OpenTable is an online reservation system for restaurants that started eleven years ago.  Thus far about 90 million table reservations have been made on OpenTable.  They have filed an S-1 with the SEC indicating that they are ready to go IPO.  OpenTable is hoping to raise $40 million from the IPO and wants their stock to be listed under the NASDAQ.  Merrill Lynch is bookrunning the deal.

The company has made $41.3 million in revenues based on the first 9 months of 2008.  This is a 41% increase from the year before.  Revenue is generated by restaurants that pay subscription fees (54%) and reservation fees (42%) that show up through the system.  Installation fees generate 4% of OpenTable’s revenues.

Through the IPO, OpenTable is hoping to raise an additional $40 million.  Between 1999 and 2000, OpenTable raised about $48 million in VC funding.  Fortunately former eBay executive Jeff Jordan was able to street the company through the bubble and make it as far as IPO.  When a web 1.0 company makes it this far, you just have to commend it.

[via CN and TC]

On a list of top 10 stupidest things for every human being to do, I think number one is writing a threatening e-mail to the President of the United States.  But that is exactly what Timothy Ryan Gutierrez decided to do.  Gutierrez could be facing about 10 years in jail after the F.B.I. decided to investigate an e-mail threatening to assasinate President Barack Obama.  Another message that Gutierrez sent contained a threat to blow of Mall of America with 40 pounds of C4 in Bloomgton, Minnesota.

The F.B.I. arrested Gutierrez yesterday in Durango, Colorado after an indictment was filed.  Gutierrez told the Cortez Journal that he never had any intention on carrying out the message of the e-mail.

“I’m not mad about him becoming president, but he’s not doing what he said he was going to do,” stated Gutierrez. “He’s not doing anything for the lower class — just the middle and upper class. Medications are going up, not lowering, and jobs are being lost. His actions are going to get him in trouble.” Gutierrez told the paper that he was unemployed but plays with computers.  “I’m in serious shit” stated Gutierrez after being arrested.

I don’t think that Gutierrez should be surprised about his punishment.  After all you are threatening the most powerful man in the country.  Given the current sensitivity the country has towards any possible threats, the government will take all precautions to protect this man.  Even going as far as having him wear a bulletproof suit during the inaugural address.  Gutierrez will have a lot of thinking to do in those 10 years of prison time.

[via Wired]

I first noticed that Red Herring was down when I logged into my Netvibes account and noticed their feed wasn’t responding.  Then I went to their website and it decided not to load all day today.  Silicon Alley Insider reporter Dan Frommer pointed out that on a Twitter message by Falguni Bhuta, it stated “Heard my former employer Red Herring is closing.  Surprised it survived for so long.”

Why is the website down?  It’s rumored that Alex Vieux hasn’t paid the hosting bill for months now.   Ever since Red Herring and their 19 employees were evicted from their Belmont, California offices this past May, the company has been in a downward spiral with the exception of their website.  Red Herring has been hanging on to about a 46,000 rank on Alexa and still receives a good amount of traffic.

I think that Red Herring should at least say goodbye in an article before just shutting down cold turkey.  Check out what the people are saying about the situation on Twitter.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) plans to be discontinuing their Briefcase service.  Briefcase is a Yahoo! service allows people to store files online.  Yahoo! Briefcase will be shut down on March 30.  Yahoo! told users to retrieve or delete their documents before shutting down the service.  Yahoo! Briefcase offered users 30MB of free online storage.  The service was launched about 10 years ago.  The service “usage has been significantly declining over the years, as users outgrew the need for Yahoo Briefcase and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities.”

The news of Yahoo! Briefcase shutting down this service arrives on the same day that Google was revealed to be working on GDrive, a file storage service.  Microsoft SkyDrive offers 25GB of free storage online too.  Other services that Yahoo! shut down recently includes Mash, Content Match in Europe, and their unlimited music service.

Google Street View is a feature that is built in Google Maps.  Anyone using Google Maps can click Street View and see what it looks like to walk down the road in front of specific addresses.  Google captures these pictures by driving around cars with 360 view cameras on top of them.  Google has been quiet about the cars they send around, but sometimes they are caught in the wild.

Recently in upstate New York, a Google Street View car hit a baby deer on Five Points Road and had been recording the whole time.  “The driver was understandably upset, and promptly stopped to alert the local police and the Street View team at Google. The deer was able to move and had left the area by the time the police arrived. The police explained to our driver that, sadly, this was not an uncommon occurrence in the region — the New York State Department of Transportation estimates that 60,000-70,000 deer collisions happen per year in New York alone — and no police report needed to be filed,” wrote Wendy Wang, Street View Operations Manager.

I think that this is one of those pictures that needs to be archived and added to a top list of Street View pictures.

Over one billion people in the world do not have access to clean water. Water-related diseases constitute 80% of sickness and is the leading cause of death all over the world. Therefore Playpumps International has created a mechanism that resembles a playground toy for many third world countries. The Playpump will be installed near schools and can gather about 1,400 liters of water per hour at 16rpm from a depth of 40m.

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Brian Ussery noticed that there is a reference to the GDrive in Google Pack.  The file is commented that GDrive is an online file backup and storage.  There are also two lines that describe the application.  “GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.”

Based on the comments in these files, we can only expect that GDrive will eventually be bundled with Google Pack.  This means that you can access any kind of files on GDrive anywhere on a mobile device, web browser, or desktop.  No details on when it will be released though.

[via GoogleSystem]

The GigaPan Epic is a robotic mount that helps photographers create detailed panoramas. David Bergman used his Canon G10 and the GigaPan Imager to take a panoramic photo of Obama’s inaugural address. The GigaPan Epic and Stitcher software is available for $379. And the GigaPan Epic 100 will be available for $49. The Epic is very easy to use. First you connect a digital camera to the Epic. After that a small roboto mount automates the picture taking process. And then hundreds of thousands of images are connect together using the Stitcher software.

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Authorities in Tampa has been using the Microsoft Surface to visualize safety information for Raymond James Stadium, the spot for Super Bowl Sunday. The Surface will be displaying Microsoft Virtual Earth map for region tracking events, incidents, resources, and real-time tasks. All of the tracking using Virtual Earth will be done in real-time.

Check out the video below:
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:286ccd43-a8c8-4fd8-be1f-f942d4da016f&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Super Bowl: Microsoft Surface helps police monitor security">Video: Super Bowl: Microsoft Surface helps police monitor security</a>

Google Inc. paid a good amount to become the default search engine for Firefox, but that didn’t stop Microsoft Corporation from creating an add-on for the competing web browser.  Microsoft has just created a plugin that adds Windows Live Search to the search box of Firefox and has built-in search suggestions.

“We’re happy to report that we’ve officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand,” stated Live Search managers Beatrice Oltean and Debapriya Ray.  The add-on uses Microsoft Live Search API 2.0 and is part of a project called Silk Road.

Microsoft Live Search is behind Yahoo! and Google in terms of the numbers of search queries made on a given day.  Microsoft is trying several marketing strategies to take away market share from competitors such as the Live Search Cashback program and building the internal search for Facebook.

Police in Switzerland have found a marijuana plantation using Google Earth.  Police stated that this discovery was part of a much bigger investigation.  This led to the arrest of about 16 suspects and a 1.2 tons of marijuana, cash, and $780,000 worth of Swiss francs were confiscated.  The Swiss police officers found the marijuana field in the state of Thurgau last year when investigating the drug ring.

The two acre plantation was hidden in a field of corn.  Officers also used Google Earth to locate the address of the two farmers involved in the drug operation.  The 16 suspects charged with managing the marijuana plantation has sold about 7.7 U.S. tons of marijuana between 2004 and 2008.  The turnover of these drugs brought in about 3-10 million francs per year.

Google Earth is rumored to be launching an ocean service later this week.

[via Wired]

Amazon.com has posted a 9% increase in fourth quarter net income and an 18% rise in sales.  As a result, Amazon’s shares rose to over $56 per share in after hours trading.  This past holiday season, Amazon had their best ever despite the challenges faced by all retail companies.  Amazon reported a net income of $225 million for the quarter, up from $207 million a year ago.  Net sales increased 18% to $6.7 billion.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com mentioned that the Kindle ebook reader helped with the increase in net income.  But Bezos did not disclose how many units were sold.  Amazon sold out of Kindles for the second consecutive holiday season.  Amazon expects their first quarter sales to grow about 9-19% or about $4.53 billion to $4.93 billion.  Wall Street projects growth to be about 11%.

Gross margin slid to 20.1% from 20.6%.  Amazon.com’s free shipping, lower prices, and expanded product lines provided Amazon the opportunity to gain market share from a lot of their competition.  Amazon’s international sales increased by 19% to $3.07 billion.  A lot of Amazon.com’s increase in profit is due to people favoring fixed price websites over auctions like eBay.com.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen invested $7 billion in Charter Communciations.  Fifty-one percent of Charter Communications, competitor of Comcast, is owned by Allen.  Charter is the fourth largest cable operations company in America with about 5.5 million customers across 27 states.  The stock of the company is about 8 cents per share.

Back in 1999, Charter’s stock was about $27.75.  This was around the time that they had their IPO.  Now the communications company may be facing bankruptcy.  Charter CEO Neil Smit stated that the company is negotiating with bondholders and will be trying to roll over debt into new loans payable.  This would swap debt for equity in Charter.  Charter missed paying their debt payment this month and will be seeing another $1.9 billion in debt coming in this year.  Charter has borrowed about $21 billion.  I think it is suffice to say that Paul Allen will not be investing anymore money into the telecomm company.
Other properties that Paul Allen has invested in is the Seattle Seahawks, DreamWorks SKG, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, USA Networks, CNET, Priceline, Egghead, and Value America.  In 1998, Paul Allen bought Marcus Cable Company for $2.8 billion and paid $4.5 billion for stake in Charter.  Charter ended up acquiring Marcus.

“For over 20 years, I have been talking about and investing in the `wired world,’ a connected future marked by the merger of high-bandwidth data channels, the power of the personal computer, and the availability of compelling content,” stated Allen at the time of the investment.  Charter has never made profit since 1999.

Four former executives at Charter pleaded guilty to inflating revenue, cash flow, and the number of subscribers.  Shareholder lawsuits costed the company $144 million in cash and stock.  Charter CEO Carl Vogel resigned shortly after the controversy.

After Charter introduced their triple play package, subscribers rose once again.  The subscribers paid about $106 per month and the company double operating income to $208 million, but that was all wiped out by $478 million of interest on debt.

Microsoft ended up investing $1 billion in Charter’s biggest competitor in 1997.  Comcast became the nation’s biggest cable company which encourage Microsoft to buy more stock in Comcast in exchange for $5 billion stake in AT&T Broadband in 2002.  Within the last year, Microsoft liquidated all of their shares in Comcast.

[via AP]

Craig Ramsden is a 19 year old kid from the U.K.  Recently he left a Facebook status saying “I’m twisted at home. My head’s up my ****. I feel like killin some1 need to stay off the hard stuff ha —- it it’s Saturday ha.”  Shortly after writing that he went to a bar and stabbed Paul Gilligan, 31, to death.  Yesterday Ramsden was sentenced to over 17 years in jail.  This is the same punishment that was given to Edward Richardson for murdering his wife, Sarah for changing her Facebook relationship status to Single.

The Facebook post that Ramsden wrote was shortly deleted after the stabbing, but police were able to find it by examining the laptop used by a witness that visited Ramsden Facebook page after hearing about the stabbing.  The judge dismissed the idea that Ramsden was provoked because he actually returned to the bar and committed the act after writing about what he was intending on doing.

Facebook has about 150 million users.

[via CNET]

Facebook has removed a group that calls for ‘Global collection to hire a sharpshooter to liquidate Evo Morales.’  The group was formed this past August and over 8,000 members joined.  Morales is the President of Bolivia.

“We need to get the money to inspire someone to do it,” stated the group creator Hony Pierola, 20.  Pierola created the group “to laugh a little and wouldn’t be so stupid as to do it with serious intentions.”  But as more people joined, the group got really heated.  One of the postings from August 10 called out for torturing and suffering of Morales “like he’s doing indirectly to many Bolivian people.”  Morales has caused a division in Bolivia regarding policies for empowering Native Americans in the country.  Ivan Canelas, a spokesman for the government of Bolivia did not know about the Facebook group, but officials will be looking into it.

Jaime Schopflin, spokeswoman for Facebook stated that the group was in violation of TOS and was removed within 90 minutes of the first complaint.

[via Telegraph]