Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance Tuesday at Techcrunch Disrupt was hotly anticipated. What did he have to say? Facebook’s stock plunge is “disappointing” and it bet too much too fast on HTML5, but is still positioned to make “big bets.” Read more »
Facebook’s Chinese ambitions, the falling price of flash storage, a chat with Web daddy Sir Tim Berners-Lee, rise of the swarm robots and why do people continue to reject science are some of the topics in this bonus back-to-work installment of Om Says reading list. Read more »
Patent troll suits — in which shell companies that don’t make anything sue those that do — are proliferating. The latest example may include a shell firm suing Facebook and others for using banner ads. Read more »
Facebook and Instagram finally closed the deal on their acquisition today, as Instagram noted the popular photo sharing app hit 5 billion photos uploaded so far, a huge number and testament to growth as it prepares to merge with the social media giant. Read more »
British arch-satirist Armando Iannucci – best known for his documentary-style dissections of the political classes — is getting ready to take on his next project: a black comedy based on Silicon Valley’s worst moments of excess. Fish, meet barrel. Read more »
Is it fair to blame Facebook’s CFO for the failure of the company’s IPO, and the subsequent decline in the share price? Not really. The wildly inflated hopes and dreams of an overheated technology sector were also to blame, and he had no control over that. Read more »
Tech companies have become increasingly adept at manufacturing desire, but to what end? Behavior designer Jason Hreha argues that the industry needs to seriously consider the impact of its products. Are we helping our users lead better lives, or are we making them compulsive, impatient and distractible? Read more »
With so many different photo and social networks out there, our digital memories are usually all over the place and out of sync on a variety of different services. Irrive gathers these things into a single product that makes it easy to share single events across the web. Read more »
Ever since Facebook stumbled with its IPO, there has been a constant drumbeat of criticism saying Mark Zuckerberg should step down as CEO — but Silicon Valley is devoted to the idea of strong founders retaining control of their companies. Will that be Facebook’s undoing? Read more »
In a move to boost sales through social recommendations, online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, has added a new feature called “PinPointing” that offers recommendations based on Pinterest accounts. Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work very well yet. Read more »
Although the ad-driven business model behind Facebook looks similar to that of a newspaper, the crucial difference is that the social network knows a lot more about its users. The more focus that newspapers put on doing the same, the better off they will be. Read more »
Facebook says the app has been rewritten so it’ll not only open and scroll faster, but news feeds and notifications will load right away. To do that, Facebook rewrote it as a native iOS app, doing away with HTML5. Read more »
Facebook is now free to move ahead with its purchase of Instagram now that the FTC has given its blessing. The deal, however, is not as lucrative for Instagram, which took a lot of Facebook stock as compensation. Read more »
How much of your data is Facebook collecting every day? Some new stats from the company reveal just how large its user base is, and what big data means to a company with 950 million users. Read more »
Schools like the University of Kentucky are forcing athletes to install software that monitors their social media accounts for words like “panties” or “fight.” Some states are proposing laws to put a stop this. Read more »
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Is it the end of an era for the former rock star venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and did greentech play a large part in that fall from grace? Read more »
After a summer that has seen increased activity in social media marketing, media giant Gannett Co. today announced that it has purchased BLiNQ Media, which helps companies execute and manage ad campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Read more »
Twitter seems to be at a crossroads, and according to a recent GigaOM survey, its prospects for the next five years are promising. Key challenges in the near future will be establishing a revenue model and survive the backlash from developers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Groupon’s precipitous stock decline since its public offering in November 2011 has turned the local commerce company from a web hero to a piñata. The problem is that of false expectations and lofty valuations from a company that was never really a tech-company. Read more »
Data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. To cut power and costs tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are cutting electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Follow along our tour as we take you on a rare journey through Facebook’s first data center in Prineville Oregon, which houses its Open Compute servers. We’ll bring you along the air flow route, and down into the secret server room: Read more »
Facebook is building a deep storage facility at its data center in Oregon. Read more »
The market is tough for photo apps outside the realm of Facebook and Instagram, as shown by layoffs at the photo-sharing app Hipstamatic on Thursday. Read more »
No mobile browser has passed through the first two hurdles in the Ringmark test, a tool created by Facebook that checks for a wide range of HTML5 support. That is, no mobile browser until now. The most recent beta of Dolphin Browser for Android just did. Read more »
As we consume more and more content via real-time streams that come to us through Twitter and Facebook and newer platforms, how does that affect advertising? Everyone wants their ads to look like just another form of content, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Read more »
Insiders can now sell Facebook stock and the reaction so far hasn’t been pretty. Here’s a quick look at what the financial press is saying. Read more »
With nearly 80 million members and 4 billion photos that are growing by hundreds every second, Instagram is taking an ambition step ahead by using geo-data to create a better photo consumption experience. The new version could lead to possible business opportunities, or so I think. Read more »
Where’s the party at? That’s the question Vamos is trying to answer with an iOS app that aggregates and overlays Facebook event data on a map, for real-time and hyperlocal discovery Read more »
Sony’s newest e-reader, the Reader PRS-T2, may appeal mainly due to the $129 price tag. But the ability to share passages on Facebook and integration with Evernote make it even better. Evernote is superb for clipping web content for viewing later on nearly any device. Read more »
How to connect and influence consumers’ energy use habits with big volumes of smart grid data? Making data interesting, of course. But that’s easier said than done. DJ Patil, a data scientist extraordinaire at Greylock Partners and previously at LinkedIn, doled out some tips. Read more »
Smartphones can enable an amazing level of connectivity, but they can also allow that activity to be monitored and used in controversial ways. But for mobile marketing to realize its full potential, consumers may need to sacrifice their privacy to one degree or another. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Most companies in the market for a new data center deal in total secrecy with agents and data center providers under NDA. Cloud backup player Backblaze is turning that model on its head by publishing the RFP it’s using for its new data center. Read more »
Like Apple is doing in North Carolina, Facebook is adding on a smaller data center at its facility in Prineville, Oregon. The new building won’t add jobs to the region, but represents Facebook’s rapid infrastructure build out. Read more »
Federal investigators viewed the Facebook profile of an alleged gangster in the Bronx by asking his informant “friend” to show it to them. A judge ruled this was not unconstitutional because Facebook users can’t control what other people do with the information they post. Read more »
Facebook is now encouraging expectant parents to memorialize the moment by introducing a new life event for Timeline called “Expecting a baby.” The move, however, goes too far in getting people to share about things in the future out of their control. Read more »
Facebook’s App Center was launched in June as part of the social network’s attempt to be more relevant to mobile users and help them find apps they like for their smartphones. It’s also another way of attacking the mobile app discovery problem plaguing both iOS and Android. Read more »
Facebook probably has about 180,000 servers out there for its 900 million plus user base. That’s dramatic growth from an estimated 30,000 three years ago. Read more »
In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and are able to capture and put it to use. Read more »
Leap Commerce, the company behind Best Decision, a mobile shopping app is working on a platform that would make shopping more easy and simpler. It wants to integrate other third party services such as Taskrabbit. Time for someone like Pinterest to snap them up. Read more »
San Francisco red-hot startup activity is not only inflating the commercial real estate market, but it is also having an impact on the residential rental market, data shows. Since January 2011 annual rents are up by $5000, but down in Peninsula, rents are up even higher. Read more »
