“I’m Eric Simons and I’m the founder of a company called ClassConnect,” the young man explained the website he created, allowing teachers to share lesson plans. Simons told an educational symposium last year that he moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley to get his startup off the ground.

“I managed to convince a couple of my buddies to drop out of college to come join me and we were able to convince a couple of guys to invest in us,” he said.

KCBS’ Matt Bigler Reports:

Simons was accepted by ImagineK12, a tech incubator focused on new ideas in education. $20,000 in seed money materialized, allowing the startup to work at AOL’s Palo Alto headquarters. After four months, however, the money ran out.

But, instead of moving out, Simons decided to simply continue working and living on the campus. He used his still-active security card to eat in the building’s cafeteria, shower in the gym, and work late into the night.

After two months, he was caught by a security guard and kicked out.

Simons, now 20, told CBS 5 he did what he had to do to build his company.

“I couldn’t imagine going home and basically closing shop and saying ‘I’m done,’” Simons said.

According to CNET, Simons has received another $50,000 in venture capital funding and is now working out of a rented house in Palo Alto. Simons is still allowed on the AOL campus in Palo Alto, but for working only.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, Apple Inc. said that Cook requested that his restricted stock units not receive dividends. The dividends that Apple workers are getting amount to $2.65 per quarter for each restricted stock unit held. The shares are not normally eligible to receive dividends, so Apple’s decision is a perk for its employees.

The decision comes two months after Apple introduced a regular dividend and authorized a $10 billion stock buyback program to start giving some of its cash hoard back to shareholders. It was a move that former CEO Steve Jobs long resisted. After his death last year, Apple’s management has signaled that it’s been considering options for the money, which amounted to nearly $100 billion.

Even without the dividend, Cook, 51, remains one of the highest-paid CEOs in America. His pay package was valued at $378 million when he became Apple’s chief in August. That was almost entirely in stock awards, some of which won’t be redeemable until 2021, so the value could change dramatically.

Assuming Apple pays quarterly dividends of $2.65 over the vesting period of Cook’s shares, the company said he will give up about $75 million in value.

Shares of Cupertino-based Apple fell $5.60 to $559.72 in afternoon trading Friday. The stock has traded between $310.50 and $644 over the past year.

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This person said the firm is reviewing orders its retail clients placed for Facebook stock, and will make price adjustments if the clients paid too much. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The person did not say what amount constituted overpaying for Facebook’s stock.

The world’s largest social network’s IPO was highly anticipated. But technical problems with the Nasdaq Stock Market delayed its open on Friday, and the stock closed nearly flat on its first trading day at $38.23.

Shares of Facebook, down about 13 percent since its Nasdaq debut, closed Thursday up just over three percent.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Meat clerk Ryan Young intervened when he saw the man pushing and then kicking the woman who is six months pregnant at a Safeway in Del Rey Oaks on April 21.

The announcement by Safeway comes after a public-relations nightmare for the Pleasanton-based grocery chain in the wake of the suspension. Petition-hosting site Change.org said it received nearly 200,000 online signatures urging Safeway to reinstate Young.

In a statement contained in a press release from Change.org, Young said he was grateful for the support. “Knowing that I had all these people standing behind me and that I wasn’t alone really helped me through this difficult time, ” said Young.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5 Ron Lynd said Safeway managers agreed Wednesday let Young go back to work.

The union had filed a grievance on behalf of Young, who also was commended by the Del Ray Oaks’ police chief and applauded by Monterey County residents for stepping in to defend the pregnant customer on April 21.

Until Tuesday, Safeway had defended its decision, saying that Young was suspended for unspecified actions caught on a store surveillance video during the confrontation.

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Facebook Inc.’s stock climbed $1, or 3.2 percent, to close at $32 on Wednesday. But the gain was only a small reprieve for shareholders. The stock’s rocky inaugural trading day Friday was followed by a two-day decline. The stock is still trading nearly 16 percent below its $38 IPO price.

The initial public trading of Facebook’s stock was tarnished Friday morning by a half-hour delay, caused by glitches on the Nasdaq Stock Market. It was marred further this week as investors began accusing the banks that arranged the IPO of sharing important information about Facebook’s business prospects with some clients and not others.

Related Stories:
Regulators Probe Bank’s Role In Facebook IPO
Facebook Reportedly Looking To Move Stock To NYSE After Botched IPO

Several shareholders who bought stock in the IPO have filed lawsuits against Facebook, its executives and Morgan Stanley, the IPO’s lead underwriter. At question is whether analysts at the big underwriter investment banks cut their second-quarter and full-year forecasts for Facebook just before the IPO, and told only a handful of clients about it.

One suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, claims Facebook’s IPO documents contained untrue statements and omitted important facts, such as a “severe reduction in revenue growth” that Facebook was experiencing at the time of the offering. The suit’s three plaintiffs, who bought Facebook stock on its first day of trading May 18, claim they were damaged in the process.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Facebook said the lawsuit is without merit.

Another lawsuit, filed in San Mateo County Superior Court, holds Facebook and underwriters liable, claiming that Facebook’s IPO documents misled investors. Both suits seek class action status on behalf of investors who bought Facebook stock on Friday and lost money.

“No one gets it perfect, as far as saying what the financial results are,” said Anthony Michael Sabino, professor at John’s University’s Peter J. Tobin College of Business. The bottom line, he added, is whether Facebook or the underwriter had material information about Facebook’s finances that was not disclosed publicly.

“At this moment, it’s still too early to say,” he said. “We don’t know enough, but this could turn out to be an issue.”

What is known is that beginning in March, Facebook began meeting with analysts at the underwriting firms. The gatherings are a customary part of the IPO process and are designed to help analysts understand the company’s business so they can make accurate financial projections.

On May 9, day-three of Facebook’s pre-IPO roadshow to meet with prospective investors, the company filed an amended IPO document that said its mobile users were growing faster than revenue. According to a person familiar with the matter, Facebook then had another meeting with analysts and told them that based on the new information in the filings, the analysts’ forecasts should be at the low end of the range that the company gave them in April. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not publicly authorized to discuss the matter.

Adding to the day’s events, Facebook was in talks with the New York Stock Exchange to move its stock from the Nasdaq Stock Market after the botched offering, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The news of the talks was first reported by Reuters.

NYSE spokesman Rich Adamonis said: “There have been no discussions with Facebook regarding switching their listing in light of the events of the last week, nor do we think a discussion along those lines would be appropriate at this time.”

A Nasdaq spokesman declined to comment.

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The streamlining announced Wednesday represents HP’s largest payroll purge in its 73-year history. The reductions will affect about 8 percent of HP’s nearly 350,000 employees by the time the overhaul is completed in October 2014.

The cuts come eight months after HP hired Meg Whitman as CEO to turn the company around.

HP hopes to avoid as many layoffs as possible by offering early retirement packages.

KCBS’ Rebecca Corral Reports:

The company expects to save $3 billion to $3.5 billion annually from the job cuts and other austerity measures.

Word of the mass layoff had leaked out in media reports late last week, so the news didn’t come as a surprise.

Nevertheless, the sobering details overshadowed the release of HP’s latest quarterly results. Although HP’s earnings and revenue declined from a year ago, the numbers were better than analysts had projected. HP also delivered another pleasant surprise by offering a forecast that raised hopes that HP may be poised to bounce back.

“While I wouldn’t say we have turned the corner, we are making real progress,” Whitman told analysts during a conference call.

Echoing comments she made three months ago, Whitman cautioned that “turning HP around is going to be a lot of hard work. It’s going to take time. But we know what needs to be done.”

Investors were pleased, although it wasn’t clear whether their glee had more to do with the cost-cutting or the company’s performance during its fiscal second quarter, which ended in April.

HP shares surged $1.97, or more than 9 percent, to $23.05 in Wednesday’s extended trading. That’s still about half their value before HP parted ways with Mark Hurd, a cost-costing specialist who stepped down in 2010 amid a scandal revolving around the nature of his relationship with a former actress who worked as an HP contractor. An investigation into it uncovered inaccurate expense reports.

The current troubles at HP have been traced both to Hurd, who cut research and development to boost profits, and his successor, Leo Apotheker, who didn’t respond to the threat posed by a shift to computing on smartphones and tablets.

Whitman’s plan calls for less bureaucracy so the company can respond more quickly to customer needs. She also wants to boost research and development to spur more innovation.

HP, which is based in Palo Alto, has been struggling to sell more personal computers and printers, partly because they aren’t needed as much now that people are spending so much time surfing the Web on phones and tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad. The company’s efforts to sell more business software and consulting services have been stymied by competition from the likes of IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp.

“Work force reductions are never easy,” Whitman said Wednesday. “They adversely impact people’s lives, but in this case, they are absolutely critical to the long-term health of the company. Our goal is simple: a better outcome for the customers at reduced cost for HP.”

Whitman plans to funnel most of the savings from the job cuts into product development. Some of the extra cash will go toward boosting HP’s earnings, too.

HP’s workforce has undergone several other reorganizations during the past decade. Two of the biggest occurred during Hurd’s regime. HP announced 14,500 job cuts in 2005 in one of his first big acts as CEO. HP also announced 24,600 cuts in 2008 after buying technology consulting service EDS for $13.9 billion.

HP did not say where the latest cuts would come from. HP is combining its printers and PCs division, which could reduce some overhead.

As part of the latest crackdown, Whitman is changing the leadership at HP’s recently acquired Autonomy division, which makes software that finds and analyzes data within companies and government agencies.

Bill Veghte, HP’s chief strategy officer, is replacing Autonomy founder Mike Lynch in an effort to boost the division’s financial performance. The shake-up is likely to amplify investor questions about whether HP blundered last year when it paid $11 billion to buy Autonomy. That deal was announced in August by Apotheker, just a month before he was fired.

Whitman told analysts she still believes the Autonomy acquisition was smart.

The company earned $1.6 billion, or 80 cent per share, in the February-April quarter. That represented a 31 percent decline from $2.3 billion, or $1.05 per share, at the same time last year.

If not for several items unrelated to HP’s ongoing business, the company said it would have earned 98 cents per share. That figure topped the average estimate of 91 cents per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet.

Revenue fell 3 percent from last year to $30.7 billion. That was about $800 million above analyst projections.

To pay for severance and other restructuring costs, HP expects to take a pre-tax charge of about $1.7 billion in the current fiscal year, which ends in October. About $1 billon of those charges will come in the current quarter ending in July. HP expects to take charges of an additional $1.8 billion through fiscal 2014.

The company also expects to register a charge of $1.2 billion to account for the declining value of the Compaq computer brand. HP bought Compaq a decade ago in a deal that many shareholders, including the son of a company founder William Hewlett, tried to block.

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Hochschild decided to research a phenomenon after she found herself fully immersed in it, scrambling to hire someone who could care for her aging mother on the other side of the continent.

“She didn’t have children. She was a one-room school teacher in a rural Maine town. How was I going to take care of her, make sure she was OK?” Hochschild said.

KCBS’ Susan Leigh Taylor Reports:

She did eventually find just the right person, and acknowledges the necessity of a professional service that barely existed a generation ago when families were less spread out geographically.

“It worked out, and I needed the market. But I found myself in an everything-for-sale world,” she said, and proceeded to catalogue it.

Her book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, introduces a bewildering array of for-profit industries—coaches and experts at navigating all variety of interpersonal relationships from parenting to the workplace.

Hochschild found even the most intuitive and emotional of human acts had become work for hire, “name-ologists, potty trainers, wantologists who help us figure out what we want.”

In all fairness, the want-ologist was a trained psychologist who focused on desire. And Hochschild points out that in at least one case, the clinician helped the client realize she didn’t need to buy a bigger house to be happy.

“It really raised for me the question, not of meeting real needs,” she said. “We do have real needs for market services, but what kind of a world are we moving into?”

Hochschild believes the outsourcing of personal services has become a source of malaise in modern life because professionalizing things that had been part of family life has forced a reexamination of what activities give us joy and meaning.

She recounted the story of a father who chose to throw a birthday party for his 5-year-old daughter himself rather than hire a birthday party planner.

“He lived in an upscale world where people were hiring birthday party planners,” she said, adding that a routine part of such packages is a professional entertainer.

“So he put on a 10-gallon hat and pretended to be Crocodile Dundee,” she said. “After a while, he ran out of things to say, and these girls started to fidget.”

Hochschild said even the other parents weren’t sure how to salvage a party for children accustomed to much more structured group activities.

“And a neighbor came up and said, ‘Michael, leave it to the experts. The experts know what 5-year-olds think is funny.’”

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Wednesday’s verdict comes about two weeks after the same jury, with two additional members, failed to agree on a pivotal issue in Oracle’s copyright-infringement case against Google. As a result, Google Inc. faced maximum damages of only $150,000 – not the hundreds of millions of dollars that Oracle Corp. was seeking.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissed the jury, skipping the damages phase that had been originally scheduled. Had Oracle been able to pursue damages, confidential documents detailing how much money Google makes from its Android software might have become public.

The outcome ends, for now, a showdown pitting two Silicon Valley titans in a courtroom duel that brought Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page to the witness stand during the 5 1/2-week trial.

In vindicating Google, the jury delivered a humbling setback to Oracle. The world’s leading maker of database software had accused Google of building Android around Oracle’s copyrighted and patented Java programming system. Oracle inherited the rights to Java in a $7.3 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010.

During the copyright phase of the trial, the jury ruled against Google on a key question related to Java’s “application programming interfaces,” or APIs, that provide the blueprints for making much of the software work effectively. Although the jury found that Google infringed on those APIs, it reached an impasse on whether Google was covered under “fair use” protections in U.S. law. The lack of a fair-use determination hobbled Oracle’s ability to extract huge sums from Google.

The jury found that Android infringed on nine lines of Java coding, but the penalty for that violation is confined to statutory damages no higher than $150,000.

In the second phase of the trial, the jury considered Oracle’s allegations that Android violated two Java patents. The jury said Wednesday that Google had violated neither. The patent case was considered to be worth far less to Oracle than the allegations of copyright infringement.

In a statement, Google said Wednesday’s verdict “was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem.” Oracle countered with a statement asserting it had “presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java.” Oracle didn’t say whether it intended to appeal the jury’s verdict.

Although Alsup dismissed the jury, the case still has a few potential twists.

Google has filed for a mistrial on the API ruling. Google argues that the law doesn’t allow an infringement finding if the fair use question isn’t answered. If mistrial is granted, the allegations could be re-examined by a new jury.

Alsup also will rule on whether the law even allows APIs to be copyrighted – an issue being closely watched by computer programmers. If Alsup finds APIs can be copyrighted, Oracle could still pursue a portion of Google’s Android profits, but obtaining a large award might still be difficult as long as the fair-use question is unresolved.

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The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Facebook’s much-anticipated IPO was delayed by a half-hour on Friday because of glitches on the Nasdaq.

After pricing at $38, Facebook’s stock closed up 23 cents on Friday and has been down since. On Wednesday, it closed up $1, at $32, still down nearly 16 percent from the IPO price.

The news was reported earlier by Reuters.

NYSE declined to comment. A Nasdaq spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.

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But not forever, according to Lee Houskeeper, a publicist for the bar.

The bar’s owners, James and Tasios Bovis, plan to recreate the Gold Dust Lounge piece by piece in a larger space in Fisherman’s Wharf, he said.

Houskeeper said he cannot yet disclose the exact location, for which a lease is still in the works.

He said “we don’t expect a problem,” but said he could not say exactly where it will be until the ink on the lease dries, which he hopes will happen before an afternoon news conference scheduled for Wednesday, he said.

“There’s a lot of moving parts,” Houskeeper said.

Work to be done includes stripping the existing space of its furnishings and decorations and reinstalling the items in the new space.

The process, which will get under way Thursday, is expected to take about four months, according to Houskeeper.

“I think people are grateful that the place is going to exist … and that the Bovises are going to spend all this time to recreate the thing that they love,” Houskeeper said of the bar’s loyal patrons.

Fans of the establishment created a grassroots movement in support of the bar that ultimately failed to keep it in its current location.

In the meantime, Houskeeper said, the Bovis family will set up a temporary Gold Dust Lounge in a back room at Lefty O’Doul’s, which it also owns.

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The City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved putting a minimum wage ordinance on the Nov. 6 ballot. If approved, the minimum wage would rise from $8 to $10 an hour, with annual inflation adjustments.

Mayor Chuck Reed said the election will allow for city leaders, residents and business owners time to gather input and weigh in on the proposed ordinance.

The Council’s vote came after a majority of public speakers urged councilmembers to adopt a minimum wage hike outright which the council rejected 8 to 3.

The proposal originated in a San Jose State sociology class that gathered enough petition signatures last month to qualify it for in time for an election.

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Rick Ketchum, the head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the self-policing body for the securities industry, said Tuesday that the question is “a matter of regulatory concern” for his organization and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The top securities regulator for Massachusetts, William Galvin, said he had subpoenaed Morgan Stanley. Galvin said his office is investigating whether Morgan Stanley divulged to only some clients that one of its analysts had cut his revenue estimates for Facebook before the stock hit the market on Friday.

The bank said late Tuesday that it “followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs,” referring to initial public offerings of stock. It said that its procedures complied with regulations.

The questions about the role played by Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for the deal, add to the confusion surrounding Facebook’s IPO. In the most hotly anticipated stock debut in years, the offering raised $16 billion for the social networking company, valuing it at $104 billion

On Tuesday, Robert Greifeld, the CEO of the Nasdaq Stock Market, acknowledged to shareholders of Nasdaq’s parent company that “clearly we had mistakes within the Facebook listing.”

The stock debut, originally set for 11 a.m. EDT Friday, was delayed more than half an hour because of technical problems at Nasdaq. Some brokerages were still sorting out the aftermath on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, our clients continue to feel the effects of this in some cases,” said Stephen Austin, a spokesman for Fidelity Investments, one of the country’s largest brokerages. Fidelity was still waiting for some Facebook stock orders that it placed on Friday to be executed. Fidelity’s systems had performed normally, Austin said.

In the meantime, Facebook stock itself has been a disappointment. It fell $3.03 on Tuesday to close at $31 and has now fallen $7, or more than 18 percent, from its offering price of $38. It managed to add just 23 cents in its first hours of trading on Friday, then suffered a big decline on Monday.

The Reuters news service reported Tuesday that a Morgan Stanley analyst, Scott Devitt, cut his estimate for Facebook’s revenue this year to $4.85 billion from more than $5 billion earlier. Reuters reported that it was unclear whether Morgan Stanley had told only select clients about the reduced estimate.

Reuters reported that the analyst cut his figures for Facebook while the company’s executives, including founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were shopping the stock to potential investors in the weeks ahead of the IPO, a process known in investing as a road show.

Morgan Stanley, in its statement, did not specifically address which clients might have been told about a reduced estimate from one of its analysts. It said that “a significant number” of analysts, including those from other firms underwriting the stock issue, had reduced their estimates for Facebook to reflect publicly available information about the company.

That was a reference to a May 9 regulatory filing in which Facebook said a shift by many Facebook users toward mobile devices might limit its revenue growth. Social media companies have struggled to make as much money as they would like from mobile advertising. Advertising accounts for more than 80 percent of Facebook’s overall revenue.

Morgan Stanley also said that revised analyst views were taken into account in setting the stock offering price at $38 per share. Facebook, working with Morgan Stanley, first set a range of $28 to $35 for the offering price, then raised the range to $34 to $38 before setting it at $38 on the night before the IPO.

When the stock started trading Friday, it jumped several dollars, but quickly fell back toward $38. It never crossed below that level on its first day, and outside analysts said that was probably because Morgan Stanley, eager to avoid the embarrassment of a first-day decline in the stock price, had rushed in with thousands of buy orders at $38.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman, decided shortly before the stock debut to raise the number of shares the company would offer by 25 percent. The Journal, citing people familiar with the planning of the stock offering, also reported that Morgan Stanley had assured Ebersman there was plenty of demand for the stock.

A spokesman for Facebook Inc., which is based in Menlo Park, said late Tuesday that the company had no comment.

The SEC had already said on Friday that it was looking into problems surrounding the IPO. On Tuesday, the agency’s chairman, Mary Schapiro, said: “I think there is a lot of reason to have confidence in our markets and in the integrity of how they operate, but there are issues that we need to look at specifically with respect to Facebook.”

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Forty-seven-year-old Thomas Langenbach appeared in court Tuesday on four felony counts of burglary that could net him up to five years in prison if convicted. He didn’t enter a plea.

Authorities say Langenbach covered the original bar codes on Lego sets with his own bar-code stickers to get a cheaper price. They say he then sold the pilfered sets of colorful toy bricks on eBay.

Langenbach works for German software giant SAP. His LinkedIn profile lists him as a vice president in a Northern California division.

Attempts to reach Langenbach, who is free on bail, were unsuccessful.

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“We’re predicting over 4.2 million Californians to be traveling beginning Thursday morning through Monday evening, the day of Memorial Day,” said AAA spokeswoman Cynthia Harris. In fact, her agency’s survey found that many drivers will be cutting corners – on expenses. “People are spending less on entertainment and are traveling considerably closer to home than they were in past years.”

“This is due in part to the volatility in gas prices,” she reasoned.

She expects that other holiday travelers will be using trains, buses and boats to get around, representing an increase of nearly 12% over last year.

KCBS’ Dave Padilla Reports:

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“I’ve never been busier in my life,” declared Brian Zuckerman with a company that installs structural foundations in the area. “We did more revenue in the last quarter of 2011 than I did in the best half of any previous year.”

Santa Clara Vice Mayor Lisa Gillmor is hoping the new football stadium will infuse life into the area, much like AT&T Park did in San Francisco’s South of Market.

“This is going to be a catalyst that spurs additional development in this whole surrounding area, we’re looking at additional hotel rooms, additional new hotels, commercial, restaurants, shopping, all types of recreation,” she said hopefully.

By some estimates, the region’s unemployment rate – an estimated 30% in the construction trade – will make a drastic turnaround within a year.

KCBS’ Mike Colgan Reports:

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The Democratic governor wants voters to approve the temporary increases in November as part of what he described as a series of steps to help California recover from the recession without deeper cuts to education and social services.

Brown, who was elected governor the first time in 1974, told the chamber’s annual gathering in Sacramento on Tuesday that he is looking forward to his “third act” when economic conditions have improved.

His speech, before about 1,000 business leaders, drew a mixed reaction. The level of government spending and the cost of public employee pension benefits remain concerns.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Google says Dennis Woodside, previously president of Google’s Americas region, is Motorola’s new CEO. Departing CEO Sanjay Jha will help to ensure a smooth transition.

Google Inc. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. announced the $12.5 billion deal last summer, expecting it would close late last year or early this year.

Approval from Chinese regulators was slow in coming. On Saturday, China approved the deal, on condition that Google Inc.’s Android software would remain free for other phone makers for at least five years.

Google is buying Motorola, a pioneer in the cellphone industry, to prop up its patent portfolio and help defend phone makers who use Android against litigation.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

SAP said it is offering $45 per share for the Sunnyvale company. That’s a premium of 19.6 percent from Monday’s closing price of Ariba shares. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market as of March 31, according to FactSet.

Ariba’s board has approved the deal and SAP says it should close during the third quarter if Ariba shareholders approve the sale.

SAP, based in Walldorf, Germany, said the deal is worth about $4.3 billion.

Ariba’s revenue grew almost 40 percent to $444 million in its latest fiscal year. SAP says the deal should add to its adjusted profit in 2013. The company has around 2,600 employees.

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Fior D’Italia opened its doors in 1886, operating in a number of North Beach locations over the years. It took its final orders from customers Monday night.

Business has been down for the restaurant since a fire in 2005 forced another move from Union Street to the corner of Mason and Francisco streets.

The restaurant called itself “America’s Oldest Italian Restaurant.”

KCBS’ Chris Filippi Reports:

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So.cl is not being branded as a competitor to Facebook. In fact, the website focuses more on interests than friends.

KCBS Technology Analyst Larry Magid:

Termed by Microsoft as “an experimental research product focused on the future of social experiences,” So.cl users can log in to the network using their Facebook or Windows Live account and are then presented with a variety of topics of interests.

Once users find the topics they are looking for, they can form relationships around those interests.

The site is also closely tied into the Bing search engine, so users can share what they search, although there is a big disclosure about this in terms of possible privacy issues.

You can hear Larry Magid’s Tech Report Monday through Friday at 3:50pm on KCBS All News 740AM and 106.9FM.

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The company, Blueseed, had previously talked about building a floating platform with homes and work spaces. Placing the community in international waters would allow Silicon Valley startups to get around costly and time-consuming work visas. In San Jose Monday, CEO Max Marty said he is now leaning toward retrofitting a used cruise ship for $30 million to $80 million instead of building the platform village from scratch. Making the plan more affordable.

The community would still allow workers to get to the mainland on tourist or business visas, which are easier to get. But the plan still lacks funding.

Prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel has promised half a million dollars in seed money, but has not yet written a check.

Researcher Vivek Wadhwa said the idea is interesting, but most high-tech entrepreneurs are married with kids. That could be a problem on a cruise ship.

“I’d love to see lots of companies come out of this. Any effort is welcome, but this is only a band-aid. That’s where the problem is. It’s a drop in the ocean,” said Wadhwa.

Still, the plan could be a blueprint for companies to hack immigration regulations. Marty said 200 startups have expressed interest.

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The Monterey Herald reports that customers angered by Safeway’s actions on Sunday picketed the store in Del Rey Oaks where employee Ryan Young stepped between the couple on April 21.

Safeway spokeswoman Teena Massingill said Young was not suspended without pay for coming to the woman’s aid, but for other unspecific actions that were caught on a store surveillance video.

The company is reviewing the footage along with the union that represents Safeway workers.

The Del Rey Oaks Police Department and its chief have commended Young for defending the woman.

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Over the next five weeks, a total of 3,000 piles will be drilled at the site.

“Each one of those colored tubes represents where a pile is going to be driven or drilled,” said Tom Albanese with Central Concrete Supply. “They drill down several feet and once they get all the dirt out of it, they’ll slip in a rebar cage. They’ll put the rebar cage in and than they’ll fill it immediately with concrete before it collapses, just in case there’s any loose ground down below.”

KCBS’ Mike Colgan Reports:

Albanese said that by the time they’re done, 80,000 cubic yards of concrete will be poured at the site. To put that in context, that’s enough concrete for 8,000 home foundations.

Project director Jack Hill said they’ve already buried 30 miles of underground utilities.

“In the next 90 days, until August 1, all the work that’s done here will be below grade for the most part,” said Hill. “Around August, mid-August or September, than you’ll start to see the frame going up, like a house.”

Central Concrete has supplied concrete for several projects around the Bay Area, including the NASA Ames Building and San Francisco Academy of Sciences.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

After the social network’s stock fizzled on Friday in its long-awaited debut, its stock fell 11 percent on Monday, even as the rest of the stock market rallied.

The downward spiral has left some people sitting on big losses, and others scratching their heads. After all, nothing fundamental has changed at Facebook in the days since the much-hyped company came to the stock market – Facebook still has more than 900 million users, its 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg controls the company, and it is still one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public.

Facebook’s IPO -like Netscape’s in 1995 and Google’s in 2004- was billed as a milestone moment. Netscape’s offering ushered in the era of the Internet browser. The company’s stock more than doubled in its first day of trading. Google’s IPO heralded the age of search. It posted an 18 percent gain in its stock market debut. Facebook was supposed to offer proof that social media is a viable business and more than a passing fad.

But investors don’t seem convinced. Facebook’s stock closed Monday at $34.03, down 11 percent from Friday’s closing price of $38.23. The investment banks that arranged Facebook’s offering set a price of $38 on Thursday. Although many investors had hoped for a big first-day pop, Facebook’s stock opened Friday at $42.05 and fluctuated between $45 and $38 throughout the day.

For a host reasons, Facebook’s falling share price shouldn’t have been a surprise.

-Its IPO occurred the same week that the markets posted their worse performance so far in 2012. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 4 percent.

-Meanwhile, Europe was trying to avert financial disaster.

-At the same time, the American public’s love affair with the stock market continued to wane. People have yanked over $400 billion from U.S. stock mutual funds since 2008.

-Banks are being cautious too. All this is happening in the backdrop where banks are under pressure from regulators to become more conservative after the financial crisis. “Regulators want banks to take less risk,” said Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of Tabb Group, a markets research firm. “To support a $100 billion offering can be challenging in this environment.”

-Investors were also spooked by the trading glitches at the Nasdaq stock market on Friday. Some people weren’t sure if their trades had been executed and trading of the stock was delayed by a half hour.

“It was like trying to get a jumbo jet to take off in turbulent weather,” said Kathleen Shelton Smith, principal of Renaissance Capital, IPO research. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

With all of these factors in place on the day of Facebook’s IPO, some people may wonder why Facebook’s stock didn’t do worse.

The answer is: Facebook had some help. On Friday, Facebook only got as low as pennies above the offering price of $38 per share but never fell below. The banks that arranged the IPO, the deals underwriters such as Morgan Stanley and others, put in enough “buy” orders at $38 to keep the price from dropping below that level. It’s a customary gesture from underwriters to support the company they helped bring to market, explains Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida. It’s a way to save face and show that the company and the bankers gauged an appropriate level of demand from investors and valued the company correctly.

Pulling off a successful IPO means properly gauging supply and demand. The underwriters work with the company to decide how much stock to sell and at what price. Facebook sold 421 million shares. That was a lot of stock to sell. It is one of the largest IPOs on record.

Investors and the technology industry are closely tracking the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company’s shares. In the same way that Netscape ushered in a new era for Internet darlings in 1995, Facebook may have done the opposite for similar companies waiting to go public today. There are 168 companies in the pipeline trying to raise $41 billion through IPOs in the U.S.

“Facebook has raised cost of capital for all the companies that come with an IPO in its wake,” said Smith.

Facebook’s falling share price may be a sign that investors are taking a rational look at the company’s financial performance in comparison to its peers.

Though there are many ways to judge if a stock’s price is too high or too low, one popular method is to compare it to earnings. The so-called price-earnings ratio, divides a company’s stock price by the company’s annual earnings per share. A higher ratio suggests a stock is expensive because, in a sense, it takes more years of earnings for investors to get back they paid for it. A lower ratio suggests it is cheap.

By this logic, Facebook looks expensive compared to some companies. It is trading at 74 times its earnings in the past year, according to FactSet, a research firm. That compares with Apple at 13.7 times and Google at 18.6 times. The Nasdaq index of technology stocks trades at 20.8 times.

“There must have been some sober second thoughts about this,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group who was first to come out with a “Sell” rating on Facebook’s stock on Friday.

It’s not that he thinks the world’s largest online social network is a bad investment. But at $38 per share, it’s just too expensive considering the risks associated with Facebook’s brief history and unproven advertising model, he says. His fair price, or “target price,” is $30.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, who came out with an “Outperform” rating on Facebook before its IPO, said he thinks the investment banks that arranged the offering overestimated demand for the company’s stock.

Facebook originally set a price range of $28 to $35 for its IPO, which would have valued the company at $95 billion at the high end. Last Tuesday, though, it increased the price range to $34 to $38 per share, valuing the company at as much as $104 billion.

Then, responding to extraordinary demand from prospective investors, the company announced on Wednesday that it would add 84 million shares to the offering. The shares came entirely from the company’s early investors – such as Goldman Sachs and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The fact that these investors were offloading more stock instead of hanging on to it may have served as a warning sign to new investors.

“The late addition of 84 million shares to the offering overwhelmed demand, limiting the first day price,” Pachter said in a note to investors.

Aside from rational risk calculations, some investors “un-friended” Facebook for emotional reasons on Monday. Alper Aydinoglu, a student at DePaul University in Chicago sold all 50 shares that he got via Etrade at $38 last week. He racked up an 11 percent loss.

“I’m not willing to stick through the volatility,” said Aydinoglu.

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Yahoo is selling half of its roughly 40 percent stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., one of the most successful companies in China’s rapidly growing Internet market. The $7.1 billion price ensures that Yahoo will get a hefty return from its $1 billion investment in Alibaba in 2005.

The deal, coming a week after Yahoo’s CEO abruptly resigned over misstatements in his official biography, will provide more financial firepower for the latest regime trying to turn around the long-struggling Internet company. It came after more than two years of negotiations on how Yahoo will sell the stake.

KCBS’ Matt Bigler Reports:

Alibaba’s portfolio includes Taobao.com, China’s version of eBay, and TMall, which brand owners can use to sell directly to consumers. Alibaba also runs a search engine for shoppers and an online payment service.

Things have been going so well at Alibaba that it now accounts for a large portion of Yahoo’s earnings.

While Yahoo has profited from the Alibaba investment, Yahoo’s stock price has plunged by more than 55 percent since the company invested in Alibaba.

Yahoo’s revenue has been steadily shrinking as rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. developed more products to grab the attention of Web surfers and attract more online advertising.

Alibaba is buying back its stock from Yahoo to gain more control of its own destiny, something that CEO Jack Ma wanted, especially as Yahoo became mired in its own internal disarray in recent years.

“The transaction will establish a balanced ownership structure that enables Alibaba to take our business to the next level as a public company in the future,” Ma said in announcing the deal with Yahoo late Sunday.

The deal calls for Alibaba to raise the money needed to buy Yahoo’s stake within the next six months. Yahoo will get $6.3 billion in cash and $800 million in a new class of preferred stock in Alibaba, a privately held company.

Yahoo also will license its brand and some of its technology to Alibaba during the next four years as part of an arrangement that will include an upfront payment of $550 million.

After taxes, Yahoo estimates it will receive $4.2 billion just from the upcoming sale of half its Alibaba stake. Yahoo had been trying to work out a tax-free deal, but it wound up too complicated to pull off.

In a conference call Monday with analysts, Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse hailed the outcome as a “home run” for Yahoo’s shareholders.

Yahoo will sell another quarter of its original investment as part of Alibaba’s initial public offering of stock, expected by the end of 2015. Yahoo will then have the option of selling its remaining holdings on the open stock market.

By staggering the sale of its stake over several years, Yahoo conceivably will make even more money if Alibaba is as successful as it has been in recent years. Alibaba is now worth an estimated $35 billion, up from $2.5 billion seven years ago.

Both Alibaba and Yahoo said they may collaborate on other joint ventures in the future, despite the increasingly strained relations between the companies that contributed to more than two years of sometimes-prickly negotiations.

Yahoo intends to distribute most of the proceeds from its initial Alibaba sale to Yahoo shareholders, although its recently reshuffled board of directors hasn’t decided yet how the money will be paid out. For now, the company is adding $5 billion to its pool of funds for buying back its stock, raising its total commitment to $5.5 billion over an unspecified time frame.

The Alibaba windfall provides a measure of comfort to Yahoo’s long-suffering shareholders, many of whom still lamenting the company’s squandered opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, in May 2008.

Yahoo’s stock was at $34.14 when Yahoo announced the Alibaba investment in August 2005. It fell to $19.18 before Microsoft made its initial bid, in January 2008. Yahoo’s stock is now trading at less than $16.

The Alibaba announcement couldn’t have come at a better time for Yahoo. A week ago, newly hired CEO Scott Thompson left after just four months because of fallout from a bogus college degree listed on his official biography. As part of the shake-up, the company appointed a disgruntled shareholder, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, along with two of his allies to the board of directors, while accelerating the exit of five other directors.

Morse described the timing of the Alibaba deal as coincidental, but that didn’t stop analysts from theorizing that the company is operating with a new sense of urgency and direction under the new board and interim CEO Ross Levinsohn. His background is more deeply rooted in Internet content and advertising than Thompson’s was.

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney called the Alibaba deal as a “meaningful win” for Yahoo, while BGC Financial Partners analyst Colin Gillis is so encouraged by the recent developments that he believes Yahoo’s stock price can hit $20 within the next year, up from its previous target of $18. Yahoo’s stock hasn’t touched $20 since September 2008 when the company was still run by co-founder Jerry Yang. Levinsohn is the fifth person to run Yahoo since then, counting an interim CEO stint by Morse.

Having been burned by the company so many times, investors were less enthusiastic about the Alibaba breakthrough than most analysts. The company’s shares gained just 16 cents, or 1 percent, to close Monday at $15.58.

“I am not sure people could have reasonably expected a lot more than what they got out of this deal,” said Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ analyst Scott Kessler. “There are far too many people who are too cynical about the Yahoo story at this point.”

J.P. Morgan analyst Douglas Anmuth believes investors are worried about Alibaba’s ability to raise the money needed to pay Yahoo. He says they are also disappointed by the lack of clarity about when Yahoo will be buying back its stock.

“This feels like the market’s just not willing to give Yahoo much credit until a deal is officially done,” Anmuth wrote in a Monday research note.

Wedge Partners analyst Martin Pyykkonen believes most investors realize the Alibaba windfall won’t solve the problems that have been eroding Yahoo’s revenue, especially because the money will be funneled to shareholders instead of invested in acquisitions or content-licensing deals that might help the business.

“This is really just a short-term fix,” Pyykkonen said of the Alibaba sale.

Yahoo faces its biggest challenge in the online advertising market, where it has been losing market share to Google and Facebook as advertisers shift more of their budgets to the Internet.

Investors also want Yahoo to sell its 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan so it can reel in even more cash on sharpen its focus on its U.S. business. But Yahoo has said it isn’t close to agreeing on an acceptable price with Softbank, the controlling owner of Yahoo Japan.

The Alibaba deal still represents one of the few times in recent years when Yahoo has outshined Google in an area of business. While Google has been able to dominate Internet search and advertising, some of the company’s high-profile investments outside its specialty have proven to be busts. Google lost most of its money on a $1 billion investment made in AOL Inc. in 2006 and a $500 million investment in wireless service provider Clearwire Corp. in 2008.

When it trims its Alibaba stake, Yahoo will also be shaving its profits. Yahoo’s earnings from its investments totaled $172 million during the first quarter, with most of that flowing from Alibaba.

Gillis expects Yahoo to offset the reduced earnings from Alibaba by buying back about 277 million shares under its expanded repurchase program. With less stock outstanding, Yahoo’s earnings per share should rise by about 9 cents per share next year, even after accounting for the decreased income from Alibaba.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Bloomberg Businessweek is citing unnamed sources in reporting that the struggling U.S. Internet company could announce as early as Sunday that it has reached an agreement to sell half of its 40 percent stake in Alibaba.

The transaction could bring Yahoo $7 billion.

Representatives for both companies declined to comment Sunday.

Yahoo and Alibaba have been negotiating for more than a year. The talks at times have also involved Japan’s SoftBank Corp., Alibaba’s other major shareholder.

The deal could help appease Yahoo shareholders by giving the company a cash infusion for dividends and possible acquisitions or share repurchases.

Yahoo’s market value is $19 billion.

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Google Inc. is buying the mobile phone maker for $12.5 billion. The deal was announced last August and had received all necessary regulatory approvals except in China.

Google’s relations with China have been strained since it moved its search engine out of the country two years ago in a dispute over censorship and security.

Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick says the Chinese government cleared the deal on Saturday.

The deal allows Google to expand into manufacturing phones, tablet computers and other consumer devices for the first time. Google also gets access to more than 17,000 Motorola patents.

The deal is expected to close early next week.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Google Inc. is buying the mobile phone maker for $12.5 billion. The deal was announced last August and had received all necessary regulatory approvals except in China. Google’s relations with China have been strained since it moved its search engine out of the country two years ago in a dispute over censorship and security.

Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said the Chinese government cleared the deal on Saturday.

The deal allows Google to expand into manufacturing phones, tablet computers and other consumer devices for the first time. Google also gets access to more than 17,000 Motorola patents.

The deal is expected to close early next week.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

General Motors has sold 5,000 electric vehicles so far in 2012, compared to 5,000 for all of last year, said spokesman Shad Balach.

“So the market is definitely growing. Public awareness is important. People need to understand how the cars work and operate,” he said. “Once they get behind the wheel, they’re sold.”

KCBS’ Mike Colgan Reports:

Balach and others testified at a State Senate hearing in Fremont Friday about ways the state can support the growing demand for the latest automobile technology.

Just about every major manufacturer either is selling electric model or is planning to bring one to market. Balach said GM, for example, expects to start selling the Chevy Spark next year, and an electric Cadillac by mid-2014.

Sen. Ellen Corbett, the majority leader who chaired the hearing, pointed to the confluence of environmentalism and interest in technological innovation as factors fueling the electric car market in California.

“California is the number one market for these types of vehicles. People buy electric vehicles in California, so we have to have the infrastructure as well, to allow them to plug in and keep driving,” she said, pointing to manufacturers like Tesla Motors as important engines of the Bay Area economy.

Balach said it was important to avoid early mistakes by using standard connectors, and first installing the electric vehicle infrastructure in areas that would be best served.

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In its much-anticipated debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market, Facebook’s stock closed Friday at $38.23, up 23 cents. It had been priced at $38 per share on Thursday night.

After an anxiety-filled half-hour delay, its stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first time as investors were finally able to put a dollar value on the company that turned online social networking into a global cultural phenomenon.

The stock opened at 11:32 a.m. at $42.05, but soon dipped to $38.01. By noon, it was up again at $40.40, a 6 percent increase.

It fluttered throughout the afternoon, but it never hit the double-digit jump that many Facebook-watchers had expected. By the end of the day, more than 500 million shares had changed hands.

The closing price means Facebook is worth about $105 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonald’s and storied Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

But as many people looked for a big first-day pop in Facebook’s share price, the single-digit increase was somewhat of a letdown.

“It wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been,” said Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital. “But I don’t think we should view it as a failure.”

Indeed, the small jump in price could be seen as an indication that Facebook and the investment banks that arranged the initial public offering priced the stock in an appropriate range. It’s also a supply and demand issue. Facebook offered nearly 20 percent of its available stock in the IPO, so there was enough to meet demand. In comparison, Google offered just 7.2 percent of its stock when it went public in 2004 — and rose 18 percent on day one.

To IPOdesktop’s Francis Gaskins, it means mom-and-pop investors are becoming “much more educated and careful” about not buying into hype. And he said that the banks taking Facebook public have learned from the 10 IPOs of social media companies in the past year and are better able to gauge how much stock to make available in an initial offering.

It might not have been possible for the social network to live up to the hype that led up to its IPO. It’s Facebook, after all, a place where people are emotionally invested in endless online diversions and rekindled friendships, an endless depository of baby photos, favorite songs and fleeting memories.

“It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,” said Gartner analyst Brian Blau. While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company.

Earlier Friday, the company’s 28-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, smiled as he rang the opening bell from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Surrounded by cheering Facebook employees and wearing his signature hoodie, he pushed the button that signals the opening of the stock market in New York. The morning’s events followed an all-night “hackathon” at the company, where engineers stayed up coding software and conjuring up new ideas for Facebook and its 900 million users.

“Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing, our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg said. “In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you guys all do going forward.”

Afterward, employees tried to get back to business as usual, building the company under immense new pressure to meet shareholders’ expectations. To remind everyone not to get caught up in the hoopla, Facebook’s employees were given t-shirts that read “Stay focused & keep hacking.”

On Thursday, Facebook and the investment bankers settled on a price of $38 per share. The company and its early investors raised $16 billion in the offering, which valued Facebook at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public.

Now, the stock market will begin assigning a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces and held accountable for profit it earns—or loses—from one quarter to the next.

But Facebook is a rare company whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust. It is a cultural touchstone for the way technology reshapes our lives. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while becoming one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as “FarmVille.”

Facebook’s public debut marks a new milestone in the history of the Internet. In 1995, Netscape Communications’ IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom. That explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had hatched a “new economy”.

It took Google’s IPO in 2004 to prove that an Internet company with a disruptive idea could be profitable. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection.

Facebook’s IPO heralds a new phase of the Internet’s evolution. This social era makes connections among people as important as Google’s massive index of Web links. Still, the IPO will raise new pressures for Facebook to generate more revenue, perhaps by digging further into the trove of revealing information that people share on the network to sell even more targeted ads.

The IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company’s cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to being in other talented engineers and promising technology. That’s what has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don’t include Google’s still-pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China.

Zuckerberg’s biggest deal so far came when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on the $38 price for Facebook’s stock, Instagram is in line to receive nearly $1.2 billion.

Though Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from California, people outside the stock market in Times Square snapped photos of a big blue Facebook sign that lit up the building. Some of them used their smart phones to check in to the Nasdaq on Facebook. Frederick Nolde, who was visiting from Richmond, Va., said he bought 100 shares through the online brokerage eTrade.

He thinks the company is worth $100 billion. “I think Google is a good comparison and it’s worth $200 to 300 billion. The real question is how they do in mobile. If they can figure that out they’ll do well.”

In Menlo Park, some mourned the one that got away. Venture capitalist Mark Siegel visited Facebook’s headquarters to ponder. Like many of his fellow tech startup investors with offices a short drive from Facebook on Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road, Siegel said he had chances to back Facebook early on but didn’t.

He said at the time, when competing social networks like Friendster and MySpace still had clout, it wasn’t clear that Facebook would come out on top.

“In hindsight, any price would have been a good price to pay,” said Siegel, a managing director at Menlo Ventures.

There’s still time. Bruno del Ama, the CEO of asset management firm Global X Funds, is waiting until Thursday, to get in on Facebook.

“On the first day you see a tremendous amount of volatility,” he said. In three days, short-sellers will be able to sell the stock, he added, so by day five, investors should see more stability. Global X has a fund focused on social media stocks, and del Ama expects “significant growth” in the sector in the coming decade. Facebook, right now, is the crown jewel of the space. And it’s likely here to stay, by virtue of its position.

“Once companies have built a network, it’s really difficult to displace them,” del Ama said, adding that while massive companies such as Google are trying to compete with Facebook—and may have better technology—“we care about where our friends are.”

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

That’s down from 11 percent in March.

The state Economic Development Department said Friday that nearly 300,000 new jobs have been added since April 2010.

More than 2 million Californians are still out of work, but there were 164,000 fewer unemployed than a year ago.

The nation’s unemployment rate also fell in April, to 8.1 percent.

A year ago, California’s unemployment rate was 11.8 percent.

The state agency says 385,600 jobs have been created in California since the economic recovery began in September 2009.

Last month, they included jobs in mining and logging, trade, transportation and utilities and professional and business services.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Instead of operating as a separate division, Yahoo’s commerce operations will operate within the company’s global media team.

Interim CEO Ross Levinsohn announced the decision in a memo sent Thursday to Yahoo Inc. employees. The move signals Levinsohn’s ideas for turning around the troubled Internet company differ from Thompson’s.

The reversal comes a month after Thompson created the consumer-commerce division to help revive Yahoo’s revenue growth.

Thompson stepped down from Yahoo last weekend after just four months on the job. His departure was triggered by the revelation that his resume included a college degree in computer science that he never received.

Now, one of the executives hired by Thompson is out a job at Yahoo, too. Sam Shrauger is leaving after joining Yahoo last month to oversee the consumer-commerce division.

Thompson and Shrauger had previously worked together at PayPal, an online payment service owned by eBay Inc. Shrauger left PayPal to oversee Yahoo’s consumer-commerce division with Mollie Spilman, who had previously been overseeing Yahoo’s marketing in the Americas.

Under the new setup dictated by Levinsohn, Spilman will become Yahoo’s chief marketing officer. She replaces Penny Baldwin, who had been picked by Thompson to handle the job on an interim basis.

The global media team that now includes the reorganized consumer-commerce division will be overseen by Mickie Rosen.

In his memo, Levinsohn promised to share more details about his vision for the company within the next few weeks.

“I’m fired up and I hope you are too,” Levinsohn wrote.

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Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the high end of its expected range. If extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold as part of the transaction, Facebook Inc. and its early investors stand to reap as much as $18.4 billion from the IPO.

The IPO values the company at around $104 billion, slightly more than Amazon.com, and well above well-known corporations such as Disney and Kraft.

The $38 is the price at which the investment banks orchestrating the offering will sell the stock to their clients. Facebook’s stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market sometime Friday morning under the ticker symbol “FB.” That’s when so-called retail investors can try to buy the stock.

KCBS’ Matt Bigler Reports:

Facebook is the third-highest valued company to ever go public, according to data from Dealogic, a financial data provider. Only the two Chinese banks have been worth more. At $16 billion, the size of the IPO is the third-largest for a U.S. company, squeezed between No. 2 power company Enel and No. 4 General Motors, according to Renaissance Capital. The largest U.S. IPO was Visa, which raised $17.86 billion in 2008.

For the Harvard dorm-born social network that reimagined how people communicate online, the stock sale means more money to operate the data centers that hold the trove of status updates, photos and videos shared by Facebook’s 900 million users. It means more money to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling Menlo Park, headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year.

And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company back in 2004. He’s selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he’ll get some $640 million.

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The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104 billion. The sky-high valuation has its skeptics. Google Inc., whose revenue stood at $38 billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207 billion.

“There seems to be somewhat of a hype around the stock offering,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau in somewhat of an understatement.

There are a few reasons for the exuberance. One is the IPO’s sheer size. Investor appetite for the stock will likely propel Facebook’s valuation above other well-known companies such as Kraft, Disney and even Amazon.com.

Secondly, it’s personal.

“It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,” Blau says. While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company, so it resonates as something they understand.

And then there’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who just turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds. He’s counted the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs among his mentors and he became one of the world’s youngest billionaires—at least on paper—well before Facebook went public. A dramatized version of Facebook’s founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie that won three Academy Awards last year, propelling Zuckerberg even further into the public spotlight.

Though Zuckerberg is selling about 30 million shares, he will remain Facebook’s largest shareholder. He set up two classes of Facebook stock, building on the model Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created as part of the online search leader’s 2004 IPO. The dual class structure helps to ensure that he and other executives keep control as the sometimes conflicting demands of Wall Street exert new pressures on the company.

As a result, with the help of early investors who’ve promised to vote their stock his way, Zuckerberg will have the final say on how nearly 56 percent of Facebook’s stock votes.

True to form, Zuckerberg and Facebook’s engineers are ringing in the IPO on their own terms. The company is holding an overnight “hackathon” Thursday, where engineers stay up writing programming code to come up with new features for the site. On Friday morning, Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook’s headquarters.

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CLEAR has been rebuilt from the ground up since the company left customers high and dry when it abruptly closed in 2009. According to a company statement, service at SFO will resume on May 23rd, ahead of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

The new CEO, Caryn Seidman Becker, promised the same familiar service.

“It’s a different culture. It is a different company. It is a much faster system, but it is the same great idea which is leveraging biometrics, using your fingerprints and iris image to speed through airport security,” she said.

KCBS’ Susan Leigh Taylor Reports:

Registered travelers can skip having their boarding pass and identification reviewed by a Transportation Security Administration worker, and instead head straight for the inspection area.

The service costs $179 a year for individuals. A family plan allows travelers to add a spouse or partner for $50, while children under 18 can be enrolled on a family plan for free.

Previous CLEAR customers can reactivate their memberships for free.

Seidman Becker said the company is in talks to bring the CLEAR service to Mineta San Jose International and Oakland International Airports as well.

CLEAR is also available to travelers flying from airports in Denver and Orlando, Florida.

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The looming cuts cited by Bloomberg News and the technology blog All Things D would trim as much as 9 percent of HP’s workforce, based on the 349,600 people employed by the Palo Alto company as of last October. A breakdown on HP’s website listed 324,600 employees, but company spokesman Michael Thacker said the information was wrong. He pointed to the October figure listed in HP’s annual report as the most accurate head count.

Bloomberg News says HP is mulling 25,000 job cuts. All Things D, which is affiliated with The Wall Street Journal, estimates the purge will jettison 30,000 jobs. Both reports cited unnamed people familiar with HP’s plans.

Thacker declined to comment on the reports.

The job cuts could be announced next Wednesday, when HP is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings.

Those results are expected to show that HP, the world’s largest maker of PCs and printers, is still struggling to adapt to a technological shift that is enabling more computing tasks to be completed on smartphones and tablet computers such as Apple Inc.’s hot-selling iPad.

The trend has been crimping HP’s sales. Analysts predict HP’s revenue for its current fiscal year ending in October will total $122 billion, down 4 percent from $127 billion last year.

If HP trims its payroll by at least 18,000 workers, the company could save more than $1 billion annually, according to ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall.

If it occurs, the purge would be the most dramatic step taken so far by HP CEO Meg Whitman, who took the job last September after the company abruptly ended the 11-month reign of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker.

Whitman told analysts that she inherited such a messy situation that it may take several years for the company to bounce back. HP is trying to lift its stock price back to where it was nearly two years ago before the company demanded the resignation of another CEO, Mark Hurd, who was widely respected on Wall Street. Hurd stepped down in August 2010 amid questions about his relationship with an HP marketing contractor.

HP’s shares are worth half as much as they were before Hurd’s departure. The stock gained 3 cents Thursday to close at $22.03.

Whitman has said she is also trying to fix some problems that she blames on Hurd. In particular, she says Hurd crippled HP’s ability to innovate by imposing deep reductions in the company’s research and development budget. Whitman has indicated that she would reduce expenses in other areas so she can funnel more money into research and development.

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“People are buying one share not as an investment. They’re buying just to be a part of it, to have a connection with a favorite company or a favorite brand of theirs,” said Lance Lee, describing an overlooked segment of the market served by his company, OneShare.

KCBS’ Tim Ryan Reports:

Not since Google in 2004 or Martha Stewart’s company in 1999 has an initial public offering generated this much interest in owning a framed stock certificate, he said, although in this case the $39 frame costs more than the stock in question.

“In this case, I think people want to be part of this whole brouhaha that’s going on, and what could be more democratic than just one share?” Lee said.

OneShare does a brisk business framing stock ownership in brands like Burger King, Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson and Dreamworks for young people whose parents or grandparents see a clever way of teaching a child something about the stock market, Lee said.

So it should be no surprise his best seller is Disney.

“We have many stories where they’re telling the parents, ‘I own Disney.’ Well, I guess they do,” Lee said, adding that stocks sold in children’s names come bundled with a financial literacy program.

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The State of Appnation survey released Wednesday found smart phone owners now average 41 apps per device, compared to 32 in 2011. But the amount of time spent with those apps has only grown 2 minutes, from 37 to 39 minutes per day.

“We’re dealing a problem of ‘appathy’ with 2 p’s. There’s simply too many apps out there that are chasing a finite amount of time that people have to use them,” said John Gerzma, executive chairman at BAV Consulting, a New York brand marketing firm.

KCBS’ Tim Ryan Reports:

Gerzma said app developers face an increasing amount of consumer fatigue in the rush to create programs that will engage users in a meaningful way.

There are more than 500,000 apps available for download on iPhones and Android smart phones, but the top 50 apps account for 61 percent of total app usage.

Gerzma pointed to another recent study by TeleNav in 2011 that found one-third of respondents more willing to give up sex for a week that go a week without a mobile phone.

“Clearly we love our smart phones, but the problem really is that the apps are just cluttered.”

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Speaking after an owners’ meeting in New York, Selig said there’s no timetable for resolving Oakland’s dispute with the San Francisco Giants. The Giants are preventing the A’s from building a ballpark in San Jose, which is part of the Giants’ territory.

KCBS’ Mark Seelig Reports:

Asked whether he would approve a move by Oakland, Selig said “it just depends on where they’re moving to.”

Those remarks put South Bay baseball boosters in a pessimistic mood.

“It’s clear that any other sites would be outside the Bay Area, and it would be a shame,” said Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone, an outspoken proponent of bringing the A’s to the South Bay.

Wolff has never publicly declared any intention to move the team outside the Bay Area, and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan remained confident the team would stay in the East Bay.

“It’s a question of who can build a baseball stadium in time for the end of the A’s lease, and I think at this point Oakland’s in the best spot. We have the funding, we have the place, we can do it on time,” said Quan.

A group of local business owners stands ready to buy the team or help finance a refurbished stadium at the Oakland Coliseum complex or another East Bay site.

Quan added the Coliseum was situated on prime real estate for a new stadium because of its proximity to Oakland International Airport, Interstate 880 and Bay Area Rapid Transit.

“We have the best location, maybe in the nation right now, for a baseball stadium,” she said.

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The database’s Vice President Daren Bloomquist said on a statewide level, April foreclosures were down 30 percent compared to the same month last year. Nationwide, he said rates were at their lowest since July of 2007.

One trend he said is that lenders are increasingly agreeing to do short sales instead of foreclosures.

“Let the homeowners sell the property for less than what they owe, in effect kind of forgiving part of the mortgage,” Bloomquist said describing the trend.

KCBS’ Janice Wright Reports:

He added that it’s better for both the market and the neighborhoods.

“They get a new homeowner in that property right away. A homeowner who is taking care of the property, mowing the lawn,” he said, adding that it cuts down on foreclosure ghost towns.

Another research firm said Thursday that an increase in April home prices in the San Francisco Bay area is the region’s first annual gain in nearly two years.

DataQuick said Thursday that the median price for new and existing houses and condominiums in a nine-county region was $390,000 last month, up more than 8 percent from a year earlier. It is the first annual increase since September 2010.

April sales soared more than 13 percent from last year to nearly 7,700 homes.

DataQuick says buyers who have been sitting on the sidelines are moving to take advantage of lower prices and low lending rates.

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The reason Warner Brothers is doing this is to promote their three-disc Blu-ray 70th anniversary edition of the film along with an illustrated e-book on the movie.

But Facebook has other motives. When you go to their page to download the app, you’ll notice pitches for all sorts of other films. It’s really an opportunity for them to make it known that they’re open for business when it comes to renting movies.

KCBS Tech Report:

Facebook actually has allowed users to stream movies for a charge for a while, but a lot of people don’t know that. It may or may not be a coincidence that this campaign comes two days before the company’s IPO.

This also begs the question of how soon will it be before we start seeing Facebook on our TV’s. The trend is growing for the convergence of computers, TV, smartphones and iPads. I think Mark Zuckerberg would have Facebook on our toothbrushes if he could figure out how.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)