Is Facebook Working On a Smartphone?
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times reports that Facebook has resumed its stealthy efforts to create a smartphone, apparently to assert its position in an Internet increasingly accessed via mobile devices, and to counter products and moves made by major competitors Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. The Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg has gotten personally involved in the project, which has recently landed several iPhone/iPad engineers from Apple. Wired ran a similar story a month ago, reporting that Facebook has ramped up its "Buffy" code-named collaboration with HTC on a phone which will probably be Android-based, support HTML5 and include a large touchscreen and high-quality camera (for Instagram). Facebook won't confirm or deny these reports."
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Adobe Acqui-hires Thumb Labs To Make Mobile Apps For Behance And Its New Creative Cloud
Another step for Adobe in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring Thumb Labs, a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency. Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed. The news follows on from Adobe’s acquisition of another New York-based design startup, Behance, a platform for designers and others in the creative industries to share their work, which Adobe picked up in December 2012 reportedly for around $150 million. Earlier this month, Adobe put the Behance acquisition into context when it announced a massive push on its Creative Cloud strategy, with social/community features powered by Behance. Verdi tells TechCrunch that Thumb Labs will see out existing contracts it has with other clients, but as of May 31, it will focus its efforts exclusively on making mobile apps for ...
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About 30% of Facebook's Advertising Revenue, Or $375M, Came From Mobile Platforms
Almost one-third of Facebook’s advertising revenue is now coming from mobile platforms, according to the company’s latest earnings release. About $375 million of Facebook’s $1.25 billion in advertising revenue came from products like the company’s new mobile app install ads. That’s up from last quarter, when Facebook said it made 23 percent, or $305.9 million, from mobile ads. So this is a nice 22.5 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile advertising revenue. Because Facebook now sees about three quarters of a billion users per month on mobile devices, the company has to make a commensurate amount from these platforms. Analysts and investors are closely watching to see how well Facebook makes this leap from desktop-based ads to mobile ones. Unlike Apple and Google, Facebook doesn’t own its own smartphone OS or sell its own hardware. It doesn’t have a way to earn a cut of app sales or in-app purchases like it does with games and apps on the Facebook platform. Advertising ...
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Milk Virtual Goats For Womens’ Rights In This New Facebook Game
Instead of spending to grow virtual crops faster, Facebook gamers can turn those purchases into donations for cattle donations and fistula operations in the developing world. A new Facebook game coming to the platform in a few weeks is all about womens’ rights. Based on The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book about women, it’s called Half The Sky and is the fruit of a collaboration between a non-profit Games For Change and Canada’s Frima Studios, which is one of the bigger independent developers in the country. While there have been a few early projects in gaming for social causes like Darfur is Dying and social entrepreneurship game Urgent Evoke, it’s still a pretty new genre. Games For Change’s co-president Asi Rudak says that non-profits often turn to dinners and galas to raise money and awareness of humanitarian issues. And yet, games can have a much farther reach with millions of players. Games For Change put out a $1 million request for proposal ...
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Facebook Removes Instagram User Counts From Developer API After Holiday Traffic Confusion
In the aftermath of a controversial story claiming Instagram’s traffic numbers were down, it looks like the data that was the source of the story has now disappeared altogether. Instagram was in the spotlight, and owner Facebook’s shares tumbled, when the New York Post ran a story between Christmas and New Years Day claiming that the popular photo app’s traffic was falling off a cliff after the controversial introduction, and then reversal, of new terms of service. We and several others cast doubt on how the NYP read those traffic numbers, which came from AppData, and Facebook eventually said they were inaccurate, too. Now that data is no longer there. Facebook tells us that this is to bring Instagram in line with the rest of its own apps, which stopped appearing on AppData in December 2011. “We don’t provide app usage metrics for apps owned or created by Facebook through our API,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’ve updated our API to reflect this for Instragram, which ...
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