investing

Updated 3:50 p.m. PDT: It's official: Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook during its next round of financing, valuing the company at a whopping $15 billion.

News.com's Ina Fried in her Beyond Binary blog reported earlier Wednesday that Microsoft had beaten out Google in the high-stakes bidding war for the slice of tasty Facebook cake. The final deal resulted in a 1.6 percent stake in the social-networking company, notably smaller than the 5 to 10 percent that had been talked about in recent weeks.

"We are pleased to take … Read more

Looks like every social-media-obsessed blogger's predictions have been correct: the Facebook news just won't stop flowing out of Palo Alto, Calif. And it's still coming.

On Wednesday morning, some inconvenient blogger leaks led the company to admit that it will be making a major, advertising-related announcement in New York on November 6. Then, at the CTIA Wireless conference, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz not only announced a BlackBerry-friendly version of Facebook's mobile platform, he also said that developers using the Facebook Platform are now welcome to extend their applications to the mobile realm.

Now, some dirt-digging by … Read more

NISKAYUNA, New York--General Electric will spend $1 billion in research and development this year on clean energy technologies, part of its Ecomagination environmental initiative.

The industrial giant announced the investment on Tuesday at its Global Research center here, where it also said that it will put $6.8 million of that into plug-in hybrid vehicles as part of a U.S. Department of Energy project.

The company hosted a day-long presentation at its labs to showcase technology developments in solar electricity, plug-in hybrid components, water desalination, high-efficiency lighting and home energy dashboards, and materials for wind turbines and aviation.

GE … Read more

Investors are betting clean technologies are good for their pocket books. The economic potential of the clean industries is not lost on policymakers either.

On Monday, two Boston-based lobbying organizations--Clean Energy Council and the New England Energy Innovation Collaborative--announced that have merged, creating the New England Clean Energy Council.

The goal of the group is to provide a more unified and louder voice to policymakers as they look to encourage development of clean energy companies, organizers say.

New England is one of several areas vying to create a vibrant clean tech "cluster" of companies. Silicon Valley is already … Read more

Oliver Alexy of Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) Business School has written an interesting paper titled "Putting a Value on Openness: The Effect of Product Source Code Releases on the Market Value of Firms." The research traces the impact of open source on company market valuations from January 1, 1999, to April 30, 2007. The research is hampered somewhat by a lack of private-company data, but it still offers up some useful conclusions.

Alexy tracks open source through the pre-bubble era (mostly hype leading to outsized but highly transitory investor returns) to today, where open source is becoming the de facto way of building software businesses. You can see the rise, then fall, and subsequent rise in the graphic at right.

Along the way, he suggests, investors have grown wiser as to what kind of open-source business models make sense.

Intriguingly, the early bible for would-be open-source capitalists (Martin Fink's The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source) turns out to have offered up mostly wrong advice, so far as investment returns go. Using open source as a competitive weapon to batter competitors yields paltry returns, according to Alexy:… Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The legendary Internet technologist Bill Joy has found a better place than the Internet to put his venture capital dollars: green technology.

On Monday Joy gave a talk on why he is exploring a wide range of green technologies as a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. He spoke at the Lux Research conference on nanotechnology where he also predicted major changes in transportation industry and solar energy.

Joy, credited with inventing several Internet technologies as a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, joined the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm in 2005.

According to an e-mail copied to the CenterNetworks blog, Facebook's much-touted developer grant program may be off to a rocky start. The FBFund initiative is apparently restructuring its application process and is asking that all previous applicants re-submit their materials. Initially, applications were to be submitted via e-mail; now, a submission form is available.

"To make sure that everyone understands the conditions of submitting a grant application, we will not review any materials you have sent via email, and any materials you may have sent have been deleted," the copy-pasted e-mail read. It's apparently to ensure … Read more

This story has been updated with further commentary pertaining to Microsoft's strategic interest in Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is in talks to acquire a stake of up to 5 percent of social-networking wunderkind Facebook.

Discussions over such an agreement with the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company are still preliminary, the story by Robert A. Guth, Kevin J. Delaney and Vauhini Vara notes, but if such a deal goes through, the much-hyped Facebook could be valued at up to $10 billion as it heads toward a long-rumored initial public offering. Both companies denied requests to comment to … Read more

Because opening up the site just wasn't enough, apparently: Facebook is branching into a new role as an investor. The company has announced a new program called FBFund to provide grants to developers who are interested in creating applications for the Facebook Platform. FBFund, with cash infused by Facebook investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, will start with $10 million and will provide $25,000-$250,000 grants to developers who apply for the program. The fund's investment committee will consist of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, vice president of product marketing and operations Charmath Palihapitaya, and board … Read more