Technology

CB Insights:
2012 Venture Capital Funding to Facebook Mafia Up 137% vs. 2011.  Greylock is Most Active VC FB Mafia Investor So Far.  —  The Facebook Mafia isn't waiting for an IPO to strike out on their own as company alumni have already raised $271 million of venture capital funding since 2006.

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
The Google AdSense Killer And 3 Other Ways Facebook Could Make A Lot More Money  —  Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren't going to cut it.  If Facebook wants to live up to a $104 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams.  An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads …

Facebook's got it all -- 845 million users, a $104 billion valuation, blackmail-worthy pics of everyone born in the '90s, and a screen-printing studio. Yup, that's right, the social-media behemoth houses a basement art studio, the Analog Research Lab, where designers Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak churn out hand-screened posters that go up all over Facebook's 36 global offices.

An anonymous reader writes "More than 1,000 UK government staff have been caught snooping on citizen data — including criminal records, social security, and medical records. From the article: 'The U.K. government is haemorrhaging data — private and confidential citizen data — from medical records to social security details, and even criminal records, according to figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests. Just shy of 1,000 civil servants working at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), were disciplined for accessing personal social security records. The Department for Health (DoH), which operates the U.K.’s National Health Service and more importantly all U.K. medical records, saw more than 150 breaches occur over a 13-month period.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pui-Wing Tam / Wall Street Journal:
More Start-Ups Join the $1 Billion Club of Valuations  —  Pinterest Is Latest Start-Up Hitting Rich Valuation; Venture Activity Rivals Dot-Com Boom Days  —  The coveted club of Silicon Valley start-ups worth a billion dollars is quickly losing its exclusivity.

Greg Sandoval / CNET:
Simon & Schuster settles antitrust-ebook suit with state AGs  —  Simon & Schuster, one of the five major book publishers accused in multiple lawsuits of conspiring with Apple to fix e-book prices, has settled the complaint filed by numerous states' attorney generals, CNET has learned.

snydeq writes "J. Peter Bruzzese sees a solution for organizations seeking to cut down employee time spent on social networks at work: treat social networking like a smoke break. 'Try as you might to keep social networks at bay, mobile devices let people be in constant connection to their social networking vices over the cellular networks, which you can't block. Still, it's not completely impossible to stop social time-wasting over mobile: You can establish policies that, if enforced strongly enough, eliminate social networks from being accessed on company time. Treat it like smoking: Let employees take a 15-minute coffee/smoking/Facebook break and make them go to a designated area to do it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jennifer Van Grove / VentureBeat:
Facebook's rocking, all-night hackathon kicks off with standing ovation for CEO  —  On the eve of the largest technology IPO in American history, the company at the center of all the hoopla is celebrating in a geeky-chic style emblematic of its eight-year history.

Chris Ziegler / The Verge:
RIM, Motorola told Apple they could find a nano-SIM compromise: here it is  —  Eventually, the committee chairman decided to hold an informal vote by show of hands whether each of the two proposals adequately met the jamming requirement.  For the Apple design, seven voting members said it did not, 28 said it did.

NNUfergs writes "Sure, my smartphone can deliver just about any piece of information I could want in under 30 seconds, but I miss being able to just look at my wrist to get the time, date etc. I've been shopping around for a while and haven't come across anything particularly inspiring. There are loads of various features that have been incorporated into watches, but you usually only see a small, specialized set in a given watch. Budget is always a concern, but I am willing to invest in a quality time piece. In short, I'm not looking for a piece of jewelry; I'm looking for a gadget to wear on my wrist. Are there any neat, fun or just plain cool watches out there for techies? What do you have?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miyoung Kim / Reuters:
Samsung gets 9 million preorders for new Galaxy phone: report  —  (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co has received some 9 million pre-orders for its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone from more than 100 global carriers, the Korea Economic Daily reported on Friday.

Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

Here is one version of Craig Venter's life story where he would've been a dutiful scientist at the National Institutes of Health, a respected yet anonymous researcher in genetics, perhaps. Thankfully, Venter saw that story line developing—and set about making sure it never happened. Instead, in 1992 Venter left the NIH to head the nonprofit Institute ...

Chris Ziegler / The Verge:
Microsoft talks Windows Store features, Metro app sandboxing for Windows 8 developers  —  In a post today on Microsoft's Building Windows 8 blog, program manager John Hanzen took a deep dive on two topics that are set to separate the platform's Metro style apps apart from every Windows app before them: installation and permissions.

Joel Kotkin / Forbes:
The Best Cities For Tech Jobs  —  With Facebook poised to go public, the attention of the tech world, and Wall Street, is firmly focused on Silicon Valley.  Without question, the west side of San Francisco Bay is by far the most prodigious creator of hot companies and has the highest proportion …

Dylan Tweney / VentureBeat:
Kleiner Perkins closes its fifteenth venture fund with $525M  —  Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, has closed its fifteenth investment fund.  —  The company announced today that it has raised $525 million for KPCB 15 …

MikeatWired writes "The malware business growing around Google Android — now the leading smartphone operating system — is still in its infancy. Today, many of the apps built to steal money from Android users originate from Russia and China, so criminal gangs there have become cyber-trailblazers. Sophos and Symantec on Wednesday released their latest Android malware discoveries written in Russian. While the language narrows the number of potential victims, the social-engineering tactics used to get Android users to install the malware is universal. The gang tracked by Sophos is using fake antivirus scanners, while Symantec is tracking cybercriminals using mobile websites to offer bogus versions of popular games. Sophos says the criminals are like other entrepreneurs launching startups. They're starting in Russia, but have far greater ambitions. 'I don't think we can say that they're necessarily using it as a testing ground — think of it more as a local business that as it grows may gain multinational ambitions,' Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in an email interview on Wednesday. The cyber scam tracked by Sophos was reported this week by GFI Lab, which discovered links to the bogus antivirus software on Twitter. Sophos dug deeper and found that the .ru domains pointed to the same Internet protocol address hosted in Ukraine."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
Apple Receives Regulatory Approval for 20-Megawatt Solar Farm at North Carolina Data Center  —  The North Carolina Utilities Commission today officially approved (PDF) Apple's proposal to construct a 20-megawatt solar farm across the street from its data center in Maiden, North Carolina.

Lex Friedman / Macworld:
Apps using global hotkeys will remain welcome in the Mac App Store  —  Despite reports earlier Thursday suggesting that Apple would disallow Mac App Store apps from employing systemwide keyboard “hotkey” shortcuts, sources close to the matter confirm to Macworld that such apps remain welcome …

Emil Protalinski / ZDNet:
Facebook IPO: Final numbers  —  Summary: Facebook is going public on Friday.  Forget all the hype, speculation, and rumors.  Focus on the numbers, not the letters.  Here's a quick rundown of the most important and most recent ones.  —  When Facebook filed for its initial public offering (IPO), I wrote Facebook's IPO by the numbers.