Facebook isn't just popular with its 1.3 billion (and counting) users.
According to "The Facebook Effect," Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick's brilliantly-reported book about the company's founding, Facebook has also always been very popular with executives hungry for a merger or acquisition.
As early as four months after Facebook's inception, investors and executives began lining up to beg Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take their cash and sell the company. Zuckerberg turned all their offers down, but some got much closer than we ever imagined.
Here are all the times that Facebook almost sold out:
1. An unnamed NYC financier offered $10 million
Facebook, then TheFacebook.com, went live in February 2004. Just four months later and prior to any outside investment, a 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg fielded a $10 million offer from an unnamed New York financier. According to Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg never took the offer seriously.
2. Friendster
One early bidder for Facebook was Friendster, former Friendster executive Jim Scheinman told VentureBeat in 2007.
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The meeting didn't go anywhere, but the issue rose again in the fall of 2007. Google's top ad salesman, Tim Armstrong, convinced the company's board to let him pursue a deal in which Google would serve Facebook's international ads.
"The board even approved talks about buying [Facebook], if it made sense," writes Kirkpatrick. Google never got the deal, but its offer to invest in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation reshaped Mark Zuckerberg's company forever.
4. Viacom
During the Spring of 2005, Facebook (still TheFacebook) was talking to The Washington Post Company about an investment. Out of nowhere, Viacom offered $75 million to buy the company. Zuckerberg would have earned $35 million on the spot, reports Kirkpatrick.
Instead, then-Facebook president Sean Parker used the offer to haggle better terms out of the Post, which eventually got scooped on the deal by Accel Partners anyway.
Viacom refused to give up. Focus groups were telling them that MTV viewers were spending more and more time on the site. In the fall of 2005, Zuckerberg flew to New York to meet with CEO Tom Freston.
Freston pitched all kinds of synergies between MTV and Facebook. Zuckerberg wasn't interested. "It was a no-thank-you meeting," a source tells Kirkpatrick.
In early 2006, MTV boss Michael Wolf stopped by Facebook one last time. Zuckerberg told him he thought the company was worth $2 billion.
A couple of weeks later, Viacom sent Facebook a $1.5 billion offer – $800 million in cash up front, the rest via payout later.
Facebook almost sold, according to "The Facebook Effect," but it wanted a bigger upfront payment. Viacom's CFO was nervous about paying so much for a company with such small revenues. The deal fell apart. Viacom never came back.
5. MySpace
In the spring of 2005, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe visited Zuckerberg and his team to "put out feelers about possibly buying TheFacebook," Kirkpatrick reports. Zuckerberg, his -- For more information read the original article here.
One of the most fascinating things I learned after spending a week in Seoul, South Korea was how connected the country is.
There's free WiFi just about anywhere you go, even at the airport. And if you travel a lot, you know free WiFi at an airport is nearly impossible to come by.
Not only is much of Seoul blanketed in free wireless Internet, but that Internet is much, much faster than what you typically get in the U.S.
Here's a speed test I conducted at a coffee shop in Seoul using its free WiFi:
Those numbers probably don't mean much to the average person, but they're really fast. The download speed, at 47 megabits per second (Mbps), is at least 5 times faster than your typical download speed on a cable modem in the U.S. The upload speed, or the speed you transmit data, is even more impressive. It's about 50 times faster than your typical cable modem connection.
One megabit is the same as 0.125 megabytes. So that means my connection in Korea let me download at nearly 6 megabytes per second. That's fast enough to download two MP3 songs in a second.
Here's what the same test looks like using my Manhattan apartment's Time Warner Cable connection:
Those speeds on Time Warner are actually faster than average (I'm lucky to have a strong connection), and are more than good enough to handle a bunch of Netflix streaming and casual browsing. But if I want to download a large file like a full-length movie on iTunes, I'll have to wait a very long time. Meanwhile, the upload speed in my apartment is just sad. It would take forever to upload a large file like a 30-minute home movie to an online storage account like Dropbox.
According to research firm Akamai, the average download speed in the U.S. as of the end of 2013 was just under 10 Mbps. Meanwhile, South Korea boasted the fastest average speed at 22 Mbps. I got much faster speeds in Seoul, likely because it's a very modern city with great infrastructure.
The good news is average Internet speeds continue to increase in the U.S. every year, according to Akamai. But it's doing so at a slower rate than other countries. Japan, the Netherlands, and Latvia all have faster average Internet speeds than the U.S.
Disclosure: Samsung paid for a portion of this trip to South Korea for a separate series of stories about the company. It paid for the flight and some meals. Business Insider paid for lodging and all other expenses.
The U.S. Navy christens the USS Zumwalt on Saturday, a $7 billion stealth destroyer that hosts an incredible array of capabilities not seen in any other ship in the fleet.
Built by General Dynamics, the Zumwalt DDG-1000 will be the Navy's largest destroyer — replacing the aging Spruance-class destroyers that had already been decommissioned — with technology onboard for targeting submarines, defeating minefields, and obliterating shore defenses with low-altitude missiles that evade radar, artillery, and even an electromagnetic rail gun, which is currently in testing.
"The christening of the future USS Zumwalt represents the beginning of another era of service for this great name," said Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus in a statement. "Just as Admiral Elmo R. "Bud" Zumwalt helped shape our nation's Navy as the 19th chief of naval operations, DDG-1000 will help shape the future of surface combatants."
The destroyer "carries technologies that will benefit the Navy for years to come, most notably its Total Ship Computing Environment — a single, secure network that controls everything from radars to weapons," said a spokesperson for Raytheon in an email.
While the ship has a mission center — the standard "bridge" that most ships have — with state-of-the art consoles and communications equipment, the Zumwalt is unique in having secure networking that allows the ship's captain to control all manner of systems from anywhere on board.
What can it do?
The ship is basically a Swiss-army knife for missions of the future, as it's tailored for sustained operations against targets at sea or on land, support of special operations forces, and has enough power and tech on board to drop in systems the Navy is still testing — like laser weapons, rail guns, and advanced radar tracking for ballistic missiles.
It's also virtually invisible in the water. Its futuristic lines serve to maintain its stealth, as the ship would be seen on an enemy radar screen as nothing more than a small fishing boat. It also has Raytheon's Integrated Undersea Warfare sonar, a sophisticated suite of sensors for anti-submarine and torpedo defense.
Computers and automated systems also mean less crew onboard. A typical Arleigh-Burke class destroyer requires 210 sailors, but the Zumwalt requires only 130 to operate it, plus another 28 for aviation operations (the ship has a helipad large enough for two helicopters or one helicopter and a vertical takeoff drone).
If the systems onboard don't convince you of its futuristic qualities, the man in charge of the ship may do it. The skipper of the Zumwalt will be none other than a real-life Capt. James Kirk, although he's of no relation to the fictional Kirk of "Star Trek" fame.
Of course all this high-tech gear doesn't come cheap: The original cost estimate was pegged at about $3.8 billion, but that goes up to $7 billion when factoring in research and development — a problem that forced the Navy to cut its -- For more information read the original article here.
A 3D printer called The Micro, from a company called M3D, has gone absolutely nuts on Kickstarter. It has raised an astounding $2.47 million over the past four days and blew by its $50,000 target in less than 11 minutes.
This certainly isn't the first low-cost, consumer-grade 3D printer to go wild on Kickstarter. The FORM 1 raised nearly $3 million in 2012. Plus, the Buccaneer raised $1.4 million in 2013 and the the RigidBot 3D Printer raised $1.1 million in 2013, too.
So what's so special about M3D's 3D printer? M3D says it's packed a lot of innovation into a low price. While it hasn't said what it will charge consumers once it gets the printer into production, people who contributed on Kickstarter could get one for as low as a $199. There are still some available for a $299 contribution, too.
M3D is using the money to finish the prototype and set up manufacturing in the U.S., it says.
The speed at which this company got its funding is amazing.
It's the fifth-fastest Kickstarter project to date to hit a $1 million, according to researcher Statista. The Micro hit $1 million in 25 hours. That compares to game console Ouya, which hit $1 million in 8.22 hours and watch computer Pebble's 27 hours.
It's a springtime Saturday, with the weather finally warming up for a lot of folks. Sounds like the perfect day for brunch with friends, right? Wrong. Instagram is down, and it's causing a panic among aspiring food photographers. Just look at these poor lost souls.
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-- For more information read the original article here.
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