zuckerberg

The legal spat is winding down between Mark Zuckerberg and the former college classmates who accused him of stealing Facebook's business plan from them.

The two sides will be in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday to iron out the details of a settlement between Facebook and ConnectU, founded by Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra.

The three ConnectU founders claimed in a lawsuit filed in 2004 that Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, stole ConnectU's code and business plan while all four were students at Harvard University.

ConnectU tried to back out of the … Read more

As has been repeatedly rumored, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen will be taking a seat on Facebook's board of directors. In a press release issued Monday afternoon, the veteran entrepreneur--co-founder of Netscape, former CTO of AOL, and now co-founder of social site Ning--was announced as the board's fourth member. He'll join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as two of the company's early investors, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital.

"Marc is an industry leader, and we're fortunate to have him join … Read more

The rumors have been floating around for a while, and now Mike Arrington is reporting that Marc Andreessen is going to join Facebook's board of directors. (Kara Swisher had the original news break back in May.)

Best known as the founder of Netscape, Andreessen these days is involved with Ning, which supplies a platform for "white label" social networks that you can brand as your own.

We'll try later to get more clarity about how all of this is supposed to shake out.

If the move indeed goes down, Facebook will pick up a plugged-in entrepreneur … Read more

A U.S. District Court judge has decided to enforce the settlement that Facebook and would-be rival ConnectU signed in February, rejecting the ConnectU founders' claims of fraud.

The legal battle between the two social-networking sites has gone on since 2004, when ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra initially sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several other early employees for allegedly stealing ConnectU's code and business plan while they were all students at Harvard. Facebook countersued in 2005, claiming that ConnectU had hacked into its user database to mine e-mail addresses.

Both parties must still show … Read more

As she lurched towards an unfortunate demise in the Democratic Primary election, Hillary Clinton sought out Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and appeared to blame him for her failure to defeat Barack Obama.

Last week, a Clinton campaign operative placed a phone call to Zuckerberg, choosing a less than optimal time of the morning. When Zuckerberg picked up, the New York Senator came on the line to firmly state her views.

"Mr. Zuckerberg. You and your friendsters- I believe that's the trendy term- are costing me the Presidency," declared the Senator.

"Um, we're Facebook, not Friendster, … Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his new COO Sheryl Sandberg fielded questions from Kara Swisher at the D6 conference. The pair stayed on message. Zuckerberg has learned to simply state the company goals in answer to almost any question. It shows focus and the savvy of a budding politician. Sandberg brought serious chops to the monetization and marketing discussion.

Kara asked Zuckerberg why he chose to be the CEO, even as the company has grown to 550 people. He sidestepped the question and talked about the company goals--helping people share information, building products, and creating teams.

Zuckerberg offered up that … Read more

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest person ever to score a spot on Forbes magazine's annual list of billionaires, is known as a quiet, businesslike fellow.

Self-confident, definitely. Arrogant, possibly. It'd still be a stretch to imagine him partying on yachts, scheming his way into secret societies, and creating popular Web projects so that he could hook up with more girls. But according to a tipster to media gossip blog Gawker, that's what's detailed in Face Off, a forthcoming book that purports to be written by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich.

"They dined … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--The secret to tech industry success might just be Larry Brilliant's favorite ashram in India.

The director of Google's philanthropic efforts told attendees of the Future in Review conference here that during the 10 years he spent in India, he lived in an ashram that has hosted some of the tech industry's luminaries.

Apple's Steve Jobs heads the list, but in recent years, Brilliant has taken Larry Page, eBay founder Jeff Skoll, and the most recent visitor, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, to the ashram.

While he took many interesting detours in a 30-minute session, … Read more

The latest wild rumor circulating is that after doing a search ad deal with Yahoo, Microsoft will spend its cash acquiring Facebook for $15 billion to $20 billion.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook's future as a standalone company. "You can tell, from our history and what we've done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long term," Reuters reported.

Zuckerberg declined to comment on a follow-up question regarding the prospect of a sale. Microsoft invested $… Read more