May 2012

Zuckerberg Facebook IPO to Make Him Richer Than Ballmer

Facebook’s $11.8 billion initial public offering will cement the status of 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg as one of the world’s richest men and put his social network among the highest-valued companies in the US. Facebook is offering about 337.4 million shares for $28 to $35 each, according to a regulatory filing. At the upper end of that range, the co-founder’s stake would be $17.6 billion, making him richer than Microsoft Corp.’s Steve Ballmer and Russian steel billionaire Vladimir Lisin, who are both twice his age.

California to reap windfall from Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook IPO

California has a friend about to write a hefty personal check that could help ease the state budget crunch. Mark Zuckerberg, the 27-year-old founder and chief executive of Facebook whose initial public stock offering in two weeks could value the company at $96 billion, will cut in the state for an estimated $189 million in cash, according to calculations from PrivCo, which researches private companies. The federal government will be in the money too, collecting an estimated $714 million in federal income tax from Zuckerberg. And that’s just the payout from Zuckerberg. The windfall for California from the rest of the IPO could net California hundreds of millions more.

US Study Cites Worries on Readiness for Cyberattacks

A study commissioned by President Obama to assess the nation’s ability to respond to terrorist attacks and man-made and natural disasters has found that state and local officials have the most confidence in their public health and medical services but are the most concerned about whether agencies can respond to cyberattacks.

Called the National Preparedness Report, the assessment is the first of its kind released by the federal agency and was intended to serve as a baseline for preparedness. The report’s findings about cybersecurity that appeared to be the most troubling, and they continued a drumbeat from the Obama administration about the need for Congress to pass legislation giving the Department of Homeland Security the authority to regulate computer security for the country’s infrastructure. The report said that cybersecurity “was the single core capability where states had made the least amount of overall progress” and that only 42 percent of state and local officials believed that theirs was adequate.

Nielsen Reports a Decline in Television Viewing

The number of American households with access to a television set and a TV signal is shrinking for the second year in a row.

The data, released by The Nielsen Company, is sure to be pored over by television and Internet executives for evidence of changes in consumer behavior. While the vast majority of American homes still have functioning television sets, more than one million no longer meet Nielsen’s definition of a “TV household:” those that have at least one television set and a cable, satellite or antenna connection. Last year, for the first time in 20 years, Nielsen said the number of such households had dropped to 114.7 million, from 115.9 million previously, despite a rise in the number of households in the country. On May 3, Nielsen said the figure had dropped further, this time to 114.1 million. Nielsen also estimated that the total number of people living in those homes has shrunk, but at a lesser rate — to 289.2 million, down 100,000 from 289.3 million last year. Nielsen attributes the drops both to economic factors and to technological ones.

Why Oracle vs. Google Matters to You

The tech industry is on tenterhooks awaiting the result of the Oracle vs. Google trial. The reason: Oracle is claiming Google should pay it billions of dollars based on the idea that application programming interfaces, the instruction sets for using its Java programming language, are covered by copyright.

The judge is inclined to agree, and the question before the jury is what that would be worth. But to open source advocates such as Pamela Jones, founder of Groklaw, all this is nonsense. As she explained, APIs are more like the list of objections one might make during a trial. There is a list of possible objections, which all lawyers know, she wrote Proffitt. "If a lawyer stands up and says, 'Objection, hearsay' everyone in the room knows what it means. It's referring to the list." If someone could copyright the list, the very idea of hearsay, courts would not be able to function. That's how the European Court of Justice sees it as well.

Why does this matter? Open source, in short, seemed perfectly legal when the issue was the enforceability of a license. But copyright lives forever -- Mickey Mouse is still subject to copyright -- and if anyone who writes a program or programming tool can assert property claims on it for 100 years, programming as we know it is indeed threatened.

Europe's more stringent view of online privacy

[Commentary] A Q&A with Jacob Kohnstamm.

He has emerged as a central figure in the simmering international debate over digital privacy - and as a consistent critic of major U.S. Internet companies. Kohnstamm is chairman of both the Dutch Data Protection Authority and the Article 29 Working Party, the European Commission's advisory body on online privacy. In that role, he recently instigated a French investigation into Google's planned overhaul of its privacy policies and sternly warned major online advertisers that their proposals for a do-not-track option for its Internet browser wouldn't meet the standards of European law. He talks about the European view of digital privacy, the ongoing debate over do not track and the status of the European Commission's strict new privacy proposals.

How smartphones and tablets are fueling commerce

Smartphones and tablets are driving both in-store and online commerce, but their roles are distinct in many ways. Nielsen shed some light on how consumers are using both types of devices to aid their shopping. Overall, 79 percent of respondents in a survey conducted in the first quarter said they had shopped using their smartphone or tablet. But when it came time to buy, 42 percent of tablet owners said they bought purchased items on their device compared to 29 percent of smartphone owners.

Taking E-Mail Vacations Can Reduce Stress, Study Says

You probably don’t need a doctor or scientist to tell you this, but your e-mail could be killing you. A new study released by the University of California, Irvine, which was co-written with United States Army researchers, found that people who do not look at e-mail on a regular basis at work are less stressed and more productive. The study, “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email,” looked at 13 workers in a typical office setting and asked them to discontinue e-mail for five days. The results were that during the e-mail hiatus, these people spent longer periods of time focusing on a single task at work and shifted between computer windows much less than those who were slaves to their in-box.

Justice Department Returns $44 Million to Victims of Qwest Communications Fraud

The Justice Department has returned approximately $44 million to victims of a securities fraud scheme related to Qwest Communications International Inc., Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney John F. Walsh for the District of Colorado and Special Agent in Charge James F. Yacone of the FBI’s Denver Division announced.

The $44 million in funds were forfeited to the United States as a result of the 2007 federal conviction of Qwest’s chief executive officer, Joseph P. Nacchio, for securities fraud. The forfeited funds are being returned to 112,210 victims who incurred losses on Qwest securities purchased during the fraud scheme. Between 1999 and 2002, Nacchio publicly announced unrealistic revenue projections for Qwest and then caused Qwest to issue false and misleading statements to the public about the company’s financial condition, as part of his scheme to commit securities fraud. After the irregularities were discovered, Qwest stock, which had traded as high as $60 per share, plummeted to about $1 per share. Following his conviction, Nacchio was sentenced to 70 months in prison and was ordered to forfeit $44 million in funds, the net proceeds he received from the fraud scheme. Nacchio was also ordered to pay a $19 million fine, which, by law, was paid to a fund for victims of crime.

Hollywood movies open abroad, then come home

As the movie "The Avengers" opens in the US, it's already brought in more than $250 million around the world. Why are movies opening in all these other countries before the US? Almost 70 percent of tickets for American movies are bought overseas. You used to need American premiers to sell them. Not anymore.

Benton

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