Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook just hit 1,000,000,000 users. That’s a lot of people tagging and poking and posting GIFs of puppies kissing geese. So, to celebrate, Facebook released the dumbest video we’ve seen in a while. More »

Monetization makes you do crazy things, and none perhaps so crazy as Facebook encouraging users to promote their own lives so as to make them stand out among their friends. The promoted posts trials allowing individuals to highlight particular updates for a fee is one of the odder transitions from business Facebook use to personal users; meanwhile, founder Mark Zuckerberg tells BusinessWeek he’s “optimistic” about mobile monetization, but falls short of actually outlining Facebook’s plans to squeeze cash out of the 600m mobile users.

Asked about where the next big jump in user figures will come from, Zuckerberg highlights mobile for its massive growth. “The big thing is obviously going to be mobile. There are 5 billion people in the world who have phones, and a billion people using Facebook” the social CEO said. “There are actually already 600 million people using Facebook on phones, so that’s growing really quickly. And as more phones become smartphones, it’s just this massive opportunity.”

Exactly how Facebook plans to take advantage of that opportunity, however, is unclear. It’s not a new problem, either; worried whispers around Facebook’s mobile users not pulling their weight in terms of site income were circulating prior to the company’s IPO, and Zuckerberg himself fingered the gap in strategy in interviews last week.

“There are a lot of different bets that we’re making. A lot of it over the next few years is going to come down to mobile. There is this funnel that I think is pretty clear and in our favor, which is there are going to be more people using mobile devices. There are already 5 billion so that’s where the user growth is going to come from. We already know that people who use Facebook on mobile use it more, spend more time on it” Mark Zuckerberg

One possible area of development could be the overlap between commerce and mobile use. Research has already shown the growth of mobile devices among users comparing purchases, even if they still often return to their desktop in order to complete the transaction. Zuckerberg hints that there’s potential in “what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are” and predicts “there’s about to be a big push in commerce,” perhaps a lucrative one if Facebook can leverage its mobile users and take a cut from any shopping virtual spree they go on.

“Over the long term I also think we’re going to make more money per amount of time that people are spending on mobile, because it has this focus as a device. It’s more like TV, where you’re doing one thing at a time” Zuckerberg concludes. “The advertising and monetizing has to be integrated in, whereas on desktop we kind of reached this equilibrium where there’s the content and then the ads off to the side of it. So I’m really optimistic about that.”

The first step toward such integration is Facebook Gifts, allowing users to buy their friends real-world gifts even if they don’t know their address, clothes size, or other personal preferences.

Shaky self-promotion: Facebook’s cash-milking and vague 600m mobile monetization is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Earlier this year at CES, Razer revealed a concept that they had been working on dubbed Project Fiona. If this is the first time you’ve heard of it, Project Fiona is a gaming device concept cooked up by the folks at Razer which has been designed to combine the power of a PC, and the portability of a tablet into some sort of mobile gaming device. As you can see in the rendering above, the device will also come with dual handles on each side where buttons and analog sticks can be accessed. While that’s all good, a release date for Project Fiona has yet to be determined as it was unclear if Razer had plans to turn it into a reality.

Well if you love the idea of Project Fiona and wouldn’t mind getting your hands on the finished product in the future, Razer’s CEO, Min-Liang Tan, has posted on Facebook that if the Project Fiona post reaches 10,000 Likes/Shares in the next 7 days, Razer will be turning Project Fiona from a concept into a reality. This is not the first time that Razer has taken to Facebook to gauge the reactions of their customers, but it works, so if you want to see Project Fiona on the shelves in the future, give it a Like/Share! At the time of posting the Facebook post has 8,388 Likes and 3,343 Shares.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook: Over one billion served, Money makes your Facebook posts go round,

Facebook has passed one billion active users, social network founder Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed, of which 600m are mobile users. The new milestone again sees Facebook’s average age of users fall, now down to 22 versus 23 when Facebook hit 500m users in July 2010; according to the site, it has seen over 1.13 trillion “Likes” since the February 2009 launch.

“If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you” Zuckerberg wrote today of the announcement. “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

There are 140.3bn friend connections, including check-ins and location-tagged posts, and Facebook now has a total of 219bn photos uploaded. Counting images that have since been deleted, 265bn images have been uploaded to the site since fall of 2005.

Other stats include 17bn location-tagged posts, and 62.6m songs played a total of 22bn times overall. Zuckerberg told Businessweek that the celebrations were relatively low-key: “Well, just everyone came together and counted down” the founder said, “then we all went back to work. We have this ethos where we want to be a culture of builders, right?”

Next up, though, isn’t necessarily chasing more membership numbers, but using the shared data more effectively. According to Zuckerberg, that may well involve commerce:

“So for the next five or 10 years the question isn’t going to be, does Facebook get to 2 billion or 3 billion? I mean, that’s obviously one question. But the bigger question is, what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are. I think that’s going to be really transformative. We’ve already seen some of that in games and media, music, TV, video, that type of stuff. But I think there’s about to be a big push in commerce” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

Facebook hits 1bn active users: Commerce integration next says Zuckerberg is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Welcome to Wednesday evening, everyone. Today, T-Mobile and MetroPCS announced that their rumored merger was indeed real, and not long after, T-Mobile CEO John Legere released a new video explaining the deal. We heard more about the iPad Mini today, with the Wall Street Journal claiming that it’s already in production and comes with a 7.85-inch screen, while accessory maker Cygnett released cases for the iPad Mini a little bit early. Speaking of iPad, we found out today that Apple ships a whopping 188,000 iPads per day, which is just plain absurd.

The Kindle Paperwhite has officially sold out, so expect a wait of 4-6 weeks if you order one today, while listings for a 32GB variant of the Nexus 7 and the Galaxy Nexus 2 popped up in a warehouse database. Apple will require approval for third-party Lightning accessories, and EE’s 4G network will go live across the UK on October 30. Oracle says that the rumors aren’t true and it isn’t planning to purchase NetApp, while Google was awarded a patent for its smartwatch today as well.

A tape featuring an eerily accurate Steve Jobs Q&A session from 1983 was made public today, and an Apple job posting suggests that an all-new SoC is on the way. The FTC has hit a former scareware distributor with a massive $163 million fine, and iFixit gave us a look inside the new Super Slim PS3 today. iFixit also told us that the amount of toxins in smartphones is on the decline, which is only a good thing, and HP CEO Meg Whitman is saying that the company will probably have issues making a profit next year.

The first presidential debate is tonight, do you know where you’ll be watching it? If not, we have a few suggestions for you. The budget-priced Nokia Lumia 510 was spotted in the wild today, and Facebook has started testing promoted posts for all regular users. Apple struck up a deal with biometrics firm Microlatch today, while Twitter Surveys were introduced as a paid service for advertisers and Sony’s PlayStation Mobile launched on the PS Vita and select Android devices.

Finally tonight, we have a couple of original articles for you to check out – Don Reisinger asks if there can ever be another Apple, while Chris Davies goes hands-on with a BlackBerry 10 Alpha B device. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, enjoy the rest of your night folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: October 3, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.