Facebook Helps Nab Real-World Thief

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»

She kept $2,300 after it fell out of another customer's pocket

(NEWSER) - Finder, keepers does not apply here. Police nabbed a Philadelphia woman who picked up $2,300 in cash off the floor in a convenience store and kept it. The problem, police say, is that she knew it fell out of the pocket of the customer in front of her and thus had a legal responsibility to return it. Instead, the 28-year-old quickly left the store with the loot, as surveillance video shows, and now faces misdemeanor charges of theft and receiving stolen property. (See the surveillance video at NBC10 in Philadelphia .) More»

Kentucky man Michael Baker busted after sharing photo

(NEWSER) - How to go jail in two easy steps: 1. Siphon gas from a police car. 2. Post a photo of yourself siphoning gas from a police car on Facebook. Kentucky man Michael Baker, 20, was arrested and charged with theft after cops got wind of the photo he had shared, which also captures him flipping the bird, the Smoking Gun reports. "Just got out of jail," he later told his 380 friends. He eloquently added, "yea lol i went too jail over facebook." Further up the criminal scale, people have been arrested for hiring a hit man and for boasting about a bank robbery on Facebook. More»