares in the low 30s.

In addition, underwriters don’t aim for a flat performance on the first day because of a practice called “leaving money on the table,” which rewards institutional investors for getting on board. Though that looks like a kickback of sorts, Brau says there’s no clear-cut reason why IPOs always factor leaving money on the table in.

“There are at least 50 different academic studies I know of that that have 35 different theories,” Brau says.

One popular theory is that it’s a way of rewarding such investors for honesty. The argument goes like this: During an IPO road show, the company and bankers are looking for an accurate read on what investors plan to spend.

If such investors didn’t know that they would be rewarded for telling the truth, then they would intentionally low-ball the amount they intend to buy at. If an institutional investor thought that the stock should be worth $10, say, then they might say they’ll spend $8 to enjoy the ride on the opening day.

2. It’s NASDAQ’s Fault

“It threw it a bit of a curve,” Pleines says. “It may have held it back a little bit.”

3. Investors Are Wary of Social Media Stocks

4. It’s GM’s Fault

Though no other advertisers appear to have followed suit, the move didn’t reassure investors who were already nervous about Facebook’s first-quarter revenue slide and its admitted inability to transition its ad model to mobile.

5. It’s Overvalued

The Golden Arches, with restaurants all over the globe, close-to 100% brand recognition and a proven business model, posted $27 billion in revenues last year and a $5.5 billion profit. Facebook made $1 billion on $3.7 billion in revenues.

Not surprisingly, 79% of investors in a recent Bloomberg poll thought that Facebook was overvalued. As Espen Robak, the president of Pluris Valuation Advisors, told The Atlantic, Facebook’s valuation is plausible because of the company’s tremendous reach.

But, as Robak told the publication, no one knows how Facebook will be able to monetize that reach.

“Think of it this way,” said Robak. “Google has a pretty standard price-earnings ratio right now — around 15 to 20. That’s where Facebook will ultimately have to get. They need vastly larger profit.

“How many more ads can they sell? Four times more in the next year? I don’t think so. They have to get revenues from somewhere else.”

Robak thinks that maybe — just maybe — Facebook will be able to tap into its user data to provide a new solution to advertisers.

6. Retail Investors Are Taking a Wait-And-See Attitude

According to Pleines’ data, no matter how well the recent social media IPOs did on opening day, their stocks were still down — across the board — after the first month.

But it’s not just a social media thing: We may not remember it well, but Google’s stock languished for a month or more after its debut. “While Google did not trade lower in its first month of trading, it did trade back its original open price of $100,” Pleines wrote in a recent note to clients. “But after that it never looked back, trading as high as $196 over the next three months.”

In other words, the question of Facebook’s true value wasn’t answered on Friday. In all likelihood, we won’t know for a few months at least.

via mashable

Lawyers tried to ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s big day with a sprawling lawsuit that portrays the Facebook founder as a rogue hacker, and accuses the company of tracking users on their computers and iPhones. The lawyers want to collect $15 billion for you and me and nearly everyone else on Facebook.

Here’s a plain english Q&A of what’s going on:

What did Facebook do that was so wrong?

The company placed files on users’ computers called cookies that told the social network which websites they visited.

Is that so unusual? I thought lots of sites do that

The problem is that Facebook appears to have tracked you even after you logged-out. Under the company’s own policy, it promised not to do that and thus violated the limits of your consent when it did.

How exactly did Facebook track me?

Many websites like CNN or Justin Bieber Zone have a “Like” button that acts like an extension of Facebook. The company collects data about your visits to those sites — including, it seems, when you are logged out. The unauthorized tracking reportedly took place across smartphones and tablets too.

Well, maybe this was an honest mistake?

After blogger Nik Cubrilovic called out Facebook for stalking its users, the company awkwardly suggested that the tracking of logged-out users was a “bug” or a narrow technical measure. That claim hasn’t stood up well. Cubrilovic and German regulators soon called BS and suggested Facebook was doing this deliberately for more than a year. The lawsuit also points to a Facebook patent application for cookies that follow users after they log out.

So where did this lawsuit come from?

There are actually more than a dozen cases across the country. They were recently consolidated into one lawsuit in San Jose, California.

Why are the lawyers asking for $15 billion?

It’s a great way to grab headlines during a week the press is already in a Facebook frenzy. The $15 billion itself is loosely based on the Wiretap Act which lets people sue for $10,000 if someone records their conversation without permission. The lawsuit also cites studies that claim an individual’s web history is worth $52. There are also state law penalties. And so on. The lawyers had to pick some number so they chose $15 billion.

Will Facebook actually have to pay that $15 billion?

The short answer is no. The Wiretap Act was written with telephone conversations in mind so it’s no slam dunk that a court will decide the law should apply the same way to computer cookies (Google, HTC and Samsung are facing similar lawsuitsunder the same legal theory). At the same time, some judges have ruled that Facebook-style “privacy invasions” aren’t worth anything in dollar terms because no one has been harmed.

In this case, however, a judge would likely conclude that Facebook’s behavior (if the allegations are true) was egregious enough to find liability under at least one of the plaintiffs’ 11 claims. But if other tech related privacy suits are anything to go by, the case will settle long before a trial.

I’m on Facebook. Will I get some of that money?

Doubtful. While the class action aspires to cover everyone who was on Facebook from May 2010 to September 2011, a cash payout is unlikely. As noted above, judges have a hard time putting a dollar value on this type of privacy breach. When there has been a privacy settlement in other tech-related cases (like Google Buzz or Facebook Beacon), the money has been divided up between lawyers and non-profit groups that act as privacy activists.

What does Mark Zuckerberg have to do with all this?

The lawsuit paints the Facebook CEO as a creep who has a long history of using his hacking skills to steal people’s personal data. The complaint opens by reproducing this email exchange:

The lawsuit also lists a chronological history intended to show that Zuckerberg and his company have long displayed a systemic disregard for user privacy. This is, of course, just a legal tactic that doesn’t necessarily prove that Facebook is any better or worse than other tech companies on privacy issues. Facebook, which told Bloomberg the complaint is baseless, would likely add that this was an accident that shouldn’t detract from the fact it provides a popular free service to millions of people.

Are lawsuits the best way to solve the privacy problem?

Probably not. But since the government often has a hard time understanding (let alone regulating) the tech industry, the lawsuits can be an effective way of raising awareness and forcing companies to take care about how they handle consumer data.

Here’s the complaint itself:

Facebook Wiretap Act Complaint Copy

via gigaom