1. FACEBOOK FINISHES YEAR ONE AS PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY
Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of Facebook's IPO. How are things looking for the social network? Shares are down 31 percent to $26, compared to their opening price of $38 on May 18, 2012. Revenue, however, is up: The company made $1.46 billion in revenue first quarter of 2013, compared to $1.06 billion a year earlier. Thirty percent of those funds came from mobile, a relatively new category for Facebook. That's up from 23 percent of revenue the last quarter of 2012. [Wall Street Journal]
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2. BILL GATES RECLAIMS 'WORLD'S RICHEST' TITLE
With a $72.7 billion net worth, Bill Gates, 57, once again reins supreme on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as "world's richest man," overtaking Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, who has held the title since 2007. Gates' net worth rose 16 percent year-to-date, and Slim's America Movil, the largest mobile phone operator in the Americas, dropped 14 percent. [Bloomberg]
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3. HACKERS TARGET FINANCIAL TIMES
"Apologies, we have been hacked and you may see tweets not from the FT — we are working on getting this fixed," the Financial Times wrote on its Twitter feed this morning. The tweet followed two prior ones, stating, "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here." The Syrian Electronic Army are supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who hack newspapers and entities it deems hostile to the Syrian government (and also The Onion). The group was responsible for recently hacking The Associated Press' Twitter feed on April 23. [Wall Street Journal, Information Week]
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4. PROM SPENDING UP
A survey by Visa found high schoolers are spending $1,078 on prom, up 33 percent from 2011. Families in the northeast are spending the most: $1,944 per student. The survey also found that single parents spent more, on average, than married parents: $1,563 compared to $770 per student. [Fox News, The Street]
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5. JC PENNEY'S ONLINE SALES DROP EVEN MORE THAN IN-STORE SALES
JC Penney's online sales plunged 33 percent last year to $1.02 billion, even worse than the company's in-store sales, which fell 25 percent. In his first public remarks since returning to his post as CEO, Mike Ullman said that JCP.com operated as "a completely separate entity inside the company, with little synergy between stores and online." Macy's and Kohl's online sales rose 40 percent in the same period. [BuzzFeed]
