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| Posted: 22 Oct 2011 11:31 PM PDT  How important is mobile to Facebook? Already, 350 million of its 800 million monthly active users are on mobile devices, and that number is just going to get bigger. “Fundamentally we view it as a really big shift for our company, as fundamental as the shift from desktop apps to the Internet,” Facebook CTO Bret Taylor tells me in the TCTV interview above (which was shot at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week). “Companies really need to redefine themselves in this world of devices rather than browsers on people’s laptops.” Taylor goes even further with this stunning prediction: “A few years from now, most every single person at Facebook who works there is going to be working on mobile almost exclusively.” Mobile and social go hand in hand. Facebook wants to create a seamless experience across the desktop and mobile, as well as between mobile devices. Here is where Project Spartan may come in. Project Spartan is the unofficial name given to Facebook’s mobile HTML5 efforts. “I am not sure what Project Spartan was,” demurs Taylor before proceeding to explain how the mobile web it fits into Facebook’s overall mobile strategy. Facebook wants to be available everywhere on any device. If that means native mobile apps, that’s fine. But if someone doesn’t have a Facebook mobile app on their device, there will always be a mobile web version as well. “Where we can play a role in mobile is just helping app discovery and engagement,” says Taylor. That ambition is actually quite large. App discovery is like search for mobile. Whoever controls it, controls what people can do on their phones. Here are links to Mary Meeker’s mobile slides I mention at the beginning, and the first video with Taylor from this interview. In the video below, we talk about the interest graph and how there is an opening for startups to explore it. At the end, I also ask Taylor what he thinks about Google+. Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term... Bret Taylor is the CTO of Facebook. He joined Facebook as the head of platform in August 2009, after serving as the co-founder and CEO of the social network aggregator FriendFeed. He most recently worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, where he began to develop FriendFeed with Jim Norris. During his four years at Google, he led more than 25 successful product launches, including Google Maps, Google Local, Google Web Toolkit, the Google Maps API, and...
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| TechCrunch Gadgets Weekend Giveaway: Name PocketCloud’s Mascot, Win An iPhone 4S Posted: 22 Oct 2011 09:17 AM PDT  See Mr. Fauxcredible over there? He needs a name and Wyse wants to give an iPhone 4S to the reader who comes up with the best one for him. Pocketcloud by Wyse is a remote desktop solution for IT folks and they’re trying to jazz up their marketing. To that end, they asked if I would “crowdsource” their mascot and ask you folks for some help. To enter, simply drop a name below in comments. Enter as many times as you wish and Wyse will pick one winner from all the thousands of comments that I expect we’ll get. Here’s a bit about Pocketcloud to give you some background. I’m going for Floyd, but you may have better ideas.
The winning submission wil get an iPhone 4S for the carrier of their choice, international entrants included. We’ll pick a winner on Monday, October 24 at noon Eastern time.
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