It may now be obscured by all the hoopla surrounding Facebook’s going public, but back in November the popular user-generated review site, Yelp, filed to go public and planned to raise $100 million ahead of its IPO (at an expected $1 to $2 billion valuation). On Friday, Yelp filed an amended S-1 that shows that the company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “YELP.”

But, of perhaps greater interest to those following Yelp’s trajectory is the fact that the third amendment to the company’s S-1 includes full-year financials for 2011, showing that, while the company’s net revenues have continued to rise since 2009, its operating losses have continued to increase right along with them. Yelp’s total revenues in 2011 were $83.2 million, up 74.6 percent from $47.7 million in 2010 (and 25.8 million in 2009), but net losses were up to $16.9 million in 2011 — a 74.2 percent increase from a net loss of $9.5 million in 2010. (Adjusted EBITDA losses were $1.1 million.)

The amended S-1 also shows some adjustments in Yelp’s traffic for 2011, as it saw 65.7 million unique monthly visitors for the year (with 5.7 million uniques on mobile), up from 39.3 million in 2010. Yelp users left 24.8 million reviews in 2011, up from 15.1 million in 2010.

As to Yelp’s increasing net losses, most of that was incurred from sales, marketing, and product development-related expenses, as sales and marketing costs increased 61 percent to $54.5 million in 2011. Product development costs, in turn, rose 77 percent to $11.6 million, up from $6.5 million in 2010. Of course, revenues increased right along with losses, jumping to $83.2 million, with the majority of revenues coming from local advertising, which accounted for approximately 70 percent, or $58.4 million, of that total.

Yelp was founded Jeremy Stoppelman, a former PayPal exec, in 2004, and follows the public debuts of both Groupon and Zynga late last year, along with the announced IPO of Facebook last week. Yelp may be operating in the red, but it’s not alone, joining the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial. It’s not unusual for fast-growing companies like these to operate at a loss early on their growth, spending big money on acquiring talent and competitors, or getting their message out through advertising.

In terms of the latter company, Amazon’s updated filing with the SEC recently revealed that LivingSocial had sustained $558 million in losses in 2011, which mostly came from acquisitions, stock compensations, and marketing costs. While this was an expected part of LivingSocial’s fast-paced growth cycle, the high number certainly caught many by surprise — and in comparison — Yelp’s losses look slightly more manageable.

As for Yelp, Goldman Sachs is leading the IPO, with Citigroup and Jefferies pitching in on management of the deal.

The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51.

Appleton worked at the company since 1983, starting on the night shift production line. He died piloting a Lancair experimental aircraft around Boise.

He is survived by his wife Dalynn and his children.

Micron is a major semiconductor supplier and most notably built a number of memorable laptops and hard drives during the early days of the dot com years. The company currently produces the Crucial and Lexar memory lines, among other hardware.

via Micron

Ansca Mobile, the Palo Alto-based mobile development company and makers of the popular Corona SDK, is accusing its partner PapayaMobile of ripping off parts of its SDK  for use in PapayaMobile’s Social Game Engine. According to Ansca Mobile COO David Rangel, his company recently discovered that Papaya’s engine is what he calls a “blatant copy” of some aspects of the Corona SDK.

In addition, says Rangel, some of PapayaMobile’s syntax and sample code is identical to Ansca’s, and the company is using graphic assets it took from the code on the PapayaMobile website.

The code PapayaMobile is being accused of copying is available here in the Corona SDK, a free download from the Ansca Mobile website.

You can also see that the image above the “Physics Demo” on this page of PapayaMobile’s website (as of the time of writing) is an image from Ansca’s sample code packages. It even has the Ansca logo.

If you were to download the sample code, you would see that it’s very similar to Ansca’s code, Rangel says. What this means, he explains, is that they “clearly based how their physics engine works very closely on ours.”

Ansca hasn’t yet settled on legal action, but Rangel says “we do think it’s egregious and is worth calling out.”

The situation is a strange one because Ansca and PapayaMobile announced an official partnership back in August which allowed PapayaMobile’s SDK to be integrated into Corona. This made it easier for mobile game developers to add social elements to their games.

Stranger still are the accusations that Ansca reached out to PapayaMobile to try and resolve the situation, but never heard back. PapayaMobile, meanwhile, claims to not have heard of these accusations until this morning, when we contacted them for comment.

As of right now, PapayaMobile doesn’t have an official comment on the situation. The company says it needs more time to research matter in order determine what’s really going on. They’ll let us know when they have more information.

Note: We’ll update this post with that info, when it becomes available. 

Bad taste. Is nothing off-limits anymore?

I’m always up for a good satire but this Action Electronics’ video promo airing on Taiwanese for the Action Pad misses the mark. It’s not the turtle neck, stage, or even the premise. For me it’s the angel wings and halo. The little props takes the ad from a tasteless parody to an absurd stunt. But personal feelings aside, this company won. Their ad spot went viral and the Action Pad won’t go unnoticed.

PC World spoke with an Action Electronics’ spokesperson who indicated they’re not trying to “use his death.” She added “This is not meant to make fun of Jobs.”

The tablet in question is just another budget 7-inch Android tablet. It runs Android 2.3.3 and costs 6990 yuan ($236 USD) — nothing special besides the marketing.

The commercial started airing on Taiwanese TV late last month. The company even held a mock press conference with the impersonator, which is slightly less offensive because of the lack of angel wings and halo.

Apple is known to aggressively defend its image and Steve Jobs likeness and generally quickly releases the legal hounds. But this is a slightly different case. This isn’t a Steve Jobs action figure. This is some company, desperate to sell their wares, turning to a dirty tactic that they knew would go viral. It’s hard to hate on swaggering bravado even if the result is fucking ridiculous and rude.

Mobile ad startup Mojiva is the latest startup to start throwing around the word “billion” in its press releases. The company says it now reaches one billion unique devices each month.

Of those devices, about 224 million are in the United States, Mojiva says. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, account for 33 million, 10.6 million, and 8.7 million devices, respectively. Overall, Mojiva says it’s serving 45 billion ad requests in 190 countries.(When mobile ad network Millennial Media filed for an IPO last month, it said it reached 200 million unique users worldwide and claimed 40 billion ad impressions per month.)

Mojiva CEO Dave Gwozdz said via email that 2011 was a big year for the company. The network saw “roughly 350% growth … in many different areas,” including revenue, ads served, and publishers in the network, he said — and the company’s ad serving business, Mocean Mobile, grew even more quickly. Plus, Mojiva raised a $25 million round in July.

When asked about 2012, Gwozdz said that the mobile ad industry as a whole will need to start providing better analytics and optimization, as well as more standards around ad serving counts and ad sizes. As for Mojiva itself, not surprisingly Gwozdz said that it will continue to focus on providing opportunities for its advertisers and publishers. More specifically, he said the company will be trying to expand in China.

Facebook put the “sexy” in S-1 today, with its IPO filing basically DDoSing the SEC’s site and eventually Scribd this afternoon.

Because it drives massive amounts of traffic we are genuinely interested, we covered it a lot on the site and even changed our logo to Zuck’s face, a move that some thought was funny and others not so much. We’re going to be doing this for some big stories from now on, so new life goal = Getting your face TechCrunched.

For the record I don’t think the Zuckerlogo is the most egregious thing we’ve done [dramatic pause] but do find being like “All hail Zuck” sort of lame — just because it’s just not that cool to be all fanboy about anything.

Here’s a round up of all the posts we’ve done so far, in case you JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH FACEBOOK IPO.

Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO

“Facebook is looking to raise $5 billion— and will mint hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of employees as millionaires in the process.”

Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.”

Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile

“[Facebook] had 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users as of December, for year over year growth of 39% and 48% respectively.”

Facebook’s Profits: $1 Billion, On $3.7 Billion In Revenues

“The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent.”

Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Zuck Owns 28 Percent

“Mark Zuckerberg is the largest shareholder with 28.2 percent of the company. He’s followed by Accel (invested in 2005) and Accel Partner Jim Breyer who owns 11.4 percent of the company. Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns 7.6 percent of the company, followed by DST with 5.4 percent. Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first investor, owns 2.5 percent.”

Zynga Makes Up 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue

“If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected.”

Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

“The excitement over the Facebook IPO has crashed the SEC’s website. The link to the Facebook SEC filing, previously available here, is no longer loading. Instead, we’re seeing a “this webpage is not available message” when attempting to load the site using Google’s Chrome web browser, and similar errors in other browsers.”

Facebook Still Growing Everywhere, Europe Leads At 229M, Asia Catching Up With 212M

“I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out Facebook’s regional traffic numbers via third party measurement firms and by scraping its ad tool. But now, I don’t have to, because the company has included the breakdown in its S-1 filing today.”

Facebook’s Risk Factors: Mobile, Gov, Slowed Growth, Google+

“Facebook’s $5 billion S-1 IPO filing includes a detailed assessment of business risks. These include: its lack of mobile monetization and the fact that it doesn’t own a mobile platform, government censorship and privacy scrutiny, inability to maintain its growth rate, and competition from Google+ as well as Twitter and Microsoft.”

Mark Zuckerberg Will Have a $1 Salary, Starting In 2013

“Zuckerberg requested that his base salary be reduced to $1 per year, effective January 1, 2013. His 2011 base salary was $500,000, and he also received a $220,500 bonus for the first half of the year.”

Can’t Get Facebook’s SEC Filing To Load? Good News, We Have It Here

“Since we were getting a little frustrated with the slow-loading, totally crashing SEC.gov website, we decided to do everyone around here a favor.”

Facebook’s IPO: An End To All The Revenue Speculation

“This means no more “leaks” of Facebook’s revenue numbers to spike its valuation in secondary markets. No more banal and vague conversations about how Facebook is “killing it” at San Francisco bars. It means that I’ll never have to write another one of these “Report: Blah Blah Blah” posts about Facebook revenue using this Zuckerberg dollar graphic I made for Mike.”

Payments Are A $557M Business For Facebook — That Could Expand From Games To Apps

“It’s not specific about what these other apps are, but they could include anything that somehow uses Facebook. Dating apps, social shopping apps, news-reading apps — who knows? The filing is meant to paint a broad picture of where Facebook is headed, and the line could just be a simple aside for potential investors. But still, any developer running payments in a way that connects to Facebook should keep it in mind.”

Facebook Ads Becoming (A Little) More Valuable; Mobile May Be Next

“Despite the fact that mobile makes up about half of Facebook’s traffic, the company doesn’t currently serve ads in its smartphone apps, something the filing brings up multiple times. However, Facebook says, “We believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds.”

Facebook Wants All 2 Billion Internet Users, But Growth Rates Are Slowing

“The problem, as the filing also notes, is that “our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time.” A quick analysis of the worldwide monthly and daily active user counts in the document shows this phenomenon is already in full effect.”

IP phone company ShoreTel has today announced that it is beefing up its offerings by acquiring unified communications company M5 Networks in a deal that is valued up to $146 million in cash and stock.

ShoreTel’s motivation for snatching up M5 was an effort to be able to offer its customers a choice of either on-premise or hosted solutions, enabling the company to reach a larger and growing market of users looking to deploy unified communications solutions. Gartner predicts that the “Voice as a Service” market is expected to show a 36 percent compounded annual growth rate in North America before 2015 — to $2.2 billion.

ShoreTel acquired enterprise mobility leader Agito Networks in October 2010 to extend the unified communications technology to mobile devices, enabling them to solve the bring-your-own-device problems that are changing the enterprise market.

M5 Networks, too, has made a couple of acquisitions lately, including Callfinity last year and Geckotech the year prior. The cloud communications company, which was founded in 2000, provides phone systems, applications, and cloud communications for businesses, and claims to be one of the country’s largest specialized VoIP providers.

Under the terms of the deal, M5 shareholders will receive approximately $84 million in cash and 9.5 million shares of ShoreTel stock, for a total of about $146.3 million in “initial consideration based on ShoreTel’s average stock price over the prior 30 days of trading.” Furthermore, M5 shareholders could receive additional consideration of up to $13.7, according to the company’s statement.

ShoreTel announced its Q2 earnings today, with revenue coming in at $58.0 million, up 8 percent sequentially from the first quarter of fiscal 2012 and up 22 percent from the second quarter of fiscal year 2011. Despite GAAP net loss for the quarter being $2.5 million, or $0.05 per share, ShoreTel had some highlights over the last six months, forging a distribution relationship with Ingram Micro in October, an expanded distribution agreement with Windstream, a North American communications service provider, along with expanding its relationship with Hewlett Packard, which will become a reseller of ShoreTel’s “Mobility solution.”

According to the statement, following the close of the acquisition, M5 will be operated as a ShoreTel business unit, which will be led by M5 CEO Dan Hoffman, while engineering teams will remain separate.

For more, see ShorTel’s announcement of the acquisition here and the announcement of its Q2 earnings here.

Facebook just filed its IPO registration (SEC doc here) and its financials are off the charts. Facebook’s IPO document provides the first peek at its financials.

The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. In fact, it was exactly, $1.000 billion (I don’t think that was a coincidence). Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent. Revenues come primarily from advertising (85%), as well as payments for virtual goods (15%) and platform development fees (negligible). Payments alone was a $557 million business last year, a number which our own Eric Eldon nailed in December.

The company has an extremely healthy 27 percent net profit margin (its operating profit margin is 47 percent). That is right in line with Google’s net profit margins of 26 percent. Software margins are a beautiful thing.

Facebook’s business throws off a ton of cash. Net operating cash in 2011 was $1.5 billion, up 122 percent from 2010. Free cash flow (a related measure) was $470 million in 2011. The company ended the year with $3.9 billion in cash.

Here is some of our additional coverage on the filing:

• Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment
• Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile
• Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Who Owns What?

Click the charts below to enlarge:

Facebook has just filed its S-1 to IPO. Below is the letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s purpose, in which he explains “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.”

Regarding business, Zuckerberg says “We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services…As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”

Zuckerberg compares Facebook to transformative technologies like the printing press and the television, stating “Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

Zuckerberg also describes Facebook’s internal mantra, known as “The Hacker Way”. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation…hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration…We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls.

The letter concludes with Facebook’s 5 core principles: Focus on Impact, Move Fast, Be Bold, Be Open, Build Social Value.

The overall message Zuckerberg wants investors to understand is that Facebook’s primary goal is to do good for the world — bringing humans closer to each other and the businesses that affect their lives. Investors should believe in this mission if they want to own a piece of the company.

The full text of the letter can be found below:

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

[signed Mark Zuckerberg]

The wait is over: Facebook has just filed for its IPO.

Facebook is looking to raise $5 billion— and will mint hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of employees as millionaires in the process. You can find its S-1 embedded below, or right here. Updating

Rumors of Facebook’s public offering have been swirling for years, and have long been routinely sidestepped by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The company has openly acknowledged that an IPO was indeed inevitable, but has avoided giving any sense of timing — “When we’re ready” has become a familiar mantra from Facebook executives.

The wait has been made possible, in part, by the rise of secondary markets and special stock sale programs, which have allowed early employees to sell off some of their valuable stock for liquidity. Such sales have helped reduce the amount of internal pressure to go public, which has given Facebook more time to build up its reach and products prior to the IPO.

Facebook also received an exemption in 2008 that allowed it to surpass the SEC’s ’500 shareholders’ rule, which would have mandated that the company begin releasing some of its financial figures publicly (Facebook argued at the time that most of its shareholders were employees — and their request was approved).

Here is some of our additional coverage on the filing:

• Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment
• Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile
• Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Who Owns What?