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Andreessen Horowitz announced that it has raised US$1.5 billion for a fund aimed at investing in technology startups. The new fund is launching just as one of the firm’s well-known bets, Facebook, prepares to go public. Andreessen Horowitz has an unspecified stake in the social network.
A sobering account of conditions at Apple’s contract factories in China recently appeared in The New York Times. Essentially, the manufacture of those sleek and sexy devices that consumers love so much has been accompanied by 23 deaths and 273 injuries. In a horrific account of one of the deaths, the Times told of Lai Xiadong, who was severely burned and died of his injuries two days later.
Zero hour is approaching as the certainty grows that Facebook will be filing for its initial public offering this week. Zero hour for excited investors and Wall Street banks — and zero hour for privacy advocates. Even as a private company, Facebook had no problem pushing the envelope, said Consumer Watchdog spokesperson Carmen Balber. "Facebook is already treading dangerous waters … ."
This is it — the week every social media investor has been waiting for. Facebook is expected to file for its IPO this week, according to widely circulating rumors, in response to huge demand in the market — to say nothing of its own employees, many of whom stand to become millionaires overnight. Morgan Stanley is said to be the leading investment bank in the offering.
Oracle has closed on its $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base from which to compete against Salesforce.com.