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063 / Anthony Collins

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Transmission 63 touches down with a live set by Anthony Collins, recorded at our massive Circoloco party at South St. Seaport in May. The Scissor and Thread co-founder laid it down for a killer crowd at the Beekman Beer Garden for an amazing night that we’re really glad we captured for posterity.

admin@bestintechno.com (Podcast Recycler) 23 Oct, 2012
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062 / Three

For Transmissions 62, Chris Milo [DJ Three] turns in an energetic live set recorded when Verboten invaded New Orleans’ Voodoo Fest last year. The king of the closing set returns to the Verboten decks this October in BK, where he’s joined by Stacey Pullen and Dinky for a long night of musical mayhem.

admin@bestintechno.com (Podcast Recycler) 10 Oct, 2012
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Zynga's weak pivot to mobile, loss of casual gamers turns serious

Zynga Inc's inexorable decline over the past six months, capped by a sharp reduction in its 2012 outlook on Thursday, has sharpened interest in what Chief Executive Mark Pincus will do next.

Wall Street's excitement over a game publisher once counted among the stars of the new social Internet has cooled since its December initial public offering. On Friday, analysts slashed their price targets on a stock that dived as much as 22 percent, to $2.21 - more than three-quarters off its $10 debut.

The fate of the company now rests with Pincus, the 46-year-old co-founder who controls a majority voting stake. Analysts say he needs to downsize its current 3,000-strong global workforce and come up with a hit that can captivate the growing number of players now moving to mobile devices, where its presence is relatively weak.

Zynga did launch several such games this year, including "The Ville" and "ChefVille," and is working on several more. On Thursday, Pincus emphasized to employees in a company-wide memo that Zynga would be "continuing to invest in its mobile games business."

But he warned that the company will make "targeted cost reductions," which analysts interpreted to mean layoffs as Pincus shifts Zynga away from the "casual" Facebook games, like "FarmVille," that were the company's bread-and-butter for years.

"They have banked on the casual gaming segment, and to readjust the business to more core gaming, some casual heads probably have to roll," said P.J. McNealy, CEO of Digital World Research.

The transition will be jarring for a company that moved early to build a formidable business almost completely on top of Facebook's burgeoning platform. "FarmVille," "FrontierVille," "Zynga Poker," "Mafia Wars" and "CityVille" took off primarily as Facebook games on personal computers. They accounted for 83 percent of total revenue last year.

Zynga has not been able to reverse the tide of users abandoning its previously lucrative Web-based games for offerings on smartphones or games from competing publishers.

Monthly-paying players rose to 4.1 million in the second quarter from 3.5 million. That number would have declined had it not been for new players attracted to "Draw Something," which Zynga purchased in March. The company said on Thursday it will write off about half the game's $183 million price tag.

One saving grace for Pincus may be Zynga's large cash holdings, which amount to roughly $1.6 billion and will stave off any talk of bankruptcy. And Zynga's revenues, while shrinking, remain substantial.

"This is an expectation game," McNealy said. "If people are looking for a possible turnaround in three months it's probably unlikely. If people are looking at the next 12 to 18 months, then it's possible."

KEY DEPARTURES

Pincus' attempt to revive his company has been undermined by an accelerating employee exodus.

On Friday, the two creators of "Words with Friends," one of Zynga's most popular mobile games, announced that they had departed, following more than a dozen key employees who have left in the past six months.

"The departures underscore our skepticism about ZNGA and its ability to address the challenges it faces as it pivots towards mobile and its in-house gaming platforms," Brian Pitz from Jefferies & Co wrote in a research note on Friday. "Yesterday, CEO Mark Pincus asked employees to not lose sight of the bigger picture, but this may not be enough."

Besides betting big on mobile, Pincus hopes to capture growth in online gambling games, an effort that could take years to pay off. It could take 18 to 24 months for U.S. authorities to legalize it, McNealy said.

Zynga Poker, where players win virtual currency as opposed to real cash, is the world's largest online poker game. The game constituted 18 percent of Zynga's $332.4 million revenue last quarter, behind "FarmVille," which brought in about 29 percent.

Zynga plans to seek out overseas markets such as the United Kingdom and France, where online gambling is partially legal. Pincus told analysts on an earnings call last quarter that these first real-money gaming products would launch in the first half of 2013.

TAKEOVER CHATTER

Some on Wall Street now speculate about the possible takeover of a company whose stock has fallen more than 80 percent from its high earlier this year.

For most of Friday, Zynga traded below the company's book value of $2.30 a share according to Thomson Reuters data - the sum value of its assets including real estate holdings and roughly $1.6 billion in cash.

Tom Taulli, an editor at IPOPlaybook.com, said the names of potential acquirers being bandied about have included Amazon, Yahoo and Activision, the game publisher that has a small presence on Facebook and smartphones, two platforms where Zynga has invested heavily.

Even at such a discount, analysts warn that Zynga, valued at $1.88 billion, may not be a natural acquisition target for interactive media companies, given the uncertainty about Zynga's business and the mixed results of major social gaming deals generally.

Last July, Electronic Arts acquired PopCap Games for $650 million in cash plus stock but recently laid off employees and shuttered a PopCap studio. And analysts have continued to second-guess Walt Disney Co's $763 million deal for Playdom in 2010.

"Disney and EA have a pretty sour taste in their mouth," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG. "Everyone who has tried to make a purchases in this sector is losing money."

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said most acquirers would probably wait a while longer to see how Zynga fares.

"In a situation where you have fundamental problems and the business is deteriorating, it's going to be tough" to negotiate a sale, Bhatia said. "What's needed is swift action to right-size the company."

Apple's iPhone 5 gets thumbs-up from Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports, the influential reviewers' group that blasted the iPhone 4 for a faulty antenna, on Friday gave Apple Inc's latest smartphone a thumbs-up despite echoing widespread complaints about its patchy mapping service.

The organization, which in 2010 withheld its recommendation for the iPhone because of spotty reception when the gadget was held in a certain way, said laboratory tests confirmed that the new iPhone 5 ranked among the best smartphones but its mapping function clearly fell short.

Apple's latest iPhone, sporting a larger 4-inch screen and 4G capability, drew scathing reviews for glaring errors in a new, self-designed mapping service. Chief Executive Tim Cook apologized last week and directed users to rival services run by Google Inc and others.

"Despite the widespread criticism it has received, Apple's new Maps app... is competent enough, even if it falls short of what's available for free on many other phones," reviewer Mike Gikas wrote on the group's website on Friday.

"As Apple has recently apologized and promised to fix these and other map glitches, we expect the Map app to improve in time," he wrote.

Apple's shares were down 1.3 percent at $658.43 in early afternoon trade on Nasdaq.

The consumer electronics juggernaut began selling its latest smartphone last month. Sales of over 5 million in its first three days in stores fell short of outsized expectations as it struggled with supply constraints.

Its homegrown Maps -- stitched together by acquiring companies and employing data from a range of providers including TomTom NV and Waze -- was introduced with much fanfare in June by software chief Scott Forstall. It was billed as a highlight of the updated iOS 6 software.

Errors and omissions quickly emerged after the software was rolled out. They ranged from misplaced buildings and mislabeled cities to duplicate geographical features. Users also complained that the service lacked features that made Google Maps so popular, such as public transit directions and street-view pictures.

The last time Apple faced such widespread criticism -- including from Consumer Reports -- was during 2010's "Antennagate" furor, when users complained of signal reception issues on the then-new iPhone 4. This year the consumer group, which reviews everything from cars to kitchen appliances, also warned initially that Apple's new iPad threw off too much heat.

A defiant Steve Jobs at the time rejected any suggestion the iPhone 4's design was flawed, but offered consumers free phone cases at a rare, 90-minute press conference called to address those complaints.

"Now that our auto experts have completed their tests, including some carried out some days after the launch, they describe the app as relatively streamlined, and concluded that it generally provides clear guidance, including voice and on-screen directions," Gikas wrote.

"However, they did find that it lacks the details, traffic data, and customization options offered by the free Google navigation app found on Android phones."

Hidden Powers of Your Mouse





        You use your mouse for just about everything: you drag, you drop, you highlight, you scroll. But even if you click your mouse a thousand times a day, I bet I've got a few secret mouse tricks you've never heard of.

Click Tricks
You surely know that double clicking highlights a word, and you might even know that triple clicking highlights a paragraph. But have you ever wanted to select a column of text in a Word document, without getting all the text to the left and right of it? Here's how you can: Hold down the alt and left mouse button (on a Mac, option-left mouse), and drag the cursor over the section you want to select. The coolest thing about this trick is that the text you are selecting does not even need to be formatted as a column for this to work.

Scroll Tricks
Most mice have a scroll wheel. Sure, it takes you up and down on a page, but in combination with other keys, it can do much more:
  • Scroll sideways: In many versions of Excel, holding down the shift key while scrolling will take you sideways. That's super helpful in a big spreadsheet.
  • Scroll wheel as back button: In most web browsers, if you hold the shift key while using the scroll wheel, it works like the back button: You can fly through all the sites you've recently visited. (Some mice have side buttons that work like back and forward buttons in your browser, too.)
  • Scroll to zoom: Holding ctrl and scrolling lets you zoom in or out of the page you're viewing. Ctrl-scroll up zooms you in; ctrl-scroll down zooms you back out. On a Mac, this trick will zoom in and out your whole screen, not just the document you're in.
Windows-Specific Tricks
While most of the tricks I've listed so far work in either Windows or Mac OS, here are a few that are specific to Windows machines:
  • To maximize a window: drag the title bar to the top.
  • To minimize all windows except the active window: "Shake" the title bar. Then if you want to restore all the windows you just minimized with this shortcut, just click again on the title bar of the window in view.
  • To view two windows in a 50-50 split: Drag the title bar of one document to the left edge of your screen, then drag a second document to the right edge; they will snap into position in a nifty side-by-side view.
Bonus Sneaky Trick
Suppose you want to walk away from your hyper-secure work computer for a few minutes and not have to re-log in when you get back. Sure, you could change the sleep settings, but this idea is much more clever: Set your mouse on top of your analog watch or a clock. The mouse tracks the second hand's movement and it tricks your computer into thinking you're still busy working. Of course, there are valid security reasons for NOT using this trick, but I still think it's cool that it works.

Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey's Role 'Reduced' Over Co-worker Difficulties

The role of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who returned to the company as executive chairman after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus from day-to-day operations, has been "reduced" after co-workers complained he was "difficult to work with" and "repeatedly changed his mind about product directions." Although he is still involved in strategic decisions as executive chairman, no one directly reports to him anymore.

That's according to The New York Times, which published a profile of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo over the weekend. The profile describes Costolo's leadership style and background in standup comedy.

[More from Mashable: Big Bird Appears on ‘SNL,’ Talks About Tweets [VIDEO]]

The story claims that Dorsey, who is also a co-founder of mobile payments system Square, left Twitter in 2008 after he struggled to prevent the service from frequent, multi-hour outages. These days, Twitter very rarely goes offline.

Another item of note: The Times says that Twitter is planning to go public in 2014, according to "insiders." In an interview with CNBC late last month, Costolo said an IPO is "not something we're focused on right now."

Shopping or browsing on Main St? India's Big Data firms know

Shopping in a U.S. department store? Surveillance cameras may be watching, and not because you might be a shoplifter.
In minutes, video of which aisles you visited, what products you picked up and put down, what you bought and the displays that caught your fancy will be sent to a company in Bangalore, India.
"These logs can be analyzed to determine propensity to purchase, what a customer's intent, satisfaction, sentiment is," said Dhiraj Rajaram, CEO of Mu Sigma, which says it is among the world's biggest pure-play data analytics companies.
The business of storing, decoding and analyzing unstructured data - think video, Facebook updates, Tweets, Internet searches and public cameras - along with mountains of facts and figures can help companies increase profits, cut costs and improve service, and is now one of the world's hottest industries.
It's called Big Data, and although much of the work is done in the United States, India is getting an increasing slice of the action, re-energizing an IT sector whose growth has begun to falter.
One reason for the emergence of Big Data as India's next big thing in IT is the dramatic fall in the costs of storing and working with huge volumes of data with the advent of cloud computing and open-source software programmes such as Hadoop.
"There are hundreds of (analytics) boutiques in India right now. Every other week I hear some of my friends have started on their own," said Santosh Nair, who quit a job in an IT services provider four months ago to open Analytic Edge.
The Bangalore firm has studied pharmacy sales, population trends and other data to help a U.S. funeral company pinpoint areas for its marketing campaigns.
SERVICES NATION
Others are getting into the business of data storage and processing as costs plummet.
"It doesn't mean I need a server which has 50 terabytes of space. Cloud technology helps me rent space which is cheap," Nair said. "Ten terabytes of space might cost me about $500 a month. It's not expensive."
That amount of data is equivalent to about 20,000 hours of CD-quality music.
Globally, data output last year was estimated at 1.8 zettabytes - 1.8 billion terabytes, or the equivalent of 200 billion full-length high-definition movies.
Millions of networked sensors in cameras, mobile phones and other devices, along with spiraling output from social media sites, are contributing to the data explosion, said a report on Big Data last year by the McKinsey Global Institute.
This has great potential for businesses, it said.
"We are on the cusp of a tremendous wave of innovation, productivity and growth, as well as new modes of competition and value capture - all driven by Big Data as consumers, companies, and economic sectors exploit its potential."
As India stakes its claim in the knowledge-intensive business of Big Data, however, it stands to lose much of the cost advantage that helped it to dominate business-process outsourcing.
Instead, industry officials say, India's success will depend on its large numbers of maths-savvy IT engineers and the skills its IT industry has picked up over 15 years as the world's biggest outsourcing destination.
"The Indian cost benefit is eroding significantly," said Mahinder Mathrani, operating partner at the Symphony Technology Group, a Palo Alto, California-based private equity firm that is in the software and services field.
"In the big data analytics space, it will be more about talent arbitrage," he said. "Good statisticians who have a blend of business acumen and analytic skills and also technical aptitude aren't inexpensive, even in India."
POOL OF TALENT
India's pool of talent will be in demand, with data analytics specialists seen globally in short supply for years to come as Big Data takes off.
But the Indian industry also believes it will gain an advantage from its broader expertise in services.
"We are a services nation," said Sundararaman Viswanathan, a manager at Zinnov, a software consultancy in Bangalore. "For example, we had the Internet and we built the outsourcing industry around it. We are extremely good at it."
"We can build a service which is around asking the right questions, and putting together the insights and giving it to the customer."
India's National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) forecasts that the Big Data business in India will be worth as much as $1.2 billion within three years, a six-fold increase from current levels.
That would be double the growth rate it expects for Big Data worldwide: to $25 billion from $8.25 billion.
"It's an industry where, because of cost, skill, language and ability to learn, India stands a very, very strong advantage," said Rajeev Baphna, CEO of Bangalore-based data services company Analyttica.
"India started to focus on creating a space in this field by leveraging a number of advantages it has: One, talent; two, the ability to have a very strong process-driven delivery at lower costs that the services industry has mastered."
It's not just boutique firms that have entered the field. The giants of India's outsourcing such as Infosys Ltd and Wipro Ltd have also moved into the Big Data business, but smaller firms may be better placed to deliver.
"The larger, well-established companies have a challenge," said Symphony Technology's Mathrani.
"Their existing business models preclude them from being nimble. This is not about migrating work already being done somewhere else. It's about solving business problems for which no specification exists."
GROWTH IN OUTSOURCING
Globally, Big Data is used in a multitude of applications.
IBM Corp has a team of 5,000 crunching data to help oil companies find, extract and process oil more efficiently.
General Electric Co said in May it could spend up to $1.5 billion to acquire data analytics companies, aiming to mine multiple data points and find ways to extend how long gas turbines, jet engines and other heavy equipment can run without unscheduled maintenance.
In retail, the scope of Big Data is enormous. McKinsey has estimated that a retailer using Big Data to the full, including trends from social media such as Twitter and Facebook, can increase operating margins by more than 60 percent.
Healthcare, insurance, banking and other financial services are also big users.
For India's IT industry as a whole, the surge in Big Data comes at an opportune moment.
India's exports of software and IT services, which make up the outsourcing industry, should grow 11 to 14 percent to $77 billion to $79 billion in the year ending March 2013, according to Nasscom. But this is a tapering off from 20-plus percent growth a few years ago.
In addition, outsourcing and offshoring in the financial industry - about 30 percent of the total - has come under fire and will likely face stricter supervision after recent lapses involving offshore units in India.
These include accusations by the New York State banking regulator in August that Standard Chartered Plc hid $250 billion in transactions with Iran and that the entire foreign asset compliance process of its New York branch was outsourced to Chennai, India, with no evidence of any oversight or communication between the Chennai and New York offices.
In Big Data, however, while the revenue numbers are still small, the mood is upbeat.
"We think this is just the tip of the iceberg," said Rajaram at Mu Sigma. "The world is only going to change faster and faster and faster. There will be more data, more algorithms, more applications, more new technologies."

Amazon pays top dollar to buy Seattle HQ

Amazon.com Inc said on Friday it will spend over $1 billion to buy its Seattle corporate headquarters in what will be the United States' biggest commercial real estate deal so far this year for a single property.

The world's largest Internet retailer plans to buy 11 buildings in the trendy South Lake Union area, comprising 1.8 million square feet of corporate office space, for $1.16 billion from Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen's investment firm.

Based on the value of the deal, Amazon is paying the highest ever price for an office building over 100,000 square feet in Seattle at around $644 per square foot. That is more than double the average rate of $308 per square foot for the city's office space, according to Real Capital Analytics.

Amazon has been leasing the properties and it may make more economic sense for it to buy the location in the current low-interest environment and gain more control over its HQ, analysts said.Amazon expects to close the deal in the fourth quarter on the modern office buildings in South Lake Union, a former semi-industrial wasteland now known as a center for tech firms and fashionable restaurants."It's good to have control over your home office," said RJ Hottovy, an equity analyst at Morningstar.At the end of August, Allen's Vulcan Real Estate, part of his Vulcan Inc investment vehicle, put the buildings up for sale.The deal marks the United States' biggest single-asset commercial real estate transaction of 2012, according to Real Capital Analytics, which tracks such sales.Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with school friend Bill Gates, has been the central figure in the revitalization of the South Lake Union neighborhood.Amazon already has plans to build new offices nearby to house its growing staff, which total more than 50,000.Earlier this year, the e-commerce company revealed plans to build more than 3.3 million square feet of office space over the next eight years.Vulcan said on Friday that it will use some of the $1.16 billion from Amazon to continue other real estate investments, including the re-development of the remaining 30 acres of property it owns in South Lake Union.Vulcan is working on several residential and commercial projects in the neighborhood, including a 375,000 square foot project that it is developing for Amazon.

China's Huawei, ZTE should be kept from U.S. : draft Congress report

China's top telecommunications gear makers should be shut out of the U.S. market because potential Chinese state influence on them poses a security threat, the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee said in a draft of a report to be released on Monday.

U.S. intelligence must stay focused on efforts by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp to expand in the United States and tell the private sector as much as possible about the purported espionage threat, the panel leaders said, based on their 11-month investigation of the pair.

Employee-owned Huawei is the world's second-biggest maker of routers, switches and other telecommunications equipment after Sweden's Ericsson. ZTE ranks fifth.

The broadside comes as Huawei mulls a possible initial public offering, sources said, as part of a possible effort to overcome suspicions that have all but blocked its U.S. efforts, including business combinations.

Huawei spokesman William Plummer rejected the committee's allegations in a statement emailed to Reuters.

"Baseless suggestions otherwise or purporting that Huawei is somehow uniquely vulnerable to cyber mischief ignore technical and commercial realities, recklessly threaten American jobs and innovation, do nothing to protect national security, and should be exposed as dangerous political distractions from legitimate public-private initiatives to address what are global and industry-wide cyber challenges," he said.

For its part, ZTE released a copy of the letter it sent to the committee, stating it "profoundly disagrees" with the claim that it is directed or controlled by the Chinese government.

"ZTE should not be a focus of this investigation to the exclusion of the much larger Western vendors," it said.

ZTE's Hong Kong-listed shares fell as much as 3.4 percent early on Monday, lagging a 0.2 percent drop in the benchmark index. Its shares down 2.4 percent at 0229 GMT after news of the company's earlier response to the U.S. committee.

It was not immediately clear whether the blackballing would curb mobile phone sales that both companies do with customers such as Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile EVEVE.UL.

The panel's draft report faulted both companies for failing to satisfy the committee's requests for documents to allay its concerns, including detailed information about formal relationships or regulatory interaction with Chinese authorities.

U.S. companies mulling purchases from Huawei should "find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property; if you care about your consumers' privacy and you care about the national security of the United States of America," panel chairman Mike Rogers said in comments broadcast Sunday night on the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Rogers and the committee's top Democrat, C.A. Ruppersberger, have scheduled a 10 a.m. Eastern time (1400 GMT) news conference to release the final, unclassified version of their report.

"CREDIBLE ALLEGATIONS"

The panel said it had received credible allegations from unnamed industry experts and current and former Huawei employees suggesting Huawei, in particular, may be guilty of bribery and corruption, discriminatory behavior and copyright infringement.

The committee plans to refer such allegations to the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, according to the draft made available to Reuters.

"U.S. network providers and system developers are strongly encouraged to seek other vendors for their projects," it said.

The document cited what it called long-term security risks supposedly linked with the companies' equipment and services. But it did not provide detailed evidence, at least not in an unclassified version.

A classified annex provides "significantly more information adding to the committee's concerns," the draft said.

Based on classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE, which are both based in Shenzhen, China, "cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems," it said.

Huawei and ZTE are rapidly becoming "dominant global players" in the telecommunications market, which is intertwined with computerized controls for electric power grids; banking and finance systems; gas, oil and water systems and rail and shipping, the document said.

ZTE's US telecom infrastructure equipment sales last year were less than $30 million.

In contrast, two of the larger Western vendors alone had combined U.S. sales that topped $14 billion, ZTE told the committee in its September 25 letter, an apparent reference to Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks NOKI.UL and Paris-based Alcatel Lucent.

"It seems self-evident that the universe of companies examined by the Committee is so small as to omit most of the equipment actually employed in the U.S. telecom infrastructure system," the letter said.

"MEANS, OPPORTUNITY, MOTIVE"

Huawei and ZTE may not be the only companies that present a risk to U.S. infrastructure, the committee's draft report said, but they are the two largest Chinese-founded, Chinese-owned companies seeking to market critical network equipment to the United States. Beijing has the "means, opportunity and motive" to use them to its own ends, it added.

Top executives of both told a committee hearing on September 13 that their companies would never bow to a hypothetical Chinese government effort to exploit their products for espionage, equating any such move with corporate suicide.

"Huawei has not and will not jeopardize our global commercial success nor the integrity of our customers' networks for any third party, government or otherwise," senior vice president Charles Ding testified at the time.

The draft showed that the committee is calling on an interagency government group that reviews national security implications of foreign investments to block acquisitions, takeovers or mergers involving Huawei and ZTE.

In addition, it said Congress should give thorough consideration to legislation seeking to expand the role of the interagency group, known as the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, to include purchasing agreements.

U.S. intelligence officials have publicly denounced China as the world's most active perpetrator of economic espionage against the United States.

Huawei has marketed its network equipment in the United States since last year. It has sold to a range of small- to medium-sized carriers nationwide, particularly in rural areas. It has marketed mobile phones through a broader range of U.S. carriers, for the last four years.

Facebook Employees Have Lost $2 Million on Average Since IPO

Facebook's declining stock value hasn't just been bad for investors -- it has also had a significant impact on the fortunes of Facebook employees.
Facebook employees have lost an average of $2 million each since the company went public in May, not counting the executives at the company who have lost even more, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited new data from the compensation research firm Equilar. As of Friday, the average employee's stocks in the company were worth $2.5 million.

This average doesn't factor in executives at the company, some of whom lost much more. Sheryl Sandberg, the company's COO, has lost more than $700 million since the IPO. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and CEO, has lost an astounding $10.5 billion.
Facebook went public at $38 per share, but the stock quickly declined and went as low as $17.55 in early September. The stock has since rebounded slightly and closed Friday at just under $21, but it's still well below the IPO price.

To be sure, the average Facebook employee -- like the company's executives -- still has a handsome amount of money in Facebook stocks, but the larger problem is what this decline does to employee morale and talent retention. Many employees likely had dreams of selling the stock above the IPO price when the employee lockup periods expire at the end of this month. Instead, employees must either delay selling off their stock in the hopes that it rebounds, or else take a significantly lower payout -- either of which may impact their personal plans.

Zuckerberg and other executives have begun to acknowledge the employee morale problem in public and in private, reportedly holding all-hands meetings to address employee concerns about the company's falling stock price. Facebook certainly isn't the only tech company whose stock price has fallen since the IPO -- Groupon and Zynga have both seen their stocks collapse -- but if Facebook's stock continues to sag, it could distract employees, make it harder to defend against poaching and more difficult for Facebook to acquire other companies.

What's more, there is still the question of whether and when the company's stock price will return to IPO levels. Barron's recently argued that the stock is overvalued even now and should be priced at $15 a share. Last month, Facebook's own underwriters Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan cut their 12-month price targets for the stock to well below the $38 IPO price. Doug Anmuth, an analyst with JP Morgan, now has a price target of $28 for the stock.

Apple Responds to iPhone 5 Purple Haze Complaints





Shortly after the iPhone 5 was released, some users began to complain that a purple flare appeared on pictures taken with the camera whenever it was pointed toward a bright light. Now, Apple is publicly acknowledging the problem with a response posted to its support page online:

Most small cameras, including those in every generation of iPhone, may exhibit some form of flare at the edge of the frame when capturing an image with out-of-scene light sources. This can happen when a light source is positioned at an angle (usually just outside the field of view) so that it causes a reflection off the surfaces inside the camera module and onto the camera sensor. Moving the camera slightly to change the position at which the bright light is entering the lens, or shielding the lens with your hand, should minimize or eliminate the effect.

Apple suggests in the response that flares can pop up on the edge of pictures taken with any iPhone -- not just the iPhone 5 -- though as you can see in the pictures Mashable took above, it appears that only the iPhone 5 has a purple flare. In any case, the solution Apple offers for any iPhone is simply to minimize the camera's exposure to the bright light causing the flare.
This is the third big complaint Apple has been forced to address publicly about the iPhone in the past two weeks. First, users complained about the quality of Apple's maps application for iOS 6, which eventually prompted the company's CEO Tim Cook to issue an apology. Then, users complained that the new iPhone scuffs easily, which prompted the company's SVP of marketing Phil Schiller to respond, noting that it's "normal."

 

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