rumors

On Monday we heard that Facebook was allowing current employees to sell a delineated portion of their common stock, something that the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Now, VentureBeat's Eric Eldon, who also originally reported the Facebook tidbit, says that LinkedIn employees are going to have the option of doing the same. The business social network, Eldon wrote, is allowing current employees to sell 20 percent of their equity in the company at a $500 million valuation. That's quite a bit lower than the billion-dollar valuation reportedly bestowed upon the company after its recent $53 million Series D funding … Read more

If you see an increase in the number of 20-somethings driving nice cars around Palo Alto any time soon, maybe this is why: VentureBeat reported Monday that Facebook is ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company's internal valuation of $4 billion. It's slated to start this fall. For early employees of the company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room, this could mean some legit cash.

Facebook's valuation was reported at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last year, but the company has backtracked on … Read more

While Sony did not unveil any new hardware at the company's E3 press conference, new photos are beginning to show up around the Net that lead us to believe they're hard at work on an updated version of the PSP.

Kotaku reports that forums members from PSPChina BBS have captured the rumored PSP-3000, identified by its PlayStation logo button that would replace the "home" button currently on the original and slim PSP models. The "new" PSP also features an onboard microphone located to the right of the volume controls.

While these photos certainly look convincing, we're still going to have to label them as rumors for now. We'll update you if Sony ever confirms their validity.

What would you want to see from the next PSP? Built-in flash memory? Larger battery life? Let us know in the comments section.

More pictures of the rumored PSP-3000 after the jump.… Read more

A lucky Google user, Adrian Pike, has noticed something cool on search results: buttons to vote on links, much like Digg or StumbleUpon. He sent some screenshots over to TechCrunch.

The feature is being "bucket tested," meaning it's likely been rolled out to a handful of random Google users. As TechCrunch points out, it's not the first time that Google has experimented with voting on links.

Google has put out some official words on the test: "This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for … Read more

Looks like we were right: PaidContent reported Thursday that restaurant and take-out menu listing site MenuPages has been acquired. The buyer, they say, is New York magazine.

No financial details were provided.

We reported back in May that MenuPages had been acquired, but didn't have any hints as to a buyer. We speculated that it was possibly Yelp or IAC's Citysearch. With New York as a buyer, it's likely that MenuPages will stay locally rooted rather than continuing to expand nationally: there are editions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, … Read more

Over the past day, a flurry of tech blogs has bloomed with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might buy Summize, a nifty Twitter search engine.

The juicy news was first reported by a virtually unknown blogger, Josh Chandler. And with all the chatter, you'd think it were the next AOL-Bebo. That's because the world of tech blogs (and this one is no exception) has a remarkable tendency to ignore the fact that Twitter is still largely a foreign concept outside the digitally astute and that there are plenty of avid Twitter users who still don't know what … Read more

I guess this is what Disney would consider edgy: the company has reportedly acquired Ideal Bite, a "sassy" eco-focused e-mail newsletter that explicitly states it's "not for readers under age 18." The price was about $15 million, PaidContent reported. That's a lot smaller than Club Penguin, which Disney acquired for $350 million last year.

Ideal Bite is small even as far as e-mail lists go--it's no DailyCandy--but its demographic was likely of interest to a buyer like Disney. The site's median household income is $82,000, press materials state; the median … Read more

NEW YORK--Glam Media CEO Samir Arora showed up at ContentNext's EconAds conference on Tuesday afternoon looking dapper in brown leather shoes and a hot pink tie to match the handkerchief in his suit pocket. But really, he said, he runs a frugal company.

On his company's recent $84.6 million funding round, he said in an onstage interview with ContentNext's Rafat Ali, "We've really not spent that in anything so far." He added, "If you look at our history, we've raised $29.6 million to date before this round...we used less … Read more

The rest of the world might not know about it, but MenuPages, an online compendium of restaurant and take-out menus for eight major U.S. cities, is a pretty big deal in New York. But is it ripe for the picking? A source close to MenuPages told us that the Gotham-based start-up has been acquired, or is close to it, but didn't know who the buyer was, which means this one remains a rumor.

The ad-supported MenuPages, operated under the company name Slick City Media, runs local sites for New York to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, … Read more