Mark Will Ring The Nasdaq Bell on 18 May , 2012

NEW YORK — Wall Street has one simple task as Facebook Inc. shares begin trading: Don’t mess it up.

Major stock exchanges, brokerage firms and mutual fund companies have been gearing up for one of the biggest initial public offerings on record. And, with all the hype surrounding the social-media giant, any snafus would be a major embarrassment.

“It has to go off without a hitch. There’s going to be a lot of visibility on this,” said Larry Tabb, chief executive of the TABB Group consulting and research firm. “If this goes poorly, it will not just be a poor reflection on Nasdaq — it will be a poor reflection on the U.S. market structure.”

In pricing its stock at $38 on Thursday, Facebook raised $16 billion in the third-biggest IPO in U.S. history and the largest ever by a tech company. The stock trades as FB.

The company is expected to sell an additional $2.4 billion in stock later this month, raising the total value to $18.4 billion. That would make it the second-largest U.S. IPO, trailing only the $19.65 billion raised by Visa Inc. in 2008.

The IPO values Facebook at $104 billion, by far the largest ever for a newly public company.

Facebook shares are scheduled to begin trading at 11 a.m. Eastern time, 90 minutes after the Nasdaq Stock Market opens. The late start is designed to give the stock exchange and Wall Street brokerage firms sufficient time to process what is expected to be a crush of opening-day orders.

At center stage is the Nasdaq, considered to be the world’s premier home for technology companies. The exchange has been testing various scenarios for how the stock will open, checking its systems through a dummy ticker — ZWZZT — to allow clients to practice processing their orders.

Glitches do happen. In April, when software developer Splunk Inc. went public on the Nasdaq, the price soared so high the exchange halted trading. However, trading reportedly continued elsewhere, leading to canceled trades.

The biggest blunder happened in March when BATS Global Markets, an electronic trading platform, suffered a trading debacle. A software glitch sabotaged the company’s own IPO, which sent the stock plummeting and forced it to cancel the offering altogether.

BATS has been in talks with Nasdaq about the Facebook IPO, but hasn’t participated in any of the tests. However, clients have been routing test orders of Facebook through the exchange, spokeswoman Stacie Fleming said.

Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange is making sure it is ready for the crush of new shares that will be dumped into the market Friday. The Big Board has dedicated a server just for Facebook trading that will be done on the NYSE Euronext Inc.’s all-electronic Arca exchange.

“We’re fully prepared,” NYSE spokesman Rich Adamonis said.

Tabb said myriad problems could arise, though he predicted high volume wouldn’t be one.

Buyers and sellers may not get access to the stock, he said, because market data feeds connecting all the exchanges could hit a snag, trading algorithms may not be properly tuned, or a server could crash.

“If there’s a problem it’ll be a technology glitch,” Tabb said.

Brokerages are getting ready to field phone calls from customers who want Facebook shares — and potentially upset clients who didn’t get as large of an IPO allotment as they wanted.

Fidelity Investments in Boston, one of the country’s largest retail brokerages, has employees on standby to deal with high customer demand, spokesman Steve Austin said.

Wall Street might spend the remaining few hours before Facebook’s public debut worrying about what might go wrong. But there’s a decidedly different atmosphere on the West Coast at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.

Hundreds of employees spent Thursday in a “hackathon” — an all-night work session for programmers and engineers.

Even founder Mark Zuckerberg was expected to attend the event — until he rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell.

By Andrew Tangel and Walter Hamilton, Los Angeles Times

Just when it seemed like the cellphone megapixel war had settled down, Nokia blew the competition away with a 41MP camera in its new Nokia 808.

It’s been a standing feature with the arrival of cameras on cellphones. Recently, the megapixels were standardised at 8MP and 12MP (though some phones boast more) as the focus has shifted to other phone features, and the quality of images has reached a plateau.

Now the Nokia 808 PureView, with its whopping 41MP lens, is the unassailable leader. But it’s not just the megapixels that count. A camera, especially one inside a cellphone, is about more than just the size of its sensor, which is what the megapixels refer to. Nokia has been including Carl Zeiss optics – the rest of the camera’s innards – in its phones.

Because the 808 has such a large megapixel count, it lets you “capture an image, then zoom, reframe, crop and re-size afterwards to expose previously unseen levels of details”.

It has taken a Nokia research team five years to build the camera phone, which means it runs on Symbian, the antiquated operating system that Nokia abandoned a year ago to focus on Windows Phone 7 for its smartphones.

-Jago News-

Google Pakistan

Today is 14 august 2011 , Clicked Google for searching and found that the big G has turned into green on the Independence day of Pakistan.

They have turned Google Pakistan into a very right combination of colors and symbols. Moon & star following Minar-e-Pakistan , which is the symbol of declaration of Pakistan in Lahore . But , there are some more little stars which is the sign of celebration of Independence day.

As a Pakistani i am personally very proud of Google that they have supported somehow from this world .

Thank you Google!

Google is finally set to give tough time to Facebook .  The searching giant recently launched Google+, a social networking site that aims to rectify the company’s failed social media efforts, such as Google Buzz and Wave, and put a dent in Facebook’s business.

So does Google+ stand a chance against Facebook, which is now over 750 million users strong and hasbeen valued at $100 billion? Google isn’t giving up without a fight: the behemoth needs a hit in the social space and one Google executive called Google+ a bet-the-company effort. To help you decide, here’s a look at six features Google+ has that Facebook doesn’t (You can see what they have in common here).

Are these elements important? Are they enough to tempt you to make the switch–or at least join Google+? Let us know in the comments below. For more on Google+, check out our tips for Google+ newbies and 9 things you need to know about Google’s new social network.

Seperate News feed

Google+ comes with “Sparks,” a basic news reader offering users access to separate news feeds covering a variety of different topics. Google+ members can customize what interests appear on their Sparks page, which is directly accessible from their Google+ profile. Clicking on one of the topic–say “soccer,” or “fashion”–in the Sparks page delivers a stream of stories from around the web, presenting the headline and first several sentences of articles from outlets such as New York Magazine, The Next Web, and YouTube.

What differentiates Sparks from the Facebook news feed is its focus on specific topics and on news: you won’t find information on your friend’s newborn, but you will find highlights from blogs, newspapers, and other media outlets sorted by topic.

Keep Your Social Circle secret

When Google+ users sort their friends, acquaintances and other contacts into Circles, no one else knows how they’ve been grouped. Google will show other Google+ users who you’ve put into your Circles, as well as who has put you into their Circles, but it won’t reveal how you’ve characterized those Circles–who else in them, how they’re titled, etc. For each post on Google+, users can specify, via a convenient drop-down menu, what Circles can see the content.

Facebook Groups operate a bit differently. Though there are different privacy settings (“open,” “closed,” and “secret”), the bottom line is that all the members of the group will be able to see all the other members of that group, as well as the type of group they’ve been added to. The members of an individuals’ Circle are visible only to the invidual who created it.

In addition, Facebook uses Lists, not Groups, to help users restrict the audience that can view status updates and other posts. But Lists remain an imperfect solution, requiring extra steps for users, who have to click through several screens to specify what “list” to share with, and setting up Lists isn’t quite as seamless as on Google+. The New York Times’ David Pogue observes, “Facebook has something similar, called Lists. But compared with Circles, it’s buried and a lot more effort to use.”

See What Strangers Are Saying

Whereas on Facebook the only posts and status updates that appear in your news feed come from people you’re friends with, Google+ allows you to see updates from people you aren’t yet following, but who are following you. The “Incoming” stream displays posts from other Google+ users who have put you into their Circles, but you have not yet “circled.” You can follow them if you choose by putting them into one of your circles.

Hang Out With People You Don't Know

Facebook Chat requires you to be friends with someone before you can chat with them. Google Hangouts, for better or for worse, are much more open: up to ten people can join a Hangout video chat, and they need not be in each others’ Circles to do so. If you’ve “circled” someone, but she hasn’t put you in one of her Circles, you can still join a Hangout she creates.

Get To It From Gmail (Or Google.com)

Via its social graph, Facebook has spread far beyond its Facebook.com domain. Facebook “like” buttons populate a slew of news sites, your Facebook friends’ activity appears on numerous third-party sites, and more and more of the information you see is customized based on your Facebook profile and personal interests.

Facebook follows people around the web, encouraging them to constantly engage with and click back to its site, but Google+ has its own advantage: it’s embedded directly into Gmail, valuable real estate that users navigate to repeatedly each day. Every interaction with their email inbox presents an opportunity for them to log on to Google+–with a single click, users can go from their inbox to their social network. Google+’s integration with Gmail also provides an easy way to populate the social network.

Embedded in the black header that now appears on Google.com, Google+ also follows people as they browse the search engine. In other words, Google has found a way to immediately put Google+ in front of users multiple times a day.

Facebook and Google in the ring

Facebook vs Google

Google announced Tuesday the launch of a new social network, called Google +, or Google Plus, which aims to take on Facebook. As our sources reported:

Google made a huge announcement this tuesday, launching Google +, or Google Plus, its long-awaited version of a social network to rival Facebook.

Google’s been trying to crack the social market for years, running into false starts with content-sharing services Wave and Buzz. (The former fizzled and the latter set off a privacy complaints that ended with a lawsuit and an FTC settlement.) Many have been waiting for Google’s big push into social since it rolled out its +1 button in March, especially as Facebook gets cozy with its search rival, Microsoft.

And then, today, Google announced +. The site bears a striking resemblance to Facebook, with streaming feeds and specialized groups of friends. In fact, Google + gathers many of the features of existing social networks.

The network has five basic components: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Instant Uploads and Huddle. It also requires a Google profile, meaning you’ll need to provide Google, at minimum, with a name and a photo.

Circles lets you group your contacts — e.g. friends, work, family. Like Facebook, this features lets you share information with groups of contacts instead of hitting everyone with your latest update at once. Sparks acts like an RSS reader or Facebook news feed, letting you input things you’re interested in and pushing relevant content to you. Hangouts features live group video chats, aiming to foster spontaneous meetings with up to 10 people. You can also alert certain groups of friends when you’re hanging out.

Instant Uploads takes care of the increasingly important mobile aspect of social networking, automatically posting users’ phone pictures and videos to a private album. From there, users can decide if and with whom they want to share their media. You also have the option to add location data to every Google + post.

And Huddle is a group texting feature — similar to Beluga, which Facebook acquired in March — that lets you have a group chat through your phone.

Some analysts are asking whether Google expansion into the social media sphere is a bad move. TechCruch guest contributor Semil Shah asked the same question:

Today’s soft-launch of Google’s new social galaxy, Google+, raises one interesting question: Can Google, a massive, multinational, cash-rich, consumer technology company with multiple successful productivity applications and services, take its dough out of the oven and bake a social network into their bread?

-Jago News-

Microsot Near to Buy Skype

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp is close to buying web video conferencing service Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion including debt, a source familiar with the situation said, in a deal which would rank as the biggest for the software company.

A deal is expected to be announced as early as Tuesday morning, the source said. The source declined to be named because the talks are not public.

Both Microsoft and Skype declined comment.

Skype, which had delayed plans for an initial public offering, had recently been looking at other options.

Four days ago, we heard that Facebook was reportedly offering between $3 and $4 billion to acquire Skype or (perhaps more plausible for a startup with $2 billion in annual revenue) that Facebook might simply construct some sort of joint venture with Skype.

M9 TVC Leaked

Jago News got a “possible Launch advertisement” for M9 by Zong.

Video AD, which for the first time reveals about the origin and scope of M9, is nicely filmed showing a photography event going wrong. It tries to depict that usual circumstances/settings, which are not as per your plan may end up ugly.

When asked about the originality of the video, Zong’s spokesperson denied to comment anything.

We were able to extract information from TVC that M9 will be a new brand from Zong where customers will be given a liberty to choose their calling plans according to their needs.

TVC exactly says “App Plan Banaye Exactly Apni Merzi Ka”

Customers will be able to choose their plan from their phone numbers or the website m9.com.pk

Earlier, the teaser video for M9 generated plenty of buzz in the cyberspace when it got leaked. We are told that Zong undesirably aired the teaser video ahead of schedule due to the leak. If that is the case, we can assume say that M9 will hit the surface in next few hours or a day at most.

Just to add here, with the teaser video and campaign on Facebook, industry has a perception that M9 is a youth brand, we would like our readers to comment on what they think, “If M9 is a youth targeted brand or it’s a more of a generic brand”.

M9 is grabbing too much user attention and might will cross record limits. Zong is always prepared for some creative offers. But for the first time they launched a Brand in Pakistan.

Zong M-9

We have received news that Zong is going to launch a industry first offer, named as M9, in coming days. This information is based upon a leaked TVC that suggests that users can register their numbers in advance by visiting M9 Website , which is blank page as of now.

We have confirmed the authenticity of M9’s launch with sources in Zong. No words yet on details of the offer, however, we can confirm that www.m9.com.pk is going to be the host of the offer. Maybe a new brand, or just a package!

City Ville

Zynga’s new game City Ville on facebook is the fastest growing game in the company’s history. It grabs 300,000 players in first 24 hours and 3 million daily active users in the first week.

It’s growth still accelerating , its already have achieved 6 million daily active users.  This is four times faster than Frontier ville and five time faster than Farm Ville.

Time Span took to get 6 Million Daily Active Users

FarmVille: 46 days
FrontierVille: 32 days
CityVille: 8   days

Whats is the reason for such a growth in this game ? Growth reason is  that It was the first time Zynga did an international launch in five languages English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. Another this game is seems bigger than last games.

Apple iPhone 4 Releasing in China on 25th September

The rumors becomes true.  Apple issued a press release today announcing that the iPhone 4 will be released in China on September 25th  through China Unicom stores and through two new Apple stores —Which will be one in Beijing and one in Shanghai.

The Chinese iPhone 4 actually has not that much difference significantly from the devices sold in other countries. FaceTime, Retina display, LED flash and HD video are all there. That said, the iPhone 4 won’t be cheap there. According to the press release, the 16 GB model will sell for 5,999 yuan and the 16 GB for 4,999. That’s around $890 and $740, respectively.

This might not be easy for Apple to get prominent share from Chinese Market.