SAN FRANCISCO Facebook Inc. has set dates for its road show and initial public offering, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing sources.
The so-called road show, where the social-networking firm will tout its offering to investors, will start Monday, the Journal reported, adding that sources said CEO Mark Zuckerberg would appear at some road-show events. The IPO, which could value the company at up to $100 billion, is set to kick off on May 18, according to WSJ
Even with the threat of PayPal looming, Square continues to grow. The company told Bloomberg Wednesday that its annualized rate of processed transactions is now up to $5 billion, up from $4 billion a month ago. It’s unclear how much Square is actually making on all this action and if it’s even profitable, but the growth is showing that Square is executing on its bid to become a payment tool for small businesses.
The company also announced that it is now guaranteeing that any funds processed by 5 p.m. will get deposited into a merchant’s bank account by the morning of the following business day. Square has been offering next day deposit for many transactions but the later 5 p.m. cut off makes more of the money available the next day. Typically, other processors can take two to five days to deposit money into a merchant’s bank account.
Fast deposits have been one of Square’s selling points. But PayPal has also been touting the ability for businesses using its new PayPal Here product to get access to their funds on the same day if they deposit into a PayPal account and then withdraw it using a PayPal debit card. PayPal is trying to get more businesses to use their PayPal accounts and is offering 1 percent back on purchases that use the debit card.
Square’s latest milestone still puts it behind PayPal, which is expecting to do $7 billion in mobile payment volume this year. And it’s still a far cry from $118.7 billion in net payment volume PayPal did last year. But with the way Square is growing, it could be on a much higher pace by the end of this year. The company, which has more than a million merchants using its payment system, is reportedly trying to raise $250 million at a valuation of $4 billion.
Facebook Inc. said it is acquiring the popular photo-sharing app maker Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock in what is the social network’s biggest acquisition to date.
Instagram enables smartphone users to adjust the images taken with their phones through several easy to use pre-set filters. Instagram’s free downloadable software/app allows users to create more interesting photos to view and share, especially when posting to social networking sites such as Facebook.
Instagram founders Kevin Systrom, left, and Mike Krieger.
The deal presents a quick bonanza for the startup, which was founded in the fall of 2010 by two Stanford University graduates and has just over a dozen employees.
Instagram is one of a cohort of young startups that have built products around smartphones and have registered incredibly fast growth in a short period of time.
On March 11, Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom gave a keynote talk at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, where he announced that the company’s iPhone app had nearly doubled its number of registered users since December, going from 15 million users to 27 million users.
Last week, the company launched a version of its application that works on smartphones running Google Inc.’s Android system and instantly notched another big leg of growth. The company now says it has more than 30 million registered users.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made clear in a statement that while he plans to integrate some aspects of Instagram into Facebook, he expects it to operate as an independent company.
“We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement. “At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.”
Recently two TV programs have successfully engaged audiences with social interaction. HBO’s Game of Thrones and ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars both broke records through TV check-ins, Get Glue, and Twitter respectively.
Pretty Little Liars Breaks All-Time Twitter Record
After two seasons building up to the reveal of the identity of the torturous character “A,” ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars finally let the identity out of the bag last Monday night, and PLL became the most tweeted and Facebooked about TV series of all time (on a single day), according to social-media ratings agencies
The season 2 premiere of HBO’s popular TV show Game of Thrones had so many social media users buzzing last night that it caused the social networking site Get Glue to temporarily crash
Game of Thrones — a medieval fantasy show based on “A Song of Ice and Fire,” a series of seven fantasy novels — raked in a high level of check-ins on Get Glue not only the night of the show, but in the days leading up to the premiere.
About 50,000 people checked-in to GetGlue on Sunday to let friends know they were watching the show. GetGlue, which rewards its users with points that can be redeemed for virtual and physical stickers and discounts from entertainment companies, experienced so much traffic during that time that its servers were briefly down.
“We also had over 90,000 check-ins for the week leading up to the premiere,” a GetGlue spokesperson told Mashable, noting that the first episode of Game of Thrones last year brought in just 9,000 check-ins on.
To put the 50,000 check-ins into context, the highly-anticipated return of Mad Men last week brought in 22,000 check-ins. Meanwhile, the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead had 43,000 and the 2011 season premiere of True Blood had 38,000 check ins.
“We knew it would be a big night, but we didn’t know how big,” the spokesperson added.
Those that used the site were also highly active on Twitter. About 50% of the tweets that said
Watching Game of Thrones” came from GetGlue.
According to social TV analytics provider BlueFin Labs, the premiere generated a total of about 60,000 comments across all social networking sites. About 54% of that activity was conducted by men, while 46% were women.
Photo Illustration by Sean McCabe
As you’ve no doubt noticed, your viewing options got a little shorter last week. Starz, the longtime supplier of popular movies and television series to millions of Netflix streaming devices, took their catalogue and went home rather than play with Netflix any longer. Popular titles like “Secretariat,” “Toy Story 3,” and “Scarface” disappeared from instant queues the world over.
While it may sound like Armageddon for the Los Gatos-based provider, especially in the wake of 2011’s pricing debacle – you know the one where they wanted subscribers to pay 60% more for the same thing – Netflix may be more prepared than you think, and that only bodes better for those same subscribers. In the past few months, Reed Hastings and company have been busy locking up lucrative, and not to mention exclusive, content deals with some of the biggest names in entertainment, something that Comcast’s recently announced Streampix or the still unnamed RedBox / Verizon partnership can’t replicate.
Newly uncovered documents show Facebook is planning to revamp their Premium Ads format and phase the existing ones out altogether on February 29th, as reported by GigaOm.
The new format looks to turn a brand’s recent posts, be they pictures, a video, a poll, or an event, into a sponsored ad that not only targets, but shows the commonality and connections between the user, their friends, and the brand. Gone will be the classic Premium Ads that featured video, polls or even RSVP and “like” functionality, marking one of Facebook’s largest ad format changes in some time.
At first glance, the unit appears to be an upgrade on the Sponsored Stories ad format that Facebook released just last year in its Marketplace, and it aims to make Sponsored Stories the Premium format by leveraging the actual brand’s posts. Of course, the new ad format is larger, allowing for commenting and additional “liking” all the same. But much is riding on the added response from the social context features. The long held belief, by Facebook and marketers alike, that friends of a brand’s fans might be fans-in-the-making and even potential customers will soon be put to the test. They’ll also have to convince digital marketers hoping to use click tags to track their campaigns that Facebook analytics is all you need. Yep, no more click tagging for Premium Ads.
Overview of the new format:
Facebook is also looking to enter the Mobile space soon. There are longer-term trends impacting pricing as well, including new thinking about mobile’s role in the online ad budget and the evolution of this space towards better creative.
Pinterest’s rapid growth is noteworthy for brands, despite not offering paid ad opportunities. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard, bringing the scrapbooking phenomenon to social media. The platform is unique as humans create content categories rather than algorithm like keyword based search.
Relevant brands should create their own pages to distribute their content. This should be done tactfully; pages should be developed as a persona that represents the brand, rather than the brand itself, at least until Pinterest rolls out brand pages officially. Additionally, brands should incorporate Pinterest buttons on their other social platforms to encourage re-pining.
Pinterest is taking its time rolling out a revenue generating platform. It’s more likely than not small brands will figure out how to use it best as a free media form, as female entrepreneurial craft makers, heavily skewed female, are a core audience to site. A few large brands that may not necessarily make sense for the site’s demographics may try to launch social campaigns, but the first few will probably stumble as their marketing message may overpower what Pinterest is all about, people’s actual interests.
80% Female/ 20% Male
Some College Experience
There is also speculation on how Pinterest will incorporate brands. The most obvious ways are promoted interest/brands similar to Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds. Promoted interests probably won’t be rolled out until the site diversifies and grows beyond 50-100MM users. Most social media platforms don’t generate tremendous response to ads, so they need a decent scale to create volume for brands.
Contributors: Andrew Hoeberichts, Angie Ossip, Nicole Lefmann, Sam Huston, Sankar Patel
Facebook is planning to make its new Timeline format available for Brands soon. Reports indicate that the announcement will be made in its first ever event specifically for marketers called FMC to be held in New York on Feb 29.
As you may remember, Timeline was first launched back in September for select users and was rolled out in December to everyone. Timeline gave users an opportunity to visually tell the story of your life. Users can post the timeline of most memorable events of their life such as your first day at school, college graduation, wedding or family reunions.
Nothing is more powerful than your memories, what you are, is shaped by your experiences including the brands you grew up with. Timeline will allow Brands to re connect with you and take you back through the journey of life. It will allow them to communicate via powerful visuals, rather than drown you down with heavy text. Brands can organize and focus on what is important to them.
Much like how Google’s self service ad words platform encouraged and brought in a whole new range of small business online, these visually striking Timeline pages may get the much needed attention from small business owners. This smart move by Facebook will hopefully encourage businesses to spend more advertising dollars on Facebook.
In the meantime, since Facebook announced Timeline, Google + and Twitter have announced their own Brand pages.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Aneja Raj
In what may be a sign for the mobile industry, Google has announced that effective today, all available AdMob cost-per-click (CPC) inventory will be entered into Google’s AdWords-style auction, where the winning bid will be determined by the quality of the ad and other competing bids at that time. No minimum bids will be required, which will let advertisers compete for mobile inventory based solely on supply and demand.
The mobile war is in full swing. Reports already indicate that Facebook will be launching their first mobile advertising with its famed sponsored stories ad format, while Apple famously already offers its rich iAds across the mobile ad network previously known as Quattro. While Facebook sponsored stories on Mobile will allow for individual endorsements to travel to a much larger audience and create larger impact, AdMob’s self service CPC model will open up the market and allow a whole set of new advertisers to enter the market.
Much like Google’s AdWords, with AdMob’s offering:
- There will be no minimum bid requirement
- You will not pay more for a CPC click than your maximum bid
- Your ads quality score will be a factor in how much you pay
- This will only affect CPC banners and CPC text & tile ad units
Aneja Raj
iPhone #1 for Web Browsing
Although Apple ships the same iPhone 4S devices to Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, their performance and features differ once they are configured for each network.
On AT&T’s network, for example, the iPhone can talk and surf at the same time — a feature not supported on Verizon and Sprint’s CDMA networks. Other factors, like call quality and service levels, also differ by network.
A new study from Metrico Wireless outlines the core values for each type of phone in which performance is directly tied to the selected carrier.
The iPhone 4S is fastest on AT&T, due to the original contract between Apple and AT&T and hence the device supports AT&T’s HSPA+ network. Apple currently does not provide support for either Verizon’s 4G LTE network or Sprint’s WiMax-based 4G network.
Metrico said that Verizon performed best in the category of completing calls, edging out Sprint and AT&T. Important note, Sprint is the only one still offering unlimited data, which it heavily promotes within high-profile programming such as NFL football.
WSJs: “All Things Digital”