AP's copy-paste trick raises new Microsoft-Facebook questions |
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AP's copy-paste trick raises new Microsoft-Facebook questions
How's this for some tech-savvy reporting? The Associated Press copied whited-out text from a court transcript and pasted it into another document to uncover the redacted words -- revealing that Facebook's internal assessment of its value in 2007 was about $3.7 bilion. That was considerably less than the $15 billion implied by Microsoft's investment in the company.
If you're in the mood for some fun, you can do it yourself with the same document: PDF, 79 pages. Playing around with it this morning, I found that you can also find the location of redacted phrases by searching for keywords (such as "Microsoft").
The AP story arose from a dispute over Facebook's settlement of its lawsuit with ConnectU, whose founders alleged that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, their former classmate, took their idea for a social network. Microsoft's $240 million Facebook investment implied a higher valuation on Facebook's stock than ConnectU received in its settlement, leading to the subsequent dispute.
According to the document, Microsoft received a different form of stock for its investment. Facebook's lawyers also pointed out that the Microsoft investment was part of a broader business relationship between the companies. And as the AP's Michael Liedtke notes, Microsoft had an incentive to pay a premium to form a tighter relationship with the popular social network.
About Todd Bishop
Todd Bishop is co-founder and managing editor of TechFlash. He has covered Microsoft and the technology industry for more than five years, most recently as a daily newspaper reporter and blogger based in Seattle.
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