Just after the markets closed on its first day of public trading, Facebook amended its S-1 with a complete prospectus detailing how much stock each underwriter got to sell. Morgan Stanley, the lead-left bank, received 162.1 million shares ($ 6.15 billion worth) followed by J.P. Morgan with 84.8 million ($ 3.22 billion), and Goldman Sachs pulled down 63.1 million shares ($ 2.4 billion). E*Trade and Itaú got the short end of the stick, receiving just $ 80 million in stock. That’s less… Read more
Editor’s note: Joe Kraus is a partner at Google Ventures, focusing on mobile, gaming, and local services. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine. He also co-founded JotSpot in 2004, a wiki company acquired by Google in 2006. Follow him on his blog, JoeKraus.com, and on Twitter: @jkraus. One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice… Read more
This week, two of the major players in the credit card industry, Visa and MasterCard launched their online digital wallet services. Known as V.me (Visa’s) and PayPass Wallet Services (MasterCard), both are very similar initiatives which see the companies clamoring to become the credit card of choice for digital transactions, the way they fight today to be the credit card for all the other transactions taking place out there in the real world. And, to be clear, a “digital”… Read more
EveryMove, an alum of TechStars’ Seattle accelerator program building what they’ve dubbed a “mileage plan for health benefits, today announced that it has closed a $ 2.6 million round of series A financing. Participating investors include Penera Blue Cross, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Nebraska, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Founders Co-op, Summit Capital, Jonathan Sposato, Voyager Capital Partner Geoff Entress, Matt Shobe, William Lohse, BuddyTV Co-founder Andy Liu,… Read more
The Internet is a lot like the American Dream. It’s this huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make something of themselves — a nearly ubiquitous platform to showcase skills and talents. Yet, it is so incredibly saturated with people trying to do exactly the same thing that the opportunity gets smaller and smaller, shrinking to the size of a pin point as more people hop online. Countless industries have seen this saturation play a role in who rises to the top, and who fizzles out as… Read more
If you’re like many Blogger users, you write in one language, but may have readers from around the world. Not all of them speak your language. Today, we’ve made it easier to bring content from your blog to everyone, with the release of a new Google Translate gadget. With the Google Translate gadget, visitors to your blog can select their preferred language from the drop-down menu, and using Google’s free translation service, it will display your posts in any of the 50+ languages… Read more
As Ned Flanders would say, education in the U.S. is in “a dilly of a pickle.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the cost of education has become unsustainable. Student loan debt is over $ 1 trillion, unemployment remains high for the recently graduated, and non-traditional students — older people, single mothers, workers looking to re-train — are returning to academia and learning programs in droves, putting even more competitive pressure on already-scant… Read more