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Big Tech Teams Up To Buy Kodak Assets

by steven on December 23, 2012

Apple, Google, RIM, Facebook, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe Systems, Fujifilm, Huawei, HTC and Shutterfly are used to constantly competing with each other, but the big tech firms have teamed up to buy patents from bankrupt Eastman Kodak for about $525 million, giving them right to use Kodak’s digital technology for photos. The group is led by Intellectual Ventures Management, which will split the payment with the licensees.

Unlikely partnerships like this one allow competitors to neutralize potential infringement litigation. The agreement resolves all patent-infringement lawsuits between Kodak and the 12 licensees, including Kodak’s suits against Apple, RIM, Fujifilm, HTC, Samsung and Shutterfly.

The auctioned patents, more than 1,100 of which are related to the capture, manipulation and sharing of digital images, were once estimated to be worth as much as $2.6 billion. Kodak needed to sell the patents for at least $500 million in order to exit bankruptcy in the first half of 2013.

“This is a fraction of our overall patent portfolio,” said Kodak spokesman Chris Veronda. “We retain ownership of about 9,600 other patents for our ongoing businesses.”

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Do You Still Think Facebook Is The Perfect Startup?

by Jason Wilk on September 27, 2012


Despite what is happening in the public markets for Facebook, French consulting firm faberNovel and purveyor of beautiful info-graphs has created a 90+ page slideshow on why they still believe Facebook to still be the next big thing. Take a look, I have embedded it below. Credit to TechCrunch for finding this:

Facebook, The Perfect Startup

View more presentations from faberNovel

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Facebook has potential turned an important milestone today regarding mobile monetization. A new study out by TBG Digital shows that on a sample of 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories have a very high click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. This would put Facebook eCPM at around $9.86, an extremely high number for mobile which has typically been thought to be unmonetizable.

Sponsored Stories are also an ad product for the web, and show an average CTR of 0.588% and generates an eCPM of $3.72. The numbers broken down below (thanks to TechCrunch for the image)

My take on this is that the product is brand new to users. Don’t forget that the first display ads ever seen on the web attracted a CTR of over 50%. Now a day, if you have a CTR over .04% on your display ads, you are accused of fraud. From the mobile ads I have seen on Facebook so far, they are both sexy and seem to be promoting fairly attractive offers. Let’s let the hype die down until the entire Facebook mobile ecosystem has had a chance to tire of the ads before we make a true judgement on whether or not this is working.

 

 

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From Reuters today:

Facebook Inc and lead underwriter Morgan Stanley were sued by shareholders who claimed they hid the social networking company’s weakened growth forecasts ahead of its $16 billion initial public offering.
The lawsuit came as Facebook and the banks that took it public face questions about the IPO, which culminated in a May 18 stock market debut plagued by technical glitches.

Facebook shares fell 18.4 percent from their $38 IPO price in their first three trading days. They were up $1.08, or 3.5 percent, at $32.08 in Wednesday afternoon trading.

The lawsuit claimed that the defendants, including Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co, concealed “a severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue growth forecasts resulting from greater use of Facebook’s app or website through mobile devices.

Anyone working in technology with an understanding of secondary markets understands why Facebook’s share price has been faltering since it opened last Friday. The rest of the public? Not so much; a big reason we’re seeing this shareholder suit above. Regardless of whether or not Facebook made some adjustments to their revenue forecasts during the road show, the bottom line is Facebook at its opening price was highly overvalued. Partly because of hype leading up to the offering, but by and far because of the fact that the FB has been a public company since January. For any of your friends complaining about their Facebook stock, be sure to remind them about this article from January:

Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a transaction that values the company at $50 billion, according to people involved in the transaction. As part of its deal with Facebook, Goldman is expected to raise as much as $1.5 billion from investors for Facebook.

Goldman Saachs brought this company public long ago to their private wealth clients at a much more reasonable valuation. Today’s price is just the results of continuous trading of privately held Facebook stock up until March.28, 2012 when Facebook banned the selling of their shares on exchanges until its IPO. What perfect timing. From January until March, Facebook’s first IPO shareholders rode it up for a nice profit. The not so lucky people are the ones who were the last to buy (at a valuation of $100B) and have to hold onto their shares until the lockup ends. Or the suckers, who bought at the first available price they could once the stock made its real IPO (or its second I should say). What is the true value of Facebook? I imagine it will settle in at a reasonable % gain above its $50B market cap when Goldman internally brought FB public to its clients. This should come to no surprised to technology investors. This is just one of the first trades that so many retail buyers were in the mix, thinking FB is the next Google. Sorry to break the news people, you just got scammed.

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Justin Timberlake To Play Role In Upcoming Facebook Movie

by Jason Wilk on September 23, 2009

  • Columbia Pictures and director David Fincher have set its core cast for “The Social Network,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama about the formation of Facebook. Just who is going to play the part of the founders? We find out today from Variety that Jesse Eisenberg will play founder Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker (Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president) and Andrew Garfield will play Eduardo Saverin (Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg as the social network became a financial juggernaut).
  • Production will begin next month in Boston and then move to Los Angeles. Scott Rudin, Michael De Luca, Dana Brunetti and Cean Chaffin will produce. Kevin Spacey is executive producer.
  • The pic focuses on the evolution of Facebook and how overnight success and wealth changes the lives of the classmates who created it.

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