Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his board met yesterday to discuss and eventually reject two funding offers for the company -- one at a $4 billion and one at $2 billion, according to reports from VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
A source close to Facebook tells us the company values itself closer to $5 billion.
Ever since a report surfaced at BusinessWeek that Facebook intended to engage in vendor-financing for new equipment, there's been speculation that the company is suddenly cash-strapped.
In addition, a source close to Facebook...
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Last summer, Mel Karmazin was rattling off his trademark one-liners to talk up the future of Sirius XM Radio, the combined company he ran that had just been blessed by regulators.
He was planning to cut costs and expand a business that was already a fixture in the lives of millions of Americans. “Forty-three cents a day — it’s not even vending machine coffee,” he said at the time, parrying a question about whether the softening economy might hurt subscriptions.
But now Sirius XM, the satellite radio company, has problems with...
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Digg is laying off 10 percent of its 75 person workforce. Chief executive Jay Adelson announced a “headcount reduction in certain areas” this morning on the company blog and gave the 10 percent estimate.
Last year, there were big rumors that Digg was looking to sell to either Google or Microsoft. With Adelson’s remarks about Microsoft, it’s tempting to wonder if that’s still a possibility, but Microsoft’s cuts, plus the fact that Digg is hiring its own sales team, makes such a move seem less likely. The situation might change if...
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The mountainous area of northern Mozambique in southern Africa had been overlooked by science due to inhospitable terrain and decades of civil war in the country.
However, while scrolling around on Google Earth, an internet map that allows the viewer to look at satellite images of anywhere on the globe, scientists discovered an unexpected patch of green.
A British-led expedition was sent to see what was on the ground and found 7,000 hectares of forest, rich in biodiversity, known as Mount Mabu.
In just three weeks, scientists led by a...
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Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks.
The San Francisco startup was the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka (also a Digg employee). It’s a micro-blogging service kind of like Twitter, but it allowed users to share much more than brief messages, including embeddable photos, videos and mp3s. Despite those advantages, Pownce’s traffic stalled while Twitter’s skyrocketed, according to data...
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It's an old nuclear bunker 30 meters below central Sotckholm, and its new conversion for one of Sweden's biggest ISPs has made it truly 007-worthy. Check it: it has simulated daylight, greenhouses and waterfalls, there're German submarine engines rigged as emergency backup generators, plus there's 1.5 megawatts of cooling for the servers. Oh, and it can survive a hydrogen bomb attack.
Facts about the data center:
* Originally a nuclear bunker: The data center is housed in what was originally a military bunker and nuclear shelter during...
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Twitter's business model is starting to show. An early sign came in April, when the popular microblogging service launched in Japan and the home page for every Japanese user included a big banner ad in the top right corner.
Then, on Aug. 7, Twitter made another change, this time in the U.S., by limiting the number of people a single user could connect with, or "follow," to about 2,000. Most recently, on Aug. 14, Twitter made the biggest move yet to slash costs. It killed outbound message delivery to mobile phones via short message, or SMS,...
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Google was in the due diligence stage of the deal, where they peer deep into Digg’s technology and financial statements. Most term sheets are non binding, so anything that gives the buyer pause can be used as an excuse to walk away - but generally the buyer already has a very good idea what they are getting well before the term sheet stage.
Two sources close to the companies suggested that some issue that came up during technical due diligence was to blame. One source said that the issue was more personality driven, and that Google...
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Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, "Spam King" Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself.
Sheriff's deputies responded to a report of gunfire in the small plains town of Bennett at about 11:15 a.m. today and found Davidson, 29-year-old Amy Lee Ann Hill and their 3-year-old daughter shot to death.
Davidson's most recent spam business, Power Promoters, was based in Bennett.
Arapahoe County Undersheriff Mark Campbell said the bodies were found...
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This one is getting passed around pretty quickly, but as he retires from Microsoft, I couldn't resist highlighting this fantastic internal email from 2003 from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features.
---- Original Message ----
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame
I am quite disappointed at how...
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