Facebook users who still rely on the old method of automatically importing their blog content to their Notes will no longer be able to do so starting November 22. read more>>
Timeline will launch when it's ready, Facebook's journalist program manager said during a panel at Columbia University School of Journalism last night. read more>>
Why create an ad for Facebook yourself, when you can lean on a host of advertising experts and creatives for help? That's the thinking behind Trada, which bills itself as a crowdsourced marketplace for ads on the social network. read more>>
A short horror video has made it to the top of our list of the fastest growing applications nine days after Halloween, followed by Zynga's newest and edgiest game. read more>>
Ad spending on social networks continues to increase, as does Facebook's share of that pie, meaning that $7 out of every $10 invested in social network advertising will go to Facebook by the end of 2012. read more>>
We’re excited to announce our latest round of confirmed speakers for Inside Social Apps 2012, coming back to San Francisco on February 8-9, 2012.
In addition to our 19 previously confirmed speakers, we’ll be welcoming the following new speakers to Inside Social Apps:
Carl Sjogreen, Director of Product Management, Facebook
Cory Ondrejka, Director of Engineering, Facebook
Charles Hudson, Co-founder and CEO, Bionic Panda Games
John Earner, GM European Studios, EA/Playfish
Will Harbin, Chairman and CEO, Kixeye
David Katz, VP of Digital Media, Starz
Clara Shih, Founder and CEO, Hearsay Labs
Mike Ouye, Founder and CEO, Red Robot Labs
Suchit Dash, Co-founder and VP of Product, Ifeelgoods
Suleman Ali, Co-founder and CEO, TinyCo
Riz Virk, Co-founder and CEO, Gameview Studios
If you're considering attending Inside Social Apps 2012, take advantage of limited early registration pricing and register now.
Space will be limited, and both previous Inside Social Apps conferences have sold out in advance.
A very limited number of passes are available at the Early Announcement price of $299. This price will be good through Wednesday November 16th only, so we encourage you to register now.
Carl Sjogreen Director of Product Management, Facebook
Cory Ondrejka Director of Engineering, Facebook
Charles Hudson Co-founder and CEO, Bionic Panda Games
John Earner GM European Studios, EA / Playfish
Clara Shih Founder and CEO, Hearsay Labs
Mike Ouye Founder and CEO, Red Robot Labs
Suleman Ali Co-founder and CEO, TinyCo
Will Harbin Chairman and CEO, Kixeye
David Katz VP of Digital Media, Starz
Suchit Dash Co-founder and VP of Product, Ifeelgoods
Daniel Terry Co-founder & CEO, Pocket Gems
Atul Bagga Senior Analyst – Video Games & China Internet, Lazard Capital Markets
Perry Tam CEO, Storm8
Peter Farago VP Marketing, Flurry
Paul Bettner GM, Zynga With Friends
Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam
Michael Lazerow CEO, Buddy Media
Simon Mansell CEO, TBG Digital
Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8
Mike Sego CEO, Gaia Interactive
Tim Chang Managing Director, Mayfield Fund
Micah Adler Founder & CEO, Fiksu
Arjun Sethi CEO, 6waves Lolapps
Brenda Garno COO & Game Designer, Loot Drop
Bill Jackson Creative Director, CastleVille, Zynga
Hussein Fazal CEO & Co-founder, AdParlor
Mihir Shah President & CEO, TapJoy
Lisa Marino CEO, RockYou
Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom, and Investor
Riz Virk Co-founder and CEO, Gameview Studios
We’ll continue to add new speakers to our 2012 lineup, so please check Inside Social Apps in the weeks to come.
Registration
There is very limited $299 Early Registration pricing for the full 2-day conference pass for Inside Social Apps 2012, available until November 16th only.
Previous Inside Social Apps conferences have sold out in advance of event day, so we strongly encourage you to register now.
About Inside Social Apps
Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading social and mobile developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis.
Social applications first made their splash in the US in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms.
Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market.
Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early.
A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on Inside Social Apps for more information.
Registration
We have made available a limited number of tickets at special $299 Early Registration pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register now.
From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco!
Music apps using Facebook have seen their traffic double or even grow tenfold since f8, giving developers at companies like Spotify, and even Ticketmaster, more to love about Facebook’s big platform feature launched at its f8 developer conference in September.
According to a Facebook developer blog today, users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times using Facebook-integrated apps since f8. As we’ve been tracking in our AppData traffic tracking service, Spotify has been the biggest beneficiary, rapidly growing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million daily active users so far since f8. It has even seen some sharp spikes in recent days, although it’s not currently clear why.
The features driving the growth include the newly-introduced ability for apps to publish listeners activity to Facebook's news feed and new home page Ticker, as we’ve been covering. Of course, so has the licensing agreements that Spotify and its partners have worked out — Facebook hadn’t been able to offer streaming music for years due to disagreements with record labels.
Timeline, the new version of user profiles, has yet to become available for most people, but Facebook says today in the post that it expects it to be ”one of the key channels for expression and discovery.”
Facebook also says it has helped stimulate the music industry’s ability to sell tickets for shows. Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and Ticketfly have all seen between $2 and $6 in direct ticket sales for every link shared, according to today's post. Global online revenue for the music industry is forecasted to increase 7 percent to $6.3 billion this year, reported technology research firm Gartner; Facebook could now be helping to drive that.
The developer blog includes some other numbers seen by music app partners since f8, noting a 1350 percentage increase in number of Facebook fans of the band users are listening to on Earbits, a 246 percent growth in business for MOG, and a 30x increase in new users from Facebook to Rdio. Of course, any growth equals a huge percentage when the starting number is small, and that’s the case for all of these other services. Still, we expect the tight integration of music, and the new features, to keep the music industry liking Facebook for a long time to come.
Brands such as Samsung Mobile, Levi's Walmart and Facebook were popular on our list of the fastest growing Facebook Pages by the number of Likes this week, in addition to a few sports Pages, a small business Page and the Halloween Community Page. There were also a few Page consolidations that made the list. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.
Jamaicansmusic.com grew by 675,400 Likes, apparently by a Page consolidation. The other musician that was on the list was singer Adele, whose Page saw 296,000 Likes in the past week as she was nominated for a music award. A few media Pages made the list, TNT We Know Drama by 613,500 Likes as the result of a Page consolidation and then " Titanic" with 409,500 Likes.
Brands previously mentioned included Samsung Mobile with 546,700 Likes as the company promotes a new phone. Then Levi’s saw 509,800 Likes after the company sponsored a nationwide hiring day in its stores. Walmart saw 328,300 Likes on its Page, which includes a variety of promotions that create feed and news ticker stories. Facebook grew by 324,700 Likes and Brazilian discount travel company Hotel Urbano by 323,400 Likes, the Page is constantly posting updates about deals.
There were games on the list, Texas Hold’em Poker with 348,800 Likes and Need for Speed with 324,300 Likes, growing a lot after the release of a Michael Bay-directed commercial. There were also sports on the list. UFC: Ultimate Fighting Championship benefitted from a Page consolidation with 323,100 Likes. Then Real Madrid C.F. with 304,000 Likes and team star Cristiano Ronaldo saw 276,300; both Pages posted constantly about news and team-related photos.
Last night, Charlie Rose aired exclusive conversations with Facebook's top executives, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Taped last Thursday in Palo Alto, the interview first ran on PBS and will also appear tonight on Bloomberg TV and on CharlieRose.com.
Here are highlights we saw.
On the upcoming IPO:
"…We've made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we're going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly… Whether it's a dividend or not, they'll be able to trade their equity for money. And you know, that's something we take seriously, as a responsibility of running the company."
Sandberg and Zuckerberg both remain discreet about timing of the IPO, and Zuckerberg says he hardly thinks about the IPO at this point.
'Can't find' enough talented engineers:
Sandberg: "We have both an education problem and an immigration problem…" We do not train—we don't graduate enough kids from high school. We don't graduate enough kids from college in this country. And having these kinds of skills, we're just absolutely far off."
China expansion is likely far off:
After some hemming and hawing about its plans to expand into China, Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed that they’ve decided not to try to go in at present because of government policies.
Sandberg: So it’s not really our choice. It’s the government’s choice, you know. We’re not available because they’ve chosen to make us not available.
Rose: Because they’ve acted a certain way, you’ve chosen not to go there. Fair enough.
Zuckerberg: Yes.
Sandberg: No, it’s — yeah, yeah.
Zuckerberg then goes on to explain that Facebook wants to be everywhere eventually over the decades and so he hopes they’ll be able to get to China one day.
Why America and Silicon Valley rules:
One, Sandberg says, is the ability to have high caliber engineers, and other is to "educate engineers who can just try out their own ideas" and the "freedom to do that." Free market economics, as Sandberg says. Facebook, Google, Apple: they've all capitalized on America's supportive entrepreneurial environment. And Facebook and Google are pretty similar, admits Sandberg, since they are both founder-led. Then Zuckerberg adds a dig, as an aside: “Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.” Google’s Bradley Horowitz responded on Bloomberg yesterday to say that he was happy to be underestimated. Anyway.
Sandberg: In America, we've had a country of entrepreneurs.
Zuckerberg: Yeah.
Sandberg: We've set up our political system so you can start companies. You can close companies. I think people don't always see the costs of increasing beauracracy on entrepreneurship. The best people are going to go where they can get the best talent and where they have the best environment to hire.
Why Facebook won't build games:
Zuckerberg: "What we're doing is really hard. And we think that we're better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard… And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company."
On Steve Jobs:
Zuckerberg: "He's amazing. He was amazing… I had a lot of questions for him on.. How to build a team around you, right, that's focused on building as high quality and good things as you are. How to keep an organization focused…It's like we're trying to do this thing in the world. And I don't know, a lot of it I just think we connected on that level."
There was a little hesitancy when Rose asked if Jobs ever wanted to buy Facebook. But Zuckerberg recounts that Jobs once said, "I admire Facebook because you guys don't want to sell out."
The company’s founder Charles Jolley was behind Sproutcore, an open source Javascript framework that lets developers create web-based applications that resemble native desktop experiences. He also designed the architecture behind MobileMe’s web-based applications at Apple. Facebook said Jolley will join the company’s mobile engineering team.
His company Strobe, which raised $2.5 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Hummer Winblad, lets developers test code for mobile web apps and manage their deployment across multiple platforms from a single interface. It also comes with analytics to track usage.
The deal to buy Strobe plays into a big push this year to get developers building HTML5-based mobile web applications instead of native ones for the iOS or Android platforms, which Facebook doesn’t have as much power to influence.
After several months of anticipation, Facebook launched an HTML5-centric platform last month that enables mobile developers to spread their applications virally — which is something the native iOS and Android app stores aren’t really designed to do because they’re directory-based and curated (especially in Apple’s case.)
Several companies hired sales and account management staff this week and SNAP Interactive brought on Jon Pedersen Sr. as CFO.
If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we'll get it into next week's post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.
Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.
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Facebook has announced