Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has sent out invitations to the Wednesday launch of the Daily, its highly anticipated iPad-only newspaper.

The e-mailed invitations said Murdoch, News Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, and Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of Internet services, will officially unveil the Daily at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, according to Reuters.

There reportedly was a two-week delay in the debut of the publication, which is said to have no print version or website.

Speculation was that Murdoch had planned to show off the Daily for the first time with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in San Francisco.

On Jan. 17, Apple and Jobs announced that for medical reasons, Jobs was taking an undetermined amount of time off from his daily duties at the tech giant.

That led to speculation that the Daily's launch may have been delayed because of Jobs' medical leave.

The Daily is expected to be available only on iPads and to cost 99 cents a week. It has a news staff stationed across the U.S. and is expected to be much like a national newspaper, with coverage of general news, culture and entertainment.

Newspaper, magazine and book publishers are hoping that the iPad and other tablet computers, such as Google Android tablets, will rise as a source of revenue for them.

Richard Branson's Project Magazine, the first iPad-only publication, was released in November and hasn't yet reported sales numbers. It soon will be headed to the iPhone and later to Android devices.

Sales of magazines on the iPad started strong last year but softened dramatically, failing to maintain consistent readership levels.

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News Corp.'s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, delayed, reports say

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch testifies on Capitol Hill on Sept. 20. Credit: Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images

Call it the $50-billion question: How much is Facebook worth?

No matter how many friends Facebook is making on Wall Street, plenty of investors don't think it's worth $50 billion. In fact, that recent valuation for the world's most popular social networking service is inflating concern of a bubble in the technology sector, according to a Bloomberg Global Poll, a quarterly survey of 1,000 Bloomberg customers who are investors, traders or analysts.

Sixty-nine percent of investors surveyed said Facebook was overvalued after Goldman Sachs invested $450 million and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested $50 million in a deal that pegged the Palo Alto, Calif., company's value at $50 billion.

Ten percent of investors surveyed said the valuation was on the money, and 4% said Facebook was worth even more.

Even analysts who are bullish on Facebook say the company has provided too little financial information and does not have a long enough track record to determine a valuation. Facebook, which has more than 600 million users, is valued at about 25 times its 2010 revenue.

Many investors who have been clamoring for Facebook shares are nervous about missing out on the next Google. They might regret passing -- at least initially -- on Google, which had a blockbuster initial public offering in August 2004. Facebook shares have been a hot commodity on private market exchanges.

The Bloomberg poll may be one of the first signals of unease among investors about the soaring valuations of privately held Internet companies with more than half of the respondents saying Facebook's rapidly ascending valuation could point to a bubble in the market.

LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, said Thursday that it planned to raise as much as $175 million in an initial public offering. The company is valued at $2.5 billion on online marketing trading exchange SharesPost. You can find its prospectus here.

Facebook had revenue of $1.2 billion in the first nine months of 2010, according to information Goldman Sachs provided to prospective investors. Goldman Sachs originally had offered Facebook shares to its U.S. clients, but it called that off because of concerns that the offering would violate U.S. securities laws.

Investors’ excitement about Facebook seems to have cooled a bit in recent days. According to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Facebook shares were trading at $28.26 a week ago, giving the company an implied valuation of $70 billion. In this week’s auction on online private exchange SecondMarket, the share price dipped 7% to $26.25, giving it an implied valuation of $65.5 billion.

The Bloomberg poll, conducted by Selzer & Co., has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

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 -- Jessica Guynn

Photo: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: Eric Risberg / Associated Press

Five men said to be members of the Web hacktivist group Anonymous were arrested in England on Thursday related to recent distributed denial of services attacks.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also issued more than 40 search warrants across the U.S. today in its own investigation into DDoS attacks on major corporations committed by groups such as Anonymous.

The five men were arrested by the United Kingdom's Metropolitan Police Service in Hertfordshire, London, Northamptonshire, Surrey and West Midlands, according to a report from the BBC.

The FBI said in a statement:

These distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are facilitated by software tools designed to damage a computer network's ability to function by flooding it with useless commands and information, thus denying service to legitimate users. A group calling itself "Anonymous" has claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they conducted them in protest of the companies' and organizations' actions. The attacks were facilitated by the software tools the group makes available for free download on the Internet. The victims included major U.S. companies across several industries.

The FBI also is reminding the public that facilitating or conducting a DDoS attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability.

The FBI also said it is working with law agencies in France, Germany and the Netherlands on the issue of Web attacks.

The National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, a private-public partnership group, is also working with the FBI, it said.

Anonymous has no official leader or even membership structure and is a loosely defined group of denizens whose ranks increase and decrease depending on the action it takes, usually in the name of some sort of activism.

Lately, the group has also moved a bit away from hacking and more toward information dissemination. It was among the many who used the Internet, and websites such as YouTube and Twitter, to assist protesters in Tunisia in getting out videos and other reports during the nation's recent revolt against its government.

Last month, Anonymous hacked the websites of Visa and MasterCard, among others, in retaliation for the companies halting acceptance of donations to the WikiLeaks website shortly after it began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables. Anonymous called the attacks "Operation: Payback."

In 2009, Anonymous levied Web attacks and picket-line protests against the Church of Scientology, accusing the group of being a cult seeking profit and not a religion.

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Hacktivist group Anonymous assists Tunisia protesters in revolt

Operation: Payback claims to have shut down Visa website in defense of WikiLeaks

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

 Image: A screenshot of Anonymous hacker-activists launching a DDoS attack as they took down Visa.com temporarily. Credit: Anonymous

Netflix released some thought-provoking data Thursday that could help consumers torn between DSL and cable-modem service. Judging by those numbers, if your top priority is streaming video, go with cable modem.

The company issued the first of what it said would be monthly charts tracking how well different broadband Internet service providers delivered Netflix's high-definition movie streams. The faster the delivery (i.e., the higher the throughput), the better the picture quality is.

Those streams leave Netflix's servers at 4.8 Mbps, but the servers routinely downshift to slower data rates when they confront congestion on the path to the customer's home. (Netflix tries to keep that path as short as possible by using content delivery networks operated by the likes of Level 3.) How much they have to downshift -- and sacrifice picture quality -- depends in part on how much bandwidth the customer buys. But it also depends on how well the ISP manages the traffic on the facilities that its customers share.

According to Netflix, the seven ISPs with the best throughput are all cable operators: Charter, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Suddenlink, Cablevision and Cable One. They all offered throughputs this month from 2.3 Mbps to 2.7 Mbps. Verizon and AT&T were next, clocking in at 2 Mbps to 2.2 Mbps in January. At the bottom of the list were Clearwire, a wireless broadband provider, and regional telephone companies Frontier and CenturyLink, which delivered throughputs of 1.4 Mbps to 1.6 Mbps this month.

Before Charter starts gloating, it should note that Rogers, a Canadian cable operator, averaged 3 Mbps in the Netflix HD tests.

The test is one way for Netflix, whose streams account for more than 20% of U.S. Internet traffic during peak times, to goad ISPs into improving throughput. ISPs, meanwhile, want Netflix to pick up more of the cost of delivering streams on their networks -- an idea that gets little or no support from Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Verizon is set to buy Terremark, an information technology services company, for $1.4 billion, part of an effort from the wireless carrier to boost its cloud-computing abilities.

The purchase offer of $19 a share in cash is a 35% premium over Terremark's Thursday closing stock price of $14.05 a share. In a filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Terremark said it accepted Verizon's offer.

By buying Terremark, Verizon hopes to "deliver business intelligence and collaboration services to anyone, anywhere and on any device," Lowell McAdam, Verizon's president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

"Cloud computing continues to fundamentally alter the way enterprises procure, deploy and manage IT resources, and this combination helps create a tipping point for 'everything-as-a-service,'" McAdam said.

Verizon said it expects to finalize the purchase of Terremark in the first three months of the year.

Terremark runs 13 data centers in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. The Miami firm's server banks are used for Web hosting, cloud computing and IT security services to "some of the world's largest companies and U.S. government agencies" such as BMW and H&R Block.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

LinkedIn Corp. plans to raise as much as $175 million in an initial public offering, the first major social networking site to plan its stock market debut.

The Mountain View, Calif., company which runs the largest networking site for professionals, filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. It is widely believed that LinkedIn expects to raise about $200 million in the offering.

Barring any roadblocks, the 7-year-old company with 1,000 employees and 90 million users could go public in the next several months in one of the most anticipated offerings of the year. Investors have been clamoring for shares of the privately held company which has an implied value of $2.5 billion on private trading exchange SharesPost.

Internet IPOs look like they will be a hot commodity. Web content company Demand Media jumped 33% Wednesday in its first day of trading. Online coupon service Groupon Inc. is in talks about a possible public offering. Facebook Inc. likely will wait until 2012 for an IPO.

LinkedIn does not have the global girth of Facebook, which has more than 600 million users, but it has carved out a profitable niche in helping people hunt for jobs, recruit new employees or find industry experts.

Setting up a profile is free on the website, but LinkedIn makes money from paid subscriptions and advertising. It had revenue of $161.4 million in the first nine months of 2010, almost double the sales from the same period a year earlier, according to the prospectus. It generated net income of $10 million compared with a net loss of $3.4 million in the same period of 2009. 

LinkedIn did not disclose the target price for shares which likely will be set closer to the actual stock sale.

LinkedIn was created in 2003 by former PayPal executive and Internet investor Reid Hoffman. It has raised more than $100 million.

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-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: LinkedIn.com pages are displayed on computer screens in New York on Thursday, Jan. 27. Credit:Jin Lee/Bloomberg

BlackBerry Internet access has been reportedly blocked in Egypt on the third day of violent protests calling for political reform in the country.

On Tuesday, Twitter and Facebook were blocked by the Egyptian government, which has been run by President Hosni Mubarak for more than 30 years.

Mubarak's grip on power is a central issue fueling the protests, and demonstrators have demanded the 82-year-old leave office and that term limits be created as well.

The BlackBerry Web shut-down has been reported by Twitter users from Egypt who have accessed the site using third-party applications and other loopholes in the governments blocking of the site.

The take-down of the BlackBerry Web access was also reported by the site TechCrunch, which noted reports aren't clear whether all Internet usage has been blocked or just parts.

Officials at Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smart phones, were not available to comment on the Internet service blocks Thursday.

The moves to cut Web access and stifle the use of social-media services such as Twitter and Facebook have been cited by many as an attempt by the Egyptian government to disrupt the mobilization of the demonstrators.

The Internet, and social media websites in particular, have become a tool for protesters to organize themselves and also to report on what's taking place.

Similar moves took place last week in Tunisia, where protesters overthrew the government and used social media websites, along with YouTube and other Web technologies, to plan protest events and spread reports on the unrest.

But in Egypt, just as in Tunisia, people have also reportedly found ways around Web roadblocks, using third-party applications and proxy servers to access websites and services.

The news of the BlackBerry block coincided with word Thursday that the former head of the United Nation's nuclear regulatory agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, returned to Egypt from his home in Vienna to take part in the protests.

ElBaradei, who is also a Nobel Peace Prize winner, heads up a group known as the National Front for Change, which is also calling for Egyptian constitutional reforms and increased political freedoms.

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Tunisia protesters use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help organize and report

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Top Photo: A protester is carried away after being fatally shot allegedly by riot police during clashes in Sheikh Zuweid in the Sinai, about 214 miles northeast of Cairo, on Thursday as Egyptians demanded the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Credit:AFP/Getty Images. Middle right photo: An antigovernment protester throws objects at a riot police vehicle in the port city of Suez,about 83 miles east of Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday. Credit: Mohamed Abd El-Ghany/Reuters. Bottom left photo: Mohamed ElBaradei, seen in a January 2008 file photo, returned to his native Egypt on Thursday to take part in protests against the government. Credit: Farzaneh Khademian/Abaca Press/MCT.

An official Facebook phone isn't under development, but increased Facebook features on mobile phones are coming, the social media giant said Thursday morning.

"Facebook is not building a mobile phone. As we've long said, our mobile strategy is to enable people to not only have access but also a great Facebook experience from any mobile phone they choose," a company spokesman said in an e-mail to the Technology blog.

"We're working across the entire mobile industry with operators, hardware manufactures and app developers to bring Facebook to mobile phones in a variety of unique and exciting ways. Some of these include deep integrations of Facebook within the device, but are not 'a Facebook phone' as they sometimes are referred to by commenters."

The Facebook phone rumor has been floating on the Web for months, and it reemerged this week with speculation that Facebook has teamed with HTC to develop a phone running a modified version of Google's Android operating system that embeds Facebook into the OS of the phone itself.

The rumors, reported by multiple news agencies and tech-related Websites, indicated that the so-called Facebook phone would be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

Reuters said Facebook's head of business development, Dan Rose, told them no HTC phones with Facebook branding were on the way but that the rumors were likely based around other HTC handsets.

"This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programming interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way," Rose told Reuters. "The rumors around there being something more to this HTC device are overblown."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Image: Facebook app on an Apple iPhone. Credit: Facebook

Sony unveiled its newest portable gaming console, code-named NGP, Wednesday night in Tokyo, as the consumer electronics giant attempts to loosen Nintendo's iron grip on the market.

The NGP, a temporary name that stands for next-generation portable, is a remake of the PlayStation Portable, which has been on the market since December 2004. While Sony has sold more than 62 million PSPs since, the device has trailed far behind Nintendo's DS, which has sold 144.6 million since November 2004.

The device, scheduled to be released late this year for the Christmas shopping season, is expected to have a 5-inch, multitouch, organic LED display with roughly four times the resolution of the current PSP. It will also boast the graphics capability of its larger sibling, the PlayStation 3 living room console. Equipped with two cameras, front and rear-facing, the device will also have an accelerometer to sense motion, much like the iPhone.

One key feature is its ability to connect to the Internet via 3G and Wi-Fi, as well as its GPS connection, for location-based applications. Such capabilities would potentially allow users to make calls, though Sony made no mention of it being used as a phone.

Among the titles expected to be released alongside the device later this year are Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty and Sony's Killzone, Uncharted, and LittleBigPlanet.

While Sony did not announce a price, many analysts expect it to sell for $299 or higher, potentially putting it above the reach of mainstream consumers. The PlayStation 3 currently sells for $300.

Analysts remain skeptical of Sony's chances for dethroning Nintendo, which is set to release its newest portable device, the 3DS, on March 27 for $250.

"It remains unclear whether there is mass market potential for high-end portable games," wrote Colin Sebastian, analyst with Lazard Capital Markets in a note to investors. "We note that Sony’s PSP did not meet initial sales expectations despite offering the highest quality graphics on a portable device at that time."

Nintendo itself is struggling with losing momentum for both its once-hot Wii game console, as well as slowing sales for its current portable console, the DSi. The Japanese game company on Thursday lowered the number of DS consoles it expected to sell its fiscal year ending March 31, to 22.5 million, down from 23.5 million predicted earlier.

Meanwhile, Sony said it would begin selling PlayStation One titles on Google's Android marketplace, leveraging the operating system's popularity to sell its catalog of games. The move would help round out Android's game offerings, which have been relatively sparse compared with Apple's iPhone App store.

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-- Alex Pham

twitter.com/AlexPham

Image: Sony's next portable game console, code-named the NGP. Credit: Sony Computer Entertainment.

Professional networking site LinkedIn could file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering as early as Thursday.

The Mountain View, Calif., company hired Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase to lead the offering.

LinkedIn spokesman Hani Durzy declined to comment.

Investors are anticipating the offering from LinkedIn, which has an implied value of $2.5 billion on private trading exchange SharesPost. It will be the first of the prominent social networking companies in Silicon Valley to dip its toes in public waters.

A $500-million investment in Facebook from Goldman Sachs and Russia's Digital Sky Technologies valued Facebook at $50 billion, the Palo Alto, Calif., social networking company said last week. Facebook is a giant in social networking with more than 600 million users.

LinkedIn, which helps people search for jobs, recruit employees and find experts, has grown to 90 million users in more than 200 countries. It has more than 1,000 employees.

LinkedIn Chief Executive Jeff Weiner ducked the question whether his company was planning to go public in a November interview. Weiner, a former Yahoo Inc. executive, joined LinkedIn in December 2008 and became CEO in June 2009.

"You don't necessarily have to go public to get to the next level," he said at the time.

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Business card? He has your profile

-- Jessica Guynn

Verizon iPhone 4 preorders are set to begin on Feb. 3, seven days before the coveted Apple smart phone hits store shelves at the carrier.

And the largest carrier in the U.S. is also taking AT&T iPhone trade-ins, according to a report from the Website MacRumors. Verizon officials weren't available for comment Thursday morning.

Verizon has announced the preorders in e-mails to its corporate mobile subscribers telling them about the preorder option, noting that the preorder sales will start at 3 a.m. EST, MacRumors said.

Preorders will only be accepted through My Verizon accounts on Verizon's site. Verizon is taking a limited number of preorders, the website said, though the carrier hasn't said just how many.

MacRumors also reported that Verizon is offering trade-in credits for AT&T iPhones toward its version of the iPhone 4, offering from $60 to $360 in credit depending on the model. The credit amounts were listed as:

iPhone 2G (original model) 16GB: $60

iPhone 3G 16GB: $105

iPhone 3Gs 32GB: $160

iPhone 4 16GB: $280

iPhone 4 32GB: $360

Pre-ordered Verizon iPhone 4s will ship to customers via two-day FedEx or, for an extra charge, next-day delivery.

The trade-in move for AT&T customers follows an offer to existing iPhone customers of an up to $200 gift card for those who bought new phones over the holidays and want to switch to the iPhone 4.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: A Verizon-model Apple iPhone 4 sits on display during a Verizon event in New York on Jan. 11. Credit: Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg

The little-known "expert-networking" industry has come under intense scrutiny from federal authorities who want to stop what they believe is an insider-trading epidemic that has spread throughout the tech industry.

Among the firms at the center of the dragnet is Silicon Valley's Primary Global Research.

Several employees from the boutique company, started in 2003, may be facing jail time for their alleged part in facilitating the sale of confidential business information to hedge fund investors looking to get a valuable edge.

The Los Angeles Times has just posted a story on Primary Global Research that details the growing number of arrests of employees as well as consultants that it hired and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those consultants were generally employees of well-connected technology firms.

From the report by Stuart Pfeifer and Jessica Guynn:

Expert-networking firms have exploded in the last decade, the result of Securities and Exchange Commission regulations adopted in 2000 that required public companies to disclose material information to everyone at the same time. The new rules increased demand for firms that could connect analysts with experts who could provide an edge, said Michael Mayhew, chairman of Integrity Research Associates, a New York firm that analyzes the performance of investment analysts.

Primary Global was one of the largest beneficiaries, charging asset managers steep fees to pick the brains of its stable of outside consultants. The company's revenue reached an estimated $20 million to $25 million a year, making it among the top five expert firms in the country, Mayhew said. Primary Global also employed a team of in-house research analysts who were frequently quoted in publications that included the Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily and Barron's.

"Users, not surprisingly, loved them for their expertise in the technology sector," Mayhew said. "They had built a pretty successful business."

-- David Sarno

Photo: The San Francisco federal courthouse where a judge this month refused to grant bail for Winifred Jiau, arrested in relation to her work as a consultant for Primary Global Research. Credit: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg News.