Facebook insiders have been selling their stock. Top level insiders such as directors from venture funds invested in Facebook, key executives and even Mark Zuckerberg himself have been quietly trying to unload some shares in private sales. These private transactions are not uncommon as startup entrepreneurs and their backers are often in search of some liquidity. What makes these particular transactions interesting are the implied values being negotiated.
When Microsoft (MSFT) bought a small stake in the wildly popular social network, the price paid implied an overall value of $15 billion. …

The stock market’s rebound has been so fast and furious that it might make folks forget that we just experienced a nasty credit crisis and market downturn. Have sinking home values not registered with the national psyche? Surf around on Zillow.com and witness the vast amounts of wealth disappearing over the last few months as homeowners see their most significant asset crumbling on a shaky credit foundation. Of course, institutional money managers are the ones buying furiously and fueling this market rebound. It is entirely plausible that, unlike the average …

Since my current work is in new media and social networking, I am keenly interested in the turbulence facing the newspaper industry. Clients, ranging from Fortune 2000 companies to small innovative startups, come to my team at SocialOptimize to gain an understanding of the new media landscape and to develop an actionable strategy for building a meaningful presence in social networks. They ask about their traditional marketing budgets and I tell them that we will see the disappearance of many old model newspaper, radio, and television companies as they struggle …

News Corporation (NWS-A) and its Myspace subsidiary announced the formation of an incubator named Slingshot Labs. It will be seeded with about $15 million to hire a team of software developers. The goal of Slingshot will be to create new Internet technologies and startups to bolster News Corporation’s properties in Web media, especially social networking giant Myspace.
Myspace has witnessed a significant slowing of growth while watching archrival Facebook achieve healthy expansion over the past year. Even Microsoft (MSFT) bought into the phenomenon by investing $240 million in Facebook at a …