Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

It’s been a long, hectic week for news — so it’s understandable if you’ve missed a couple stories on the technology side of things. Here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. In an essay in AllThingsD Voices, Jan Chipchase writes that Google Glass is the company’s “unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy … it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view.”
2. At D: Dive Into Mobile, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users.
3. Also announced at our mobile conference were Facebook’s updates to its iPhone and iPad apps to incorporate the “Chat Heads” from Facebook Home. As of Wednesday, those changes have started rolling out to users.
4. In an interview with Arik Hesseldahl, Workday co-CEO and Greylock Partner Aneel Bhusri said, “it’s the most disruptive time in 25 years” for enterprise, and that landing HP as a customer at Workday “gives people more comfort that the cloud is real.”
5. Peter Zatko, a computer hacking expert better known as Mudge, is leaving his post at DARPA, where he was tasked with helping government agencies fend off cyber attacks. Mudge’s next stop? Google.
6. If the netbook wasn’t dead already, it will be soon. New data from research house IHS iSuppli say shipments of the mini-computers will fall to zero by 2015.
7. Maybe you’ve heard of this small company called Microsoft? Windows Phone head Terry Myerson is casting his division as an underdog and going on the offensive against Google: “[there is] clearly mutiny in the Starship Android,” he said.
8. Facebook would love to put its new Home overlay on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Apple almost certainly doesn’t want it there. In this interview, Kara Swisher asked Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer and mobile head Cory Ondrejka to explain the two companies’ complicated relationship.
9. If you haven’t heard of Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi yet, you will soon. With 7.19 million handsets sold in 2012, Xiaomi president Bin Lin said the company expects to sell twice as many this year.
10. And finally, one of readers’ favorite quotes of the week came from AllThingsD’s own Walt Mossberg. He kicked off Dive Into Mobile by asking Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs about Firefox’s mobile operating system: “So … what the f**k?”

To stay on top of the latest, you should follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

1. “Firefox OS? What the f**k?” asked AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, kicking off the day’s first interview. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said it’s all about the open Web standards that underlie the forthcoming Firefox operating system.
2. Google may not have 44 million robotic cars on the road, but Waze has 44 million users, Waze CEO Noam Bardin said, and they make Waze’s maps better by using them. Bardin touted the power of crowdsourced driving directions, which so far have “validated” about 1.5 billion km (or about 932 million miles).
3. Google’s Jason Spero, appearing with Millennial Media’s Mollie Spillman, said that mobile ads will have more potential once they can track user behavior for advertisers’ sake. However, Spillman added, “It’s becoming more mainstream and mandatory that mobile is part of the marketing budget or media spend.”
4. Xiaomi sold 7.19 million handsets in 2012, and expects to sell double that number this year. The high-end smartphone company is one of China’s fastest-growing. “We believe the future of the mobile Internet is really about services,” said company president Bin Lin.
5. Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter simultaneously balanced Gaga’s plans for a hybrid album-app with the fact that physical CD sales are still incredibly important in the music business: “You can’t shock the water in our business. It’s about gradual change,” he said. “You still have to cater to the market that’s out there.”

For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile. See you tomorrow!

Onstage at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York City Monday, Xiaomi co-founder and president Bin Lin discussed the company’s driving philosophy: Building a business on services by selling mid- to high-end smartphones at cost.

“We believe the future of the mobile Internet is really about services,” Lin said. “Cellphones are really just like PCs were 20 years ago. They generated big profit margins in the beginning. But those margins are in the single digits now. The same thing is beginning to happen to smartphones. So rather than focus on devices where margins will decline, we’re focusing on services.”

But to build a business on services, you need volume. How does a startup that’s essentially just three years old do that? By selling high-spec smartphones at low-spec smartphone prices.

“Our flagship phone (the Xiaomi MI-2) has a lot of the same specs you’d see in high-end Samsung and HTC phones,” Lin said. “It’s got the same processor that Samsung uses in the Galaxy S4. But it costs about half as much. … We essentially price our phones at bill-of-materials.”

That’s a compelling value proposition, and one that Xiaomi is getting a lot of mileage out of. Lin said the batches of 300,000 handsets that Xiaomi sells directly to consumers on its website routinely sell out within five minutes.

We had assembled some of the biggest names in mobile technology and a stunning array of demos for what was sure to have been an amazing gathering before a sold-out audience.

Sandy had other plans, of course, wreaking devastation across the area, including massive flooding in lower Manhattan, where we had planned to hold the event.

As we said at the time, we would be back. And now we are pleased to announce that Dive Into Mobile has been rescheduled for April 15 and 16, still in New York at the same (now dry) venue in Battery Park.

A number of our original speakers have confirmed for the new event, including Android chief Andy Rubin, Facebook engineering head Mike Schroepfer, Verizon Wireless marketing chief Tami Erwin, Major League Baseball’s Bob Bowman and Fabricio Bloisi, head of Brazil’s Movile.

Several other speakers are making sure the new date works, and we look forward to announcing them in the coming days and weeks. We are also working on adding a few big-name speakers that couldn’t make the earlier date.

While first crack at attending the rescheduled event will go to those who were initially registered, check our registration page to get in line for tickets.

In the meantime, we made the most of our time stranded in Times Square, filming video interviews with a number of the guests who were to have taken the stage in October. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop traveled all the way from Finland, only to be stuck in New York, while Xiaomi chief Bin Lin was in from China.

Especially worth a watch are our talks with three of the international Global Voices who had made it to New York. Asia Kamukama traveled from Uganda to speak at our conference and experienced her first hurricane instead. Thankfully, we still got a chance to sit down with Asia and hear about her work setting up solar-powered computer labs in rural Africa.

We also got to meet two of the amazing high school seniors who are part of MEET, a program that teaches technology and business skills to Israeli and Palestinian youths. Program alums Amin Manna and Yuval Yogev have come up with their own mobile app aimed at promoting impromptu events via smartphone.

Also up on our site are stories on several of the products that were to have demoed either onstage or in the App Showcase at Dive Into Mobile.

• Desti
• Panacast
• Zappar
• Snapchat
• Grubhub

While those products have now launched, we have our eye out for other incredible demos to share onstage in April.

The company, which is just two-and-a-half-years old but already has sold more than five million phones and employs 1,700 people, has disrupted the Chinese home handset market by making and selling top-of-the-line smartphones direct to consumers for a fraction of the expected price.

Today, Xiaomi launched its second major phone, known as the Xiaomi Phone 2, or the Mi-2. A run of 50,000 units sold out in two minutes and 51 seconds.

While companies might shy away from literally naming one of their phones a “me too,” the new Xiaomi phone has much in common with Apple’s iPhone 5, including the size and shape of the handset, the way application icons tile on the screen in Xiaomi’s modified version of the Android Jelly Bean OS, and the look and feel of the built-in camera application.

But Lin was quick to pull his iPhone 5 out and show that the (slightly larger) Mi-2 has a better display — 720 by 1280 with a pixel density of 342 pixels per inch.

Sitting on a red couch (instead of our signature D conference red chairs) at the hotel to which we had evacuated for Hurricane Sandy, Lin told me about his company’s plans for the Mi-2 launch as well as its long-term strategy.

As we spoke on Monday, Lin seemed remarkably unstressed on the eve of his company’s big launch. That’s because Xiaomi phones are offered only online and typically sell out in a matter of minutes to fans who apparently follow the company’s progress like they would a rock band.

In fact, last week, a block of 300,000 of the older Mi-1s model — that is, a phone that everyone knew was a week away from being outdated — sold out in only four minutes and 15 seconds.

Xiaomi released just 50,000 phones for order today and said it would have 250,000 more available in mid-November.

To date, Xiaomi has sold 3.5 million Mi-1 units and 1.8 million of the between-upgrades Mi-1s. That’s only a single-digit percentage of the Chinese smartphone market, where as many as 200 million smartphones are expected to be sold this year.

The base model for the Mi-2 costs just $230. Lin said Xiaomi spends “almost that price” to manufacture the phone, but that the company doesn’t mind its low margins because it is pursuing a strategy similar to Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Xiaomi doesn’t spend any money on retail and barely any on marketing. Instead, the company corresponds with fans on Weibo and in forums, asking for their product feedback and sometimes incorporating it.

Xiaomi creates its own hardware and its own modified-Android software, and expects revenue to flow in from e-commerce in the future.

“As we see huge adoption of smartphones, we see e-commerce getting more mature, with logistics and payment systems,” Lin said. “As we get more adoption of software, the money will come after.”

E-commerce is the specialty of Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun, who founded Joyo.com, which is now Amazon.cn. Meanwhile, Lin is the software guy, having most recently led Android development in China as an engineering director of Google. Others from the seven-member Xiaomi founding team include a Motorola hardware expert and a Microsoft development director.

That unified approach has a familiar precedent in Apple, though Lin noted that Xiaomi is not yet at the point where it custom-designs its own chips.

As for what Xiaomi will do next, Lin said that the company is working to expand internationally and sees Taiwan and Hong Kong as its most likely targets, given their similarity to China. He also acknowledged rumors about Xiaomi building a set-top box, saying that kind of personal computing device might be a natural extension.

But for now, Xiaomi’s approach is really quite simple, Lin said. “The strategy is to build top-end handsets. That’s what we’re good at.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121030/as-xiaomi-sells-out-of-new-flagship-phone-bin-lin-talks-about-the-disruptive-chinese-start-ups-approach-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121024/countdown-to-dive-into-mobile-plus-some-live-streaming-for-those-who-cant-make-it-irl/ http://allthingsd.com/20121024/countdown-to-dive-into-mobile-plus-some-live-streaming-for-those-who-cant-make-it-irl/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:00:02 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=263114 D: Dive Into Mobile kicks off in less than one week, and we at team #dmobile (hashtag alert!) are ready to go.

Mobile leaders from Google, Facebook, Nokia, Verizon Wireless, Pandora, Mozilla, WhatsApp, Telefonica and more are set to join us in conversation onstage on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City.

We’ve lined up great new product demos, an interactive app showcase, and a series of short talks by end users from around the world whose lives have been significantly changed by mobile.

Ina Fried jetted to New York yesterday to greet the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 8, and I’m joining her soon, along with Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and most of the ATD team. We’ll see many of you at the conference in person (we have just a handful of tickets left available here), and invite the rest to join us for a selection of livestreamed sessions.

As with all other D: All Things Digital conferences, Dive Into Mobile won’t be livestreamed in its entirety. But we did pick some winners for you to watch from afar.

Here’s the lineup:

• Monday, Oct. 29 at 5:20 pm ET: Andy Rubin, Google
• Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 8:35 am ET: Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter, and
  Cheryl Mills, U.S. State Department
• Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 9:35 am ET: Mike Schroepfer, Facebook
• Tuesday, October 30 at 10:45am ET: Bin Lin, Xiaomi

Note: All times are approximate and subject to change. Due to the nature of a live conference, there may be delays or changes in the schedule.

Some guidance on why we picked these particular talks, and why you won’t want to miss them:

Rubin will be heading to Dive Into Mobile directly from Google’s major Android product launch earlier that day.

Mills and Stanton will be having a rare public meeting-of-the-minds between a major social media player and government.

Facebook is all about mobile these days, especially now that the Wall Street folks have picked up on how important it is, and its engineering leader Schroepfer (a.k.a. “Shrep”) will address how the company is sprinting to keep pace.

And Lin is just days away from the release of the highly anticipated Xiaomi Phone 2, the direct-to-consumer top-of-the-line Android phone that is dramatically shaking up the Chinese market and has implications for the rest of the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121024/countdown-to-dive-into-mobile-plus-some-live-streaming-for-those-who-cant-make-it-irl/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120917/dive-into-mobile-gets-even-more-global-with-xiaomis-lin-bin-nq-mobiles-omar-khan-and-ushahidis-juliana-rotich/ http://allthingsd.com/20120917/dive-into-mobile-gets-even-more-global-with-xiaomis-lin-bin-nq-mobiles-omar-khan-and-ushahidis-juliana-rotich/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:30:07 +0000 Liz Gannes and Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=250477 The upcoming D: Dive Into Mobile, on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City, aims to tell the story of how cellphones are changing lives around the world, and our three latest speakers will be a key part of that effort.

Bin Lin is the co-founder and president of the upstart Xiaomi smartphone maker, which in the last year has become a massive phenomenon in China for selling Android-based phones online — straight to consumers — with top-of-the-line components for a price that’s less than half of an iPhone. Lin will be visiting us right after the launch of his company’s second device, the Xiaomi Phone 2, which has specs to drool at, but a price of only $310.

Lin co-founded Xiaomi in 2010 after leading Android development in China as an engineering director at Google. Before that, he was at Microsoft for 11 years, in Beijing and Redmond.

Omar Khan is the co-CEO of Chinese mobile security company NQ Mobile.

Khan is also a familiar name to many who follow the smartphone scene, having held a top strategy post for several years at Samsung, before leaving that post to head up mobile efforts at Citibank. Prior to joining Samsung in 2008, Khan had served as a vice president at Motorola. So, suffice it to say that he knows the mobile landscape well.

Juliana Rotich co-founded Ushahidi in 2008 as a citizen journalism platform map of reports of post-election violence in Kenya. Since then, the nonprofit has developed open-source information collection, visualization and mapping software that continues to be relevant as new crises, disasters and activism happen all over the world.

Based in Nairobi, Rotich serves as executive director of Ushahidi. She has a degree in information technology from the University of Missouri, and previously worked in the telecommunications and data warehousing industry.

The best part is that you can still attend the conference in person, if you register soon.

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