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Waze and Facebook partnered in October 2012 when Waze released its updated version that allows users to share their drive with their Facebook friends.
This would be Facebook's third acquisition in Israel. It bought Snaptu in 2011 for $70 million and Face.com in 2012 for $60 million.
In the last year, Waze tripled its user base to 45 million and in March alone, 1.5 million users downloaded the free mobile navigation app, Calcalist said.
If you walk into the lobby of the data center Facebook operates in the high desert in Prineville, Oregon, you’ll find a flatscreen display on the wall where you can check the pulse of this massive computing facility. The display tracks the efficiency of the operation, which spans 333,400-square feet and tens of thousands of computer servers. Facebook built this data center in an effort to significantly reduce the power and dollars needed to serve up the world’s most popular social network, and — driven by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s deep-seeded belief in the free exchange of ideas — the company aims to push the computing world in a similar direction. The display — which shows much the same information Facebook engineers use to monitor the facility — is an advertisement for the Facebook way. Now, the company is taking this idea a step further. On Thursday, Facebook uncloaked a pair of web services that let anyone in the world track the efficiency of the Prineville data center and its sister facilityin Forest City, North Carolina. “We’re pulling back the curtain to share some of the same information that our data center technicians view every day,” Facebook’s Lyrica McTiernan said in a blog post. “We think it’s important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like.”
"According to Comscore, it had almost 100 million worldwide visitors in December. What's particularly impressive about that huge number is that Tumblr only has 145 employees."
Facebook's top executive in Europe, Joanna Shields, is leaving to spearhead the government's scheme to create a 'Silicon Valley' cluster of technology businesses in East London. Shields, who is vice-president and managing director of Facebook EMEA, is to become chief executive of the Tech City Investment Organisation in January. The social network, which is also looking for its first UK managing director, does not have a replacement for her lined up yet. At TCIO Shields will replace Eric van der Kleij, who did not renew his contract when it ended this summer. She will also take up a position with the government as ambassador for the Digital Industries. Shields joined Facebook in 2010, after a brief period working at Elisabeth Murdoch's digital media media venture ShineVu. She made her name at the social network Bebo, where she was president. She oversaw the sale of the business to AOL for $850m (£417m), later becoming president of its social media divison. Prior to her role at Bebo, Shields was managing director at Google, where she was responsible for building and managing the company's advertising and syndication network across Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Africa. The Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO) was set up by the government department of UK Trade and Investment in April last year, to support the growth of technology businesses in East London and make it the location of choice for tech and digital businesses. Businesses that have set up offices in Tech City include Amazon, Google, Intel and Cisco. Shields’ role will involve helping to promote the area, raising its profile internationally, and attracting investment.
UI design is about maintaining consistency while expanding possibilities. Looks like Facebook's latest iOS update does the opposite... Today facebook changed (once again) the gestures that everybody knew by now (given the high usage rate of the app), which will induce latency, friction and frustration from single handed, zero attention span millions of users. But maybe one can see some wisdom in such choices, that over time may be progressively forgotten. More frustrating are some feature reductions, namely in the photo area of the app that now longer allows posting pictures that are not in the camera roll. For instance, it is no longer possible to enrich a post with a photo picked in an existing album, including the photostream. This is a big restriction in terms of features and UI, with no understandable reason. Please voice your comments and reactions.
Beyond an impressive (and long awaited) speed and UX improvement, facebook's last iOS release raises the HTML5 vs.native apps debate to a whole new level
Two key members of the Facebook team that created the Hadoop query language Hive are launching their own big data startup called Qubole on Thursday. Co-founders Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma are taking that experience to provide a managed version of Hive that’s hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing infrastructure. The founders know from whence they speak when it comes to Hadoop and Hive, which is a framework and associated query language that sits above Hadoop and turns into something resembling a traditional SQL-based data warehouse. Both worked at Facebook from 2007 through 2011 and held senior positions on the data infrastructure team, where they played major roles in creating Hive and scaling Facebook’s Hadoop cluster to 25 petabytes of compressed data (it’s now up past 30 petabytes). Thusoo also spent a year as the project lead for Hive with the Apache Software Foundation.
Discover Facebook's extraordinary talent in tackling five classic startup challenges: Technology & User Experience, Business Model Exploration, Business & Ecosy...
UPDATE from SAI: "Note: This post has been edited from its original version, after we learned that the data we initially used was flawed. This chart has accurate data from comScore. Our initial chart showed time spent on Facebook had peaked. We can't determine that based on comScore's data because its previous data was unintentionally inflated due to existence of non-user requested URLs. Anyway, Facebook's engagement is definitely flat this year." Time spent on Facebook on desktop computers in the U.S. has peaked and now it's falling according to data from comScore
How impressive was Apple's most recent quarter? These two charts should help.
Take a look at Apple's revenue growth compared to the four most important companies in the tech space. Its growth blows them all away.
And Apple generates almost as much revenue as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook combined. Apple was at $39.2 billion, the other guys combined are at $40.4 billion.
Below that we have Apple's profit growth. Apple's profits were up 94%. Google's were up 60%. Everyone else was down on a year on a year over year basis.
And, Apple's profits of $11.6 billion are bigger than everyone else's profits combined, which came in at $8.33 billion.
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Two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and company turned the hardware world on its head when they launched the Open Compute Project, an effort to improve every aspect of the modern data center and share the results with the world at large. They began by “open sourcing” fresh designs for computer servers and power systems and cooling equipment. Then they did the same with hardware that stores massive amounts of digital data. Then they remade the racks that hold all these machines. And now it’s time for the networking gear.
The idea is to design a networking switch that anyone can load with their own operating system — just as you can load your own OS on a computer server. Typically, networking switches are sold by hardware giants such as Cisco and HP and Dell, and they ship with software specific to the company that designed them. But Facebook aims to separate the hardware from the software.
Mark Zuckerberg swore his team wasn't making a Facebook phone. But today, he greeted a room full of press in Menlo Park with a different message. "Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook phone," the social network's CEO said. But by "Facebook phone," Zuckerberg doesn't mean actual hardware. Instead his team created Home, a concept that changes the "soul of the phone," the home screen. "What would it feel like if our phones were designed around people, not apps?" Zuckerberg asked the audience. "We're not building a phone. We're not building a new MP3 player. And we're not building a new internet communication device," Zuckerberg said. Instead, Facebook Home appears the moment you turn on your phone or wake it up from stand-by mode (Zuckerberg says people turn on their phones an average of 100 times per day). Facebook Home doesn't display the typical static background photo. It shows story after story posted by friends to Facebook or Instagram in real-time. It displays status updates, photos, and other open graph stories with large images. Below is a graphic that simply explains what Facebook Home is. It's an integration on top of Android's Operating System but beneath the app icon layer we're all used to seeing on our smart phones. Facebook has built the first home screen that comes to life, and updates in real time.
Facebook has vaulted past its competitors to control 18.4 percent of U.S. mobile display ad revenues.
According to eMarketer, that means Facebook will end the year as the top U.S. publisher in mobile display, with roughly $340 million in revenue for all of 2012.
The chart below presents a visualization of Facebook remarkable performance. The social network wasn't in the picture in 2011. One year later, it has seized a fatter share of U.S. mobile display revenues than heavyweights such as Google, Pandora, and Apple's iAd platform. In the process, a greater share of revenue has accrued to the top six publishers.
However, Facebook's accomplishment needs to be placed in context. First, mobile remains a blip in the total advertising landscape. And within mobile, display still accounts for less spend than search ads— 46 percent to 49 percent of U.S. mobile ad spending. (In other countries the picture is even more lopsided in favor of search.)
Finally, it's early days yet for Facebook's mobile ads, and there are no guarantees the company's mobile ad formats will continue to succeed indefinitely.
Whatsapp, the multiplatform mobile messaging app that has been one of the runaway success stories for ad-free, paid services, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, according to sources close to the matter. We’re still digging around on potential price and other details about how advanced the deal is. But as mobile becomes the most bloody battleground in the Internet’s game of thrones, you can see how such a deal could make sense. For starters, it would be another way for Facebook to continue extending its touchpoints with mobile consumer. Mark Zuckerberg asserted, on the occasion of reaching 1 billion monthly active users on Facebook, that mobile would be crucial to Facebook reaching the “next billion.” “The big thing is obviously going to be mobile,” Zuckerberg told BusinessWeek. “There are 5 billion people in the world who have phones.” Whatsapp also has a footprint that fits with Facebook’s focus on international/emerging markets: The messaging app has users in over a hundred countries covering 750 mobile networks, on the iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia S40, Symbian and Windows Phone platforms. The startup also has demonstrable scale. We’ve heard the company has something like tens of millions of daily active users globally and these users utilize Whatsapp to send messages to family and friends. Every minute a user spends on Whatsapp is likely at the expense of a minute spent on Facebook. At the end of October 2011, when the last time Whatsapp updated its usage numbers, it announced that it was serving 1 billion messages per day — “Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second,” the company wrote then. In August 2012, that number had grown ten-fold to 10 billion messages per day, 4 billion inbound and 6 billion outbound (because they go to more than one recipient). The app, which is built on Erlang, has the potential and ambition to grow more and wants to provide “a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset.”
Facebook announced that it now has 1 billion monthly active users. It's an incredible feat. Very few companies can say they have 1 billion customers.
Most impressive is how linear this progression is.
How to get more likes, comments and share on your Facebook posts and dramatically improve your EdgeRank... Depends on day in the week, time in the day, type of content and the presence of "I".
Facebook has flopped on the public markets, and now we have vivid evidence of how badly Silicon Valley is reeling in the fallout.
Paul Graham, cofounder of Silicon Valley's most important startup incubator, Y Combinator, has sent an email to portfolio companies warning them "bad times" may be ahead.
He warns: "The bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups."
"No one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle."
He says that startups which have not yet raised money should lower their expectations for how much they will be able to raise. Startups that have raised money already may have to raise "down rounds," or at lower valuations than they previously had.
"Which is bad," he writes, "because 'down rounds' not only dilute you horribly, but make you seem and perhaps even feel like damaged goods."
JLG writes: "There are many religions when it comes to calculating the “right” price for the shares of a publicly traded company. At a basic level, buying a share is an act of faith in the company’s future earnings. The strength of this belief manifests itself in the company’s P/E (Price/Earnings) ratio. The stronger the faith, the higher the P/E, an expectation of increased profit.
Sometimes, an extreme P/E number beggars belief, it invites a deeper look into the thoughts and emotions that drive prices.
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I consider the stock market a dangerous place where, across the table, I see people with bigger brains, bigger computers, and bigger wallets than mine. I can’t win. The casino always does…unless you don’t trade but, instead, invest–that is buy shares and keep them for years, the way Warren Buffet does."
About $20 according to this analysis by Henry Blodget
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