"In the Philippines, says Eagle, "Facebook is literally becoming the internet." At the end of 2011, according to Nielsen Research, a third of the country's citizens were on the internet, or 33.6 million people. Today, the number of Facebook users in the Philipines is 29.4 million. The leading regional handset manufacturer, MyPhone, incorporates Facebook's logo into its advertising,"

"Of the 10 countries with the most Facebook users, six are emerging markets, and five of them—India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and the Philippines—represent 217 million Facebook users. The overwhelming majority are poor by the standards of the developed world, use feature phones that could not access Facebook before the dawn of Facebook Zero, and don't have any other way to use Facebook."

http://qz.com/5180/facebooks-plan-to-find-its-next-billion-users-convince-them-the-internet-and-facebook-are-the-same/


Reminder: three-quarters of the world won't see those lovely apps you're building

Smartphones as a percentage of total mobile phones:

http://qz.com/7528/reminder-most-of-the-global-market-for-mobile-services-and-content-is-not-on-smartphones/

Quote from: rcjordan on September 26, 2012, 06:15:56 PM
Smartphones as a percentage of total mobile phones:

Oooo that's shone a new light on it all, but am I seeing that right... Japan in the lowest bracket!?!?!?
I suppose they're that advance they've moved on from smart phones and have direct cortical implants instead.

>Japan

Now at 23.5% but increasing rapidly

http://www.zdnet.com/japan-sees-smartphone-user-surge-7000002960/

I didn't know about the FB zero stuff.  Great idea.  They should talk about it more, which may well drive the share price up again.

>Great idea

Yeah, but....  how are you going to monetize that? Text ads?  And, from a near-term perspective, isn't much most of that demographic worthless from a marketing perspective?

Quote from: rcjordan on September 26, 2012, 08:37:54 PM
>Great idea

Yeah, but....  how are you going to monetize that? Text ads?  And, from a near-term perspective, isn't much most of that demographic worthless from a marketing perspective?

I think the money there is long term.  Build the market now for when smart-phones arrive. 

"Zuckerberg clearly spends a lot of time thinking about what people are doing with their smartphones (emphasis mine). As he tells Lauer:

'iPhone is a great platform. There are more people who use Facebook on Android — because Android is just — more people use it, at this point. And the thing that I think a lot of people don't think about is that there are actually more people in the world using Facebook on mobile Web, right, so not using the apps on iOS or Android, but actually just going to a browser on a phone. There are more people doing that than the iPhone and all of Android phones combined, right? So it's actually a pretty diverse ecosystem.'"

http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2012/10/02/14184243-mark-zuckerberg-confirms-i-wear-the-same-thing-every-day?lite

While the places I read are reporting that Zuckerberg said that more smartphone users are actually accessing Facebook through their mobile browser than through apps specifically built for iOS or Android, reading the quote I'm not so sure that Zuck wasn't including feature phones in his definition of mobile web. He does say 'browser' though, so it sounds like smartphones only.  At any rate, this seems to confirm what we've long suspected, specialized apps for site access may not be worth developing.

Heh.  My dad calls his iphone his "smartphone."

I asked him something about his old phone (a blackberry he didn't really know how to use except to make calls and take pictures) and he said "NO.  That's the old blackberry, not my smartphone."

OooooKay.

time warp. update on FB's evil? plan

Internet.org: delivering poor Internet to poor people

http://boingboing.net/2015/04/19/internet-org-delivering-poor.html