By - NICK BILTON
Category - Facebook Application
Source - http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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| Facebook Application |
This past week, Google completed its acquisition
of the hardware maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which could
lead to the search giant’s making its own smartphone. But another
software titan might be getting into the hardware game as well:
Facebook.
Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have
been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on
Facebook’s plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by
next year. These people spoke only on the condition of anonymity for
fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook.
The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said.
This
would be Facebook’s third effort at building a smartphone, said one
person briefed on the plans and one who was recruited. In 2010, the blog
TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a smartphone. The
project crumbled after the company realized the difficulties involved,
according to people who had worked on it. The Web site AllThingsD reported last year that Facebook and HTC had entered a partnership to create a smartphone, code-named “Buffy,” which is still in the works.
Now,
the company has been going deeper into the process, by expanding the
group working on Buffy, and exploring other smartphone projects too,
creating a team of seasoned hardware engineers who have built the
devices before.
One engineer who formerly worked at Apple and
worked on the iPhone said he had met with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s
chief executive, who then peppered him with questions about the inner
workings of smartphones. It did not sound like idle intellectual
curiosity, the engineer said; Mr. Zuckerberg asked about intricate
details, including the types of chips used, he said. Another former
Apple hardware engineer was recruited by a Facebook executive and was
told about the company’s hardware explorations.
When asked Friday,
Facebook did not deny or confirm that a project to build a smartphone
existed, but pointed to a previous statement it gave to AllThingsD last
year that said in part, “We’re working across the entire mobile
industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and
application developers.”
For
Facebook, the motivation is clear; as a newly public company, it must
find new sources of revenue, and it fears being left behind in mobile,
one of the most promising areas for growth.
“Mark is worried that
if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook
will simply become an app on other mobile platforms,” a Facebook
employee said.
Facebook is going to great lengths to keep the
phone project a secret, specifically not posting job listings on the
company’s job Web site, but instead going door-to-door to find the right
talent for the project.
But can a company that is wired as a
social network learn how to build hardware? Mixing the cultures of
hardware and software designers is akin to mixing oil and water. With
the rare exception of Apple, other phone makers aren’t very good at
this.
The biggest names in consumer electronics have struggled
with phone hardware. Hewlett-Packard tried and failed. So did Dell. Sony
has never done very well making phones.
“Building isn’t something
you can just jump into,” explained Hugo Fiennes, a former Apple
hardware manager for the first four iPhones who has since left Apple and
is starting a new hardware company, Electric Imp.
“You change the smallest thing on a smartphone and you can completely
change how all the antennas work. You don’t learn this unless you’ve
been doing it for a while.”
He added, “Going into the phone business is incredibly complex.”
Facebook
also faces hurdles, often of its own making, on mobile. Twitter, for
example, is fully integrated into the Apple iPhone and allows people to
seamlessly send Twitter messages with photos or article links. Facebook,
which has had a contentious relationship with Apple, is still not
integrated into iOS.
One Facebook employee said the phone project
had been rebooted several times because Facebook originally thought it
could figure out hardware on its own. The company has since learned that
it needed to bring in people with phone-making experience, several
people said. So it is hiring hardware engineers to work with a phone
manufacturer and design the shape, style and inner workings of a
Facebook phone.
Despite the difficulties, Facebook seems well
positioned in certain ways to enter the smartphone market. It already
has an entire operating system complete with messaging, calendar,
contacts and video, and an immense app store is on its way with thousands of highly popular apps. There’s also that billion-dollar camera app, in the form of Instagram.
If
Facebook fails with its own team of engineers, it could buy a
smartphone maker. The company took in $16 billion from its bumpy I.P.O.
It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion,
which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed
Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones. HTC, which is upset
with Google for buying Motorola, is worth about $11.8 billion and
becoming cheaper by the day.
Facebook would not necessarily
challenge Apple if it entered the smartphone marketplace. Instead, it
could be Facebook vs. Google, which makes the Android operating system, with both companies going after a huge number of buyers of lower-priced smartphones.
“When
you offer an advertising-based phone, you’re targeting all the users on
prepay that are budget-conscious of their communications costs,” said
Carolina Milanesi, a vice president and analyst for the Gartner Group.
Ms.
Milanesi said that at a mass market level, both companies could take
the same approach as Amazon, offering low-cost hardware, like the
Kindle, and subsidizing some of the costs through advertising.
After
all, both Facebook and Google make their money through advertising. If
the companies have the opportunity to continually put ads in front of
people on a smartphone screen, you would think the only question left
would be to pick the right ringtone that makes that ka-ching sound.
Source - http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/facebook-tries-tries-again-on-a-smartphone/?hp
