Just In Time For A Face...

Well that’s some slick timing. Eduardo Saverin , who is best known for co-founding Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg back in their college days at Harvard, has given up his United States citizenship. His name appeared on a list published on April 30 by the United States Office of the Federal Register, which issues a quarterly list of people who have given up their U.S. citizenship. The news was first picked up by Bloomberg earlier today. The switch will almost certainly decrease the number of American taxes he owes on the $3.84 billion or so he is reportedly in line to make once Facebook goes public , which is widely expected to happen next week. As Bloomberg reported : “Renouncing your citizenship well in advance of an IPO is ‘a very smart idea’ from a tax standpoint, said [University of Michigan international tax law professor Reuven] Avi-Yonah.” On the surface, this might seem like an opportunistic move. In many ways, Facebook’s story is the most modern example of the American dream gone right. Some would argue that those who have gotten rich from the company should pay some dues back into the system that enabled that success. As billionaire Mark Cuban has written on his blog , the “most patriotic thing you can do” is “bust your ass and get rich. Make a boatload of money. Pay your taxes.” But to be fair, Saverin is a pretty unique case: He was born in Brazil in 1982, became a U.S. citizen at age 16, and has lived for the past several years in Singapore (where he reportedly drives a Bentley, parties at posh members-only clubs, and prefers the company of supermodels.) He’s also said to be investing in lots of South American and Asian companies at the moment. By all accounts his footprint is legitimately a global one. And anyway, this isn’t the first time Saverin has made a savvy move in regards to complicated international financial regulations. In a widely published IM conversation from his college days, Mark Zuckerberg described Saverin like this: “My friend who wants to sponsor [Facebook] is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn’t illegal in Brazil so he’s rich lol.”

Facebook ‘Offers&...

Digital giant says all businesses in the United States can now test its free deals platform.

Achievement Unlocked: A...

Apple doesn’t own iPad.com , apple.co.uk or many other domains that contain its name or the names of its products, but it is now the proud owner of applecom.com and appleprinters.com — two domains that were the subject of a  complaint Apple made to the World Intellectual Property Organization about a month ago. If you now visit those URLs, they automatically redirect to Apple’s main site . Apple has not made many pleas directly to the WIPO, an agency of the United Nations, in its attempt to gain better control over its brand, but in those cases where it has, the outcomes seem to have always gone in Apple’s favor. In November, it complained to the WIPO over seven domain names that included “iPhone” in their names that went straight to porn sites. Now most of those domains are dead except for iphone4s.com, which now redirects to Apple’s main site. It was also a WIPO complaint that helped Apple pick up iPods.com in July 2011. There is still a lot of ground to be covered in the area of domains and trademarks for Apple. For example iBookstore.com currently redirects to the mobile site for Project Gutenberg , a volunteer effort to digitize cultural works and quite possibly the oldest digital library around (very clever, Gutenberg guys — since it’s likely that someone using and iPad or iPhone accessing iBooks, a mobile site is exactly where they’d want to go). iBooks.com seems to go nowhere at the moment, although iBook.com goes to Apple, too. Earlier this year Apple was unsuccessful in getting Wapple , a mobile internet company in the UK, to stop using its name, claiming the company was trading off of Apple’s success. You might well wonder why it is that, given just how many Apple domain permutations there are out there ( AppleiCloud , anyone?), Apple went for these two domains. Applecom.com is an easy guess: people mistype without the dot-com all the time, and a lot of browsers automatically add the .com when those are missing. Or it could be — as was the case with the seven iPhone domains Apple got last year, because there was something dodgy on those sites (“best to avoid visiting those” wrote TNW at the time when Apple filed its original WIPO complaint for appleprinters.com and applecom.com). Or perhaps the Onion did a double-bluff and Apple really is looking at a renewed effort into the world of printers? Stranger things have happened.

Gripevine’s Dave Carrol...

It’s an interesting story. One day, Dave Carroll was taking a flight with his band-mates on United Airlines. When he landed at his destination, he noticed that United staff were throwing his $3,500 Taylor guitar around, and ultimately, damaging it pretty badly. When United did nothing to help, Carroll took matters into his own hands with the help of a little video sharing site called YouTube. His music video, “United Breaks Guitars,” took off like a rocket, and after realizing the power of social media, he joined up with his other co-founders to build Gripevine . The service basically connects customers with businesses when they have customer service issues. Businesses can sign up to hear complaints and resolve them in an open, transparent fashion. Not only does the consumer get a chance to voice their issue to the company and the world, but the company gets the chance to make it up to the user publicly. It’s a win-win.

StumbleUpon Reaches 25M...

CEO Garrett Camp tells me that content discovery service StumbleUpon hit 25 million registered users earlier this week, and that those users are pretty damn active — the service is now seeing 1.2 billion Stumbles a month. For someone like me, who sees the impressive traffic that StumbleUpon can drive to an article, the growth isn’t a big surprise, but it’s worth remembering that StumbleUpon had some, uh, stumbles of its own, having been acquired by eBay and then spun out again as a separate company in April 2009. At the time, Camp says the site had about 5.5 million registered users, so that’s almost 5x growth in three years. “If we continue at this rate, we could see hundreds of millions of users,” he says. Last December, StumbleUpon unveiled a redesign intended to make the service more friendly to new users and to brands. Then earlier this month, it released an app that integrated with Facebook Timeline . Both changes are starting to make a difference in the company’s growth and usage, Camp says. Looking forward, Camp tells me that StumbleUpon has three big priorities for the rest of the year. First, there’s mobile. Mobile Stumbles grew 800 percent in the past year, and the company plans to launch new, faster versions of its mobile apps soon. Second, there’s international growth. Right now, 85 percent of StumbleUpon’s traffic comes from North America, but the company is working to translate the site, and it plans to launch in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, with further European launches lined up after that. Third, Camp wants to help other services access StumbleUpon’s data through an API. If you’re a content site, for example, it could be useful for your readers to see related articles that are highly recommended by StumbleUpon users. Partners beta testing the API include QQ International, VICE, and Grooveshark. Oh, and if you’re wondering about that 25 millionth user, here’s the first page they saw through StumbleUpon .