At long last, the Holy Grail of Internet IPOs is here. Facebook filed Wednesday to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering.

In 2011, Facebook earned $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. As of December 31, Facebook had 845 million daily active users.

The company crossed the line into profitability in 2009, five years after it launched in founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. Facebook earned $229 million that year on sales of $777 million, and has remained profitable ever since. Advertising accounted for 85% of Facebook’s 2011 revenue, or almost $3.2 billion.

Facebook’s other revenue stream is its payment system for purchases within apps and games: Facebook Credits. Facebook keeps 30% of the revenue from those payments, and passes the remaining 70% on to the app developer. Those fees brought in $557 million for Facebook last year.

Revenue from Zynga, which makes FarmVille and other games played on Facebook, represented 12% of Facebook’s total revenue in 2011.

Another choice tidbit: In 2011, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg raked in a $500,000 base salary. But he requested — and will receive — only $1 per year in salary starting January 1, 2013.

Don’t feel too bad for Zuck, who remains the largest shareholder in the company he created. His total compensation in 2011 came to $1.48 million, according to Facebook’s calculations.

He was one of the lowest-paid among Facebook’s executive ranks. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg topped the list with a total package Facebook estimated at $30.9 million, almost all of it in stock.

Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer made an estimated $24.7 million — again, mostly in stock — while CFO David Ebersman collected an $18.7 million pay package.

It’s not yet known on which stock exchange Facebook will trade, through it said it plans to use the ticker symbol “FB.”
Facebook will likely re-file its paperwork several times over the coming months. Those updates will add more details and could even restate some of the financial information detailed in Wednesday’s filing.

How much Facebook is worth: In this initial paperwork, companies don’t declare how many shares they’re going to sell, or how much those shares will cost. Those details will be added in an updated filing shortly before trading begins.

Without that share price information, Facebook’s valuation is still speculative.

Facebook has its own guesses, though. The company said it conducted its own valuation of its stock at the end of each quarter, and as of December 31 determined it to be worth $29.73 a share.

Trading won’t begin for several months, as Facebook now has to field questions from regulators and court investors for its stock sale.

Most analysts estimate Facebook’s valuation will fall somewhere between $85 billion to $100 billion. But the value of Web companies can be extremely volatile.

A recent example: Zynga (ZNGA). The FarmVille maker’s IPO filing reported that it valued its shares in August 2011 at $17.20 each, which gave the company a valuation of $14 billion. But when Zynga went public in December, shares sold for just $10 — valuing the company at $7 billion.

Several other Internet companies made their public debuts in 2011, but the end of the year proved to be a turbulent time for the sector. Shares of Groupon (GRPN), Pandora (P), Zillow (Z), LinkedIn (LNKD) and Angie’s List (ANGI) all suffered steep double-digit losses for November, though most clawed back at least a bit in December or January.

With Facebook, it’s not a question of if it files for an IPO, but when. Rumours have been flying since the middle of 2011, a new report from AllThingsD suggests the social network is aiming to go public in the third week of May.

Faceboook is said that they will submit its S-1 filing within the next month, taking into account that the “Securities and Exchange Commission usually takes about three to four months”.

Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg stated a few weeks ago to the report that the company’s IPO was “inevitable” and said that it was “a process that all companies go through”.

Facebook is expected to hit 1 billion users by the Summer. The company’s impending IPO is likely to spark the next crop of angel investors, becoming one of the biggest Web offerings ever.

Could this spark another Dot.com boom?

Facebook has scheduled a press-only event for next Wednesday evening (January 18, 2012), without offering any hints what-so-ever about any announcement.

The invite-only event is taking place at the restaurant 25 Lusk in San Francisco. With the lack of detail on the invite, this makes us think it could be an announcement related to a completed financial transaction. Announcing something beforehand would break U.S. laws.

We would like to hear your thoughts. Feel free to comment below!

The Delhi High Court has ordered Facebook India to implement a way to remove objectionable content or the sites will face a blackout.

Justice Suresh Kait warned that if the social network cannot monitor their content, India will follow China’s censorship lead.

“Like China, we will block all such websites,” Kait said Thursday.

But if Facebook begins to moderate content, it will be the same as if they had written it. Once the Internet heavyweights begin to interfere, they become legally responsible for content under the Indian Information Technology Act.

What are your thoughts about Internet companies coming up with a way to sort content to appease the Indian court, and more importantly what do you think the Indian Government accomplishes by blocking Facebook?

Based on the social network’s recent growth, UK digital marketing firm iCrossing is projecting that Facebook will pass the significant milestone of one billion users this August.

It’s been known that Facebook has seen a slow down in new user registrations in Western markets, like the United States, where it’s coming close to saturation point amongst Internet users, but developing markets are picking up the slack and pushing it towards the landmark.

iCrossing’s projections are based on a process of linear regression on Facebook user numbers from the end of 2008 onwards. Their estimates predict that Facebook currently has around 850 million active users, will reach 900 million by the end of March and eventually the one billion milestone by the end of August.

There are a couple of big moments coming up for Facebook in 2012, and while details of its IPO are still unknown, we can set our clocks for August. Facebook has pioneered a change in online communication and who is to say where it will go in the next five years, let alone the preceding twelve months.

Facebook just announced a new Listen With button in Facebook Chat. The button allows you listen to music with friends. Expect to see this new feature to start rolling out in the upcoming weeks.

Now you will be able to listen along with any of your friends who are currently listening to music. The same song at the exact same time. You can also listen in a group, so long as one of your friends is the “designated DJ.”

So how does it work? First you will need to look for a music note beside your friends’ name while using Facebook Chat. If you see that another friend listening to music, you can also listen in by hovering over their name, and clicking the Listen With button. The music will stream through the service your friend is using.

We think this is a great move on Facebook’s part. Everyone likes to listen to music with their friends. With the new service this means you can do so even when you’re not with them: be that at work, at home, or out and about.

“Music is one of the most powerful and fun ways to connect. Whether it’s at a concert with a bunch of people or on a long car ride with your best buddy, we love listening to music with our friends. But what if you could listen to music with your friends when you’re alone, like at work, at home or on the go?”

Check out the Facebook Blog for more information.

Facebook has just announced the launched of the Comments Box plugin for mobile. This means that websites can engage their readers on mobile devices, while users can comment on news regardless of what device they’re reading it on.

If your website already is using embedded the Facebook Comments Box, the plugin will automatically appear on the mobile web version of your website. Below is the official details form Facebook Developers:

The mobile version will automatically show up when a mobile device user agent is detected. You can turn this behavior off by setting the mobile parameter to false. Please note: the mobile version ignores the width parameter, and instead has a fluid width of 100% in order to resize well in portrait/landscape switching situations. You may need to adjust your CSS for your mobile site to take advantage of this behavior. If preferred, you can still control the width via a container element.

For more information head on over to the Facebook Developers Comments Docs Page.

A federal court judge has fined Paul Ceglia $5,000 for failing to fully comply with an order to turn over his email information in his case against Facebook. Ceglia was also ordered to pay some of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s legal fees.

The sanctions are a setback for Ceglia’s claim in U.S. District Court that a 2003 contract he and Mark Zuckerberg signed entitles him to half ownership of the social networking site estimated to be worth more than $50 billion.

Ceglia’s lawyer says his client will pay the penalties.

Facebook Attorney Orin Snyder said the company will file a motion to dismiss Ceglia’s suit, claiming that Ceglia’s contract is fake.

Facebook has begun a roll-out of ads to the news feed today, but the units are not called Sponsored Stories – as some anticipated. Instead, they will labeled “Featured” to distinguish them from earned media messaging that users sometimes see.

Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, explains the terminology.

“Since people can see marketing messages from both Pages they have and have not Liked elsewhere on Facebook, we want to make it clear that marketers can only pay for stories to be featured in your News Feed if you have explicitly liked the Page,” Ta said. “And because you are always connected to your friends, we are also labeling stories from your friends that have been paid to be featured in your News Feed as ‘featured’ to keep things consistent.”

You can see an example of the new Ads above. For the above ad to appear in your News Feed, two things need to happen. First, you must have already Liked the Ben & Jerry’s Facebook Page, or one of your friends must have interacted with the Ben & Jerry’s Page. Second, Ben & Jerry must have chosen to have the ad promoted to users who have Liked its Page.

Facebook has updated its Help Center with information about the new featured stories. Facebook also lets users know they can click “hide” to remove individual stories, limit the volume of stories by subscribing to “only important posts” or unfriend the person or unlike the page that generated the story.

Mercedes-Benz USA is bringing Facebook to its cars, with a special version of the service that is built-in to a new in-vehicle telematics system called mbrace2. The service will be introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.

The version of Facebook to be offered in your MY2013 Mercedes will be stripped down to a limited set of features, specially designed for drivers and centered around the locations of businesses and friends.

Facebook VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing Dan Rose, said that the Mercedes version of Facebook reflects the company’s expansion to a growing list of settings where screens and Internet connections are available.

“Now that cars have screens that are intelligent, you would expect that more and more car manufacturers will want to make those screens capable of allowing people to connect with their friends and take advantage of the social context that comes along with that,”

Rose noted that Facebook is also increasingly being integrated into televisions. DirectTV will unveil a new social TV app with Facebook capabilities at CES, allowing people to share what they are watching and to add commentary. But unlike the TV platforms, offering Facebook in motor vehicles will involve many safety considerations.

“One of the core things that people do on their screens in the car is GPS navigation and the ability to see which of your friends are nearby is something we think will be really interesting for people.”

If a particular destination is already included then the driver can automatically publish a Facebook posting stating he/she is on his/her way to that destination. Drivers can also an estimated time of arrival, based on the current traffic patterns.

Drivers are also enabled to access a list of friends that are near the destination or gather information about restaurants in the area that their friends have “liked” on Facebook.

The Mercedes Facebook offering is the result of a collaboration between the two companies that started about six months ago. Facebook is one of several specially designed apps, including Google Inc and Yelp, that Mercedes drivers can flip between by turning a knob. The apps are part of Mercedes new mbrace2 system, which features a high-resolution color screen near the dashboard and a high-speed wireless Internet connection.

We can expect to see the mbrace2 system with the launch of the 2013 SL-Class Mercedes this spring, and the company intends to make it a standard feature on all future Mercedes 2013 models.