Mobile

Tim Bradshaw

As usage and advertising spending on Twitter’s smartphone apps begins to overtake activity on PCs, the company is refocusing on mobile, according to its chief executive.

Speaking to the FT earlier this week, Dick Costolo said that 55 to 57 per cent of Twitter’s users were on mobile, particularly as it expands outside the US, which now makes up around 25 per cent of its users, reaching as high as 80 per cent in the UK.

“That is great for us because our mobile users are more engaged,” he said. “When you are active on Twitter on mobile you use it more than if you were a desktop user.” Read more

The Securities and Exchange Commission published letters it exchanged with Facebook leading up to its IPO, revealing details of the US regulator’s concerns over the social network’s mobile business strategy, its dependence on Zynga, and how it presented its advertising model.

The correspondence was made public on Friday, a routine disclosure, and showed similarly routine questioning. Facebook responded to all questions in amended filings before the public offering on May 18.

“I know that everyone wants to paint Facebook as evil because their shares have gone down,” said Michael Pachter, a technology analyst at Wedbush. “These questions are completely reasonable questions, each of these.” Read more

Mark Zuckerberg in New YorkShopping on Facebook for apps will soon be easier with the App Center, a new application storefront for users to buy and discover content. The social networking company announced the App Center this week following an amendment to its S-1 filing that claimed it does not “currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven”. The timing of the App Center news did not go unnoticed by commentators who noted Facebook’s push to conquer mobile. Read more

Facebook said the migration of its users to mobile platforms is compromising its ability to make money from them, according to additions the company made to its IPO regulatory filing on Wednesday.

As the company fields questions from potential investors this week and next on its road show, Facebook is once again reiterating its philosophy of prioritising the user experience over generating revenue, particularly when it comes to its mobile offerings. Read more

Tim Bradshaw

Listen carefully in the City of London and, very faintly, you may be able to hear the bell ringing for round two of Facebook’s simmering battle with Apple over mobile apps.

Bango, a small mobile payments firm, quietly announced to the stock market on Wednesday that it has “signed an agreement to provide payment services to Facebook”. Read more

Tim Bradshaw

One of the more eye-catching elements of Facebook’s obligatory rundown of “risk factors” in Wednesday’s IPO filing was the section on mobile.

Facebook has huge scale on mobile. Half of Facebook’s monthly active users – 425m people – use its mobile products, as of December. Read more

Maija Palmer

Chaos Computer ClubKarsten Nohl, the celebrity mobile cryptography expert, has been at it again. Two years ago he caused a stir by showing that the secret code that protects GSM mobile handsets was easy to crack, leaving phone calls open to interception by third parties.

This year, he is due to show that handsets can also be hijacked to make unauthorised calls and send text messages, running up huge bills without their owners’ knowledge. GSM networks, which are vulnerable to this flaw, are used by around 80 per cent of the world’s mobile users. Read more

When Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Wednesday addressed a Taiwanese audience for the first time, he was in some sense preaching to the choir.

As Mr Schmidt noted, Taiwan already fared better than the US in terms of broadband penetration, the speed of its internet, and the percentage of its people with smartphones. Yet there was still one looming problem, he noted, and that was the rising cost of building more advanced telecommunications networksRead more

HTC has had an amazing run as it grew from anonymity to one of the top Android phonemakers. This has been reflected in its shipments, which have been record-breaking for the Taiwanese company for each of the last six quarters.

But is that run about to end, amid intensifying competition and a weak global economy? HTC said on Monday that it expects fourth-quarter shipments, and revenues, to be down slightly from the third quarter. Read more

Maija Palmer

mobile walletNow there is another mobile wallet to add to consumer confusion. The UK’s three largest mobile operators, Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere, on Thursday said they had teamed up to create a single platform for making payments by mobile phone. Read more