In what is likely the most anticipated and long awaited document ever received by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Faceboook has officially filed the prospectus for its initial public offering (IPO).

As rumours predicted, the company is looking to raise $5 billion with investment firm Morgan Stanley acting as lead underwriter with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and the Bank of America taking secondary positions. Should Facebook raise the money, it will be on the shortlist of the biggest tech IPOs in history.

The timeline puts Facebook’s public offering to hit the market in mid-May and now has to enter a mandated quiet period, so it could mean that it’s latest Timeline feature is the last new product users will see from the social network until that period is up.

In terms of actual numbers, Facebook reports that it has 845 million active monthly users. The company made $3.71 billion in revenue, with a cool $1 billion in profit in 2011 which had nearly doubled since 2010. This profit is also many times more than Google when they went public a while back – they “only” showed a profit of $106 million. Also – that $1 Billion dollar in profit was also the exact same number used by Justin Timberlake’s character ambitions in The Social Network, which showed the beginning of Facebook. Coincidence?

Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, owns 28.4% of the company, drawing a $483,000 salary, with a $220,000 bonus in 2011. Facebook credits Zynga with providing 12% of its revenue in 2011. But apparently Zuckerberg is looking to shrink his salary to $1 a year from 2013, just like Steve Jobs did…

Having faced some speculation about who exactly owns what, the SEC website has now presented some hard numbers from the S-1 filing. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns the most equity of anyone – his 1.1 billion Class B shares give him almost a 57 percent stake — about half of which he owns and half of which are owned by others but over which he exercises proxy voting authority. Class A and Class B shares are differentiated by their voting powers among other characteristics with the Class B shares being the most common. Zuckerberg also holds 42.4 million Class A shares which represents a 36.1 percent stake.

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Facebook has slowly started rolling out the new Timeline profile view for all users, in fact I reckon most readers of this site have probably switched to the new view  already (if not, you will be forced to use it pretty soon). Today Facebook launched a pretty great new tool to hype up the new Timeline view, simply called Timeline Movie Maker. They built the app with Definition6, and it could not be easier to use:

Simply head over to http://www.timelinemoviemaker.com/, and if you are logged into Facebook, a simple green button is displayed to generate your own movie based on your Timeline. The App will request your permission to get some of your details and naturally the photos from your timeline. Using the events and locations in your life, a one minute movie is built that is actually pretty exciting to watch.

Right now it is not yet possible to export this video or share it to sites other than Facebook. This is a pretty great way for Facebook to force users to expand their Timeline events and photos. In fact, if you do not have enough details in your timeline, the Movie Maker will not work.

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Now club-goers can combine their physical and virtual interactions at the new Facebook club that recently opened its doors in the Amazon region in Brazil.

The club, located in Epitaciolândia, a small town on Brazil’s border with Bolivia, was conceptualised by 30 year old Brazilian businessman Humbert Camacho. During a visit to the club, Camacho told the Guardian  that “The Facebook concept is about sharing ideas, adventures, friendships, parties and photos with your friends. So what we wanted to do was to build a nightclub with this concept, where people could come and share things with their friends, spend a cool night, sharing pictures, experiences and have fun.”

Camacho’s timing couldn’t be better as Facebook recently overtook Google‘s Orkut as the most popular social networking site in Brazil.

For people who cannot be at the nightclub, it will have its own official Facebook page were others can join the party virtually and share in the videos and pictures being uploaded in real time by those who are experiencing it.

While Facebook said it had no official comment on the nightclub a spokesperson expressed surprise at its existence saying “Is it really in the Amazon?”

You might already be accessing your Facebook account more from your phone than your computer, but clearly Mercedes thinks you need Facebook in even more places. At CES, Mercedes Benz is showing off its latest in-vehicle telematics system that will have Facebook access built in.

Obviously driving does not really go with reading your friend’s status updates, but the latest Mercs will instead be integrating into Facebook’s location services. Drivers can search for businesses and friends on the navigation system, which will then search Facebook’s services as well. With Facebook now being built into TVs and other consumer equipment, it was only a matter of time before we would see it land in vehicles. The problem is the implementation.

Safety is of course a concern – but the system does not distract from the existing navigation system. In fact, text entry is impossible once the car is moving. You can however change your status updates with certain preset statements – think “Jim is driving”. Users can also post their destination and route on Facebook – perfect for over sharers. Perhaps more helpful is that the features that enhance the existing navigation system. Instead of only searching for restaurants around you, the few restaurants that your Facebook friends “liked” will be shown first.

It is not only Facebook that is used however – Google and Yelp are included in search results as well. The new Facebook capable telematics system will be available on the latest 2013 SL-class, but also all Mercs that roll out in 2013.

Let us know – do you think it makes sense to have Facebook integration in your car?

Facebook has slowly begun rolling out its Timeline feature beginning in New Zealand before making it available to all users of the social network.

Facebook first announced the feature in early September and soon afterwards opened it to the developer community, which the company has revealed led to one million users signing up to beta to access Timeline. Facebook has since commented that the feedback had been invaluable going forward.

Sam Lessin, product director of Timeline told the New Zealand Herald that ”We chose New Zealand to be first – and I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this – primarily because it is an English-speaking country. It’s far away from our data centers, so we can monitor speed and performance.”

Timeline is a way for users to illustrate their entire life on Facebook, rather than just the one they have shared since first joining. Timeline takes a user’s major life events and organizes them chronologically, mapping them on a graphic in narrative format. Although the idea was widely praised, a few privacy concerns were raised including the feature visibly showing a user when they were ‘unfriended’. This, Facebook later said was a technical glitch and has since been resolved.

As Facebook ensures that the new feature is working correctly, it will slowly begin to roll out to all users around the globe.

Image credit: The Next Web

As more and more popular Internet verticals move into Facebook – like gaming (Zynga), instant messaging/email (Facebook Titan), music (Spotify) and shopping – the next logical step is payments.

Two South African entrepreneurs have done just that. Rob Sussman and Lance Fanaroff, founders of Integr8 – the largest privately owned ICT Company in Africa, have launched ZunguZ.

By connecting banking systems to the social graph, ZunguZ simplifies the process of transferring money and is the fastest and simplest way for users to transfer money to their friends. The social graph confirms the relationship between contacts in order to simplify money transfer. Users no longer need to use cumbersome banking applications to load their contact’s banking details. Instead they simply load the ZunguZ application within their social network, click on their contacts and send money. The recipient does not even need to have an account, as they can create one as soon as they wish to access their new funds. This allows the ZunguZ user base to grow virally via the Facebook social graph.

Rob Sussman says of the service that “ZunguZ has the potential to influence the purchasing decisions of over 850 million users across the world. And while we gear for the release of the second tier of the platform, we are intercepting the unbanked and low banked population at the point of purchase. We have been overwhelmed with requests from some of the largest banks in the world, as well as the most prominent SA banks, to leverage our platform to deliver their services.” (more…)

Some Facebook users have been noticing an interesting adjustment to the social network site’s interface that was initially announced at the f8 2011 conference. ‘Read’ and ‘Listen’ buttons are popping up on Facebook’s Ticker to allow users to quickly and easily consume media that other friends are engaging with.

First, a music note or newspaper icon appears next to the Ticker story to indicate the type of content that can be viewed then, when hovering over the content a ‘Read’ or ‘Listen’ label appears. Clicking on the label, directs the user to that specific content.  In some cases, the user will have to authorise the app’s installation upon clicking on the link, but if the app has already been installed, the content can be viewed immediately.

As a result, Facebook has allowed users to bounce back and forth between its various affiliated “Read, Watch, Listen” partners in an effortless way. These new buttons may boost user activity for the various applications with more visibility for Facebook’s 800 million users.

It is yet to be determined when this function will roll out to all users.

source: the next web

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Google+’s timing for the launch of it’s Business Pages is not only questionable but the new feature appears to fall short of Facebook’s even at this initial stage and it has already received some criticism as lacking in “innovation” and “interest”. Their Business Pages would have to at least possess these qualities in order to justify the timing, give Facebook something to compete with and launch with a sense of excitement and curiosity. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case. While the design is typically clean and simple of Google, the initial features are very basic and therefore the Business Pages are in no way distinguishable from any other Google+ user pages in a way that makes any impact or creates buzz.

Google’s networking platform also comes across as inflexible as it seems incapable of integrating with the business’s own apps, service offerings and third party programs. So, without this integration the business pages themselves offer very little engaging content, useful information or incentive for spending time exploring the page. Overall it doesn’t seem to take the user beyond the actual page itself.

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