Facebook

Facebook closes its first day of trading at just over its IPO price, the Washington Post reports.

In early trading, a Nasdaq glitch led to individual investors not knowing whether their Facebook trades had been executed, Reuters reports.

Bloomberg reports that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees to "keep hacking" amid the stock market hoopla.

Facebook's employee shareholders face a $4 billion tax bill, reports CNNMoney, and that could lead to a flood of shares on the market in the coming months.

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A group of 21 Facebook users who claim to have had their privacy violated by Facebook's online tracking are seeking $15 billion in damages, Bloomberg reports.

The suit alleges that Facebook improperly tracked the online activities of the social network's 800 million users between May 2010 and September 2011.

Attorney David Straite told Bloomberg that he was bringing a "groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications." Facebook plans to fight the case.

The news broke on the day of Facebook's rather unspectacular initial public offering, As of this writing, shares were trading at just a few cents over the IPO price of $38 per share.

As an IPO looms, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounces his U.S. citizenship, Bloomberg reports.

Apple may be ready to find its own way in the world of maps, Ars Technica reports.

Facebook offers what it says is a more transparent data use policy, in a release put out on a Friday afternoon. Read it on the Facebook Privacy blog.

Techcrunch reports that Bing's share of U.S. Internet searches ticks up over 30%, per data from Experian Hitwise.

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Facebook is changing its approach to application discovery in advance of its IPO. According to a release posted Wednesday to the social network's developers blog, the new App Center allows developers to charge for applications for the first time.

The App Center is intended to increase the number of mobile applications that operate over the social network. The pivot to a centralized commerce hub appears to be a way to begin to patch the company's acknowledged weakness in mobile revenue. Before the App Center was conceived, Facebook app developers relied on viral pass-along to build buzz for popular apps. The use of a centralized e-commerce hub represents a departure from that social discovery model.

Thus far, Facebook hasn't been able to monetize the audience of more than 26 million users of its mobile application. Analysts have made much of this risk factor in trying to assess Facebook's upcoming public offering. In its own S-1 filing with the SEC, the firm acknowledged, "We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven."

A report released Monday from online analytics firm comScore indicates that users of Facebook's mobile app are more engaged with the service, in terms of time spent, than those who access via desktop browser.

Is broadcast TV going the way of the newspaper?

Netflix hasn't overcome problems of its own, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Microsoft sold some of the patents it bought from AOL to Facebook, according to The Washington Post.

New technology aims to help elderly drivers stay on the road, Reuters reports.

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New York's attorney general is suing Sprint for $300 million, claiming the wireless carrier failed to collect and pay sales taxes since 2005, USA Today reports.

Facebook may go public on May 17, according to TechCrunch. But the company's COO makes sure she's out the door every evening on time, the Wall Street Journal blogs.

Verizon reported far fewer new mobile phone customers in the first quarter compared with a year ago, perhaps signaling a slowdown in the wireless market's growth, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Verizon is promising to put its marketing weight promoting the new Windows phone in hopes of developing a strong competitor to Apple and Google, Reuters reports.

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If controversial cybersecurity legislation is passed, Facebook said Friday, it would not share sensitive user information with government officials.

Facebook has voiced support for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which aims to encourage businesses and government agencies to share information about cyberthreats.

But the bill, which has enjoyed bipartisan support, has come under fire from civil liberties groups over concerns it could allow government surveillance. On Friday, the activist group Demand Progress said it had gathered 90,000 signatures for a petition pressing Facebook to drop its support for the bill.

Facebook executive Joel Kaplan issued a statement on Friday affirming the need for businesses to have access to government information, but said the bill's measures would be voluntary and Facebook would not share personal information.

"The concern is that companies will share sensitive personal information with the government in the name of protecting cybersecurity," Kaplan wrote. "Facebook has no intention of doing this and it is unrelated to the things we liked about [CISPA] in the first place -- the additional information it would provide us about specific cyber threats to our systems and users."

He noted that the bill's sponsors are open to changing some legislative language when the bill is considered in the House in coming weeks.

Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd. reported a record $125 million loss and a bunch of high level executives are now gone, including former chief executive Jim Balsillie, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Half of U.S. households own at least one Apple product, according to CNN.

Facebook says the number of users in Japan have doubled in the last six months, Bloomberg reports.

AT&T plans a big launch for Nokia's new Windows' based smart phone, according to The New York Times.

Mashable reports that one company has found a small crack in China's Internet firewall and its efforts to block access to Facebook and other U.S. social networking sites.

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Yahoo could lay off thousands of employees, according to Reuters.

PCs may soon take a back seat to tablet computers, The New York Times reports.

Malicious apps and texts are targeting mobile phones, USA Today reports.

Citigroup is partnering with IBM to use Watson artificial intelligence technology in banking, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Analysts say Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg may "only" be worth about $21 billion, The Washington Post reports.

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Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., who chairs the Energy and Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over consumer privacy and security issues, wants Facebook to explain how hackers penetrated the social networking site, resulting in violent and pornographic images on some users' Facebook pages.

Mack, chairwoman of the Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee, has asked Facebook for a briefing next week. She will be looking for details on how many users were affected, how the attack occurred, whether the vulnerability hackers used to penetrate Facebook could be used by others to gather personal data about users, and what the company is doing to prevent the incident from happening again, Bono Mack's spokesman Ken Johnson said Wednesday.

"The chairman is very concerned about what took place and wants to make certain - to the extent possible - that it doesn't happen again," Johnson said.

Bono Mack has been working on legislation that would set national standards for what actions companies must take to prevent and respond to data breaches involving consumer data.

Facebook explained the source of the images used in the attack. "During this spam attack users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar, causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content," Facebook said in a statement. "No user data or accounts were compromised during this attack...We've built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it."

A Facebook spokesman added that the company "looks forward" to briefing Bono Mack's subcommittee on the incident.