(Reuters) - Facebook Inc is set to raise up to $18.4 billion in its IPO and become the first U.S. company to be worth more than $100 billion at its debut, as investors bet on a big pop in the stock when it begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday. Frenzied demand, especially from individual investors hoping to buy into an Internet juggernaut that touches hundreds of millions of people every day, is expected to drive Facebook well above its initial public offering price of $38 a share, which was already at the top end of its target of $34
Read MoreFacebook employees give their CEO a standing ovation at the start of the company’s pre-IPO hackathon, which will run through the night and finish up shortly before FB shares begin trading on the NASDAQ. Photo via Facebook Product Designer Francis Luu , who has a set of pictures documenting the event.
Read MoreHere’s a memo that interim Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn sent his troops earlier today about some management switcheroos. No surprise that ousted CEO Scott Thompson’s first big hire from his former job at eBay’s PayPal unit is gone — just-installed-a-minute-ago commerce leader Sam Schrauger. (Also heading out, but not in the memo is PR head Amanda Pires, also from PayPal.) Also moved aside is Thompson’s Chief of Staff Marta Nichols, who had been head of investor relations at Yahoo, to a position unknown. Levinsohn’s new chief of staff is Michel Protti. So who’s in? Levinsohn favorites, of course, including: Mickie Rosen, who headed Americas media and who now gets global media and commerce; Mollie Spillman, who was co-running commerce with Schrauger and is now head of marketing (replacing former CEO Carol Bartz regime exec Penny Baldwin). For those following the soap opera that I am chief writer for, “Days of Our Yahoos,” Levinsohn became leader of the beleaguered Internet giant after a controversy over a false computer science degree on Thompson’s bio. Like sands through the hourglass, these are the former employees of our Yahoo. (At least, though, this is not a story about the Facebook IPO — hands up for those sick and tired of that one now?) Here’s the Levinsohn memo: Yahoos: Thank you for all of the feedback, support, and comments since our all-hands meetings in Sunnyvale on Monday and NYC on Wednesday. I’m fired up and I hope you are too. I believe in the power of what we’re doing. We have an incredibly talented team, unparalleled strengths in key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building everywhere. Let’s move forward quickly with conviction and confidence. We have a lot to do. The most pressing thing I heard from you is the desire to clearly define our vision and strategy. I promise you we will be transparent and plan to articulate this in the coming weeks. Right now, we’re identifying the most critical priorities and initiatives, clarifying the scope and charter of teams, ensuring we’re positioned to build on successes quickly and effectively, and focusing on Q2. As part of this, there are a few changes to the structure of my leadership team beginning today: **Mickie Rosen is now the head of global media and commerce. Mickie has done a fantastic job driving our Americas media network and will now lead the global media team — including media editorial, business development and partnerships, product, design, and engineering.
Read MoreUSA is doubling down on its commitment to digital media this year, with a broad portfolio of ancillary projects—six, covering the network's slate of originals—to boost viewership, draw in megafans, and provide deeper ad integrations for the shows' partners while the series are running. This year, the company has not one but four major automotive sponsors (Ford, Toyota, Lincoln and Lexus) buying tie-in digital integrations, and Capital One on a fifth.
Read MoreUSA is doubling down on its commitment to digital media this year, with a broad portfolio of ancillary projects—six, covering the network's slate of originals—to boost viewership, attract mega fans, and provide deeper ad integrations for the shows' partners while the series are running. This year, the company has not one but four major automotive sponsors (Ford, Toyota, Lincoln and Lexus) buying tie-in digital integrations, and Capital One on a fifth.
Read MoreJust like Hoodiegate, Facebook isn’t going to bring in its first day as a public company in the typical bell-ringing fashion. The social giant is doing things its own way: With a hackathon, of course. Sources close to Facebook say that on Thursday night, Facebook will hold a company-wide hackathon at its Menlo Park campus, another one of many in the company’s long history of all-night coding parties. Facebook knows that going public is a huge moment for the company. But just as its roadshow video was wildly different than any other pre-IPO company presentations, Facebook wants to celebrate in its own way — essentially, “the hacker way.” “It’s because building things is what defines Facebook, ” a source says. “It’s what matters most.” It’ll be similar to most every other hackathon the company holds — engineers will spend the evening coding freely, encouraged to build anything that comes to them. But there will be a few huge differences: One, it’s the last hackathon as a private company. And two, everyone at the company is invited. And yes, the boy genius CEO will most likely be there, our source says. It makes sense: Some of the company’s most important features and functions have stemmed from company hackathons. Timeline, for instance, was the brainchild of engineer Sam Lessin, spawned from an all-night coding session and eventually growing into one of Facebook’s defining features. “We hack, therefore we are,” one Facebook adage reads. Until the very end of being private, it seems.
Read MoreWith 50 percent of the mobile browser market in its home market of China, UCWeb is now looking across the Pacific. UC’s next target is the U.S., where the company released localized Android and iOS versions this past week and plans to open up a Silicon Valley office later this year. (It has already made inroads into India, where it has 20 percent share and is close to knocking off market leader Opera, execs said.) UCWeb's Roy Rong and Yu Yongfu visit AllThingsD. UC Browser is more than a just dumb container for Web sites; in China, the browser includes its own virtual currency accounts, identity system, social network and navigation services. In a way, it’s more like a mobile-only Facebook platform than the pure Chrome or Safari browsers. Plus, UC browser is quite fast, because the company maintains local data centers from where it compresses Web sites and sends them to phones. Opera Mini and Amazon’s Kindle Fire Silk browser use similar techniques. Bridging to the U.S. market won’t necessarily be easy, but UC’s design and experience across the spectrum of low- to high-end phones could be instructive. CEO Yu Yongfu — who’s on a grand tour of Silicon Valley this week — emphasized that while his company started doing all this in 2004, the U.S.
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General Motors Co. GM -0.97% plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers' car purchases, according to a GM official. The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion. Executives have spent the last two weeks trying to convince
Read MoreThere are a bunch of ways to explain away GM’s decision to stop spending ad dollars on Facebook . We’ll get to those. But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing . If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year , and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in . But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there . Instead Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers
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