Facebook ninjas scale wall, pluck iPhone techies from Apple's garden Facebook has apparently hired in more than six iPhone and iPad engineers who could well be the social network's team for a Facebook smartphone, the The New York Times reports. Facebook privately cherry-picked the Apple employees rather than posting jobs openly, say the NYT's unnamed sources. Over six hardware and software …
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Mince. If they would suck it up and let Google/Apple handle ads in the Facebook app(s) and deal them a cut they could bring a new source of income online overnight. They WANT to control the whole ecosystem, sure, but not having ads in the FB app right now, even as a temporary measure while they roll out their own thing, is a bit of a fail.
Mobile devices are a patent minefield. The existing encumbents are hardly going to take this lying down unless for some stroke of good luck FB can buy their way into the 'I've got a zillion mobile patents cartel'.
On the otherhand, is this a sign of realism in the FB Ivory Tower that their business model is not upto spec?
Who knows but it is sure going to get interesting.
This sounds like a waste of time and money on their behalf (along with the rumoured Opera acquisition)
I don't see the benefits of them having their own smartphone or their own browser. As someone points out their existing smartphone apps are terrible anyway and need a lot of work to be up to scratch.
I really can't see the USP in their own browser or smartphone? If they are aiming to put features in those products that aren't given to regular joes accessing on iPhones or Internet Explorer then that's the fast track to a shrinking userbase and before you know it they'll have half the users and they'll be the new Myspace
I can't see the sense in this either.
Even if Facebook developed a completely new hardware line and made it very distinct, the patents held on handheld devices are vague and ambiguous to say the least. The big players in mobile tech really don't want another competitor and they have control of enough IP to ensure it's an uphill struggle the whole way.
But more importantly, I can't see the logical gain Facebook would make from entering the mobile market directly. They run a platform independent online service, they have no previous experience in direct mobile tech, their service is already available on the devices that would become their competitors.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to throw their weight behind one of the giants like Google, since the potential link up for data mining users would offer them both huge advantages?
I don't approve of the idea personally, but from a business standpoint it would link up two companies who make a lot of money by profiling you and using targeting advertisements.
Surely if you linked google and facebook user data in profiling, you could capture 95% of a user's data available to be mined online. How many people use their PC/Laptop as a "facebook and emails" machine?
That's actually quite scary.
The only chance they have of getting something out this year is to buy Blackberry and use that as a starting point, they could easily get their stuff built into the OS and go from there.
Blackberry is a good fit as it gets the backing it needs to continue in business and facebook gets a brand with its own OS and bag of patents.
They should be able to do a deal that if the Zuck is involved with will be even more overpriced than instagram and MS buying Skype......
That would also take care of Google and Apple as far as pissing them of.....
Even with a tonne of cash, I'd be surprised if they got anything out by the end of the year. Way I see it, doing anything from scratch would be too difficult for them. That's a major task for even a company that does have the development experience in-house. Took Microsoft a long time to catch up with Apple and Google on this and MS have a Hell of a lot more development power than Facebook. So what are Facebook planning? Their own deployment of Android with a few tweaks? A fork of Android? Either way they're putting themselves in a head to head with Google that they cannot win. Is there anything else out there they could use? Can they licence Symbian or something? Even if they could, they don't have the expertise or business model to support sustaining it.
I don't see any good options for Facebook in this venture. All I can guess at is that they are taking a non-good option, e.g. copying Android. A road with many pitfalls in it. They must be worried.
The time to do this would have been when Facebook had its maximum popularity amongst teens. A Facebook branded phone could have had some "cool" factor back then, but now Facebook is something their parents and maybe even grandparents use. That's about as uncool as it gets. That's why a lot of teens do most of their "social" on Twitter now. They still have Facebook accounts but don't use them the way teens were a couple years ago.
I don't think there was ever any way for Facebook to sell a phone to anyone over 20, unless it defied all logic and was actually a better phone than anyone else's phone. Good luck beating both Apple AND Samsung. Given how much doubt there is about the ability of RIM and Nokia to challenge those two, the idea that Facebook could do so is laughable.
I'm sure the marketing group at Facebook thinks this is a grand idea, they already have a lot of information on their userbase, as far as who their friends are, where they go (if they checkin), and sometimes even who they spend time in real life with (via photo tags) Now they could get information on where you are every minute of the day, everyone you call and text including how frequently and what time of the day, and if enough others had Facebook phones get an even better picture of who you spend time with in real life by seeing which ones are at the same location. Valuable information for marketers. Perhaps valuable enough to sell an iPhone/Galaxy class phone for "free" with subsidy? That's the only way I see the Facebook phone succeeding...
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