Today in Tech: Facebook's mobile ads; Google's Chromecast & More

Facebook's mobile adsWhen Facebook came up with its IPO last year, one of the biggest concerns among the investors was around its ability to make money as its users shifted to smart phones - one of the points we raised here. By many accounts, there will be 5 billion smart phone users in the world sooner than later, changing the way people interact, do business and live their lives. There was a feeling that Facebook would find it tough to compete against social mobile apps such as Whatsapp or Snapchat. Facebook's latest quarterly results - its revenues went up by 53% and more importantly mobile revenues grew more than what most analysts expected - suggested that it could do well in the mobile future as well. When Facebook's mobile ad service was launched, it was widely expected that it will put off users. (I personally think it does.) But, it appears, not enough to make people go away. Not only has its user base gone up, the number of users who access the site daily has increased as well. Its mobile users surged by more than 50% to over 800 million users. No one knows if this trend will continue. But Mark Zuckerberg, facebook's 29 year old founder, has a reason to smile for now. Google's ChromecastIn media business, there's a truism that companies compete not so much for your wallet as it's for your time. That applies not just to television channels, news papers and magazines, but also to companies such as Google and Apple. When they launch a new product or a service, in effect, they are trying to capture more of your time. A case in point is Google's latest product Chromecast. By launching it, as this Reuters report points out, it's definitely getting deeper into hardware. But, getting into hardware is only incidental. It's really trying to get into your drawing room, and see how you can spend more time with it. Today, it will have to be a conscious decision for you - you have to buy a dongle. Tomorrow, it might not be. Working from homeTeresa Amabile and Steve Kramer write in HBR blog

For several weeks earlier this year, we collected daily electronic diaries from the employees of the HR department in a New York bank. Although we weren't looking for it, one particularly interesting pattern popped out of the data: strongly positive comments from employees on the occasional days that they worked from home. Again and again, we saw people writing about how refreshing it was to be freed from office distractions and to have the opportunity to catch up on work.