Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering, a move that may reduce his tax bill. (Many wealthy Americans are also doing the same to avoid the high tax bill.)

Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO valuing the social network at as much as $96 billion. Saverin’s stake of about 4 percent would be worth about $3.84 billion.

Saverin and his family came to the U.S., in 1992 because they were going to be kidnapped by Brazilian gangs because they had a successful business. They U.S. gave them a home and safe place to live, go to school, work and do as they please. Saverin took full advantage of the U.S. system. He went to Harvard, met Zuckerberg. Later when he learned Facebook was successful, he used the U.S. court system to successfully sued Facebook and got a 4 percent stake when it was questionable how much he contributed to the company.

Farhad Manjoo, an immigrant journals writes that, Saverin’s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he’s got no idea how much America has helped him out. He outlines it below.

First and most obviously, he lived a life of relative safety in Miami, something that wasn’t guaranteed for him in Brazil.

Second, also obvious: If Saverin hadn’t come to America, he wouldn’t have met Mark Zuckerberg, and—not to put too fine a point on it—if Saverin hadn’t met Zuckerberg, Saverin wouldn’t be Saverin.

Third: Harvard. Zuckerberg and his cofounders met in the dorms, and while Harvard is a nominally private institution, it enjoys significant funding and protections from the government. In 2011, Harvard received $686 million, about 18 percent of its operating revenue, from federal grants; that’s almost as much as it received from student tuition.

Would Facebook have been founded without Harvard? Perhaps—maybe Facebook would have come about wherever Zuck went to school. Still, there were social networks at lots of other schools. There was clearly something about Harvard’s student body that was receptive to Facebook.

More generally, elite, government-sponsored American universities like Harvard have been instrumental in the founding of many tech giants. Microsoft’s founders met at Harvard. Yahoo and Google’s founders met at Stanford. But even if you believe that these universities shouldn’t claim credit for the companies they brought about, it’s still hard to argue that Facebook would be where it is today without the American taxpayers’ large investment in public education. Facebook depends on really smart people to make its products. You don’t get smart people without tax dollars.

Fourth: The American government’s creation of the Internet. The strangest thing about Silicon Valley’s libertarian politics is how few people here recognize how the Internet came about. ARPANET, the earliest large-scale computer network that morphed into the Internet, was funded by the U.S. Defense Department, as was the research into fundamental technologies like packet switching and TCP/IP. Delve deeper into the network and you get to the microprocessors that run the world’s computers—another technology that wouldn’t have come about by loads of federal research grants.

Even the Web itself can trace its founding to government grants. Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN, the research group funded by Europeans governments, when he worked on the HTTP protocol. Marc Andreessen worked at National Center for Supercomputing Applications—which is funded by in a partnership between the federal government and the state of Illinois—when he created the Mosaic Web browser. Then you’ve got GPS, a technology that makes much of the mobile revolution possible, and one that is wholly created and operated by the U.S. government.

Fifth: The judicial system. If it weren’t for the U.S. courts and laws, Saverin might have been permanently shut out of Facebook. But in 2009, he settled a lawsuit with Facebook that gave him credit as a co-founder and his current stake in the firm. In other words, it’s only because Saverin could sue Facebook and depend on a relatively fair judicial system that he’s got the billions on which he’s now skirting taxes.

Fair courts aren’t to be taken for granted, by the way. There are many places in the world where, if you are wronged by a billionaire, you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. One of those places is Brazil; according to Transparency International, the courts in Saverin’s birth country are beset by corruption.

Now, none of this is to discount Saverin’s own contributions to Facebook’s success. Though he was only there at the beginning—and although he had some pretty terrible ideas for Facebook, including his plan to show interstitial ads when you went to add a friend—let’s assume that he did in fact add $4 billion of value to the world.

The question is, what’s fair for him to keep?

As an immigrant myself, I’ve got no patience for the argument that he should keep all of it. Pretty much everything in my life that I enjoy wouldn’t have happened without my being in the United States. My education, my job, my wife and family, the fact that I’m not persecuted for my race or religion (I was born in South Africa), the fact that I can sometimes forget to lock my doors at night and not end up killed by marauding bands—I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but when I think about all the ways that the United States has been integral to everything in my life, taxes seem like a tiny price.

Now, remember that the tax rate on long-term capital gains is only 15 percent. In other words, Saverin gets to keep 85 percent of everything he’s making from Facebook’s IPO. Given how much of his wealth depends on the government, that’s more than fair.

IBM has been awarded a patent for a game that will pay rewards to people who eat right.

IBM researcher Michael Paolini is the inventor of the game and says he lost 18 pounds by playing it, reports the New York Times. Paolini says the idea is to give people immediate rewards for doing the right thing.

So, choose an apple instead of a slice of apple pie, and, ca-ching!, you could get 50 cents awarded to your account.

The game was inspired by a hybrid car, the Honda Insight, that instantly tells drivers how their driving is affecting their gas mileage, Paolini told the Times.

The inventor thinks that companies or insurers may want to use the game to encourage employees to lose weight and reduce their risk for obesity-related disease. That sounds nice but there is a drawback. The game relies on people honestly recording what they’ve eaten.

OK, so anything that makes dieting fun and instantly rewarding is a cool idea. But the idea that USPTO actually granted IBM a patent on this game, that makes us want to choke.

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It is now widely know that Apple plans to replace Google maps on iPhones, iPads and iPods with the rollout of iOS6 at its WWDC in June. It is reported that Apple’s maps, which was developed, in-house, will feature 3-D maps. The maps are based on the acquisition of three mapping software companies between 2009 and 2011, Placebase, C3 Technologies, and Poly9. The stunning 3D image above is from C3, which, according to the company, uses “previously classified image processing technology… automated software and advanced algorithms… to rapidly assemble extremely precise 3D models, and seamlessly integrate them with traditional 2D maps, satellite images, street level photography and user generated images.” The video below shows a flyover of Oslo using C3?s technology.

Forbes reports: “Apple will have a new maps app with much more highly-detailed imagery than Google, collected through military-style reconnaissance without the (ahem) gathering of any personal information. It is a good bet that Apple will finesse the transitions between the different map modes far better than Google’s wonky shift from ‘map view’ to ‘street view.’”

It is said Google make four times the ad revenue off of iOS than they do with Android. Apple in changing that. It is already dis-intermediating search queries through Siri, effectively cutting Google out of the valuable identity information associated with those searches. Now, by cutting off Google maps, it is cutting off the the large amounts of data Google collects to feed it advertising engine. This will invariably hurt Google faster that if can figure out how to find alternative sources of revenue, given that Google still relies on advertising for 98% of its revenue and that revenue keeps shrinking.

Great move by Tim Cook and the team. I am sure Steve Jobs is smiling.

Yahoo CEO (YHOO), Scott Thompson is out. The official statement simply says, Scott Thompson has left the company. It doesn’t provide a reason.

Thompson lied on this resume, about having an engineering degree. When it was exposed, he lied about lying about no lying about his bogus resume. Its odd that Thompson work as eBay for 10 years and even served as Paypal president with that bogus resume.

Ironically, the Yahoo board did not fire Thompson, they let him resign. That means Thompson will probably walk away with a considerable amount of money, hence richly rewarding Thompson for lying.

——

Yahoo’s Statement:

Now Ross Levinsohn is expected to be named Yahoo’s (YHOO) CEO on an interim basis, with the departure of Scott Thompson.

He’ll be the company’s sixth CEO in five years.

So who’s Levinsohn?

He’s best known for his time running Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division which formerly owned MySpace and a host of other online properties.

Under his watch, Fox bought Myspace for $580 million—then inked a $900 million search deal with Google. Shortly afterwards, he left News Corp. to become a venture capitalist at Fuse Capital.

So he’s got a good sense of timing.

Before News Corp., he worked in positions at CBS and HBO.

He joined Yahoo in November 2010 and oversees the company’s North American media and advertising businesses.

So his reputation in the Valley is primarily as a media guy. If he’s to be more than just Yahoo’s interim CEO, he’ll need to convince Yahoo’s restive engineers and product managers that he has tech chops, too—and persuade Wall Street that Yahoo deserves the kind of multiple assigned to tech companies, not slow-growth media concerns.

Some in tech are bullish on Levinsohn.

Former Twitter executive Josh Elman, now a principal at Greylock, thinks Levinsohn is the right person for the job.

“Ross could attract strong [product and engineering] talent” as Yahoo CEO, Elman tweeted over the weekend, before Sunday’s news.

“The problem there is overcoming a long time of empty (and changing) promises,” Elman added. “That worries me more.”

At Fab.com, a flash sales site, 95 percent of its mobile visits (which make up a third of its overall visits) come from the iPhone.

At OneKingsLane, another designer flash sales site specializing in home decor, iPhone and iPad owners stand far above other mobile devices among mobile shoppers (who make up more than 20 percent of OneKingsLane’s revenue).

Why?

We sat down with Doug Mack, CEO of OneKingsLane, to find out why. Here’s one theory:

• Before the iPad came out, very few shoppers came from the iPhone — or any mobile device. Very few of the site’s sales came from the iPhone just 18 months ago. There wasn’t enough screen real estate to trigger a shopper to buy something on OneKingsLane, Mack said.

• After the iPad came out, mobile sales shot up like crazy across the board. They now account for more than 20 percent of OneKingsLane’s revenue. There’s more screen real estate on the iPad, so it removed a mental block on shopping on a mobile device.

• iPad owners are probably more likely to own an iPhone. So it’s natural to expect that the sales would translate to the iPhone from the iPad. The iPad version of the website is now the second-most visited version of OneKingsLane, behind the desktop website.

There is a little bit of cross-over for OneKingsLane’s audience, though, since most of its users use Mac computers, Mack said.

Facebook is one of the largest platforms in the world, with more than 900 million members.

The point of Facebook’s new Open Graph, a way to develop apps on Facebook, is giving users more ways to express themselves on Timeline, says Facebook engineer Alex Himel.

But how do you build apps for Facebook’s Timeline?

Himel has a breakdown of what you can do with Timeline and the Open Graph.

He used a bug-catching application he built for personal use as an example on stage at Business Insider’s Startup 2012 Conference.

Let’s get started!

Alex Himel, an engineer at Facebook, is going to walk us through the process.

But first, a quick history of the profiles on Facebook.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Apple is widely expected to launch more stores-within-stores in partnership with both Wal-Mart and Target, but one analyst argues that Wal-Mart will ultimately be the more important partner for Apple’s sales going forward.

In a research note, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster explains that Wal-Mart has 3,800 stores nationwide while Target has just 1,700 stores.

More importantly, Munster says Wal-Mart has more of a presence in rural areas than Target, which would help Apple broaden its reach to U.S. consumers.

“While Target stores will help expand distribution points, we believe from a geographic standpoint that there is significant overlap in markets with both Target, Best Buy, and Apple retail locations,” Munster writes.

At the moment, Apple only has one store-within-a-store in Wal-Mart and two in Target, though Munster notes Apple is expected to add 23 more Target locations this year.

This morning, this headline came via Bloomberg (via @Jackbeckman):

Amazon Tablet Share Fell to Just Over 4% 1Q Vs 16.8% in 4Q: IDC

That’s quite a big market share collapse!

I observed that it must mean that the Amazon Tablet (the Kindle Fire) is something people will buy as a gift over the holidays, but won’t buy themselves to actually use.

When people are buying tablets for themselves, they buy Apple’s iPad.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s actually consistent with what others observe.

Our Jay Yarow owns an iPad, but bought two Kindle Fires as gifts for relatives.

Matt Miller of Bloomberg said the same thing on Twitter.

So did Market Plunger on Twitter.

So that’s quite a trend. People will buy the Kindle Fire over the holidays as gifts, but don’t buy them during non-gift seasons.

The Kindle Fire is the fruitcake of tablets.

Google is doing everything it can to force Google Plus on everyone. Yesterday, when Star Trek star Wil Wheaton, tried to like a video on YouTube, he was forced to upgrade to Google Plus.

“It’s pissing me off”, said Wheaton.

He wrote the following on his Tumblr account:

Oh, go fuck yourself, Google. This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.”

Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you dickheads.

The worst part of this? For a producer like me, I’m going to lose a crapton of potential upvotes for Tabletop, because the core of my audience is tech-savvy and may not want to “upgrade” to yet another fucking social network they don’t want or need.

Soon it started spreading among his fans.

Neil Gaiman, blogged:

I wish Google would leave the Social Network thing to others. When Google does what it does, and does it well, it changes the world. When it rides bandwagons, it’s irritating.

I’m not on Google Plus, and I suppose that I won’t be liking YouTube videos any longer.

John Green also blogged:

I strongly agree with this. Making it so that only google plus users can decide whether a YouTube video is worth watching benefits no one except for Google Plus: It is bad for viewers, bad for video creators, and bad for YouTube’s ability to curate and tailor videos to potential viewers.

Google should know better. Microsoft has tried this same thing for years, and it doesn’t work. Forcing people to sign up for it may give Google some nice user stats to share on its earnings calls, but it won’t build long-term success or engagement.

Google should give up on social, it will NEVER succeed.