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On Monday we heard that Facebook was allowing current employees to sell a delineated portion of their common stock, something that the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Now, VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon, who also originally reported the Facebook tidbit, says that LinkedIn employees are going to have the option of doing the same. The business social network, Eldon wrote, is allowing current employees to sell 20% of their equity in the company at a $500 million valuation. That’s quite a bit lower than the billion-dollar valuation reportedly bestowed upon the company after its recent $53 million Series D funding round.

LinkedIn declined comment on the report.

For both companies, it’s probably a response to the fact that these Silicon Valley high-flyers are still independently run, with neither willing to cave to a buyout but with the likelihood of an IPO still less than concrete. According to VentureBeat, banks aren’t willing to take the companies public unless they pull in higher profits.

Facebook more or less acknowledged in its confirmation statement Tuesday that the plan is a way for employees to “sit tight” while the company works on the “growth over profits” mantra that COO Sheryl Sandberg encapsulated in a talk at the F8 Conference last month. “To provide employees with a financial cushion while we continue to build the company, Facebook has designed a one-time program to enable employees to realize some liquidity,” the statement read.

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Employees unloading stock options? It’s the hot new thing

The new player on the web publishing arena, Crowd Fusion, is building a platform “to solve the pain points of publishers at scale.” And now the company has more money to accomplish this mission, as it has closed a US$3 million Series A funding that was dominated by Velocity Interactive Group and accompanied by Greycroft Partners and an entrepreneur Marc Andreesen.

Continued here:
Web Publishing Startup, Crowd Fusion, Raises $3 Million

If you see an increase in the number of 20-somethings driving nice cars around Palo Alto any time soon, maybe this is why: VentureBeat reported Monday that Facebook is ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company’s internal valuation of $4 billion. It’s slated to start this fall. For early employees of the company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room, this could mean some legit cash.

Facebook’s valuation was reported at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last year, but the company has backtracked on that number, referring to it as a “business deal” rather than a former paper valuation. Microsoft’s stake was considered to be in “preferred stock,” whereas the $4 billion valuation refers to common stock.

The company’s actual valuation came under scrutiny in the last throes of the ConnectU vs. Facebook trial, in which plaintiff ConnectU’s founders cried foul that their erstwhile rival hadn’t disclosed its true worth during the legal process.

If VentureBeat’s report is true, this could be a sign that another way for Facebook employees to cash in their stock–an initial public offering or a sale to a big tech or media company–isn’t on the immediate horizon. It also might raise a few eyebrows: for a young corporation still abiding by a mantra of “growth over profits,” employees selling stock could seem a little bit presumptuous.

Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.

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Report: Facebook letting employees unload stock options?

A federal court ruled Thursday that a lawsuit against the executives who sold social network MySpace to News Corp. can go forward, as judge George King in the Central District of California rejected a motion to dismiss the case.

The case was brought forth by Brad Greenspan, who founded a digital-entertainment company called eUniverse in 1998. Greenspan served as CEO and chairman of the publicly traded eUniverse until late 2003, when he resigned amid financial woes that saw the company’s stock de-listed from the Nasdaq index.

While Greenspan was at the helm of eUniverse, he oversaw the creation of MySpace, but it wasn’t until after his successor, Richard Rosenblatt, had taken over that MySpace gained mass appeal. Greenspan remained a shareholder, strongly opposed MySpace’s 2005 sale to News Corp. for $580 million, and has been targeting News Corp. and the Intermix executives who sold the company with legal action since 2006.

The current class-action shareholder suit, Jim Brown vs. Brett C. Brewer et al., targets Rosenblatt, former Intermix President Brett Brewer, and venture backer VantagePoint Venture Partners as defendants (among others), with “Jim Brown” a representation of Intermix common-stock shareholders whom Greenspan claims were defrauded of billions. The real value of MySpace, Greenspan argues, was much higher than $580 million and not all of the requisite financial information was disclosed.

“It has been three years since I worked around the clock pleading with other MySpace-Intermix shareholders to vote against the sale of MySpace to News Corporation in 2005,” Greenspan said in a statement. “I knew that the value of the company was billions of dollars, however the deceptive practice of hiding MySpace financials by Intermix management robbed shareholders of their opportunity to adequately gauge the company’s value.”

Critics will likely say it’s a cry for attention and money, quasi-analogous to how they perceived the legal action that the founders of ConnectU brought against social network Facebook, claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg had stolen code and trade secrets from them. That suit appears to have finally petered out last month. As for the MySpace suit, the decision is in the judge’s hands now.

Greenspan is now at the helm of Live Universe, an entertainment holdings company that has acquired struggling dot-coms like Revver, whose troubles he blamed on policy at MySpace that blocked its ad-supported videos.

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Small victory for Brad Greenspan in ongoing MySpace spat

It’s a pity the National Security Agency can’t talk about its computational challenges, because it’s leaving a lot of the boasting rights to Google.

(Credit: Paul Ford)

In a blog posting on Friday the company shared some detail about the challenges of one aspect of its search operation, the Web indexing and processing that must take place before the results are delivered to users. The short version: Google has no choice but to think big.

First comes surfing. “We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links,” said software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj. “Even after removing…exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.”

Next comes analyzing the “link graph”–the mathematical representation of what links to what. That’s a key foundation of Google’s PageRank algorithm, which brought the company’s search engine to prominence by assigning importance to those pages that other important pages point toward.

In the early days of Google, computing PageRank for the company’s collection of a mere 26 million pages took a workstation “a couple hours,” and the results would be used for some unspecified period of time. Today, Google surfs the Web continuously and recalculates the link graph “several times per day.”

“This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections,” the engineers said.

Google likes to talk about how users have choice and competition just one click away, and that’s a fair point. But the blog post also makes it even clearer just how high barriers to entry are in the search market. That’s one of the reasons Yahoo’s BOSS (build your own search service) program is intriguing: it lets search start-ups take advantage of Yahoo’s crawling, indexing, and search technology in exchange for advertising or revenue-sharing partnerships.

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Google reveals scope of Web-crawling task