Zuckerberg Drops Out of Top 10 Tech Billionaires

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a tough week: His sister went to work for his top competitor, Google, his company’s stock price hit a new low and now he has dropped out of the top 10 tech billionaires list.
Zuckerberg’s fortune fell by $423 million on Thursday to $10.2 billion. That puts him $400 million behind James Goodnight, the co-founder of SAS Institute, the new number 10 on the $21 billion when the company went public in May. Zuckerberg owns 503.6 million shares of his company including 60 million options with an exercise price of $.06 a share. He also has $150 million in cash and other liquid assets, Bloomberg reports.
Facebook’s stock price on Thursday was down 47% from its $38 debut. On Friday morning, however, the stock was up about 2%.

Two More Facebook Execs Are Leaving

Facebook Inc.

Katie Mitic and Ethan Beard are leaving Facebook.

Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of platform partnerships, and Katie Mitic, the company's director of partnership marketing, are both leaving the company.
As the dust from Facebook's IPO settles and the company reorganizes its management ranks, it's no surprise that some executives are leaving.
But both departures leave us feeling like Facebook is having trouble holding onto the talent it needs to become a hypergrowth story once again.
Beard, a former Google executive, stabilized Facebook's platform efforts after a period of political infighting and management confusion in 2008. The platform, which third-party developers use to connect their software to Facebook's social network, is now a key part of Facebook's ubiquity and still offers the company a lot of potential for new business opportunities.
Mitic, a former eBay and Palm executive, is a member of eBay's board of directors—an unusually high-profile perch for an executive at her organizational rank—and helped spearhead a partnership between Facebook and eBay.
Facebook's spin on these departures is that the company is better off for being able to attract entrepreneurial talent, even if they don't stay for a long time.
But if Facebook is going to grow like a startup, seems like it would be better just to keep its entrepreneurs in-house.
Beard and Mitic are both worth watching, whatever they do next.

Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Arielle Now Works For Google

Google's acquisition of Wildfire Interactive, one of Facebook's top marketing partners, is awkward for the social network on a business level.
But it's even more awkward on a personal level.
That's because one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Arielle, works for Wildfire as a junior product manager.
So she's soon going to be a Google employee, working to undermine her brother's dominance in the social sphere.
We hear Mark tried to get Arielle to join Facebook. Unlike their older sister Randi, who succumbed to Mark's entreaties and ran consumer marketing for Facebook for years before recently striking out on her own, Arielle decided to set an independent course from the get-go.
She's spoken out on her blog about Facebook's recent design changes.
And she's also active on Quora, the question-and-answer site started by some ex-Facebookers. One of the questions she answered: "Which startups would be good acquisitions for Facebook?"

Zuckerberg Denies the Facebook Phone. What’s the Evidence?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday in the company’s first-ever earnings call that “it wouldn’t really make much sense” for the social networking monolith to build its own smartphone.
A “Facebook phone” has been rumored for sometime, however — and many analysts regard its appearance as a matter of when, not if.
So what’s the evidence that a mobile device based entirely around the social network is on its way?
Back in November of last year, the scuttlebutt originally reported by All Things D was that Facebook and HTC were working together to develop a phone codenamed “Buffy” that would hit store shelves in 12 to 18 months — as soon as this coming fall.
Buffy was said to run on a modified version of Android, tweaked heavily to revolve more prominently around Facebook and HTML5 support.
Then The New York Times reported this May that Facebook had hired “more than a half dozen” former Apple engineers who had previously worked on the iPhone or iPad to help build hardware for a Facebook phone. Finally, a Bloomberg report earlier this month reiterated much of what ATD reported in November, but pegged the mysterious “Facebook phone” launch to mid-2013.
The anticipation has grown so great that some designers have already began mocking up Facebook phone concepts (see gallery below).
While Zuckerberg denied the logic of Facebook building a phone, there are plenty of reasons why doing so would, in fact, make a lot of sense.
Facebook has been widely criticized for struggling to adapt to an increasingly mobile web, which most analysts see as dominating the emerging wave of digital life. One hedge fund manager recently predicted that Facebook’s mobile sluggishness would lead to the company virtually disappearing by the year 2020.
A Facebook-centric operating system — on a Facebook-branded smartphone — could go a long way toward capturing more mobile users and ad dollars.
So have all the rumors simply been hot air and will Facebook instead focus its efforts on improving a widely maligned mobile app? Or is Zuckerberg simply hedging his bets with some tricky wordplay, and a Facebook phone is in fact on the way?

Facebook founder loses $3 Billion in 48 hours

Happier times: Zuckerberg on May 18, after ringing the Nasdaq bell on IPO day

(Credit: Facebook)

For the hordes of investors large and small who bought into hype around Facebook's IPO -- heck, even for those who snapped up shares a two days ago -- this will offer little comfort. But in the last two days of trading, the assault on Facebook's stock has shaved a few billion dollars off the Facebook's famously rich founder's net worth.
More specifically, since the close of trading on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg has lost almost $3 billion, at least on paper. (His total stake is still worth about $11.8 billion, a far cry from the $19 billion he held at the IPO price).
As we all know, Facebook's stock has been struggling since its botched IPO on May 18. Ever since gong public at $38 dollars a share -- and briefly reaching $45 on opening day -- it's been a bumpy ride down. The last two days have been particularly brutal. Fisrt, Zynga, which is tied at the virtual hip to Facebook, reported dreadful earnings, spooking Facebook investors. And then yesterday, Facebook reported its quarterly earnings, which left the Street unconvinced that company is moving fast enough to turn those 955 million users into big dollars.
Zuckerberg has sold some of his stock, which the company said was necessary for him to pay his taxes. Regardless of the reason, just after the IPO, he took some profits at a price that others would envy. He sold 30.2 million shares at $37.58 a share, netting him more than $1.1 billion.
As for the future, who knows. This is the stock market, after all, and past performance is no guide for future performance. Yet there are some key dates that Wall Street is worried about. Those are when the so-called lockup periods expire and more insiders can sell their shares, which doesn't seem so far-fetched for those who got them at, say, $1 a share.
One of those dates comes on August 15, when, 90 days after the IPO, 268 million shares held by stockholders other than Zuckerberg become available for sale. But the date that causes the most concern is November 13, when 1.24 billion shares will become available for sale.
It's well understood -- and Zuck and his team said as much on yesterday's conference call -- that Zuckerberg isn't going to cater to the short-term interests of Wall Street. So he might not care that much about the following painful stock chart:

Facebook's stock since going public May 18

Facebook's Zuckerberg wins privacy patent

A patent application submitted six years ago by the founder of Facebook has now been approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2006 patent application governing certain privacy settings has been approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office -- six years after first being submitted.
The patent, number 8,225,376, was first applied for on July 25, 2006. Zuckerberg and Facebook's former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly are credited as inventors for the patent, which is titled "Dynamically generating a privacy summary." The abstract reads:

A system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary. A profile for a user is generated. One or more privacy setting selections are received from the user associated with the profile. The profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the one or more privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the one or more privacy setting selections.

The patent likely sounds more complicated than it is: as ReadWriteWeb puts it, it's probably little more than "a fancy accessory for Zuckerberg".
The patent basically covers a method of displaying an account holder's profile based on chosen privacy settings, including how a profile is displayed on screen to the individual in question and other users or groups on a social network.
Originally rejected by USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) examiners due to "obvious" claims in the patent (1, 8 and 16), ReadWriteWeb reports that after Facebook went public, the social networking giant redoubled its efforts to push the patent through -- requesting numerous interviews and a reinvestigation in to the application in February this year. Eventually, the effort paid off, and the patent has now been granted.