There are probably a million reason why Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram. Here are a few. If you read the SEC documents carefully you know that Facebook states clearly that it has 800 million accounts NOT users. Of those accounts only 148 million are active. Active, is described as logging into their accounts at least once every 30 days.

In contrast, Instagram has been downloaded 30 million times and it has an active user base of 10 million. Active meaning, that its app is accessed at least, once every 24 hours, and that is from the iPhone on iOS alone. Instagram is only now venturing into other platforms.

After Facebook’s IPO, investors will be looking for quarterly growth. We all know that Facebook is not growing regardless of what the company says. By growth, I mean growth in active users. That can only come from Instagram at this point.

The Facebook IPO, values the company at $100 billion. To put that in perspective, Apple’s iTunes makes more money and profit in a single quarter than Facebook does all year with its “800 million” users.

To maintain that $100 million valuation Facebook needs to show growth. That’s Instagram. Instagram, also fits Facebook perfectly like a glove, because its a photo sharing app, and at its core, Facebook is really a photo sharing site with social networking. What happens if Instagram adds social networking around photos?

So Facebook is buying Instagram for two main reasons, growth and to prevent Instagram from becoming a social networking site around photos.

Further, Facebook is weak in mobile. Its mobile efforts have gone nowhere. Mobile will eventually become the center piece of social commerce. That is where Facebook wants to go. Instagram, knows every detail about your photos, where you took them, when you took them and eventually it can provide you interesting data around commerce based on that data. These are some of the BIG reasons why Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram.

SONY, the consumer electronics and entertainment giant announced that it it laying off 10,000 workers, in an effort to concentrate resources on core business and bring the company back to black.

SONY has seen sales of its laptops, cameras and televisions suffer to the likes of Apple and Samsung.

No one buys stand alone cameras, today unless you are a professional photographer. For the average users the iPhone and iPads have fabulous cameras. In fact, the iPhone has a 8MG camera and the iPad has a 5MG camera. That’s more that most users will ever need. In fact, that’s what professional photographers were using just a few years ago.

It is reported that SONY is losing about $110 on every television set it sells to competition from Samsung.

Regardless, no amount of layoffs are going to solve SONY’s problems. The company has to fundamentally change its product strategy to compete with Apple and Samsung.

Facebook just announced that it has bought Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock.

Instagram is an iOS mobile-only photo-sharing app. It grew from 1 million users in January 2011 to 15 million in December 2011.

Instagram lets people apply filters to photos they snap with their mobile devices. Some of these make the photos look as if they’ve been taken in the 1970s or on Polaroid cameras.

Facebook is the largest photo sharing website. Users upload their photos on to their Facebook wall and socialize around.

Facebook said it will keep Instagram running independently. Users will still be able to run it on rival social networks such as Twitter. That’s a departure from Facebook’s tendency to buy small startups and integrate the technology — or shut it down altogether.

Instagram is Facebook’s largest acquisition to date.

Over the weekend, I finally broke down and traded in my five—yes, five—year old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny new iPhone 4S.

I’d mulled over the decision for months, but knowing now was a great time to buy and that I had to join the 21st century sooner or later, it felt like the right decision.

When the iPhone first came out, I clung to my Blackberry like a security blanket.

I claimed my $50/month T-Mobile bill was a steal compared to paying $80 and up for Verizon or AT&T, plus I didn’t need to be connected to the Web 24/7. I’d get by just fine with my laptop, thank you very much.

Problem was, I was doing myself a great disservice, wasting time and untold amounts of money. Here’s why:

Access to cost-saving apps

Luddite that I am, I thought it was cool not to be plagued by a constant stream of emails and pings. That may have been true, but I also didn’t have access to apps that could have saved me a lot of money on everyday purchases, which is stupid.

The Web has expanded in such a way that there’s a cost-saving app for just about everything, from finding discount prescriptions at the nearest pharmacy to having access to a 24/7 virtual fitness coach to comparing what you’re craving versus what you ought to be eating instead. Who wouldn’t want access to that at their fingertips?

Skipping comparison shopping in-store

Comparing prices is practically a pasttime of mine, but there’s no point in eyeballing two bottles of Aspirin or wasting a weekend afternoon going from store to store when you can easily call up the information on the Web or use a cost-comparison app like Over-the-Counter Plus to find the best products quickly and easily.

Being a more efficient worker

It was a pain in the rear having to rush home to check my laptop for an all-important message or not being able to respond in a timely fashion to someone who pinged me at work. These days, the old excuse, “Oh, I don’t have a smartphone,” sounds exactly like what it is: old-fashioned and out of touch.

Saving on gas

Only the gas gods know how much money I burned searching fruitlessly for the nearest gas station, a friend’s house or a Whataburger. I would have saved myself a lot of time (and cash) had I had access to  the iPhone’s compass and lifesaving apps like GasBuddy that let users locate gas stations nearby and view current prices.

With every spending decision, you should weigh the costs and benefits. After running the numbers and realizing how much time I’ve wasted working around the non-smartphone issue, I realized the $40 extra I’ll be paying to join this century will be well worth it.

A Google engineer is blasting the company’s management, and accusing it of abandoning “20 percent time.”

Googlers are supposed to get 20 percent time to work on a personal project, like a new app or something entrepreneurial. It’s supposed to keep its employees excited and keep them from burning out working on the same Google project.

That’s all changing, says Michael Church, who lists himself as a software engineer at Google on LinkedIn. He wrote on Hacker News:

20% time is dead. It requires managerial approval...

Managers have free rein to fuck over an employee in Perf if they believe him to be “distracted” or at risk of future distraction by 20% time, even if that employee’s performance is otherwise strong. This doesn’t make Google any worse or any different from more traditionally managed companies. It does deprive them of the right to market 20% time as a perk without being called out as liars.

It happened after an all-hands meeting in July last year, according to the post.

Another person who appears to be a Google engineer said later in the thread that managers who deprive engineers of their 20 percent time for more than a quarter get in trouble.

We reached out to Google for comment, but haven’t heard back yet. Google still claims it offers 20 percent time on its jobs website.

Are you a current or former Google engineer that knows what’s going on in the Plex? We want to know how things are going under Larry Page! Shoot us a message at mlynley@businessinsider.com — we’ll keep it confidential.

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Facebook will be listed on the Nasdaq when it goes public in May reports CNBC. It will trade under the symbol “FB”. The company plans to raise $5 billion from the IPO.

While the listing decision is a key component of the IPO process, it is immaterial to investors, and has little impact on how the company structures, and markets the IPO to investors.

It marks the end of a tense and drawn out courting process between the company and numerous executives at the NYSE and rival Nasdaq. Both exchanges launched aggressive marketing campaigns to woo the multi-billion dollar listing, and have made numerous pitches to the company in recent months.

Because both exchanges’ listing fees are relatively nominal for companies with billions in revenue like Facebook, the decision was seen by many observers as a choice of branding and image. The NYSE is widely seen as the home of the traditional “blue chip” company while the Nasdaq’s reputation is more associated with Silicon Valley.

In recent years however, the NYSE has made extensive efforts to pursue what would be considered more traditional Nasdaq companies – a strategy which has won them business with internet companies like LinkedIn (LNKD), Pandora (P) and Yelp (YELP).

SugarCRM is up against a couple of noisy competitors — Salesforce and Microsoft love to talk about their products and spend oodles on marketing every year.

But the seven-year-old company has carved out a nice niche for itself: it’s been cash flow positive since 2010, and has more than one million end users, making it the third-largest CRM vendor. Billings were up 67% last year, and almost doubled in the fourth quarter.

Now, it’s about to get bigger with a $33 million funding round led by NEA.

So how do they do it?

Focus. All they do is CRM. They’re happy to let partners fill in all the other pieces that a business needs.

As CEO Larry Augustin told us, “We’re not going to do like Salesforce has done. We’re not pushing Heroku, Force.com, Rypple, Site.com or any of those things.”

As far as Microsoft goes, “They have a solution that’s an add-on to SharePoint, Exchange, and Office. If your goal is to live in Microsoft’s world, that’s naturally where you’re going to go. Today, a lot of companies have a more heterogeneous environment. A lot of people have Google Docs, or mobile solutions that are not just Windows solutions. That’s where we shine.”

Another big difference: while Salesforce and Microsoft want customers to run in their clouds, SugarCRM wants customers choose their own cloud computing provider. The app can run on Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud, Rackspace, a company’s private data center or — ironically — even Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

“We do host, we have a multitenant data center. But our emphasis is moving product out to other cloud services. If I never bought another server I’d be very happy.”

Augustin also told us that the CRM market is far from full. Most of the company’s customers so far have been smaller businesses, and about 60% of them are moving from makeshift solutions for tracking customer relationships, like storing data in Excel or Google Docs.

But SugarCRM is moving upmarket, and sought this funding round to make sure it had the cash to cover the longer sales cycles that enterprises require. It’s also planning on making some “small tuck-in acquisitions” that help its core product.

The round was led by NEA, and NEA partner Brooke Seawell will join the board. The round also included new investments from Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital.

SugarCRM is up against a couple of noisy competitors — Salesforce and Microsoft love to talk about their products and spend oodles on marketing every year.

But the seven-year-old company has carved out a nice niche for itself: it’s been cash flow positive since 2010, and has more than one million end users, making it the third-largest CRM vendor. Billings were up 67% last year, and almost doubled in the fourth quarter.

Now, it’s about to get bigger with a $33 million funding round led by NEA.

So how do they do it?

Focus. All they do is CRM. They’re happy to let partners fill in all the other pieces that a business needs.

As CEO Larry Augustin told us, “We’re not going to do like Salesforce has done. We’re not pushing Heroku, Force.com, Rypple, Site.com or any of those things.”

As far as Microsoft goes, “They have a solution that’s an add-on to SharePoint, Exchange, and Office. If your goal is to live in Microsoft’s world, that’s naturally where you’re going to go. Today, a lot of companies have a more heterogeneous environment. A lot of people have Google Docs, or mobile solutions that are not just Windows solutions. That’s where we shine.”

Another big difference: while Salesforce and Microsoft want customers to run in their clouds, SugarCRM wants customers choose their own cloud computing provider. The app can run on Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud, Rackspace, a company’s private data center or — ironically — even Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

“We do host, we have a multitenant data center. But our emphasis is moving product out to other cloud services. If I never bought another server I’d be very happy.”

Augustin also told us that the CRM market is far from full. Most of the company’s customers so far have been smaller businesses, and about 60% of them are moving from makeshift solutions for tracking customer relationships, like storing data in Excel or Google Docs.

But SugarCRM is moving upmarket, and sought this funding round to make sure it had the cash to cover the longer sales cycles that enterprises require. It’s also planning on making some “small tuck-in acquisitions” that help its core product.

The round was led by NEA, and NEA partner Brooke Seawell will join the board. The round also included new investments from Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital.

The Nokia 900 Lumia was Microsoft’s latest best chance at turning the smartphone battle into a three way race.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the first reviews are out, and they’re not great.

They’re not awful, but they’re not great. And any Windows Phone has to be great to have a chance against Apple’s iPhone, which sold 37 million units just last quarter, and phones running Google’s Android platform, which are selling around 850,000 per day (based on Google’s activation numbers).

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been at this game for way too long, with way too many do-overs and false starts.

The iPhone was announced in January 2007. At that time, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform had 14% market share, according to research firm Canalys.

The iPhone made Windows Mobile look totally irrelevant, and it quickly started losing market share.

It took Microsoft more than three years to come up with its answer: Windows Phone Series 7. It was announced in February 2010. (Microsoft later dropped the “Series” from the name. It ought to drop the “Windows” too, but that’s another story.)

The first phones shipped that fall. The software looked fresh and new — at least it wasn’t a blatant ripoff of the iPhone like Android. But it also wasn’t good enough. No multitasking, no copy and paste, no apps.

By then, Microsoft’s global smartphone market share had dropped to 3%.

In February 2011, Microsoft signed its big deal with Nokia, committing more than $1 billion up front to joint marketing and other incentives. The first Nokia Windows Phone, the Lumia 800, shipped in England in October 2011.

By the end of 2011, Microsoft’s global market share had dropped to 1.4%.

Now it looks like the Lumia 900 won’t be the savior either.

To recap: Microsoft has had FIVE FULL YEARS to come up with an answer to the iPhone. It still isn’t there.

So how long until we can declare Microsoft’s smartphone ambitions dead once and for all?

Another year? Two? Five?

The trouble is, this isn’t some hobby project like the Zune where Microsoft can quietly withdraw and pretend the whole thing never happened. Losing in mobile could eventually bring the entire company down.

Smartphones are already outselling PCs. That has huge implications for Windows ($20 billion a year in sales), Microsoft’s business apps like Office and Exchange email (another $20 billion a year), and just about everything else the company does.

Microsoft knows this.

From everything we hear from sources close to and within the company, mobile is the new Bing. Microsoft will keep at this market for as long as it takes, and spend as much as it possibly can get away with, to become number three. The next step, from what we hear, is to make Windows Phone more like Windows, which will help developers build for PCs, tablets, and phones all at once.

What if that fails? Then what? Buy what’s left of RIM? Buy Nokia?

Maybe. Whatever it takes.

Remember: Microsoft dropped more than $10 billion on the Xbox before it ever turned a dime in profit (that’s operating loss — not including acquisitions. It’s still about $4 billion in the hole, lifetime.) Microsoft has also lost $10 billion (operating loss) on Bing and other consumer online services just since 2007.

This is way more important. Expect the commitment to go even deeper, and to drag on even longer if necessary.

Which means this zombie is going to keep walking for a long, long time.

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Two thousand unlucky Yahoo (YHOO) employees are going to be cut today, and that is just the beginning. Thousands more will be laid off in weeks and months to come reports All Things D. Yahoo currently has 14,000 employees. Don’t feel bad for them, these are fat cats that have sat of their fat behinds for almost a decade, thats why the company is in such as messy. Apparently, the most work many Yahoo employees have done for the most part of a decade was to collect a big fat cheque and file papers with the SEC to sell their stock options.

The layoffs will be company wide but the hardest hit will be the product division, search division and possible sale of its Ali Baba division. Michael Smith, a former Yahoo business development manager in Asia, has posted a scathing rant about how the company was mismanaged.

He says the layoffs, could eliminate 20 to 25 percent of Yahoo’s staff “without actually cutting much of its capabilities.”

Here are some choice bits:

• Lots of talk, no action. “I remember going to meetings where we discussed how to make plans. In fact many product people where tied up for most of 2011 working on 2012 planning. Planning that was probably a colossal waste of time and money since the guy who spearheaded that level of planning is already out of the company.”
  

• Why keep a search team around? “Yahoo gave search to MSFT …. I have no idea if Yahoo or [new CEO] Scott [Thompson] can unwind that deal but at the very least it could cut the rest of the search team, search research and tiger team to save more of the costs from the deal. The amount of people working on search experiences is still way too high. The reality is, if Yahoo outsourced search it should really do it. Get rid of all search related employees. Put a search box up and when a user clicks the button the rest is done by MSFT.”

• Microsoft middle managers have taken over. “I can’t begin to count how many new execs have been brought in from MSFT over the past 2 years – all of whom, great people aside, have been doing more planning than doing. We used to joke that although MSFT didn’t actually buy Yahoo – for the most part MSFT was running Yahoo.”

• Yahoo has done a horrible job with business deals. “Anyone remember the Zynga deal? Waste of time. Zimbra? Xoopit? Dapper? Inquisitor? You can read the list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Yahoo! . Very few of these deals made Yahoo a better, more able company but when you have corp dev people doing their own thing regardless of how it fits the product or business needs – then it makes sense to see a list like this …. I won’t even get into how the corp dev deal team handled integrations. It’s too painful to write about.”

• Why Yahoo’s suing Facebook. Under a deal signed a few years ago, “Yahoo got single sign-in, which is great, and Yahoo users were able to share more easily on FB – worked wonders for Yahoo pageviews but FB got to easily export Yahoo address books and gleaned all the resultant data. Anytime Yahoo product managers tried to export the other way around or use the data we usually found that the agreement did not support that or that FB got to personally veto the Yahoo product idea. So FB got the spoils, Yahoo lost social and made FB even stronger in the process. My guess is Yahoo wants the deal looked at again while threatening with patents – sure this is a shitty strategy but such is life once you start losing.”

Despite all this, Smith closes by saying that Yahoo is still an “amazing” company and he praises Scott Thompson for making decisions.