Technology, Facebook Ipo | featured news

Mark Zuckerberg was not kidding about Facebook’s hacker culture. The night before the chartbusting initial public stock offering, engineers won’t be counting their Facebook dollars. They’ll be doing what they have always done: Hack. Facebook will pull an all-night hackathon that will end when Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park campus.

Investors who want Facebook Inc shares when the No. 1 online social network goes public later this week may have lost the opportunity. TD Ameritrade and Fidelity's brokerage arm both stopped accepting orders of Facebook shares as of Tuesday evening, according to representatives for each of the companies.

It?s entirely possible to create a list of reasons why you and I should be trying to buy stock in the Facebook IPO. There might well be a price pop given the interest in the issue. The company looks as if it might well become part of the basic infrastructure of the modern world.

Facebook's reach is wide but not deep. Few users surveyed in an Associated Press-CNBC poll say they click on the site's ads or buy the virtual goods that make money for it.

Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday laid out his 2012 goals to investors on the Silicon Valley leg of his IPO roadshow, saying his first priority was improving the social network's mobile application.

Facebook has raked in billions and will make a splash when its stock hits the open market next week. So, what are folks on Wall Street concerned about? Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie, apparently.

As Facebook tours the country with its pitch to investors for the social network’s initial public offering, at least one hole in the company’s plan for the future that has come up repeatedly: What is Facebook going to do about mobile?

Facebook Inc's initial public offering pitch played to some bad reviews in New York, so for its Boston audience on Tuesday, the 30-minute video was scrapped and the company took more questions from analysts and potential investors.

How to put all this into a Facebook valuation? To justify the big numbers being tossed around – $100bn and up – several things must happen in the next five to seven years. The business needs to become much less capital intensive (inclusive of acquisitions) over time, as Google and Microsoft have done. That is the easy part. But margins must also stay near today’s level of about 50 per cent – which would be uncharted territory. And sales would have to grow at least sixfold in this period.

Facebook Inc. is planning to set the price range for its impending initial public offering in the high-$20s to mid-$30sa share, valuing itself at roughly $85 billion to $95 billion...