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.

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.

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.

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.

Maha Ibrahim, partner at Canaan Partners, appeared on Bloomberg West to discuss what Facebook’s IPO would look like. Because the company has waited so long, she suspects that Facebook will “own the decade” when it goes public.

Ibarahim also discusses technology company valuations, the venture capital industry and the outlook for mobile devices.

What are your thoughts about Facebook’s possible IPO?

NBC and Facebook have teamed up to co-host a Republican debate Sunday night with a social media component.

The debate, moderated by Meet the Press host David Gregory, will air on NBC Sunday, Jan. 8 at 9 a.m. ET, two days before the New Hampshire primary. The debate will also be streaming live on MSNBC.com and on Facebook, allowing political junkies to tune-in online.

Users who watch online will be able to submit questions directly to candidates via a Facebook widget.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been heavily involved with a political debate, but the built-in stream and widgets are a significant evolution in Facebook’s involvement with politics.

To follow the debate Sunday, tune your TV to NBC or visit MSNBC or U.S. Politics on Facebook.

Working closely with the Facebook Timeline team, print company MOO translated their Cover Photo concept to a Business Card format by mirroring the fonts, layout and iconography of the Timeline. See image above for how your Cover Photos translate to Facebook Cards.

Each pack contains all of your Cover Photos and each card will display your name, company or college, where you live as well as your Facebook URL, phone number and e-mail address. Located on the back of the card is space for you to add your own quotation or sentence about yourself. By default MOO will pull in the first quote we find in your Favourite Quotations field but you can edit this to say whatever you like.

Once the design was set, MOO worked hard to make the build flow for these cards as simple as possible. By using the Facebook API they can prefill pretty much every detail mentioned above. All you have to do is click Next, Next, Next. It couldn’t be any easier!

To prove it, here’s a video of how to make the cards to show you just how easy it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE_o8favJoU

To make your own Facebook cards just go to your http://www.facebook.com/yourfacebookusername/info and hover over the little Business Card in your Contact Info. Timeline MUST to be enabled for this to work. Check out the image below.

Via: MOO

Think your programming skills are world class? Facebook is asking you to prove it at its second annual Hacker Cup challenge.

“Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook,” the company said in a blog post announcing this year’s competition. “Whether we’re building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at our new headquarters, we’re always hacking to find better ways to solve problems.”

Open to coders anywhere in the world, the competition pits participants against each other in five rounds of programming challenges. Starting January 20 with a 72-hour qualification round. Three more online rounds will narrow the field to reveal the final 25 competitors, who will be flown out to Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters for a final competition in March.

The winner will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Last year, over 12,000 programmers participated. Petr Mitrichev, a Google employee from Russia, took home the top prize while wearing his Google employee badge during the competition.

For more information please visit: Announcing Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup

Since the beginning of Facebook, the user profile has been the place where you tell your story. People use it to share everything from the small stuff, like their thoughts on an article, to the most important events of their lives, like the photos of their wedding or the birth of their child.

Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today.

But since the focus is on the most recent things you posted, more important stuff slips off the page. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast.

Say you’re catching up with an old friend – would you rather find out that they had eggs this morning, or hear about their new dream job?

The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click “Older Posts” at the bottom of the page. Again. And again.

Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place.

Introducing timeline – a new kind of profile

With timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff.

Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.

As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.