Social Media Check-Ins

Facebook will put in its papers to IPO next week, according to the Wall Street Journal Friday, maybe by Wednesday February 1. Apparently the timing is still a bit up in the air but it’s in the works. The offering, looking top raise $10 billion, is supposed to value the company at somewhere between $75 billion and $100 billion. Britain’s Telegraph said PrivCo claimed Thursday night that Facebook was targeting an IPO price of $38-$40 for its shares, with a target value for the company of $90 billion-$95 billion because Facebook was “reluctant to aim for the full $100 billion valuation in the hope of leaving some value for investors following the listing.” Morgan Stanley is tipped to take the company out with Goldman Sachs, which orchestrated a sloppy $1.5 billion private placement of Facebook shares a year ago, getting a piece of the action. That placement valued Face... (more)

Hotel Text Messaging App Promises to Increase Hotel Room Sales

BEDMINSTER, N.J., Jan. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- InstantRates™ is a hotel mobile app that enables travelers to get a hotel's available rooms and rates, all by sending a simple text message to a phone number. When prospective guests text a designated keyword to the hotel's InstantRates™ phone number, within seconds they receive back text messages that tell them the day's prices and which rooms are available for booking at the hotel (Click the image to the right to enlarge a screenshot). (Photo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120127/CG43460) Hotel and Text: A Powerful C... (more)

The Cost of Free

Have to agree that this writer gets it right. At the end of his blog post, he highly recommends everyone take a good look at Google's terms of service. And, that is more sense than we usually get from people writing about our data service suppliers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and more wannabes. Usually, the sermon stops before this sound piece of advice and rests its case with "OH MY, WHAT DID WE DO TO DESERVE THESE TERMS ...". The author, in this case, puts the problem closer to its source: us, the users of said personal data resellers. Yeah, right. Google does evil. Apple h... (more)

Open Mobile Wrap-Up

Not sure if any of you had the opportunity to make it out to Open Mobile Summit last week in San Francisco, but the show, per usual, was a great representation of the fragmented business models developing in the mobile industry as both content producers and traditional mobile carriers seek to fill some of the profitability gaps caused by the decline in their traditional businesses. The rise of broadband mobile data networks and highly-advanced smartphones is an industry-wide problem and requires industry-wide attention.  There is clearly a focus on this across-the-board, in many... (more)

The Recording Academy® and HITLAB Announces Grand-Prize Winner of Emerging Talent Competition

MONTREAL and SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- HITLAB Inc. ("Hitlab"), in partnership with The Recording Academy® (www.grammy.com), has announced Hamilton, Ontario-based Tara Keith as the winner of its Emerging Talent Competition following the submission of original music to the contest's Web page (www.hitlab.com/grammycontest).The competition launched Nov. 2, 2011, and was designed to provide an unsigned musician the chance to perform at an official GRAMMY® Week event. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111116/LA07792LOGO) Keith, selected by a combinati... (more)