Facebook Receives $1 Billion from Goldman Sachs Overseas Offering; Digital Sky Technologies and Goldman Sachs Also Recently Made $500 Million Direct Investment Investment Values Facebook at $50 Billion Facebook yesterday announced it has raised U.S.$1.5 billion at a valuation of approximately $50 billion.

The transaction consisted of two parts. Today, Goldman Sachs completed an oversubscribed offering to its non-U.S. clients in a fund that invested $1 billion in Facebook Class A common stock. In December, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and funds managed by Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in Facebook Class A common stock at the same valuation.

“Our business continues to perform well, and we are pleased to be able to bolster our cash position with this new financing,” said David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer. “With this investment completed, we now have greater financial flexibility to explore whatever opportunities lie ahead.”

The investment generated a significant number of questions from interested parties and Facebook has addressed the most common ones below.

Why did Facebook raise this money?

DST and Goldman Sachs approached Facebook to express their interest in making an investment, and Facebook decided it was an attractive opportunity to bolster its cash reserves and increase its financial flexibility with limited dilution to existing shareholders.

Why did Facebook choose to raise $1 billion in the overseas offering?

Under the transaction’s terms, Facebook had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from the Goldman Sachs overseas offering, at the discretion of Facebook. While the offering was oversubscribed, Facebook made a business decision to limit the offering to $1 billion.

What are Facebook’s plans for the proceeds of this transaction?

There are no immediate plans for these funds. Facebook will continue investing to build and expand its operations.

Does this investment mean that Facebook will have more than 500 shareholders?

Even before the investment from Goldman Sachs, Facebook had expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.

About Facebook

Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

Russian hacker Kristiana Svechinskaya is accused by multi-million dollar internet fraud scam  according to famous British newspaper Mirror.

She was was arrested in New York City earlier this month, accused of being a part of an internet fraud ring alleged to have used malware and trojan viruses to steal $35 million from US bank accounts.

Svechinskaya was among four New York students accused of assisting the plot after investigators held 37 Eastern European suspects said to have been involved.

“Money mules” like Svechinskaya are said to have taken a ten per cent cut of the profits.

Hacker term is being used for people committed to circumvention of computer security.

This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (White hats), and the morally ambiguous Grey hats.

Svechinskaya faces up to 40 years behind bars for conspiracy to commit bank fraud and false use of a passport and is due to reappear in court tomorrow.

Click to tead more on Mirror.co.uk

As well known, Cloud Computing is online-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

Cloud computing allows you to host your files on the web, run your own applications, launching operating systems and scale them.

Amazon.com the Online shopping site from the earth’s biggest selection of books is also one of the biggest cloud computing services on the market. Also there are other big boys on the park as Appistry-Cloud computing middleware, GoGrid, Flexiscale, Microsoft Live Mesh, Force.com, 3Tera and more familiar;  Google App Engine.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is it’s global, private hard disk across the Internet; accessing from any computer and smartphone or even cell phone. Cloud computing offers you world class accessibility.

Is it really so?

This is fact that internet is global, but the laws are not.

Not long ago, Turkey has coincidentally blocked access several Google services, including Google Docs and its translation service because Turkey already blocked YouTube and some of the Google services use the same ips with YouTube. According to users in the country, docs.google.com, translate.google.com, books.google.com, google-analytics.com and tools.google.com are affected by the ban.

On another note, Turkey wants Google to pay 30 million lira (about $18.7 million) in taxes.

Users couldn’t access their Google Docs spreadsheets and documents. They couldn’t measure their web sites using Google Analytics.

Today, Iran, UAE, Thailand, Morocco, Iraq, Brazil, Australia (in schools) are blocking YouTube.  Do you see how many people can be affected with their cloud computing services?

Same had happened in 2009, because The Great Firewall of China blocked some of the Google Apps services.

China’s internet authorities blocked many Google searches for terms and websites deemed politically sensitive.

These are just popular issues and can be multiplied. People who use cloud computing services around the world, cannot always benefit from it’s global Access as it was told. As IT budgets pointing to the cloud computing this is still risky.

So far the issues are about Google App Engine but it’s clear that the risks and trust building mechanisms of cloud computing should be reconsidered.