Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors. Continue »

AT&T isn’t the only operator whose network shortcomings have been exposed by data-hungry iPhone users. O2 — which until recently was the only UK operator to carry Apple’s gadget — said it will spend $166 million over the next several months to shore up its network to meet ever-increasing demands from smartphone users. Additionally, the carrier said it will build 40 new cell sites in and around London in advance of the holiday season. Continue »

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant. Continue »

Java scalability specialist Terracotta has acquired the intellectual property associated with Quartz, a popular open-source job scheduler, part of Terracotta’s mission to integrate common open-source Java application components into its middleware solution. Terracotta has already integrated SQL-query service Hibernate, and it acquired popular distributed caching solution Ehcache in August. These integrations make Terracotta a more formidable competitor in the quest to manage data in cloud or scale-out infrastructures, where it battles relational databases, proprietary caching solutions like Oracle Coherence and, increasingly, flash-based solutions. Continue »

MindTouch, an open-source provider of enterprise collaboration software, announced today that its platform is now available in the cloud. You can find a video on how the platform, dubbed MindTouch Cloud, creates “a federated collaboration network” here.  MindTouch competes with Microsoft’s SharePoint, but can eliminate many of the inflexibilities of proprietary collaboration software, and MindTouch Cloud’s prices are being kept low. A 10-user group can use it for $10 per month per user, 30 users can for $8 a month per user, and 50 users can for $7 a month per user, with lower costs for larger businesses. Continue »

Even though we’re inching ever-closer towards consumption-based broadband, not all ISPs are implementing metered or tiered plans as a way to punish users who clog their pipes. For example, Verizon plans to may one day move to a consumption-based model as a way to generate additional revenue, not because of any network constraint. Brian Whitton, executive director of access technologies at Verizon, spoke with me earlier this week about that company’s fiber network — and why he believes every other ISP is going to have to embrace a fiber to-the-home strategy, too: Continue »