Facebook’s $38 Share Pr...

Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April . That’s a nice little bump but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to lock-up period. Plus, shares may pop tomorrow and their value will probably fluctuate a lot by the time six-month lock-up date hits. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag. Originally, Facebook said the deal was going to close by the end of June, according to its IPO filing. But now it appears that it may take longer because of a more thorough FTC investigation. There’s a requisite investigation if a deal is more than $66 million . But because of the more than $1 billion price that Facebook paid and the reach of both companies, the commission is said to be looking a little bit more closely at the deal , a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. The FTC usually doesn’t publicly confirm investigations until they’re over, and hasn’t publicly confirmed if they’re doing one on this deal. But there is evidence that it’s taking longer than expected. Facebook changed its IPO filing earlier this month by amending a sentence projecting a second quarter close for the Instagram deal. It now forecasts a close sometime by the end of the year . If the government blocks the deal, Facebook has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million kill fee, according to its IPO filing . Because of this, Instagram’s dozen or so employees haven’t even started at Facebook. They’re still in limbo and they’re working from their San Francisco headquarters on the app, instead of Facebook’s Menlo Park office. Meanwhile, Facebook is also trying to improve its own mobile offerings; it recently boosted the size of photographs in the mobile news feed, making the overall experience more Instagram-like. While the deal is ultimately expected to go through, a Facebook-Instagram acquisition poses several challenges for the FTC. For one, the FTC’s merger guidelines happen to focus a lot on pricing power , and how a merger would affect a company’s ability to raise prices and decrease output. But both Facebook and Instagram give their products away for free. The other components of the FTC and Department of Justice’s guidelines have to do with market share. They’ll add up the square of different market shares for competing firms, creating a number called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. If it’s above 2500, then the market is highly concentrated. If it’s below 1500, then it’s unconcentrated. But again, it’s not clear how this applies in a market where companies can rise and fall so quickly. Instagram basically appeared out of nowhere . It racked up nearly 40 million users in about 18 months. Plus, the time it takes for any given company to gain millions of daily active users is declining, partly because of the virality of the Facebook platform itself and then because the iOS and Android platforms are finally reaching scale. So how do you apply a formula like this when changes in market share are so dynamic? The last time the FTC took a close look at a consumer web deal of this size, it was back in 2009 with the $750 million Google-Admob acquisition. The commission unanimously closed it after Apple entered the competitive field with its acquisition of rival mobile ad network Quattro , which became iAd. However, there hasn’t been a smartphone app deal of comparable size to Instagram — yet.

Enough With Social Stal...

INTRO , the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is how  it’s angling to become the “LinkedIn” of the social/local people-stalking space , is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With the  iOS app ‘s most recent update, due to roll out any day (minute?) now, INTRO is adding features that will allow members of groups to connect with each other, even going so far as to shut off networking with people outside of their preferred groups. The company, which was already focused on professional (not social) networking, is integrating Meetup, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn groups for improved matching in the new app, as well as support for private groups, like membership clubs and entrepreneur networks, for example. Explains INTRO Labs founder Anthony Erwin, “some people - particularly the power players, maybe’s it’s a top VC in New York, for example – still potentially want to network, but don’t want everyone jumping at them,” he says. “When they add themselves to a private network [in INTRO], they can switch off all other types of people connected to them.” In other words, INTRO will now help the big-time players do the networking on their own terms. That’s not a bad idea, actually. The interesting thing about the introduction of this private networking feature is how it’s being rolled out. Instead of putting the burden on the user to configure this stuff in the settings, INTRO works with the network in question to automatically add INTRO users to the networks they’re a member of. Although seemingly a simple idea, doing so involves matching the user’s name, LinkedIn profile, email and location to the network’s private membership roster. Once a match has been made, a new section appears in the user’s profile section showing the badges of the networks they belong to. (Note: if you’re interested in having a network set up for your organization, Anthony says he’s taking requests via email here:  ant@introlabs.net.) Upon its initial launch, there are already 40 private networks available, mainly in New York and Londdon, which have the potential to reach to some 1.5 million members. Also new with the app’s update is support for Twitter SSO, and, just in case the ambient location crown goes to another app (if such a crown ever exists), the company is working on an API, too. This could give INTRO more room to grow – for example, companies and organizations building their own apps for events or conferences could integrate ambient location features to connect attendees. The update isn’t live in the App Store at the time of writing, but should be rolling out soon. In the meantime, you can grab  the current version of INTRO  here .

Eduardo Saverin Backs M...

Eduardo Saverin may no longer be a U.S. citizen. But that’s not stopping him from investing in American companies. In fact, he just closed a deal. He’s backing Crowdmob , a startup that’s blending app promotion with discounts from local merchants. The startup’s long-term ambition is to play in the mobile wallet space, where phones may eventually become a mainstream way of paying for real-world goods and services. (That is, if they can become easier to use than a credit card or cash.) The company, which already took some earlier seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz, has a couple products up its sleeves. One is something they’re calling ‘Appy Meals,’ which combine a paid app for free with a discount on a real-world good like the Starbucks Frapuccino below. It kind of mimics the way you’d buy a hamburger and a get token toy, except that toy is now a digital one like a game. Crowdmob’s co-founders Damon Grow , Alex Han and Matthew Moore , who is an ex-Googler, say that games are a good way to lure in consumers, who are already comfortable with using their phones to pay for apps or virtual currency.  Games and social networking apps have the highest engagement on iOS and Android , according to research from mobile analytics companies like Flurry. They’ve built several variations on the same idea of mixing real-world commerce with virtual goods. With another product, they take the same “appy meal” mechanic and apply it to in-app purchases instead of paid apps. Gamers can buy virtual currency and gift cards for real-world goods like Starbucks or movie tickets inside an app (see below). Yet another variation on the concept called Loot lets gamers watch video ads in exchange for virtual currency that can be redeemed for gift cards. Loot was built because the team knew that only a small percentage of mobile app users actually pay for things in games. So there had to be a free alternative. “Not everybody is going to pay because many users have limited budgets,” Grow said. “So we knew that we had to disrupt ourselves  by having a feature where consumers didn’t have to pay and that was Loot.” All of this goes toward building a payments network. Whenever a user makes a purchase, they’ll be able to pay with their credit card or PayPal. Then they can redeem the deal with their phone, which will show a barcode, confirmation number or send an SMS (whatever the merchants’ preferences are). They’ll have to create a CrowdMob account, so that’s how the company picks up payments information on consumers to grow out a network for a mobile wallet. Users manage their rewards in this mobile wallet and it’s synchronous across all the user’s CrowdMob accounts, whether they earned a gift card through watching ads or purchased it as part of a virtual happy meal in another game. “We want to win consumer mindshare,” said Moore. “Doling out all of these gift cards will help us get on more phones. When consumers redeem these, we’ll be able to show the merchant that we drove them to the store.” Then there’s an open API lets any partner create tasks for users to earn credits. Merchants and gift card providers can also create their own rewards for users to redeem. Crowdmob earns a cut whenever they drive installs or purchases for a mobile developer or whenever they drive sales for a merchant. The race to build a ‘mobile wallet’ is incredibly complicated right now. Google Wallet’s team fell apart over the last several months as the original technical team that built the product chafed with newer middle management brought over from Paypal. The carriers are collaborating on their own wallet offering called Isis, but when have the carriers ever cooperated on a successful consumer product? Then Visa recently introduced V.me and Mastercard launched its PayPass Wallet Services  in the last month. Saverin shied away from doing an interview for this story, but he did pass us this statement: “I really like the team at CrowdMob and their vision to create a mobile wallet that is embedded in an overall social loyalty platform where virtual and real goods can be exchanged; this platform is an important next step in a fully integrated mobile society.” He did do an interview with The New York Times yesterday where he said his decision to relinquish his U.S. citizenship had nothing to do with the lower tax rates that Singapore has . Saverin has amassed a little bit of a portfolio here in the U.S. with investments in Jumio, ShopSavvy and Qwiki. Since all of these investments have happened in the last year or two, it’s still too early to tell how his deals will pan out. It will be nearly impossible to top the investment that made him a billionaire, but you can never rule anything out in this business..

Facebook Quietly Launch...

Carefully cultivating your Facebook presence can be tough enough when you only have your personal profile to deal with, but it’s a completely different story when you’ve got a full-blown Page (or three) to manage on top of it. To help those particular users stay on top of things, Facebook has begun to roll out a new app (called, imaginatively enough, Pages Manager ) in a small handful of markets, though we in the U.S. can’t play with it just yet. As far as the design goes, the Pages Manager app should be familiar territory for anyone who’s ever used the standard iOS app, though a few thoughtful additions make the prospect of keeping tabs on multiple Pages a little less hairy. All of the Pages a user has admin rights to can be accessed from the app’s left pane for quick access, and those admins will get notifications whenever a user interacts with a Page under their purview. Thankfully, notifications can be handled on a Page-by-Page basis, so it’s easy to enough tune out trolls if need be. Perhaps most importantly, the app allows provides on-the-go access to Page Insights — the metrics that track Page performance and user engagement through likes — so admins will always have an idea of where they stand. For now, it seems as though only users in Australia and New Zealand can access the new Pages Manager app in the App Store, though SiliconRepublic reports that it’s slowly becoming available to users in Ireland as well. No news yet on whether or not an Android version is coming down the pipeline, though considering the slow-and-steady approach they’re taking with this early iOS release, it may be a while before we see it making the rounds.

Thirst Aims To Slake Yo...

Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps? In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos and photos from people’s personal streams. Thirst is one of them and it’s coming out with an iPad app today . The company is backed by nearly $1 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures, former Powerset chief operating officer Steve Newcomb and DCM general partner Jason Krikorian. It was started by two recent Berkeley graduates, Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi . Although Thirst is starting out on the Twitter platform, the company is really more about natural language processing technology. The Twitter iPad app is more of a proof of concept around whether its NLP processor works well. Verma says that it’s really difficult to keep up with information shared through Twitter and there has to be a better way of surfacing the most important news. Thirst uses a custom natural language processor to pick out the most important stories around different keywords or subjects like ‘gay marriage’ (because of this past week’s big announcement from President Barack Obama in support of it). The issue though, is how big any individual company like this can become. The biggest exits that the Twitter platform has spawned to date are, well, relatively small. Tweetdeck went to Twitter for between $40 to 50 million . Contrast that to the biggest iOS acquisition to date, which is Instagram, or Zynga, the most successful Facebook platform company to date. You could argue that recent M&A deals like Instagram and OMGPOP owe something to the Twitter platform because the social network was a growth channel for both apps, but it’s hard to say how much of their success was derived from the Twitter platform. There are also plenty of iPad-based news readers like Flipboard, Pulse and News.me that serve as competition for Thirst. Again, Verma says Twitter is just a start. And there are plenty of other places that Thirst could go. Thirst for Twitter from Thirst on Vimeo .