Google Voice Is About To Take Off: Number Porting Coming Soon For $20

We’ve been huge fans of Google Voice for quite a while now — it makes screening calls and managing multiple phones a breeze — but there’s always been a huge thorn in its side: it didn’t allow people to port their existing phone numbers over. In other words, in order to take advantage of all of Google Voice’s benefits, you’d have to get a new phone number. Now, after years of waiting, that’s finally changing: Google has quietly enabled number porting for Google Voice.

Update: Google tells us that this is currently just a test available to some users and is not rolling out to everyone yet. However, it seems likely that a wide scale launch is coming soon.

Here’s a statement from Google:

“We’re continually testing new features to enhance the user experience. For a limited amount of time, we’re making the Google Voice number porting process available to users. We don’t have any additional details to share at this time, but plan to offer this feature to all users in the near future.”

The feature was first noticed by Engadget, and I’m seeing it in my Google Voice account as well. The process appears to be fairly straightforward (and yet terrifying at the same time): tell Google your existing cell phone number, agree to some strongly worded warnings, pay $20, and you should be in business. You can see screenshots of the process below.

Oh, about those warnings. Transferring your number to Google Voice isn’t exactly painless — depending on your current carrier agreement you may have to deal with some steep early termination fees (ETFs) that can run hundreds of dollars. That means you should think twice about doing this (as the warnings make clear). And all of you who are about to buy shiny new Verizon iPhones may want to consider doing so under a new phone number, so that you can transfer your existing number to Google Voice.

This could be a turning point for the service. Up until now many people have only been able to take advantage of a limited set of Google Voice’s features (namely, voicemail) because they didn’t have a way to port their ‘real’ phone numbers over. Google Voice supports deep integration with Android, and comes pre-installed on stock Android builds, so plenty of people are going to be exposed to it, too.

I’ve been using Google Voice with my primary phone for over a year now, after the team offered to port my phone number over to the service (I was under the impression that it would be released for ‘everyone else’ much sooner than this). My experience has generally been quite positive, save for a series of downtime issues a couple months ago.



Want To Top Apple’s All-Time Top Paid Apps List? Sell A Ton Of Apps — Or Do This

Last night, we pointed out that as a part of their countdown to 10 billion app downloads, Apple actually revealed the top all-time app downloads for paid iPhone apps, free iPhone apps, paid iPad apps, and free iPad apps. The top results seemed pretty straightforward, with a few oddities here or there. And there may be a good reason for such oddities. The system appears pretty easy to game.

Well, technically, it’s probably not really “gaming” the system. At least not yet. It just appears that Apple is being a little sloppy in populating their lists. After speaking to a few top app developers, it seems that Apple is counting total download numbers in aggregate, regardless of if an app switched between being free and paid.

In other words, to boost yourself on the top paid app lists, all you would have to do is go free for all but one of the days, then switch to paid, and all those downloads would be counted towards your total as a paid app, it seems.

Obviously, free apps tend to be downloaded more than paid ones. So if you had a popular app and went free, then went back to paid, this could be a great way to jack your stats.

And several apps have done this switch from time to time (though we’re not saying they did it to jack their stats — they probably didn’t know that Apple would rank this way — instead it was just a nice offer to customers). Top apps like Traffic Rush and a few of the Tap Tap Revenge games are good examples of this.

One developer we spoke to, John Casasanta of TapTapTap, said that he found the numbers fishy because they’ve done multiple apps and Apple’s rankings don’t line up with their actual separated numbers. But if you take into account free and paid downloads for one app, things begin to align.

We’ve reached out to Apple about the issue, and will update if we hear back. In the meantime, be a bit wary of some of the top paid apps on that list — they may not be making as much money as it may seem given their position.

Information provided by CrunchBase


YouTube Rolls Out Its New Homepage To Everyone

YouTube started experimenting with a new homepage last month, amping up its recommendation features so it would suggest new content you’re interested in. Today it has rolled out that experiemental homepage to all users. YouTube product manager Brian Glick tells us that the decision was made primarily because of positive user feedback, “Over 100,000 people filled out a survey, and most thought that the homepage is better now. Millions of people opted in, now we’re just putting it out to all the rest.”

The whole thrust here seems to be increasing the recommendation aspect of the site for users who are logged in Their solution is bringing more of the videos you interact with to the fore. Says Glick, “What we’re trying to turn the homepage into a destination to go to when you don’t know what you want to watch.  Now you personalized list of content that’s waiting for you.”

YouTube includes a list of the new features on the previous experiment page, I’ve broken them down below.

Combined list


Don’t miss a video

Delete anything and “grey out”

Help me re-find stuff I just watched

Easy inbox

YouTube has removed some of the less popular impersonal features like “Videos Being Watched Now” and moved the “Spotlight” and “Featured Videos” sections over to the right side. This is part of an effort to make the left side of the homepage more personal to the users.

Glick says that the new features are meant to hit three different dimensions of personalization: “Things you’ve told YouTube you like,””Videos your friends have shared,” and “Videos YouTube thinks you like.” The new homepage focuses on serving up videos your friends have liked, channels you’re subscribed to and other things YouTube recommends based on your taste. The operative term here is YOU.

“It’s part of our broader focus on how we can bridge the gap of going from 15 minutes a day to five hours a day” Glick explains, referring to how people usually spend 5 hours on television versus 15 minutes on YouTube. “We want to make this personalized experience follow you anywhere where there is a screen.”

Information provided by CrunchBase


Is Apple Poised To Take Social Seriously In iOS With “Media Stream” And “Find My Friends”?

Another day, another iOS beta. This time, 9to5mac has dug into the latest iOS 4.3 beta and found something rather interesting: hints of a would-be new feature to be called “Media Stream”. While the details are obviously pretty scant at this point, early speculation points to a more social version of iOS.

9to5mac notes that inside the code for Media Stream is also a reference to something called “Photo Streams”, which is something other users may be able to subscribe to. What other users? Well, presumably your friends. 9to5mac is putting two-and-two together, tying these hints to the recently found “Find My Friends” feature in the first iOS 4.3 beta.

Each of these new features appear to be also tied to MobileMe, which also suggests that Apple could begin using the cloud for this new social stuff (if it is, in fact, social stuff). While there was no word about it during their latest earnings call yesterday, Apple had previously said that their massive North Carolina-based datacenter was set to come online at the end of 2010. Assuming that happened, new cloud-based services could be on the way shortly.

Much of the speculation that has been around an “iTunes in the cloud“, but it’s possible that Apple could do a smaller-scale, more personal cloud experience first. If that’s the case, something like a picture streaming/sharing service could make sense. But the name “Media Stream” also implies other media beyond pictures. Might music and videos be shared in the same way as well? Could Apple take a page from Microsoft and create a Kin Studio-like experience for iOS devices?

Apple took a pretty half-hearted step towards social with Ping last year. Have they learned from their mistakes there? And can they afford to go it alone in social, or would they try to partner with Facebook and/or Twitter on it?

Or maybe Media Stream will actually be meant to directly compete with the streaming media service Google has stated they will build into upcoming versions of Android?

At this point, who knows what Apple is cooking up here. 9to5mac seems to think all of this stuff won’t see the light of day until iOS 5. This goes along with earlier news that the new multi-touch gestures in the iOS betas weren’t meant for iOS 4.3 at all, but a later version (likely iOS 5).

iOS 5 hasn’t been announced or acknowledged by Apple, but assuming they keep on their same yearly timetable, a roadmap for it should be unveiled sometime before their WWDC event in June.

Information provided by CrunchBase


US, China Compare Clean Tech, Environmental Concerns at the Whitehouse

Today, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao revealed, at a press conference in Washington D.C., conclusions from their latest round of meetings that have taken place this week at the White House. The two world leaders have met eight times since Obama took office.

Excerpts from their speeches relating to environmental issues follow below. A full transcript of today’s press conference is available at Whitehouse.gov.

In their respective speeches, President Obama addressed the environment many times, while President Hu barely touched upon these issues directly. Instead, Hu highlighted his country’s willingness to be more collaborative and open in its handling of environmental and related trade issues.

Aside from other humanitarian, economic and geo-political security goals, the presidents said their countries’ wished and plan to: spur innovation and production of clean tech and energy; reduce pollution and curb climate change; and generally keep the flow of exports, including clean-tech related products, between the two nations robust and fair.


President Obama noted:


    The U.S. is now exporting “more than $100 billion a year in goods and services to China, which supports more than half a million American jobs.”

    This week, the U.S. and China “completed dozens of deals that will increase U.S. exports by more than $45 billion”

    China’s investment in the U.S. increased by several billion dollars through deals announced this week that deal with: machinery, software, aviation and agriculture.

    China’s new U.S. deals will support an estimated 235,000 American jobs, many in manufacturing.

    As China proposed at the Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, with U.S. blessings, the country will establish a nuclear “center of excellence,” to help “secure the world’s vulnerable nuclear materials.”

    The U.S. will cooperate with China on science and technology initiatives to advance agriculture and industry, including: a U.S.-China clean energy research center; joint ventures in wind power, smart grids and cleaner coal.

    The U.S. wants to ensure that the “government procurement process in China is open and fair to American businesses,” especially vis a vis intellectual property protection.

    Steve Ballmer of Microsoft pointed out to Obama and Hu, this week, that an estimated one customer of every 10 in China is actually paying for Microsoft products.

    The U.S. and China are the two largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouses gases, in the world.

    Both Obama and Hu agree their countries have the “responsibility to combat climate change by building on the progress at Copenhagen and Cancun, and showing the way to a clean energy future.”



President Hu noted:

    The U.S. and China “agree[d] to strengthen consultation and coordination on major issues that concern peace and development in the Asia-Pacific region and in the world,” including: the Korean Peninsula, the Iranian nuclear issue, climate change and others.

    China and the United States will…promote denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in Northeast Asia.

    Each year China and the U.S. have about 3 million people traveling between the two countries. (Each day, about 7,000 to 8,000 will be traveling between China and the United States.)

    China plans to “work with the United States and other countries to effectively address global challenges, such as meeting the climate challenge, energy and resource security, food security, public health security and serious natural disasters.”


LivingSocial Hits A Million Amazon Gift Cards Sold, $20 Million In Card Value

LivingSocial has been offering $10 off any $20 Amazon purchase since 5 am this morning and it’s been a boon huge for the daily deals company, which Amazon has astutely invested $175 million in. Now the extremely popular deal has just crossed over the one million mark, with 12 hours to go. LivingSocial tells us that there are currently 99.4K vouchers being sold each hour, 2k vouchers being sold each minute and 85 vouchers being sold each second.

Already this has beat the Groupon/Gap deal which ended in $11 million worth of Groupons sold, and it’s still got a half a day left.

CenterNetworks is keeping an impressively vigilant track of the deal’s milestones, here.

Information provided by CrunchBase


PicPlz Pretties Up Android App And Begins Accepting (Beta) API Applications

Last week, we noted that mobile photo-sharing app PicPlz rolled out a bunch of improvements to their app in an effort to better compete with rival Instagram. Sadly, that new polish was only for their iPhone app at the time. But today brings good news for Android fans: the same features! And there’s a bonus too: PicPlz is now accepting applications for access to their API.

PicPlz has more about the new features for Android users here. Here’s the main gist of the update:

  • Live thumbnail preview of your picture with different filters applied.
  • Fixed rare crash on sign up
  • Fixed issue with notifications not clearing from status bar
  • Camera view no longer turns screen brightness to 100%
  • Fixed issue with camera not properly detecting the flash state on start-up
  • Other misc bug fixes

They also promise more speed improvements in the next iteration. The Android version is key for them because it is one way they definitely distinguish themselves from Instagram — which is still iPhone-only.

The API, meanwhile, is another way they can potentially distinguish themselves — at least for a bit. Those interested are asked to sign up for the PicPlz API beta here.

Instagram caused a bit of a stink when they pulled third-party access to their data a couple weeks ago. This wasn’t meant to be a hostile act, they simply want developers to wait to use their data until they have a proper API that can scale. ”We’re testing it internally and with selected partners at this time,” they tells us.

The race is on.


How Sonos Got It Right: Up Close With A Survivor


John MacFarlane had a dream: to send music from one box to every room in the house. In 2002, the only way to do this – sanely – was to run speaker wire from room to room, creating an install headache or a rats nest of wires. Instead, his company, Sonos, succeeded at sending the audio wirelessly, a feat that has been replicated many times but has never resulted in a product as successful and popular as the Sonos Multi-Room Music System.

There’s a dirty secret in gadget start-ups: they fail. Constantly and catastrophically. Unlike web or web service start-ups, gadget start-ups require R&D, manufacturing, and distribution. The Gizmondo, the most famous of all flame-outs, involved unkept promises, horrible hardware, and an exec with organized crime ties wrapping a Ferrari Enzo around a light pole.

Making hardware is hard. It takes time, and MacFarlane and his team took three years to finally launch the ZonePlayer 100 and remote control. During this time multiple vendors tried and failed to ship similar products. However, thanks to a unique design aesthetic, some nice software, and a lot of luck, Sonos survived and is now thriving.

Read more…


After A Fateful Tweet, 60mo Raises Series A From Lightbank, Yo


Last October, finance-tracking startup 60mo sent a tweet to Lightbank that read: “Hey @lightbank, we should chat sometime. Mid-westerners gotta stick together, yo.

Three months later, Lightbank has its response: “fo sho”.

Today, 60mo is announcing that it’s closed a Series A funding round led by Lightbank. Exact details of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but we’re told it’s “in the range of a million dollars”. And yes, that tweet was actually the first time the two organizations communicated with each other.

60mo, which we’ve covered before, is an online service that helps businesses manage their finances by importing data from QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and a variety of financial institutions like Bank of America, Chase, and American Express. Once the data is in the system, you can use 60mo to create financial projections, manage your business’s budget and share the data with your accountant or investors — it’s sort of like a Mint for businesses.

Since we last wrote about them, 60mo has launched a new design, and they’ve also adjusted their pricing. The service initially started at $19 a month — that’s now jumped to $29 a month, but 60mo has introduced a new free option, albeit with limited functionality (you can only connect with one bank account or credit card). There’s also a new 30 day trial available.

Lightbank is an investment firm founded by Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell — both of whom also cofounded Groupon, among other companies.

Another competitor in this space is inDinero.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Come Get Your Tickets To The 2010 Crunchies Awards After Party!

Tickets to the 2010 Crunchies Awards are officially sold out. However, if you still would like to be a part of Friday night’s event, we have decided to release tickets to the After Party!

The After Party will be located in San Francisco at the Exploratorium on January 21st from 9pm PST – 11:30pm PST. Come celebrate the results of the 2010 Crunchies Awards with us in style. There will be a fully-hosted bar, amazing finger food, and a gaming room. ELEW will be serenading us all night long with his Rockjazz renditions of hits from Coldplay, The Killers, and more. Red Bull talent DJ Platurn and internet dance sensation, the Oakland TURF Dancers, are also set to round out the evening’s lineup.

Don’t miss this opportunity to be a part of the best night of the year. We are offering only a small number of After Party tickets to a few lucky people. Be sure to get your tickets ASAP.

For directions to the Exploratorium, please visit here.

For tickets to the After Party, go here.


Four Lessons From Evernote’s First Week On The Mac App Store

Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which is currently the No. 5 app in the Mac App Store. It also didn’t hurt that the app has been prominently featured by Apple.

We just finished our first week on the Mac App Store and it might have been the most important week in Evernote’s history. Here’s how it went and what we learned:

1. Meritocracy is sweet

I remember one of the first computer articles that I ever read (maybe it was in Byte Magazine in the early 80s while I was in junior high). It had a little survey aimed at my fellow nerds. “Do you buy software for your computer?”, was the first question. The choices were, “A) Yes, frequently. B) Yes, sometimes. and C) Rarely, I prefer to write my own.” The fact that C was a viable choice pretty much sums up the early euphoria of the consumer software industry. You just had to make something great and the rest would follow. That was a long time ago.

The following twenty or thirty years brought us monopolies and barriers to entry and this happy state of affairs became a dim memory. Then came the mobile app explosion.

Over the past year, about 70% of Evernote’s new users came from mobile app stores, mostly iOS and Android. This led us to the understandable conclusion that mobile was the crucial thing that made a platform attractive to independent developers. Last week made us realize that the reality is a little bit more nuanced. It isn’t mobile that’s overwhelmingly important, it’s the app store. Until a week ago, all the good app stores just happened to be on mobile devices, but someone with a shiny new Macbook is just as eager to get the best apps as someone with a shiny new iPhone.

A platform without a well-formed app store presents a huge challenge to developers. To succeed on such a platform, the developer has to spend as much time and money on channels, logistics, partnerships and advertising as on actually making a great product. Once an app store takes hold, the software market on a platform starts moving towards a meritocracy. This is imperfect, of course, but focusing on building a great product is the best strategy for succeeding on an app store. This is a huge boon for software nerds of all types, and has resulted in the explosion of mobile apps and services in the past two years. It’s about time that desktops joined the party.

2. Desktop software is viable again

It took a few weeks of non-trivial effort to get our existing Mac application ready for the app store. There’s never a convenient time to take a few weeks out of a busy development schedule, and December is as inconvenient as it gets, but Apple’s developer relations folks were helpful and the approval process itself worked reasonably well once we’d worked out the kinks.

The results speak for themselves. About 320,000 people downloaded Evernote in the first week of the Mac App Store. Of this number, about 120,000 had never used Evernote before, and created new accounts. This represents more than 50% of all the new Evernote accounts created last week. The Mac platform—which used to be in fourth place for new user registrations behind iOS, Android and Windows—has now jumped to first.

It’s obvious in hindsight, but the presence of a well-formed app store is the single most important factor for the viability of a platform for third party developers. If you want to take this a step further and say that a robust third-party software market is the most important factor for the success of the platform overall, well…

I hope Windows gets a good app store soon.

3. Multi-platform users are the best kind

Not only is the Mac App Store getting us new users, it’s making our existing users more valuable. Neat, but how?

So 320,000 people downloaded Evernote in the first week and 120,000 of them became new users. What happened to the rest? Well, about 80,000 people were either switching their Mac client from our direct-download version to the app store version or had simply downloaded the app and didn’t complete registration. Another 100,000 people were existing users who had previously used Evernote from other platforms (mostly the iPhone) and added the Mac version for the first time.

This is both interesting and important. Interesting because the vast majority of these people must have (1) already had Macs, and (2) known about our Mac version from previous interactions with Evernote but hadn’t bothered to install it until the Mac App Store appeared. Important because people who use Evernote from multiple devices are much more likely to stick around and to eventually pay for the premium version. This makes intuitive sense and the data is clear: in a Freemium model, people choose to pay for what they love and the more devices they use Evernote from, the more likely they are to fall in love with it.

The Mac App Store effect works the other way as well: many of the new users who first found us on the Mac App Store went on to also download Evernote on their mobile devices. Our iTunes downloads for iOS devices were up by 54% during the same week that the Mac App Store came out and that’s without any new versions or noticeable change in iOS app visibility.

4. A strike against lowest common denominator

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.

Does this mean that web apps are doomed? Not at all, but the most successful web apps will be the ones that emphasize unique benefits—sharing, communications, integrations—that are better implemented on the web than in native code. This is the main design goal for the next version of the Evernote web client, by the way.

Lost among all the gloomy economic news of the past few years is the fact that there’s never been a better time to be in software. Sure, the emergence and inevitable dominance of app stores will permanently disrupt existing industry practices—I’m glad we’re not in the business of preventing people from making copies of bits, shipping shrink-wrapped boxes or charging people for periodic upgrades—but a company like Evernote simply could not have attained a fraction of our current momentum even three years ago. App stores, cloud services, cross-platform users and Freemium economics made it all possible. The download numbers are certain to decline a bit as the excitement of the first week finds a sustainable steady-state, but the launch of the Mac App Store will have a major, and permanent, positive impact on developers.

It was worth the wait.


AOL’s Editions: The App For When You Crap

Apparently our parent AOL has this super-secret iPad app they’ve been working on for a few months. Like everyone else on the web today, the only thing we know about it is its name, Editions, and that it’s “coming soon” — the stuff on the teaser page. They (smartly) tend to not divulge secret project information to us. Based on the tagline, “The magazine that reads you”, we’re going to assume it’s a Flipboard-like app that looks at your interests and serves up content for you in a pretty format.

But actually, the “behind the scenes” video the team made as an easter egg for the teaser site actually reveals quite a bit more. For example, Senior Director of Mobile Projects, Sol Lipman, was more in favor of the tagline: “The app for when you crap.”

Watch below as Lipman, VP of Communications, Kiersten Hollars, President of Consumer Applications, Brad Garlinghouse, VP of Mobile, David Temkin, and others from the AOL family yuk it up at the west coast HQ. There’s even a too-insidery reference to a certain situation.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Qualcomm Invests $3 Million In Q&A Service ChaCha

Question and answer service ChaCha has just received a $3 million infusion from Qualcomm’s venture arm Qualcomm Venture Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to a whopping $75 million.

In a statement, Scott Jones, ChaCha’s CEO says that Qualcomm’s “experience and insight into the global wireless ecosystem will help ChaCha continue to expand its service worldwide.” ChaCha has been a roll over the past year, achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and reaching record traffic numbers for its Q&A product.

The company has nearly 32 million unique inquisitive users monthly and answers over 3 million questions daily. In December, ChaCha hit a record of nearly one million unique visitors to ChaCha.com in a single day and hit another record of two million mobile SMS text questions in one day.

ChaCha’s success have proven that flexibility in a company’s business model can end up paying off on the long run. Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine but encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people. The company then evolved into a basic Q&A site, focusing on both mobile and web platforms.

And the company has steadily been adding new features to its platform, including a Facebook integration, business listings and ChaCha.me.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Eventbrite Sold Over 11M Tickets Last Year For $207M In Gross Sales

Ticketing company Eventbrite has had a banner 2010. In a blog post wrapping up its 2010 milestones on its company blog the company reveals that gross ticket sales in 2010 were exactly $206,899,900, more than double the $99,141,981 in ticket sales raked in in 2009. The total number of tickets sold in 2010 also ran laps around the 5,141,051 sold in 2009, at 11,004,743.

Eventbrite also had 222,353 events posted in 2010, over 9,370 cities from 147 countries represented, bringing in an 17,224,232 average monthly page views. The most trafficked month for the Eventbrite site was October with 6,738,155 unique visitors.

The post also provides some interesting statistics like ratio of tickets sold to stars in the Milky Way (11 to 200,000), orange cups purchased for the Eventbrite kitchen (36), games of Connect Four played in the Eventbrite office, and bags of candy purchased for the candy bowl (92).

Eventbrite is free for people offering free tickets and charges a fee for people selling tickets through the service. The average Eventbrite ticket price is $60.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Facebook Teams With Snaptu To Launch Rich App For Feature Phones

Facebook has proven to be immensely popular on smart phones: it’s the most downloaded application of all time on the iPhone and probably holds the record on Android as well. But the user experience for so-called feature phones, which still make up the vast majority of cell phone usage worldwide, hasn’t been as rich — users generally have relied on Facebook’s lightweight m.facebook.com site, which gets the job done, but doesn’t really have an ‘app’ feel. Today, that’s changing.

Facebook has just announced the launch of a new application for feature phones that was developed in conjunction with Snaptu. According to Facebook’s announcement, the app will work across 2,500 device models from the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. The application will include a home screen that looks similar to the one seen on the iPhone and Android, and Facebook notes that it also includes contact sync support and faster scrolling through status updates and photos.

If you’re on a supported feature phone, you can download the application right here. To help introduce the new app to users (and get them hooked), Facebook has partnered with 14 mobile carriers worldwide to offer free data access to the application for 90 days. This is probably going to lead to a significant jump in mobile usage for these feature phone users, especially if carriers help Facebook get the word out.

Facebook has another mobile initiative called Facebook Zero that delivers a super-lightweight version of the site to users on certain international carriers, free of charge.

Update: I just spoke with Snaptu CEO Ran Makavy and Henri Moissinac, Director of Facebook Mobile, who shared some additional details.

  • The relationship between Snaptu and Facebook isn’t being discussed (i.e. they aren’t saying how much money is changing hands as part of their partnership, though they did say no ads are being shown in the app). They say that the relationship will be long-term as Snaptu continues to help improve the app.
  • You can only use the application if you are on one of the supported carriers — even if you’re willing to pay your own data fees, the app simply won’t work if you’re on an unsupported carrier. It sounds like Facebook offered these carrier partners exclusivity to help sweeten the deal, but things may change down the line. Makavy points out that even if you can’t get the official Facebook app yet, you can still download Snaptu (and download their Facebook application from their), which is very similar.
  • The 90-day free window begins today, not when the user first gets the app.
  • Facebook found that the big hurdles facing feature-phone users were price and a lack of some functionality on m.facebook.com. Facebook Zero is meant to help with the first problem, this application helps with the latter (and Moissinac says that it should also use less data that m.facebook.com, which should make it cheaper as well).