The new Nokia Asha 205 is the first Nokia device to feature a dedicated Facebook button.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jes�s.

Facebook and Nokia partner to increase connections on-the-go

The new Nokia Asha 205 is the first Nokia device to feature a dedicated Facebook button

Espoo, Finland - Facebook and Nokia have today announced an innovation with the introduction of a built-in Facebook button available on the new Nokia Asha 205.

Introduced today, the Nokia Asha 205 is the first Nokia phone that includes a dedicated Facebook button, designed for people who want the fastest, one-click access to popular Facebook features.

"People around the world use Facebook Mobile to connect and share with their friends," said Javier Olivan, head of growth, engagement and mobile for Facebook. "We are focused on delivering the best Facebook experience to as many people as possible and our partnership with Nokia perfectly complements our strategy of giving people around the world a rich Facebook experience for keeping in touch with their friends."

"Globally, young consumers have increasingly started using Facebook for socializing, keeping in touch and striking new friendships. The launch of the Nokia Asha 205 responds to this growing demand and gives them a unique option for accessing Facebook while on-the-go," said Timo Toikkanen, executive vice president, Mobile Phones, Nokia. "We have seen that many people who use Nokia Asha devices are hyper-social and we are proud to partner with Facebook to improve the user experience of those consumers further with the introduction of the Facebook button."

The new Nokia Asha 205 enables people to easily access the Facebook for Every Phone app and use messaging, one of its most popular features. People using the messaging features in Facebook for Every Phone can now:

• See which of their friends are online to start chatting with them right away
• Start messages and group chats fast
• Reach more of the people they know, wherever they are, no matter what device they are using

People using the Nokia Asha 205 can also easily access other Facebook features, such as sharing photos and status updates with their friends, so they can stay close to the people around them with the touch of a button.

About Nokia

Nokia is a global leader in mobile communications whose products have become an integral part of the lives of people around the world. Every day, more than 1.3 billion people use their Nokia to capture and share experiences, access information, find their way or simply to speak to one another. Nokia's technological and design innovations have made its brand one of the most recognized in the world. For more information, visit http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia

About Facebook

Founded in 2004, Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.

www.nokia.com

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What is HTC counting down on Windows Phone Facebook photo albums?

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jes�s.

What is HTC counting down on Windows Phone Facebook photo albums?

Confirmed HTC is going to announce a new Windows Phone 8 smartphone tomorrow September 19th in a press conference, meanwhile Windows Phone facebook photo albums uploaded some pictures of before different brands devices. The ad content says: HTC is counting down their top Windows-based devices of all time. What are they counting down to?

Facebook

 Palm III, Kyocera 6035 Palm Phone, Compaq XDA, Samsung i700, Samsung i830,

HTC to hold press conference tomorrow Sept. 19.

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Facebook wants to be your inbox for every kind of message

WorldWideTech. Francisco De Jes�s.

Facebook announced an overhaul of its messaging system, which will compete with e-mail. 

 Facebook wants to be your inbox for every kind of message.

The world's largest social networking company is providing each of its 500 million users with an @facebook.com e-mail address as part of a revamped messaging system that integrates with various types of communications.

Facebook's new inbox can tie together mail sent to someone's e-mail address, instant-message aliases and cell phone number in addition to Facebook's own messages and chat conversations. Like the News Feed, unread notes are ranked by how important Facebook thinks the sender is in your life, and users can tweak those settings.

"Because we know who your friends are," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, "we can do some really good filtering for you."

Rather than creating separate threads for each conversation, Facebook logs all communications and groups them together by contact. So all chats with your mom are listed on one page. Based on a brief demo Monday, the stripped-down page resembles an IM or text-message window, eliminating the option of e-mail subject lines.

�I should only need those two things: a person and a message," Andrew Bosworth, a software engineer at Facebook, said at the company's news event Monday. "The system is definitely not e-mail. We've actually modeled it more after chat."

Incoming messages pop up on the bottom of Facebook's site, similar to the chat feature.

"We think that we should take features away from messaging," Zuckerberg said. "We think it should be minimal."

But like e-mail, users can attach files. Sharing documents via Microsoft's Office Web Apps service will be integrated "over the coming months," a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

The inbox is broken into three folders.

The "social inbox" contains conversations with your top contacts -- people you message with most often. An "other" folder keeps correspondences of less importance, or those with people or companies that Facebook's system is not familiar with, such as banking notices. (Operators of pages you've "Liked" can send messages to this folder as well.) Finally, the service filters what it thinks is spam into a last bin.

Facebook will launch this with a "slow rollout," said Bosworth, turning it on for more users over time. Facebook's iPhone application will support the new inbox Monday for accounts that have it enabled, Bosworth said.

The system may incorporate more services later. Zuckerberg said he considered voice as one.

For instant messaging, it supports Jabber -- the underlying technology of Google Chat -- but not Skype, AIM or Windows Live Messenger. Support for IMAP, which would allow Facebook.com e-mail users to access their inbox from a program such as Microsoft's Outlook, is in development, Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg opened the announcement by talking about changes in how young people communicate. He reminisced about a conversation with some high school students who said they primarily talked through Facebook and text messaging on their phones. E-mail is "too slow," he recalled them saying.

"It's not that e-mail doesn't get delivered immediately," Zuckerberg said. "It's too formal."

Numerous studies, as recently as April of this year, have found that e-mail is a very small part of how young people keep in touch. Facebook has modeled its new system to reflect those trends. Zuckerberg said 350 million people use its system for private correspondences, transmitting 4 billion messages a day.

Zuckerberg will take the stage again Tuesday during the Web 2.0 Summit, presumably to elaborate on this new system, which Bosworth said has been among the company's biggest undertakings. The project took about 18 months of work from 15 engineers -- the largest team the company has ever devoted to a new product, Bosworth said.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/15/facebook.email/index.html?hpt=T2

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Facebook: Reveals DEALS feature

WorldWideTech. Francisco De Jes�s. November 04, 2010

People who use Places, Facebook�s location feature, will see a yellow icon indicating that a redeemable deal or coupon is available nearby. They can then use the application to �check in� at the store or restaurant and show their phone�s screen to an employee to claim their deal.

�We�re enabling merchants to push deals out to their existing customers and hopefully attract new customers,� said Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook, during a press event at the company�s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

Mr. Kendall said Facebook would not charge businesses directly to list coupons and special deals through the mobile application. Instead, businesses can purchase advertising to publicize their offerings on Facebook, he said.

One of Facebook�s first partnerships involving the new Deals feature is with the Gap. The company outlined a campaign offering a free pair of jeans to the first 10,000 users who check into their local Gap store using Facebook�s mobile application.

Facebook also plans to work with nearly two dozen major chains like H&M, 24-Hour Fitness and McDonalds for special offers. But eventually all merchants and small businesses with a Facebook Places page will be able to offer deals.

�It starts to solve an age-old problem that local businesses have always had,� said Emily White, director of local at Facebook. �They�ve been told they need to be online. But it hasn�t always been clear what the benefit is. That�s what this deals platform allows. It�s turning those fans, those visitors, those eyeballs into real dollars, real people and real business.�

Local retailers will be able to offer several different kinds of deals, including one-time offers and loyalty rewards, as well as �friend deals,� for those who check in and �tag� multiple friends. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, said it would be difficult to defraud the system because people will be required to be present at a store in order to redeem the coupon.

To start, the new feature is available only through the Facebook iPhone application. Android users can find local deals through a dedicated mobile Web site.

Facebook�s deals program borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, which have long been experimenting with similar ways to offer rewards and deals on cellphones.

Facebook�s large user base, which exceeds half a billion people, gives the company a clear advantage over smaller competitors that have only just begun to gain traction, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner.

�Facebook is now the largest photo-sharing site on the Web and the largest invite service on the Web,� he said. �Getting into the local deals business might have the same effect.Competitors will have to maneuver in order to not be at a disadvantage and get squashed.�

Facebook�s announcement also places the company more squarely in Google�s line of sight, as both companies battle to be the primary hub for both businesses and consumers on the Web. In recent months, Google has taken steps to bring more small businesses online and help users find those businesses more easily.

Analysts say the two companies are competing to tap the market for mobile advertising and search, which is still in its infancy. For retailers, the Facebook feature offers the chance to establish online connections with real-world customers and learn more about them.

Another advantage Facebook has over Google is a way to exploit the social connections of its users. As they cash in on deals, alerts are published to their Facebook news feeds, alerting people in their network to the offer and broadening the number of people who know about it.

�Each of these announcements may seem like a small thing, but it adds to the centrifugal force that Facebook has in the evolving modern Web,� said Mr. Valdes.

Mr. Zuckerberg said the announcement aligned with Facebook�s larger goal of building a social Web that, increasingly, is also mobile.

To illustrate the point, he said 200 million people were now using Facebook through its mobile application, a threefold increase since last year.

�Think about Android and iPhone,� Mr. Zuckerberg said. �This is a much bigger footprint than that. The only bigger platform is the mobile Web itself.�

Related articles

• Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook launches instant smartphone coupons (ft.com)

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Yahoo: with Y-Connect mimics Facebook ?

Yahoo will roll out a feature called Y Connect to allow media publishers, web developers and other websites to integrate elements of their services with Yahoo-an approach Facebook has used in allowing sites to forge links to the popular social network.

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Facebook and Skype together.

Image via CrunchBase

WASHINGTON � Skype and Facebook joined forces Thursday to let users of the popular Internet communications service chat with their friends on the booming social network.

The new Skype version 5.0 for Windows includes a Facebook tab and integrates Facebook's news feed and phonebook into Skype, the Luxembourg-based Skype said in a statement.

Skype users can call Facebook friends directly on mobile or landline phones, send SMS messages or make free Skype-to-Skype calls to Facebook friends who are also Skype users, it said.

They can also post status updates to Facebook that can be synched with Skype "mood" messages and comment on Facebook friends' updates and wall posts.

"We're working with companies such as Skype to make it easy to find your friends anytime you want to connect," said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Skype on Thursday also added a new group video-calling feature and "automatic call recovery," which helps reconnect calls interrupted due to Internet connection problems.

Skype said video-calling accounted for approximately 40 percent of all Skype-to-Skype minutes in the first half of the year.

Skype, which was founded in 2003, bypasses the standard telephone network by channelling voice, video and text conversations over the Internet.

The company announced plans in August to raise up to 100 million dollars in shares by listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Related articles

• Facebook and Skype deal to dial friends and family (bbc.co.uk)
• You: Facebook joins forces with Skype (france24.com)
• Facebook and Skype Integrate Their Services (nytimes.com)
• Skype adds Facebook tabs, group video chat (cnn.com)

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Rumor: Facebook and Skype in talks for integration

Facebook and Skype are working on a deal that would integrate Facebook Connect with Skype accounts, AllThingsD has learnedciting sources familiar with the situation.

ATD has managed to get a hold of a screenshot showing the new features in action: once you connect Skype withFacebook, you�d be able to SMS, chat with or call your Facebook friends directly from Skype. You should also be able to login into Skype with your Facebook credentials.

The new features should go live in Skype 5.0 when the new version goes out of beta in a couple of weeks.

It�s a logical step for both companies. Facebook�s chat capabilities are somewhat limited compared toGoogle Talk, which is deeply integrated with Gmail, and offers voice and video chat capabilities. Enabling new ways to communicate with your Facebook friends is definitely one of Facebook�s goals. Skype, on the other hand, will be very happy to extend its user base with Facebook�s 500+ million users.

If the story turns out to be true, it would be interesting to see whether Facebook will also integrate Skype features into its web interface, or perhaps its mobile application.

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Facebook Is Secretly Building A Phone

Facebook is building a mobile phone, says a source who has knowledge of the project. Or rather, they�re building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware. Which is exactly what Apple and everyone else does, too.

It was a little less than a year ago that we broke the news that Google was working on a phone of its own � which was eventually revealed as the Nexus One. It was about that time, says out source, that Facebook first became concerned about the increasing power of the iPhone and Android platforms. And that awesome Facebook apps for those phones may not be enough to counter a long term competitive threat.

Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.

Two high level Facebook employees � Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos � are said to be secretly working on the project, which is unknown even to most Facebook staff.

Both have deep operating system experience.

Hewitt helped create the Firefox browser and was working on Parakey before it was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Parakey, which never launched, was described as a �Web-based operating system.� Hewitt also created all of Facebook�s iPhone web apps and then native apps, but finally quit building for the iPhone in disgust late last year. But he knows operating systems and he knows mobile.

Papakipos also has a perfect background for this project. He was leading the Google Chrome OS project until June. He then quit and went to Facebook. Papakipos is considered a rockstar developer, and there are any number of jobs he�d be able to do at Facebook.

But that doesn�t answer the question of why he�d leave the Chrome OS project before it was finished. It would have taken something really interesting to lure him away. Something like a Facebook Phone, for example.

So what might this phone look and feel like? We don�t know yet. When will it be announced? Don�t know. But I�d speculate that it would be a lower end phone, something very affordable, that lets people fully integrate into their Facebook world. You call your friend�s name, not some ancient seven digit code, for example. I�d imagine Facebook wanting these things to get into as many hands as possible, so I�d expect a model at a less than $50 price. Pay your bill with Facebook Credits. Etc.

As for timing, the holiday season is always a good time to launch new products. But that may be too soon.
Or who knows, the whole project might get killed before it sees light. All we know for sure is that Hewitt and Papakipos are working on something very stealthy together. And we have a source that tells us that stealthy thing is a Facebook phone.

We�re also not discounting possible partnerships around this. Spotify was said to be working on a phone with INQ last year based on a shared investor, Li Ka-Shing. It turns out Li Ka-Shing is also a sizeable investor in Facebook. So an INQ/Facebook partnership on a phone certainly wouldn�t be a surprise.

Related Post: http://worldwidegadget.blogspot.com/2010/09/facebook-building-web-based-os-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Worldwidegadget+(Worldwidegadget)

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Facebook building a web based OS and a phone

Francisco De Jes�s September 20, 2010

Now everybody  wants to build a phone ,  maybe  the new FaceKINbook  When the money is there you can think in anything. The envy for the  Palm webos web-based  best smartphone  OS perhaps. I wish them luck, but I just see a wasting of time and money on this adventure.

The News:
"Facebook is building a mobile phone, an unnamed source with knowledge of the project told TechCrunch. The company is reportedly building the software for the phone and working with a third party to build the hardware.

Two high-level Facebook employees, Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, are said to be secretly working on the project, which is unknown even to most Facebook staff. Both have deep operating system experience.

Hewitt helped create the Firefox browser and was working on Parakey before it was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Parakey, which never launched, was described as a "web-based operating system". Hewitt also created all of Facebook's iPhone web apps and then native apps. Papakipos was leading the Google Chrome OS project until June. He then quit and went to Facebook. Separately a Facebook spokesman denied the company is developing a mobile phone, saying it is focused on better integrating the online social network with mobile phones."

Source: http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=757500

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