It has been a month since Facebook released Home, the company’s take on a socialized operating system built atop Android. And at a press event this week, Facebook talked about how the app has done in its first weeks on the market.

The verdict thus far? Not exactly a home run.

Consider this: Home’s project leads Cory Ondrejka and Adam Mosseri said the app was nearing a million downloads as of this week.

Sound impressive? Look at it this way: One million downloads of Facebook Home is less than .1 percent of Facebook’s entire monthly active user base, now topping 1.1 billion people every month. And as the company disclosed in its last earnings call, more than 750 million of those people visit Facebook regularly via mobile device.

Put simply, one million downloads is a drop in the social ocean.

Not that that matters to Facebook, which insists that it’s not that concerned with low numbers, even if some think they should be. “[The number of downloads is] not really important to us,” Mosseri told reporters. “What’s important to us is if people are liking the apps a lot.”

Update 3:15 p.m. PT, with further release context: User satisfaction, in this case, is the thrust of Facebook’s rollout strategy for Home, according to the company. Though Home is available for download globally, right now only five Android devices are capable of installing the software — a small amount compared to the hundreds of available Android handsets on the market. Facebook frames this as intentional; release slowly to select devices, and you can listen and fine-tune the product in future software updates, ultimately making the users happy. (That’s the goal, at least.)

While it might be unusual for Facebook to dismiss download numbers — particularly in the long term — it’s fair for the company to put user experience and uptake first. The problem is that Facebook didn’t break out how many of those downloads actually resulted in installs and prolonged use of the application. Downloads, after all, do not imply continued or even occasional usage. And as many negative Google Play reviews point out, there’s nothing keeping an unsatisfied user from immediately deleting Home shortly after installation.

Facebook did provide some encouraging data: Those who have downloaded the software spend 25 percent more time on Facebook as a whole, and users’ favorite features, they said, were Chat Heads and Cover Feed.

But the latter point is probably moot, considering that Chat Heads and Cover Feed are pretty much the key features of the software. And downloads and even engagement across Facebook as a whole don’t give us a clear picture of how many people are actually using and enjoying Home.

In fact, it’s exactly like Amazon’s continued unwillingness to disclose its actual Kindle sales numbers, or Google’s history of doling out cloudy Google Plus stats. It’s hard to take a new feature seriously if any company is unwilling to provide meaningful metrics on engagement and usage of the product in question.

But, as we’ve argued before, it doesn’t really matter how many folks inside the U.S. are going for Home, because it’s more important as an international play, a way to invade the phones of the myriad people whose primary computing devices are palm-sized. But project lead Mosseri wouldn’t give me the breakdown of international versus domestic downloads.

So, it’s fine that Facebook is listening to user feedback and is willing to improve the product on a regular monthly basis. But until Facebook drills down on just how many folks are actively using and enjoying the product, it’s probably best to postpone any victory lap.

Pheed wants to take that a step further. On Thursday, the company launched an update to its iOS application that allows Pheed users to watch streaming pay-per-view broadcasts from other Pheed users directly from their mobile devices.

Pretty straightforward: A user wants to do a live broadcast of some material. Say they’ve got a song to perform, or a discussion to hold, what have you. They set up the event and decide what they want to charge — if anything — for other Pheed users to view the live broadcast. The in-app payment system accepts the cost of admission and sends it to the user’s bank account, and viewers are sent a reminder before the broadcast goes live.

Smart. It’s obviously something that could appeal to the masses of musicians and artists out there who are promoting themselves via social and apps — think of the Lady Gagas, the Snoop Doggs and others who are creating their own mobile apps to promote their albums and content — while giving random small-timers the ability to promote their material as well.

After all, it may be easy for Snoop to get his spliff-happy app downloaded thousands of times to push his new album, but the starving artist in L.A. may have a tougher time. Live performance could be a novel way to garner an audience. (I think of early YouTube stars who came from being nobodies to hosting their own TV shows.)

Unlike some other more high-profile social video apps, Pheed is bootstrapped, fairly small and doesn’t bankroll stars to join the service. “We’ve never paid anyone to join, we never gave out equity and we’re not that rich,” Pheed co-founder O.D. Kobo said in an interview. “We really tried to do it the old-school way by just showing off the product before we launched.”

It seems like the service is already doing fairly well. Pheed won’t give me hard numbers quite yet, but the app grew by 1.2 million users in February, and also gained traction from the missteps of some competitors. “We benefited from the whole Instagram mess,” Kobo said, referring to the time when the photo-sharing service came under fire last winter after announcing its intent to eventually monetize user photos in a vague way. “Lots of photographers came onboard back then, and we gained something like 5,000 to 10,000 users per day.”

I’m curious to see how a pay-per-view option could help bolster the service, if at all. I’d imagine it could introduce some headaches to artists if technical problems arise and users want refunds for a faulty broadcast; customer service is never an easy task, and I’d guess even less so for a small-time creative trying to deal with an angry customer via mobile app.

Still, targeting the creative class niche is clever, especially when a large part of the service already skews somewhat young, in the 18-to-mid-20s range — the crowd companies like Facebook desperately want to keep inside their services and other startups are still trying to court.

The update should be live in Apple’s App Store today.

But on the heels of runaway hits like Temple Run 2 and Subway Surfers, the company is off to the races, hoping to give those single-player phenomena a multiplayer-focused run for their money.

(Pardon the barrage of running puns.)

The company’s latest game is Running With Friends, a smart twist on the popular endless-runner genre. As with other games, you swipe on the touchscreen to avoid obstacles, collect powerups and move your character around the screen: Left and right to change into one of three “lanes,” up to jump and down to slide.

The twist comes in the form of some familiar multiplayer features that Zynga has built around this tried-and-true formula. This is asynchronous multiplayer, meaning you can challenge someone to a race without needing to play at the same time as your opponent to compete (as is the case in other “With Friends” titles).

Developed in partnership with Twisted Metal and God of War creators Eat Sleep Play, the game just looks good — the bright Subway Surfers-esque 3-D graphics are streets ahead of the other titles in Zynga’s existing lineup.

Factoring in a bit of luck from a pregame slot-machine spin, Running With Friends awards points to players based on how far they can run and how many bonus items they pick up along the way. And if one of your opponents has run the same obstacles as you already, the game remembers how they moved, sort of like the “ghost” mode in Mario Kart.

That means you might see your friends on the track and can shove them out of the way with a swipe — which, let’s be honest, is pretty fun.

The game is iOS-only to start (so, available on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), but Zynga’s mobile SVP Travis Boatman told AllThingsD that the company will likely do what it has done with previous games like Zynga Poker and Words With Friends: See how the game does, improve it and then roll it out to other platforms, one at a time.

Courtesy 2K Games

When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known.

And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol.

Although the WWI dogfighting game — scheduled to launch on May 9 — will be iOS-only, Meier acknowledged that “there’s certainly a logic into looking into other platforms and seeing what the possibilities are.” He caught up with AllThingsD on the phone recently to talk about how he sees the changing landscape of games.

CC BY-SA 2.0 Antonio Fucito

Sid Meier: The very early console games were very simple, twitchy hand-eye coordination games. And then, over time, strategy became okay to do on console. I think we’re going to go through a similar evolution with mobile, where initially the games are pretty casual and simple, but that’s not because of any restrictions in the platform or anything, it’s just that the market is gonna evolve and the audience is gonna evolve. There’s definitely a role for more strategy-oriented games on mobile.

And do you think that’ll go mainstream, or will that be a niche audience?

I think [strategy] is probably not going to be the predominant genre on mobile, but it will grow in the same way it has grown in the PC market and the console market. In a lot of ways, it’s more suitable to mobile than console because, on mobile, you could potentially be distracted, so you want a game that’s played at the player’s pace, and not at a pace that’s driven by the game itself — something you can start and stop, and put away for a while.

What about multiplayer? Depending on whom you ask, the future of multiplayer games could be asynchronous and turn-based, or all about playing live, either in the same room or on different devices anywhere in the world. Do you have a dog in the fight?

Since our game is turn-based, we chose to support two of those modes. One is the asynchronous mode, where you can have 10 games going on at the same time with 10 different people. The other mode, which we’re calling “hot-pad” mode, is where you’re playing on the same machine with the same player. Real-time multiplayer is suited to another type of game. I’m playing a lot of World of Tanks right now, and that works really well as a real-time multiplayer game. It might not work so well on mobile, where you might get a phone call, or maybe you’re traveling and you can’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to hang around until the end of the game.

What did you learn from the experience of heading up such a small team on Ace Patrol? Do you think you will do the same thing in mobile again?

I’ve enjoyed the small-team aspect — fewer meetings, and more time to actually work on the game. And I’ve learned really to kind of appreciate some of the unique features of the mobile platform: The touchscreen, the gestures, the swiping, the pinching. That tactile interaction between the player and the game really connects you more closely with what’s happening on the screen. We’re very impressed with just the raw horsepower of the platform. For a flight game, it’s fun to have a 3-D world to fly through … we actually weren’t sure whether we could do that when we started. Also, [we've learned] how many of our core strategy game elements that we’ve used on other platforms seem to work fairly well on iOS.

And that’s interesting because not all games are as mobile-friendly as others. Will Firaxis be doing more with turn-based games on mobile?

I think it works very well, yes. There are certainly some real-time games that work just fine. But the turn-based games that we’ve done, whether it’s Haunted Hollow or Ace Patrol or XCOM, later this summer, just all seem to be a natural fit for the mobile platforms. Is it part of our future? I think the answer is pretty assuredly yes. But we’re not giving up on PCs. They’re our bread and butter, and the new consoles are very interesting, but we definitely see mobile as a significant part of our future going forward.

What do you think about what Microsoft is doing with Windows? Obviously, they have the legacy title for being the home of PC gaming, and yet, in some ways, they’re making their main OS a lot more like a mobile operating system.

That’s a very interesting development. The PC market is splitting into tablet PCs and the traditional desktop PCs. These games that we’re doing cross over really nicely into tablet PCs or any kind of mobile format. That’s another reason why we’re looking really seriously at this market. I’m not sure what’s happening in the PC market, whether it’s going to go toward tablet or continue to be really strong in desktop. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Dubbed “Silvermont,” the new design sets its sights squarely on devices like smartphones and tablets, which obviously have limitations on battery life and require system-on-a-chip specifications made with energy efficiency in mind.

The design incorporates Intel’s “tri-gate” 3-D transistor technology first introduced in 2011, which essentially lets the company create smaller, faster processors which can perform at a lower voltage with less power leakage. Intel claims an improvement of around five times lower power consumption over its current Atom core mobile chips, with three times more peak performance.

“We have the ability to monitor what the power delivery characteristics of the platform are,” said Belli Kuttanna, Intel fellow and chief architect, in a briefing with reporters and analysts. From there, “we can change the limits to where the CPU cores are performing and dynamically adjust the power budgets.” In other words, it’ll help decrease battery-life consumption.

The update is yet another move in Intel’s move toward mobile, a space the company has sorely lacked. Historically, Intel’s core strength (so to speak) has been building beefy, high-power processors for desktop computers — chips that have no business in mobile devices.

But as the industry has shifted to mobile over the past few years, competitors like ARM Holdings and Nvidia — which specialize in designing and licensing low-power architecture designs for systems-on-a-chip — have gained solid ground in the chip space, leaving Intel struggling to catch up.

Intel has continually promised to deliver better mobile results soon. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the company announced that it will debut new chips aimed at the high and low ends of the Android market.

“We’ve done a lot of work on Android over the past few years,” Dadi Perlmutter, Intel executive VP and chief product officer, said at the briefing. “We’ve shipped 12 different phones to market.”

And as Mike Bell, the head of Intel’s mobile chip efforts said in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile last month, Intel is getting the hang of building chips for mobile, and claimed that its chips match and in some cases exceed ARM-based chips in certain performance and power-consumption comparisons.

Mobile is clearly a growing priority for Intel, especially as sales of personal computers, a market it dominates, have crashed to historically low levels. The decline has started to hit Intel where it counts: In its quarterly results, which last month showed a year-on-year decline of 25 percent.

Intel’s incoming CEO Brian Krzanich — tapped by its board of directors last week to succeed Paul Otellini, who is retiring — is said to have won the job in a joint pitch with incoming president Renée James that includes using Intel’s world-leading manufacturing capabilities to push chips into emerging product categories like wearable devices.

Intel plans to introduce the new Silvermont technology later this year. Shares of Intel were trading down a penny at $23.95 midday.

As has become customary for such events, Apple is prepping a giveaway for whoever downloads the milestone app — in this case, a $10,000 gift card to the App Store. The next 50 customers will get a $500 App Store gift card.

Cheapskates (and Android users) can even enter without downloading an app by going here.

Apps, meanwhile, have become big business for Apple and Google, generating billions in revenue. Software sales, meanwhile, have helped transform iTunes from a near-break-even business to a significant profit generator.

Apple has also paid out more than $9 billion to app developers, up from more than $7 billion as of January.

And app downloads continue at a torrid pace, with Apple having reported in October 2012 that it had just crossed 35 billion downloads.

The new details about the decision to name Krzanich as the successor to retiring CEO Paul Otellini emerged in a brief report by CNBC’s Jon Fortt (video below) after he talked with Chairman Andy Bryant, who led the board’s search.

The joint pitch initially threw the board for a bit of a loop if only because it’s a highly unusual — and, one would presume, risky — move, in so delicate a matter as CEO succession at one of the world’s most influential tech companies. While the conclusion, at least as far as Krzanich goes, certainly appears to have been a predictable one — every Intel CEO since Andy Grove has been COO first — outsiders were still in the running until the very end.

Also a key selling point, though there are as yet no particulars about this, was Krzanich and James’ vision for pursuing the mobile market where Intel is as yet not participating significantly. Expect more noise on that subject once the pair starts their new jobs after May 16.

Not surprisingly, those in the mobile ad business are quite bullish. At our recent D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Google’s Jason Spero and Millennial Media’s Mollie Spilman made the case for why the small screen is a real and present opportunity.

Here’s the full video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130502/googles-jason-spero-and-millennials-mollie-spilman-talk-dollars-at-dive-into-mobile-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130502/intel-capital-leads-9-million-round-in-mobile-app-firm-feedhenry/ http://allthingsd.com/20130502/intel-capital-leads-9-million-round-in-mobile-app-firm-feedhenry/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 08:22:56 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=317677 Intel Capital has led a $9 million investment round in FeedHenry, a provider of cloud-based mobile applications aimed at the enterprise, with offices in Carriganore, Ireland, and Burlington, Mass.

Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130502/intel-capital-leads-9-million-round-in-mobile-app-firm-feedhenry/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130501/growth-mobile-and-more-facebooks-first-quarter-earnings-liveblog/ http://allthingsd.com/20130501/growth-mobile-and-more-facebooks-first-quarter-earnings-liveblog/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 20:57:53 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=317427 Well, the numbers are in. Facebook made its revenue estimates this quarter, coming in at $1.458 billion, though missed its profits by a penny at earnings per share of 12 cents.

The real story here is mobile (as always). The company’s mobile ad revenue accounted for 30 percent of the overall ad biz — a whopping jump from the 23 percent of mobile ad revenue raked in last quarter.

A good thing for the social giant, considering the company’s entire user base is slowly trickling over to accessing the site via mobile device. Monthly active users viewing the site on mobile devices came in at 751 million, a 54 percent jump year over year.

Scary at first, perhaps, for the Web industry as a whole, with all the companies in the Valley scrambling to make the move to mobile effectively. Now, optimistic as ever, Facebook continues to position it as an opportunity, not a liability.

Check out my notes from the company’s quarterly conference call earlier on Wednesday, starring CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman.

———————
1:55 pm PT: Gotta love the flute music. Holding patiently.

2:00 pm: About to start!

2:02 pm: Buncha standard legalese. Please hold for actual substance.

2:03 pm: First up, Mr. Zuckerberg.

2:04 pm: Zuck says he’s surprised how the growth keeps going even though there’s more than a billion people using the service.

Funny, considering the growth rate is slowing overall.

2:04 pm: FLASH — Zuck is super stoked on Facebook Home, the company’s recent mobile software release.

It’s great! Gonna be huge! Alas, we just released it and only a few phones can use it. So please hold for more awesomeness.

2:06 pm: Next up, Instagram. Zuckerberg also loving how great CEO Kevin Systrom is doing with the platform. 100 million users. Fantastic!

2:07 pm: Zuckerberg playing up how important Facebook Platform is to the company. Especially mobile apps from third parties.

“I think it’s clear now that we can create a lot of value for devs by providing identity,” he said. “We’re starting to see real revenue from mobile app installs.”

2:08 pm: Platform emphasis makes sense. Facebook really needs great content flowing through the news feed to keep you coming back and looking at it. That means cool-looking apps and stuff.

2:10 pm: Again, big emphasis on Home, Graph Search and the like as “long-term investments.”

In other words — THE MONEY FROM THESE PRODUCTS WILL COME LATER, Y’ALL.

2:11 pm: Time to Lean In! COO Sheryl Sandberg is on the call.

2:11 pm: Sandberg reiterating how awesome the shift to mobile is. We check our phones so often, that’s perfect for mobile ads!

Mobile ads biz doing great internationally — “particularly in Asia.”

2:12 pm: Sandberg, like Zuckerberg, is pushing the company’s mobile app install ads product. Basically a paid way to stick your app inside the mobile news feed. Click on it, and it’ll send you to the Google or Apple app store and have you download the app.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard anecdotally that those ads do indeed drive significant downloads. Good ad product, it seems.

2:13 pm: Sandberg talking about the Atlas acquisition, which closed last week.

Big deal for ad measurement success. Basically it’ll be another way to show the ad folks that yes, your Facebook ads are worth it and no, don’t measure by clicks like you’re used to with your stuffy old Google ads!

2:15 pm: Sandberg, in a nutshell: FORGET CLICKS. We got way better ways to measure ad success.

2:18 pm: Sandberg feeling great on Q1, and still pushing the fact that it’s early days in the ads biz for Facebook. Keep on keepin’ on.

2:19 pm: Here comes CFO Ebersman.

2:19 pm: Mobile still huge in terms of who’s accessing the site. As we know.

2:20 pm: Crazy. Mobile-only users visiting Facebook on a monthly basis at 189 million users.

2:21 pm: Payments and fees revs were up year on year. Games in particular were up 12 percent.

Huh. Q1 saw a record number of people playing games on Facebook.

2:23 pm: Warning: Expenses are gonna swell. But we’ve been saying that for a while. Infrastructure, engineers, new campuses, new products — all of that costs money.

2:24 pm: So take note of that last thing Ebersman said.

Q1 had a record number of people playing games on Facebook, while Zynga’s contribution to that dropped by 37 percent. Other game developers are up 60 percent.

That’s a big deal. Larger diversification of the games and payments ecosystem.

2:29 pm: Growth and engagement geographically is up internationally, Ebersman says.

Mobile obviously responsible for that.

2:30 pm: A question about different screen form-factors.

2:32 pm: Zuckerberg: Sure, there will be more screens. Whether it be desktops, or phones, or “glasses … whatever the products are.”

“The big question for us is which platforms do we see growing the quickest?”

2:32 pm: “Ads during the first six or seven years of Facebook were just in the right-hand column.”

“Whatever the form-factors going forward…” we’ll get it right. –Zuck

2:35 pm: A question on Atlas: “As people are looking more holistically at all the ad spend they’re doing, they’re looking at everything leading up to that purchase — not just the last click.” –Sandberg

2:36 pm: So again, the Atlas buy is about more measurement than just the last click before buying a product. Offline influence, etc.

2:36 pm: Sandberg “increasingly encouraged” by SMBs around the world in their willingness to take up Facebook’s ad biz.

Hope so! That’s not really where the focus is right now, though.

2:38 pm: Sandberg really pushing the fact that tons of SMBs have Facebook Pages.

Still doesn’t help the little guys without massive followings break through to the news feed, though. We’ll see.

2:40 pm: Ooh, a video ads question!

Hope they don’t dodge it.

2:40 pm: Sandberg says video is a “really exciting area” — and advertisers can use Facebook’s existing embeddable video product in their ads.

Continuing to explore the area, Sandberg says, but nothing to announce today.

Shucks.

2:41 pm: Ah, a question about Instagram and monetization.

When you gonna slap ads on our pics, Sheryl?

2:41 pm: Zuck on Instagram: “They’re really doing well and growing quickly.”

Focus should be on community building. He’s optimistic on biz opportunity, but they aren’t slapping ads on anything just yet.

“They’re growing a lot faster now and were faster to get to 100 million than Facebook even was,” Zuckerberg says.

2:43 pm: Boring question, boring response.

Mobile mobile mobile.

2:44 pm: Two questions: Platform and Graph Search.

Zuckerberg is super happy with gaming ecosystem and how it’s doing, despite “Zynga,” whose growth ain’t great.

Ouch!

2:45 pm: Poor Zynga can’t catch a break.

2:45 pm: Zuck on platform (in my words): Please, dear god, developers. Give us your apps. Distribute them here.

2:46 pm: As far as Graph Search goes, repeat after me. Early. Days.

2:46 pm: “The launch wasn’t this point where we expected a ton of people to start using it. … real roll-out will start pretty soon.” –Zuckerberg on Graph Search

2:47 pm: Fun question from Mark Mahaney: Do the kids still like Facebook? I hear it’s not hip anymore.

2:47 pm: Ebersman: Facebook is awesome for everyone, regardless of age! And yes, kids still like Facebook.

Telling: Ebersman really emphasized Instagram’s influence with the young crowd.

2:49 pm: Funny. I asked my 12-year-old neighbor the other day which apps she used — she told me Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. (No Facebook!)

2:50 pm: Lotsa mobile app install ad buyers are new advertisers to Facebook.

Makes sense why Zuckerberg keeps making his call to arms for developers.

2:55 pm: “Owning our own data centers removes another party from the mix.”

Also lets them “build them exactly how we want them to look.” Best for efficiency, Ebersman said.

This in light of a recent announcement that Facebook would be building another data center in Iowa.

2:56 pm: Hmm. Sandberg advocates promoted Pages product to SMBs rather than other larger ad spend products.

Sort of a “no duh.” But I’m still not convinced the little guys are getting good ROI there.

3:00 pm: So, 3 percent of the payments revenue bump came from user-promoted posts and, to a lesser extent, Facebook’s Gifts product.

Hmm.

3:01 pm: And that’s a wrap, folks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130501/growth-mobile-and-more-facebooks-first-quarter-earnings-liveblog/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130501/shares-slouch-as-facebook-barely-makes-its-q1-numbers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130501/shares-slouch-as-facebook-barely-makes-its-q1-numbers/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 20:17:10 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=317397 First quick take on Facebook’s numbers, which hit the wire on Wednesday.

And it’s a slight miss on profits while coming in just above estimates on revenue: Profit of 12 cents per share on revenue of $1.458 billion. The Street’s consensus was 13 cents on revenue of $1.44 billion.

Canned quote from the CEO, ahoy. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the first few months of the year,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “We have seen strong growth and engagement across our community and launched several exciting products.”

On to mobile ad revenue growth. Unless you’ve been asleep for the past two years, you know the world is shifting from desktop to mobile. So Facebook’s mobile ad revenue numbers are ones to watch.

Facebook’s mobile ad sales accounted for 30 percent of overall ad sales, compared to the fourth quarter of last year where it accounted for 23 percent of overall ad sales. Quite the jump — much larger than expected.

Also of note: Facebook’s monthly active and daily active user numbers. MAUs came in at 1.11 billion as of Q1 count, while DAUs were at 665 million. That’s compared to 1.06 billion and 618 million, respectively, at the end of Q4.

Just like we thought, mobile MAUs are still on the rise, coming in at 751 million, a massive 54 percent jump year over year.

Shares of Facebook were wavering up and down in afterhours at $27.15 at around 1:15 pm PT, down about .25 percent from close.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130501/shares-slouch-as-facebook-barely-makes-its-q1-numbers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130429/ibm-tackles-machine-to-machine-data-deluge/ http://allthingsd.com/20130429/ibm-tackles-machine-to-machine-data-deluge/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:45:06 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=316400 When you hear the word “message” in relation to the Internet, you probably think of a person sending a message to another person or perhaps a group of people. But the fact is that messages are increasingly being sent from one machine to another without a human being in the chain of communication.

Factory equipment is reporting operational data to some server somewhere. Utility stations report their operating conditions or send notifications of repairs that might be needed. Weather stations constantly report temperature and wind speed and so on. You get the idea. When you hear the phrase “Internet of Things,” this is part of what it means. But in this case it’s often referred to as “machine-to-machine” communications, or M2M for short.

The flow of all this messaging data is quickly turning into a deluge. Consider that there may be as many as 22 billion devices connected to the Internet by the end of the decade, and that they’ll be generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and it’s a pretty sure bet that big tech companies are going to throw a lot of computing power into new efforts to handle it all.

Today IBM announced a new appliance that’s intended to help companies sort through that deluge. It’s called MessageSight, and it’s an appliance that gets installed in a typical server rack. It takes advantage of a new industry standard technology called MQTT or Message Queuing Telemetry Transport.

MQTT is important because it’s a standard that everyone can work with, said Michael Riegel, an IBM VP. “It’s significant because buildings and traffic lights and mobile phones all have different protocols,” he said. “Having a common standard enables a whole lot of innovation.”

The biggest problem is sorting messages quickly, which the MessageSight can do. It has the capability to process 13 million messages every second, and can route them to the proper place. Once they’re sorted and collected, they can be analyzed for patterns. If you’re seeing a certain kind of equipment failing at a regular interval, you can order more preventative maintenance or track down a faulty component. IBM has long been making the case that this kind of analysis — “analytics” is one of Big Blues favorite words these days — can lead to important insights that can help pretty much any business operate more efficiently and save costs.

And the idea isn’t just about industrial gear but pretty much anything that can be measured. Health care data is always considered a target for this kind of measurement and analysis. The automotive industry is also getting hip to it, and indeed Ford took part in IBM’s announcement today. Some cars are basically turning into rolling sensor platforms, generating truckloads of wireless data.

As it happens, IBM isn’t the only one seeing a big opportunity around M2M communications. SAP, the German software giant, put out a survey today of 751 IT decision makers in six countries that concluded companies in China, Brazil, Germany and India appear to be the “most ready” to embrace the possibilities of M2M. (The value of that finding, however, appears to pivot on whether or not those surveyed actually knew what M2M stood for. Respondents in China and Germany scored highest, while more than half of those surveyed in the U.S. got it wrong, thinking it meant “mobile to mobile.”)

My conclusion: Get ready to hear a lot more about this in the next year or two.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130429/ibm-tackles-machine-to-machine-data-deluge/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130429/which-messaging-app-is-right-for-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20130429/which-messaging-app-is-right-for-you/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:00:11 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=316253 Smartphone messaging apps are all the rage these days.

But for some people they’re a mystery. Why would you use a messaging app when your phone’s SMS text messaging function is fine enough for photos and text, or if you use iMessage on the iPhone?

The point of these new smartphone messaging apps is to go beyond that, by letting you send different kinds of media, connect easily and cheaply with international friends, and even send pictures of yourself that will self-combust a few seconds after they’ve been opened. They also create new, mini social networks that companies hope make users stick around.

These apps, for the most part, use data to send the messages, so they won’t add to your tally if you have a monthly limit on SMS through your wireless carrier.

This week, I channeled my inner teenager and dove into a handful of different messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Snapchat and a new one called Burn Note. I see some of the benefit to using these apps. Some features are useful, like being able to loop in friends who own various phones on the same messaging thread. Others are just fun, like the app that let me doodle on a Google search pic before sending it off to a friend.

But their usefulness depends a lot on whether your friends and family are using the same apps. Otherwise, the conversations in the apps stall, which happened to me. And it can be a little distracting, to say the least, to have messages flying through a second or third app on the phone.

Here’s a guide to help you evaluate how they work before you commit to using one.

Adding Multimedia to Messages

One of the most popular message apps available is WhatsApp, which has been around since 2009, and runs on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows phones. It costs 99 cents to download, and WhatsApp has said that it plans to introduce a small annual fee to users in some countries.

WhatsApp is super simple in design, and yet it goes beyond regular old text messages with options to send — in addition to photos and videos — audio notes, contact cards and an active map image that pinpoints your location. It pulls in local business data, so I was able to get specific and message a friend my location at a Subway sandwich shop.

WhatsApp has a big international user base; two of my most active WhatsApp friends included a regular international traveler, who was in Vietnam at the time, and a friend from Canada.

WhatsApp worked fine for me, and I’ve continued to use it with at least one friend who regularly pings me through the app. My only gripe about the app was that the photos I took and sent through the app weren’t saved to my iPhone’s camera roll.

Another new app for multimedia is called MessageMe. MessageMe launched last month, and is available on iPhone and Android phones. Unlike WhatsApp, MessageMe is free to download. And MessageMe lets you doodle on the images you send. I sent an ailing co-worker a picture of chicken soup I found through Google search, and scribbled on it: “Feel better!”

MessageMe also allows you to send song excerpts directly through the app. From there, the recipient can buy the song from iTunes or Google Play.

Of the two, I used WhatsApp more, mostly because I had more friends using the service. But I prefer MessageMe’s design and features.

Making Your Messages Disappear

A growing trend in messaging is sending images and text that will vanish after the recipient has had the chance to view them — something that addresses some privacy concerns and raises other issues, like illicit-photo sharing among teen users.

A well-known app with this core feature is Snapchat. Free to download, it’s available on iOS and Android devices.

With Snapchat, you snap a picture or video from the app, and then determine the length of time the viewer can see it, from one to 10 seconds. You send it off, and shortly after the recipient opens the message, it disappears. If you want to get creative, you can also doodle or scribble text on the photo message. One friend sent me a Snapchat of his poker hand with the text “Not Winning.”

I just don’t understand why I’d use this on a regular basis, although I see the appeal for people leaving digital footprints they are worried about others seeing. Usually if I share a smartphone photo with friends, it’s because something made me think of them, or it’s a particularly cool image. And I’m okay with those people having that picture.

And, let’s say I did want to share a self-combusting pic: Snapchat users still have the ability to capture a “screen shot” of the image sent to them, if they’re quick enough.

A newer app that offers disappearing messages is Burn Note, which was spawned from an email service of the same name. These are text-only messages with a view time of up to 120 seconds. The messages first appear as black boxes. Pressing on your phone’s touchscreen will unveil the text within the boxes.

Burn Note lets you create a password for conversations as an additional layer to ensure privacy. There’s also a checkbox at the bottom of the app that’s meant to prevent messages from being copied, but I was still able to capture a screen shot of these messages.

The bottom line is, even if a messaging app promises to erase your messages for you, there are still ways in which they can be saved.

Payments and Group Messages

Remember GroupMe, the app that made group messaging easy and then was acquired by Skype (which was acquired by Microsoft) in 2011? This app is still around, and despite the fact that others have crowded into the same space, it has some new features that are worth checking out.

The main feature of GroupMe, which is free to use, is that friends with different devices can all be on the same thread. So, even if you have an iPhone, one friend has an Android device and another is using a feature phone, you’ll all get the messages. Whether GroupMe uses data service or SMS, however, depends partly on the kind of device you’re using.

Prior to doing research for this column, I hadn’t actively used GroupMe for about a year, and I was surprised to find that I liked it better than before. This time, I started a group with three friends to organize upcoming weekend plans. It worked well for us, except for one friend who said that the deluge of messages used up all of the memory allowed for texts on her flip phone.

GroupMe now lets you create a tab among friends — let’s say you’re out to dinner, and someone comes up short — and charge everyone’s credit cards from the app, provided that they’ve attached their payment information to the app.

This isn’t a new concept. An app called Venmo, to name just one, allows shared bill payments via text message. But it’s new to GroupMe. I created a bill on the app and sent it to my friends, but I’d have to wait for two or more people to “split in” before I could collect from them.

GroupMe also has a new feature for photos, provided you’re using the GroupMe app and you’re not on a feature phone. If you and your friends share a series of photos during your group conversation, you can conveniently swipe to the left to see all of the pictures arranged in a gallery on the side, instead of swiping up through the conversation to find that one shared photo you liked.

A lot of these messaging apps are stepping on one another with feature sets: WhatsApp offers group messaging as well, and the creator of MessageMe says the company plans to introduce bill-splitting to the app.

So, is it worth it to use another messaging app aside from your phone’s built-in capabilities? It ultimately depends on how valuable the extra features are to you — and whether the people in your work or social life are using them, too.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that both MessageMe and WhatsApp have indicated they will introduce bill-splitting to their apps. While MessageMe plans to do so, WhatsApp’s co-founder has said the company believes mobile payments to be a possible area for monetization in the future.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130429/which-messaging-app-is-right-for-you/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130426/what-if-a-computer-could-be-a-teacher/ http://allthingsd.com/20130426/what-if-a-computer-could-be-a-teacher/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:00:45 +0000 Steve Wozniak http://allthingsd.com/?p=315731

Blackboard image copyright Picsfive

In December, I made some forecasts for 2013 — many of them looking at the future of collaboration solutions and the implications for enterprises. After a recent fireside chat I took part in at Avaya Evolutions in New York City, it seems to me that the future of video and mobile collaboration has arrived.

Videoconferencing has truly become a part of our daily lives. Technologies such as Apple’s FaceTime or Google Hangouts are easy to set up and use, and are affordable at the consumer level — so much so that video calling is now part of the daily norm for a rapidly growing number of people. It’s this kind of simplicity that explains how and why video has found its way not only into everyday life but also areas like business and education.

Cost and cumbersome requirements are no longer barriers. Today, it seems as if every company I talk to already has, or is starting to, use videoconferencing — making the question not if, but what, video solution a company will implement. When making that choice, simplicity is and will continue to be the key for those companies.

Organizations are looking to implement solutions that are two things: Intuitive and obvious. Which is why, looking back to the fireside chat, I appreciate systems like the one from Avaya that can be launched with a single click from any device with a Web browser, or by simply dragging and dropping participants into a conference. Ease of use is paramount. Location has become irrelevant. Now we can include people on a discussion via their smartphones with minimal difficulty. That is the difference.

Of course there are still challenges, but ultimately the technology is finally here, and bridging numerous gaps in the collaboration needs for enterprises.

What’s still missing?

All too often, technology does not cater to the everyday user. Owner’s manuals are too complex; my guess is that most people simply do not use them. The result is that people hardly know how to use their own technology.

I bought a garage door recently. The manuals were difficult to follow, so I finally went online and found a nice video that taught me how to program it. Things like this show how video instruction can be extremely helpful and a great supplement to traditional methods.

Technology for the masses, and the classes

People need better education, and technology should help with that. This is an absolute passion of mine, and one that I have paid close attention to for many years. I always believed computers were going to be able to do great things for learning — and they have, but there’s more to come and still farther to go.

Today, schools with BYOD programs or solutions for providing devices to students are encouraging collaboration with students, teachers, and even professionals — right in the classroom. It’s a real-time, dynamic educational environment, enabled by technology. This instant exchange and feedback model is much more invigorating and conducive to true education and understanding of the world. What a change from the traditional, deskbound, blanket curriculum that forces every student into the same mold.

I have always also wondered: What if a computer could be a teacher? The ability to have one-on-one interaction with dynamically aware computers could completely revolutionize the way we learn. We may not be there yet. Computers still can’t actively engage and recognize emotions and facial expressions, which would be key. However, collaborative and video technologies in the classroom are allowing students to receive individualized attention and learn at their own pace while being actually engaged.

In the modern mobile world, dreams can quickly become realities, due to our ability to instantly connect with other people and their ideas. That spontaneity is due to the availability and growth of collaboration technologies in everyday life, in the classroom and in the workplace. That is where the future of video and mobile collaboration has arrived.

Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Jobs in 1976. After leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak was involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities in schools and stressing hands-on learning and encouraging creativity for students. Making significant investments of both his time and resources in education, he “adopted” the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. Wozniak currently serves as chief scientist for Fusion-io.

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