Facebook, the massive social network that counts one of the most popular iPhone apps of all time in their portfolio, is rumored to be readying a $5 billion IPO (initial public offering). Yes, Zuckerberg and co. might finally be ready to hit the stock market. The New York Times reports:

The Internet giant plans to list a preliminary fund-raising goal of about $5 billion, one of these people said. Another cautioned that any such number was largely a placeholder for determining filing fees, and that the final amount could differ significantly. And the company could still decide to delay its filing.

While huge, it narrowly misses out on being the biggest tech IPO ever — that distinction belongs to Infineon. That is, of course, unless Facebook raises the stakes to $10 billion, then they’ll own all the records. And the money.

Facebook has enjoyed enormous growth but not without growing pains, including and especially in regards to user privacy and transparency. Along with Google and Twitter — the former public, the latter still private — Facebook faces Federal privacy oversight for the foreseeable future.

Still, if Facebook does pull the trigger on this IPO, will that change anything? If any of us could buy stock and become a shareholder, does that make trusting our data to Facebook any easier, or any more difficult?

Source: New York Times

Curious how to setup notifications in iOS 5? With all the various banners and popups, badges and sounds, widgets and lock screen options, it can be a little tricky for first-time users, but worry not — we have you covered! First up, here’s how the new Weather and Stock widgets work!

Stock widget

The Stock widget pulls stock information directly from the native Stocks app in iOS 5. By turning the Stock widget to ‘On’ you’ll see a scrolling ticker displaying your favorite stocks. If you want to change the stocks that are displayed in the Stock widget, just follow these quick steps:

1. Open the Stocks app from the iPhone home screen, or tap the Stock widget in Notification Center.
2. Tap the ‘i’ information button in the lower right-hand corner.
3. Tap the + button in the upper left-hand corner to add a new stock. You can search for stocks by stock ticker or company name.
4. Tap Done to finish.

Now, the stock that you’ve just added to the Stocks app will show up in the scrolling Stock widget within Notification Center!

Weather widget

Apple also included a weather widget that displays current weather information as well as a full five-day forecast. Just swipe to the left or right to reveal the five-day forecast. The weather widget pulls information from Yahoo! Weather locations stored in the native Weather app in iOS 5. In order to add or change weather locations, follow these steps:

1. Open the Weather app from the iPhone home screen, or tap the Weather widget in Notification Center.
2. Tap the ‘i’ information button in the lower right-hand corner.
3. From here, you have the option to either use Local Weather (pulled from location services) or add a location manually. For instructions sake, we’ll add a new location. To add a new location, tap the + button in the upper left-hand corner.
4. Search by City, State or ZIP and input your preferred location.

Now the location you’ve manually setup will be displayed in the Weather widget. If you have more than one location in the Weather app, the Weather widget will only display the 1st location. If you have no manual locations set and have the Local Weather feature on, you’ll only see the temperature relative to your geographic location (make sure you have Location Services turned on!)

There you have it, how to configure your Notification Center widgets. We’ll cover the other elements, like Mail and Messages notifications, Lock Screen info, etc. next time. Meanwhile, if you have any favorite Notification Center tips, let us know in comments!

Daily Tips range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

How do you keep track of stocks on your iPhone? A Stocks app/widget was one of the original apps introduced for the iPhone 2G in 2007 and with a small upgrade in iPhone OS 3.0 last year, it still has a place on almost every iPhone home screen (even if only because Apple won’t let non stockies delete it). But if you are a hardcore market watcher, a bear or a bull, a buyer or seller, is the built in Stocks app enough to get you through a trade?

There are a variety of 3rd party stock apps in the iTunes app store that aim to do the job better, or at least more seriously. Do you use any of them? Which ones and why?

From the intense day trader to the casual yearly investor, having a device that’s always on the internet, and always on you seems like a natural fit for the dynamic world of stock trading.

I know next to nothing about it — other than Apple and Google are doing pretty well these days — so if you have any recommendations, any tricks on how to better use your iPhone in todays hectic (and hellacious) markets, let us know in comments!

Unlike the iPhone 3GS, the iPad doesn’t have built-in stocks, weather, voice memo, clock, calculator, or compass apps. It does, however, have the brand new iPad App Store, and yeah… there are apps for all that!

Check out our picks after the break!

Bloomberg for iPad [Free - iTunes link] offers not just stocks but news, company info, price charts, trends, analysis and… you get the idea. It could just be information overload on a 9.7″ screen, but that’s likely just what you stockies want!

Weather Channel Max [Free - iTunes link] costs nothing (thanks to Toyota) but packs in the weathery-goodness. Full screen, customizable maps, in-motion radar, local, regional, and national video, and more make it not so much of a replacement as a escalation.

Voice memos for iPad [Free - iTunes link] is the “I can’t believe it’s not butter” of replacement apps. It looks similar to Apple’s iPhone Voice Memo app, but it’s scaled up to iPad size. Unlimited recording, tagging, pause, levels, timer, and email options make it a great fill in option.

Clock… We haven’t found a good replacement for Clock yet. If you know of one that matches the functionality and the grace of the iPhone Clock app, let us know in the comments. And developers — make a good one, with a great icon. Seriously.

PCalc Lite [Free - iTunes] or PCalc [$9.99 - iTunes link] make the iPhone calculator look anemic by comparison. It includes an optional RPN mode, multiple undo and redo, unit conversions and constants, a couple of themes, and much more in the paid version.

Compass HD + Vector Magnetometer / Gravitometer [Free for now - iTunes link] is an app that, frankly, we may not be smart enough to properly describe. It has absolute mode, north mode, declination mode, and relative modes, and a bunch of different display modes for acceleration visualization. Get it while it’s free!

So there you have it, App Store to the rescue! Did we miss any (other than clocks!)? Are there alternatives your like better? Let us know in the comments!

Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber suggests that bigger, iPad versions of the built-in iPhone Stocks, Calculator, Weather, Clock and Voice Memo were scrapped by Steve Jobs:

It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who.

Gruber was responding to theories that these apps would instead be offered as App Store downloads, or could be part of some secret widget dashboard implementation. In other words, that it’s a design issue, not a technical issue.

However, new UI that would make the iPad an amazing bedside clock (how’s that for a Lock Screen), or show Stocks with a variety of graphs and related news and data, or weather for several days and cities at once, certainly seems possible for Apple’s UI wizards. Perhaps they simply lacked time to re-do the apps for the already extended April 3 release date?

Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.

Speaking of which, any little birdies hear anything about an iPhone 4.0 sneak preview event yet? Or is everyone just focused on getting the iPad out right now?

CNNMoney.com News, Stocks, and Video [free - iTunes link] for iPhone (and iPod touch) is the latest big name entrant into the App Store financial news and media space. Leveraging their brand and resources, it looks like CNNMoney.com’s mobile site while working like an iPhone app. iPhone-likeness aficionados may take a few blinking moments to adjust, but it’s a deliberate design decision that will no doubt appeal to the massive user-base of CNN.com’s existing web services.

TiPb had a chance to test drive CNNMoney, and from a pure content standpoint it’s impressive. When you first launch, you’re greeted with the News dashboard. At the very top is a rotating stock-ticker, then a sampling of latest news, stocks, videos, etc. Users can easily check or uncheck specific content options, and drag them around to re-sequence them in whatever order they prefer. (I immediately put technology news at the top).

The content itself isn’t merely a feed. In an effort to give mobile users the best experience possible, both statistical measures like popularity and hand-picked curation on the part of CNN Money’s editors determine which stories and in what order they’re made available to the iPhone app. Also, stories loaded into the app are cached locally in case you need to go offline (i.e. on an airplane).

The free app is supported by advertising, but when there is no appropriate or available ad, rather than filler or “house ads”, CNN Money cuts users a much-appreciated break and removes the ad space completely.

My Stocks is pre-populated with a few high profile favorites but can be easily customized. Tapping a stock brings up a details and graph view. As is typical with online stock reporting, quotes are delayed roughly 15 min. Once you’ve viewed a stock quote, a new section pops up on your dashboard News tab called Last 3 Quotes, and as the title indicates, it keeps track of your most recently views stocks.

Videos shows thumbnails and a brief description of the story. CNN Money typically produces over a dozen unique video segments a day, and they load quickly and look good on the iPhone.

The Add/Remove tab lets you do the content re-arrangement mentioned previously.

It should be noted that while CNN Money is compatible with iPhone 3.0, and the system-wide Copy functionality works fine, it doesn’t yet support push notification alerts, or automatic HTTP video stream optimization. Hopefully we’ll see these in an update. Along with a good James Earl Jones rendition of “This is CNN”.

Screenshots after the break…

Stocks, the widget-like application that’s been unchanged since the original iPhone 1.0 release is finally getting some refresh love from Apple in iPhone 3.0. While the top part, or actual stock info, remains the same, the old version’s graph along the bottom has been replaced with news results. Still want the graph? No problem, turn to landscape view and you get it bright and bigger than before. Also new, if you tap on the graph line, you get the stock price that day and if you tap at a second location as well, you get the delta (change in value) between those two points.

A small update, long in coming, but likely appreciated by many who are more than ever checking it daily, if not hourly, if not by the minute…