It's probably one of the first times there has been an IPO

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the top of expectations. Now, regular investors will have a chance to buy stock in Facebook for the first time. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market sometime Friday morning. The ticker symbol will be FB. Facebook's offering is the culmination of a Cheap Christian Louboutin year's worth of Internet IPOs that began last May with LinkedIn Corp. Since then, a steady stream of startups focused on the social side of the Web has gone public, with varying degrees of success. It all led up to Facebook, the company that's come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts. It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. "They could have gone public in 2009 at a much lower price," said Nick Einhorn, research analyst at IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital. "They waited as long as they could to go public, so it makes sense that it's a very large offering." Facebook Inc.'s valuation is the third-highest in an IPO, according to Dealogic, a provider of financial data. Only two Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China in 2010 and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in 2006, have been worth more. They were worth $133 billion and $132 billion, respectively. By another measure —the amount raised— Facebook ranks third among U.S. IPOs. The largest was Visa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008. No. 2 was Enel, a power company, and No. 4 was General Motors, according to Renaissance Capital. The $38 share price is the price at which the investment banks arranging the offering will sell the stock to their clients. In an IPO, the banks buy the stock first from the company and the early investors and then sell to the public. If extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold as part of the transaction, Facebook and its early investors stand to reap as much as $18.4 billion. For a company that was born in a Harvard dormitory and went on to reimagine online communication, the stock sale means more money to build on the features and services it offers users. It means an infusion of money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year. And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company in 2004. He's selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he'll get some $640 million. He will hold on to about 28 million shares, worth $1.06 billion. The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104 billion. The sky-high valuation has its skeptics, who worry about signs of a slowdown and Facebook's ability to grow in the mobile space when it was created with desktop computers in mind. Rival Google Inc., whose revenue stood at $38 billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207 billion. "There seems to be somewhat of a hype around the stock offering," says Gartner analyst Brian Blau. That may be an understatement. Facebook's IPO dominated media coverage in the weeks and days leading up to the event. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie made headlines when he wore it to a meeting with investors as did General Motors' decision this week to stop advertising on the site —and rival Ford's affirmation that its Facebook ads have been effective. There are more than a few reasons for the exuberance. First, there's Facebook's sheer size and high profile. The company grew from a college-only social network to an Internet phenomenon embraced by legions of people, from teenagers to grandmothers to pro-democracy activists in the Middle East. Secondly, it's personal. "It's probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome," Blau says. While most Facebook users won't see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company. And then there's Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds. He counted the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs among his mentors, and he became one of the world's youngest billionaires — at least on paper — well before Facebook went Christian Louboutin High Boots public. A dramatized and less-than-flattering version of Facebook's founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie that won three Academy Awards last year, propelling Zuckerberg even further into the public spotlight. Though Zuckerberg is selling about 30 million shares, he will remain Facebook's largest shareholder. Even after the IPO, he will own 503.6 million shares, or 32 percent of Facebook's total shares. At the $38 share price, his stake in the company is worth $19.1 billion. Zuckerberg will control the company with 56 percent of its voting stock as a result of agreements he has with other shareholders who promise to vote his way. The set-up helps to ensure that he and other executives keep control as the demands of Wall Street for short-term returns exert new pressures on the company. True to form, Zuckerberg and Facebook's engineers are ringing in the IPO on their own terms. The company is holding an overnight "hackathon" Thursday, where engineers stay up writing programming code to come up with new features for the site. On Friday morning, Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook's headquarters a continent away.

Growth has to feed through to the people

Leaders of Germany and France Tuesday held talks on boosting economic growth amid the ongoing European debt crisis and keeping Greece within the eurozone. "We share the responsibility for a good Cheap Christian Louboutin development in Europe and I think we will find solutions for individual problems in this spirit," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a joint press conference with French President Francois Hollande, who just took office hours before his first diplomatic trip. The newly sworn-in French president said he is willing to build a "balanced" and "respectful" relationship with Germany. "Carried by this spirit, I believe we will of course find solutions for the different problems," Merkel said. For his part, Hollande said, "Everything should be put on the table" at the forthcoming informal summit of EU leaders in Brussels on May 23. "It will be very important that Germany and France present their ideas together at this summit and work closely together to prepare it," Merkel said. In addition, Hollande affirmed his wish for a renegotiation of the EU fiscal pact, saying that "I said it during my election campaign and I say it again now as president that I want to renegotiate what has been agreed to include a growth dimension." Referring to this, Merkel said, "Growth has to feed through to the people. And that's why I'm happy that we'll discuss different ideas on how to achieve growth." Despite their policy differences, both Hollande and Merkel have joined forces to build a workable relationship in order to continue the Franco-German cooperation to fight the eurozone debt crisis. At the conference, the leaders of the eurozone's two largest economies also expressed their wish for Greece to stay in the single currency bloc. "We want Greece to stay in the euro," Merkel said. She also said Germany and France were prepared "to study the possibility of additional growth measures in Greece" if Athens said they needed them. Hollande agreed with Merkel, saying promoting a growth-driven strategy was at the core of his presidential campaign. "I hope that we can say to the Greeks that Europe is ready to add measures to help growth and support economic activity so that there is a return to growth in Greece," Hollande said. Earlier in the day, the final critical talks among Greek party leaders failed to form a coalition government after the May 6 parliamentary elections, with the debt-ridden country heading to fresh polls in June. "Efforts to form a coalition administration ended Christian Louboutin Peep Toe with no result. On Wednesday a new party leaders meeting will discuss the appointment of a caretaker government to lead the country to repeat elections," the presidency said in a statement. Greece is suffering from political instability and a financial crisis, fueling fears that the country could face the risk of a chaotic default and an exit from the eurozone. Greece's leaving the single-currency club could send shockwaves across Europe and the international financial system.

The bacteria that infected Copeland

Whether she was hiking in the woods, growing organic vegetables or working on her master's degree in psychology, Aimee Copeland embraced her passions with Cheap Christian Louboutin determination and a constant smile that made friends wonder if she ever had bad days. Now the 24-year-old Georgia graduate student is fighting to survive a flesh-eating bacterial infection that forced doctors to amputate most of her left leg. They warned she would likely lose her other foot and both hands. Copeland contracted the rare infection, called necrotizing fasciitis, within a few days after suffering a deep cut May 1 when she fell from a broken zip line during an outdoor excursion. Her parents and sister remain at her side after a week at an Augusta hospital, while friends 200 miles away at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton are holding vigils and organizing blood drives while praying for Copeland to recover. "When she put her mind to a project, there was no letting go. She was relentless until it was completed," said Richard LaFleur, a fellow graduate student who enlisted Copeland to help recruit for the psychology department. "I don't expect anything less at this point because she's fighting for her life. If anyone will pull through this, it will be Aimee." Copeland had just finished her second year of graduate school and was planning to soon begin work on her thesis when she was injured. It happened on a kayaking trip with friends when she tried to cross the Little Tallapoosa River on a homemade zip line. The line broke and Copeland Christian Louboutin Shoes Sale fell onto the rocks below, suffering a nasty gash in her leg. Doctors at the local emergency room closed the wound with nearly two dozen staples, but it became infected within a few days. On May 4 she was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis and flown to Augusta for treatment by specialists. Infections by so-called flesh-eating bacteria are rare but sometimes can run rampant after even minor cuts or scratches. The bacteria enter the body, quickly reproduce and give off toxins that cut off blood flow to parts of the body. The affliction can destroy muscle, fat and skin tissue. Affected areas sometimes have to be surgically removed to save a patient's life. The bacteria that infected Copeland, a bug called Aeromonas hydrophila, is found in warm and brackish waters. Many people exposed to these bacteria don't get sick and when illnesses do occur, it's often diarrhea from swallowing bacteria in the water. Flesh-eating Aeromonas cases are considered extremely rare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not keep statistics, and only a handful of infections have been reported in medical journals over the past few decades. Group A streptococcus is the type of bacteria usually blamed in flesh-eating cases, and most doctors often aren't looking for Aeromonas, said Amy Horneman, a microbiologist at the Baltimore VA Medical Center. "It's the Rodney Dangerfield of pathogens," said Horneman, referring to the late comedian who declared he couldn't get respect." But "when a traumatic water infection Christian Louboutin Heels occurs, that's the first organism you should think of."