CEO bans email, encourages social networking

Who needs email when you have text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and a menagerie of alternative communication tools? Not Atos, a French IT firm that's planning to give email the boot. Over the course of the next eighteen months, CEO Thierry Breton hopes to ween 80,000 employees off of the old standby, pushing text messages, phone calls and face-to-face chats as alternatives. Breton strives to promote a collaborative social network similar to Facebook or Twitter to fill email's void and suffice as an easily accessible global network. Having himself been email sober at work for three years, Breton claims email is inefficient, and a burden to the workflow. Will this new social environment promote efficiency, or will pet photos and status updates become the new spam? If employees can't keep their social inclinations under wraps, Atos may have to resort to the Medieval carrier pigeon. Delivery estimates for long distance range from five days to never.

Source:http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/ceo-bans-email-encourages-social-networking/

Facebook’s IPO Motive: Keeping Employees, Not Compliance

Many people have believed that Facebook’s initial public offering is due in 2012 since the company announced its giant funding round from Goldman Sachs at the start of this year. At that point, the company said in a press release that it ”expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.”
Public filings don’t necessarily mean a company has to make its stock available for public purchase, but most usually do anyway.
But our understanding is that it will be going public sometime next year for a different reason: rewarding its large roster of talented employees, who have been waiting years to cash in. Compliance isn’t the primary motive.
Purely from a financial perspective, the pressure for an IPO has been building internally, even as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders have downplayed the  idea. (In fact, for a while I was wondering if maybe Facebook just wouldn’t IPO, or at least not for years, something others who follow the company closely, like David Kirkpatrick, have also speculated about.)
After distributing standard stock option plans to employees in its early years, Facebook switched to restricted stock units in late 2008. Instead of vesting into stock that employees owned like options had, RSUs could only be sold after an IPO. Meanwhile, Facebook restricted current employees from selling any stock they owned, although it couldn’t stop former employees from doing so. Instead, as a stop-gap liquidity measure, it allowed employees to sell a small portion of their options in late 2008 through 2009. Newer employees who got RSUs haven’t had the same opportunities.
But over the last couple months, I’ve heard from sources close to the company that it could file as soon as early next year, and no later than the end of next year, which matches widespread reports that have come out already. That Zuckerberg has started setting expectations along these lines with employees, as Business Insider hears today, is not too surprising.
Facebook has worked hard to recruit or acquire some of the top engineers and product leaders in the world, even as most of its early core employees have left for early retirement or to start their own companies. Between the flush funding environment and trendy image of doing startups these days, along with big offers from rivals like Google and Twitter, a vague promise of a big exit has become a harder sell.
So despite fears that an IPO would introduce the pressure for short-term profits instead of long-term value or spoil employees to the point that they lose the edge they have today, delays have gotten harder for Zuckerberg and Facebook to justify. The 500-shareholder rule is often cited as the main rationale for why the company will go public next year. But between Facebook’s ability to file public documents without going public, and a new bill working its way through Congress that would raise the minimum requirement to 2000 shareholders, it actually isn’t as big of a concern.
In any case, an IPO is going to be one of the company’s biggest tests. Can it maintain its talent pool and grow revenue like Google, Amazon, Apple and other top tech companies have been able to do? Can it maintain its vision for being the social layer across everything in the world? We’re about to find out.
Source:http://blog-bin.com/

Start Nominating Now For The 5th Annual Crunchies Awards

It’s that time of year again when we start taking nominations for the fifth annual Crunchies Awards, the annual celebration of startups and technology. Once again we are co-hosting the awards with GigaOm and VentureBeat. We are moving to a new, bigger location—the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, which can seat over 2,000 people. The event will take place on January 31, 2012.
But who will be there? Well, that’s where you come in. Nominate the most deserving startups, founders, and investors across 20 categories from Best New Startup to Best Mobile App. We are taking nominations until midnight PT on December 13, 2011. You can nominate one company or person per category per day, but otherwise can nominate as much as you want. (You can read all the rules here).
Who do you think will make it this year? Square, Spotify, Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest? Who is the best angel investor? Who is the best CEO? What is the most impressive technology achievement of the year (Siri or something else)? You tell us.Put your own nominations in now. Details and full list of categories (with last year’s winners) are below:
The 5th Annual Crunchies Awards
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA
7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.
Tickets will be released in batches starting early December. Davies Symphony Hall can seat over 2,000 attendees, double the size of previous Crunchies Awards.
Nominations open: Friday, November 18th
Nominations close: Tuesday, December 13th at 11:59pm PST
Finalists announced: early January
Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne@techcrunch.com.
For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.
List of Categories:
Best Technology Achievement (2010: Google Self Driving Cars)
Best Social Application (2010: DailyBooth)
Best Shopping Application (2010: Groupon)
Best Mobile Application (2010: Google Mobile Maps for Android)
Best Local Application (new 2011)
Best Tablet Application (2010: flipboard)
Best Design (2010: gogobot)
Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010: addmired)
Best Cloud Service (new 2011)
Best International Startup (2010: Viki)
Best Clean Tech Startup (2010: SolarCity)
Best New Device (2010: ipad)
Best Time Sink (2010: Cityville)
Biggest Social Impact (new 2011)
Angel of the Year (2010: Paul Graham)
VC of the Year (2010: Yuri Milner)
Founder of the Year (2010: Mark Pincus)
CEO of the Year (2010: Andrew Mason)
Best New Startup of 2010 (2010: Quora)
Best Overall Startup of 2010 (2010: Twitter)
Source:http://blog-bin.com/