Facebook shares closed today at $28, up more than 16 percent this week and hitting a new high not seen since July.

Shares have been on the rise now that major lockup periods have passed and a number of analysts have improved their ratings for the stock. Facebook’s Q3 earnings showed significant growth in mobile monetization and new partnerships for Facebook Gifts — including one with Apple announced this week — are driving increased optimism.

Until this week, Facebook hadn’t traded over $25 since July 26 when the company released its second quarter earnings. That kicked off a steep decline before a period of lockup expirations drove the stock price down even further. Shares hit a low of $17.73 in early September, climbed after CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public interview with Mike Arrington, and fell back to the $19-$20 range around the time that lockups expired.

The last major lockup ended on Nov. 14. Many analysts had advised investors that Facebook stock would be volatile until after that date. Shares have done well since then, and some analysts are upping their target prices. Bernstein upgraded Facebook from “market perform” to “outperform” with a price target of $33. Piper Jaffray set a 12-month price target of $38, which was the company’s IPO price in May. BTIG Research upgraded shares from a sell rating to a neutral rating, also with a $38 price target.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today reported $1.262 billion in revenue for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2012 — a 32 percent increase from the $954 million reported in Q3 2011.

Revenue from advertising was $1.09 billion, representing 86 percent of total revenue and a 36 percent increase from the same quarter last year. Payments and other fees revenue for the third quarter was $176 million, a 13 percent increase over Q3 2011 and a 9 percent decline sequentially from the second quarter of 2012.

Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.01 billion as of Sept. 30, 2012, an increase of 26 percent year-over-year. Daily active users (DAUs) were 584 million on average for September 2012, an increase of 28 percent year-over-year. Mobile MAUs were 604 million as of Sept. 30, 2012, an increase of 61 percent year-over-year.

Facebook is leaning hard on its early progress in mobile growth and monetization. “I’m [...] really happy that over 600 million people now share and connect on Facebook every month using mobile devices,” Zuckerberg said in the earnings press release. “People who use our mobile products are more engaged, and we believe we can increase engagement even further as we continue to introduce new products and improve our platform. At the same time, we are deeply integrating monetization into our product teams in order to build a stronger, more valuable company.”

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Apple is holding its fourth quarter conference call on October 25, according to an announcement from the company. The call will take place at 2:00 P.M. PT/5:00 P.M. ET, and will provide another early glimpse into how the iPhone 5 is doing since the quarter ended in September.

You can follow the conference call live at Apple’s events site, but we’ll also be bringing you the results and a wrap-up of the call.

Already, some analysts have been making predictions about the company’s Q4 results. Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu shared numbers that see around 27 million iPhones being sold in the September quarter, for instance, buoyed by the iPhone 5. He said in the note that despite lukewarm reviews, Apple’s sales tend to be brisk quarter after quarter, and should remain so once again.

Revenues for Q3 totaled $35 billion, and Apple brought in $8.8 billion in quarterly net profit.That led to a $9.32 earnings per diluted share. Apple somewhat under-performed compared to a lot of very high analyst expectations for the quarter, but blew past its own conservative estimates.

iPhone sales that were down compared to first and second quarter numbers had a lot to do with performance coming in under Wall Street expectations. We’ll see if this time around, those sales buoy back up or remain slower overall since the iPhone 5 was only introduced late in the quarter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has added five more real-time bidding partners to its exchange program, according to AdExchanger.

Optimal, RocketFuel, Nang, Criteo and X+1 are now among 14 companies approved to run retargeting ads on Facebook after users visit external websites marked with cookies. The exchange, also known as FBX, has generated a lot of interest from advertisers since it was announced in June, but little information has come out publicly about the beta.

During Facebook’s second quarter earnings call, COO Sheryl Sandberg said FBX was still in a “very early outlook stage,” though the company was encouraged by the response so far. In fact, Facebook Exchange was a common point of conversation among many advertisers at the SES Conference in San Francisco this week. We spoke with a number of people involved with real-time bidding who hoped to become part of the program.

Although retargeting data cannot yet be combined with Facebook’s demographic and psychographic targeting options, FBX shows promise as the start of remarketing and intent-based advertising on the social network. It’s also likely that Facebook would one day allow advertisers to layer user profile data on top of cookie-based data for even more powerful remarketing campaigns.

AdRoll, AppNexus, DataXu, MediaMath, Tellapart, TheTradeDesk, Triggit, Turn and Xaxis are other demand-side platforms involved in the test. AdExchanger sources say the process for vetting and approving new partners has seemed somewhat arbitrary and often based on existing relationships. Optimal, for example, is a Preferred Marketing Developer with Ads API access. It is the only partner approved to sell ads through FBX and the API. It’s unclear how the exchange will fit into the PMD program, but AdExchanger found a new check box in the PMD directory called “FBX Through Real-Time Bidding.”

Last week we noticed Facebook was hiring a “Technical Account Manager, Facebook Exchange, PMD Program.” The position has not yet been filled.

Groupon today announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2012, its third quarterly earnings report since its initial public offering in November 2011.

Groupon’s revenue for the second quarter was $568.3 million, up 45 percent year-over-year. Revenue was up 1.6 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis, compared to the $559.3 million Groupon brought in during the first quarter of 2012. These top-line Groupon’s results were lower than analysts expected — the average of analyst expectations for Groupon’s revenue was $574.8 million.

However, the company had a stronger-than-anticipated performance at the bottom line. Groupon’s net income for the second quarter was $28.4 million, or $0.04 per share — which is a boost from the average of its Wall Street analysts’ estimates for the quarter which was $0.03 per share.

Groupon has had a rough go of it on the stock market in recent months, and it doesn’t look like today’s mixed results will give it the boost it needs. At market close today its stock was trading at $7.55 per share, a major fall from its $20/share IPO price. In after-hours trading the company slid even further — 15 minutes after the company’s earnings release hit the wire, the company’s stock was down more than 13 percent, to $6.51 per share.

Looking ahead, though, Groupon is optimistic that its quarter-over-quarter growth will pick up: The company said it expects its third quarter revenue to be between $580 million and $620 million,with income from operations expected to be between $15 million and $35 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry, deal quantity has given way to quality — or, at least, to deal size.

According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers‘ latest US technology M&A Insights report for the second quarter of 2012, M&A deal transaction volume decreased by 15 percent from the first quarter of 2012, from 65 deals in Q1 to 55 deals in Q2. But the value of cumulative transactions actually increased by eight percent quarter over quarter, to $31.8 billion.

On a year-over-year basis, the deal transaction slowdown is even more apparent: Q2 2012 showed a 35 percent decrease on a volume basis from the 85 M&A tech M&A transactions that occurred in the second quarter of 2011. But in terms of deal value, things actually have grown — Q2 2011 deal value added up to $26.8 billion, compared to the $31.8 billion that Q2 2012′s deals comprised.

This switch is because, according to PwC, “the busiest technology acquirers have switched gears to focus on integrating large acquisitions that closed in the last four quarters, and to potentially shed non-core assets in coming months.” So it seems that the M&A volume slowdown could only increase in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, tech industry IPOs saw a bit of a pullback in the second quarter of 2012 — there were 10 listings in Q2, compares to 13 listings in Q1. But despite what seems like a slowdown for tech, this was actually a glimmer of hope compared to the rest of the economy: Tech IPOs led all other industries in both volume and value during the second quarter of 2012, according to PwC.

But this IPO sluggishness may only lead to more M&A activity, according to Rob Fisher, who heads up transaction services for PwC’s U.S. technology industry segment. “The potential impact of a prolonged slowdown in IPO activity may further boost deal activity as former IPO candidates instead consider the M&A route,” he said in a statement issued by PwC along with its latest report.

In short: big companies may be getting their checkbooks ready, but public market investors may be having to wait a bit longer before they see another Facebook-esque coming out party from Internet stars.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner today addressed the company’s earlier incident of password theft, saying that it doesn’t seem to have an effect on growth.

The theft, as well as the flurry of negative publicity, may have caused some members to question the professional social network’s ability to keep their data safe. However, during today’s conference call on the company’s second quarter earnings, Weiner said “the health of our network” remains “as strong as it was prior to the incident.”

The company’s growth numbers seem to back that up. LinkedIn added 13 million new members in the past quarter, bringing the total to 174 million members. It’s also seeing an average of 106 million unique visitors each month.

Back in June, it was revealed that 6.5 million million account passwords had been stolen and published online. LinkedIn hashed and salted its database, and it disabled accounts of members who were at “greatest risk”.

The company said that none of the email addresses associated with the passwords had been published, and that it hadn’t detected any unauthorized attempts to access members’ accounts.

Weiner said the company is still working to improve its security. The company is taking a $2 to $3 million charge for the next quarter to further invest in this area.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yelp today reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2012, its second ever financial report as a publicly-traded company. Overall, the reviews site showed continued top-line revenue growth and a smaller net loss than it has posted in the past — a performance that bested the estimates of Wall Street analysts.

Yelp’s Q2 revenue was $32.7 million, up 19 percent from the previous quarter and up 67 percent year-over-year from the second quarter of 2011.

The company’s operations are not yet in the black, but the bottom line performance was better than many expected. Yelp’s Q2 net loss was $2 million, or negative 3 cents per share. That’s a big step up from the $9.8 million loss the company posted in the first quarter of 2012. It’s still more than its Q2 2011 loss of $1.2 million — however, that was notably before the company started incurring the costs associated with trading on the stock market. On an adjusted basis, Yelp’s EBITDA was $1.6 million, nearly 1.5 times more than the $649,000 in adjusted EBITDA it brought in during Q2 2011.

Analysts estimated that Yelp would have a loss of negative six cents per share during Q2 2012, so the Street may well be pleased with these results.

Also today, Yelp boosted its projection for full-year 2012 revenues: It now says it should make between $135-136 million during 2012, representing growth of 62-63 percent from 2011. Previously, the company expected it would make between $128 million to $132 million in 2012, so this is certainly a much sunnier outlook.

Here is a graph illustrating today’s earnings as compared to Yelp’s history, cooked up by TechCrunch graphic designer Bryce Durbin:

And here’s a statement from Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman:

“Yelp’s second quarter performance highlights the underlying power of our model. By focusing almost singularly on cultivating rich, authentic local content, we have created a unique platform that is rapidly becoming the de facto local search engine for connecting consumers with great local businesses.

We are now active in 90 Yelp markets around the world and are seeing an increase in our consumer engagement, especially on mobile, where their connection to local businesses is enhanced by the location-based capabilities of their mobile devices.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch is currently missing <%=Fucks%> to give to Forbes. We expect to add more into our posts in <%=deadline%>.

Responds our more serious than me co-editor Eric Eldon, ”Our disappointing F-Bomb second quarter 2012 financial results and outlook for the third quarter 2012 illustrates that our F-Bomb business continues to be in the midst of transition. Within our F-Bomb business unit, we have established early momentum with F-Bomb+, and we are increasing our investments in F-Bomb+ to achieve market success.”

I have no idea what the fuck that means because there are numbers in there. Even if I did understand what that meant, I probably wouldn’t give a fuck anyways.

Also, TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Also also, TechCrunch CrunchUp/August Capital Party. 

TechCrunch, fuck yeah.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook stock drops 11 percent – Facebook shares closed at $23.70 today, down significantly since the company’s second quarter earnings call on Thursday. The company met analysts’ expectations with $1.184 billion in revenue, but many investors are underwhelmed by the the social network’s ability to monetize its 955 million users, who are increasingly accessing the site from mobile devices.

Facebook triples spending on lobbying - Facebook spent $960,000 in lobbying from April to June of this year, up from $320,000 during the second quarter of 2011, according to The Hill. The company, which lobbies on issues related to privacy, online piracy and cybersecurity, among others, spent $650,000 in the first quarter of 2012. By comparison Google spent $3.9 million in the second quarter of this year, and more than $2 million during the same period in 2011.

Facebook expands bug bounty program – The company announced that it recently expanded its bug bounty program to better reward people who discover vulnerabilities that could compromise the integrity of Facebook user data, circumvent the privacy protections of Facebook user data or enable access to a system within Facebook’s infrastructure. The program had paid out $300,000 in bounty as of June. Ryan McGeehan, who manages Facebook’s security-incident response unit, told Bloomberg, “If there’s a million-dollar bug, we will pay it out,” said. Information about the program is available here.

Facebook adds engineering team to London office – Facebook announced that it is hiring engineers for its London office. The company has a number of offices around the world, but only Menlo Park, New York and Seattle have engineering teams. According to a note from the Facebook Engineering page, “Our team in London will start small, focusing on building a core of great engineers, and then grow over time and eventually focus on building products in key areas like mobile and platform.”

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook