Saudi King Abdullah to buy Facebook for $150 billion to end the revolt

Left with no option, Abdullah advised by Goldman Sachs has decided to buy out Facebook and “clean out the weeds”. The offer on the table is $150 billion. Facebook balance sheet was shown to King Abdullah and his kingdom advisors had mentioned that it is not even worth $1 billion given that it generates no profit. But the King threw the report into the dustbin and fired his advisors and decided to hand over the investment banking mandate to Goldman Sachs who put the value at $150 billion. The deal will be all cash. It is worthwhile to remind our readers that Goldman Sachs had invested into Facebook at an unimaginable $50 billion valuation.

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Facebook Announces Global 'Hacker Cup' Competition

Facebook is taking its hackathons global with the launch of the Facebook 2011 Hacker Cup.
"We're starting the Hacker Cup to bring engineers from around the world together to compete in a multi-round programming competition," Tim Stanke, Facebook software engineer said in a blog post. "Contestants will have to successfully solve algorithmic-based problem statements to advance and are ranked by accuracy and speed."
Registration for the competition opens December 20. Hackers will only become eligible after answering at least one question right in the qualifying round, which lasts for 72 hours, starting January 7.
There are three rounds in the contest, two of which will take place online. Three thousand of the top hackers from Online Round 1 will advance to Online Round 2. The top 300 competitors from Online Round 2 will win a t-shirt. Only the top 25 will get to participate in the final round at Facebook's campus on March 11, and Facebook will pay to for their travel and accommodations.

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Facebook, Skype Poised to Enter Partnership

Facebook and Skype are about to enter a partnership, according to All Things Digital, the Wall Street Journal tech blog.

According to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, the two companies are "poised to announce" a "significant and wide-ranging partnership." Some features of the new partnership include allowing users to SMS and call Facebook friends from Skype, as well as the integration of Facebook Connect into the Skype platform.

Swisher also reports that video chatting Facebook friends via Skype will be available, as evidenced by a screenshot sent in by an unnamed source.

The report, if true, comes just a week or so after rumors of a Facebook phone popped up. On September 19, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was in the process of building a mobile phone platform, and working with a third party to build the hardware. TechCrunch reported that Facebook was developing its own mobile phone platform because it wanted to "integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone," and it could obviously only do this if it controlled the platform.

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