Top Google Engineer Decamps for EMI Music

From Facebook to Google, Silicon Valley frowns on flashy spending

(NEWSER) - Facebook's staff may be full of zillionaires, but don't expect Ferraris in the parking lot. Silicon Valley, where almost 14% of homes earn more than $200,000 per year, is deeply opposed to conspicuous consumption—hence Mark Zuckerberg's iconic hoodies and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's underground house. "The message here is, ‘Keep shipping product,'" an insider tells the New York Times . "If someone buys a fancy car and posts a picture of it, they get ridiculed and berated." More»

Google, Yandex lead the way, but Facebook will trounce them

(AP) - Facebook hopes to raise as much as $13.6 billion in an initial public offering of stock, probably in mid-May. It would be the largest IPO ever for an Internet company. Here are the top 10, according to Renaissance Capital, an IPO investment adviser:

1. Google: $1.67 billion, 2004
2. Yandex NV (Russian search engine), $1.3 billion, 2011
3. Infonet Services Corp (now part of BT Group PLC), $1.08 billion, 1999
4. Shanda Games, $1.04 billion, 2009
5. Zynga, $1 billion, 2011
6. Giant Interactive Group, $887 million, 2007
7. Renren, $743 million, 2011
8. Groupon, $700 million, 2011
9. Orbitz, $510 million, 2007
10. BarnesandNoble.com, $450 million, 1999

Eric Jackson says the web's top companies never seem to last

(NEWSER) - Right now, Google and Facebook seem invincible, but in five to eight years they could well be gone, argues Eric Jackson in Forbes . "Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone." After all, it's happened to loads of web giants before them. The more you look at the Internet, the more "it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born," he argues. Just look at Yahoo, now "a shell of its 2000 self." More»

Sergey Brin sees threat from governments, Hollywood, Facebook

(NEWSER) - Internet freedom is under attack, says Google's co-founder. "It's scary," Sergey Brin tells the Guardian , saying he's "more worried" than ever about "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world." Once, Brin doubted the Internet could be controlled. "I thought there was no way" for countries like China "to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle," he says. More»

Old levees need $1B upgrade to protect Facebook, Google, et al

(NEWSER) - It might just be the only thing that could take down Facebook and Google in one fell swoop: some good old-fashioned biblical flooding. As the AP explains, a chunk of Silicon Valley sits on land that used to be part of San Francisco Bay. Which is fine except for two things: Sea levels keep rising, and the levees designed to keep the water out are about a century old. More»