Li Ka-shing buys Facebook stake

Online social network Facebook.com has closed a $60 million investment by Li Ka-shing through the billionaire Hong Kong tycoon's foundation, a source familiar with the deal confirmed on Monday

The source said the deal, which values Facebook on the same $15 billion terms as the stake Microsoft took in the fast-growing social network site in October, involves an investment by the Li Ka Shing Foundation.

Li-backed companies such as Hutchison Whampoa and TOM Group were not involved, the source said.

The stake gives Li a 0.4 percent share of Facebook. Microsoft's holdings represent another 1.6 percent.

The All Things Digital blog, owned by Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., reported the deal on Friday.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment. Spokesmen for Hutchison and Li's foundation also declined to comment.

Earlier on Monday, TOM denied it had invested in Facebook after reports of the investment by Li, TOM's major shareholder, helped push its shares 48 percent higher in Hong Kong.

"There is speculation that Li's investment could translate into closer ties or a partnership between TOM and Facebook," an analyst with a U.S. investment bank said of TOM's leap. "But I believe it's too early to talk about any co-operations."

Founded in 1980, the Li Ka Shing Foundation has focused on funding a variety of health, education, and environmental projects in recent years.

But it also has taken stakes in various Internet projects, including a $45 million investment in May in Joost, the Internet television site founded by the co-founders of Skype.

Facebook opened the investment round to a variety of partners but only Microsoft and Li's foundation have participated, the source said.

Providence Equity Partners, a $21 billion media-focused private equity firm, looked at joining the latest round but walked away, said a second source familiar with those negotiations, citing the high valuation Facebook had sought.

In October, Microsoft announced its $240 million investment that valued Facebook at $15 billion. Facebook also agreed to let Microsoft buy an additional $260 million worth of shares should Facebook seek further capital.

In prior rounds dating back to 2004, Facebook has taken about $40.7 million from venture capital investors including PayPal co-founder and former CEO Peter Thiel along with Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners.


© 2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

Online Safety on MySpace and Other Social Networking Sites

Safety Tips for Social Networking

Social Networks or Online Communities have become an integral part of the lives of many teenagers today. There are some real dangers involved, as there are in off-line aspects of a young person’s life. But rather than attempting to deny access and participation in this form of online socializing, we suggest that with some common sense, open, calm dialogue, and simple guidelines, participation in an online community can be a safe and enriching experience. Here are our tips for making this happen (More information about social networking is available by scrolling down this page.):

For Parents:

1. We recommend a minimum age of 16 for participation in on online community. Generally, children younger than 16 are not mature enough to handle the opportunities and challenges of social networking.


2. Begin an open conversation about your teens' social networking experience. Try to establish a context for discussion that is not combative or accusing.


3. Create your own account on MySpace or another social network. Spend some time browsing the network's site. This will give you familiarity with the world that is so essential to your teen(s) and their friends and will facilitate future conversations.


4. If your child has an account, require that they show it to you. Periodically monitor/read it.


5. Set the expectation that only people they know in real life should be on their "friends" list.


6. Know your children's passwords, screen names and account information. This will enable you to view their pages even if they set their profile to "private". (Private profiles are accounts that can only be viewed by thers given explicit permission to view it. This is a double-edged sword, in that it means strangers [like sexual predators] don't have an easy way to learn about or harass the private account owner. However, it also means that without being granted access, parents and other adults in positions of authority or care-giving cannot view the online activity of the owner either.)


7. Remove online privileges if it becomes a problem. This is only as a last resort and keep it mind that a young person can establish an account and access it school, the library, or a friend's house. Clearly, open dialog and trust is best.


8. As another last resort, consider installing keystroke capturing software on your family computer from www.getnetwise.org. Again, this won't deal with your child's using computers away from home.


9. Talk with other parents, with teachers, and other adults who work with kids. Also, check out the links to other helpful websites below.

For Children:

1. Talk with your parents. Let them learn and understand the role of social networking in your life.


2. Never post anything you wouldn't want your parents, teachers, or future employers to see.
   


3. Never post personal information (phone number, E-mail or address) on the web. The same applies for your friends' information. Be aware that information you post could put you at risk of victimization


4. Never meet with anyone you first “met” online and tell your parent if anyone requests a meeting.


5. Only add people as friends if you know then in real life. Set privacy settings so that you have to approve people to be added as a friend.


6. Include your parents and other trusted adults as friends. If your parents do not have an account, give them access to your profile.

What is Social Networking ?

Social Networking is a term used to describe the fairly recent breed of websites, also referred to as online communities. These sites generally enable their subscribers to post a journal and various forms of media content, to generate and maintain relationships with other participants, and to engage in discussions around common interests with others. Some of the most popular social networks are in the U.S. are MySpace, Xanda, LiveJournal, BlackPlanet, MiGente, AsianAvenue, Bolt, Hi5, Facebook, and Friendster.

These sites are immensely popular with teens and young adults and have become an integral part of their lives, much like television was for their parents. Social networks or online communities offer great opportunities for self-expression, relational support, new experiences, helpful information and just plain fun.

What are risks?

Objectionable Content:
On many online communities, users post material that is not appropriate for children or that many parents would find objectionable. This can include obscene language, racist or violent text or images, and a wide range of sexual content including pornography.

Overexposure:
Parents need to be concerned not only with what their children might see and hear, but also what they may present. Teens can make unwise decisions about what they post online. This includes posting pictures of himself or herself or of friends in a sexually provocative or incriminating manner; publishing personal information that sexual predators could use to learn more about a child or their friends; or bragging about exploits (real or made-up) or making threatening and harassing remarks that could have negative consequences.

Contact with predators: Much publicity has been generated around sexual predators (mainly adults) looking for minors to exploit. There are such individuals who frequent online communities that teens use. Sometimes, these adults will pretend to be teens themselves, but often they will be quite clear about their age and intent.

Contact with other inappropriate adults and businesses: Various segments of the sex industry (legal and otherwise) have a presence on social networking sites, often to recruit customers and workers. Minors should not have direct contact with such sex professionals and organizations, but it does happen. In some cases, teens could become victims of sex-trafficking or be persuaded to provide sexually explicit pictures or video for pay.

Source

Social Networks

We hear the words “Social Network” a great deal these days. It's an Internet phenomenon that is bearing fruit, both by virtue of launching successful ideas and by providing much appreciated services to Internet users. It began with Craig's List, not long after the Internet itself became a phenomenon.

Craig Newmark set up a mailing list (and later a web site) to list the artistic venues and events in the San Francisco area. Anyone was allowed to post details, and the postings were moderated. Pretty soon people were posting advertisements for property to rent, small items they wanted to sell, lonely-hearts ads and so on. Craig's List became a global phenomenon with local pages to cover most major cities in the world, and the web site is a highly valuable property. But it was never intended by its founder to be anything other than a free service.

Craig's list currently employs just over 20 people who manage the web site, although the web site itself is vast. This small group of employees could never have assembled such a wealth of content. It is the customers who do all the work. Each individual customer doesn't do much, but, taken together, their efforts produce a remarkable resource. This is the principle behind social networks—to harness the power of the many. You can appreciate the idea simply by considering a number of “social networks” that have given rise to successful services (and in
some cases generated a handsome cash flow). Here's a list, many of which you will probably be familiar with. After all, most of these services have tens of millions of users:

• Wikipedia: arguably the best encyclopedia in the world, with just under 1.5 million user-contributed articles. It aggregates expertise.
  


• MySpace: self-publishing within your network of friends and colleagues. It's a grapevine. It aggregates opinion (what to listen to, what to watch, what's groovy) and is now the most popular web site in the United States.
  


• YouTube: The people's television network, allows anyone to post their own video. Founded in February 2005 by three young men (the oldest graduated high school in 1995), it is being acquired by Google for a mere 1.65 billion dollars in stock.
  


• BitTorrent, Skype and other P2P plays: All of these share your computer power with everyone else in order to deliver their service. Beyond that they aggregate content for sharing or in Skype's case, nothing more than a VoIP telephone directory (with the users doing the input).
  


• eBay: This is not normally thought of as having a social network element, but it does. It creates markets where markets didn't previously exist. Few people would have thought, for example, that there was a market for first edition AOL CDs. But there is, by virtue of eBay. (It is estimated that about 1 million people worldwide make a living from eBay, some in very ingenious ways).
  


• Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg: These three services are similar but not identical. They aggregate opinion. All provide interesting and usually high quality web links (which users voted for). Del.icio.us and Digg are real-time services. Del.icio.us is like a real-time record of who is interested in what right now, but it is also a high quality search capability that complements Google nicely. Google is blunderbuss search for when you are looking for something precise. It has depth but minimal quality. Del.icio.us is quality only. Digg is a little like a Reuters feed for interesting news. Stumbleupon is a resource that directs you to delightful or interesting web pages.
  


• SecondLife: a 3-D virtual world that is so popular it makes money by selling virtual real-estate for hard cash. Several major companies have set up shop in SecondLife and Reuters has opened a news bureau there.
  


• Freecycle.org: This is a goods recycling service that enable people to give away possessions that they no longer want and need. It simply allows people to post either what they have or what they need to an email feed. If you see something you want, you make contact and arrange to collect it. If you see something that someone needs and you can give away, you contact them. There are two prime rules. The receiver arranges transport and anyone who tries to sell anything they've collected through Freecycle will be banned from the network.
  


• World of Warcraft: This is a hugely popular Internet-based multi-player game with more than a million players. It is the most successful of several virtual worlds that the Internet has spawned. However it is also a very powerful (and commercially successful) social network.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but notice how varied it is. Publishing, entertainment, education, information services, non-profit activity, unashamed commerce; just about any kind of web site can leverage a social network. The basic idea isn't complicated. Individuals are enabled to make specific contributions, the contributions are moderated (often by other contributors) and aggregated and something valuable emerges. The individuals involved may not even think that they are making any effort. Just a few clicks with a mouse, and maybe inputting a few details could be all that is required.

The investment required to leverage or create a social network can be very low even for an organization with few resources—and the value produced can be very high. All organizations that are pursuing web-based business need to consider whether there is opportunity for them here.

Robin Bloor, Partner, Hurwitz & Associates

The Social Networks to Help Spammers

British Internet users receive 20 billion messages per day from spammers, surpassed only by this parameter traditional leaders on the amount of spam - the United States and China, wrote The Daily Telegraph referring to a study by the company IronPort.

Thus, an average of one British accounting for 300 spamming letters a day or 98 per cent of the total mail traffic. This is twice as much than a year ago.

Total peace is distributed daily to 120 billion spamming letters. According to the document next year's social network will be the main source for spammers to data users. Over the past 13 months their personal data shared with the entire internet 60 million people.