Finance Matters

Posts Tagged ‘surprise’

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that most of the stock sold on secondary markets for private companies comes from ex-employees — though we couldn’t really prove that.

But, now we can. At least, according to SecondMarket, a secondary market for shares of private companies. It just released a whole load of statistics about trading of private company shares in 2011.

SecondMarket handled about $600 million in transactions last year across nearly 15,000 accredited investors.

Coming as a surprise to absolutely no one, Facebook was the most demanded private share on SecondMarket, followed by Twitter and FourSquare.

Here’s a list of some of the other highlights the company saw in its 2011 trading year:

The most demand was for consumer web and social media products — not a big surprise.

Here’s another way of looking at it — a GIANT portion of the second market trades were for consumer web and social media shares.

Most of those shares came from ex-employees. Only a little more than 10% came from existing employees, and very few of those shares were sold by investors.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Google has put a black censorship bar over the log on its home page to protest SOPA, the proposed anti-piracy law that many prominent techies say would censor the web unfairly.

Here’s what it looks like:

Yesterday, Google said it would put up a link guiding users to find out more about SOPA — it did, and here’s where that link leads — but the black bar is a surprise. It should definitely draw attention.

Other prominent sites that changed right at midnight ET include Craigslist:

Wikipedia:

And WordPress, which did this:

A bunch of other sites are planning to go dark or change their sites during the day tomorrow, including Cheezburger network, Mozilla, and TwitPic.

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The man leading Apple’s expected push into textbooks is Roger Rosner, the head of Apple’s iWork group.

He’s not a very familiar name.

The Wall Street Journal, which reported the news earlier this afternoon, says that Rosner showed up on stage at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference last year to demonstrate iCloud.

But he isn’t one of the big names who shows up on stage at every Apple event like Scott Forstall or Eddy Cue, and he didn’t even make our list of secret Apple execs you’ve never heard of.

Rosner and Cue are expected on stage in New York on Thursday to announce the new push.

The announcement is expected to include tools that developers can use to create new textbooks, rather than for reading existing ones.

Don’t miss: Why Apple Will Have A Hard Time Revolutionizing The Textbook Business.

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Donald Trump is never one to take the high road so perhaps it’s not a surprise that shortly after Michele Bachmann ended her campaign for the GOP nomination Trump tweeted this:

Indeed, it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that Bachmann’s decision to not do Trump’s ridiculous, trumped up (forgive the pun), entirely self-serving debate was what did her in at the polls and not the myriad of other reasons that have plagued her entire campaign and encouraged voters to conclude she was unelectable. 

Presumably this means Trump is also taking credit for Santorum’s victory?  You will recall only Santorum and Gingrich were the only two candidates to agree to appear in the debate before it was canceled.  Alas, Trump does not provide and explanation for Romney.

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Thought people were tired of the Kardashians?

Think again.

In a Q&A with Reuters’ Tim Molloy, E! President Suzanne Kolb viewers are tuning in to the network’s all things Kardashian programming for one reason:

I think there’s something emotionally aspirational around that family dynamic and visually aspirational about the way that family lives…

From every piece of research I’ve seen, people aspire to be them or to befriend them.

We were guessing it was more about watching how that 72-day marriage fell apart.

With much of the programming being marathon re-runs of the family’s shows, it’s no surprise that Kolb admits the network never seriously considered canceling any of the Kardashian shows, despite the backlash that followed word of Kim’s divorce earlier this year.

But!

For those of you who can’t take it anymore, there’s a chance you’ll be watching less of them soon — E! plans to develop and pilot original scripted programming next year.

Click here to read the rest of Kolb’s interview>>

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