Today in Tech: Facebook's first post-IPO report card; Gokul Rajaram; Mobile future & iPad apps for Olympics

Facebook's first post-IPO report card

Facebook announced its first results as a public company, and markets weren’t  impressed. Its share prices dropped by 10%. Three big reasons: slowdown in revenues, lower margins, and no visibility on how things will go in the future. In an earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg sounded confident and in control, but facebook gave no earnings outlook, which might have raised investor concerns.

Here are the numbers.

Facebook Q2 Earnings

Facebook's Gokul Rajaram
I guess Facebook-watchers will increasingly turn their attention to Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s advertising products director for clues on how the world's biggest social networking site will earn its revenues. Rajaram obtained a BTech in computer sciences from IIT Kanpur, before going to University of Texas at Austin for an MS (and later to MIT Sloan for an MBA), and has been working on internet ad technologies since 1997. He was in charge of Adsense at Google, and in 2007, he left the company to found Chai Labs, where he built an artificial intelligence based platform that’s being used by NBC, Travelocity etc. In 2010, Facebook acquired Chai Labs bringing him in. A recent profile in Wired introduced him to the readers thus: Meet the Man Engineering Facebook's Revenues. Can he make it grow as fast as investors expect it to - that's is the big question.

To get an idea of how he thinks about these things, listen to this video from Techcrunch.

Are we ready for the mobile future?
Fast company has a superb interview with MicroStrategy CEO and tech historian Michael Saylor. Here’s a bit that will take some time getting used to, but there’s no denying we will be there sooner than later.

There's going to be 5 billion smart phones; there's also going to be 5 billion tablet computers. And this is the part that most of the world hasn't come to grips with, which makes it such an incendiary movement.

 

We're in an inflection point where it's cheaper to learn to read on a tablet computer than it is to learn to read on paper. And that being the case, it's only a matter of time before every 6-year-old kid has a tablet computer, and we know for a fact, 3 to 4 year old kids are using tablets and iPads, and 75 and 80 year olds are using them.

 

So instead of 5 percent of the economy being remade, it's 50 percent. I think this puts this on the scale of being the biggest transition we've yet experienced in the history of technology.

iPad apps for Olympics
Olympics 2012 is starting today. Here are a few apps worth having on your iPad, while you sit glued in front of TV.

Olympics Join In: Official app. Lots of information. Functional, esp for those who are in London. Works for others too.
Reuters Olympics London 2012: Beautiful photographs, elegant design
AFP Olympics 2012: Doesn't look as beautiful as Reuters ap. But easy to access.
Sports Illustrated: Live from London 2012: Has the look of a magazine. One feature, Latest News, looked promising, but did not work for me. Still worth downloading for the beautiful photographs and essays.
‎

Also of interest

• Why Facebook Might Really Be Doing Its Own Phone, Despite What Zuck Said: AllThingsD
• How to Get Mountain Lion's Best New Features on Windows: Lifehacker
• Amazon profit drops 96% : Fortune
• Turns Out Apple Conducts Market Research After All: WSJ
• 34-button Google calculator now appears in search results: Geek
• Can Creativity be Automated?: Technology Review
• The Malaysian Model For Smart, Self-Sufficient Communities: Earthtechling

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.