investor

Apple's shares are trading lower this morning as investors start to come to grips with the news of Steve Jobs taking his second medical leave of absence in two years.

An hour and a half into morning activity on the Nasdaq exchange, Apple shares were down approximately $13 to just over $335 per share, representing a nearly 4 percent slide.

Apple released word of Jobs' medical leave early yesterday on the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., meaning that the stock market was closed. That extra day to process the news likely softened the reaction on Wall Street … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Few in Silicon Valley had heard of Russian investor Yuri Milner when, in spring 2009, his investment firm Digital Sky Technologies bought a $200 million stake in Facebook and announced plans to buy more through employee stock buybacks.

Now, with stakes in Zynga and Groupon as well as the acquisition of the ICQ messaging client from AOL, Digital Sky Technologies and its sister company Mail.ru have become impossible to ignore in the industry. DST's stake in Facebook is rumored to approach 10 percent. The firm has itself gone public. It's pioneered a new kind of investment … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The offices of Path float 40 stories above the city in one of the upper floors of a residential tower just a block away from the waterfront, where the hallmarks of a young start-up--fridges of Red Bull, whiteboards awash in colorful scribbles, the glow of massive Mac desktop monitors--colonize what would normally be coveted apartment space for one of San Francisco's most financially fortunate. There's a balcony with sweeping views of the Bay Bridge and the waters underneath, where on this sunny fall afternoon a lone kayaker in a bright-orange craft flits around uncomfortably close to industrial … Read more

Facebook keeps getting bigger. Twitter isn't going away any time soon. Even the companies built to take advantage of these companies' social-media wiring--the Groupons and Zyngas of the world--have gotten huge in their own right. It's ubiquitous, and arguably mature.

So why does Sand Hill Road fixture Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, which has spent nearly four decades investing in companies like Amazon, Google, Intel, and AOL, think it's the right time to start a fund specifically geared toward new investments in social media?

The venture firm, which had a Java-specific fund in the 1990s and launched … Read more

There's a lot of chatter right now about Instagram, an iPhone app for adding artsy filters to photos and sharing them across various social-media networks, which has taken the early-adopter crowd by storm and courted heavy investor interest in the mobile photo-sharing niche.

A Thursday New York Times story revealed that investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has a stake in Instagram, just led a $5 million funding round for the parent company of competitor Picplz--which in turn caused a blogger at Business Insider to wonder whether the apparent conflict of interest indicates that Instagram has been sold.

CNET … Read more

Microsoft tries -- again -- to bribe users to Bing it while Blockbuster goes bankrupt and Blackberry bets on BlackPad. Also: Blogger bounced from bar. Bye!

Investor frustration with Dell has now hit its founder and CEO.

Twenty-five percent of Dell stockholders voted to withhold support for Michael Dell to serve on the board of directors at a Dell investor meeting on Thursday. The figure represented 377.8 million of 1.5 billion votes.

Though 75 percent approved retaining Dell as chairman, the "protest" vote was a clear signal sent by unhappy shareholders to the company, according to Patrick McGurn, special counsel for ISS, a proxy-advisory firm.

McGurn told The Wall Street Journal that any withhold vote over 20 percent is "something that … Read more

Must be a slow summer Friday: Bloomberg cites "three people familiar with the matter" who say that Facebook won't go public next year. This follows up on somebody else's story last year about the company definitely not going public this year, and another report the previous year about Facebook not going public last year, and so forth. Basically, every so often there's yet another report that Facebook is delaying a potential IPO. Again.

Granted, this sort of update about Facebook not going public is undoubtedly of value to the financial-services audience who read Bloomberg's … Read more

An Intel executive's brandishing of a tablet design on Tuesday means rivals to the Apple iPad are a certainty.

And the first serious Intel-based designs will show up at Computex in June. "People ask me, are you serious about trying to participate in the tablet market? The answer is yes...The message is stay tuned for Computex," Intel Vice President Mooly Eden, who heads the chipmaker's client group, said at the Intel investor meeting on Tuesday.

Intel, not surprisingly, sees distinct advantages for devices based on its upcoming dual-core Atom for Netbooks and tablets. "(People) … Read more