What can you buy with 16 billion dollars? You can get 50 Boeing Jumbo Jets, the whole economy of Jamaica or, if you are feeling especially altruistic, you can acquire about 1% of Greek's government debt.
If you are Facebook, however, you have one additional option - to invest them in a phone. Employees of the company, which recently raised $ 16 billion from it's massive IPO, and several engineers as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, are quoted by The New York Times claiming that the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. Facebook has reportedly already hired several former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone and on the iPad.
This is not the first attempt of the virtual network to move into the physical world with a smartphone. It has worked on a handset before and the latest project is called Buffy. Now, building on it, Facebook will use the money raised from the IPO and expand the endeavor. An employee describes to the Times the logic behind the move with Mark Zuckerberg's concerns that "if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms."
Mark Z is right to worry about the future of it's company. For one, the IPO, while raising enough money to buy a decent fleet of Jumbo Jets, did not impress investors and shares are now well below their initial offering price of $38. What is more, the advertising based business model of the company that has been quite successful so far is threatened by users migrating to smartphones and tablets where it is more difficult to display ads. That is why, producing an own smartphone certainly makes sense since Facebook will be able to put ads right on it's screen. With almost a billion users worldwide, the social network can also count on strong sales and not only among early adopters in developed countries but also in developing ones where more people go online using a smartphone than a PC or a laptop.
So, investing the newly raised cash in a smartphone is... well, a smart idea. Just one issue remains - the name. Buffy the iPhone slayer? Tech companies have a long history of ridiculous code names for their products. Microsoft, for instance, has always had a thing for the flora and fauna stylistic including Windows Longhorn (subsequently called Vista) and Windows Mango (Windows Phone 7.5). Android's version names on the other hand seem to be created by someone on a sugar trip - starting with Cupcake, going soft with Eclair and culminating in Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Mark Z certainly has some more thinking to do...
If you are Facebook, however, you have one additional option - to invest them in a phone. Employees of the company, which recently raised $ 16 billion from it's massive IPO, and several engineers as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, are quoted by The New York Times claiming that the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. Facebook has reportedly already hired several former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone and on the iPad.
This is not the first attempt of the virtual network to move into the physical world with a smartphone. It has worked on a handset before and the latest project is called Buffy. Now, building on it, Facebook will use the money raised from the IPO and expand the endeavor. An employee describes to the Times the logic behind the move with Mark Zuckerberg's concerns that "if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms."
Mark Z is right to worry about the future of it's company. For one, the IPO, while raising enough money to buy a decent fleet of Jumbo Jets, did not impress investors and shares are now well below their initial offering price of $38. What is more, the advertising based business model of the company that has been quite successful so far is threatened by users migrating to smartphones and tablets where it is more difficult to display ads. That is why, producing an own smartphone certainly makes sense since Facebook will be able to put ads right on it's screen. With almost a billion users worldwide, the social network can also count on strong sales and not only among early adopters in developed countries but also in developing ones where more people go online using a smartphone than a PC or a laptop.
So, investing the newly raised cash in a smartphone is... well, a smart idea. Just one issue remains - the name. Buffy the iPhone slayer? Tech companies have a long history of ridiculous code names for their products. Microsoft, for instance, has always had a thing for the flora and fauna stylistic including Windows Longhorn (subsequently called Vista) and Windows Mango (Windows Phone 7.5). Android's version names on the other hand seem to be created by someone on a sugar trip - starting with Cupcake, going soft with Eclair and culminating in Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Mark Z certainly has some more thinking to do...
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