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Facebook Bumps Up Amount of IPO Shares Offered By 25 Percent

Mike Isaac in Social on May 16 at 4:06 am PT

Facebook is bumping up the number of shares in its initial public offering by nearly 25 percent, pushing the total amount to more than 420 million shares. The increase means the company may end up raising $16 billion on Friday.

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Quote-Saving App Banters to Shut Down; Founders Jump to Betaworks

Mike Isaac in Social on May 15 at 4:42 pm PT

After struggling to attract a significant user base over the past year, conversation-saving app Banters is closing up shop, co-founder Lauren Leto announced via company blog on Tuesday. Leto and partner Patrick Moberg had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the likes of Chris Dixon, Khosla Ventures and SV Angel. The two will join Betaworks — Leto as general manager of the firm’s Findings product and Moberg as a “hacker-in-residence.”

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Social Analytics Start-Up Prosodic Launches With $1.4 Million in Seed Funding

Mike Isaac in Social on May 15 at 9:17 am PT

Software platform and social analytics firm Prosodic announced Tuesday it had completed a $1.4 million round of seed funding at its official launch. Investors in the round include Ignition Partners and angels Gary Vaynerchuk and David Remer of Remer Inc. The company is a predictive analytics service, informing its corporate and media customers what content should be shared with targeted audiences and how often.

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Cannes Ad Conference Roars for Twitter’s Jack Dorsey

Peter Kafka in Media on May 15 at 7:02 am PT

The Cannes Lions, the people who put on a giant advertising trade show every year in France, have named Twitter’s Jack Dorsey as their “Media Person of The Year.” The honorific comes as Twitter has begun ramping up its ad-selling efforts. For context: Previous winners include Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.