The Facebook Phone

SUN VALLEY, ID - JULY 11: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Laura Arrillaga Andreesen, chairwoman of the Silicon Valley Venture Fund, attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 11, 2011 in Sun Valley, Idaho. The conference has been hosted annually by the investment firm Allen & Company since 1983 and is typically attended by many of the world's most powerful media executives. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Facebook coming into the smartphone space is a big deal. I mean, this is hardware. But it perhaps makes a ton of sense. Facebook is likely the top app on all mobile platforms. So might as well.

If Robert Scoble is to be believed, it will be a contextual phone.

The coming automatic, freaky, contextual world and why we’re writing a book about it

Google Now tells you to leave early for your next appointment because traffic is bad. Automatically..... new kinds of apps that will, in real time, hook up to all sorts of databases about us and the businesses we buy from or work for, and bring us back interesting smart alerts and more.

Facebook Is Said To Work With HTC On Mobile Phone For Mid-2013

Asked in an interview at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, about his greatest challenge right now, Zuckerberg said it was “the shift to mobile.” .... Facebook could use a modified version of Android for its smartphone.

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Brazil: Rio De Janeiro: Statue Of Christ: Photos

BuzzFeed Success "Secrets"

Chris Dixon is sharing some insider information.

BuzzFeed’s strategy

BuzzFeed. We passed 30M unique visitors last month, our revenue is on pace to be more than 3 times what we did in 2011, we have grown from 26 full-timers at the start of last year to 117 today ..... Nobody has built a truly great publishing company for the social age and we have a good shot to be the ones who do it. ..... we don’t publish slideshows. Instead we publish scrollable lists so readers don’t have to click a million times and can easily scroll through a post...... we don’t show crappy display ads and we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share. ...... we focus on publishing content our readers love so much they think it is worth sharing ...... We manage our own servers, we built our CMS from scratch, we created our own realtime stats system, we have our own data science team, we invented own ad products and our own post formats, and all these products are brought to life by our own editorial team and our own creative services team. We are what you call a “vertically integrated product” which is rare in web publishing. We take responsibility for the technology, the advertising, and the content and that allows us to make a much better product where everything works together. ........ skill is 63% luck. ..... “social advertising will be the biggest media business since cable television.” ...... we are equally obsessed with 1) entertaining content, 2) substantive content, and 3) social advertising. The teams that focus on each of these areas are equally important which is a key part of our success. We want our cute animals, humor, and animated gifs to be the best of their kind on the web – they aren’t just a cheap way to generate traffic. We want our reporters to have the best scoops, the smartest analysis, and the most talked about items – they aren’t just a hood ornament to lend the site prestige. And we want our advertising to be innovative, inspiring, and lead the shift to social – and not just be a necessary evil that pays the bills. ....... We love the silly, we love the substantive, and we love making advertising that is actually compelling

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Boom Decade

Allied lines of communication in India, Burma, and China in 1942–43. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is yet another sign that this is going to be a boom decade.

NEA Has Closed On $2.6 Billion For Its 14th Fund, Perhaps The Biggest In VC History

“We’ve been very active in India and China for over a decade, and we’re interested in investing across a lot of different geographies. Brazil is very interesting to us, other parts of Southeast Asia [beyond India] are interesting to us. There are a lot of exciting economies that are really ripe from our perspective.”

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Samsung Deserves Room To Play

Image via CrunchBase

Samsung: Apple wouldn’t have sold a single iPhone without stealing our tech

Samsung has been researching and developing mobile telecommunications technology since at least as early as 1991 and invented much of the technology for today‘s smartphones. Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung‘s patented technology.

For good measure, Apple seeks to exclude Samsung from the market, based on its complaints that Samsung has used the very same public domain design concepts that Apple borrowed from other competitors, including Sony, to develop the iPhone. Apple‘s own internal documents show this. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked “excessive ornamentation” such as buttons, fit in the hand, were “square with a screen” and had “corners [which] have been rounded out.”

Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. . . . Also contrary to Apple‘s accusations, Samsung does not need or want to copy; rather, it strives to best the competition by developing multiple, unique products. Samsung internal documents from 2006, well before the iPhone was announced, show rectangular phones with rounded corners, large displays, flat front faces, and graphic interfaces with icons with grid layouts.

Apple relied heavily on Samsung‘s technology to enter the telecommunications space, and it continues to use Samsung‘s technology to this day in its iPhone and iPad products. For example, Samsung supplies the flash memory, main memory, and application processor for the iPhone. . . . But Apple also uses patented Samsung technology that it has not paid for. This includes standards-essential technology required for Apple‘s products to interact with products from other manufacturers, and several device features that Samsung developed for use in its products.

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Apple's Surprise Enterprise Entries

Image via CrunchBase

Good Technology: iPad, iPhone dominating enterprise markets

While smartphone activations outnumber tablet new-installs by around three to one, Apple continues to dominate in the corporate tablet space, crushing all competition. ..... more than 80 percent of American employees continue business-related communication from their mobile devices after they have left the office. The amount of usage averages seven hours per week -- adding up to more than a month and a half of (typically unpaid) overtime per year. ...... top ten devices activated in the second quarter of 2012 are led by the iPhone 4S, followed by the iPad 3, iPhone 4, iPad 2, the Samsung Galaxy S II, Motorola Droid Razr, iPad, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the Samsung Galaxy Note. ..... Windows Phone 7.5 accounted for 1.2 percent of the total smartphone activations, with Apple holding 70.8 percent and Android gaining ground to 28 percent...... The financial services industry leads mobile device activations .... the "bring your own device" movement in information technology.

Steve Jobs was all about the consumer space. But then there are unintended consequences. You build factories. You end up polluting rivers. Only I think the smartphone, tablet penetration of the enterprise is a good thing, though inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

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