stocks

iStockphoto founder re-enters the market with Stocksy

Bruce Livingstone, who founded microstock powerhouse iStockphoto more than a decade ago and left it in 2009, is trying again with a new stock-art sales venture called Stocksy.

And he's doing it at a time when iStock is, if not necessarily vulnerable, the target of criticisms that it's out of touch with the army of photographers who contribute the imagery it licenses. To succeed, a microstock needs lots of customers licensing its photos, videos, and other works, and it needs a lot of contributors supplying a steady stream of fresh material.

It's these contributors Livingstone appears to … Read more

Apple stock drop blamed on huge hedge funds

Hedge funds that drove up the price of Apple's stock were also responsible for driving it down, Reuters reported yesterday.

After reaching a high of $705 in September, shares of Apple started getting battered in the fourth quarter.

The stock was especially hit hard after Apple revealed its fiscal first-quarter results last month, numbers that disappointed Wall Street. The company achieved record revenues. But some analysts and investors worried that higher competition and lower profit margins mean that Apple's best days are behind it.

As a result, many of the hedge funds with huge positions in Apple dumped … Read more

Eric Schmidt cashing out 42 percent of his Google stock

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is planning on selling off about 42 percent of his stock in the search giant, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today, Marketwatch reported on the expected sale, suggesting that Schmidt -- currently Google's chairman -- will try to net as much as $2.51 billion from the sale of the stock. To date, he owns as much as 2.3 percent of Google's stock, and has 8.2 percent of the company's voting power.

Schmidt currently owns 7.6 million shares of Google's Class A stock, … Read more

Nasdaq said to be settling with SEC over Facebook's IPO flop

Dozens of lawsuits and investigations emerged after Facebook's initial public offering on the Nasdaq Stock Market last year. One investigation, initiated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, focused on technical errors in Nasdaq's system that inadvertently delayed trading that first day.

Now, word has it that Nasdaq may be able to settle the debacle with the federal regulators, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Sources familiar with the matter have told the Journal that Nasdaq has been in preliminary settlement talks with the SEC. If the two sides do make a deal, it will most likely … Read more

Google shares hit all-time high

It's not a bad day to be Google.

The search giant's shares soared to an all-time high today amid hopes it will soon resolve its European antitrust issues.

Google reportedly handed a settlement proposal to the European Commission yesterday, just making the deadline to respond to an inquiry into possible antitrust issues.

The EU's probe was opened in 2010 when European regulators asked the company to explain how it ranked search results and advertising after complaints of anticompetitive behavior from European businesses. Google has been trying to settle the case since it started as it faces a … Read more

Shutterstock's new tools revamp photo and video search

It's a challenge for anybody selling a wide range of anything online: how do you get the right products in front of the right customers?

Shutterstock, which sells stock-art photos and videos to customers such as ad agencies and PowerPoint presenters, has the matchmaking problem in spades. With 550,000 active customers and more than 23.7 million images, pairing the right buyer with the right photo isn't easy.

Which is why the New York-based company, which went public last October, is retooling how it presents its products to better compete with iStockphoto and other rivals.

Shutterstock has … Read more

Time for Zuckerberg to unwrap his plans for Facebook Gifts

When Facebook reports its fourth-quarter earnings today, investors will be hyper-focused on how much progress the social network is making on mobile. The rapid shift to mobile has, of course, been the key part of the Facebook story since the company went public in May. First mobile was a giant problem; then CEO Mark Zuckerberg artfully reframed the problem as a giant opportunity.

And that opportunity extends to Facebook Gifts, which Facebook rolled out to all U.S. users near the end of the fourth quarter. Of all the products that Facebook unveiled in late 2012 -- and there were many … Read more

The 404 1,195: Where what the ETF? (podcast)

Listeners of The 404 Show have plenty of financial questions, so we look to our resident expert Jill Schlesinger from "CBS MoneyWatch" to make sense of it all. From ETFs to IRAs and everything in between, Jill and Jeff navigate the choppy waters of personal finance. They'll also talk about Apple in great detail, and whether the company's sinking stock price is a sign of things to come.

Jill hits up The 404 Show every three weeks, so if you've got a question you want answered on the show, be sure to send a tweet or e-mail us! … Read more

Apple no longer the world's 'most valuable company'

Apple has lost its top spot as the world's most valuable company.

Apple shares today are down more than $11 to around $439, pushing its market capitalization below $412 billion. That decline, coupled with a 16-cent gain in Exxon Mobil's stock price that pushed that company's market cap to $417.2 billion, has robbed Apple of its market-cap leadership position.

Market capitalization measures the value of a company, and is calculated by multiplying a company's total shares outstanding by the share price.

Apple and Exxon Mobil had been battling for the top spot in 2011, when … Read more