Charts: Facebook’s IPO ...

Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise about $16 billion at the final price of $38 a share. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. Here’s how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data. Then here’s how it compares to how much Google and Microsoft each raised in their respective IPOs. We also have historical price data from SecondMarket , which is a private secondary market that became popular among former Facebook employees who wanted to offload part of their stake in the company. Facebook has outperformed many of the largest tech companies in the world over last few years. (That’s not totally surprising though since they started from a much lower base.) Here’s how the number of transactions has scaled up on SecondMarket over the last few years.

Analysts: Nokia On Trac...

The Facebook IPO is expected to usher in a day of massive trading volumes on the markets, and some believe that might translate to a lift for some tech stocks . But one that could really use some help has just been served another course of bad press: Nokia is apparently burning through its cash reserves — fast. The company, for years the biggest mobile phone maker in the world, has fallen on very tough times, as competition from companies like Samsung, Apple and a barrage of inexpensive device makers, have translated into declines in sales, market share and profitability. That’s now translating into what has been identified as another issue: the burning of the cash pile. In the last five quarters, Nokia has burned through €2.1 billion ($2.7 billion) from its cash reserves. Analysts polled by Reuters on average believe that at the rate Nokia is going, it will go through another €2 billion ($2.5 billion) in the next three quarters, with the total current cash pile of €4.9 billion ($6 billion) gone within two years. To put that in some context, in 2007 Nokia had cash reserves of €10 billion in 2007 ($12.7 billion). That points to its cash pile burn accelerating — a result of the fact that the company has been trying to transform its business, which requires investment, while at the same time seeing massive sales drops: In the company’s last quarterly earnings , reported April 18, Nokia reported that overall revenues were down by $4 billion (€3.4 billion) to $9.7 billion (€7.4 billion). Smartphones, the core of Nokia’s fightback strategy, declined by more than 50 percent both in revenues and unit sales, and the company saw a 40 percent drop in revenues from devices, its biggest business, with sales in those now at €4.2 billion. Nokia also swung to an operating loss of $1.7 billion, blaming the double-whammy of competition from Apple/Google as well as restructuring costs, as the company has pushed to put a stronger emphasis on its new line of smartphones in a race to gain back its rapidly disappearing market share in the higher-margin end of the smartphone market. That market share has been slipping for some time now, but it was in the last quarter that it finally slipped enough to put Nokia into number-two behind Samsung. According to Q1 figures out earlier this week from Gartner , Nokia now has 19.8 percent of the mobile market to Samsung’s 20.7 percent. While Samsung’s sales have been rising, up to 86.6 million units from 68.8 million in the quarter a year ago, Nokia’s have been going in the reverse direction: now at 83.1 million units compared to 107.6 million a year ago. Nokia currently has two tranches of credit bonds outstanding: bonds of €1.25 billion euros at 5.5 percent maturing in 2014 and €500 million of notes at 6.75 percent due in 2019. These have now reached the lowest investment grade status at S&P , Fitch and Moody’s  with negative outlook. “I would not rule out the possibility of Nokia being downgraded further,” Nancy Utterback, a credit strategist at Aviva Investors, told Reuters. “The company is in a negative spiral that will be hard to reverse.” Reuters does also point out some bright spots. The company is expected to sell 20 million of its new Windows Phone-based smartphones this year, and 46 million next year. And if the company continues on its cost-reducing course, it could end 2012 with €2.8 billion ($3.6 billion) in net cash this year. And there is another possibility that we will likely see raised more and more: a “white knight” in the form of a Microsoft acquisition. The software company  is already heavily entwined with Nokia over the use of the Windows Phone OS — paying Nokia $1 billion annually for this — a relationship that could well deepen if Nokia’s problems continue to grow.  [Image: Images of Money, Flickr ]

Twitter Now Honors Mozi...

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today , 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce  that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter. As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers. As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release. A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision. The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT. — Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

AppHarbor Launches Its ...

Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog , dotCloud . Then last year AppHarbor , a ‘Heroku for .NET’ out of Y Combinator launched . And today AppHarbor has extended its service to European developers. EU applications will still run on Amazon’s infrastructure, but they’ll be running out of the EU-West region (Dublin) instead of US-East, where all current applications are located. The startup raised $1.4m last year though the amount was not announced at the time. Backers include Accel, Ignition, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Quest, Start Fund and Salesforce and there are plans to raise a Series A soon. “We have spent a lot of time making sure the AppHarbor platform is modular and scalable and this paid dividends when time came to spin up our new EU location. New applications are created in either the US or EU and existing applications cannot be moved, but we’re already thinking about how to turn this up another notch to make AppHarbor a zero-configuration, multi-region, geo-load-balanced application platform,” cofounder and CEO Rune Sørensen told us. Add-ons in the the AppHarbor add-on catalog will work with EU-based applications. Some (such as SQL Server) will provision resources based on where your application is located. For add-ons that do not currently support the EU, a warning will be displayed when they’re provisioned to an EU application. AppHarbor is designed to address Microsoft Azure limitations such as being locked into Microsoft’s own database, and its non-support of Git. They now claim to be 15-20% of Azure’s size in terms of number of users – not bad for a six person startup. Offices are in Copenhagen and San Francisco. In terms of competition Meerkatalyst claimed to be doing similar bett never appeared while and Moncai has yet to launch.

Positionly Raises $300,...

Search engine ranking startup Positionly has secured $300,000 seed funding from Berlin-based led by seed VC Point Nine Capital and joined by Angels Mariusz Gralewski and Michal Skrzynski . The idea behind Positionly’s service is that small business owners don’t need to know about SEO. Its clients already include TD Bank Opower, ESPN and TUI. Users can either enter search keywords manually or upload them from .csv files or a Google analytics account. The Poland-based service then tracks search engine rankings over time, generating simple search engine reports. Pricing ranges from $19 to $99 per month. However, its service proposition is not unique. For example, Link Assistant targets individual users as well as corporations with its desktop software Rank Tracker . The company boasts Microsoft Germany, MasterCard and General Electric amongst its 380,000 clients and is completely bootstrapped. Positionly enters a crowded market. SEOmoz received $18 million in backing earlier this month and offers Rank Tracker within a broader SEO monitoring service priced at $99 per month. Conductor got $10 million funding back in 2009, and Searchmetrics raised $11 million with a recent found this past January 2012 . Editor’s note: This post is written by contributor Natasha Starkell , CEO of GoalEurope , an outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing, innovation and startups in Central and Eastern Europe.