Categorie: social

LeVar Burton Snags @ReadingRainbow Twitter Handle To Push New Reading App

LeVar Burton, social, TC, Twitter

sub-square-readingrainbowWhile we nerds may best remember LeVar Burton as a VISOR-clad Starfleet officer, he also spent much of the 80s and 90s instilling in children an appreciation for reading. In fact, Burton is still stuck to the idea of encouraging childhood literacy — he launched a new company called RRKidz this past September that’s currently working on (among other things) a “disruptive” new iPad reading app.

But when the time came to set up the all-important Twitter account to provide “the latest info on the upcoming relaunch of [Reading Rainbow] as an app,” he found that someone had already laid claim to the @readingrainbow handle. What’s more the account owner hadn’t so much as made a peep in the last three years.

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Facebook’s Mobile Monthly Active Users Grew 21% Over Past Four Months

facebook, facebook ipo, social, TC

facebook-mobile-appsEarlier analyst estimates from December had pegged the monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile apps at around 300 million per month. This number includes smartphone apps, like those for the Android and iPhone, but also apps that run on BlackBerry, Nokia, and feature phones. At the time, that number equated to roughly 40% of the company’s overall user base.

Facebook hadn’t revealed an official number for monthly active users on mobile since September, however, which was then at 350 million users for both mobile apps and mobile web combined. Today, thanks the Facebook IPO filing, we have an update to the official numbers: there are now 425 mobile monthly active users as of December 2011, out of Facebook’s total 825 million users.

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Facebook’s Risk Factors: Mobile, Gov, Slowed Growth, Google+

facebook, facebook ipo, social, TC

Facebook RiskFacebook’s $5 billion S-1 IPO filing includes a detailed assessment of business risks. These include: its lack of mobile monetization and the fact that it doesn’t own a mobile platform, government censorship and privacy scrutiny, inability to maintain its growth rate, and competition from Google+ as well as Twitter and Microsoft.
Here’s a closer look at these risks, followed by the full text of the risk summary, and you can see the whole Risk Factors section starting on page 10 of the S-1 filing to the SEC.

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Facebook Still Growing Everywhere, Europe Leads At 229M, Asia Catching Up With 212M

facebook ipo, Fundings & Exits, social, TC

Screen Shot 2012-02-01 at 2.25.24 PMI’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out Facebook’s regional traffic numbers via third party measurement firms and by scraping its ad tool. But now, I don’t have to, because the company has included the breakdown in its S-1 filing today.

And what does it show? Across the board growth. Take a look at the graphs below, going back to March of 2009. Contrary to various other data sets, there is literally no month where it didn’t gain users in every single region.

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Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

facebook, facebook ipo, social, TC

facebook-ipo-secIt appears that the excitement over the Facebook IPO has crashed the SEC’s website. The link to the Facebook SEC filing, previously available here, is no longer loading. Instead, we’re seeing a “this webpage is not available message” when attempting to load the site using Google’s Chrome web browser, and similar errors in other browsers. This has gone on for several minutes now, as everyone is clicking through to read the filing. That’s too bad for anyone coming late to the news – you’ll have to wait for those who already had it loaded up on their screens to tell you what it said.

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Facebook’s Profits: $1 Billion, On $3.7 Billion In Revenues

Fundings & Exits, social, TC

fb-prof-revFacebook just filed its IPO registration (SEC doc here) and its financials are off the charts. Facebook’s IPO document provides the first peek at its financials.

The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent.

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Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile

facebook ipo, Fundings & Exits, social, TC

845-million-facebook-usersAs part of its initial filing to go public, Facebook has just revealed some new user numbers that illustrate just how big it is.

It had 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users as of December, for year over year growth of 39% and 48% respectively. Mobile is also half the user base, with 425 million monthly actives. Some other stats, which are a big more vague: 100 billion friend connections as of the end of last year, and 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the last three months of the year.

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Pearson-Incubated Startup Alleyoop Launches To Gamify Adaptive Learning

Alleyoop, pearson, social, Startups, TC

alleyoopAccording to the National Center on Education and the Economy, only 1 in 6 high school freshmen will go on to graduate from college on time, and about 25 percent of Americans drop out before they finish high school. A Pearson-backed startup launching today, called Alleyoop is betting that by combining adaptive learning with some elements of gamification, it can help prepare high schoolers and young people for college — and increase college graduation rates.

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Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment

facebook, facebook ipo, social, TC

g287954g47m63Facebook has just filed its S-1 to IPO. Below is the letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s purpose, in which he explains “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.”

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