Westpac Bank in New Zealand had accidentally deposited $8 million into the bank account of a service station owner Leo Gao and his girlfriend Cara Young.  After discovering the money, they quickly withdrew the money and fled to somewhere in Asia.

The way it was discovered that the couple was in Asia was because Young’s sister Aroha Hurring joined them and posted details about their location in a Facebook status message.  The message stated that she was enjoying the heat and the local Asian beer.

Young’s mother Sue Hurring said “Well you’ve got to have a laugh.  It is bizarre.”  Hurring then blamed her daughter’s boyfriend for the incident.  “Well, if you really want to know I’d like to wring his blinging neck for getting the whole… I don’t know what to say.  Never mind Leo, he can stay there. Just come home now please [Cara]. It’s going to be OK.”

Getting them to come home through extradition will not be possible because the New Zealand and China don’t have any sort of treaty agreement.

Cara and Leo both applied for a $10,000 loan and a Westpac employee accidentally inserted a few extra zeroes instantly giving the couple access to 10 million New Zealand dollars.  The employee that made the slip is supposedly so distraught about what happened that he or she needed to see counseling.

[via ABC News Australia]

Digital Sky Technologies (DST) is a Russian investment company that has just bought $200 million worth of Facebook stock based on a $10 billion valuation.  Last week Digital Sky also made an offer to buy $100 million-$150 million worth of common stock at $6.5 billion valuation.

The common stock offer would be used to buy stock from employees as long as they are willing to cash out.  Digital Sky is owned by Russian businessman Yuri Milner.  DST also has ownership in major online mailing system Mail.ru.

The $200 million investment made in Facebook today is for 1.96% equity.  This deal is very similar to the $240 million investment Microsoft made in Facebook.

“I know for a lot of companies the IPO is the endpoint or the goal,” stated Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. “For us it will be an event on the path to where want to get eventually.”

Over the weekend VentureBeat reported that Facebook was close to raising $150 millionin capital to buy back shares from employees that want to cash out on their work.  A lot of the shares that were given to employees were valued at less than a dollar each, but the investors are rumored to be buying them for $10 each.

Before this round of funding, Facebook raised over $516 million.  Peter Thiel invested $500,000 as an angel round.  Accel invested $12.7 million in Series A.  Greylock, Meritech, and The Founders Fund invested $27.5 million.  And Li Ka-shing, Microsoft, and the European Founders Fund invested $375 million in Series C.  Lastly Facebook raised $100 million in debt from TriplePoint Capital to help pay for their server costs.

Given Facebook’s revenues of about $550 million for this year, the company has been reportedly turning down funding with term sheets that would valuate the company from between $6-$8 billion.

It will be a few years before Facebook goes public.  Facebook makes most of their revenue from advertising.  They are working with about 70 out of the top 100 advertising companies to earn their revenue.  Facebook’s revenue is expected to grow 70% higher this year compared to last year.  The company will also be cash flow positive next year.

[via Reuters]

Clare, Michigan is a small city that is about 85 miles north of Lansing and about 161 miles from Detroit.  A man in Clare was robbed at gunpoint of $10 as part of a gang initiation when he was at a bar.  Instead of telling the police that he was at a bar, he felt more comfortable telling his Facebook friends.  This was because of the man was worried about his  professional reputation.

A third party reported it to the police so they found out anyway.  Police contacted the victim and heard a tip that led to the arrest of the suspects last week.  The two suspects were Aron Davenport (19), Jason Wiers (17), and a 16 year old male.

“From our investigation we have every reason to believe that this gang was looking to get established here,” stated Police Chief Dwayne Miedzianowski.  The police caught one of the suspects during a traffic stop and the other suspects in various parts of the city.

Moral of the story: if you get robbed tell the police, not a social network.

[via MLive.com]

Facebook application Dogbook started about a couple of years ago. The point of Dogbook is for dog owners on Facebook to connect with each other. Features include the ability to upload dog photos and meet up with other dog owners to go for walks.

Complementing Dogbook is another service called Catbook. Both services were started by Canadian Geoffrey Roche and his son Alex. Recently Dogbook hit over 800,000 bios of dogs. Advertisers on Dogbook includes Purina.

Check out the video below of FOX News talking about the service. It looked like they had a ball doing it:

Above is a screenshot of multiple toolbars being used here that I pulled from an experiment at Rev2.org.  It includes a web toolbar from Krumlr, Ow.ly, Digg, and Facebook.  When I see a screenshot like this, I cannot help but think how this reminds me of GeoCities circa 1990’s when there was that stupid web banner that dragged up and down as you scrolled through content pages.  That banner alone helped contribute to the downfall of GeoCities.

The first one to come up with the toolbar out of all of the Web 2.0 companies was StumbleUpon.  Their web toolbar was just an alternative to the Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar.  StumbleUpon just made it easier to use the service for those who did not have access to their own computers with the toolbar already installed.

But then Digg decided to replicate StumbleUpon’s web toolbar even though it was not necessary whatsoever.  The community was much better off without the Digg toolbar.  Given Kevin Rose is such an avid Twitter user and Digg wanted more traffic, this is why they created the toolbar and shortened the links for Digg.com URLs.

It didn’t stop at Digg.  Facebook decided to get into the web toolbar game by creating that feature for shared links on the social network.

All of these web toolbars are doing something worse than what the GeoCities banners were doing back in the 90’s.  These web toolbars are absorbing more traffic since it is their domain names being used but loading the content owner’s website in an iFrame.

By not getting the traffic that other websites are taking from you and if for some reason you aren’t getting the link-bank credit, then you could be potentially losing traffic.  Fortunately for Pulse2.com, our main traffic sources are not from these content-stealing web toolbars.  This is why I personally don’t mind it as much as many others.

For those of you out there that are using Wordpress, there are some plugins available that automatically kill off the web toolbars.  One of them is called “Frame Breaker, aka Die Digg-bar die!“

Facebook has recently taken StudiVZ to court claiming that the German social network is simply a knockoff of their own website.  StudiVZ is one of the largest social networks in Germany with over 16 million users.  Facebook itself has about 2 million active users in Germany.  This makes Germany the country with the 18th most highest number of Facebook users.

To make matters even more interesting, StudiVZ was acquired by a larger company already for a price between €50 million-€100 million in 2007.  Taking StudiVZ to court is leading people to believe that they are going to go after any other clone next.  Xiaonei is the Chinese clone of Facebook.

In order to gain market share in Germany, Facebook started contests such as the German Application Contest and Facebook for Good – Germany.  Facebook also hired a few ambassadors in Berlin and Munich.

[via InsideFacebook]

The developers that are making money on applications placed on Facebook are generally selling virtual goods and games on the social network.  Facebook itself hasn’t created a payment platform yet.  However Facebook is currently testing a payment system platform over the next several weeks where real money can be exchanged.

A payment system made available through the social network could be huge.  Similar to how Apple sells music and applications for a small cut of each transaction, Facebook could do something similar.  Facebook currently makes most of its money from advertising and hasn’t done much to monetize applications on their own website.

Last month Facebook tried an experiment called Credits.  Credits was a virtual currency where users could give virtual points to each other for things such as favorable shared links.  As we receive more news on the payment systems rumor, we’ll continue to update Pulse2.com.

[via VentureBeat]

Before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University, he attended a private boarding high school called Phillips Exeter Academy.  Education at this elite high school has a tuition cost of $37,960 for boarding students per year and $29,330 per year for day students.  The school was established in the 1780’s and has alumni that comprises of politicians, major executives, celebrities, etc.

When Zuckerberg was at Harvard he worked for a company on campus called ConnectU that was started by Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra.  He quit that company to start his own company called TheFacebook.com.  Zuckberg reportedly turned down offers to be acquired by both Microsoft and Yahoo! after it had started growing rapidly.  The origins of the name TheFacebook.com may have started at Exeter itself.

Below are a couple of images from Exeter of their annual student directory.  The student directory is titled “The Photo Address Book” but has the nickname of “The Facebook.”  David W. Farrant, a student at Exeter that graduated in 2000 confirmed with ReadWriteWeb that The Photo Address Book was called The Facebook by students because the original name was a mouthful.

When Zuckerberg was a senior, student body president Kris Tillery pushed to have the student directory published online in 2000.  It turned out that they did take the student directory online under the URL: http://student.exeter.edu/facebook.  This website is not online anymore.

While Zuckerberg was at Exeter, he developed an artificial intelligence music player software that Microsoft and AOL both had interest in.  Both companies also wanted to recruit Zuckerberg to their companies, but he decided to go to Harvard instead.   At Harvard, Zuckerberg also started a service called Facemash which was similar to Hot or Not, but pulled photos of student dorm photos.  Admins at Harvard were not happy with that service so they had him take it down.

And that is one of the origins of Facebook.  If Zuckerberg did not attend Exeter, there probably would not be a Facebook today and Friendster would still be the place to be.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Over the last week, Facebook has been criticized for not deleting groups that promote the denial of the Holocaust.  The biggest debate around these groups was the issue of free speech and Facebook’s terms of service (TOS).  Brian Cuban, a Dallas-based attorney and brother of Mark Cuban, has been pushing for the removal of the Holocaust denial groups.

“The Holocaust Denial movement  is nothing more than a pretext to allow the preaching of hatred against Jews and to recruit other like minded individuals to do the same.  Allowing these groups to flourish on Facebook under the guise of ‘open discussion’ does nothing more than help spread their  message of hate,” wrote Brian Cuban on his blog.  “Is this the kind of open discussion that Facebook wants to encourage?  Is this really where you want to draw your line?”

Since Cuban started pushing for the removal and additional coverage was made at TechCrunch, two out of the five groups have been disabled.  Three of them remain.  Facebook has pushed for the removal of pictures that show breastfeeding and even recently banned a Ku Klux Klan group.  Why they are taking their time removing the Holocaust Denial groups is a mystery to me.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt responded the controversy being stirred by Brian Cuban and Michael Arrington (TechCrunch).  Schnitt wrote “Many of us at Facebook have direct personal connection to the Holocaust, through parents who were forced to flee Europe or relatives who could not escape. We believe in Facebook’s mission that giving people tools to make the world more open is a better way to combat ignorance or deception than censorship, though we recognize that others–including those at the company, disagree.”

[via CNET]

Social network company Facebook.com has launched their service in 6 new Indian languages.  These languages include Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, and Malayalam.  The Facebook page that people in India connect from are asked “Do you speak Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil or Malayalam? Now you can use Facebook in any of these languages to connect with your Indian friends all over the world.”

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg went on a spiritual journey tour around India after some major changes were made at the company.  One of the co-founders had recently left and the company was getting tons of funding. Fortunately the addition of the Indian languages may encourage more users in India to join the social network.  Worldwide, about 770 million people speak the 6 languages that were added.

[via TopNews]

Social network company Facebook is switching offices from downtown Palo Alto, California and moving to a 150,000 sq. ft. office building at Stanford Research Park.  The Research Park is located at 1601 S. California Ave.  This move directly affects 850 of Facebook’s local employees.

Facebook’s engineers will be on the first floor, marketers on the second, and operations on the third.  Everyone will get snacks and this move is designed to make employees closer.  Facebook will also be giving Bay Area employees a Caltrain GO Pass for unlimited rides from San JOse to San Francisco.

[via Mercury News]

The Palm Pre is getting closer and closer to their release date (which has yet to be announced). However the company is getting ready to market their phone.  The Palm Pre appeared in a Sprint commercial recently and it was leaked that Sprint employees will start training for the phone tomorrow.

Photographer Jaime Wilson let a picture of the TV ad leak on Twitter.  She even uploaded a photo of the Facebook set being used (pictured above) for us to check out.

On the set, there are protruding ledges for actors to sit on and the profile picture has a big empty area.  There are a few cutaways on the scene where embedded videos can be shown.  Palm will most likely use the TV set to demonstrate how easy it is to use Facebook features using the Pre.

[via SlashGear]

Chris Kelly is making an attempt to return to politics.  Kelly is the former Clinton campaign and White House staff member.  Kelly is currently the Facebook chief privacy officer and head of public policy.

“Ever since I worked in public life when I was very young, I thought it was something that I might do at some point,” stated Kelly.  “Over the past few years at Facebook, it’s become clear to me that the role of the attorney general is incredibly able to help make change in the world, and that’s what I got into technology to do, too.”

While Kelly’s team is campaigning, he will be staying with Facebook.  He also implied that he will not formally step down from the company unless he wins the election.

Recently Facebook revamped their terms of service that gives ownership of user content to the social networking company.  It doesn’t matter if a user quits the social network or not, the data still belongs to Facebook.

About 56% of users wanted the old TOS back where Facebook did not own the data submitted by users.  But then Facebook held a democratic process to define the new terms.  Facebook came up with the “Statement of Rights & Responsibilities.”  Several mothers complained when Facebook had removed pictures of them breastfeeding babies.

According to The Telegraph, the Isle of Man KKK group was removed from Facebook.  The group stated “Keep the Isle of Man white and free from foreigners.” The profile picture featured a hooded KKK member.

The description of the group was “There are too many comovers (sic) [non-British] on the Island. They are taking all of the jobs, houses and most of all they are taking advantage of our ****ing Island. …. join us and help clense (sic) the Isle of Man.”  One member posted this message on the wall of the group: “Damn blacks and indians (sic), coming over here taking our jobs – who the **** do they think they are?”

The person that wrote the “Damn blacks and indians” comment was actually mixed race and decided to write it as an ironic comment rather than being serious.

This group is a violation of Facebook’s terms that state “You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”  This is why Facebook shut it down.

The Isle of Man is an island situated in the center of the British Isles.  Queen Elizabeth II holds the title of the Lord of Mann for the Isle of Man.

[via Mashable]