The Appstore currently supports testing of more than 5,000 Android apps, and is enabled for more than 16,000 Web apps. If users have a compatible smartphone, they can first try simulating the app on their phone before deciding whether they want to buy it.

“The more we remove friction for customers who want to try apps, the more apps they will try. Those customers are more likely to find apps they are excited to download,” Amazon said in a post on its Appstore developers blog. “In this way, Test Drive helps customers understand the value of premium apps and helps drive downloads of freemium apps.”

Amazon said the test drive feature will be activated on selected compatible smartphones, and will be available for free for users who upgrade their phone with the latest version of Amazon Appstore for Android.

“Amazon brings the Test Drive experience to Amazon.com and Android phones using the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers,” Amazon said. “When customers click the Test Drive button, we launch a copy of the app on EC2. As customers interact with the app, we send those inputs over the phone’s Wi-Fi Internet connection to the app running on Amazon EC2. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to the customer’s computer or phone. All this happens in real time, allowing customers to explore the features of the app as if it were running locally on their mobile device.”

The blog post goes on to note that apps requiring Java Native Interface (JNI), keyboard, multi-touch, microphone, camera, gyroscope, near-field communication or GPS are not part of the test drive feature, but soon will be included in the upgraded test drive releases.

Google doesn’t offer such lucrative services and deals or app testing to the emerging mobile platform; they are just concentrating on the increased availability of Android applications. Users can ask for a refund only once within 15 minutes from downloading the app from Google Play. We can only hope that Google Play soon introduces more consumer-centric features, which they’ll have to do if they want to remain competitive.

Facebook Upgrades App Center for Mobile

Shortly after its IPO filling Facebook announced the latest development in its forthcoming App Center for mobile apps. The company blog post said that developers can now use the Facebook App Center platform to place their apps, and iOS and Android users have streamlined options to install apps via the platform, either through their computer or mobile devices.

“Facebook sends over 160 million people to mobile apps each month through news feed and timeline,” Facebook software engineer Brent Goldman wrote in a blog post this week. “Soon, with the App Center, it will be easier than ever to drive mobile app installs and reach the over 500 million people using Facebook on mobile devices.”

The App Center is available from Facebook’s iOS app, Android app and mobile website m.facebook.com.

The move will allow developers to better integrate mobile apps with the Facebook platform, and will also provide them a stage to incorporate Facebook login on their apps. This will give the Facebook app experience some structure, as users will have the control to download apps, rate apps and get to know some detailed information about the apps before buying or downloading.

This could also help Facebook’s larger mobile strategy, as the social network could add more mobile users, which will help the company to target monetization through a budding ecosystem across mobile devices.

For installing apps from a mobile device, you can follow Goldman’s instructions as posted on the blog:

“All apps built for iOS, Android, and the mobile web have a “Send to Mobile” button on their app detail page. Once people click “Send to Mobile,”” they’re logged into your app and we immediately send a Facebook notification to their mobile device. By clicking the notification, they’ll be redirected to your mobile web app or the respective install page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.”

China Mobile App Store – An alternative to Google Play

Google Play service isn’t yet available in China because of censorship concerns, despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the smartphones sold in China run on Google’s Android OS.

China Mobile Ltd. saw that as an opportunity, opening its Mobile Market store for Android apps in 2009. Since then, the app store has gained 158 million registered users and more than 630 million apps have been downloaded, making it world’s largest carrier-operated app store.

“Without having to compete with the official Google store, China Mobile has an opportunity that operators in other countries don’t have,” said Kent, a London-based analyst. “China Mobile’s relationship with subscribers leaves it well- placed to take advantage.”

China is a huge market for any mobile vendor.  Smartphone shipments are projected to increase 52 percent this year to 137 million units, according to a March estimate from market researcher IDC.

China’s censored web content and online stores selling apps, games and e-books are helping local players to drive and promote their other businesses.

“If a developer makes a very good app, then it will help boost traffic on our network and help our growth that way,” said China Mobile’s Chief Executive Officer Li Yue.

Android’s Google Play Faces Rising Competition from Amazon, Facebook and China is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• The Top 15 Cloned Android Apps and Games Posing as Trojans
• Google TV Steps It Up as Online Video Market Explodes
• Android Market hits 20,000 Apps Milestone
• 5 Standout Features We Want for Android 5.0 Jelly Bean
• Everyone’s Copying Apple’s Game Center
• HOW TO: Spot the Right Consumer Cloud for Your Media

The actual thread of this Trojan has been mitigated because the FBI took down the network involved and seized the servers that ran it—however, infections still persist.

After seizing the IP addresses used by DNSChanger, the FBI has been running the servers as if nothing happened so that people infected could change their settings and move on. However, on July 9, 2012 the FBI will shut down these servers and everyone still infected with this Trojan will suddenly find themselves out in the cold and unable to access web pages—this includes Fortune 500 companies who might have infected systems.

The first date set for this shutdown, March 8, has already passed because the FBI filed for an extension on the shutdown with the expectation that doing so without finding a better solution could be catastrophic.

In fact, Paul Vixie, “Father of DNS,” came out recently to warn that simply shutting down the DNSChanger servers would cause outright blackouts. “Remediation, which has not worked, has taken many forms, which did not work,” Vixie drily noted as reported by The Register.

Solutions have been passed around suggesting that the FBI change the DNSChanger servers to redirect requests to pages that explain the person is infected and then link them to instructions on how to fix their computer. However, this probably wouldn’t have any effect on internal systems that nobody uses to surf the web—but that said, even out of the 500,000+ infections every single one will not be caught.

Google has decided to step up to the plate and offer a solution: the above, except that it will be through their search engine and would provide the message that they should get themselves fixed.

Krebs on Security reports the statement from Google and how the warning will appear to those infected:

The company said the warning (pictured above) will appear only when a user with an infected system visits a Google search results property (google.com, google.co.uk, etc.), and will include the message, “Your computer appears to be infected.” Google security engineer Damian Menscher said the company expects to notify approximately a half-million users in the first week of the notices.

“In general we want to notify users [of malware infections] anytime we are capable of doing so, but the fact that we don’t do this more often is really just because it’s hard to come across cases where we can do it this accurately,” Menscher said.  “In many cases we only have maybe a 90 percent confidence that someone is infected, and the false positive rate of 10 percent is simply too high to be feasible. But in this case we can be essentially certain that someone is infected.”

Google is throwing a lot of resources at this, including translators to localize the message across the globe.

“We think part of it is that all of the public press on this so far has been in English or a handful of other languages,” Menscher said. “It turns out that only half of these infected users speak English as their primary language.”

Time is running out on people and corporations infected with DNSChanger. Individuals may simply just not know and if they’re lucky enough to use Google they’ll find out shortly—corporations, on the other hand, will have to look to their IT Departments to make sure they’re not burned come July 9.

No Mayans involved.

FBI Shuts Down DNSChanger in July; Google Sets Out to Warn the Infected is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Anonymous Threatens To Shut Down the Internet; the FBI Could Darken the Cloud Instead March 8
• Anonymous “Operation Blackout” That Didn’t Happen but What-Could-Have Been
• Tomorrow: Anonymous Threatens to Blackout the Internet on March 31st
• Feds File for Extension on DNSChanger Trojan Shutdown
• Online Threat Growing Rapidly, Can Destroy Companies, says FBI Cyber Security Head
• Adobe Addresses Vulnerabilities in Defense Industry, Recommends Upgrades

Almost ironically, one of the statistics that the USBJS tracks and publishes information about is cybersecurity and hacking.

According to rumors about the leak, it includes not just data internal to the department but potentially also e-mails, memos, and other communication. The file has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay and is available for download, however few people have received it so far in order to sift through its contents and verify what it contains.

Alongside the leak, Anonymous released one of their commonly stunning—and often surreal—videos to commemorate the event.

Here’s a transcript of the English-portion of the video:

Greetings world,

We are Anonymous.

Today we are releasing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now.

Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump.

We Lulzed as they took the website down after being owned, clearly showing they were scared of what inevitably happened.

We do not stand for any government or parties; we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information.

We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.

The price we pay very often is our own freedom. The price governments pay is the exposure of their corruption and the truth being revealed, for the truth will set us free in the end.

So once more we call on you. Hackers, activists, and freedom fighters; join us in our struggle against these corporate.

Dispatches from Anonymous collective sources also claim that the USBJS shut down their public website in order to stop the attack but there’s no evidence that this happened.

In a statement released yesterday, the USBJS responded to ZDnet with the following statement:

“The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a website server operated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that contained data from their public website. The Bureau of Justice Statistics website has remained operational throughout this time. The department’s main website, justice.gov, was not affected.”

Anonymous Allegedly Leaks 1.7 GB U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics Data is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• Anonymous Hacker Havittaja Slams DDoS Into CIA, US Department of Justice Websites
• Christmas Hack of Stratfor Leaves US and UK Intelligence Officials Laundry Flapping in the Wind
• The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks Undergo Massive DDoS Attack from Unknown Source
• Anonymous Looks to Obsolete Pastebin for Leaks With AnonPaste
• Pastebin Starts Policing Hackers’ Posts, Says They’re Not Against Anonymous
• Anonymous “Operation Blackout” That Didn’t Happen but What-Could-Have Been

Pronounced “social,” the project from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs is not designed to compete with Facebook though it is launching with a similar premise, allowing students to share and search content with their peers for research purposes.

“FUSE Labs’ So.cl project is now accepting all users interested in joining the site,” Microsoft said in a statement. “So.cl is an experimental research project focused on the future of social experiences and learning, especially among younger people. So.cl combines search and social networking for the purpose of learning and is the latest experiment from FUSE Labs.”

So.cl search is integrated with public Bing APIs to display web pages, images, or videos search results data.

To connect to the social site, you must enter your Facebook or Windows Live login information. So.cl lets you initially define your interests based on themes (like music, sports, travel, art, food etc.).  Once you set up your profile, you can start to monitor the activities of several people, follow and be followed by other users. You can also comment and publish text, photos and video. The central search engine is powered by none other than Bing, searching these themes with a live chat option.

“We expect students to continue using products such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other existing social networks, as well as Bing, Google and other search tools,” Microsoft said on the social site. “We hope to encourage students to reimagine how our everyday communication and learning tools can be improved, by researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives.”

A Competitor to Google+

So.cl combines several functions of social media, search engines and an interface very similar to Google+ from which you can share content. Although the So.cl interface has a more than reasonable resemblance with Google+, you can also see the influence of other social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The site resembles Pinterest in that users can create boards. It’s similar to Facebook in that it provides the ability to follow other users, and like Twitter in a way to follow general interests such as film or design.  And just like the initial days of Facebook, the network is only meant for universities and students.

Despite the glaring similarities to today’s most popular social networks, Microsoft is really building off its existing services, and even leveraging one of its most popular social partnerships to date. So.cl uses Facebook login to create new user accounts, and as Microsoft has a sizeable investment in Facebook, they’re likely to continue teaming up around certain things like social search and Skype integration.

As a standout feature, Microsoft adds “video parties” in So.cl that distinguish the site from other social networks as it allows users to search for videos, which then can be edited and shared with other users, though Google+ aims to do something similar with Hangout.

Microsoft’s Social Networking History

This isn’t the first time Microsoft’s gotten involved in social, having injected user-generated content to enhance search recommendations on Bing.  Bing’s social approach has largely been sidelined by Google’s massive reach, and has yet to prove the real potential and Bing.

Microsoft’s research team also developed location-based social networking that brings together the physical and online world for social networking services.

Future So.cl Goals

What priorities we will see in the furthered development of the Microsoft’s social network in the coming months?

On paper, so.cl is still an experimental project, but in fact it leaves little confidence that Microsoft intends to use so.cl as a research tool just for students. Rather, Microsoft likely plans to explore the social media space on a broader spectrum, targeting a niche audience in hopes of gaining early adoption through its research-enabled value proposition.

At first glance it appears that Microsoft is planning to use the experience of real search users to boost its own search engine, Bing.  Your search results are shared with others, and the results can also be access by third parties.  This means that the social interactions can also benefit other companies and partners, building a business model and potential advertising platform relatively early.

Microsoft is yet to integrate Bing search engine with So.cl, but looking at the long term, this may help revive Bing and enable Microsoft to take advantage of growing trends around social search and recommendations.

Window 8 operating system and the next version of Windows Mobile OS will also likely offer a number of ways to post on its social network, completing the circle and competing at a wider range with Google’s encompassing approach to social search and Apps.

Can Microsoft’s New So.cl Network Revive Bing Search? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• The Little Bird that Could: 100M Twitter Users Ripe for Ad Revenue
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But almost as quickly the early gain faded, and shares of the world’s largest social networking company were trading just above their initial offering price before rebounding in the afternoon. Facebook’s stock was trading at $38.15 by 1 PM in New York.

The price band was initially set as $34-38. To celebrate the much-anticipated IPO, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell at the NASDAQ stock exchange Friday morning. Facebook put up 421 million shares of its common stock for sale.

The IPO filing was managed by Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup.

Facebook’s initial public offering was “unprecedented in terms of the demand” from average investors, said Stephen Kay, a managing director at brokerage Knight Capital who works with retail brokerages.

Confidence in the Company

The IPO price now values the company at 107 times more than its 12- month earnings, which is more than every Standard & Poor 500 member except Equity Residential and Amazon.

“It shows tremendous confidence in the guy wearing the hoodie,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, referring to Zuckerberg and the signature sweatshirt he wore during meetings to market the stock. “He hasn’t specified how he’s going to do it, but he’ll have to do it to justify this price.”

Facebook grew its earnings 65 percent last year, faster than most companies. Facebook’s $16 billion share sale has surpassed that of General Motors, making it the second-largest stock market debut in US history.

Market Cap

At the current valuation, Facebook is now placed ahead of Amazon and Cisco, and ranks the 23rd largest U.S. company by market cap, according to Capital IQ.

In terms of total market cap, Facebook is now at $104.1 billion, the largest in the U.S history.

“Facebook is the 18th IPO worldwide so far this year to price above initial projections,” said Dealogic.

With a total share of 484.4 million, the social giant would be generating $18.41 billion, making it the second-largest U.S. offering ever behind record-holder Visa’s $19.65 billion deal in 2008.

Initial Reactions

Some asset managers responded the Friday debut as a disappointment following a historic run-up to the offering.

Michael Mullaney, vice president and chief investment officer for Boston-based Fiduciary Trust, said only a handful of clients are interested in buying Facebook shares.

“If we did get one it would have been a small piece,” said Mullaney. “And then who would we give it to? Which one of our clients gets the shares? I’d rather trade it on the open market with every Tom, Dick and Harry. It makes my life easier.”

Ronald Coleman, head of research and institutional equity of Columbus Advisors Group in Taunton, Mass., said he was looking a target price of $50 to $55 a share.

“It’s a flop,” he said. “I was looking for a 20% to 30% pop on day one, and you didn’t see that. Long term, the model is still a good one, but the problem was they waited too long to go public.”

Underwriters then bought the stock to keep it from falling below $38 after its debut.

Chris Brown, manager of the Pax World Balanced mutual fund, made a $14 million investment on a secondary market before the IPO.

“Going into the IPO, there has been a lot of skepticism from investors, in particular institutional investors, questioning anything from whether the price of the stock is fair, to whether Facebook can successfully monetize and sell ads,” he said. “We’re long investors. It’s nice to have the stock up for one day, but it’s only one day. It’s hard to extrapolate much as to the future of the company.”

Investors’ Future Plans

Facebook has allocated nearly 15 percent of the shares to retail investors. Executive management team of Facebook plan to sell 89.4 million shares, including restricted stock units, options and common stock.

Others like Goldman Sachs aimed to sell 28.7 million, and Venture capital firm Accel Partners planned to offer 49 million shares to investors.

“There’s hundreds of millions of people that want to emotionally buy this stock and most of them are going to have to buy it in the aftermarket,” Jon Merriman, chief executive officer at investment firm Merriman Holdings Inc. in San Francisco, said before the stock began trading. “I’d like to see it season over a couple of months.”

David Menlow, president of research firm IPOfinancial.com expects to see the shares appreciate in coming days and investors should hold it for longer period.

“I think people will buy and hold for the longer term,” Menlow said. “We would like to see the company’s stock settle somewhere between $40 and $45.”

Facebook Waited Too Long to Go Public: Initial IPO Reactions is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• Can Microsoft’s New So.cl Network Revive Bing Search?
• Pinterest Joins the List of $1 Billion Dollar Enterprises

Facebook’s business model has also attracted lots of attention with the pending IPO, particularly how they’ll develop around advertising, building out their monetization efforts for their burgeoning mobile brand and other media entities.

Here’s your final roundup of Facebook news before the IPO hits:

Facebook tops social on Android – needs to leverage mobile presence

According to new SmartMeter data, the NPD Group’s Connected Intelligence sector, Facebook’s app and social site is the most used social networking website and app on the Android platform. Nearly 75 percent of U.S. Android smartphone users have accessed the platform in March, making it the most popular social-networking site on the Google platform.

The Facebook app on Android  has quite a reach, with users spending over 15 minutes a day, or almost 470 minutes a month.

In its regulatory filings leading up to its IPO Facebook said that usage growth is a result of their innovative mobile products. The company hasn’t yet publicized details on how they plan to monetize the 500 million users who use Facebook on their mobile devices. The current data will benefit the company in unleashing their mobile advertising potential, a necessity for Facebook once they go public.

“Ultimately, Facebook’s mobile success rests on delivering compelling mobile app and web experiences, and monetizing on these experiences,” said Linda Barrabee, research director, NPD Connected Intelligence. “In order to do this, Facebook needs to ensure that monetization efforts via advertising enhance and do not disrupt the mobile social consumer experience; and with Facebook’s IPO looming and trading expected to begin on May 18, all eyes are on the company.”

Facebook Pages Manager app debuts for iOS

During the build-up to Facebook’s $100 billion-plus IPO offering, mobile took center stage. Yesterday, the social network giant quietly unveiled Facebook Pages Manager, an app for iOS for marketers and advertisers to manage their brand pages.

The app looks similar to the current Facebook iPhone app, and allows users to view recent user activity, writes post, and access Page Insights stats, like the number of people visiting your page, the weekly total reach and number of people talking about your profile pages.

“We’re testing an app that helps owners of small to medium Pages more easily manage their Facebook presence,” Facebook said in a statement.

The free app is available for download via the iTunes store in selected regions only. Facebook didn’t say whether the Android app will get a similar app offering.

Facebook’s One Trillion Dream

Could any company ever top the trillion-dollar mark beating established giants like Apple, Exxon Mobil and Walmart? An interesting analysis on Mashable thinks Facebook has that potential.  And surprisingly, it could be sooner than you think.

According to the social network’s latest S-1 securities filing, advertising accounted for more than 80 percent of its $1billion in revenue in the most recent quarter. The company had revenue of $3.7 billion last year.  After the IPO, the company will be valued 27 times of that revenue at around $100 billion.

So theoretically, if the permutations and combinations are correct, another $37 billion in revenue or over 120 percent annual revenue growth year after year will lead Facebook to reach the trillion dollar mark. At this rate, the company will hit $37 billion at some point in 2014.

The most likely source of this growth would be advertising. Facebook is also expanding outside of its traditional product lines, most notably into mobile business.

“You don’t have the distribution problem, you don’t have the manufacturing problems, you don’t have problems that typically limit growth,” says technology analyst and Enderle Group president Rob Enderle. “Facebook’s limits are simply the speed at which it can grasp a particular group.”

But does Facebook will ever reach that milestone? Enderle predicts “That would be a textbook mistake.”

Facebook monthly active user base has increased by 118 percent between March 2009 and March 2010, but it slipped to just 43 percent between 2010 and 2011 and further to 33 percent last year.

In addition, Facebook’s $100 billion valuation is due to the expectation of demand for stock, not because of its income. It had a lower advertising revenue figure last quarter compared to the previous quarter. Moreover, Facebook experienced a setback when General Motors pulled $10 million worth of ads from the platform.

“If Facebook were to focus on becoming a $1 trillion company, they probably won’t make it,” Enderle says. “You over-set expectations. If employees are led to believe it will be a $1 trillion company, and if investors are led to believe it will be a $1 trillion company, and if Facebook only triples itself, in the eyes of those people it will have failed.”

Mark Zuckerberg Returned to Writing Code

Bloomberg Businessweek’s story on how the Facebook founder hacked the world of Silicon Valley revealed the young entrepreneur is again going back to his roots – he has started writing code after a six-year hiatus from programming.

So what took Zuck back to basics? As Facebook nearing public and some of its best talent will even get richer, the technical CEO wants to stand out as an inspiration to the engineers in what they value most – writing codes and focused on building Facebook brand.

Facebook IPO Sets Sights on $1 Trillion as Zuckerberg Inspires His Engineers is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• How Facebook IPO Affects Its Ad Network: the Need for a Mobile Ecosystem
• Two Sides of $100B Facebook Valuation, and Why California’s a Big Winner
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• Can Microsoft’s New So.cl Network Revive Bing Search?
• Facebook Waited Too Long to Go Public: Initial IPO Reactions

Lightbox creates innovative mobile products, especially for Android and HTML5. The Lightbox Photo app automatically sets personal photo blogs based on a user’s uploads.

“The Lightbox team has incredible experience developing innovative mobile products that people love,” Facebook told AllThingsD. “We look forward to welcoming this world-class team of engineers to Facebook.”

The London-based Lightbox team will join Facebook, but the social network will not acquire any other data or services from Lightbox expect for the seven members joining Facebook’s team.  In the coming weeks, Lightbox will be open-sourcing portions of the code written for Lightbox and posting them to their Github repository.

“We started Lightbox because we were excited about creating new services built primarily for mobile, especially for the Android and HTML5 platforms, and we’re honored that millions of you have downloaded the Lightbox Photos app and shared your experiences with the Lightbox community. Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users,” said Thai Tran & Nilesh Patel, Co-founders, Lightbox, in the official Lightbox blog.

Lightbox services will run till June 15^th after which the company will shut down the service. Users can download all their information from Lightbox till that date.

Facebook is expected to have their initial public offering on May 17, and in the coming days Facebook’s busy making quite a few acquisitions, mostly in the mobile space. First was the Instagram acquisition for $1 billion, then Tagtile, the customer-loyalty application and finally the acquisition of mobile discovery startup Glancee.

The addition of Lightbox’s mobile developers is another step towards strengthening the Facebook mobile ecosystem. Facebook aims to cater to more mobile developers as they experiment with advertising models in their own network.  Facebook, through its mobile products, wants to create a robust platform to monetize and to adopt new advertising and marketing plans, and that will be key for its revenue-generation once it goes public this week.

Lightbox Is the Latest Mobile Photo Acquisition for Facebook as IPO Nears is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• HOW TO: Export Your Instagram, Glancee and Lightbox Data
• How Facebook IPO Affects Its Ad Network: the Need for a Mobile Ecosystem
• Waiting for Instagram for Android? Try These Apps First
• Online Jobs Spike in Q3: Animators, Mobile Apps Developers, and Content Writers Wanted!
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As part of Facebook’s pre-IPO road show, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman, met with potential shareholders and investors about their mobile and social plans.  Zuckerberg during a meeting in Palo Alto last week, discussed the company’s mobile strategy in particular.

Facebook users are increasingly and consistently accessing the social network via their smartphones, a trend that Facebook hope to capitalize through advertising as it prepares for its IPO.

“Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where our ability to monetize is unproven, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results,” Facebook notes in its IPO filings.

Mobile is a top priority

In the last few months Facebook has been busy making quite a few acquisitions. Facebook’s purchase of Instagram surprised many, considering its $1 billion price tag. Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that this was a timely purchase, as it directly fits into the company mobile strategy.

Facebook anticipates that mobile devices are the future, especially applications that focus on HTML5.  Connecting users around their mobile activity is another trend Facebook will likely monetize through brand marketing, as it’s done online with Spotify and other companies that were quick to support the newer Timeline.

“Over the next 10 years or so, every consumer category should be transformed to be built around people,” Zuckerberg told fund managers. “People will listen to music and watch TV with other people through Facebook.”

Mobile growth has exceeded 10 times the reach of the PC web, in just a third of the time. Facebook will need to adopt new advertising and marketing plans to master the platform.

“Mobile growth has set a new precedent as the first truly global platform—obtaining 10 times the reach of the PC Web in one third of the time. Today’s consumer demands a richer experience on both their smartphone and tablet device. In fact, people worldwide are now spending more time on their mobile devices than watching TV.

“In the U.S., people are spending about 142 minutes a day on their devices, compared to 135 minutes for TV and 96 minutes on PCs, making mobile the primary media consumption channel in the nation, yet mobile ad spend has not increased at a proportionate rate. The reason behind this is that the new mobile paradigm requires a completely new way of thinking, a new set of rules and standards and a fundamentally different strategy,” said Anne Frisbie, VP and MD, North America, InMobi.

Mobile Facebook users spend way more time with the mobile site than on the desktop. That means that Facebook is losing money, since it doesn’t run its display ads on its mobile site.  And Instagram has succeeded in a field in which Facebook still somewhat clumsy, though Instagram, too, has yet to fully monetize its mobile presence.

Facebook also collects personal more data including user’s location, which would help the company to offer more relevant mobile ads.

“We know Facebook has an awful lot of data, but what they have not worked out yet is the most effective means of using that data for advertising,” said Catherine Tucker, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They are going to have to experiment a lot more.”

Facebook may be opting to go into the smartphone market on its own, as rumors rise around the social network building a smartphone with HTC.  One benefit of Facebook launching its own device is the expanded possibilities of direct access to its ecosystem, which Facebook is already improving.

Mobile Apps Ecosystem

Considering over 488 million users are accessing Facebook on their mobile device, any improvement made in mobile ecosystem will have a great impact on the future of Facebook’s mobile strategy.

“Look, whom Facebook is competing – with Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like. You must have a strong brand and a strong user platform,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

As a part of its goals to monetize a mobile ad network, Facebook officially announced its own catalog of mobile applications. The catalog, dubbed the Facebook App Center, will allow users to enjoy the wide range of Facebook applications and mobile phone apps across iOS and Android devices.  The company plans to generate additional mobile traffic with the App Center, and Facebook engineers are busy creating products designed to help  its 488 million mobile user base.

Nevertheless, the core problem for Facebook still lies in the advertising model, which generates 85 percent of sales. The advertising revenue per user is no longer growing, and advertisement sales aren’t keeping pace with their gains in mobile users.

“In terms of Facebook’s valuation, the big issue is whether they’re going to be able to grow to have sustainable profits,” said Ritter, finance analyst in Gainesville. “The biggest issue in that regard is the mix of desktop users versus people using their mobile device.”

Facebook will need to jump ahead of its traditional advertising, and maybe even take a share of the revenue generated by developers who are going to sell apps in the App Center, helping it diversify advertisement tactics for the mobile scene.

How Facebook IPO Affects Its Ad Network: the Need for a Mobile Ecosystem is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Lightbox Is the Latest Mobile Photo Acquisition for Facebook as IPO Nears
• Facebook IPO Sets Sights on $1 Trillion as Zuckerberg Inspires His Engineers
• Two Sides of $100B Facebook Valuation, and Why California’s a Big Winner
• Facebook’s New Premium Ads and Its Impact on Advertisers
• Android’s Google Play Faces Rising Competition from Amazon, Facebook and China
• The Best of Mark Zuckerberg

According to Bitcoinica, this represents only a fraction of the total of their bitcoins and withdrawal requests will be honored; but they have suspended operations while the investigation proceeds. The exchange also believes that the database itself was compromised.

This particular breach comes after a months of repeated, serious wallet compromises where massive numbers of bitcoins have been stolen or lost. In early March, a Linode server hack caused the loss of ฿46,703 BTC (worth $228,845 at the time) with the largest fraction of nearly ฿43,000 BTC of the loss coming out of Bitcoinica’s pockets. In August 2011, Bitomat lost their wallet with almost ฿17,000 BTC due to a backup failure when using Amazon’s elastic-computing cloud. Also in that same month, MyBitcoin.com disappeared with $250,000 worth of BTC. Finally, starting the long-line of targeted attacks against Bitcoin wallets and exchanges (or just plain bugs) was the hack against MtGox last year in June—the nascent currency hasn’t caught a break with breaches, insecurity, and bugs since it started to gain widespread publicity.

Since bitcoins aren’t just numbers in a bank, and it’s possible to steal them by just copying them out of a wallet and then transferring them, they make a pronounced low-hanging-fruit to hackers looking to make a quick buck. MtGox and other exchanges have seen huge amounts of expenditure and investment into making their own severs more secure against invasion since last June; but it’s obvious that the digital nature of bitcoins are changing the face of the digital heist—and Bitcoinica is the latest victim of a vast loss.

According to posts on the Bitcoin Talk forums, left by Bitcoinica CEO Zhou Tong, the hackers appear to have breached root access at their server host at Rackspace discovered via a massive transfer of bitcoins from the given wallet from what appeared to be one of the site administrators. To this extent, it’s suspected that the Rackspace password was changed by attackers via the password-recovery mechanism and an intercepted e-mail. Amidst the comments, some respondents criticized Bitcoinica for not using better security such as two-factor password recovery and offline cryptographic storage for the bitcoin wallet.

Of course, there are strong reasons to keep particular sums of bitcoins liquid and open in wallets in order that they may be moved quickly when transactions need to happen. As a result, Tong defended the decision to keep such a large wallet in the open:

“The sum of margin balance is the absolute minimum of funds we have to keep (so that we can honor every withdrawal request),” Tong explained. “Since the system is down at the moment, we don’t have the knowledge of open positions. We’re pretty sure that margin balance can be covered with our off-site reserves, but we are unable to determine value of unpaid unrealized profits and the unpaid swaps.”

The Bitcoin market has seen some ups, some downs, but largely it’s been driven by popular attention and these large-numbered and high-profile hacks reveal that its vulnerable to what I dubbed a “new type of bank heist.” Bitcoin exchanges are the cyberspace version of Wells Fargo transporting money via stagecoach and locomotive with bandits looking to waylay the money train.

Bitcoinica’s ability to cover the bitcoin assets of their customers through the loss will be instrumental to keeping a sense of balance in the market and also a sense of security.

However, looking at this heist in the long-line of bitcoin losses related to cybersecurity, we might still be in for the long haul.

Bitcoinica Suffers Staggering $87,000 Bitcoin Loss in Server Breach is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Linode Breach Leads to Massive Heist of 46,000 BTC from Bitcoinica, Faucet
• Bitcoin7 Hacked, Funds Recovery Requires Sensitive Personal Information
• Bitcoinica Growing Pains Result in Data Errors
• Bitcoinica Adds a Little Forex Brokerage to the Bitcoin Ecology
• Forum User Passwords Possibly Stolen In Bitcointalk.org Bill Cosby Hack
• Who is Tom Williams? MyBitcoin.com Reappears with Statement Claiming Site Was Hacked

Just take a look for yourself, Xbox maintains the largest majority of video views in the report across non-PC devices at 28.2 percent:

For a look at the actual report, it’s over at Freewheel.

However, there’s some things to keep in mind about the report: it only covers professional content that’s displaying advertisements, which means  NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo—but not silly YouTube Nyan cat videos, Netflix, Hulu, and et cetera. As a result, this sort of gauge is looking at what kind of cable impact we’re seeing with Xbox-as-entertainment-cloud in the living-room than anything else.

We at SiliconANGLE have been watching this trend for a while now and waiting for Microsoft to pounce. After all, we’ve seen reports that streaming video is a big factor in console usage according to a Nielson report. The Xbox experience has been trying to license cable shows, networks, and updated their interface in order to pull all of this into the dashboard that gamers see at launch—it’s obvious that Xbox LIVE is wheedling their way into cable contracts by trying to bring the big guns on board even if the initial showing of FiOS for Xbox did seem extremely lackluster.

Set-top-boxes and Internet-enabled smart-TVs look like they’re the next-big-ticket to Big Entertainment and the big cable companies are looking a little bit trepidations about people cord-cutting away with Internet-based video and television. It’s hard to see that Microsoft and the Xbox should worry them, after all, Xbox LIVE Gold has been trying to cozy up to cable companies by becoming part of their subscription service (furthermore: you do need Internet in order to use Xbox LIVE and cable can provide that.)

On the other side of the market, Google and Apple are pushing hard with their own cable-ready products and services like Google TV and Apple TV. However, they’ll need hardware to support that in the form of set-top-boxes and Internet-hooked smart-TVs—Microsoft already has the jump on them with a console already in millions of households.

It’s just the flip of a switch.

On that front, Google and Apple have it cut out for them on the streaming TV front—especially if Microsoft manages to make nice with a cable provider and wrangles in all those subscribers already sitting in front of their games.

Xbox Maintains Stealth Living-Room Cloud Entertainment Crown is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Microsoft Xbox 360 “Madrid” Beta Dashboard Update Rolls Out
• Xbox Leads the Personal Cloud to the Living Room with Comcast Cable
• Hulu Plus on Xbox LIVE this Friday, First Week is Free
• Microsoft Stalls Plans for Web TV Streaming Subscriptions
• Patents Suggest Microsoft Might Develop DVR Functionality with Next-Gen Xbox
• Rumor: Is Microsoft really in the ‘early stages of licensing’ for a Kinect-enabled TV?