Facebook earnings: Good, but not good enough

 Facebook's shares plummeted to all-time lows in after hours trading after the company's first quarterly earnings report failed to wow investors.

Shares of Facebook (FB) fell more than 10% to around $24 -- nearly 40% below the company's initial public offering price.

Facebook did beat analysts' revenues expectations slightly and earnings matched forecasts, but that was apparently not enough for Wall Street.

Behind the numbers: Facebook is still posting strong growth. It generated $1.18 billion in second quarter revenues, up 32% from a year ago.

Related: Facebook analyst: Sell to buy in 2 months

And while Facebook reported a net loss of $157 million due mainly to $1.3 billion in compensation expenses tied to stock-based pay following the IPO, the company did generate a profit of 12 cents per share when excluding those costs.

Analysts were expecting sales of $1.15 billion and earnings (backing out the compensation charges) of 12 cents per share.

Zuckerberg addresses concerns: CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the company's investment in research and development as a positive.

"Our goal is to help every person stay connected and every product they use be a great social experience," Zuckerberg said in a release. "That's why we're so focused on investing in our priorities of mobile, platform and social ads to help people have these experiences with their friends."

Click here to continue reading: http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/26/technology/facebook-earnings/index.htm

The myth of the 'drunk phone'

Some young adults are so fond of their expensive smartphones that they take a cheaper backup phone with them to bars and leave their fancier phones at home where they are safe from spilled vodka tonics, pickpockets and uncoordinated drunk people.

That's according to consumer-behavior expert Laura Krajecki of the Starcom MediaVest Group, who stumbled upon the trend while researching beer and shared it with AdAge. "They take what they call their 'drunk phone' ... because they don't want to lose their smartphone," she said.

CNN's independent research yielded different results, however.

An exhausting, though hardly exhaustive, survey of bar patrons in San Francisco this past weekend turned up zero people who had opted to carry a beater phone out with them on a night of drinking. Nor did any interview subjects know other people who had ever done such a thing.

But as seasoned bartender Jerome Bishop put it, "I've never heard of anybody doing that, but it doesn't mean they don't."

It's possible the people in watering holes visited by this reporter were not young enough (are college students more likely to binge drink and lose things?), well-off enough (a stream of secondary phones can add up), or beta testing top secret phones for their Silicon Valley employers.

Interestingly, while the mythical back-up phone was nowhere to be found, carrying multiple phones was not uncommon. Two friends at Churchill bar were hauling around their assigned work phones -- both BlackBerrys, of course -- in addition to their personal handsets.

Many people admitted to having lost their phones while drinking in the past but were still set on taking their smartphones with them on nights out.

Click here to continue reading: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/17/tech/mobile/drunk-phones/index.html