Other carriers also have so-called “below-the-line” fees, named that because they frequently appear at the bottom of the phone bill after the service charges. Such fees help boost revenue growth in a massive organization, but consumer groups criticize them because they are less likely to be noticed by users and allow carriers to advertise lower prices than they actually charge.

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But that plan is now on hold.

“While Facebook works to create a better Facebook Home experience, they have recommended that Orange in France and EE in the U.K. hold off on launching the HTC First at this time,” a France Telecom-Orange representative told AllThingsD.

Facebook is saying that it wants to work on retooling Home before it renews its effort to get the software preloaded on new devices. “As a result of customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding customization features to Facebook Home, and will limit support for new devices at this time,” Orange said.

At the launch of Facebook Home, the social network talked about a program to get more phone makers to preload the software. It showed a slide listing other hardware partners, including Samsung, ZTE, Lenovo, Sony, Alcatel One Touch and Huawei, in addition to launch partner HTC.

Neither AT&T nor HTC has commented directly on sales of the HTC First, though the carrier has dropped the price to 99 cents with a contract, down from the initial $99 sticker price.

Whether the HTC First will ever see the light of day in Europe remains unclear, though Orange said it still wants to work closely with the social network.

“Orange remains committed to bringing our customers the newest and best mobile experiences, and we will continue to build on our strong relationship with Facebook to provide these new experiences in the future,” the carrier said.

Ben Ling, a longtime Silicon Valley angel investor and Internet exec, has joined Khosla Ventures as a venture partner.

Ling is the second hire of high-profile operating execs by Khosla. Former Square, Slide and PayPal exec Keith Rabois — who is a close friend of Ling’s — joined the firm in February.

In an interview today, Ling said he has been contemplating his next move, and the idea of becoming a VC after years of operations was appealing.

“I thought a lot about the ability to have impact across a broad set of companies, and was attracted to Khosla’s model of venture assistance,” said Ling, who added that he will focus a lot on the mobile ecosystem. “When I was younger, I thought it would be fascinating to be an investor, and here I can help a lot of companies grow and scale.”

Ling is a former Google and Facebook product exec, as well as an active investor in 80 startups, including such high-profile ones as Fab.com, Square and Quora. He was most recently COO at Badoo, but left the company last fall.

At Google, he worked on search, YouTube and local products, and was closely linked with former Googler Marissa Mayer, whom he followed internally when her responsibilities shifted there. Many thought he might next pop up at Yahoo, where she is now CEO.

Not so, but also not a surprise; Mayer provided Khosla with a lovely statement about Ling: “Ben is an amazing entrepreneurial leader and has a great eye as an investor for both talent and ideas. I’m excited to see him join Khosla Ventures to find and foster the next set of entrepreneurs who will define the technology world.”

That’s a massive amount of product to move in the first month after the device’s commercial debut. But, as noted here last week, this number doesn’t refer to devices sold to consumers, but to carriers: “The S4 may well be selling much faster than its predecessor, but not so much faster that there will be 10 million units in consumer hands next week. Some will still be sitting on carrier shelves awaiting purchase.”

And that’s worth noting. Because while many handset vendors like to tout shipments into the channel as sales, there is some variation. Apple, when it posts quarterly earnings, reports iPhone “sell in” numbers to retail partners. But when it makes its annual “First Weekend iPhone Sales Top TK” news release, it’s referring to sales to consumers. So, when Apple said last September that it sold more than five million of its iPhone 5 in three days, it wasn’t referring to devices sitting on retail shelves, but to those purchased by end users.

In a key hire, Jawbone said today that it had hired Mindy Mount, a top corporate VP at Microsoft, as its president.

The move by the San Francisco-based maker of wireless, music and wearable devices is part of what has been a major upgrading of its management and board. Recently, Jawbone added Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Rob Wiesenthal of Warner Music as directors.

Jawbone has also recently done a big acquisition — purchasing BodyMedia, a wearable health and fitness company, for $100 million. The move comes just a couple months after it bought data and digital-design companies Massive Health and Visere.

All this expansion requires tight organizational efforts and Mount has a lot of financial and operational experience, having held several key jobs at the software giant. She was most recently corporate VP and CFO at Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which includes Bing, MSN and Microsoft Advertising. Before that she held a similar job at the Entertainment and Devices Division, which has the Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone units.

Previous to that, Mount ran AOL’s U.K. unit, worked in strategy at Time Warner and also was an exec at Morgan Stanley. She has an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business and an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In an interview today, Mount said that what attracted her to Jawbone was the challenge of scaling the fast-growth company, which is helmed by CEO and co-founder Hosain Rahman.

“Right out of the block, I’ll be spending time on business operations, since the scale and scope and complexity of Jawbone has really increased,” she said. “What really attracted me to the role is that it is a really meaty one … It’s a company with great products, where I can come in and have real impact, because consumer electronics companies really have to execute.”

Jawbone products include Jawbone wireless headsets, Jambox speakers and the Up personal fitness wristbands. The company has raised a lot of funding, totaling about $210 million from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

Asked about his favorite apps, Kutcher pulled out his phone to look at his home screen.

“I use Facebook and Twitter a lot,” Kutcher said at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas, adding that he also spends a lot of time using Flipboard, Path and Couple — three companies he has invested in.

The actor and investor talked about the importance of mobile, and its current challenges when it comes to user experience and app discovery.

“I don’t think anyone has mastered mobile,” Kutcher said.

Kutcher is the wrap-up speaker at what will be the last spring show for CTIA, which is going from two shows a year to one, with next year’s event planned for September, back in Las Vegas. The final fall show focused on enterprise wireless will be in October in San Jose.

Here’s their latest attempt: “TV ad targeting,” which promises that it can find Twitter users who saw a TV ad, and then show them another ad from the same marketer when they come to Twitter.

The basic idea: If you were watching the Super Bowl, and you tweeted about it while you were watching, and Samsung ran an ad during the game, Twitter could let Samsung find you on Twitter and show you another ad, later.

If that sounds like a lot of ads to you, the TV-watching Twitter user, well … all this stuff is free, right?

Here’s a video that shows how it’s supposed to work:

The most obvious limitation here is that, for now, the program is only supposed to work if you tweet about a show while you’re watching it. And since most regular humans don’t write tweets while they watch TV — most regular humans don’t write tweets, period, though they may read tweets — that caps the available audience for this sort of thing. (And, by the way, if this works, then Facebook would really benefit from this, since even Twitter executives acknowledge that it has a much larger audience of people commenting about TV shows than Twitter does.)

You may also wonder if someone who watches a TV show actually sees the ad, what with DVRs and bathroom breaks and lots of second screens and all. Twitter has an answer for that, in a blog post announcing the campaign: “We believe a user engaged enough with a TV show to tweet about it very likely saw the commercials as well.”

The big picture: As it has been doing for several years, Twitter is trying to connect itself to the TV industry by telling both advertisers and programmers that it can help them boost the stuff they’re already showing.

Note that Twitter’s pitch is different from some other platforms that want TV money, notably video platforms like YouTube, that tell TV advertisers the audience they want isn’t watching their stuff. Instead, Twitter wants TV spenders to think about spending additional money with them.

Think of it as “Twitter times TV,” Twitter ad chief Adam Bain told marketers today, “with Twitter being a force-multiplier.”

The stuff powering all of this, by the way, comes from Bluefin Labs, the startup Twitter bought for $90 million a few months ago. At our D: Dive Into Media conference in February, Bluefin founder Deb Roy showed off the way his company connects Twitter and TV, and if you watch the clip below, you can see a direct connection between it and the program Twitter launched today:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/like-that-tv-ad-you-just-saw-twitter-wants-to-show-you-another-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130523/yahoo-scoops-up-another-small-startup-gaming-platform-playerscale/ http://allthingsd.com/20130523/yahoo-scoops-up-another-small-startup-gaming-platform-playerscale/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 14:58:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=324709 Yahoo said it had bought PlayerScale, a small gaming infrastructure startup for cross-platform gaming. Yahoo has been on a bit of a tear in buying up small companies for low prices, to strengthen its talent and expertise in a wide variety of arenas, including mobile, productivity and gaming. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but PlayerScale said on its blog that it would “continue to support our existing product,” which is Player.IO.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/yahoo-scoops-up-another-small-startup-gaming-platform-playerscale/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130523/twitter-adds-more-video-advertisers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130523/twitter-adds-more-video-advertisers/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 14:39:49 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=324683 Twitter is stepping up its video ads plans by adding a new list of advertisers to a program it has been tinkering with for the past few months, and giving the product a name: Twitter Amplify. New partners include Discovery, Time Inc. and Major League Baseball; they join previously announced deals with distributors like Fox and BBC America.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/twitter-adds-more-video-advertisers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130523/with-new-mobile-app-nextdoor-unveils-its-take-on-the-neighborhood-watch/ http://allthingsd.com/20130523/with-new-mobile-app-nextdoor-unveils-its-take-on-the-neighborhood-watch/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:50 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=324608 Think of what you’re used to in a local neighborhood-watch group: Signs posted around a community with contact information, perhaps monthly meetings to discuss safety issues and concerns. Until now, it has been mostly low-tech stuff; something like “potlucks organized in church basements,” or maybe private Yahoo bulletin board groups.

Nextdoor, the private social network aimed at connecting people in neighborhoods, has a different take. The company unveiled its first mobile app on Thursday, essentially a way for residents of communities to stay in close, constant communication on issues specific to their homes, directly from their smartphones.

If you haven’t heard of it, yes, it’s another social network. And yes, it’s about strengthening ties to those you consider close, something like the original vision of the social app Path.

Unlike existing networks, however, Nextdoor isn’t about sharing things like what new band you listened to, or what type of omelet you had for breakfast. It prioritizes utility over recreation. So, in a typical Nextdoor stream, you’ll likely see posts about local garage sales, want ads for babysitters or rooms for rent. And each node of shared information is relegated strictly to the confines of your specifically drawn neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods, so, in theory, you’re only in contact with people that would actually find this information useful. (Read Katie Boehret’s recent review of Nextdoor here.)

The new app is largely a port of all the website’s features over to a plain, unobtrusive mobile interface (every mobile social stream looks the same these days). You can post updates, welcome new neighbors and the like.

The biggest pitch, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of the user activity on Nextdoor’s network, is for local safety. Users have convened on Nextdoor to report local burglaries, muggings or suspicious activity in their area. Until now, users could only access the site via desktop or the mobile Web. But with the new app, Nextdoor’s pitch is that it will be far easier to keep tabs on your local goings-on, especially in terms of safety issues.

Especially compelling: You’re able to send and receive urgent alerts to your phone. So, if something bad is going down in your neighborhood, a Nextdoor user can send out an alarm that pings everyone in their district, whether they’re at home or not.

And, perhaps most importantly, you’re able to use the app to post photos on the fly.

By now, we’re well aware that photos do quite well when circulating through social networks — see Instagram, Twitter’s filters, Pinterest, et al. Nextdoor’s appeal here, though, again trumps utility over recreation. Snap a camera-phone shot of a stray cat who may belong to someone, a set of keys lost on the ground or a shady-looking dude peering in someone’s window, and your network of neighbors will be able to see it quickly.

“Think about having hundreds of cameras available at any given moment,” Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD. “Everyone has a smartphone.”

That’s a cool enough thought for any local safety enthusiast — if not a little “Big Brother”-ish — and seems much more feasible than relying on patrols or radios. I wondered, though, if something like Nextdoor’s service would encourage locals to pull a Charles Bronson vigilante move on troublemakers, eschewing calling in the actual police.

Anything is possible. But Tolia said Nextdoor members weren’t doing that sort of thing thus far.

Ideally for the company, the app becomes something more than just another icon in your mobile tray — less an app than a tool, and a connection to what’s happening back at your home when you’re out in the world.

Of course, the perennial question remains: Can a smart take on an age-old social function convince people to sign up for yet another social network?

The app is in Apple’s App Store now. I guess we’ll soon find out.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/with-new-mobile-app-nextdoor-unveils-its-take-on-the-neighborhood-watch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130523/triaged-email-at-tablet-scale-mailbox-app-comes-to-ipad/ http://allthingsd.com/20130523/triaged-email-at-tablet-scale-mailbox-app-comes-to-ipad/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 12:00:27 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=324599 Mailbox, the iPhone email app that some folks really love — and that Dropbox loves so much it paid many millions for — is now available for the iPad. The swipe-to-triage service still only works with Gmail, but it has been modified with panels to fit the larger screen. No Android yet.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130523/triaged-email-at-tablet-scale-mailbox-app-comes-to-ipad/feed/ 0