Facebook has agreed to buy the hugely popular photo-sharing app maker Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock in a blockbuster deal reverberating around Silicon Valley.

It’s about the only thing that could top Justin Bieber on Instagram.

Facebook’s chief executive and founder made the announcement Monday on Facebook in a post that has already generated tens of thousands of likes. He has pledged to allow Instagram to remain independent.

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote. “We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.”

Facebook officially filed to become a publicly traded company today and, in doing so, spilled the beans on many of its internal figures and statistics that are normally under wraps. A crazy fact that emerged is that an average of 250 million photographs are uploaded to the service every day. That’s equal to 10.4 million per hour, 174,000 per minute, or 3,000 photographs per second. In terms of storage, the photos and videos hosted by the service take up 100 petabytes, or 100 million gigabytes. Wowzers.

via petapixel

Continue for details and the exclusive letter he wrote to the shareholders.

Read the rest of:
"FB files for IPO turning it into a $100B company; The Zuck now worth about $28 BILLION!"

The western New York man suing over claims he owns 84 percent of Facebook Inc. has a copy of a $3,000 cashier’s check that may support his contract claim against the company and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.

The purported canceled check is made out to Zuckerberg and dated three days before Paul Ceglia claims the two men signed a contract in 2003. That agreement, Ceglia said in court papers, entitles him to control of the world’s biggest social networking website.

Read the rest of:
"Facebook owner might lose 84% of the company to an old business partner—FB is worth $11 Billion!"