Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

It's happened. Facebook is a public company. Should you invest in this massive offering? Join us live at 9:30 a.m. Pacific/12:30 p.m. Eastern to talk about the IPO and what it means for you. And also how it might change the economics of technology forever.

We have great people to talk about this IPO:

• Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO. 
• Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy'

Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. Pacific (12:30 p.m. Eastern), I'll be hosting a special live episode of Reporters' Roundtable with three great guests, to discuss and debate the Facebook IPO.

Joining me tomorrow are:

• Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO. 
• Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO

I'll disclose this off the top: I'm a big fan of Evernote. I like the app and use it all the time. I even pay for it. I also enjoy talking with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, who I have found to be uncommonly deliberate and transparent for a startup CEO.

With the news around Evernote lately -- the company's recent $70 million funding round and its acquisition of Penultimate -- I thought it'd be good to bring Libin back to the Reporters' Roundtable to discuss the current state of the software economy, and what Silicon Valley looks like from the startup's perspective today.

In this discussion we also talk a little about Libin's "100-year startup" talking point. We don't get too much into the company's global ambitions, though, and I do want to point out that as popular as Evernote is here in the U.S., it's also apparently very big in Japan, and, Libin hopes, will also soon be big in China (subscription to The Wall Street Journal required).

Libin is probably going to become CEO of a public company within a few years. Do you think he'll be able to keep Evernote innovating, figure out how to turn its revenue stream into a flood, and keep investors happy? Watch the video below.

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Wrapp rolled out in the U.S. today. It's a mobile/Facebook gifting platform, kind of like Karma, which I covered recently and liked quite a lot. I don't think Wrapp is as slick or as fun as Karma, but it's got a devilishly clever business model, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it can go wrong.

See my Reporters' Roundtable interview with Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh, below, for more. His perspective on the business of gift-giving is interesting, and it might help you come up with ways you can think around the edges of your business.

What Wrapp does that's so clever: It combines gift-giving with targeted marketing with social metrics. The idea is that if you want to gift someone (I guess that's a verb now), Wrapp will look at the person you're thinking of, figure out where they are and how valuable they are to the Wrapp partners, and display for you a number of potential gift card option. For example, if you're looking at getting something for your fashionable girlfriend, you might see a $10 gift card from H&M you can give her -- at no cost to you.

You can add on to the gift card value (and you'd better, you lout), to give her $100 (at a $90 cost). Or you can just cheap out and go for the freebie.

Either way, H&M gets a good potential customer into the store, and for a very reasonable (to H&M) expense of only $10.

Wrapp, of course, takes a fee when the "card," which resides on the recipient's smartphone, is redeemed. The company also helps brands collect data on who's connecting with whom. If the companies working with Wrapp are smart, they're also correlating big data about who's buying what based on their social profiles.

Personally, I'd rather pay for a box of chocolates with cash and give that as a gift; I don't like the thought of an honest gesture being exploited as a datapoint on some product marketing wonk's Powerpoint. But that's because I'm a romantic. Wrapp is a smart business and it really could help more people connect through gifts and gift-like gestures.

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The startup Wavii fascinates me. I've spend a career honing my writing and analysis skills, and here comes a punk startup that can read what I write and summarize it in a clear headline that's often better than my own.

How does it do it? Is my job threatened? I sat down with the CEO of Wavii, Adrian Aoun, and we talked about how the product works, why he built it, and how it traces its lineage back to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky.

For more on Wavii, read my review, Wavii groks the news so you don't have to.

It is the coolest tech demo we've seen this year: Google's Project Glass, which is an effort to create a glasses-based heads-up display for the real world.

With the Google glasses, you look out a window and get a weather report overlaid on your field of view. Look at a product and get information about it. Look at a bus stop and see when the next bus is arriving. Share photos. And maybe even look at a face and get the name that goes with it. Who wouldn't love that?

If you can't wait for Google to launch its augmented-reality product, I hope you like snow because Recon Instruments makes a heads-up display product just for skiers. Today, I'm talking with two guests about Google Glasses, the Recon products, and personal augmented-reality in general with:

• Martin LaMonica, senior writer for CNET News
• Dan Eisenhardt, CEO of Recon Instruments

Google launched a redesigned version of the social network Google+ this morning. In the blog post announcing the upgrade, Google Senior Vice President of Social Vic Gundotra wrote, "More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+." What does that really mean? Are 170 million people using the social network the way they use Facebook? I talked to Gundotra, as well as VP of Product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz, on a special Reporters' Roundtable interview this morning.

When I asked Gundotra how many people are using Google+, he deftly told me I was looking at it wrong. "You have to understand what Google+ is," he said. "It's really the unification of all of Google's services, with a common social layer."

The news of Yahoo has not been good of late. A patent lawsuit against Facebook turned tech commentators against the company. And then Yahoo announced a massive 2,000-person (14 percent) staff layoff.

Is it all part of a new Yahoo strategy? We'd all like to hope so, but new CEO Scott Thompson has not revealed how these moves serve a broader purpose.

Where does Yahoo go from here? Can it bounce back? Can it co-exist with Google, Facebook, and the rest of the Web?

Our guests today are:

• Charles Cooper, executive editor at CNET News.
• Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of All Things Digital.

Social-network users have an expectation that their views of their networks are theirs alone, that there is a private side to the public persona. But to get some jobs or scholarships, that expectation is thrown to the wind. What's truly private in a networked world?

Recently, reports have popped up about potential employees being required to divulge their personal social-network passwords or let hiring managers view their account. Some college sports players have to let "compliance officers" into their online social worlds.

What can a hiring manager or school reasonably ask of a person when it comes to monitoring their online social life? And where can, or should, a person draw the line? On this Roundtable, we discuss the topic with Bob Sullivan, author of the Red Tape Chronicles for MSNBC.