Huh? You haven’t joined Facebook? Psych! Haha, that’d be unbelievable. The actual thing you could not have known of is an IPO. “IPO” is just Initial Public Offering; yeah, like on the stock market. Noting a few different people close to the company, a notorious tech forum said that Facebook representatives designated May 17 as the D-day to throw out their long awaited initial public offering. That being said, a different guy in San Jose Mercury News noted that the actual date isn’t set in stone and could easily shift to be a couple of days earlier or later than that. The social network giant’s IPO is the most anticipated tech stock debut in at about half of twenty years. Facebook, started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm, is trying to raise $5 billion in this offering. The biggest IPO so far for an Internet company is $1.9 billion, that business being Google in 2004. While this should be quite an awesome event, there are tons of people who are skeptical about how this event will go down. Facebook will probably have a high IPO, but from then on it’s tough to speculate what will happen. Some of the most anticipated and latest IPOs for large tech companies like Zynga have really gone downhill. It will be interesting to see how Facebook does. One positive idea is that it will probably be a good kick-start for Silicon Valley. Many of the Facebook people will probably take their wealth and start some sweet new startups.

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What do Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and National Geographic’s James Cameron have in common? Besides having a lot of money, they are shelling out some cash for a company to soon dig up some very expensive, rare, and priceless metals from some asteroids passing Earth. It seems like the sort of thing you’d see in a sci-fi movie or game, but it is a legitimate idea that is coming to fruition.Planetary Resources, a startup located in Bellevue, WA, will center its gaze to making low-cost robo-spacecrafts to go on surveying projects to asteroids passing near Earth. The first of these trips will be a basic demonstration trip around Earth; this mission is expected to be completed by the end of 2014, according to Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson.Similar to the Ansari X Prize competition, the aim of Planetary Resources is to start deep-space discoveries to the private world of business. The Ansari X Prize was given to Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne nearly 10 years ago for completing the first flight beyond Earth’s atmosphere by a manned and privately produced spaceship. Commercial space flights, as many other news articles are announcing, are expected to start later this next year. The first clients of Planetary Resources are likely going to be top-notch science agencies like NASA, and also private research institutes. Surprisingly, in roughly 5 to 10 years the company believes they will position observation platforms in orbit around Earth. They seek to tap into some of the hundreds of asteroids that go relatively near Earth. The idea? To get precious metals. Some think it will just make the wealthy people more wealthy while the rest of us get to watch it in the news.

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