A man from New York who names himself Paul D. Ceglia has claimed 84% ownership of Facebook and has sued both Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in New York’s Allegany County State Supreme Court.

According to Wall Street Journal, Ceglia, to support his claim, has showed a contract paper signed by Mark Zuckerberg and himself dating April 28 2003 which says Zuckerberg paid him $1000 to design and develop a website (thefacebook.com, Facebook’s initial domain) which was partly developed by Zuckerberg before, also in return Ceglia gets 50% stake in Facebook in addition to 1% interest of Facebook’s equity for each day after 30 days till the website is finished as a part of his compensation. So by the time Facebook was launched, which was in February 2004, Ceglia’s stake increased from 50% to 84% by adding those 1% interest.

A part of that contract document states that, “the purchase and design of a suitable website for the project Seller [Mr. Zuckerberg] has already initiated that is designed to offer the students of Harvard University [sic] access to a website [sic] similar to a live functioning yearbook with the working title of ‘The Face Book.”

The claim completely contradicts with Facebook creation as Zuckerberg purchased thefacebook.com domain in January 2004 while his earlier product Facemash was built in October/November 2003. As the case is currently in court, Judge Thomas Brown who is hearing the case has issued a temporary restraining order against Facebook transferring any of its assets.

TheNextWeb quotes on the issue:

why Zuckerberg would agree to giving away half or more of his idea – if this is true – is pretty hard to grasp

Although a Facebook Spokesperson has said the suit is completely frivolous and they will fight it vigorously. According to local news paper, Wellsville Daily where the case is currently being heard, Facebook has asked the court to move the case to federal court. Here is what it had to say.

Court officials confirmed Ceglia is claiming because of a written contract with Zuckerberg, Ceglia is asking for a “declaratory judgement that defines ownership rights.” and he’s seeking 85 percent of ownership of Facebook. It has to do with the “formation of the entity,” court officials said.

According to WSJ, Ceglia does not have a good reputation in court circles as he is accused of defrauding over $200,000 from his wood-pellet fuel company’s customers which case is still going on.

According to a commentator named Jason Hanna on WSJ, who has downloaded and read the contract says:

Bizarre. I just download the legal filing myself. The seller in this contract is in fact Mr. Zuckerberg and the Buyer is Mr. Ceglia. It is a “work for hire contract” in which Mr. Ceglia is the purchaser of services to be performed by Mr. Zuckerberg for the StreetFax Database – owned by StreetFax LLC (i.e. Paul Ceglia’s enterprise).

If I’m interpreting this correctly (I’m not a lawyer) Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to give away equity in his own company (i.e. FaceBook) to work for Mr. Ceglia and receive a $1000 payment? Why delivery of services to StreetFax LLC would be tied to equity in Facebook, and the go-live date of Facebook, is completely nonsensical.

It all seems quite suspicious.

Well by looking at Jason’s comments and at Ceglia’s reputation, the whole case looks fake but if by any chance if court favors Ceglia it will be a huge setback for Facebook which currently has over 500 million users.

What do you people say about this sue on Facebook. If anyone of you gets a hold of this legal filing please let us know about it in our comments.

Update: Earlier there were conflicting reports that Ceglia claimed either 84% or 85% stake. After studying the original court filing document by Ceglia, we got to know that he indeed claimed 84% stake. Below is the copy of that court complaint document and also the Facebook filing to dissolve the temporary restraining order.

Ceglia v. Zuckerberg complaint

Ceglia v. Facebook Motion for Dissolution

[Via WSJ]

According to TechCrunch, Google has secretly invested anywhere between $100 to $200 million in the popular social games development company, Zynga. Apparently, neither Google or Zynga has officially confirmed this news but TechCrunch says that they have confirmed the story from multiple sources.

If the deal is true, then it would be strategically wise decision by Google keeping in view of growing popularity of Zynga’s games on social networks especially Facebook. Earlier there were rumors about Google planning to launch a social networking site called “Google Me” to compete with Facebook. So this deal might just go hand in hand with that news as the deal with Zynga will greatly benefit Google’s new social network in routing Zynga’s solid user base to its network.

There is another news floating around which is confirmed from multiple sources that Google is planning to launch Google Games later this year. The main source of this is from the Google’s job board where the company is looking for a Games Project Management Leader for developing commercial games for Google.

Now we have to just wait and and see till Google officially coming out with its next product releases.

Below is that job opening for Product lead for Google Games.

Product Management Leader, Games – Mountain View

This position is based in Mountain View, CA.

The area: Product Management

One of the many reasons Google consistently brings innovative, world-changing products to market is because of the collaborative work we do in Product Management. With eyes focused squarely on the future, our team works closely with creative and prolific engineers to help design and develop technologies that improve access to the world’s information. We’re responsible for guiding products throughout the execution cycle, focusing specifically on analyzing, positioning, packaging, promoting and tailoring our solutions to all the markets where Google does business.

The role: Product Management Leader, Games

The Product Management Leader, Games will be a flexible, results-oriented, and experienced senior leader who will be responsible for developing Google’s games commerce product strategy and partnering to build and manage the business with a cross-functional team. You will have visionary product insight, combined with experience in the online content business, significant technical expertise and extensive leadership and business skills. The Product Management Leader, Games combines a great instinct for developing compelling products with a strong focus on users and technical aptitude to work with a world class engineering team and the business sense to drive product goals and strategies.

Responsibilities:

• Identify market opportunities and define product vision and strategy.
• Develop and launch new products and enhance existing products.
• Lead and mentor a team of Product Managers.
• Engage closely with the engineering team to help determine the best technical implementation methods as well as a reasonable execution schedule.
• Establish partnerships as necessary to drive the growth of Google’s products.

Requirements:

• Technical degree or equivalent experience. Masters or PhD preferred.
• Experience building an online gaming business both on the web and on mobile devices. Deep understanding of the game business and how to create hits.
• Proven success in driving product strategy and product design for a successful game.
• Solid product management experience with a track record of creating innovative and winning Internet or software solutions.
• Significant people and organizational management skills. A natural leader and mentor.
• Demonstrated ability to gather user requirements and convert them into a winning product vision. Strong quantitative and analytical abilities.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to evangelize the merits of Google’s products internally and externally.

Youtube has gone beyond the 1080 HD videos which is still not very common on many consumer electronics devices today. Youtube has announced at the VidCon 2010 conference that they will now support a massive 4096×3072 pixel resolution of super HD videos and content on their website.

To achieve 4096p resolution, Youtube has increased pixel density by 600% while on the downside it has increased bitrate by only 25% on 1080p resolution to reduce the video file size. Because of the lower bitrate, the videos might not show true 4096p but will be definitely better than 1080p videos. Although, Youtube has said in future they will increase the bitrate which will automatically increase the file size and will need very fast broadband speeds.

Youtube’s previous supported a maximum of 1080p HD videos which was announced in December last year and in just little more than seven months they are supporting four times 1080p resolution which is really huge. According to Youtube blog, the ideal screen size of watching 4096p HD videos is 25 feet while IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors.

Here is a snippet from Youtube Blog.

Because 4K represents the highest quality of video available, there are a few limitations that you should be aware of. First off, video cameras that shoot in 4K aren’t cheap, and projectors that show videos in 4K are typically the size of a small refrigerator. And, as we mentioned, watching these videos on YouTube will require super-fast broadband.

We’re excited about this latest step in the evolution of online video. We’ve been impressed by the 1080p videos you’ve uploaded over the last seven months and can’t wait to see (in 4K!) what you do next.

To view the video in more than 1080p resolution you just have to select “Original” in quality drop down menu. Below are the five videos from Youtube’s playlist which gives you a glimpse of how a 4096p resolution video looks like.

Note: Above screenshot is a compressed version of 4096p image.

Source: Youtube Blog

Google has finally made possible to add short URLs to its Google Map service. Till now Google Maps had very long URLs which usually became unmanageable if you send multiple Google Map links to your friends.

According to Google Operating System, Google Maps Short URLs will be hosted on Google’s official URL shortener, Goo.gl which was launched last year. By default, Short URLs are not enabled on Google Maps. To enable it, go to the Google Maps Labs link on the top of the page and enable the Short URLs option. Then you can see a “Link” option on the top of your map which displays the short URL of that map when clicked. Unfortunately, you cannot embed the maps when the Short URL option is selected

Google Maps short URLs uses both “goo.gl” and “maps” in the URL which makes it easier for any one who sees the link that this is a map hosted on Google. Here is an example of Google Map Short URL on US Map.

http://goo.gl/maps/Fc5y

Facebook has announced that they are shutting down its virtual gifts shop. The virtual gifts shop was added on Facebook in 2007 where users could buy virtual gifts through Facebook credits and send it to others.

On Facebook blog, the social networking site has confirmed this and said the virtual gift shop will be closing down on August 1st as they are now focusing more on improving other products. Facebook said the gifts which you received will remain visible on your wall  and also you will be able to view the gifts sent or received on your gifts page even after the service is shut down. If you still want to send gifts after August 1st, you can use third party applications like Birthday Cards, Hallmark Social Calendar, Pieces of Flair and someecards.

Facebook’s Jared Morgenstern has says on Facebook blog:

“Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts. We’ll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the ‘Like’ button and the Wall.”

This is a surprising move from Facebook as their gifts shop generates over $10 million a year according to InsideFacebook. It looks like Facebook is concentrating more on using Facebook credits on third party apps for which they take 30% commission for each credit transaction. Currently Facebook credits is being tested in about 150 games on the network and might generate over $1.6 billion in U.S. revenue this year.

Google has added a new option on Gmail where users can add custom rich text signatures in their emails while sending it. Users can customize their signatures on their wish i.e they can add links, images or text and can use their own fonts and colors.

You can create new signatures by following steps.

1. Click on the “Settings” tab in your Gmail account
2. Then scroll down to the Signatures section where you will see a signature editor.
3. Create new signatures in the Signature Editor which will be automatically added on your future emails.

You can even create unique signatures for different email addresses associated with your account by using the drop down button. For that you have to use custom “From” Address first, then automatically that email address will appear in the drop down box in the Signature editor section.

[Source: Gmail blog]

Facebook has acquired local travel recommendation service, Nextstop. Nextstop is a service where users can create their own local travel guides or browse through other user’s guides and recommend it to other users.

On their blog post, Nextstop has confirmed the acquisition and said that the service will shut down from September 1st while the existing guides will be released under Creative Common License where users can upload them to Picassa, Google Maps and other sites. Currently the site has over 100,000 recommendations on various places in the world.

Here is an excerpt from Nextstop blog post.

When we started nextstop just over two years ago, our goal was to make it dramatically easier to discover great things to do anywhere in the world. During that time, we’ve been amazed and delighted by your enthusiasm for this project, and it’s strengthened our conviction that information from friends and passionate locals is a much better way to discover the world around you.

It’s with that goal in mind that we have some big news to share today: nextstop has been acquired by Facebook. What this means is that we’ll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets.

This creates a number of big changes for the nextstop product and our community, but we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own.

Nextstop was founded by ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham in early 2009. At Google they worked on the development of Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picasa. With this acquisition, all the current employees will be inducted into Facebook, while Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham will work as product managers under Facebook’s product director Blake Ross.

Nexstop faced stiff competition from similar sites like Yelp and Where I’ve Been, but what made the service standout from them was making recommendations social through Facebook Connect where users can even filter recommendations. Facebook will hugely benefit from this acquisition as both the founders of Nextstop have worked in Google’s social products and it looks like Facebook will soon come out with some location based service by using Nextstop’s technology.

White House and the State Department’s office of innovation staffer, Katie Jacobs Stanton has joined Twitter Management to manage company’s business and international strategy. 

She joined White House as Director of Citizen Participation and was also involved in Obama’s election campaign to manage new media strategies. Earlier, she worked for Google as Principal, new business development, product manager for Google’s Finance applications and also managed the implementation of OpenSocial.

She confirmed that she is joining Twitter through her tweet where she told she will be moving back to California where she earlier worked for Google.

“Today’s my last day in govt! Have enjoyed my experiences @whitehouse & @statedept. My next adventure will be @twitter in SF! #CAHereICome!”

Even before joining Twitter, she openly advocated twitter to be used by government officials and agencies in getting connected with public. In fact she also spoke at Twitter’s first developer conference in April on how to use social media for good causes.

Twitter is on a hunt to hire Government Liason Officer through which they want to establish deeper connections with the government officials in Washington.

[Via VentureBeat]

Columbia Pictures has released second trailer of their new movie “The Social Network” which is based on the popular social networking site, Facebook and is also called as “The Facebook” movie. The movie is directed by David Fincher which stars Jesse Eisenberg who plays Mark Zuckerberg in the movie.

The new trailer reveals more details about what the movie will be like. Although it repeats some of the dialogues which we saw in the first trailer, but this time they are shown as messages in the form of Facebook status updates where Mark Zuckerberg starts off with the billion dollar Facebook idea which is later followed by his seniors Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accuse him of stealing their idea and later about lawsuit by Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin.

The movie looks more interesting with every new trailer. The Social Network is releasing on October 1st this year while it will be premiered in 48th annual New York Film Festival on September 24th. Check out the second trailer of “The Social Network” below and do say what do you feel about the new trailer.

A group of Argentinian hackers headed by malware researcher Ch Russo has hacked the illegal file sharing site, The Pirate Bay and got access through the website’s admin panel and entire user database.

The group first succeeded to sneak through the website’s user database through a series of SQL injection attacks where they were able to access the complete user information including information on torrent uploaders and trackers and were also able to add, edit, ban or delete users.

After hacking Pirate Bay, Ch Russo posted a message on his blog

“As any other website, as any other system or mechanism, www.thepiratebay.org has robust parts and soft spots. We beleive that the people behind this comunity always acted with the local laws on their side, and so have we. The community caused problems to huge companies and corporations which turned into threats between this companies and them. What we have done, we did not do it with anger, or for commercial value. As always, we saw the change, the moment and decided to take it. The protocol or procedure done to achieve this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary”.

Russo also said that he and his associates did not hack the site seeing the commercial value of it and did not delete any user data, but he acknowledged that the data would be of huge interest to anti-piracy companies like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Russo commented on KrebsOnSecurity saying

“Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it. Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected”

Now the vulnerable component that facilitated the access through the Pirate Bay user database has been removed. Although Russo claims that his team did not have any contact with Pirate Bay’s administrators since the attack.

[Via Krebsonsecurity and Softpedia]