Announcements

A cement truck driver was killed in a collision with a big-rig in Fremont Friday morning, a police spokesman said.

The crash was reported at about 8:30 a.m. near the intersection of Kato Road and Benicia Street, Fremont police Detective Bill Veteran said.

The cement truck driver, whose name is not yet being released, was killed in the crash while the big-rig driver was hospitalized with injuries that are not considered life-threatening, Veteran said.

The investigation into the collision is expected to close Kato Road for several hours, and motorists are advised to avoid the area, according to police.

A San Ramon man has been arrested in a fatal hit-and-run accident that left a man visiting the Bay Area from China dead on a Dublin roadway, authorities announced Friday.

Dublin police said Spencer Freeman Smith had been arrested Thursday afternoon after deputies examined his heavily damaged black 2012 Mercedes-Benz CLS550 in his garage.

Investigators had been led to Smith – who recently purchased the vehicle – by identification numbers on a car part found at the scene of Tuesday night's fatal hit-and-run of Bo Hu, who was killed while cycling on Dougherty Road.

 The vehicle had suffered extensive windshield and front-end damage. It has been taken into custody for further examination, according to Lt. Herb Walters. 

Smith, an employment attorney with offices in San Francisco is suspected of fleeing the scene after striking 57-year-old Bo Hu, who was riding or walking his bicycle north on Dougherty Road near the shoulder at
the time of the crash around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The car was traveling on Dougherty Road toward San Ramon when it struck Hu on his bicycle, according to police.

Hu was visiting the area from China, according to a coroner's technician.

Dublin police said Smith had been booked at Santa Rita Jail.

Police are investigating a suspicious package containing a threatening note that was found at a business in San Jose Friday morning.

The package was reported at 8:49 a.m. at a business in the 1300 block of Lincoln Avenue, police said.

The Police Department's bomb squad was at the scene to investigate the package as of 9:30 a.m.

Neighboring businesses have been evacuated and nearby Willow Glen Elementary School has been ordered to shelter in place while police try to determine the contents of the package, according to police.

Facebook is trading up 8 percent Friday, as investors seek to put a dollar value on the company that turned online social networking into a global cultural phenomenon.

Earlier, the company's 28-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, smiled as he rang the opening bell from Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Surrounded by cheering Facebook employees and wearing his signature hoodie, the 28-year-old pushed the button that signals the opening of the stock market in New York.

The morning's events followed an all-night "hackathon" at the company, where engineers stayed up coding software and conjuring up new ideas for Facebook and its 900 million users.

On Thursday, Facebook and the investment bankers arranging the IPO settled on a price of $38 per share. The company and its early investors raised $16 billion in the offering, which valued Facebook at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public.

Now, the stock market will assign a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces and held accountable for profit it earns --or loses-- from one quarter to the next.

But Facebook is one a rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street's money lust. It is a cultural touchstone for the way technology reshapes our lives. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while becoming one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier.

That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as "FarmVille."

Facebook's public debut marks a new milestone in the history of the Internet. In 1995, Netscape Communications' IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate.

Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom. That explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had hatched a "new economy".

It took Google Inc.'s IPO in 2004 to prove that an Internet company with a disruptive idea could be profitable. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection.

Facebook's IPO heralds a new phase of the Internet's evolution. This social era makes connections among people as important as Google's massive index of Web links.

Still, the IPO will raise new pressures for Facebook to generate more revenue, perhaps by digging further into the trove of revealing information that people share on the network to sell even more targeted ads.

Facebook's IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company's cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to being in other talented engineers and promising technology.

That's what has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don't include Google's still-pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China.

Zuckerberg's biggest deal so far came when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer.

Based on Facebook's IPO price of $38 per share, Instagram is in line to receive nearly $1.2 billion.

Though Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from California, people outside the stock market in Times Square snapped photos of a big blue Facebook sign that lit up the building. Some of them used their smart phones to check in to the Nasdaq on Facebook.

Frederick Nolde, who was visiting from Richmond, Va., said he bought 100 shares through the online brokerage eTrade.

He thinks the company is worth $100 billion. "I think Google is a good comparison and it's worth $200 to 300 billion. The real question is how they do in mobile. If they can figure that out they'll do well."

A car careened into a tree early Friday on a Berkeley street, killing a young woman and severely injuring a man and small child, Berkeley police said.

Police got 911 calls reporting the accident on California Street just north of Allston Way at about 1:13 a.m.

According to Berkeley Police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said it appeared that no other cars were involved.

“Officers found a car that had collided with a tree,” she told KTVU. “Initially there were three occupants in the car. It was a challenge for both patrol officers and the fire department to get the individuals out of the car. The officers and fire department did some heroic work to get them out.”

Kusmiss said her department’s fatal accident team was on the scene and using surveying tools to map the debris in an attempt to determine why the Cadillac – with a Compton registration -- careened into the tree.

“There is evidence scattered around a wide area,” she said of the force of the impact.

Kusmiss said the severely injured driver would be tested to see if substances were a factor in the crash.

The female passenger was declared at the scene while the man and child were transported to a local hospital with serious injuries.

Kusmiss would not speculate on the relationship of the three victims. She did say the adults were in their early 20s.

The name of the deceased victim has not been released pending notification of their family.