Transportation Stocks Going Downhill, MMLP, OMAB, SSW, UPS, UNP Reports InvestorCentral.us

Shares of Martin Midstream Partners (MMLP) dropped $0.23 per share or 0.7%, falling to $32.43. Stock volume in Martin Midstream Partners was 118,857 shares in the trading session. This high volume usually confirms the trend in the movement of the stock price.

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Transportation Stocks Going Downhill, MMLP, OMAB, SSW, UPS, UNP Reports InvestorCentral.us

Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less (Mashable)

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook

See original here:

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook? Facebook laughs in the face of such limitations. On Facebook, 140 characters is barely clearing your throat. In a Vadim Lavrusik announced that the limit of Facebook status updates has now been upped to “more than 60,000 characters.” When Mashable asked, Lavrusik explained what that meant, exactly: You can now post a status update measuring 63,206 characters.

[More from Mashable: How Does Facebook Compare to the World’s Biggest IPOs?]

But not one character more than that. Sorry, would-be Facebook novelists; you’ll have to split your prose into multiple updates. (As Lavrusik points out, an average novel will now require nine status updates.) This also goes for group messages and posts on your friends’ walls — so you can now annoy the heck out of them with unreasonably long catch-up messages.

Facebook update character limits have been expanding almost as rapidly as the social network itself. Until March 2009, the limit was barely bigger than Twitter’s, at 160 characters. Then 420 characters marked the end of your post’s potential. This summer, it jumped from 500 to 5,000, and now the limit has hit the stratosphere.

[More from Mashable: Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s $100B IPO]

So much for social media keeping things short and sweet. At least one Facebook user has already attempted a status update with 60,000 characters of nonsense words, but he’ll need to add 3,206 more to hit the limit.

Below is Facebook’s visualization of the status update limits. Would you ever post a message this long? Let us know in the comments. But please, if you can, keep it short.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less (Mashable)

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook

Read the original post:

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook? Facebook laughs in the face of such limitations. On Facebook, 140 characters is barely clearing your throat. In a Vadim Lavrusik announced that the limit of Facebook status updates has now been upped to “more than 60,000 characters.” When Mashable asked, Lavrusik explained what that meant, exactly: You can now post a status update measuring 63,206 characters.

[More from Mashable: How Does Facebook Compare to the World’s Biggest IPOs?]

But not one character more than that. Sorry, would-be Facebook novelists; you’ll have to split your prose into multiple updates. (As Lavrusik points out, an average novel will now require nine status updates.) This also goes for group messages and posts on your friends’ walls — so you can now annoy the heck out of them with unreasonably long catch-up messages.

Facebook update character limits have been expanding almost as rapidly as the social network itself. Until March 2009, the limit was barely bigger than Twitter’s, at 160 characters. Then 420 characters marked the end of your post’s potential. This summer, it jumped from 500 to 5,000, and now the limit has hit the stratosphere.

[More from Mashable: Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s $100B IPO]

So much for social media keeping things short and sweet. At least one Facebook user has already attempted a status update with 60,000 characters of nonsense words, but he’ll need to add 3,206 more to hit the limit.

Below is Facebook’s visualization of the status update limits. Would you ever post a message this long? Let us know in the comments. But please, if you can, keep it short.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less (Mashable)

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook? Facebook laughs in the face of such limitations

The rest is here:

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook? Facebook laughs in the face of such limitations. On Facebook, 140 characters is barely clearing your throat. In a Vadim Lavrusik announced that the limit of Facebook status updates has now been upped to “more than 60,000 characters.” When Mashable asked, Lavrusik explained what that meant, exactly: You can now post a status update measuring 63,206 characters.

[More from Mashable: How Does Facebook Compare to the World’s Biggest IPOs?]

But not one character more than that. Sorry, would-be Facebook novelists; you’ll have to split your prose into multiple updates. (As Lavrusik points out, an average novel will now require nine status updates.) This also goes for group messages and posts on your friends’ walls — so you can now annoy the heck out of them with unreasonably long catch-up messages.

Facebook update character limits have been expanding almost as rapidly as the social network itself. Until March 2009, the limit was barely bigger than Twitter’s, at 160 characters. Then 420 characters marked the end of your post’s potential. This summer, it jumped from 500 to 5,000, and now the limit has hit the stratosphere.

[More from Mashable: Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s $100B IPO]

So much for social media keeping things short and sweet. At least one Facebook user has already attempted a status update with 60,000 characters of nonsense words, but he’ll need to add 3,206 more to hit the limit.

Below is Facebook’s visualization of the status update limits. Would you ever post a message this long? Let us know in the comments. But please, if you can, keep it short.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

What Is a Good IPO?

When a company goes public, we often hear about if an IPO was “successful” or not. That is usually determined in the media’s eyes by whether the stock rose on its first day of trading. Big gainers like Groupon ( Nasdaq: GRPN   ) or LinkedIn ( NYSE: LNKD   ) are considered “successful” because they popped when they went public

Read more here:

When a company goes public, we often hear about if an IPO was “successful” or not. That is usually determined in the media’s eyes by whether the stock rose on its first day of trading. Big gainers like Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN  ) or LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD  ) are considered “successful” because they popped when they went public.

But does that really make an IPO successful? It depends on whom you ask.

The bankers and big initial buyers
When a company goes public, investment banks like JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM  ) , Citigroup (NYSE: C  ) , and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS  ) work with the company to set a price, and then they shop the deal to clients. These clients are mostly large institutional investors like hedge funds that have lots of capital and trade with the bank often.

For buyers of shares, it’s easy to see why a fast-rising price is deemed successful. IPO buyers can sell off shares or hedge their positions for a quick profit, and the client is happy.

For investment banks, it’s a bit more complicated. The bank gets a percentage of the offering proceeds as a fee, but it is also normally offered a portion of shares (usually 15%) for overallotment. If the stock rises on Day 1, the bank can short the stock and turn around and buy shares at the original offer price from the company. This is one way IPOs can make big money for investment banks.

The company going public
But what about the company that actually sold shares? If the stock rises the day trading opened, that’s money the company left on the table that could have been used to fund operations. A successful IPO in the company’s eyes should really be a stock that is offered at a price higher than the stock trades at on Day 1.

But since an investment bank has a vested interest in an IPO having a good performance early in its life, for both itself and its clients, why wouldn’t it err on the side of underpricing an IPO? It just makes good business sense.

There are other ways to go public, like a Dutch auction that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) used for its IPO. The auction welcomes all bidders and is priced at the lowest price that equals the number of shares being released to the public. This process also keeps investment banks from controlling the process too much and making money on an underpriced IPO.

Who wins?
In the end, the success of an IPO depends on which side of the deal you’re on. Investment banks and their clients want a stock to soar early in its life and think a pop on opening day is successful. A company would prefer to see the stock drop, indicating that it was actually paid too much for its IPO.

As retail investors, we’re often just along for the ride. But as Alex Planes has pointed out this week, most IPOs have been losers for long-term retail investors this year. The bottom line is that buyers should beware.

Toronto Stock Exchange hit by trading glitch (Reuters)

TORONTO (Reuters) – TMX Group said on Wednesday that trading has resumed in all shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange after an unexplained glitch froze trading of companies whose symbols started with the letters M to Z. The operator of Canada’s largest stock exchange said it was still investigating the cause of the technical failure, but it ruled out hacking.

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TORONTO (Reuters) – TMX Group said on Wednesday that trading has resumed in all shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange after an unexplained glitch froze trading of companies whose symbols started with the letters M to Z.

The operator of Canada’s largest stock exchange said it was still investigating the cause of the technical failure, but it ruled out hacking.

The problem, one of the worst trading glitches to hit the TMX in recent years, affected high-volume stocks such as Research In Motion and Sun Life Financial.

“TMX Group regrets this unfortunate and rare disruption to our normal market operations and the inconvenience this caused our customers,” Chief Executive said Tom Kloet in a statement.

“We are continuing to investigate the root cause to ensure that the problem does not recur,” he added.

The glitch did not affect all stock trading in Canada. TMX Select, TMX Group’s alternative trading system, operated normally for all Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange symbols. The TSX Venture Exchange also operated normally throughout the nearly two-hour long outage.

A spokeswoman for the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, the national self-regulator for the country’s investment dealers, said the stocks were also being traded normally on markets operated by TMX competitors.

An official at Alpha Group confirmed the alternative trading system continued to match trades for stocks that were frozen on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Thomas Caldwell, an outspoken shareholder of TMX Group, played down the significance of the outage.

“Every Exchange will have breakdowns – these are computer systems. New York has had them, London has had them,” he said. “We all understand that these things do happen.”

The outage happened the same day Canada’s competition regulator said it has “serious concerns” about a C$3.8 billion ($3.7 billion) proposal by a consortium of Canadian financial services companies to take over TMX Group, a deal that would bring most of the country’s financial exchanges under one roof.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Hodgson, Jennifer Kwan and Euan Rocha; editing by Peter Galloway)

Toronto Stock Exchange hit by trading glitch

TORONTO (Reuters) – TMX Group said on Wednesday that trading has resumed in all shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange after an unexplained glitch froze trading of companies whose symbols started with the letters M to Z.

See original here:

TORONTO (Reuters) – TMX Group said on Wednesday that trading has resumed in all shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange after an unexplained glitch froze trading of companies whose symbols started with the letters M to Z.

The operator of Canada‘s largest stock exchange said it was still investigating the cause of the technical failure, but it ruled out hacking.

The problem, one of the worst trading glitches to hit the TMX in recent years, affected high-volume stocks such as Research In Motion and Sun Life Financial.

“TMX Group regrets this unfortunate and rare disruption to our normal market operations and the inconvenience this caused our customers,” Chief Executive said Tom Kloet in a statement.

“We are continuing to investigate the root cause to ensure that the problem does not recur,” he added.

The glitch did not affect all stock trading in Canada. TMX Select, TMX Group’s alternative trading system, operated normally for all Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange symbols. The TSX Venture Exchange also operated normally throughout the nearly two-hour long outage.

A spokeswoman for the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, the national self-regulator for the country’s investment dealers, said the stocks were also being traded normally on markets operated by TMX competitors.

An official at Alpha Group confirmed the alternative trading system continued to match trades for stocks that were frozen on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Thomas Caldwell, an outspoken shareholder of TMX Group, played down the significance of the outage.

“Every Exchange will have breakdowns – these are computer systems. New York has had them, London has had them,” he said. “We all understand that these things do happen.”

The outage happened the same day Canada’s competition regulator said it has “serious concerns” about a C$3.8 billion ($3.7 billion) proposal by a consortium of Canadian financial services companies to take over TMX Group, a deal that would bring most of the country’s financial exchanges under one roof.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Hodgson, Jennifer Kwan and Euan Rocha; editing by Peter Galloway)

Hands On With Spotify’s New App Platform (Mashable)

Spotify just announced its new app platform. Partnering with the likes of Rolling Stone , Pitchfork , Billboard , Last.fm and The Guardian , the online music service aims to allow users to get more from their tunes. As Mashable reader Cristian Parrino pointed out in the comments, the fact that an app has launched its own app platform is an intriguing move

Read the original post:

Spotify just announced its new app platform. Partnering with the likes of Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Billboard, Last.fm and The Guardian, the online music service aims to allow users to get more from their tunes. As Mashable reader Cristian Parrino pointed out in the comments, the fact that an app has launched its own app platform is an intriguing move.

[More from Mashable: Spotify Announces New App Platform]

In short, Spotify is looking to expand its ecosystem — by allowing others to build on top of its interface.

We downloaded the preview version of Spotify and fired up some of the apps.

[More from Mashable: What to Expect From Spotify’s ‘New Direction’ Event]

The Spotify Platform is clearly in the early stages, but the potential of this sort of platform is immense. For publications such as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Billboard, apps offer a way to provide content and perhaps even gain interaction. Reading an album review while listening to the album makes for a compelling user experience.

Still, the most interesting apps are those that integrate with the service in new and inventive ways. For instance, the Last.fm app allows users to generate related song playlists based on the track they are currently listening to. And TuneWiki brings lyrics to Spotify in a way that is real-time and synced alongside playback.

Whether or not Spotify can evolve from a simple service into a platform for other services — the way Facebook, Twitter and iOS did — remains to be seen. But we’re hopeful that Spotify apps will encourage more innovation in social music.

Check out our gallery of Spotify apps below, and let us know in the comments which ones you think you’ll enjoy the most.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Hands On With Spotify’s New App Platform (Mashable)

Spotify just announced its new app platform. Partnering with the likes of Rolling Stone , Pitchfork , Billboard , Last.fm and The Guardian , the online music service aims to allow users to get more from their tunes.

The rest is here:

Spotify just announced its new app platform. Partnering with the likes of Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Billboard, Last.fm and The Guardian, the online music service aims to allow users to get more from their tunes. As Mashable reader Cristian Parrino pointed out in the comments, the fact that an app has launched its own app platform is an intriguing move.

[More from Mashable: Spotify Announces New App Platform]

In short, Spotify is looking to expand its ecosystem — by allowing others to build on top of its interface.

We downloaded the preview version of Spotify and fired up some of the apps.

[More from Mashable: What to Expect From Spotify’s ‘New Direction’ Event]

The Spotify Platform is clearly in the early stages, but the potential of this sort of platform is immense. For publications such as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Billboard, apps offer a way to provide content and perhaps even gain interaction. Reading an album review while listening to the album makes for a compelling user experience.

Still, the most interesting apps are those that integrate with the service in new and inventive ways. For instance, the Last.fm app allows users to generate related song playlists based on the track they are currently listening to. And TuneWiki brings lyrics to Spotify in a way that is real-time and synced alongside playback.

Whether or not Spotify can evolve from a simple service into a platform for other services — the way Facebook, Twitter and iOS did — remains to be seen. But we’re hopeful that Spotify apps will encourage more innovation in social music.

Check out our gallery of Spotify apps below, and let us know in the comments which ones you think you’ll enjoy the most.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Hands On With Spotify’s New App Platform (Mashable)

Spotify just announced its new app platform. Partnering with the likes of Rolling Stone , Pitchfork , Billboard , Last.fm and The Guardian , the online music service aims to allow users to get more from their tunes

The rest is here:

Spotify just announced its new app platform. Partnering with the likes of Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Billboard, Last.fm and The Guardian, the online music service aims to allow users to get more from their tunes. As Mashable reader Cristian Parrino pointed out in the comments, the fact that an app has launched its own app platform is an intriguing move.

[More from Mashable: Spotify Announces New App Platform]

In short, Spotify is looking to expand its ecosystem — by allowing others to build on top of its interface.

We downloaded the preview version of Spotify and fired up some of the apps.

[More from Mashable: What to Expect From Spotify’s ‘New Direction’ Event]

The Spotify Platform is clearly in the early stages, but the potential of this sort of platform is immense. For publications such as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Billboard, apps offer a way to provide content and perhaps even gain interaction. Reading an album review while listening to the album makes for a compelling user experience.

Still, the most interesting apps are those that integrate with the service in new and inventive ways. For instance, the Last.fm app allows users to generate related song playlists based on the track they are currently listening to. And TuneWiki brings lyrics to Spotify in a way that is real-time and synced alongside playback.

Whether or not Spotify can evolve from a simple service into a platform for other services — the way Facebook, Twitter and iOS did — remains to be seen. But we’re hopeful that Spotify apps will encourage more innovation in social music.

Check out our gallery of Spotify apps below, and let us know in the comments which ones you think you’ll enjoy the most.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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