Facebook announced its first acquisition today – a low-profile and unlaunched Web OS startup by Firefox founders’ Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt called Parakey – for an undisclosed sum (tens of millions?).
This doesn’t sound that big until you note that Blake Ross launched Firefox, the open-source browser that seriously threatens Internet Explorer. Parakey is focused on the space between desktop and browser, and aims to move much of the action on one’s hard drive (e-mail databasing, file storage, software apps) directly in to a browser.
The obvious impact of this acquisition is the Facebook Platform. Ross and Hewitt are reportedly going to be immediately joining Facebook, and if it is anything like it sounds, we can start expecting some really cool stuff from Facebook soon.
So all of this just goes to say that Facebook will head for an IPO soon and when it does, it might be the first big signal that the tech boom is back.
Ben Horowitz, CEO of Opsware second from right and associates
Today Marc Anderson announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share. Co-founder of “build your own” social networking service Ning and one of the internets oldest names, Netscape.
In September 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, a small group of colleagues and I started a new company, Loudcloud, based on the idea that the huge Internet infrastructure buildout then underway — by startups and big companies alike — required a new approach to running modern datacenters and computer systems at high scale: automation.
The eight years that have followed have been an unbelievable journey.
Loudcloud took off like a rocketship, raised $350 million in equity and debt financing, went public in March 2001, and was rapidly nearing $100 million in annual recurring managed services revenue when the entire market blew up and virtually all of our competitors and peers went bankrupt.
Streakr brings users the best of the web. They simply download a ‘discovery’ bar onto their browsers which, at the touch of a button, finds dozens of new websites that match their interests. They can then rate the sites they like and dislike by stamping them with a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ icon. Once selected, the URLs are saved onto their personal profile page and indexed for future reference. The sites, which users can also review, can then be shared with fellow Streakrs via the social network.
The Facebook blog says there are now 30 million users. Take a look at the active users chart (Unlike MySpace, Facebook doesn’t pad its numbers with dead accounts) on Mashable showing that the number has doubled since the beginning of the year.
Facebook has been making the news a lot since the opening of Platform which you can read about here, with new applications being announced regularly.
“With this evolution of Facebook Platform, we’ve made it so that any developer can build the same applications that we can. And by that, we mean that they can integrate their application into Facebook—into the social graph—the same way that our applications like Photos and Notes are integrated.” says Katie Geminder, Director of Product at Facebook.
A good list of Facebook “awesome applications” can be found on Mashable, and you might want to check out the Facebook blog.
There is also a video (less than 3 minutes) explaining the social-networking site’s expansion of services.
Over the weekend Apple made a killing with half a million iPhones flying off the shelves! Apple is said to have sold out of iPhones in 95 of 164 of its stores, while AT&T has nearly depleted its entire stock.
By the closing Sunday of week one, approx. 700,000 iPhones had been sold, this has much exceeded its previous estimate of 400-500,000. Reports predict that the iPhone may be AT&T’s fastest selling product ever and possibly one of the fastest selling electronic devices of all time.
The Ferrari 1000 from Acer combines breakthrough technologies from the fast-moving world of Formula 1 with revolutionary dual-core processing power in an ultra-lightweight notebook that delivers a mobile experience second to none. Read the rest of this entry »
