Facebook Unveils Mobile Platform -- But No Facebook Phone

Facebook Unveils Mobile Platform -- But No Facebook Phone

Facebook has a problem: How to get its 500 million users moving?

The popular social network has about a half billion users, yet Facebook doesn't have a single, unified version of its mobile site -- yet. That all changed Wednesday at a special event at Facebook headquarters, where company head Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new mobileplatform.

But no Facebook phone.

"There's been a rumor floating around that Facebook was going to build a phone," Zuckerberg joked. "No," he said simply. But the company did need a way to simplify development for the 200 million people who use its social network on various mobile devices.

"The only platform bigger than this is the mobile web itself," Zuckerberg told attendees at the event. So he unveiled a new mobile platform including a unified, single sign-on feature, and new tools that the company claims will encourage developers to build better apps.

But no Facebook phone.

A number of developers came on stage to show off new apps that incorporate the new software, built with a new SDK -- or software development kit, the tools a programmer uses to write software -- which Facebook announced would be released shortly. Part of the SDK is a set of tools specific to mobileapplication developers. One is the single sign-on feature, which lets users sign in to Facebook simply by clicking a button, rather than entering their user info.

But no Facebook phone.

Prior to the event, rumors swirled about what would be announced at the mobile event, rumors centering on a potential phone. The invitation Facebook sent provided no details whatsoever other than to say that the event begins at 10:30 a.m. on November 3 and would be followed by lunch.

But the invitation sported an image of two shaded figures alongside what appears to be the old string-and-Dixie-cup phones that kids in treehouses have long used to communicate. One hopes an actual Facebook phone -- if it ever arrives -- will be slightly more high-tech.

Technology blog TechCrunch reported last month that Facebook was secretly developing a special smartphone.

Facebook then issued a carefully-worded response that said the company was not “building” a phone. The company had projects focused on “deeper integration with some manufacturers.”

But to be clear: There's no Facebook phone.

By Jeremy A. Kaplan

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Ben Horowitz: Why Andreessen Horowitz Just Raised $650,000,000

Ben Horowitz: Why Andreessen Horowitz Just Raised $650,000,000

Andreessen Horowitz just raised $650,000,000 for our second fund. Through the process, people asked us three questions consistently and I will answer them here.
Why raise $650M?

Isn’t smaller better? As a matter of core philosophy, we invest in companies not stages. We want to be in business with the best entrepreneurs going after the biggest markets and we do not care whether they need seed money, venture money or growth money. We believe in great entrepreneurs and the products and companies they build. We do not focus on special return profiles for various stages of investment.

As result, our fund is stage agnostic. As in fund 1, we are excited about investing $50,000 in exciting new seed deals and we are excited about investing $50,000,000 in companies like Skype. While $650M would be a large venture fund, it is a moderately sized seed, venture, and growth fund.
Why raise $650M? I heard you guys could raise at least $1.5B?

Interestingly, we get the opposite question as well. Why so small? We do not want the fund size to dictate our investment pace. We have seen other firms raise so much money that they lower their quality bar in order to “put the money to work.” We would strongly prefer to run out of money sooner and be forced to raise a third fund than to have that problem.
Why only one fund? Why not separate growth and venture funds?

First, from a returns perspective, we do not want to attempt to predetermine where the good investments will be. In our experience, the quality of companies in each investment stage varies wildly over time. It’s possible that the right strategy for this fund will be to invest $550M in venture, $50M in seed, and $50M in growth. It may also be the case that $400M in growth, $150M in venture, and $100M in seed is the right mix. One thing is certain; we won’t know until we see the companies.

Second, one of the founding principles of the firm is to have general partners who are skilled in helping companies at all three stages of development. As former entrepreneurs, we believe this is ideal. When you are raising seed money, you need an investor who can help you grow. When you are the founding CEO of a growth company, you want an investor who understands the value of a founder running the company and who can help you develop into a skilled CEO. As a general partner who has founded, grown, taken public, and run companies at scale, do I belong in the seed fund, the venture fund, or the growth fund? With one fund, I don’t have to choose and neither do our entrepreneurs.

Finally, we believe in being totally aligned with our investors. In venture capital, general partners are paid a percentage of the return on investments. This percentage is called carry. Firms that break their funds into separate vehicles for growth and venture typically separate the carry incentives as well. For example, if their growth fund loses 50% and their venture fund gains 50%, the general partners will be paid carry for a 50% gain on the growth fund, but and will not be paid anything or pay back anything on the venture fund. So, if you are an investor in both funds, even though you might lose money on your investment, you will still have to pay the general partners for making you money. That structure does not seem fair to us, so we elected to have one fund. If our investors don’t make money, we don’t make money.
Gee, that was fast. Have you even invested fund 1 yet?

We raised $300M for Andreessen Horowitz Fund I 16 months ago. Typically, firms invest venture capital funds in between 2 and 3 years. Why did we invest fund I so quickly? Two core reasons:
Prior to raising fund I, Marc and I were angel investors for three years. Many of those angel investments turned out to be outstanding venture-stage startups. As importantly, the entrepreneurs who ran them wanted us to invest in their venture rounds. As a result, we made investments in great companies like RockMelt, Nicira, and Apptio rapidly after raising the fund. And we are incredibly glad that we did.
We invested $50M in Skype. Companies that can become primary, important, long lasting consumer franchises generally do not come up for sale. When they have already reached over 100M users, are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and are deeply profitable, an opportunity to buy them is even more usual. So when we learned that Skype would be available, we jumped at the opportunity to be a part of one of the world’s most important companies

by.businessinsider.com

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Microsoft Raises Kinect Forecast to 5 Million Units

Microsoft Corp. boosted its forecast for the Kinect motion-control device for the Xbox gaming system to 5 million units this quarter, predicting the most successful Xbox product debut by sales.

Based on pre-sales, retail orders and consumer interest, the company expects to exceed a previous forecast of 3 million units, Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, said in an interview today. The device, which lets players control games with motion and voice, goes on sale tomorrow.

Microsoft and Sony Corp., with its Move controller, are competing against Nintendo Co., whose Wii machine set the standard for motion-controlled gaming. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, is using Kinect to attract a larger slice of the market for casual gamers, while extending the life of its Xbox 360 console, which went on sale in 2005.

Sony has been selling Move since mid-September. Michael Pachter, a video-game analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. in Los Angeles, predicted Sony will sell about 3 million units by the end of this year.

Microsoft dropped 36 cents to $27.03 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have fallen 11 percent this year.

Price Tag

Kinect costs $149.99 alone and comes bundled with Xbox machines, starting at $299.99. It sold out in preorders at retailers such as Amazon.com Inc., Best Buy Co. and GameStop Corp., according to David Hufford, a Microsoft spokesman. Those stores will have more stock when the product goes on sale tomorrow, he said.

In the U.S., 25,000 retailers will sell the device and 5,000 of those will stay open tonight for customers who want to purchase Kinect at midnight. Microsoft is holding a midnight event at the Toys “R” Us store in New York’s Times Square, Mattrick said.

“They are really defining Kinect as the must-have holiday item,” Mattrick said of retailers. “It means it’s going to be our biggest holiday ever.”

By Dina Bass 

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New reports from comScore and Nielsen show RIM is still the market leader in smartphones...but Android is coming on strong

New reports from comScore and Nielsen show RIM is still the market leader in smartphones...but Android is coming on strong.

Earlier this month, none other than Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs indicated that theiPhone had overtaken Canada’s Research in Motion as the leader in the smartphone market, and a report from market research firm IDC backed up the claim. However, in an indication of just how fuzzy all this scientific measurement of markets can be, two more research firms weighed in today—and neither finds the iPhone is leading the market. Both Nielsen and comScore find RIM is still the market leader for smartphones, although the iPhone is in second place andAndroid is showing rapid gains.

According to comScore, RIM remained the top smartphone platform during the third quarter of 2010, accounting for 37.3 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers aged 13 years and over. That was actually a 2.8 percent drop compared to RIM’s share in June 2010. Apple’s iPhone accounted for 24.3 percent of the market—unchanged since June—and Google’s Android platform (now represented by myriad devices) accounted for 21.4 percent of the market, up 6.5 percent since June. Microsoft came in fourth with a 10 percent share for the third quarter (a drop od 2.8 percent since June), and Palm landed in fifth place with a 4.2 percent share, down 0.5 percent since June. (It’s worth noting Windows Phone 7 was not yet available to consumers, nor was the Palm Pre 2 on sale in the U.S.).

Nielsen’s figures also show RIM on top, but the percentages change a bit. According to Nielsen, RIM accounts for 30 percent of the U.S. smartphone market with the iPhone hot on its heels with a 28 percent share. Google’s Android platform is in a more-distant third place with a 19 percent share; however, where RIM lost ground in the third quarter of 2010 and the iPhone held steady, Android showed strong growth, and Nielsen says Android was the preferred platform amongst consumers who chose a device in the last six months. Nielsen also notes that while Apple has the most smartphone users under age 44, fully half of Android users are under 35 years of age.

The disparity of these figures from leading market analysis firms—and companies’ eagerness to embrace them to their advantage—highlights both the inherent difficulties in measuring things like “smartphone market share,” as well as how competitive the U.S. smartphone market has become.

• By: Geoff Duncan

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4G Wireless Image Scrambled As T-Mobile USA Enters The Mix

    

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--So what is 4G? Thanks to the wireless carriers, the answer is only getting more confusing.

T-Mobile USA is the latest carrier to jump into the 4G fray, boasting in a new campaign that began Tuesday night that its HSPA+ network--which it previously claimed was 3G--is actually the nation's largest fourth-generation network.

That conflicts with positions taken by Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), which has been evangelizing the benefits of 4G for the past two years; its partner Clearwire Corp. (CLWR), which is responsible for building out the network and reports its third-quarter results on Thursday; and the other national carriers moving into 4G. Unsurprisingly, the move was not received well.

"Despite T-Mobile's marketing claim and their desire to try to keep up with companies like Sprint, T- Mobile's HSPA+ is not a 4G network," a Sprint spokeswoman said.

"Third-party research is clear--AT&T has the nation's fastest mobile broadband network, period," said an AT&T Inc. (T) spokesman.

The increased rhetoric underscores the high-stakes game played by the carriers as they jockey for position as the fastest and most advanced network on the block. With the preponderance of programs and services reliant on a speedy wireless connection, consumers are starting to show interest in so-called 4G networks, even if they don't quite know what they are.

The conflicting campaigns probably won't help the already scant public knowledge of wireless technology. In a recent Yankee Group survey of more than 1,200 consumers, 57% said they have either never heard of 3G or don't understand the term. With 4G, that figure jumps to 68%.

The practice of adding "Gs" with each technology revision isn't the healthiest practice for the industry, analysts say. More confusing is the use of 3.5G, which has started to pop up in phones such as Nokia Corp.'s (NOK) recently released N8.

"That is going to get pretty ridiculous really quickly," said Christopher Nicoll, analyst at Yankee Group.

Another wrinkle: none of the current networks actually qualify as 4G, according to the ITU, a U.N. agency responsible for setting global standards for communications technology. The agency last month said that only two standards, LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2, are considered true 4G technologies. While Verizon Wireless is launching an LTE network and Sprint and Clearwire have embraced WiMax, neither of the deployments come close to the specifications laid out by the ITU.

Still, by adopting the 4G name, T-Mobile USA is hoping to capitalize on the growing interest, even if its network is an update to a 3G standard. The carrier is already promoting the MyTouch 4G and G2 as the first phones capable of taking advantage of the network's highest speeds.

The carrier, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG (DT), has AT&T in its sights early with a commercial that riffs off of the popular PC versus Mac ads, inserting instead the "old AT&T network" versus T-Mobile USA's newer 4G one.

AT&T, however, has been rolling out the same HSPA+ technology and claims it has the nation's fastest network. Unlike the other major carriers, it hasn't yet staked a claim in 4G, but plans to launch an LTE network next year.

T-Mobile USA said its network is in 75 markets and in some cases, offer a faster connection than the 4G equivalent offered by Clearwire and Sprint.

"If you look at the speed of the WiMax network out there, we're meeting, beating and exceeding them right now," T-Mobile spokesman Reid Walker said.

Walker added there already is customer confusion over 4G, and he says T-Mobile USA's higher speeds bring some clarity.

T-Mobile's push comes ahead of Verizon Wireless's own move into 4G. The carrier, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and Vodafone Group PLC (VOD), plans to have the network up in 38 cities and 62 airports later this year.

"We are comfortable with the way our LTE network will perform," a Verizon Wireless spokesman said. He declined to comment on whether the carrier would embrace the 4G name.

The increased noise over 4G only diminishes Sprint and Clearwire's lead, which has shrunk as other carriers prep their own upgraded networks. Clearwire, which turned on its WiMax network in the New York area Monday, is available in nearly 60 markets.

By Roger Cheng 

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Google in 'significant breach' of UK data laws

Google in 'significant breach' of UK data 

laws

There was a "significant breach" of the Data Protection Act when Google collected personal data via its Street View cars, the UK's Information Commissioner has ruled.

But Google will not face a fine or any punishment, Christopher Graham added.


Instead, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will audit Google's data protection practices.


The move marks a U-turn for the ICO which originally ruled that no data breach had occurred.


Last week the ICO vowed to look again at the evidence, after the Canadian data agency found the search giant in breach of its law.


Its decision was welcomed by MP Robert Halfon, who has been critical of the ICO and of Google, which he recently accused of deliberately collecting the data for commercial gain.


However, he said that action had come too late.


"The ICO failed to act when it should have done, despite the fact that Google staged a significant infringement of privacy and civil liberties, by harvesting millions of e-mails, wi-fi addresses, and passwords.


"Furthermore, the ICO has already proved that it lacks the technical expertise to audit Google's activity. What confidence can we have in their audit now? People feel powerless."


The ICO said it "strongly refutes" Mr Halfon's suggestion that it did not have "the necessary expertise to audit" Google.


"We have a team of experienced and qualified auditors who regularly check organisations compliance with data protection requirements."


Mr Graham said Google must delete the data - collected from unsecured wi-fi networks - "as soon as it is legally cleared to do so".


Google has apologised for collecting the data, which it said had been done by mistake.


'Profoundly sorry'


Google has been the subject of scrutiny from data protection agencies around the world, following news that software in its Street View cars collected personal information.


Street View has been under scrutiny in Germany


This was revealed following a request from the German data commissioner to audit all the data being collected by Street View cars.


Google discovered that, along with legitimate data about the location of wi-fi hotspots, the cars were also hoovering up personal details from unsecured networks, known as payload data.


Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel, said the firm was "profoundly sorry for mistakenly collecting payload data in the UK".


Google said it happened as the result of code written by one of its engineers being mistakenly incorporated in the Street View software.


"Since we announced our mistake in May we have co-operated closely with the ICO and worked to improve our internal controls," said Mr Fleischer.


"We are in the process of confirming that there are no outstanding legal obligations upon us to retain the data, and will then ensure that it is quickly and safely deleted."


'Serious violation'


It announced recently that it would appoint a head of privacy and ensure that all its engineering teams followed strict privacy protocols.


New impetus was given to the UK enquiry, which had originally ruled that no significant breach had occurred, following harsh criticisms of Google from the Canadian authorities.


Last month it found that the search giant had breached its privacy laws.


"This incident was a serious violation of Canadian's privacy rights," privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart concluded.


But she said that no further action would be taken if Google tightened its privacy policies.


Backlash


Street View is now available in around 20 countries and allows uses to walk through towns and cities using photos taken by the Street View cars.


Anyone wishing to have an image removed can request this from Google.


But there is a growing backlash against the service, following complaints from people that their privacy was breached when the photos were taken.


In Germany, where Google is imminently rolling out a service, the government forced it to allow people to opt out of the service before pictures went live.


Italy has asked it to give citizens notice before starting mapping operations while the Czech Republic has banned it from taking any more pictures.


by bbc.co,uk

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Google Settles Buzz Lawsuit

The company will set aside $8.5 million to fund privacy education, but Gmail users will not be compensated. 

Google began sending messages to Gmail users in the U.S. on Tuesday to provide notification that it had reached a settlement in the Buzz class action lawsuit.

The launch of Google's Buzz social networking service in February prompted a privacy outcry andsubsequent lawsuits, which were aggregated into a class action.
 
Eric Rubin, CEO of Dreamfactory, talks about the company's Business Essentials, a suite of software services, including project management and business intelligence, that runs on the Salesforce.com AppExchange platform.

Google made a series of changes to its service to address complaints that Buzz exposed private and potentially sensitive Gmail contacts. These included making choices about followers and following more visible, moving to an auto-suggest model rather than automatic following, and the addition of Buzz to the Google Dashboard to make it easier to see one's Buzz settings.

The settlement does not include an admission of error or any compensation for Gmail users. Rather it acknowledges the changes Google made in its service to address complaints and commits $8.5 million, less legal fees, to be directed to "organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the Web," as Google puts it in its letter.


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Those seeking compensation have to opt-out of the settlement before the December 6 deadline, file a separate lawsuit, and win in court.

As a result of a separate privacy snafu -- the company's inadvertent gathering of WiFi packet data through its Street View cars -- Google last week made a significant commitment to improve its approach to privacy by adding a new director of privacy to oversee product management, implementing additional process controls and auditing, and adding further privacy education for employees.
By Thomas Claburn

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