(elitedaily.com)

Doesn't it seem the Facebook IPO was just yesterday? And yet here we are at the company's third earnings release, which brings promising news. In fact, we're a little surprised the Facebook execs on the earnings call didn't punctuate their remarks with jazz hands.

That's because, 23 percent of the company's $1.33 billion in Q4 ad revenue came from mobile. That's a jump from Q3, when it was about 14 percent. And it's a big jump from last year, when it was basically zero. Overall ad revenue was also up 40 percent.

"Today there's no argument -- Facebook is a mobile company," crowed Zuck in this afternoon's earnings call.

Sure, there were plenty of others things mentioned on the conference call: Zuck talked up Graph Search while attempting to manage expectations re: Gifts. COO Sheryl Sandberg revealed that 65 percent of advertisers opt for the Newsfeed, which promises higher click-throughs and conversion rates.

But this show was really all about mobile. Zuck danced his way through a series of examples of Facebook's newfound smartphone pizzaz: As of New Year's Eve, there were 680 million mobile monthly active users, a 57 percent increase over last year. (Jazz hands!) Day-to-day, more people now access the service via mobile than web. (Jazz hands!) Familiar features now work just great on mobile.

Zuck even cited numbers from ComScore, saying Facebook now accounts for 23 percent of all time spent on apps, with Instagram accounting for another 3 percent. And take a bow, sir!

The goal for the next year, he added, is to get just as good at building "new, mobile first" experiences. Poke didn't exactly get the company off to the best start, but it sounds like there'll soon more people on staff helping generate and realize ideas. Mr. Zuckerberg said they plan to add to the headcount in product development.

Growth don't come cheap, though. In his own remarks, CFO David Ebersman explained that their expenses are likely to grow 50 percent in the next year. It's also worth noting that, as New York's Kevin Roose pointed out on Twitter, that the company spent $1.4 billion in R&D in 2012.

Not that Facebook is currently a small business, either: According to Mr. Ebersman, the company has something like 4,600 employees. Total headcount grew 44 percent in 2012, driven by a beefed-up technical staff.

"We're committed to building a highly profitable, cash-generating business in the long run" Mr. Ebersman. One certainly hopes so.

"BLERG." -- Mark Cuban. (Photo: flickr.com/yoderbaum)

This morning, Dealbook honcho Andrew Ross Sorkin made his case for the villain in the melodrama that is Facebook's bungled IPO: CFO David Ebersman, who gave the $38 offering price the go-ahead. His excessive optimism--so goes the argument--flooded the market with overpriced shares, which have since lost half their value, and now there's no upswing in sight, and that means Mr. Ebersman, at the very least, deserves a public calling-out.

Well, Mark Cuban thinks that's bullshit.

In a new blog post titled "Facebook Handled Its IPO Exactly Right," he calls Mr. Sorkin's conclusion "180 degrees wrong" then goes on an absolute tear in defense of Facebook's IPO pricing. Short version: It's not David Ebersman's job to make sure you don't lose money betting on Facebook. 

Have you ever been to an auction where the selling party told a buyer to reduce their price because they were worried that the item might not hold its value? Neither have I.

Pretty sure that, if anything, an imminent collapse in value merely inspires the hard sell. But Mr. Cuban doesn't stop there, proceeding with a subtle plug for his television show:

If the CFO of Facebook came on SharkTank and told me that he was able to sell his shares to the public for $38 a share, but turned down the opportunity, I would crush him for being an idiot.

Then, he goes for the caps lock:

Facebook was able to raise about 10 BILLION DOLLARS in this IPO. The CFO’s job is not to manage shareholder portfolios. His job is to help Facebook succeed. I don’t know about you, but putting 10 BILLION DOLLARS in the bank in my opinion is one way to help them succeed.

We're certainly never buying a used car from Mr. Cuban after reading this.

(Photo: The D Networks)

It's been almost four months since Facebook's alarmingly botched IPO, and yet its specter still haunts the markets. On Friday, $FB stock closed at $18.06 a share, dropping a sharp 5.40 percent in a single day--the worst drop a tech company experienced that day. (Comparatively, Zynga--which has been widely panned for its parachuting stock--only dropped 3.11 percent.) To date, Facebook has lost $50 billion in market value since its IPO.

And yet, despite much talk of banks and underwriters and Facebook's nascent leadership team, we've yet to pin down a real target for our IPO ire. Luckily, Dealbook's Andrew Ross Sorkin thinks he's found the likely culprit: Facebook CFO David Ebersman, whom you've probably never even heard of:

And yet if there is one single individual more responsible than any other for the staggering mispricing of Facebook’s I.P.O., it is Mr. Ebersman. He signed off on the ever-increasing offer price, which ended up at $38 after the company had originally planned a price range of $29 to $34.

He — almost alone — pushed to flood the market with 25 percent more shares than originally planned in the final days before the offering. And since then, as the point person for investors, he has done little to articulate how or why the company’s strategy will lift the stock price any time soon.

According to Dealbook, Mr. Ebersman is ultimately guilty of buying into his own hype about the price of Facebook's stock. Following a roadshow, it's typical for investors to indicate that they're interested in purchasing two or even three times more stock than they end up actually getting. Mr. Ebersman, writes Dealbook, "did not seem to appreciate what was happening. They seem to have believed their own hype and took those orders as real, giving them the misplaced confidence to push the I.P.O. to the highest possible price and issue more shares."

So what will happen to Mr. Ebersman? Nothing, so far. As Dealbook points out, Zuck told employees following the IPO: “So, you’ve heard we’re firing David?”

He was just joking. Heh.

Cause you're growns-up and you're growns-up and you're growns-up!

It's been less than a week since Facebook debuted on the public markets. But each day, it seems, unearths new contenders for another round of the Facebook IPO Blame Game. (Play along at home!)

While Congress plans its investigation into underwriters like Morgan Stanley, Dan Primack dropped an interesting perspective in his Term Sheet newsletter: Blame the "adults."

Institutional investors also didn't want Zuckerberg to take Facebook public unless he added some big-name "adult" supervision. After all, what does a 20-something know about running a multi-billion dollar public corporation? Just imagine the costly mistakes he would make.

Hence hiring seasoned executives like Sheryl Sandberg as COO and David Ebersman as CFO. But the hires meant to boost Facebook's maturity level with the public markets may have backfired.

Mr. Primack, for example, has some choice words regarding Ms. Sandberg's decision to recuse herself from the underwriter selection process based on her previous relationships at Google.

Pardon me, but wouldn't such relationships actually have been important? Not to get bankers to take on Facebook as a client -- everyone wanted them -- but because she might have a better sense of who would, and wouldn't, be the best fit? And, once Facebook did pick her pal Michael Grimes over at Morgan Stanley, wouldn't it have been good to have a third opinion in the room -- particularly one so close to both key players?

Mr. Grimes, if you'll recall, helped Morgan Stanley lock down deals for the LinkedIn, Pandora, Zynga, and Groupon IPOs, which Henry Blodget credits to his "dork" cred and love of video games.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Mr. Grimes was the Facebook CFO's "main confidant."

"This IPO was an Ebersman and Grimes show," said one of the people familiar with the matter. "They were joined at the hip."

It seems they both saw eye-to-eye on decisions that may have sealed Mr. Ebsersman's fate as "Facebook fall guy."

The Journal's sources say it was Mr. Ebersman, backed by Morgan Stanley, who decided--less than three days before the IPO--to boost the number of shares Facebook would offer by 25 percent.

His main adviser at lead underwriter Morgan Stanley assured him there was plenty of demand, they said.

That decision by the 41-year-old Facebook executive may have doomed any real chance the social-networking company had that its stock would jump on its first day of trading—a hallmark of successful IPOs.

Now, just because an IPO pop makes a big noise doesn't necessarily mean its a hallmark of success. But Mr. Primack notes, Mr. Ebsersman may also have been guilty of selective disclosure:

Then there is Ebersman, who oversees a financial operation that allegedly warned underwriter analysts -- but not others -- to cut Q2 guidance estimates (even if all it really said was "please start paying attention to what we said about mobile"). If true, what he (and MS) did may actually have violated securities regulations -- and also means he shouldn't be too quick to count his unvested shares.

While potential shareholders were fretting about Mark Zuckerberg's controlling share of Facebook, who was watching the grown-ups table?