All of Facebook's growth comes from mobile

Facebook had an earnings call, and Business Insider has put together a chart showing their composition of revenue sources:


Quite simply: Absolutely all their revenue growth the last few years comes from mobile. BI focuses on how well they have managed the transition into being mobile-centric, which is true. In any case it is stunning how important the mobile part is for Facebook in particular and ad revenue in general.

Food for conspiracy theories

So, according to the WSJ Google is buying a maker of solar-powered drones. They are also talking to other companies in the sphere (pun semi-intended, semi-working).

It would not fit very well with the mantra of "Don't do evil" for Larry to go crazy and mount guns on these drones, but even without the craziest ideas it makes me a tiny bit uneasy knowing the same company may know where I am (GPS from mobile phone) and be able to record me from a drone with extremely sharp eyes. That company better have decent privacy policies and be strict with relevant governments and agencies...

9 billions of patents

Google is selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for about USD3B, not that long after acquiring the company for about four times that amount.

Many interesting things to say about this (before converting to Mac, I was a sworn Lenovo user on laptops - can they win the enterprise mobility market?), but one thing that stands out is that the patent portfolio must surely be great... That, or it just did not turn out as planned for Google (since no-one quite seemed to 'get it' it could be a genius move, or...not) this time. But I think my 5 cents rests with the patents being the core motivation and that it is troublesome to compete with your own partners in the Android ecosystem.

All in all it seems, from the outside, like a good move from Google.

Adobe acquiring PhoneGap - for better or worse...

I just wanted to write a really short note on the news two days ago that Adobe is acquiring Nitobi, the makers of PhoneGap.

I have been using and talking PhoneGap for about a year and a half now, building a rather powerful authoring tool that uses PhoneGap with some native extensions to build apps for iOS and Android.

Anyway, I am thrilled with the prospect of one of the industry giants, with excellent track record on the tool side, supporting PhoneGap. I also feel this gives a certain approval of PhoneGap as a serious tool. On a related note, I have had clients that I held presentations for about cross platform mobile development in 2010 come back the last months and say "we were wrong, there is actually a use for PhoneGap". Since it is hard to plot a graph safely from a random subjective data point or two, having Adobe "stamp the whole chart right there" - saying there is room for this technology for sure, was really a energy boost for me.

On the other hand, I am slightly skeptical based on Adobe's (lacking) track record on mobile devices. As I have noted before, I feel that the really great mobile platform from Adobe has been only months away since I tested an early Flash Lite edition in 2002. I am also not sure if I view the split with the ASF taking care of the OSS version as a good one. Does this mean there will be a split of versions and functionality also in the core product and APIs? For me, that would be a huge disappointment (while I find it perfectly fine that the PhoneGap Build service will be developed as a closed proprietary Adobe product and of course that tools like Dreamweaver and Photoshop gets export wizards and whatnot!). And damn, PhoneGap is a better name than Callback. :-)

In any case it is exciting times for mobile apps development in the space, literally, between HTML5 and native apps.

And on a day like this I cannot end without (even though I am not generally a fan of throwing around either "R.I.P." or "awesome" all the time): R.I.P. Steve Jobs, AWESOME innovation legacy you leave behind - and you changed a generation's view of product development and importance of design in innovation.