Bigger & Bigger & Bigger: Facebook valued at $65 billion in new investment | Reuters

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"(Reuters) - Investment firm General Atlantic is investing in Facebook, valuing the leading social network at $65 billion, representing a 30 percent boost from its last big investment in January, according to a report on CNBC.

General Atlantic is purchasing a block of roughly 2.5 million Facebook shares from former Facebook employees, giving the firm a 0.1 percent stake in the company, CNBC said.

The deal, which has not closed and requires approval from Facebook, would give General Atlantic a 0.1 percent stake in Facebook, according to the report...."

This will be fun....'With Tilt-Shift And A News Feed, Instagram Is Ready To Rock SXSW'

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From TechCrunch:

"For all the talk of group messaging apps being the breakout hits at SXSW this year, most people are overlooking another genre: mobile photo-sharing apps. But that’s probably because a few of those apps already are pretty big hits. Take Instagram, for example. The app already has well over 2 million users, even though it’s not even six months old yet. For some context, when Foursquare successfully launched at SXSW two years ago, they left town with just 5,000 users.

But just because Instagram has had some early success, that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the value of putting out a new app in time for SXSW. And this morning we get just that. And it’s brings two pretty significant upgrades.

The first big addition is a new camera feature called tilt-shift. If you’re a camera app fanatic, you’ll undoubtedly already know what this is. For everyone else, it’s a new effect that allows you to focus on a certain part of an image and blur the rest. “It’s one of the most popular filters people have used outside of Instagram,” co-founder Kevin Systrom says, noting that they decided to build their own from scratch...."

read the full post on TechCrunch

Marissa Mayer: 40% Of Google Maps Usage Is Mobile (And There Are 150 Million Mobile Users)

  • Mayer revealed that 40% of Google Maps usage is mobile. And Christmas and New Years day had mobile usage of Maps surpass the desktop — which is a first for Google products. Google Maps now has 150 million mobile users. To put that in context, Maps for mobile had 100 million users in August of last year.
  • Next, the local team showed off the current version of Google Maps, which uses vectors to render maps. Because these vectors take up 1/100 of the size of the old tile system, they can be cached, and can include 3D representations of buildings.
  • Next up: Google Maps Navigation, the GPS feature included on Android phones. Users drive 12 billion miles a year with Google Maps Navigation. Navigation recently launched a feature that automatically routes people around traffic — which is saving users a total of 2 years per day in time that would have been spent in traffic.
  • Read the full article on TechCrunch.com