Author: Sal McCloskey

The short answer is no. They will have an extremely successful IPO on launch day followed by volatility for a month. How they handle the volatility will determine how successful it will be long-term, but the first few months will be measured on “how” rather than “if it’ll be” successful. The longer answer is a bit more disconcerting and may make the long-term prospects for a Facebook IPO look something like what is happening with Groupon (pictured above). The fourth amendment to their S-1 filing with the SEC revealed some risks that many had speculated about but nobody knew for sure until Monday….

For years, the Gawker network, which includes Gizmodo, io9, and Kotaku, has fought a battle against commenters, particularly trolls. The huge blog network is driven in many ways by the comments on the site and founder Nick Denton doesn’t like it. He went so far as to call comments on his sites “a joke” at SXSW and said the promise of thoughtful discussion never materialized. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “It’s a promise that has so not happened that people don’t even have that ambition anymore. The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership – that’s a joke.” Now, they’re going to try to reinvent…

Hope can be a great thing. False hope can destroy lives. Such is the case with what an esteemed colleague wrote on Fast Company about how startups should build the next Tabasco rather than shoot for the next Instagram. The idea is simple: build something that will last. Don’t shoot for the quick cash. Buyout should be an option, not a goal. Ideal world this, utopian society that. The reality of today’s ultra-competitive startup world is that the quick in, quicker out companies like Instagram are the only examples that startups should be following. While it’s nice to believe that companies have an…

Everyone has startup fever again after Facebook’s huge purchase of Instagram last week, perfect timing for Path to announce a $30 million round of funding led by Redpoint. “We are delighted to announce that last week we closed a significant round of funding with a new set of investor partners,” CEO Dave Morin. “It is important to us to work with investment partners who share common values around quality and building for the long term. Our ‘Path’ has only just begun, and we are looking forward to continuing to bring world-class design and simplicity to the world of mobile personal…

Some ideas were born to work. The Listserve may be one of them What would you say if you were selected to send an email to 10,000 people? 100,000? 1,000,000? What if the audience was a relatively-captive one, an audience that knew they would only be hearing from one person every day, and today that person is you? That’s the concept of The Listserve. People sign up to receive one email a day. Launched by 5 NYU graduate students as part of a new project out of NYU’s ITP masters program, it is currently waiting to reach 10,000 subscribers before sending out the first email. The person who is sending…

There are already questions surrounding Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1 billion yesterday. Was it a talent purchase (of 13 employees)? Is it the peak of social media purchases before the bubble starts bursting? Is Facebook only interested in companies with zero revenue? Is this a play against Google+? Twitter? There’s one question that was clearly answered: “How do you build a billion dollar company in 17 months?” In this Instagram Infographic, Visual.ly takes us down the path that started in March, 2010, when Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger raised $500,000 in seed funding for burbn,…

Late last week payment processor Global Payments revealed that MasterCard and Visa cardholders were at risk through a security flaw in their system.  We now know that the cards affected in the breach processing system were only in North America but that the original estimates of tens of thousands of cards affected were grossly understated. The worst is apparently over as the security flaw is reportedly plugged. Names, addresses, and social security numbers were not affected, only credit card numbers. “We are making rapid progress toward bringing this issue to a close. Our nearly 4,000…

France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of increasing revenues in the French music and movie industries did not materialize and revenues fell in both industries. The French music market fell 3.9% in 2011 while the video market fell 2.7%. As Ernesto of TorrentFreak…

We often look back at the great minds of the past in wonder as their predictions of what the future would look like. Sometimes, they are relatively accurate. Other times, they’re way off. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1974, Clarke nailed it. He said that we would all have computers, not like the ones that surround him in the video but much smaller ones.  As he describes them, he motions with his hands an approximate size and shape and one can imagine a laptop resting in his hands as they were perfectly positioned. He said we would be able to talk to people around the…

While national and worldwide agencies wage a war against online crime through the criminal courts, Microsoft is finding success using civil suits to help crack down on botnets, arguably the most dangerous form of cybercrime due to the massive scope of their reach. Through botnets, which are groupings of computers that attempt to harvest personal and bank information from millions of computers connected to the internet, cybercriminals have a nearly automated way of getting passwords and hacking into financial accounts. They are often hard to trace and even harder to take down, but Microsoft’s…