These days, the 29-year-old Facebook executive is winning raves from Wall Street as the social media giant courts investors in preparation for its upcoming stock offering. Cox earned his kudos for his breakout performance in a slick video shown to investors and posted on the Web.

“I didn’t know who he was. I just knew I wanted to be his friend,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said after watching the video, in which Cox passionately pitches Facebook’s product and mission. “I couldn’t even tell you what he said. I just instantly liked him.”

Facebook’s vice president of product, Cox has had that effect on people inside Facebook since he dropped out of a Stanford University graduate program in 2005 to join the tiny startup when it had fewer than 100 employees.

His hometown friends aren’t at all surprised by his rise.

“Chris somehow grasped all of what was going on a heck of a lot more than the rest of us,” said John Gaines, a friend from junior high. The teens would stay up late on weekends, interacting with the growing pool of computer users from around the world on AOL.

“I had no idea how it would play out,” Gaines recalled. “In hindsight, it seemed he could see then that it could be bigger than any of us thought. He could tell it was just the tip of the iceberg.”

Since joining Facebook, Cox has tackled some of its biggest challenges. He worked on News Feed, which fueled Facebook’s explosive growth. As a 25-year-old engineer, he was tapped to run human resources and set the tone for Facebook’s culture. He even coined the company’s mission: to make the world more open and connected.

In 2008 he became one of Facebook’s top executives, charged with helping Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg carry out his vision for the products Facebook rolls out to its 900 million users. Cox oversees hundreds of engineers, designers and product managers at the Menlo Park, Calif., company.

Executives stand to reap big dollars with the IPO, but Cox’s compensation isn’t known.

As Facebook enters the final stretch, Cox has been traveling the country with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman.

He’s as comfortable slinging shares of Facebook as he is grooving on the keyboards in an Afrobeat band.

“Chris exemplifies the heart, soul and intellect that make Facebook the profoundly impactful company that it is today,” said former Facebook executive Dave Morin, who runs mobile social networking app-maker Path.

Facebook declined to make Cox available for comment.

Cox was born in Atlanta and raised in Winnetka, the youngest of the family’s three children. His mom taught high school English and humanities at New Trier High School; his dad was an actuary and a former executive at Aon, a Chicago-based insurance brokerage and consulting firm.

Cox learned to play piano and program computers at an early age. He was a math nerd who played in New Trier’s jazz band and devoured great literary works, from the Greeks to Friedrich Nietzsche. He said he saw the world as a giant puzzle that he wanted to piece together.

“It all came very easy to him,” said his father, Daniel Cox.

Paul Sally, New Trier’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, was a math teacher when he had Cox as a sophomore in an honors precalculus class. He remembers the teen standing out from his classmates.

“As teachers, you remember a lot of your students and you remember certain things about them, and for Chris it was his focus, his creativity and his vibrant personality,” Sally said. “When I saw that he had that position at Facebook, it didn’t surprise me one bit that that’s where he ended up.”

Article source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0517-facebook-cox-20120517-91,0,5795804.story

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Technology Writer
–
2 minutes ago 

NEW YORK (AP) — Don’t try to friend MaLi Arwood on Facebook. You won’t find her there.

You won’t find Thomas Chin, either. Or Kariann Goldschmitt. Or Jake Edelstein.

More than 900 million people worldwide check their Facebook accounts at least once a month, but millions more are Facebook holdouts.

They say they don’t want Facebook. They insist they don’t need Facebook. They say they’re living life just fine without the long-forgotten acquaintances that the world’s largest social network sometimes resurrects.

They are the resisters.

“I’m absolutely in touch with everyone in my life that I want to be in touch with,” Arwood says. “I don’t need to share triviality with someone that I might have known for six months 12 years ago.”

Even without people like Arwood, Facebook is one of the biggest business success stories in history. The site had 1 million users by the end of 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg started it in his Harvard dorm room. Two years later, it had 12 million. Facebook had 500 million by summer 2010 and 901 million as of March 31, according to the company.

That staggering rise in popularity is one reason why Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering is one of the most hotly anticipated in years. The company’s shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday under the ticker symbol “FB”. Facebook is likely to have an estimated market valuation of some $100 billion, making it worth more than Kraft Foods, Ford or Disney.

Facebook still has plenty of room to grow, particularly in developing countries where people are only starting to get Internet access. As it is, about 80 percent of its users are outside U.S. and Canada.

But if Facebook is to live up to its pre-IPO hype and reward the investors who are clamoring for its stock this week, it needs to convince some of the resisters to join. Two out of every five American adults have not joined Facebook, according to a recent Associated Press-CNBC poll. Among those who are not on Facebook, a third cited a lack of interest or need.

If all those people continue to shun Facebook, the social network could become akin to a postal system that only delivers mail to houses on one side of the street. The system isn’t as useful, and people aren’t apt to spend as much time with it. That means fewer opportunities for Facebook to sell ads.

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet American Life Project, says that new communications channels — from the telephone to radio, TV and personal computers — often breed a cadre of holdouts in their early days.

“It’s disorienting because people have different relationships with others depending on the media they use,” Rainie says. “But we’ve been through this before. As each new communications media comes to prominence, there is a period of adoption.”

Len Kleinrock, 77, says Facebook is fine for his grandchildren, but it’s not for him.

“I do not want more distractions,” he says. “As it is, I am deluged with email. My friends and colleagues have ready access to me and I don’t really want another service that I would feel obliged to check into on a frequent basis.”

Kleinrock says his resistance is generational, but discomfort with technology isn’t a factor.

After all, Kleinrock is arguably the world’s first Internet user. The University of California, Los Angeles professor was part of the team that invented the Internet. His lab was where researchers gathered in 1969 to send test data between two bulky computers —the beginnings of the Arpanet network, which morphed into the Internet we know today.

“I’m having a ‘been-there, done-that’ feeling,” Kleinrock says. “There’s not a need on my part for reaching out and finding new social groups to interact with. I have trouble keeping up with those I’m involved with now.”

Thomas Chin, 35, who works at an advertising and media planning company in New York, says he may be missing out on what friends-of-friends-of-friends are doing, but he doesn’t need Facebook to connect with family and closer acquaintances.

“If we’re going to go out to do stuff, we organize it (outside) of Facebook,” he says.

Some people don’t join the social network because they don’t have a computer or Internet access, are concerned about privacy, or generally dislike Facebook. Those without a college education are less likely to be on Facebook, as are those with lower incomes. Women who choose to skip Facebook are more likely than men to cite privacy issues, while seniors are more likely than those 50-64 years old to cite computer issues, according the AP-CNBC poll.

About three-quarters of seniors are not on Facebook. By contrast, more than half of those under 35 use it every day.

The poll of 1,004 adults nationwide was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications May 3-7 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

Steve Jones, a professor who studies online culture and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says many resisters consider Facebook to be too much of a chore.

“We’ve added social networking to our lives. We haven’t added any hours to our days,” Jones says. “The decision to be online on Facebook is simultaneously a decision not to be doing something else.”

Jones says many people on Facebook try to overcome that by multitasking, but they end up splitting their attention and engaging with others online only superficially.

Arwood, 47, a restaurant manager in Chicago, says she was surprised when colleagues on an English-teaching program in rural Spain in 2010 opted to spend their breaks checking Facebook.

“I spent my time on break trying to learn more about the Spanish culture, really taking advantage of it,” she says. “I went on walks with some of the students and asked them questions.”

Kariann Goldschmitt, 32, a music professor at New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., was on Facebook not long after its founding in 2004, but she quit in 2010. In part, it was because of growing concerns about her privacy and Facebook’s ongoing encouragement of people to share more about themselves with the company, with marketers and with the world.

She says she’s been much more productive since leaving.

“I was a typical user, on it once or twice a day,” she says. “After a certain point, I sort of resented how it felt like an obligation rather than fun.”

Besides Facebook resisters and quitters, there are those who take a break. In some cases, people quit temporarily as they apply for new jobs, so that potential employers won’t stumble on photos of their wild nights out drinking. Although Facebook doesn’t make it easy to find, it offers options for both deleting and suspending accounts.

Goldschmitt says it takes effort to stay in touch with friends and relatives without Facebook. For instance, she has to make mental notes of when her friends are expecting babies, knowing that they have become so used to Facebook “that they don’t engage with us anymore.”

“I’m like, ‘Hmmm, when is nine months?’ I have to remember to contact them since they won’t remember to tell me when the baby’s born.”

Neil Robinson, 54, a government lawyer in Washington, says that when his nephew’s son was born, pictures went up on Facebook almost immediately. As a Facebook holdout, he had to wait for someone to email photos.

After years of resisting, Robinson plans to join next month, mostly because he doesn’t want to lose touch with younger relatives who choose Facebook as their primary means of communication.

But for every Robinson, there is an Edelstein, who has no desire for Facebook and prefers email and postcards.

“I prefer to keep my communications personal and targeted,” says Jake Edelstein, 41, a pharmaceutical consultant in New York. “You’re getting a message that’s written for you. Clearly someone took the time to sit down to do it.”

Associated Press Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius in Washington contributed this report.

• http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com
• http://facebook.cnbc.com

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Article source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5idQeLxuGcW2vOwexH6tFk1ALS9jw?docId=07202af42a88489ebbd1f2d8c877171d

Magalhaes captured the M-1 Light Heavyweight Championship against Viktor Nemkov at M-1 Challenge 25. In his next title defense, Magalhaes has claimed that M-1 Director of Operations Evgeni Kogan was seen publicly coaching his opponent and cheering against the promotion’s champion.

Magalhaes has made it clear that he wants out of his M-1 contract, but as a champion, M-1 has a championship clause which would enable them to match any offer made by another promotion. This has forced Magalhaes to wait out the period of the champion clause and not seek employment with any other organization.

Magalhaes announced he had placed the belt on EBay and then tweeted M-1 director Evengeni Kogan:

@Evgenikogan Hey buddy, you wanted your belt back? #placeyourbid it’s on @ebay

Shortly after the auction went live the initial starting bid of $0.99 jumped upwards to $20,000 in only a few hours. The bidding price continued to rise and after Magalhaes looked into some of the bidders, he realized that they were legit. It is being reported that a sports memorabilia dealer raised the price to $90,000 and Magalhaes closed the auction out with that winning bid. Magalhaes took to twitter to announce the sale :

SOLD!!! @ebay #winning $100k http://pic.twitter.com/nEGnAqyt

Magalhaes is a former ADCC gold medalist and finalist of the Ultimate Fighter season 8. In the finale he lost by TKO to Ryan Bader. After another UFC loss against Eliot Marshal at UFC 97 he was cut from the organization. Magalhaes has gone on to win seven of his last eight fights. Five of those fights came in M-1 global and include his light heavyweight championship win and defense.

 UPDATE: At time of publishing, Magalhaes had released another tweet that seems to indicate that the high price bidding may have not been legitimate.

So I contacted @ebay, and they informed that the last real bidder was the one who wanted to pay $5.00 . I knew that belt wasn’t worth s—!

Filed Under: MMA

Tags: Ebay, Evgeni Kogan, featured, M-1 Global, Mixed Martial-Arts, Vinny Magalhaes

Article source: http://prommanow.com/2012/05/16/vinny-magalhaes-sells-m-1-light-heavyweight-belt-on-ebay/

Would the term “Anglophile” be a grotesque understatement in describing your devotion to all things British? Have you daydreamed about wearing corsets and frilly dresses while being waited on in Buckingham Palace? Well, now you can buy yourself a piece of the Royal dream—a pair of Queen Elizabeth II’s very own silk underwear is apparently up for sale on eBay.

Don’t click ‘bid’ just yet — the frilly bloomers have not been confirmed as authentic, the Daily Beast takes pains to report. They are being sold by the estate of the Hungarian-born, Miami-based Baron Joseph “Sepy” de Bicske Dobronyi, who died in 2010 — an “aristocrat, art collector, world traveler, movie maker, pilot, wine collector, sportsman, playboy, and bon vivant,” according to his profile on the not-always-reliable Wikipedia.

(PHOTOS: Diamond Jubilee: 60 Years of Queen Elizabeth II)

TMZ reports that before Dobronyi came into possession of the underwear when they were left on a private plane after the Queen’s visit to Chile in 1968; the pilot, a friend of Dobronyi’s, gave them to him. A rep for Dobronyi told TMZ that a deal to auction off the piece with British auction house Hansons Auctioneers was taking too long, so the estate went ahead and put it up on eBay themselves.

However, they do warn:

“Since Buckingham Palace or the garment maker have not confirm or deny the authenticity that this pair of underpants are from Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, the estate cannot confirm its provenance and it is the buyer’s responsibility to do that on their own before bidding. In either case this is an excellent example of a vintage undergarment of that era and very collectable.”

So, if you want a pair of 44-year-old embroidered panties, with a monogram of the royal crown and the initial “E” stitched on it, you know where to go. Current bid is at $5,810.00 with five days left.

MORE: Edvard Munch’s The Scream Sells For a Record $120 Million at Auction

Article source: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/17/queen-elizabeth-iis-underwear-for-sale-on-ebay/

LONDON (Dow Jones)–The cost of insuring Spanish debt against default was higher in early trading Thursday ahead of the Spanish bond auction, but off the record wide seen on Wednesday.

At around 0730 GMT, five-year credit default swaps on Spain were three basis points wider at 541 basis points, according to data-provider Markit. This was nine basis …

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120517-702454.html

When Facebook completes its initial public offering this week, Microsoft certainly will benefit financially.

At the high end, Facebook could be valued at up to $104 billion, which means Microsoft could see its original investment in Facebook grow in value from $240 million to up to $1.6 billion.

Microsoft, which now has a 1.8 percent stake in Facebook, is also planning to offer 6.6 million of its 33 million shares in the IPO. If valued at the high-end estimate of $38 per share, that means Microsoft would make some $250 million.

Not bad for what was a relatively small investment, for Microsoft, back in 2007.

But probably more important to Microsoft than the money is the partnership the two companies have built over the past six years. They’ve made mutually beneficial moves in the fight against their common competitor, Google.

“Facebook has been really valuable as a way for Microsoft to reach customers it couldn’t get to otherwise,” said Rob Helm, an analyst at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. “It’s an asset for Microsoft’s business products as well.”

The relationship between the two companies started with a 2006 deal in which Microsoft would sell banner advertising and sponsored links on Facebook. The two companies also agreed to work together on future technology initiatives.

Then, in 2007, Facebook accepted Microsoft’s offer of $240 million to buy a 1.6 percent stake, reportedly choosing it over competing offers from Google and Yahoo.

That year, the partners expanded their advertising relationship, with Microsoft selling banner ads for Facebook overseas.

In 2010, Microsoft and Facebook announced a partnership to build social search in Bing. Since then, Microsoft has added Facebook features to Bing, including indicating when websites in search results are “liked” by the searcher’s Facebook friends, indicating which pages within popular websites are “liked” by friends, and allowing users to link websites related to them in Bing search results.

In addition, Skype, a division of Microsoft since October, last year started allowing its users to conduct video chats with Facebook friends both on Skype and on Facebook.

Facebook, and other social networks, are also deeply integrated into Windows Phone.

Last month, Microsoft sold 650 patents that it had bought from AOL, along with rights to 275 more, to Facebook, a move thought to benefit Facebook in its patent battle with Yahoo, and to be boon for both Facebook and Microsoft in their fight against Google.

And last week, Microsoft announced its biggest-ever overhaul of Bing, which is slowly making inroads on the dominant Google. A major part of that overhaul? Facebook, one of several social-media networks whose content will be included in one of three columns in Bing’s revamped search results page. (Google does not have Facebook data in its search results page, although it does include content from Google+, its own social-networking site.)

“Microsoft deserves some credit for recognizing pretty early on how important Facebook would be and maintaining that partnership for a long time,” said Helm, the Directions on Microsoft analyst. “Business partnerships are like mayflies. This one has held up really well.”

What makes Facebook such an enticing partner, Helm said, is that there are so many Facebook users out of reach to Google, Microsoft and others because certain privacy settings can make Facebook user information invisible on the public web.

Being able to get behind that Facebook “wall” to reach those users — either for advertising or to engage them in trying products — is what makes such a partnership so alluring.

There are also more subtle ways that the partnership has benefitted Microsoft, Helm says, citing technologies that Facebook has pioneered that are finding their way into Microsoft’s business offerings.

For instance, although SharePoint, Microsoft’s collaboration software for businesses, doesn’t include Facebook itself, it has Facebook-like features, including activity feeds and status updates for co-workers.

“This is speculation but I think it’s likely, in the future, there might be closer links,” Helm said.

Though the two companies have had a close partnership so far, Microsoft — and other Facebook partners — may have to pay even more attention to what Facebook says once it goes public.

“Once Facebook has a $96 billion capitalization or whatever,” Helm said, “it’s going to be in a different weight class in terms of how it deals with all of its partners.”

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com.

Article source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2018224977_microsoftfacebook17.html

Can’t
imagine why! I mean, it’s not as if Facebook is a company that would–time and again–get you to share more data than you realize
you’re sharing. And it’s not as if the company is run by a guy who in 2004 used private Facebook login data to hack into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson
staffers and read their emails. And it’s not as if this same guy would hack into a rival website and change user profiles and user privacy settings.

But you know what? If you’re thinking about buying into this week’s Facebook IPO, the various transgressions and missteps of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
don’t really matter. Facebook has a magical property that insulates it from user discontent. It’s a property that other big tech companies–Microsoft, Google,
Apple–don’t have nearly as much of. And it’s the reason I think Facebook is a better long-term bet for investors than any of these companies.

The magical property is “positive network externalities.”

Positive network externalities exist when, the more people who use a product, the more valuable
it is. Operating systems, for example, have positive network externalities. Once tons of people use Windows or iOS or Android, there are tons of apps for the
operating system, and that makes it more attractive.

But nothing has positive network externalities quite like, well, a network. With a network like
Facebook, the whole point of using the product is that other people are using it. So a network with Facebook’s level of market penetration is
really, really attractive–so attractive that it’s almost impossible to imagine an alternative arising.

Go ahead: Try to imagine someone starting a rival to Facebook. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. Google tried that in 2011 when it created
Google Plus. Google Plus is in many ways a great product–so great that Facebook copied some of its features. But the one thing Google Plus doesn’t have is
something Facebook does have: Just about anyone you’d want to network with is already on the network.

And so long as Facebook has this, how could any other network get it? Thanks to positive network externalities, any upstart rival is inherently so
unattractive, compared to Facebook, that it can never lure many Facebook users to jump ship and so can never become significantly more attractive. It’s a
chicken and egg thing, except way more so than just about anything else we say that about.

So for Facebook users, there’s really no way out–which is why Zuckerberg and Facebook would have to behave much more atrociously than usual for customer
blowback to become a serious problem.

Compare this to Google’s situation with search: If people don’t like changes in Google’s interface, or get queasy about Google’s privacy policies,
there’s nothing to keep them from switching, one by one, to a rival search engine until Google loses its dominance.

I suppose it’s possible to imagine established networks that occupy different niches from Facebook’s–Twitter, LinkedIn–adding so many dimensions to
their platforms that eventually these networks morph into Facebook rivals. But even then, I think they’d have to catch additional lucky breaks–say, Mark Zuckerberg
lapsing into a year-long coma, or deciding that, on second thought, world domination isn’t nearly as worthwhile as monastic contemplation.

No sign of that happening so far. Here is Zuckerberg’s current aspiration: “I
think that we’re going to reach this point where almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way. We make decisions at
Facebook not optimizing for what is going to happen in the next year, but what’s going to set us up for this world where every product experience you have
is social, and that’s all powered by Facebook.”

There is serious talk about Facebook eventually supplanting email and the World Wide Web as the fabric of cyberspace–becoming the basic medium through which
most people on the planet reach out and virtually touch other people in increasingly subtle and lifelike ways. When you realize that every
year people live more and more of their lives in cyberspace, that prospect starts to seem pretty awesome–or awful, depending on your view of Zuckerberg and
of Facebook.

But here’s the thing about your view of Zuckerberg and Facebook: Neither Zuckerberg nor Facebook has reason to lose much sleep over it.

Article source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/why-facebook-is-a-better-bet-than-google-was/257314/