Milestones in Facebook's history

Some key developments in the eight years since Facebook Inc.'s creation: 

February 2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University. 

March 2004: Facebook begins expansion to other colleges and universities. 

June 2004: Facebook moves headquarters toPalo Alto, Calif. 

September 2004: Facebook introduces the Wall, which allows people to write personal musings and other tidbits on profile pages. Lawsuit filed against Facebook claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from a company co-founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a third person at Harvard. 

September 2005: Facebook expands to include high schools. 

May 2006: Facebook introduces work networks, allowing people with a corporate email address to join. 

September 2006: Facebook begins letting anyone over 13 join. It also introduces News Feed, which collects friends' Wall posts in one place. Although that led to complaints about privacy, News Feed became one of Facebook's most popular features. 

May 2007: Facebook launches Platform, a system for letting outside programmers develop tools for sharing photos, taking quizzes and playing games. The system creates a Facebook economy and allows companies such as game maker Zynga Inc. to thrive. 

October 2007: Facebook agrees to sell a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft for $240 million and forges advertising partnership. 

November 2007: Facebook unveils its Beacon program, a feature that broadcasts people's activities on dozens of outside sites. Yet another privacy backlash led Facebook to give people more control over Beacon, before Facebook ultimately scrapped it as part of a legal settlement. 

March 2008: Facebook hires Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, snatching the savvy, high-profile executive from Google Inc. 

April 2008: Facebook Chat introduced. 

February 2009: Facebook introduces ``Like,'' allowing people to endorse other people's posts. 

June 2009: Facebook surpasses News Corp.'s Myspace as the leading online social network in the U.S. 

August 2010: Facebook launches location feature, allowing people to share where they are with their friends and strangers. 

October 2010: Release of ``The Social Network,'' a movie about Zuckerberg and the legal battles over Facebook's founding. It gets eight Academy Awards nominations and wins three. 

June 2011: Google launches rival social network called Plus. The Winklevoss twins end their legal battle over the idea behind Facebook. They had settled with Facebook for $65 million in 2008, but later sought more money. 

September 2011: Facebook introduces Timeline, a new version of the profile page. It shows highlights from a person's entire Facebook life rather than recent posts. 

November 2011: Facebook agrees to settle federal charges that it violated users' privacy by getting people to share more information than they agreed to when they signed up to the site. As part of a settlement, Facebook will allow independent auditors to review its privacy practices for two years. It also agrees to get approval from users before changing how the company handles their data. 

December 2011: Facebook completes its move to Menlo Park, Calif. Its address is 1 Hacker Way. 

January 2012: Facebook begins making Timeline mandatory. 

February 2012: Facebook files for an initial public offering of stock. A few weeks later, it unveils new advertising opportunities for brands, allowing messages from them to mix in with Facebook status updates and photos. 

April 2012: Facebook announces plans to buy the photo-sharing social network Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. It also discloses it plans to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ``FB.'' 
May 3, 2012: Facebook sets a price range of $28 to $35 for its IPO. At the high end, that could raise as much as $11.8 billion, before selling any extra stock reserved for high demand. Facebook's offering values the company at $76 billion to $95 billion, based on the expected number of Facebook shares following the IPO. 

May 7: Facebook begins its road show, where executives talk to potential investors about why they should invest in the stock. The first stop is New York. 

May 8. Road show goes to Boston. 

May 11: Facebook updates its policy to give users more clarity on how much information they share is used by the company. It's in response to an audit by data-protection authorities inIreland, where Facebook has its overseas headquarters. The company also signals that it may start showing people ads on sites other than Facebook, targeting the pitches to interests and hobbies that users express on Facebook. Road show concludes in Palo Alto, Calif. 

Tuesday: Facebook increases its price range for the IPO to $34 to $38. At the high end, the sale would raise about $12.8 billion and values the company at $104 billion. 

Wednesday: Responding to extraordinary demand, Facebook says it would add 84 million shares, worth up to $3.2 billion, to the IPO. That brings the total to 421 million shares, or $16 billion, offered by Facebook and its early investors. 

Thursday: Facebook prices its IPO at $38 per share, raising $16 billion. The company stands to reap as much as $18.4 billion if extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold too. That would be the second-largest U.S. IPO ever, lagging only Visa Inc. The offering values Facebook at about $104 billion.




Soure:TOI

Facebook CEO set to become richer than Microsoft CEO

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc (FB)'s $11.8 billion initial public offering will cement the status of 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg as one of the world's richest men and put his social network among the highest-valued companies in the US. 

Facebook is offering about 337.4 million shares for $28 to $35 each, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. At the upper end of that range, the co-founder's stake would be $17.6 billion, making him richer than Microsoft Corp's Steve Ballmer and Russian steel billionaire Vladimir Lisin, who are both twice his age, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

Zuckerberg, who began the service for Harvard classmates as a 19-year-old in his dorm room, built Facebook into the most popular social-networking site in the world, topping 900 million users last quarter. Now he has to prove he has the leadership skills to deliver enough growth to justify the company's valuation, said Paul Saffo, managing director at Discern Analytics in San Francisco. 

"The whole story about the Silicon Valley is hard-working, entrepreneurial tech geeks getting big payoffs," said Saffo, whose firm provides analytics to institutional investors. "The challenge he has is: Can Mark grow as quickly as his company has grown? And can Mark grow faster than his company has grown? Because, of course, that's what a leader must do." 

Passing MySpace 

Zuckerberg, who has developed a reputation for introducing new products quickly, helped the company supplant MySpace as the most popular social service while also navigating competitive threats from Google Inc, Twitter Inc and other social-media sites. The company has expanded its appeal by enabling developers to build applications on top of the platform, offering users music, movies, e-commerce options and other extras. 

"They stayed nimble, like a startup of a smaller size," said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Altimeter Group. "The culture encouraged them to experiment and innovate on a regular basis, even when they had the lead." 

Facebook's IPO would value the company at as much as $96 billion. It is offering 180 million of the shares, while existing owners such as Accel Partners and Digital Sky Technologies are offering 157.4 million shares, according to the filing. Zuckerberg is offering 30.2 million of his 533.8 million shares. The majority of his net proceeds will be used to pay taxes associated with exercising a stock option. 

Majority control 

He may control about 57 per cent of the voting power of Facebook's outstanding capital stock after the offering, according to the filing. 

Zuckerberg has shown patience in bringing Facebook to the brink of an IPO. After starting the company in 2004, he rolled it out to other college campuses, reaching 1 million users by the end of the year. Zuckerberg also received a key investment from Peter Thiel, who made much of his wealth as a co-founder of online-payments service PayPal, later sold to EBay Inc. 

It wasn't until 2006 that Zuckerberg opened up the service so anyone could join. Facebook accumulated 12 million users by the end of 2006. 

Zuckerberg was able to woo other investors along the way to handle the growing user base. That included software company Microsoft, Accel and Russian investor Digital Sky. 

Facebook, while preparing for the IPO, has remained active on other fronts. After being sued byYahoo Inc in March for patent infringement, the company has been looking to buy intellectual property from other owners of it. Facebook plans to spend $550 million on some of the patents Microsoft had earlier said it would purchase from AOL Inc. 

Microsoft CEO Ballmer's net worth was $15.4 billion as of yesterday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.


source :TOI

Test your anti virus is working or not

ARTICLE BY GOWTHAM

Have you ever wondered how to test your Antivirus software to ensure it’s proper working? Well here is a quick and easy way to test your antivirus. The process is called EICAR test which will work on any antivirus and was developed by European Institute of Computer Antivirus Research. This process can be used by people, companies and antivirus programmers to test the proper functioning of the antivirus/antimalware software without having to deal with the real computer virus which can cause damage to the computer. Here is a step-by-step procedure to test your antivirus.

1. Open a notepad (New Text Document.TXT) and copy the following code exactly onto it, and save the notepad.

EICAR Test code

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

2. Rename the file from New Text Document.TXT to myfile.com

3. Now run the antivirus scan on this myfile.com file.

If the antivirus is functioning properly on your computer, then it should generate a warning and immediately delete the file upon scanning. Otherwise you may have to re-install your antivirus.

NOTE: Most antivirus will pop-out a warning message in the Step-1 itself

You can also place the myfile.com file in a ZIP or RAR file and run a scan on it so as to ensure whether your antivirus can detect the test string in the compressed archive. Any antivirus when scanning this file will respond exactly as it will do for a genuine virus/malicious code. This test will cause no damage to your computer even though the antivirus will flag it as a malicious script. Hence it is the safest method to test the proper functioning of any antivirus.

Infosys posts highest employee addition in 4 years

Infosys made a gross addition of 15,352 people in the quarter.

BANGALORE: Infosys made a gross addition of 15,352 people in the quarter, and a net addition of 8,262 people, taking the total headcount to 1,41,822. The net addition was its highest quarterly addition in at least four years.

The company expressed confidence that it would meet its previous forecast of adding 45,000 people during the fiscal.

The attrition rate has fallen to 15.6% from 17.1% in the same quarter the previous year. Analysts say that this is perhaps driven by people choosing not to swap jobs in uncertain times.

The quarter reported a utilization of 77.3%, up from the preceding quarter, but lower than what it was a year ago. "The hiring number indicates that the company sees strong growth ahead despite economic uncertainty. Whether this assumption is right or wrong, we have to wait and see," said Ankur Rudra, sector analyst with Ambit Capital. 

Mobile spam texts hit 4.5bn in india

illian Brockell got so fed up with unsolicited text messages from a single spammer on her mobile phone that in a fit of frustration she called the sender back -- 20 times.

Turning the tables on the spammer in early April felt "satisfying," she said. Still, it hasn't stanched the flood.

"I don't even get that much junk mail in my Gmail account," said Brockell, a 31-year-old journalist who lives in Washington, DC. "This is my phone. It seems more personal."

The unwelcome messages that have been clogging e-mail inboxes for two decades have made the jump to handsets, as more people use smartphones in place of personal computers and texting becomes more popular. The number of US spam text messages rose 45 per cent last year to 4.5 billion messages, said Richi Jennings, an industry analyst. Spam phone calls also are proliferating. The surge is costing carriers money and frustrating users, who must pay for the messages and deal with potentially fraudulent texts.

Spammers can get phone numbers from the internet, or use software or websites to randomly generate thousands or even millions of numbers in a particular area code. Often using prepaid phones that can't be traced back to the sender, they can then use auto-dialing technology to reach recipients.

Costs for spammers are extremely low. Unlimited texting for a prepaid phone costs about $20 per month and can be used to spam millions of people. Yet for wireless customers without a texting plan, the cost of receiving constant spams can add up quickly. The typical fee is 20 cents per received text.

'Volume of abuse'
"Bad actors will go to the biggest installed base worldwide," Greg Goldfarb, a managing director at Summit Partners, which manages more than $10 billion in assets, said in an interview. "The volume of abuse that comes to people around me has increased 50 times in the last 18 months."

The spam messages can promise free Apple iPads, or claim the consumer won a $1,000 gift card at Wal-Mart Stores Inc or Best Buy Co, according to SMSWatchDog.com, which lists spam reports. Clicking on links can install malware that collects information from the phone. Responding can also authorize charges to the subscriber's mobile bill.

For wireless-service providers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, texting is an important source of profits. Still, they are concerned about the escalation of spam texts. As users contact customer-service lines to fight fraudulent text-related charges to their phone bills, carriers may be spending $5 to $50 per spam text complaint, Goldfarb said.

Federal cases
In response, carriers and the US Federal Trade Commission have brought suits against at least three large-scale spammers, including an FTC suit that was settled last year. The FTC charged the spammer with transmitting at least 5 million unsolicited text messages to promote products such as loan- modification programs and debt-relief services. According to the suit, the spammer sent out text messages at a rate of 85 per minute, 24 hours a day.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received 2,600 complaints about mobile texts, about the same number as in 2010, said Christine Todaro, an attorney with the agency. Recently, the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection created a special team to conduct investigations related to mobile issues, she said. In a lawsuit filed in March, AT&T claimed that spammers using 14 phone numbers made more than 20 million illegal phone calls to its and other carriers' subscribers.

Anti-spam software
The carriers also are collaborating on a new anti-spam effort that will be unveiled this year, said David Diggs, a vice president at wireless-industry group CTIA. They're also likely to sink billions into anti-spam and mobile-security software, said Goldfarb, whose company is ramping up investments in mobile-security companies.

"I think the market is going to be much larger than traditional e-mail security or PC security," Goldfarb said in an interview. "The mobile-security threat is far more severe," because of the greater number of devices involved, he said.

Hackers in the past had more often sought out financial transaction information, account and credit-card numbers on personal computers. Now they're searching for the same information on smartphones, whose sales exceed those of PCs.

One in five Americans used a mobile phone for banking in the 12 months ended in January, according to a Federal Reserve Board survey of almost 2,000 consumers.

"You have to follow the money, where the most sensitive data is being used," said Melissa Siems, senior director of mobile marketing at Intel Corp's McAfee unit. McAfee Mobile Security software scans applications consumers download on their smartphones to flag fraudulent ones, which might access your contacts and send them spam text messages. Last year, Google removed a number of malicious programs from its mobile app store.

Acquisition candidates
As carriers build their arsenals of anti-spam tools, it may offer a revenue opportunity for equipment suppliers including Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. The equipment makers may seek to acquire or invest in startups with mobile anti-spam technologies in the next few years, said Jeff Wilson, principal security analyst at consulting firm Infonetics Research.

One possible acquisition target is Cloudmark, a San Francisco-based startup and an investment of Summit's, which already sells mobile anti-spam software to the top four U.S. wireless carriers.

"There's an opportunity for consolidation," Wilson said. "Many companies want to have the expertise in-house. Everyone is trying to get the mobile carrier money."