There has always been some news floating in the world of Technology that Facebook is interested in building a phone. If the question is asked to Facebook, they will deny it and say that they believe in partnerships. However, the joint partnership with HTC to release two Facebook phones (HTC Salsa, HTC ChaCha) didn’t produce fruitful results, though they were a good offering.
This seems to have prompted Facebook to build their own complete offering with full control over R&D. It might be that Facebook was always looking for it and failure with HTC might not be the reason. Building a good phone need people who are expert on the subject and it requires some serious talent acquisition.
According to NY Times, Facebook is on a hiring roll. They have bought more than a dozen of engineers who were working with Apple and is credited with the success of products like the iPhone and iPad.
Also, one of the engineers who was earlier working with Apple on iPhone was once asked by Mark Zuckerberg about the chips that make the frequencies work and the discussion was in great detail. This raised some questions among journalists.
Apple seemed to have a tip on the developments. As before the introduction of iOS 4, Apple was about to introduce the integration of Facebook too along with Twitter, but they backed-out in the last moment and introduced Ping which wasn’t much of a success. Few saw the introduction of Ping as a music driven social network and some saw it as much more than that.
Facebook already has a user-base of 700 million and soon, it will be approaching 1 billion users. With that many users, it can’t depend on others for everything and needs to have something as a backup. Recently, Facebook introduced cross-platform web app center where they want developers to build applications leveraging the use of Facebook, this could host as the future market for apps. They bought Instagram to bring a specialized photo application, wants to have an app to exclusively manage pages, timeline and other features.
NOW READ;
