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Showing posts with label Featured. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Featured. Show all posts

Monday, May 7, 2012

Facebook reverses Google’s IPO innovation

7:10 AM  exiler  No comments

Facebook’s video for retail investors in its forthcoming initial public offering is a nice innovation, but fundamentally, Facebook is taking a step back from Google’s IPO in 2004.

The IPO bookrunners and co-managers are a litany of Wall Street names, led by Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. But Facebook has dropped Google’s attempt to upend the IPO process by running an electronic auction.

The biggest uncertainty is how much of a role Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and controlling shareholder, will play in marketing the new stock. But regardless of that, his company is taking a distinctly traditional approach.

This is a shame, given the amount of effort Google, under the influence of Hambrecht & Quist, put into making its IPO more open and networked with an auction process. That was an attempt to give IPOs a Silicon Valley twist.

The most recent Silicon Valley IPOs, however, have been traditional to a fault. Not only have they stuck to Wall Street underwriting as the means of pricing the stock, but they have largely opted for dual class share structures (as did Google).

Whatever the tensions between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, it seems as if the pair have reached a comfortable accommodation.

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Friday, May 4, 2012

Why you should believe the 4-inch iPhone rumor

10:12 AM  exiler  No comments


By John Brownlee, Wired
May 4, 2012 -- Updated 1637 GMT (0037 HKT)

(CNN) -- On Thursday morning, iLounge released mockups of what it says the next iPhone is going to look like, according to the site's own unnamed sources. The main differences in appearance between the next iPhone and the current iPhone 4S? A metal back, a smaller dock connector, a 20 percent decrease in thickness, and a longer 4-inch display.

Concept designs for future iPhones are a dime a dozen and usually look like something Syd Mead might have slapped together after a glue-induced aneurysm. But iLounge's concept looks pretty good. It may not prove to be an accurate prediction in the end, but it's a sensible proposal.

The most obvious change in iLounge's mockup is the 4-inch screen. That's a big bump, as the iPhone's display has stayed at 3.5 inches with a 3:2 aspect ratio since 2007. Why in the world would Apple change it now?

It all comes down to LTE. LTE radios take up more room in a smartphone than 3G radios and use more power. To put LTE capabilities in the next iPhone, you need to make room not just for the radio, but find enough juice to power it without significantly decreasing battery life.

The problem is there's just not a lot of room inside an iPhone for anything more than is already there. An iPhone is a densely packed sandwich of silicon, radios, flash storage, motors and cameras. Over the past five generations, Apple has packed in everything that makes up an iPhone about as densely as possible, and the battery still makes up the bulk of every device.

If it's going to fit anything else, Apple needs to make more room.

That's one reason why iLounge is saying Apple will be ditching its current dock connector for a micro-sized version: Space saved in this area is space Apple can stuff with a larger battery or make for a bigger LTE chipset. But it's also a reason why Apple would make the display bigger.

There's been a lot of talk over the last couple of years that with the iPhone 5, Apple would bump the display up to a larger four inches, but the rumor's always had a lot of problems. Increasing the iPhone's display while maintaining its current 3:2 aspect ratio would make the device wider in the hand and harder to operate one-handed. It would also either decrease the pixel density of the iPhone's Retina display, making it less "retina-ey" and more jaggy to the eyes, or require more pixels per inch to compensate, causing iPhone developers to design their apps for multiple resolutions (the exact same kind of fragmentation problem that's bitten Android on its ass). No good.

That's why conventional wisdom (until a couple months ago) was that Apple would keep a 3.5-inch display and eschew LTE until the radios were sufficiently small and power-efficient to fit into the current iPhone's form factor. But with the new iPad's WiFi + 4G release, Apple has made it abundantly clear that it is finally ready to embrace LTE. And the way the company is going to do it is by making the iPhone's display longer, but not wider.

This theory was first floated over on The Verge, then gained traction when Daring Fireball's John Gruber hinted that the person who had initially suggested it might just work for Apple, and know what direction the next iPhone would go. It's got a lot to recommend it.

By ditching a 3:2 aspect ratio in favor of a 9:5 display, the new iPhone would feel about the same in the hand as the iPhone 4S, retain its current 326ppi resolution, and allow Apple room for an LTE chip and more battery. Apps could either be easily updated to support the new iPhone's 4-inch display without breaking compatibility with 3.5-inch devices, or run in a letterbox without modification at their existing resolution.

There are other perks. Lengthening the display allows the iPhone in landscape view to show 16:9 videos without the ugly bars on either side. It gives game developers more room for on-screen controls, like virtual buttons and thumbsticks, without a gamer's fingers obscuring what's on the display. And so on.

Only Apple knows for sure what the next iPhone will look like, but iLounge's concept isn't necessarily all wet. Putting the display on a stretching rack might be the key to getting an LTE iPhone this year. And if you think Cupertino would never mess around with an iDevice's aspect ratio like this, might I introduce you to our good schizophrenic friend, the iPod nano?

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Is Mark Zuckerberg a risk factor for Facebook's IPO?

9:51 AM  exiler  No comments


Mark Zuckerberg, shown here in 2010.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Is CEO Mark Zuckerberg an obstacle to his own company going public?

Fox Business News correspondent Charles Gasparino is claiming that an internal J.P. Morgan document discussing Facebook's IPO cites Zuckerberg as a "risk factor." No other details were revealed in Gasparino's teasing tweet, but the correspondent promised to reveal more information on "FBN@11am."

But beyond Gasparino's limited tweet, Facebook's own S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission highlights some potential risk factors concerning Zuckerberg.

Obviously, the loss of Zuckerberg as well as other key personnel would hurt Facebook's business, the company noted. But even and especially with Zuckerberg at the helm, the huge number of shares and voting rights that he'll own could also spell trouble.

After the company goes public, Zuckerberg will "own or have the ability to control approximately 57.3% of the voting power" of the company's outstanding capital shares, according to the SEC filing. As such, that means the CEO will be able to control certain matters up for approval by the investors, including the election of board members as well as the management and direction of Facebook itself.

What if Zuckerberg's own interests differ from those of the stockholders?

"As a board member and officer, Mr. Zuckerberg owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders," the filing noted. "As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally."

As a result, the voting power that will rest with Zuckerberg could impact both the company and its stock price.

"This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support," the filing further noted. "This concentrated control could also discourage a potential investor from acquiring our Class A common stock due to the limited voting power of such stock relative to the Class B common stock and might harm the market price of our Class A common stock."

Facebook's IPO has already been delay. Management was scheduled to kick off a roadshow to promote the public offering, with trading slated to start May 14. But Zuckerberg has been tied up with other matters. With the roadshow now rescheduled for mid-May, the IPO could take off in June.

But will the risk factors cited in the SEC filing have any impact on the IPO? Facebook still seems on track to go public, so it's clearly counting on Zuckerberg to manage his voting rights in the best interest of the company rather than in the best interest of himself.

CNET contacted Facebook for comment. We'll update the story when we get more information.

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IPv6: Europe 'ahead' in new net address scheme

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By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

Norway is leading the way in preparing for the move to the net's new addressing scheme, a survey has shown.

The survey comes a month before World IPv6 day that will see many v6 websites permanently activated.

The new IPv6 scheme is needed because the older system, IP Version 4, is about to run out of addresses.

Compiled by Europe's net address overseer, RIPE, the report found that Norway was ahead of Asian nations where IPv4 addresses are no longer available.

The UK sat just outside the top 20 of nations as only 17.3% of its networks can work with IPv6 traffic.

Every device attached to the internet needs what is known as an IP address to ensure data reaches the right destination.

Version 4 of the scheme defining the format of those addresses was drawn up in the 1970s. It made available a pool of about four billion addresses.

The rapid growth of the net and the web has rapidly drained the pool and exposed a need to move to IPv6. This has an effectively inexhaustible supply of addresses available.

Traffic tops

To see how far the world has got in converting to the new scheme, RIPE, which oversees IP addresses in Europe, has been logging which networks have announced that they can handle IPv6 traffic.

It found that 49.3% of Norway's networks could route this traffic. Holland was in second place (43.5%) and Malaysia third (37.1%).

Top 20 IPv6 nations

  • Norway - 49.3%
  • Netherlands - 43.8%
  • Malaysia - 37.1%
  • Japan - 32.5%
  • Sweden - 31.9%
  • Germany 30.9%
  • New Zealand - 29.7%
  • Belgium - 29.2%
  • Singapore - 29.1%
  • Ireland - 28.7%
  • Finland - 28%
  • Denmark - 27.7%
  • Austria - 27.3%
  • Switzerland - 26.7%
  • Portugal - 25.9%
  • France - 22.3%
  • Taiwan - 21.2%
  • Slovenia - 21.1%
  • Hong Kong 20.4%
  • South Africa - 20%

"The move to IPv6 is definitely picking up," said Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE. "Though it's still slower than I as an engineer would like."

Neither China nor the US, which have the two largest net using populations, made RIPE's Top 20 list.

While many networks in these countries were starting to be able to handle traffic for the old and new addressing schemes, only a handful of end users were using the protocol, said Mr Karrenberg.

"There's a lot of deployed equipment," he said. "Some of it can be upgraded but some of it will need to be exchanged."

The migration to the new scheme was going to be helped, he said, by the fact that router and modem makers were producing hardware that could handle both IPv4 and IPv6.

There was more use of IPv6 in Asian nations, he said, because there were no more IPv4 addresses available to allocate to that region. To continue expanding and adding new customers, web firms in Asia had to adopt IPv6.

He predicted that Europe's stock of IPv4 addresses would run out later in 2012, and said all firms should be getting on with the job of adopting IPv6.

"Whoever is only now just getting stuck into the planning stage is going to be late," he said. "They really need to get on with it."

World IPv6 day is due to be held on 6 June and is intended to be a way for firms to test how they work with the new protocol.

In addition, many big net names, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft's Bing, have pledged to turn on IPv6 versions of their sites and leave them running.

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