BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Facebook Boasts That A 'Crazy Hack' Made Its New Android App Possible

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Facebook Ships Best Version Yet Of App For Android (Facebook)
Because of memory limitations and other coding issues, Android had to be reconfigured in order for Facebook's massive app to be able to work on the open source platform. Yet, according to the company, it's the best version of the app yet: "We released this code with Facebook for Android 2.0 in December. It's now running on hundreds of different phone models, and we have yet to find one where it doesn't work. The great speed improvements in that release would not have been possible without this crazy hack. And needless to say, without Android’s open platform, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to ship our best version of the app. There’s a lot of opportunity for building on Android, and we’re excited to keep bringing the Facebook experience to more people and devices." Read >>

BII_HTML5Update_MobileWeb1 Mobile App Engagement Continues To Dominate Mobile Web (Nielsen via BI Intelligence)
Apps are the Internet portal of choice for U.S. mobile consumers. According to Nielsen, time spent in mobile apps continues to dwarf mobile Web engagement. As of August 2012, minutes spent per month in mobile apps was 4.6 times that of the mobile Web, up from a multiple of 2.7 in March 2011. Between March 2011 and August 2012, consumer time spent in mobile apps grew 200 percent compared to 75 percent growth for the mobile Web. The reason for the disparity seems pretty straightforward: The biggest time buckets on mobile are best accessed through apps. Games, the most popular mobile activity by time spent, are almost exclusively accessed through apps. Social networking, the second most popular activity, is likewise an app-driven phenomenon.

iOS Continues To Dominate Mobile Ads (Velti via i2G)
Mobile advertising and platform exchange firm Velti has released its monthly snapshot on the State of Mobile Advertising for February 2013. Among the interesting tidbits, the report found Apple iOS devices accounted for a whopping eight out of the top 10 mobile devices serving ad impressions. iPhone devices had a 37.4 percent share, while iPads comprised 17.2 percent of all impressions served in February.

top devices mobile ads

And while Samsung Galaxy devices comprised less than 5 percent combined share of impressions, the report speculates the release of Galaxy S4 might significantly alter the mobile ad market in the coming months. Read >>

Department Of Defense Set To Go iPhone (Electronista)
The mobile device testing program currently underway at the Department of Defense has produced a pending purchase order for Apple hardware. Following completion of the first phases of the project, as well as a few other initiatives coming to fruition, the Department of Defense will be ordering just over 650,000 iOS devices from the Cupertino manufacturer following conclusion of the sequester. The breakdown was 120,000 iPads, 100,000 iPad minis, 200,000 iPod touches, and the remaining 210,000 filled by various iPhones. Read >>

Yahoo Buys Mobile Startup With Big Search Chops (Search Engine Land)
Yahoo announced that it has acquired Jybe. The company is described by Yahoo as "a personalized recommendation company founded with the vision to help people find the things they love to do based on what’s trending in their social circles." It sounds like a "social search" or "social discovery" app. All five Jybe team members are former search people, and former Yahoo employees. Read >>

Pinterest Acquires Livestar, The Mobile Recommendations Startup (TechCrunch)
Pinterest acquired Livestar, the mobile recommendations app founded by Microsoft alum Fritz Lanman. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but this seems to be an engineering acquihire situation. Livestar was founded in 2011 and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt this past fall. The service was meant to provide personalized recommendations from your friends and authoritative sources from around the Web, and was aiming at disrupting the likes of Foursquare, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes. Read >>

New Rules For Mobile Payments And Loyalty Startups (Forbes)
For every truly outstanding startup, five or six have a faulty premise, fail to solve a problem, or choose “cool” over simple. Here are the rules for mobile payments and loyalty startups:

Solve a real problem
Be invisible
Solve the merchant's problem, not the consumer's
Target emerging markets
An e-wallet is not a business

Lucky for startups, banks aren’t the only game in town. Still, most promising startups will likely partner (or be acquired by) platform owners, industry incumbents, or retailers. Check out the article for the last five rules. Read >>

Surprising Mobile Facts (New Relic via readwrite mobile)
Smartphones are in fact taking over the world. An infographic from Web application monitor service New Relic offers some surprising statistics about the mobile landscape. For example, every day more than 1.3 million Android devices are activated — which is way more than the 300,000 babies born daily. Users now spend more time each day surfing the Web or on their mobile apps than they do watching television. There are more than a billion smartphones in use around the world, and age is no barrier — teens, adults and seniors are all well represented among their users. Read >>

more androids than babies