Category: Tech news

We all know the “four horsemen” of tech: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These are the companies that pretty much everyone agrees will shape the foreseeable future of the tech sector. In some circles, that list makes waves for who is not included: Microsoft. But any rational thinker (meaning those outside of Redmond or anyone who hasn’t made a career as a .Net developer) knows that Microsoft simply no longer belongs on that list.

But that doesn’t mean the list is perfect. In fact, I do think there’s an omission that’s becoming a glaring one: Samsung.

Sure, Samsung is not an American company (it’s South Korean). Nor did it start as a scrappy technology startup that set out to change the world (it started in 1938 as a local produce trading company). Nor does it operate like an American technology company (the entire company is and has been run largely by one family, even through national scandals). Hell, Samsung isn’t even just a technology company (but Samsung Electronics, which I’m clearly going to focus on here, is by far the largest subsidiary of the Samsung Group).

But trying to suggest that Samsung is not one of the most important companies in technology is increasingly folly. In fact, there’s a decent chance that it will end up being the most important tech company of 2013.

This week, Bloomberg reported that Samsung would start selling Tizen-based phones in 2013. According to Jungah Lee’s sources, this is at least in part due to Google’s purchase of Motorola last year. This is important because Samsung is by far the most important Android partner. Not only does it dominate from a market share perspective, it’s really the only Android OEM that is actually making any money. (Motorola, by comparison, is a total dog that is actually losing money.) And it’s making a ton of it.

The company (again, just the Samsung Electronics group) posted about $155 billion in revenue in 2011. That’s almost exactly the amount of revenue that Apple posted in 2012. Samsung should come in closer to $190 billion when its fiscal 2012 comes to a close.

Not only is it bigger than Apple from a revenue standpoint, it’s almost twice as large as the three other “horsemen” combined ($190 billion versus what should be about $100 billion for Amazon, Facebook, and Google in 2012). And unlike Amazon and Facebook which make little or no profit, Samsung is hugely profitable. $12 billion in profit for 2011 should move closer to $20 billion in 2012. That’s not a ton compared to Apple ($55 billion in profit in 2012), but it should be roughly twice as much profit as Google pulls in for the year.

But let’s forget the money and go back to Android. Samsung is so important and deserves a place with the other horsemen because it is the most important piece of the Android ecosystem beyond Google. And it seems that the company is at least exploring the possibility of taking a step back from that ecosystem, or hedging its bet. That could be the story of 2013.

Imagine Samsung, with 40 to 50 percent of the Android market, breaking away to focus on Tizen. Or perhaps more realistically, imagine Samsung forking Android for its own purposes while exploring the Tizen possibilities. Not only can the company afford to do it, there may be several incentives to do so.

Amazon is closing in on its own phone running a forked version of Android in a similar manner to its Kindle Fire tablets. The first iterations of that tablet weren’t great, but they’re getting better. And because it now has its own forked Android app store, Amazon is going to be in control of the entire ecosystem. Samsung has no such control if it remains a loyal Android partner.

Maybe it’s okay with that, but Samsung must be looking at how profitable Apple is as a result of its total control. Shitty mobile skins only give the illusion of control, Samsung needs to control the full stack. And given its position of power, the company has the leverage to do that if it chooses to.

And it’s not just an offensive imperative, it’s a defensive one too. Google continues to say the right things publicly about maintaining distance from its Motorola unit with regard to Android. Of course, it says this with the Google X phone project well underway. A true Google phone.

Perhaps it’s a project meant less to scare Samsung and more to fight back against Google’s true bane: its carrier partners. Or maybe it’s Google hedging against Samsung’s position of power. It doesn’t matter. The Google/Samsung relationship is starting to show signs of strain, and they’re only going to get more pronounced — exhibit A.

Beyond mobile devices, the hot topic for 2013 is the future of television. Most of this is focused around Apple with a little bit reserved for Google’s TV projects. But it’s once again Samsung that is already the leader in the space. Sure, it’s the old school (shitty margin) television space, but why doesn’t anyone think that Samsung can translate its success in smartphones here as well? It simply hasn’t really tried yet.

Perhaps that’s another part of the Tizen equation. Or maybe a forked Android will find its way here as well. But Samsung has a huge head start on Apple, Google and everyone else.

And Samsung isn’t stopping with phones and televisions (or memory chips and flat-panel displays where it is also the global leader). Chairman Lee Kun Hee recently gave a speech to employees underscoring the need to venture into new businesses. The son of the man who started the produce trading company knows that the future of his company will be products that don’t even exist today. Samsung is in this for the long haul.

It feels as if the recent Apple/Samsung legal battles have branded the South Korean company as little more than a copycat in this country. But that’s a dangerous underestimation of a company that is quickly becoming one of the most important ones in tech right now by pretty much every metric. A fifth horsemen.

The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — made it past the Fiscal Cliff in good order and got back to the day job: buying stuff. With CES on the horizon, the talk quickly got down to screens big and small. Passive TV vs. transactional mobile devices, the differences between the platforms are being absorbed by the big players as they rush to consolidate each other’s positions.

Microsoft continues to struggle in this two-horse or maybe three climate, with Amazon straddling both Google’s context engine and Apple’s credit card superiority. The Gang seems well-positioned to navigate, with Android fans favoring the big lead Google maintains in knowing our data from Gmail and search outward, and Apple enjoying the AirPlay loyalty and its potential in the TV Everywhere battle. A good start to an exciting year we all believe is in the cards.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

It’s the New Year and along with resolutions about eating healthier, being kinder and exercising more frequently, I’d like to add one more to the list. Let’s banish the term “big data” with pivot, cloud and all the other meaningless buzzwords we have grown to hate.

To be completely honest–I have been one of the bigger abusers of the term in posts, as you can see here, here and here. It seems like every enterprise startup nowadays is in “big data.” There are even venture funds devoted to investing in “big data” startups.

Why have I grown to hate the words “big data”? Because I think the term itself is outdated, and consists of an overly general set of words that don’t reflect what is actually happening now with data. It’s no longer about big data, it’s about what you can do with the data. It’s about the apps that layer on top of data stored, and insights these apps can provide. And I’m not the only one who has tired of the buzzword. I’ve talked to a number of investors, data experts and entrepreneurs who feel the same way.

According to Vincent McBurney, ”Big Data” originates from Francis Diebold of the University of Pennsylvania, who in July 2000 wrote about the term in relation to financial modeling. That was over 10 years ago. In the meantime, so much has happened since then with respect to how and what people can do with these enormous data sets.

And big data is not just about the enterprise. The fact is that every company, from consumer giants like Facebook and Twitter to the fast-growing enterprise companies like Cloudera, Box, Okta and Good Data are all big data companies by definition of the word. Every technology company with a set of engaged regular users is collecting large amounts of data, a.k.a. “big data.” In a world where data is the key to most product innovation, being a “big data” startup isn’t that unique, and honestly doesn’t say much about the company at all.

According to IBM, big data spans four dimensions: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity. Nowadays, in the worlds of social networking, e-commerce, and even enterprise data storage, these factors apply across so many sectors. Large data sets are the norm. Big data doesn’t really mean much when there are so many different ways that we are sifting through and using these massive amounts of data.

That’s not to under-estimate the importance of innovation in cleaning, analyzing and sorting through massive amounts of data. In fact, the future of many industries, including e-commerce and advertising, rests on being able to make sense of the data. Startups like GoodData, Infochimps, Cloudera, Moat, and many others are tackling compelling ways to actually make use of data.

Another fact worth pointing out is that enterprise companies like IBM, large retailers, financial services giants and many others have been parsing through massive amounts of data for some time now, before this word was even coined. It’s just that the types of data we are now parsing through is different, and we don’t need to be using these data analytics systems through on-site data centers.

So let’s figure out a different way to describe startups that are dealing with large quantities of data. Perhaps it’s about the actual functionality of apps vs. the data. It’s the New Year and a great time to brainstorm over ways we can avoid “the term that must not be named.”

Editor’s note: Bill Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Twist, an investor in companies such as SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and Yammer, and board member of Big Fish Games. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @westcoastbill.

As an early investor and founder with more than 15 years experience, I constantly field questions about the existence of an angel/Series A crunch. Rather than join this debate, I tell investors and founders that it’s more important to focus on the next big thing and think beyond current trends, even in a tough financing/startup environment.

I look for ideas that haven’t been able to come to fruition, or a market that’s been underserved. I’m drawn to concepts that are habitual and pervasive, but still lack an efficiency that could not have been solved or elegantly addressed until now. So that’s why I will be spending a lot of time this year thinking about, well, time – the one thing we all wish we had more of.

“When” Vs. “Where”: The Transition From Location To Time

Even now, we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift away from “where” technology to “when.” While companies like Foursquare pioneered the location-based industry, consumers will now seek the tools that not only tell them where someone is, but when they will arrive or how it will save them time. Things like Apple’s Find My Friends and Google Latitude do serve a purpose, but location is only part of the value. That crucial “when” is the missing element.

My infatuation with Uber reveals this. It’s nice knowing where your town car is, but seeing its ETA is so much more valuable. Similarly, I see so many opportunities for adding “when” to a slew of consumer apps and services next year and beyond. I imagine a day when I know that my yoga instructor (whom I found via Zaarly) has left and is going to arrive at my apartment. When I order from GrubHub or Seamless, I’ll know when that pastrami sandwich is going to show up at my door. Let’s face it — do you really care where your food is? Or, do you really just want to know when it’s going to arrive?

The implications of time will not just affect our personal lives. In the U.S. alone, businesses lose $90 billion annually due to people running late for corporate events and meetings. Just think of the time employees can save when they know that their co-workers are going to be late for meetings — let alone what they could be doing with those precious new-found hours of productivity.

The Most Precious Commodity

But think bigger. Companies like SolarCity can use time-based services to better serve their customers and manage their workforce. Consumers get happy not having to block out a four-hour window waiting for some technician to show up while managers make better efficiencies of inventory and workforce. Advances in mobile and geo-fencing technologies will soon make the “wait for the cable guy” a thing of the happy past.

As we enter 2013, entrepreneurs should be maniacal about targeting pain points that improve our lives. Time is perhaps our most precious commodity and those that make it a fundamental aspect of their business will win – and win big.

Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via John Robb, who’s always worth your attention: The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.”

He fleshes it out in a series of posts, but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the fly.

Sound like a pipe dream? Not at all: Matternet is a startup working on implementing just that for delivery of high-value goods (pharmaceuticals, electronics) to developing countries and/or rugged locations where the roads are so few and/or terrible that UAVs become the superior option. Their idea is for drone transportation to – literally – leapfrog trucks in those areas in the same way the cell phones leapfrogged land lines.

Robb’s, typically, is bigger. Essentially, he envisions the Dronenet delivering to individual buildings and even houses, eventually replacing UPS, FedEx, DHL, and the postal system. What’s more, it would dovetail awfully nicely with the 3D-printing revolution: I’ve argued before that almost nobody needs their own 3D printer, but the Dronenet could ultimately provide not just same-day but often same-hour delivery of newly printed items.

Feel free to be skeptical about the economics or the logistics, obviously – we’re talking about, by definition, a lot of moving parts – but hey, at least you can’t complain that this idea is boring.

Best of all, though, it lets me quote one of my favorite lines in all of science fiction:

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just
human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap
technical fix: smart boxes.

–Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Just as shipping containers (and pallets) revolutionized shipping, the Dronenet will need standard-sized, interchangeable, reusable smart Droneboxes. (Which in turn every self-respecting 3D printer will be able to crank out pretty much from scratch.) They will be to the Dronenet what packets are to the Internet.

If I may step back into a slightly philosophical stance, this would actually be quite a striking development. People have been talking and speculating about the “Internet Of Things” for so long that it has actually threatened to become a little boring before it even begins to exist. Until now my assumption has always been that the Internet-Of-Things mostly just meant ubiquitous Internet connectivity coming to things that already exist in the physical world. But the Dronenet would be different: The Dronenet, if it happens, would instead be an instance of the physical world becoming more like the Internet.

Will it actually happen? Who knows? It may become yet another beautiful notion slain by that tragic assassin named economics. Or niche Dronenets may arise in a handful of places around the world where they make economic sense, but fail to ever quite mesh into, well, a world-wide web.

My greatest concern, though, is not economic but political: it’s that someone will start packing drones full of Semtex and sending them after political targets. I’ve been thinking about drone disasters for some time: a whole four years ago, before drones were big, I wrote (and CC-released) an entire novel about their misuse by terrorists.

That seems inevitable, and it seems likely that when it happens it will lead to a ham-handed, TSA-style clampdown on all drone activity everywhere, and a government monopoly on the use of drones (perhaps for panopticon surveillance), throwing the Dronenet baby out with the terrorist bathwater. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But I fear I have a lot of trouble coming up with reasons why it won’t.

Editor’s note: Rodney Rogers is chairman and CEO of Virtustream. He is also on the boards of UnitedLex, Teliris, and Greensmith Energy Mgmt., and is an angel investor in Cloud Sherpas, BetterCloud, iYogi and others. Follow him on Twitter @rjrogers87.

I’m a large enterprise and my ears are ringing. I hear that you, AWS, know exactly what I need.

Before I get into that, AWS, I want to let you know that I admire you. You made a market. You, quite brilliantly, made and own the public commodity cloud IaaS market. It’ll be awhile before Google GCE makes a dent, and most of the carriers and technology OEMs scrambling to build their OpenStack commercial extensions are far behind you. You own the public commodity cloud, and you will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But this doesn’t mean you know me, AWS, and I believe your foray into enterprise will expose you. Yes, I realize this may be cloud blasphemy to some. Here are six pro-tips from yours truly, me, your Fortune 500 prospect:

1. First Off, re:Invent This

At the most basic level, your enterprise messaging is naïve. There was a lot of bravado coming out of Las Vegas. Here’s what I heard: Private cloud is bad; hybrid cloud shouldn’t exist. The only answer is AWS public cloud, and you’re a fossil if you don’t realize that. You’re talking to me like I’m one of your hacker groupies.

You’ve built your business largely by selling self-service IaaS to those technologists building holistically modern, scalable, cloud-aware applications that drive new-generation consumer technology, and to support test/development environments in the enterprise. Actually, you’ve mostly sold to the 20-something kids of my IT leaders with minimal human interaction against virtually no competition. Well played – err brilliant! And… that won’t happen here. It’s not that simple. There are myriad use-case requirements within my IT walls. Please see my last post on this very topic.

2. Everyone Gets Their Ass Kicked Sometimes For No Good Reason

You’ve used your superior scale and product portfolio to dominate the IaaS space for the commodity public cloud use-case against both proprietary up-starts and OpenStack wannabes. In my large enterprise arena, however, you’ll be competing with companies that are 100x larger than you and who have enjoyed deep selling relationships into the enterprise for 10x as long as you’ve been around.

It’s not to say that those legacy technology providers are better than you. In fact, this space has never been so ripe for disruption. However, you can bet all your marbles that large legacy OEM technology (good or bad), legitimate up-and-comer innovation, irrational VAR FUD, legacy golfing relationships, et al. will make the competitive process a lot more complicated than you’re used to. You’ll need to respect that and acclimate to it. Thinking it’ll be different for you is like thinking a newly elected U.S. president will go to Washington, D.C., and change Washington, D.C. We’ve all seen how that’s worked out.

3. Get Ready To Grind, Baby, Grind

IRR, ROI, ROE, ROA. There’s an endless financial rationalization to the sales process in large enterprise. It’s built this way on purpose. Why? To slow it down, of course! This is not something you’re used to. Beyond financial justification, you’ll have to benchmark your value proposition against your competition. Get ready to get frustrated. Get ready to watch pipeline entries slip from quarter to quarter. What will seem unnatural today will be SOP tomorrow.

You also announced at re:Invent that you have hired more than 100 salesmen “to focus on enterprise.” Bravo! The fact that you thought that was newsworthy makes my point (see Nos. 1 and 2). The enterprise does not necessarily just buy IaaS if you plan to capture high-value, full-production landscapes. We buy solutions (see Nos. 4-6). Oh and finally, it takes IaaS and application content (sometimes even client industry content) to sell those pesky solutions. A “salesman” is only one pawn in the game. Think expensive customer-facing solutions engineers and architects. And more.

4. Performance Enhancers Are Legal; It’s Called Your IP

Most of the private cloud appliance pushers out there fear-monger “performance and security” when they sell their solutions to me versus the public cloud. As cloud aficionados, we all know that fear is not always justified with proper engineering. However, I see three problems here for you:

1. All public cloud technical architectures are not created equally.
2. Most of my workload landscape infrastructure spend today is not on “cloud-aware” applications.
3. Your private instance offering emasculates much of the economic benefit of your core product.

You can try to tell yourself that SLAs don’t matter and are not worth the paper they are printed on. However, for revenue-generating, production-application environments, the reality is they do matter to me. I not only need assurance that the infrastructure will be available, but assurance of response times of the production applications that run on it.

Enterprises are largely virtualized on VMware today leveraging SAN storage technologies. We all know the expense of VMware licensing and the scale-out inefficiencies of its cluster limitations. However, this high-overhead configuration is built for secure performance, and this has pre-conditioned your buyer. You’ll need to prove a modified Xen kernel running simple multi-sized VMs atop NAS, as IaaS will be enough to ensure enterprise-grade performance. (Hint: A Chaos Monkey will not be the answer for sophisticated memory-intensive, transaction-intensive, fully integrated production ERP systems.) Not having an abstraction layer to optimize consumption and/or guarantee things such as IOPS (ultimately, application response time) will make this a tough road for you. Not impossible, but certain use-case requirements are going to kill you.

5. Make Your Customer Forget These Two Words: “Availability Zones”

I’m not going to rail on your highly visible cloud outages here. I believe it’s silly the way some of your competitors do so in their brain-dead “I-don’t-live-in-a-glass-house-also” sort of way. If anyone knows that sometimes “shit happens” in technology, it’s me. However, it’s important you also understand that shit can’t happen here.

The fact is that your more sophisticated customers today can, for a price, engineer ways to reduce outage risk. In the enterprise, for revenue generating production application landscapes, there is simply no alternative. You’d do well to offer pre-engineered replication/fail-over as a core service offering. We may not be hipster-cool consumer technology startups, but when you do have a problem, we can’t stop shipping product and get on Twitter to bitch about your outage.

6. Get A Little Touch In Your Life

Your “no-touch,” managed-services model is just not going to fly. I actually would suggest the opposite. Again, we buy solutions. In fact, our environments are constantly morphing. We buy and sell divisions. We require constant performance tuning and sizing. We require asset utilization rates that do not look anything like this.

Managed service wrappers sell IaaS in complex, full-landscape production IaaS. The thing is, it’s really more about application performance than infrastructure for us. Having the content to support those applications running on your infrastructure is a big-time difference maker. Partner with an SI like an Accenture or Capgemini for that? Hmm. I can only imagine what happens to the value proposition in this case (likely bad things), but I guess “one throat to choke” would be pro-tip No. 7.

In My World, The Customer Actually Does Know Best

Unlike those sexy startups, I have a lot of time, capital, and expertise invested in my IT infrastructure. Flip a switch to holistic unsupported self-service commodity public cloud? No. I’m going to use existing assets where it makes sense, leverage new technologies (potentially yours included) for the same reason, and apply those new technologies by required use-case.

There might be something to this hybrid cloud thing after all.

Graphicly is about to close a $1 million bridge round of funding, as first revealed in a regulatory filing.

The company started out as a marketplace for digital comics, but last year it launched a new set of tools aimed at helping publishers distribute their content onto a wide range of platforms, including iOS, Android, and Kindle. CEO Micah Baldwin told me today that things have been taking off, with millions of dollars in annual revenue and 1,500 percent growth year-over-year. (And even though it’s no longer focused exclusively on comics, it recently announced a big comics deal to distribute more than 60 Peanuts titles.)

Baldwin added that the funding is supposed to get Graphicly to profitability, which the company should reach by the middle of 2013. At that point, the startup may raise a larger Series B.

And he has other plans for 2013. Right now, he said that building a native app based on a book is an expensive process, so as an alternative, he wants to add more and more interactivity and app-like capabilities to e-books created in the Graphicly platform.

“Publishers seem to want it and desire it,” he said. “They’re stuck in this world of doing apps, which are just really expensive.”

That strategy won’t just add capabilities for existing Graphicly customers — it will also allow the company to expand into new areas. As an example, he said that quick and easy publishing of interactive e-books could dramatically change education, with students turning in their assignments in e-book format.

Baldwin said the funding comes mostly from existing investors. The company has now raised about $6 million from backers, including Mercury Fund, 500 Startups, Dundee Venture Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and Venture51.

You can read more about Baldwin’s publishing strategy in this interview.

Sequels can be risky business for embattled social game developer Zynga. They can extend the lifespan of a popular franchise like Farmville. But they also siphon away players from the original game.

So if a sequel doesn’t retain players well, it can cannibalize the player base for both the original and the follow-up like with Mafia Wars and Mafia Wars 2, which the company shut down just days ago.

But Farmville 2, with its 3D graphics, has managed to stay atop the charts since it was released late last fall. The game is really the one standout sequel in Zynga’s recent line of follow-ups including Cityville 2, which has dramatically lost traffic over the past several weeks.

Zynga just released some engagement stats today about the performance of Farmville 2. To underscore how big a risk Farmville 2 is for the company, the original game has been one of the top money makers for the company since it was launched in 2009. Even three years later, it made 20 percent of Zynga’s $285.6 million in online gaming revenue in the third quarter of last year. That’s $57 million in one quarter alone or more than a half-million dollars a day. The company was super careful with its prize possession, even testing it under the name of Big Harvest in the Philippines before launch. All eyes will be on Zynga’s next earnings call, when the company will reveal how well this sequel has performed financially.

Farmville 2 currently has 42.4 million monthly active users, 7.4 million daily active users and a healthy stickiness ratio of daily-to-monthly active users at 17.5 percent, according to tracking site AppData. It appears to have peaked though, and has lost about 700,000 daily active users in the last seven days, according to the service.

That’s not necessarily something to be alarmed about though, because most social games peak early on and then decline while retaining the most lucrative players or “whales.” Even if active usage declines overall, revenues can still increase from a good title for months or years to come. The original Farmville was around for about eight months before it peaked in monthly active usage, but that was before Zynga had amassed its network of players on the Facebook platform.

Heyzap, which built a social platform for mobile games, has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding.

The round was revealed in a regulatory filing (first spotted by The Next Web). Co-founder Jude Gomila confirmed the news over email and said the funding comes from existing investor Union Square Ventures and Qualcomm.

Heyzap was incubated by Y Combinator and started out as a platform for Flash games before refocusing on mobile. It has been rolling out a number of new features over the past few months, including player leaderboards and achievements, and the company says it now has 9 million registered users.

Gomila said the new funding will be used to hire engineers and salespeople: “Our leaderboards, achievements and ads SDKs are taking off and we want to fuel the growth there.”

Heyzap has now raised more than $8 million total.

Facebook keeps user counts for its mobile apps hidden, but analyst Benedict Evans found a way to uncover them and they provide critical insight into the direction and performance of Facebook’s mobile efforts. Most interestingly, Facebook’s Android user count is growing much faster than its iPhone user base, but is found on a lower percentage of Android devices. Let’s take a closer look at the data.

A year ago, Facebook stopped reporting user counts for its own mobile apps via the Graph API. But if you searched for one that none of your friends used and hovered over the search result, you could see its monthly active user count (MAU). Evans of Enders Analysis meticulously recorded until “some time in November [2012], those disappeared and were replaced” with hover cards lacking the usage data, he tells me. He incorrectly calculated Facebook’s mobile web site stats due to overlap between native app and HTML5 site users. Facebook declined to comment but solid analytics sources and old official numbers say the rest of his stats are accurate.

Evans gave me the raw data dump from his research, which is more current than his blog post, and here’s what it shows.

iOS vs. Android

As of September 2011, Facebook for Android has 66 million MAU and Facebook for iPhone had 91 million MAU. In December 2011, right before Facebook stopped openly publishing stats, Android surpassed the iOS app. By just 11 months later in November 2012, Android had grown to 192.8 million MAU while iPhone only had 147.2 million MAU.

This shows Android is a core source of growth that helped Facebook reach 604 million mobile users by the end of Q3 2012. This underscores the need for Facebook to speed up Android development. Many new features and sometimes entirely new apps like Pages Manager launch first on iPhone. This could be because Facebook defaulted to giving employees iPhones for a long time, and still more team members carry them than Androids.

While Facebook for Android may have more absolute users than its iPhone counterpart, the iPhone has a much better penetration rate. Facebook’s native app is actively used by 73.6 percent of the estimated 200 million iPhone install base. Only 35 percent of the estimated 550 million Android install base see monthly usage of Facebook’s native app. This may be in part due to the popularity of Android in China where Facebook is blocked. However, it may also show Facebook’s lagging penetration in emerging markets like India where Androids are common.

This all leaves out the iPad, though. Facebook for iPad rapidly grew from just a few million users in September 2011 to 48 million MAU in September 2012. If you estimate iPad’s install base at 100 million, 48 percent use the Facebook app monthly. That’s a lower penetration than on iPhone but worthy of regular updates.

Meanwhile, out of the 195.2 million iOS devices regularly accessing Facebook’s native apps, only 53.8 million or 27.5 percent of devices have turned on Facebook’s iOS 6 integration. That means there’s lot of people who aren’t using contact sync, easy sharing, and single sign-on for third-party apps. Facebook may need to come up with a way to convince more users to turn on the integration, both for its own benefit, and to convince Apple that Facebook is a powerful partner.

The big takeaway from the iOS / Android platform battle is that Facebook needs to focus more on Android. If Facebook’s iOS and Android apps have continued on the same growth trajectories, by now Android likely has more MAU than the iPhone and iPad apps combined. Even if Android is not the preferred mobile OS of employees, building for it is critical to keeping its overall mobile usage growing.

Feature Phones Are Big. RIM, Nokia, Windows Not So Much

From September 2011 to November 2012, the Facebook’s feature phone app called Facebook For Every Phone that’s built on the Java Platform, Micro Edition, more than doubled in MAU to 82 million. The feature phone app’s growth shows emerging markets around the world are getting on mobile, and a decent number are using Facebook.

We don’t hear much about this app from Facebook. That might be because most of its employees carry smartphones, and so it may be harder to see how important it is, brainstorm improvements, and test updates. But until low-cost smartphones start displacing feature phones in the developing world, Facebook needs to innovate here.

What it doesn’t need to worry as much about are the second-tier smartphone platforms. RIM’s BlackBerry still has a somewhat significant Facebook user base of 60.2 million as of December 2012. Unfortunately that was only up from 48.9 million in November 2011, and its failed PlayBook tablet’s Facebook app had just 690,000 MAU by December 2012. Meanwhile Nokia had 15.7 million MAU by November 2012, and Windows Phone had only a couple million Facebook users. Fracturing engineering resources across these platforms is likely inefficient for Facebook.

Messenger Grows Quickly, But Is Still Far Behind

Facebook does a lot. Having a ton of features on the web makes sense, but cramming them all in a single mobile app can make it feel bloated. That’s why Facebook began releasing standalone apps in August 2011. They give users quick access and a dedicated interface to a popular feature, and helps Facebook experiment with new capabilities it might add to its primary smartphone apps.

After buying the group messaging and SMS-replacement app Beluga in March 2011, Facebook re-skinned it, and hooked it into its unified web/mobile messaging system. The result was Facebook Messenger which launched for iOS and Android in August 2011.

A month later it had almost 3 million MAU. Growth picked up in the fall and it had 10 million users on each platform by November. It continued steadily gaining users, and Android pulled in front of iOS in Fall 2012. By late November 2012, Messenger had 22.8 million iOS MAU, 32.3 million Android MAU, and 1.6 million BlackBerry MAU for a combined 56.7 million MAU.

That sounds impressive but Messenger still lags far behind several international messaging apps. WhatsApp is believed to have several hundred million users and China’s TenCent says its WeChat app had 200 million users as of September 2012. That’s why we’ve heard Facebook has made inquiries about acquiring WhatsApp as well as Snapchat, which it instead ended up cloning as Poke. Owning the platform you private message on is critical to Facebook because knowing who you message with helps it refine its content-sorting relevancy algorithms. There’s also potential monetization options within messaging.

Facebook Camera Can’t Compete With Instagram

Facebook knew it had do something unique with photos on mobile. So, long before it began negotiations to buy Instagram, it started building Facebook Camera. The Instagram deal was signed quickly, and Camera was almost done so it launched the standalone app a month later in May 2012.

Though Camera offered its own filters, a powerful bulk upload option, and more cropping flexibility, Instagram had too much momentum and a loyal user base. Instagram passed 100 million users in September 2012.

Thanks to Evans, we’re now getting our first look at Camera’s progress, and its lackluster performance. A month after its launch it hit 1.4 million users, dipped for a while, and now six months later it only has 1.5 million MAU. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to Facebook. It showed a slick photo selection flow, filters, and bulk uploads were popular, so Facebook added them to its primary apps. But in the end, Facebook may be better off dedicating development resources to Instagram.

What’s Next For Facebook Mobile?

To put it simply — going hard at Android, making its feature phone app more viral, and figuring out whether to concentrate on one omni-app or several standalone apps. Obviously there’s monetization, but that’s for another article.

Android’s growth momentum means Facebook for Android needs to become its premier app. Facebook’s competition with Google might make that painful, but it needs to stick to its social layer strategy. It should view building an incredible Android app as a way to take advantage of Google’s mobile install base, not the other way around.

There’s a ton of of feature phone users, and not enough are on Facebook. The social network should look to how it can convince its feature phone users to get their friends on-board too. That might mean some kind of incentive program for feature phone recruiters or recruits, such as mobile data discounts.

Finally, with Messenger, Camera, Poke, and Pages Manager, its standalone app portfolio is starting to bulge. Users might not want a home screen full of Facebook, and that might lead them to bury the apps in a folder. Then again, Google has done well with a suite of standalone mobile apps. Either way, 2012 was about Facebook getting serious about mobile in general. 2013 will be about trading the shotgun for the scalpel.

[Image Credit: Kelsey Dake / The Daily Beast]

[Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

Your song hits the Billboard Hot 100 Charts at number 11, you and your brothers have played with the likes of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, things are great, you’re on fire. You’ve got it made, right? Wrong. Lester Chambers is living proof that just because you become “popular,” doesn’t mean that you will be rewarded properly for it.

Lester’s tale is multifaceted, starting with the release of the hit single “Time Has Come Today” in 1966 with “The Chambers Brothers.” It’s a song that you’ve probably heard on the radio, in commercials and in many Vietnam-themed movies. Mr. Chambers has received a pathetic $1,300 from the record labels for his talent and work having to do with the song.

Zip to 2012, when Lester published a photo of himself on Reddit, one that you’ve probably seen already:

He’s even done an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the site. I got to spend the better part of yesterday with Lester, his family, band (The Mud Stompers) and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit. What I saw was a group of people wanting to right a wrong that was dropped on an unsuspecting Lester Chambers so many years ago. You see, Lester didn’t read his contract fully and didn’t ask a lawyer to do so, either. Sadly, he was taken advantage of time and time again, even though the labels promised to “fix it.” They never fixed it, so with Ohanian and Reddit’s help, the Internet has its chance to shine once again.

The Power of Community

Since Lester was brave enough to post that photo on the Internet, the folks on Reddit figured out who he was and bubbled it up to Ohanian. He reached out to Lester, and was surprised when Lester responded. The rest, as they say, is history.

The power of community, in any size, shape or form, is a marvel to watch. Something that Reddit has always been known for is fostering a mob mentality that can work for the common good. This was pretty obvious when Ohanian decided to take it upon himself to fight the SOPA and PIPA acts. In the end, the Internet won.

When it comes to Lester and his career, what you have is a wonderful and talented man, someone who never squandered riches, took drugs, hurt anyone or did anything “wrong.” What he did incorrectly was care too much about what he loves the most, his music.

When people come up to me and say that they have my music, I don’t ask them where they got it, I just say thank you for listening. – Lester Chambers

For the love of music

The stories that Lester shared with Alexis and I yesterday blew us away. The Chambers Brothers toured with the Beatles, played with Jimi Hendrix, and had a fan in Bob Dylan – all of the things that you hope and pray for as a budding artist. Lester’s story was supposed to have a happy ending, much like this music does, but it wasn’t in the cards.

This can change now; Lester has a second chance.

When we were first shown our album cover for “Time Has Come Today,” it had four white dudes on it, not me and my brothers. – Lester Chambers

Not only did Lester and his brothers get screwed out of royalties, as African Americans, they were treated less-than-human. When they went on tour, they were forced to sit in the back with the kitchen staff, hoping to get a “ham sandwich” or other “scraps.” There was no VIP treatment for the Chambers’. According to Lester, they were once told “We simply cannot allow four black dudes and a white drummer to play on our stage in front of white patrons.” That’s wrong, and we know this now, but Lester had to live through it.

His son, Dylan, looks at Lester like any son does, with a twinkle in his eye. He’s always been proud of his father and his heritage, no matter how bad things got. At one time, Lester was homeless, along with Dylan, and family friend Yoko Ono helped them out. Yes, these folks are a national and global treasure, but the record labels didn’t care about them.

The Internet does, though.

Kickstarted

With Ohanian’s help, there is a Kickstarter project that ends in just five days. Naturally, it will be used to fund his next album with his band The Mud Stompers.

If you play it, I’ll sing it. – Lester Chambers

If you sing it, I’ll play it. – Baron Chase, The Mud Stompers

To date, over $56,000 has been raised by over 2,000 people, and I imagine that this album might be Lester’s best ever, if only because of his renewed trust and vigor for the music that he loves so dearly. He never lost his love for the music, but his world was shattered by how others treated him. Maybe this time, things will be different; in fact, I know they will be.

Last night, Lester and The Mud Stompers performed at San Francisco coworking space, WeWork Labs. I’m not sure how many people were there, but I was told that more than a hundred signed up for the free Q&A and concert. Listen to Lester explain his relationship with The Beatles:

Lester is appreciative for all that he has, doesn’t crave what he doesn’t have, no matter how many horrible things that he’s been through. The best part about all of this is that you can see and feel how excited he is to continue on his path of creating and sharing music, which is and will always be what he’s known for.

His time has come today, and tomorrow. And the next. The Lester Chambers story is one that will never end, and he hopes that young musicians will learn from his plight, suggesting that you “make sure that all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed in the right place” when it comes to contracts.

Hop on the train, ya don’t need no ticket or baggage, just get on board.

In case you’ve missed our previous Weekly Good pieces, have a look here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Austin-based Vobi.com, a cloud-based collaboration startup which will sell its services through mobile operators, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Dallas VC firm Trailblazer Capital. The firm specializes in communications companies that have unique IP, explains Vobi CEO Mark Castleman, making it a good fit as Vobi’s lead investor.

Castleman himself has extensive experience in both telecommunications and collaboration, most recently with PBX Central, a PBX-as-a-service company he founded, where he now sits on the board. He brings that experience to Vobi, which has been in stealth mode for around two years.

Vobi will offer subscribers a platform for online collaboration, allowing them to work on projects, share files, media, and more. It’s not an online file storage site, though – it only works to connect users with those types of services. And access to Vobi’s dashboard is based on your phone number.

In practice, the way this may work is that instead of phoning a co-worker or client and then instructing them on how to view or edit a given file – maybe through a WebEx meeting, a URL they type in, an email attachment, etc. – they can simply enter in their phone number at Vobi.com and a workspace for collaboration is presented immediately, no effort required.

While that sounds simple enough in concept, the technology that makes such a thing appear seamless is non-trivial. To be clear, with Vobi, you’re not typing in a username and password to access this portal – just your cell phone number. “We’re big believers in mobile phone numbers being the key identity element,” explains Castleman. “It’s globally unique. My phone number in France is accessible, but my social security number in France means nothing.” He also notes that email addresses aren’t completely portable either – when someone leaves their company, for example, they lose access to that email.

After using the phone number to connect its users, Vobi will then connect a user’s mobile number to their other identities like email, and accounts on various cloud services or social networks, making it something like a smarter caller ID. On this front, the service may compete with other startups, like TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CallApp, for instance, but Castleman explains that it’s not just about delivering additional info to enhance a phone call, it’s actually about collaborating while on the call.

“Our enterprise use case is that you have a workspace – your tablet, desktop or laptop – and your voice interface is your phone, ” he says. “Meanwhile, you’ve shared content with [your call recipients] like your Box, or Dropbox, or Salesforce, and emails. When you make that call, on your Vobi screen on your laptop or computer, you get an activity stream that shows you all the content that you’ve shared, and you have a collaboration panel.”

“We reconstitute the workspace in that environment to show you what your last interaction looked like, as well as any asynchronous shares you’ve done through Box, etc.,” he adds.

More simply put – it’s a smarter collaboration service that picks up where you left off, after having first authenticated users via their phone numbers.

To make this work, Vobi needs carrier relationships as well as partnerships with online cloud services. Castleman – who happens to be on his way to an AT&T developer conference today – says he can’t provide details at this time as to who those carriers and partners will be, but he would say that the service will launch when it gets at least one of the top U.S. carriers on board. That’s expected to take place this year.

Vobi is designed to be a good fit for carriers, he tells us, as the base feature can be sold like other monthly, subscription-based features such as Call Waiting or Call Forwarding, for example. “Through the carriers, like a switch, it’s turned on. And once it’s turned on, it’s like electricity. Now the applications are like the various things you plug into it,” he says referring the forthcoming Vobi-connected apps that would connect a user to Salesforce, Box, and others. “That’s a great model for the service providers, too, because they’re used to it and because they know how to sell features,” he adds. The apps will be sold both in the operators’ app stores and in the consumer-facing markets provided by platforms makers like Apple and Google. (Vobi is first launching on mobile as an iOS and Android app.)

However, in a move that could also prove disruptive to web conference providers like GoToMeeting and WebEx, users won’t need to install a smartphone app to use Vobi. They could simply type in their cell phone number to start a collaboration session on their notebook or desktop. Because the Vobi is tied into carriers’ database of subscribers, it will immediately know who’s logged in and who they’re currently talking to, and present the screen accordingly.

Vobi’s technology is fully functional, and all of its pre-launch efforts now are being directed at commercialization of the service at scale. The company, co-founded by Cameron Cooper, filed its patents years ago, and has been very quietly and deliberately moving forward ever since.

“The carrier world is a slow-moving world, but once things get baked into that world, they have the ability to have an enormous impact,” says Castleman. “When you embrace them, you can really do some cool stuff because – let’s face it – everyone is their customer.”

Hulu just posted an internal email from CEO Jason Kilar to its blog, indicating that he and CTO Rich Tom will be leaving the company during the first quarter of 2013. The timing is new, but word that Kilar was on his way out was circulating as early as August 2012, when an internal memo included a passage about transitioning to a new CEO.

In the email announcing his and Tom’s departure, Kilar said he’ll be working with the board to ensure a smooth transition. Kilar said that the decision was difficult, but didn’t share much about the reasoning behind his or Rich’s departure, or what they’ll be doing next.

“I’ve been so fortunate to play a role in this amazing, ongoing journey,” he wrote in the email. “My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I’ve ever made. Though the words will fall short of the intended mark, please know how much this team means to me and how very thankful I am to be able to innovate and build alongside you each day.”

Kilar says in the blog post that he’ll be providing a more specific date to the Hulu team at a later date, but also plans to be involved in steering- the company “for much of Q1.” The exiting CEO took the reins at Hulu in June 2007, shortly after it was formally announced.  He helped grow the company to its current state, with 3 million paying subscribers for Hulu Plus, the premium version of the service launched in late 2010.

In December 2012, Hulu said that it managed $695 million in revenue, a 65 percent increase from its 2011 haul. The content library also grew 40 percent over the year, and in total, the company managed to generate more than $1 billion in revenue for content partners who offer video through the service.

Recently, however, Hulu has been seen as facing a number of complex issues, thanks in part to the exit of private equity firm Providence, which sold its stake in the company for $200 million in October. Providence was seen by some as the last disinterested party on a board full of media companies, all of which have a more direct stake in the content that appears on Hulu as streaming video. When Providence made its exit, our own Ryan Lawler explained why the time might soon be ripe for Kilar to exit, perhaps to explore more entrepreneurial pursuits.

At the time of Providence’s equity sell-off, Lawler said not to expect an immediate departure by Kilar, but he did say to watch for developments along those lines to start taking shape within the 12 months that followed that move. It might be early yet to call Kilar and Tom’s exit the beginning of an “unraveling,” as Lawler put it, but watchers will definitely be paying a lot more attention to what Hulu does next now that one of its primary architects is taking his leave.

Developing…

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

As Amazon’s continues to add more tools to its Web Services (AWS), the Management Console that provides a graphical user interface to services like S3, EC2 and CloudFront started to look a bit unwieldy. Today, Amazon is making a number of design changes to make the Management Console a bit easier to use for developers. In addition, Amazon is also launching a tablet-optimized view of the AWS Console and an Android app for managing EC2 cloud computing instances.

The new design, says Amazon, will offer more customization options and improve “information display on your screen of choice.” The new design now allows users to customize the Console navigation with shortcuts to the services they use most often (you can just drag and drop them into the menu bar), for example, and allows developers to easily select and compare the settings of different AWS resources.

The Console now also features a new “Monitoring View” that allows users to see statistics for their resources like CPU utilization, database connections, read latency etc. Other improvements include endless scrolling and larger buttons (especially useful for tablet users), as well as the ability to collapse sidebar menus.

As for the EC2 Android app, Amazon notes that it will allow you to see your EC2 metrics, stop and reboot EC2 instances, receive CloudWatch alarms and view CloudWatch Graphs. While the app currently just supports EC2, Amazon says that it plans to support additional services “very quickly.” Support for other mobile operating systems is also in the works.