The Festival of Words: From Gyles Brandreth to Anthony Scaramucci – all you need to know about the Fleet Street Quarter festival
Facebook’s long-awaited WhatsApp deal completes – costing Zuckerberg another $3bn October 6, 2014 Facebook's share price opened broadly flat today after its long-awaited deal to take over WhatsApp completed. But the deal has ended up costing Facebook nearly $3bn more than was originally intended, because of the amount of time taken to get approval. The deal – in which WhatsApp shareholders received 177.7m Facebook Class A shares and [...]
Alex Salmond’s Scottish independence defeat: From Yes Scotland to One Scotland on Facebook September 19, 2014 Scottish first minister Alex Salmond has updated his Twitter and Facebook photo in light of his referendum defeat. Having previously said “Yes Scotland” in support of his independence campaign, an hour ago this was updated to say “One Scotland”. Yesterday, Scots went to the polling stations to cast their votes on whether they wished [...]
Mail.ru share price up as Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov takes full stake in “Russian Facebook” VKontakte for $1.47 billion September 16, 2014 Moscow-based internet company Mail.ru has bought a remaining 48 per cent stake in the social network VKontakte, Russia's answer to Facebook, for $1.47bn (£909m) taking full ownership of the business. Mail.ru said in addition to the sale, all legal action among itself, United Capital Partners which sold the stake and VK founder Pavel Durov had [...]
Alibaba listing’s legal fees set to dwarf Facebook September 7, 2014 ALIBABA, the Chinese e-commerce giant that sells more than Amazon and Ebay combined and is seeking to raise over $21bn (£12.8bn) in its float this month, will pay some of the highest legal fees for a US listing, six times what Facebook paid two years ago. The legal fees for Alibaba’s public listing, $15.8m according [...]
Why Facebook makes us lose trust in society September 1, 2014 Facebook exposes us to “offensive behaviour and hate speech”, giving rise to feelings of depression and distrust, according to a new study. Researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome looked at the way in which 50,000 Italian people use social networks, and compared the results with the individuals' reported levels of happiness and self-esteem. [...]
Facebook is cracking down on clickbait with news feed change August 26, 2014 Just weeks after clickbait was recognised as a modern word worthy of addition to the online oxford dictionary, Facebook has made a change to its news feed algorithm which could signal its demise. Clickbait, or “content…whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular web page” as the online OED defines, [...]
Facebook’s WhatsApp hits 600m active users after just five years August 25, 2014 Facebook’s mobile messaging app WhatsApp has soared to 600m monthly active users, its chief executive announced yesterday, just four months after it passed 500m. Last August WhatsApp had just 200m users while the number doubled to 430m in January 2014. In February Facebook announced it had bought WhatsApp for $19bn in the social network’s largest [...]
Iced-Berg? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and fellow tech CEOs get soaked August 14, 2014 It's often been said that the Silicon Valley tech scene is overheating, but photos of its best known chief exec dumping buckets of ice water over themselves is nonetheless perplexing. On closer inspection, though, you realise its a new social media “nomination”, not completely dissimilar to the no-makeup selfie, in a bid to raise [...]
Diageo likes Facebook’s Nicola Mendelsohn July 30, 2014 DRINKS giant Diageo has bolstered its digital marketing expertise by appointing Facebook’s vice-president of Europe, Middle East and Africa to its board. Nicola Mendelsohn will join as a non-executive director at the beginning of September. She joined Facebook last year from Karmarama advertising agency.
OKCupid experimented on users just like Facebook did because “That’s how websites work” July 29, 2014 Dating site OKCupid has boldly admitted to performing experiments on users in the same way as Facebook because “that’s how websites work.” OKCupid founder Christian Rudder detailed three experiments the website performed on users in a blog post titled “We Experiment On Human Beings!”. Despite the public outrage after Facebook was found to have experimented [...]