Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com And, that’s a wrap! After yesterday’s half-day kickoff to D: Dive Into Mobile — Global Edition , Tuesday saw a full day of great speakers on topics ranging from messaging to activism to driverless cars. In case you missed it, here’s a good place to start: Starting at the end: “We’re big believers that this [phone] screen is the first screen,” said Bob Bowman, president of Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media, in the conference’s final interview . “Anybody that doesn’t believe that is living on another planet or doesn’t have children. Reality is the second screen.” “Our goal with Android is to reach everyone,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said. “We’ll cross one billion Android devices in six to nine months. In a year or two, we’ll hit two billion.” Schmidt also talked about Google’s self-driving cars and the company’s new gadgets . Intel said it is getting the hang of mobile — which is good, because the company also reported bleak Q1 earnings today, with a 25 percent drop in profit as demand for PCs declines. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter , which officially claims 200 million monthly active users. WhatsApp has eight billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages per day, Koum said. Meanwhile, SnapChat CEO Evan Spiegel said his photo- and video-messaging app has grown by three times in four months, and that users are now sharing 150 million ephemeral photos per month, versus 40 million permanent pictures per month on Instagram.
Read MoreThe last time we asked MLB.com boss Bob Bowman for his take on mobile platforms, it went something like this: He loved Apple and Apple users, supported Android because he had to, and thought BlackBerry was still a viable market. That was two years ago . What do things look like now? Well, Bowman, who runs Major League Baseball Advanced Media, baseball’s digital business, is still a big Apple fan. But he has acknowledged that his users are increasingly picking up Android devices — particularly the high-end Samsung units. And BlackBerry? Gone but not quite forgotten: “We hope BlackBerry comes back.” Some details from Bowman’s chat with Walt Mossberg at D: Dive into Mobile today: His user base, which used to split 80/20 in favor of iOS over Android, has now moved to 70/30. “The Samsung phone is quite a good Android phone,” Bowman said. But the uptick in Android users, he said, doesn’t track with revenue. That still splits 80/20 in favor of iOS users. “Maybe even 85/15.” Bowman figures this is because iOS users are still, on average, paying more for their phones than Android users, and that means they’re more willing to pay for content like his apps/subscription service, which starts at $20. (Note that other developers have told me that when you compare high-end Android buyers to iOS buyers, the differences in behavior patterns tend to go away. [ See post to watch video ]
Read MoreYou gotta give Facebook credit for being willing to get weird. Latest example: The social giant’s new commercial for Facebook Home, the brand new software that turns your plain ol’ Android phone into a Facebook phone. It features a daydreaming employee, messing around on the new device, and of course has CEO Mark Zuckerberg center-stage. But the real star of the strange commercial is a screaming goat, who yells in the face of an excited Zuckerberg talking to the troops on Facebook Home’s launch day. Like I said. Weird. The company first delved into strange territory last year with “Chairs”, the commercial it released when it hit the billion-user mark. It was a bit of a head-scratcher
Read MoreOriginally designed as an app that cleverly packaged Twitter and Facebook posts in an attractive magazine-like format for iPads, Flipboard has introduced a new version that enables people to create their own online magazines others can read.
Read MoreIf you have young children, you probably know Club Penguin: A massively multiplayer game owned by Disney that’s a runaway hit with kids. At its Kelowna, Canada, headquarters this week, the company took members of the media behind the scenes and explained its efforts to preserve parents’ trust that those kids are safe. “We believe Club Penguin is a safe start to social,” said Chris Heatherly, Disney Interactive’s VP and GM, who replaced Club Penguin founder Lane Merrifield last October. Heatherly and other Club Penguin employees described the site as a social destination, similar in some ways to Facebook, which officially does not allow users under the age of 13 (not that that has ever stopped anyone). Facebook’s 13-plus rule derives from laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which outlawed the online collection of personal information about the under-13 set. So, for Club Penguin’s primary audience of 8- to 12-year-olds, moderators manually screen out usernames that contain players’ real names and ask for parents’ email addresses — not players’ — during registration. The company announced an upgrade to its “Safe Chat” technology, which screens out words, phrases and slang, not to mention players’ “dictionary dancing” attempts to circumvent the filter by combining words that sound like banned words. For example, to prevent bullies from saying “you’re gay,” the company also blocks out phrases like “you’re grey.” But the effectiveness of auto-moderation based on whitelisted and blacklisted words is limited, company reps said. Social tech director Marc Silbey gave the example of the word “beach,” which some players have tried to use in lieu of the banned word “bitch.” Trying to censor phrases that sound like “you are a beach,” Sibley said, can also ensnare harmless sentences like “you want to come to the beach?” The new upgrade, officially called “dynamic validation,” feeds the entirety of what kids type into a real-time search engine that tries to divine meaning and appropriateness. Silbey said about 80 percent of what Club Penguin players type is ultimately ruled “safe,” and that the new technology can automatically validate 90 percent of that without the need for a human moderator’s judgment.
Read MoreLaurene Powell Jobs appears on NBC’s “Rock Center with Brian Williams” tonight. It’s her first interview since her husband Steve Jobs died. She has a very specific agenda in mind. Along with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, she’s pushing for immigration reform, and to promote “ The Dream is Now ,” a documentary about “Dreamers” — young immigrants who live in America and would like to become citizens but can’t. But Jobs and Guggenheim aren’t relying on TV alone — the documentary itself will run on MSNBC this weekend — to get their message out. At 10 pm ET, when “Rock Center” airs, they plan on releasing a flood of Tweets and Facebook posts promoting their movie, and calling for immigration reform. To do that, they’re using Thunderclap , a startup designed solely to promote mass social media messaging. It works by getting Twitter and Facebook users to essentially hand over control of their feeds in order to broadcast a single message, at a given time, for a specific campaign. So far, the “Dream” campaign has signed up more than 700 people to push out its message tonight ; Thunderclap says they have a collective “social reach” of 1.2 million people.
Read MoreGunning to win more advertising dollars, Facebook Inc. is using new ways to cull personal information from outside the social network and match it with data submitted by its billion-plus users. The efforts are winning over advertisers such as General Motors Co. and Neiman Marcus Group Inc. but are further raising privacy concerns as Facebook harnesses a mosaic of information about its users. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
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