So you are Tengesa, Forgetmenot, Dariro, 6tm solutions, and countless other Zimbabwean and African startups that are hoping to change the world and you are looking at Facebook’s IPO; you realise that Mark Zuckerberg and co have reached the promised land. And that’s $104 billion worth of real estate. For perspective Econet has a market capitalisation of $710 million and the MTN Group $30 billion.
To prove that the “Hacker Way” is alive and well at Facebook, the social network will be hosting an all-night, employee hackathon at its Menlo Park campus and satellite offices.
The event, dubbed Hackathon 31, is especially significant for the social network as it comes on the eve of its initial public offering and is meant to reinforce the mantra that, while its public listing is important, Facebook’s focus will always be on building and shipping products, a source familiar with the event told VentureBeat.
Facebook has launched its own app store, letting you play and download games and apps for both the browser-based site and for your iPhone or Android mobile.
The new store will let you browse through the ever-growing world of apps before deciding to use them. To help you wade through the universe of apps, Facebook will use its social data to only show the best of the best, with user ratings to determine which apps will feature. If your annoying fart app only got one star, it's not getting in.
Facebook is about a week away from a near $100-billion valuation outing on Wall Street and at least one Wall Streeter is complaining about Mark Zuckerberg's attire for the IPO road show.
Scammers have launched a campaign preying on users of OpenID in an attempt to steal log-in credentials, according to Barracuda Labs.
Barracuda security researchers Dave Michmerhuizen and Luis Chapetti say they are seeing specially built log-in pages that appear similar to pages used as part of the OpenID authentication process. When users type in their credentials, the data is collected by a rogue website, which sends back a message that the credentials have been validated.
We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas. They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.
Two members of Congress have introduced a bill that would ban the practice of requiring job applicants, employees or students to provide their social networking information.
The Social Networking Online Protection Act, authored by Congressman Eliot Engel of New York and sponsored by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, is in response to a growing number of reports of employers demanding their employees’ Facebook passwords as a condition of employment.
Facebook officials are launching a site on their social network aimed at making their 900 million-plus users and their systems more secure.
Facebook, in partnership with Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and Sophos, on April 25 announced the Antivirus Marketplace, where users can download free six-month licenses or full versions of the companies’ anti-malware software for six months to a year, depending on which products they choose.
A jilted boyfriend who put nude pictures of his former lover on Facebook has been sentenced to six months' jail - the first social networking-related conviction in Australian history and one of just a handful in the world.
Ravshan ''Ronnie'' Usmanov told police: ''I put the photos up because she hurt me and it was the only thing [I had] to hurt her.'' The six pictures, according to court documents, showed his ex-girlfriend ''nude in certain positions and clearly showing her breasts and genitalia''.
Want to find out how much data Google and Facebook have on you? I did so for my own accounts – many seven or more years old – and across different places, there was a phenomenal amount. Here's how to get the same information on yourself.
Any company based in the EU is obliged to give users all data it holds on them if requested. Google's EU-based subsidiaries don't process any user data, and so avoid this requirement, but for anyone outside the US and Canada, Facebook's Irish office holds masses of data.
