The Clock Is Set For A Facebook IPO By April, 2012

Today, Facebook announced that it raised a total of $1.5 billion in its latest round, giving the company a valuation of $50 billion. But it also disclosed something else: when it will likely go public.

Buried at the bottom of its press release, it sets a date for when it expects to start filing public financial reports:

Even before the investment from Goldman Sachs, Facebook had 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.

While Facebook could decide to report financial publicly without actually going public, once it goes through the trouble of financial reporting and the increased scrutiny that brings, there will be little remaining reasons to remain private. So the clock is now ticking. Expect a Facebook IPO by April, 2012.

With increasing SEC concerns about private trading of Facebook stock on places like SecondMarket and pooled funds like Goldman’s which are engineered to skirt SEC disclosure rules, putting a timetable on when financial disclosures will be forthcoming is probably a good idea.

Photo credit: Flickr/ kobiz7

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Great News: Missing Cybersecurity Expert Dancho Danchev Is No Longer Missing

A week ago, ZDNet ran a troubling story about that fact that one of its contributing bloggers, Bulgaria-native malware researcher Dancho Danchev, had gone missing since August 2010. His last blog post on ZDNet appeared on August 18, 2010, and his personal blog had last been updated three weeks later.

ZDNet stated that it had tried to contact them repeatedly, to no avail, and got in touch with Bulgarian CERT authorities to prompt an investigation into his sudden disappearance.

Well, good news: Danchev appears to be back online, safe and sound, judging by the recent activity on his Twitter account. From the looks of it, he’s already getting in touch with Larry Dignan, ZDNet Editor in Chief, as well as David Grober, Managing Editor of ZDNet Blogs.

Danchev tweets that he’ll be summarizing “everything that happened” in a blog post this weekend, although he adds that he won’t be able to disclose all details due to the sensitivity of his work. Either way, good to have you back, Dancho.

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So, What’s this Monkey Statue All About? (TCTV)

The Crunchies Statue. Sure, everyone wants it. But so many people ask us, “Why the hell is it a monkey?” (Hint.)

Still, no one was quite as confused by it as our new intern. Lucky for us a documentary crew was in that day to catch the footage. Watch below.

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Groupon CEO Andrew Mason: I’m Following The Arnold Schwarzenegger Guide To Leadership

This evening at the Crunchies, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason took home the coveted CEO of the Year award. But we couldn’t let him leave the stage without taking the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the red-hot company.

Our own Michael Arrington kicked things off by asking about Groupon’s press release for its recent funding round, when it “Raised, Like, A Billion Dollars“. Groupon and Mason have long had a very amusing and irreverent sense of humor. But how long can they keep that up before it causes a deal to fall through, or something else undesirable to happen?

Mason replied that he’s taking the Arnold Schwarzenegger approach to leadership. That is, he’s taking the first part of his career and doing everything stupid he can think of, so people have no expectations for him down the line (then again, he did just win CEO of the Year, so he’s not setting the bar too low).

Michael followed up by asking if Groupon had selected Morgan Stanley to lead the company’s IPO. Mason responded, “We are talking to bankers about the possibility of going public…. We have not made any decisions about whether to go public or who to do it with”.

Finally, Michael asked about Groupon’s revenue — could it do $4 billion this year?  To which Mason responded, “Which one’s the revenue?”

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