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A year after Facebook Inc's fumbled IPO, Wall Street remains slow to recognize what Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg argues has been an across-the-board improvement in its business. Facebook's ability to deliver ads to mobile phones, improvements in measuring the effectiveness of its ads and increasing user engagement have all put the world's largest social network in a better position than before the IPO, Sandberg told the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday. "When I look back at the last year since we went public, I believe we are unequivocally a much stronger company today than we were on literally any metric I can think of," Sandberg said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday. Facebook became the first U.S. technology company to debut with a value of more than $100 billion, in May 2012. Its shares have lost almost 40 percent of their value since. "I can't speak to the stock price but I do feel strongly that we ar

The founder of the outlawed Megaupload file-sharing site denounced on Thursday "the largest data massacre in the history of the internet", after a European firm wiped out private photos, videos and documents stored on servers used by the site. _0"> Dutch firm LeaseWeb said it had in February erased 630 servers rented by Megaupload, about a year after U.S. authorities closed the site and charged its operators with facilitating online piracy, racketeering and money laundering. "Our lawyers have repeatedly asked LeaseWeb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the U.S.," Kim Dotcom said on Twitter. "We were never warned about the deletion," Dotcom said, adding that the loss of the files had reduced him to tears. Dotcom, who also goes by the name Kim Schmitz, has New Zealand residency. He and his colleagues are fighting extradition to the United States.   He argues that Megaupload was merely a storage facility for

Sony Corp CEO Kazuo Hirai said on Thursday that the electronics firm's board will consider hedge fund Third Point's suggestion to spin-off the electronics company's profitable entertainment arm. _0"> Hirai made the comments at an annual shareholders' meeting in Tokyo.   Hirai said it was important for Sony to revitalize its electronics division as well as to continue growth of its entertainment and financial businesses, which have steadily contributed profits to the overall group. (Reporting by Mari Saito; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance program that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said. The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive U.S. digital snooping beyond American shores has set off a global furor.   "If India doesn't want to look like an authoritarian regime, it needs to be transparent about who will be authorized to collect data, what data will be collected, how it will be used, and how the right to privacy will be protected," said Cynthia Wong, an Internet researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch. The Central Monitoring System (CMS) was announced in 2011 but there has been no public debate and the government has said little about how it will

A co-founder of file-sharing website Pirate Bay was sentenced to two years in jail on Thursday for hacking into computers at a company that manages data for Swedish authorities and making illegal online money transfers, a court said. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was extradited to Sweden last year from Cambodia to begin a one-year jail sentence after being convicted in 2009 of internet piracy. He was then charged by authorities as part of the separate hacking investigation.   "The hacking has been very extensive and technically advanced," the Nacka district court said in a statement. "The attacker has affected very sensitive systems." He had denied the charges. Prosecution documents say Warg, a 28-year-old Swede, managed to transfer 24,200 Danish crowns ($4,300) online, but also attempted, in several different transactions, to transfer a total of around 683,000 euros ($915,500). The investigation was into data infringement involving outsourcing firm Logica. Swedis

For European insurers frustrated that "cyber crime" policies have so far failed to find a ready market among skeptical companies, hope may be at hand. Not only has a huge data loss by Sony Corp dramatically illustrated the risks of hacking raids on corporate data, but the European Union is working on regulatory requirements which threaten heftier fines on unprepared companies. The net effect for the insurance sector is that its efforts to establish cyber cover as a lucrative business line alongside risks such as weather catastrophes may be about to bear fruit. In the United States, cyber cover has grown to be a market worth more than $1 billion in annual premiums, but Europe has not yet followed suit, perhaps surprising given a run of high profile, and costly, hacking incidents.   Yet the U.S. growth only came after legislation a decade after insurers first started offering policies to cover so-called "cyber risk". "If I was to compare the UK and Europea

British sales of tablet computers are booming, Europe's second-biggest electricals retailer Dixons said, underpinning profit growth and offsetting weak markets in debt-squeezed southern Europe. The firm, which trails Metro's Media-Saturn by annual sales, achieved triple-digit growth in tablet sales over the year in the UK and Chief Executive Sebastian James forecast "another big tablet Christmas." "Less than a third of UK households now have a tablet and we also think these are personal devices so there's lots of road left in this particular product," James told reporters on Thursday.   "And there's going to be some further product innovation as these tablets get thinner and lighter and more powerful," he said after Dixons beat guidance with a 15 percent rise in underlying profit for the year to April 30. The most popular lines are the Apple iPad , the Samsung Galaxy and the Google Nexus. Across Europe many store groups are strugglin