Sometimes you just gotta do your own thing. Such was the case with Boris Vaisman, who dropped out of Y Combinator’s winter batch (where he was on kid-safe phone lockdown tool, Kyte). Says Vaisman, it was just a matter of “having a different vision in terms of how to move forward.” So what has Vaisman, along with co-founder Ankush Agarwal, now launched instead? Play Safe, an app for Android that lets kids safely play games on your own smartphone.

To be honest, Kyte has the arguably bigger vision. It wants to provide a kid-friendly user interface for kids’ own Android smartphones. A Net Nanny for the modern age, if you will, but one infused with family-friendly features. However, that company is a bit of ahead of today’s reality (as well it should be, this is cutting edge stuff here). Only half of the U.S.’s mobile phones are smartphones. Today’s kids are still not necessarily rockin’ a iPhone or Android. The picture is changing, though. Nielsen says that two-thirds of all handsets being sold are smartphones. There will come a time when you will buy a phone, and it will be smart.

In the meantime, a more common scenario is one where your kid (or for the childless: those grubby small people who your friends keep toting around), grabs your phone and starts to play games. Or whines for your phone until you give in and hand it over.

The problem here, explains Vaisman, is that the kids download apps, delete your own apps, or access parts of your phone that they should not be messing around with. (The horror of finding you kid in your inbox I cannot describe.) The solution? With Play Safe, kids are given a simple, pre-approved dashboard which lists only the games and apps you’re OK with them launching. In testing, our 2-year was fine with it. She said she didn’t really know what she was doing on the Android homescreen anyway.

For now, the exit procedure from the dashboard is just hidden, not password-protected. You push and hold the Play Safe logo for 5 seconds straight to leave the app. Vaisman says that password protection will be added within a week. That will allow the app to be used with older kids, who are savvier about these things and are bound to figure out the trick.

Vaisman and Agarwal are in bootstrapping mode now, but hope to use the app (currently free and ad-free) as the starting point to build a company whose focus is on family-friendly applications. Future apps would be paid and/or monetized in other ways, but with Play Safe,  they’re looking to build credibility with parents and establish their brand.

Play Safe is live in the Android Market Google Play Store here.

After a rough day yesterday, RIMM’s stock opened down 10% today, trading at $10.05 at the opening bell. The stock price briefly recovered but it’s on a steady downward trend as of this post’s writing. If this slide continues, the stock is set to hit a low not seen since 2003.

Trading of RIMM shares was halted for 15 minutes yesterday in order to issue a what the company called a “business update“. CEO Throsten Heins detailed RIM’s recently challenges and also explained that the company is employing the help of Royal Bank of Canada and J.P. Morgan to evaluate financial strategies. The company also warned that it will report a loss for the fiscal quarter ending on June 2. This came on the heals of report that states RIM is set to layoff a major chunk of its workforce.

Things at RIM are set to get worse before they get better. It seems nearly every week another high-placed executive is leaving the company. The RIM of the future (if there is a future for RIM) will look nothing like the RIM of the past.

I still believe RIM can recover. The company has a good chunk of the enterprise smartphone market and the products in the pipeline are very compelling. However, RIM needs to make it through these dark days first and hiring bankers is a good start.

Much has been said about the Nokia 808 Pureview since its debut at MWC in February, but most recently the rumors have centered around delayed availability in the UK. The phone, and its 41-megapixel camera, weren’t expected to hit shelves across the pond until July.

But according to Amazon’s UK site, the phone will be available on June 21 unlocked for £499.98 (US$778). Camera happy customers are more than welcome to place their pre-orders now.

The big selling point for the 808 Pureview (if you haven’t already figured it out) is a 41-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss sensor. To be fair, that 41-megapixel figure is a bit misleading.

In actuality, the camera is taking 41 megapixels of raw data, shrinking it down to improve resolution, and churning out something closer to an 8-megapixel photo. That 8-megapixel photo, however, will be much better than an 8-megapixel image taken with a much smaller sensor (the Pureview 808 sensor is 1/1.2″).

The phone, on the other hand, is more of a beast than a beauty. It’s clunky, and it runs Symbian. But surely there are some early adopters out there waiting to get a taste of Pureview imaging — it will, after all, appear on Nokia’s Windows Phones soon enough.

[via SoMobile]

According to the IDC, 17.4 million tablets were shipped worldwide in the first quarter, with the lion’s share (68 percent) of those being iPads. As the iPad’s popularity has grown, it’s begun to find increasing adoption in the enterprise and among IT decision makers. As a result, some companies are looking to find better ways to utilize the iPad’s interface and unique display to present and visualize business data in more exciting and engaging ways.

Roambi, one of these slick new business intelligence (BI) apps, is finding success enabling companies to transform their snooze-inducing Salesforce, Oracle, or SAP data (i.e. BI data) into interactive mobile dashboards, snappy charts and sexy graphs, and instantly deliver them to the iPad.

Building on its initial use case, last year Roambi released its so-called “Roambi Flow”, an app and content system that allows users to easily create and share original documents and interactive reports using analytics, text, graphics, video, and collaborative content.

Designed with the iPad interface in mind, those reports really look more like magazine-style publications, but based entirely on the custom content you provide. (Not unlike a BI data-version of Inkling.)

And today MeLLmo (the creator of Roambi) is taking its functionality one step further, moving from simply being a content creator to becoming a distributor and publisher as well, by launching a new platform that enables organizations to deliver analytics and multimedia content to anyone with an iPad. In other words, the key value proposition for the new platform is that companies can now not only create interactive reports in Roambi Flow, but actually turn those magazine-style reports into apps that can be published on the App Store, with customer logos, etc.

The platform also includes new licensing and features that give businesses the ability to distribute their custom Roambi reports both internally, just to staff, or externally to customers and consumers. They can also create and distribute co-branded materials in a single issue or series as iPad apps, saving money by removing the need to hire specialized designers, and, in turn, extending the reach of their brand thanks to the App Store’s massive, built-in user base.

As an illustrative example, an analyst firm, say, could upload a PDF, automatically transform it into a Roambi Flow document (i.e. a flip-style magazine for iPad), add interactive analytics, photos and videos, and then publish it as their own app on the App Store — either for targeted customers or open download.

What’s more, companies can do this over and over, ad nauseum, publishing a bunch of separate apps or creating multiple editions within one. That company could also use its distribution mechanism to continuously publish the most up-to-date sales presentations for their sales force, for example, or use it as a marketing tool, publishing brochure-style content for open downloading.

In addition to its platform launch, the startup is today introducing Roambi Pulse — its tenth visualization tool for the iPad — which allows users to compare key performance indicators in animated, vivid display. By embedding historical performance of key metrics within interactive titles, users can swipe and tap their way through (what are presumably) more compelling and engaging insights. A Roambi Pulse sample can be found in the free Roambi app now available in the App Store.

As for integration? Roambi’s platform connects with a mess of business information sources and integrates with existing systems from IBM Cognos, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Google Docs.

MeLLmo raised $30 million from Sequoia in its first round of institutional funding back in September.

For more info, find Roambi at home here.

One of the nice little surprises at Samsung’s Galaxy S III unveiling in London was that the device would be preloaded with the fabled Android version of the Flipboard social magazine app. The news came from out of the blue — while the iOS version has garnered plenty of acclaim and some nifty new updates, Android users were (largely) left out in the cold.

Now it appears that the app will soon be finding its way onto other Android devices, but perhaps not in the way that most users would hope. According to a new report from Engadget, the Flipboard team is close to releasing a beta version of the app to a small number of users to gain critical feedback before launching the final product.

But why the slow and steady approach? Engadget’s sources say it’s because of the sheer number of devices they have to account for. As wonderful has having a device for every niche is, it’s pretty clear that the process of ensuring a consistent experience across multiple hardware configurations can be a real headache. It seems especially difficult when the iOS version of the app has become well known for its handsome design and solid usability — making sure that experience carries over to the hordes of Android devices floating around out there is certainly no trivial feat.

If all of this holds true, then Flipboard is being very smart about how it goes about making those final tweaks. There will always be people willing to go through the extra work of loading up an .apk on their device in order to be the first to have something, and using them as a testbed for a wider release down the line only makes sense. For now though, there’s still no official word on a release date — the Flipboard for Android page only says that the app will launch in “the coming months.”

Those of you who don’t care much for minor imperfections can dive right in though — the .apk was pulled from a Galaxy S III demo unit prior to launch, and you too can join in the fun provided you know where to look.

Today PayPal opened up a new front in its strategy to expand its role in mobile payments, a business PayPal projects will generate it $7 billion in revenue this year. The eBay-owned payments company today launched a new retail mobile payments app for iOS and Android devices, PayPal InStore, where users can create barcodes that get scanned to deduct payments from users’ PayPal accounts. Available only in the UK, clothing chains Coast, Oasis, Warehouse, and Karen Millen are the first to sign on to the service, and PayPal tells me there are no plans to add NFC to the app any time soon.

PayPal InStore underscores some of the challenges that remain with NFC technology. Yesterday, Gartner presented a picture of a $172-billion mobile payments industry that is still largely based around older technologies like SMS and web-based payments, with newer services like NFC chips playing a very marginal role. And Juniper Research today noted that transactions made on NFC phones in North America and Western Europe will account for less than two percent of all mobile payments this year.

PayPal InStore is one example of how retailers and others can use techonologies available today to offer mobile payments. In this case, a user creates a barcode for a product in the app. He/She then presents their device to get it scanned by the cashier. The amount then gets deducted from a users’ PayPal account.

I asked PayPal whether the door is open for the app to be upgraded to NFC when the chip technology is more ubiquitous — it would certainly make sense, given that it would speed up use of the service. The answer? Not really.

“We think that it will take years for NFC to get any kind of traction in stores, but we are helping retailers roll out mobile payments quickly and cheaply now,” said Ron Skinner, PayPal’s spokesperson in the UK. “We’re not dismissing NFC but our point is that the world may have moved on by the time NFC gets some kind of scale.”

This appears to be the first time that PayPal has launched a barcode-based app. It is not available in the U.S. and Skinner says there are no plans to roll it out elsewhere, either.

“This particular solution is not in the U.S.,” he said, noting that a region-specific service is all part PayPal’s 2012 plan: “It’s a test and learn year for PayPal and our retail partners.”

PayPal last week expanded its mobile payment services in the U.S. by adding 15 more major retailers to the list of those supporting the payments company’s apps in that market. In the UK, the company has a headstart with its branding: as TNW points out its main mobile app broke the 1-million user mark as far back as 2010. Skinner also points out that the high penetration of smartphone users in the UK makes it worthwhile to try out new payment methods here.

PayPal has been looking at a number of different technologies to enable mobile payments. It has trialled NFC, launched a dongle-based service called Here, and looked at ways of using pin codes and credit cards to complete the payments from users’ PayPal accounts — this is the service it has trialled with Best Buy and will likely be the basis of the expansion announced last week. As for PayPal InStore, the Inquirer notes that Windows and BlackBerry versions are also under development.

Meanwhile, Juniper’s NFC projections, in contrast to Gartner’s, are significantly more optimistic about how much NFC will be used, and about how much money will be generated from NFC.

Juniper predicts in its new report that one in four consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe will tap, wave and hover NFC-enabled handsets at points of sale to buy goods by 2017. Juniper’s principal analyst, Windsor Holden, says that works out to $180 billion in mobile NFC transactions by 2017 — just $8 billion more than Gartner believes will be made in mobile payments overall this year. Gartner says that the total transactional value for all kinds of mobile payments will be $617 billion by 2016.

One area where both analysts seem to agree is on the complexity and challenges in making NFC work. Chief among them is that there are a number of parties involved in enabling payments — mobile operators, handset makers, payment providers, retailers and banks — and as Juniper points out a “single point of contact to take responsibility” will be needed to make these services gain credibility with users.

So far, we’ve seen a lot of efforts, including Google Wallet, the Isis consortium, and several commercial projects in Europe (eg, France Telecom working with Visa) — but no clear leader in NFC emerging out of all of that.

Nokia today announced it is losing another senior executive: Esko Aho, who had once been the prime minister of Finland and is currently EVP, corporate relations and responsibility and a member of Nokia’s leadership team, is leaving the beleaguered handset maker for Harvard University. There, he will be the Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School for public policy. He had been with Nokia since 2008 and a member of the executive team since 2009.

In his role at Nokia, Aho had overseen the company’s global policies and activities regarding sustainable development and social responsibility. Although his departure may not appear as destabilizing as some other executive exits — Colin Giles, Nokia’s EVP of sales, is leaving at the end of June and is not being replaced —  it is still a sign of how much the company is shedding the old guard as it looks to turn its struggling business around.

On a wider scale, Nokia has lost about 9,000 employees in the last year, according to the FT, and may well reduce its 122,000 headcount even more in the months ahead.

Nokia said in an emailed statement that Aho will leave the company at the end of August, but that he will remain involved as a consultant on public affairs (i.e., lobbying the Finnish government, or advising on how best to?).

Nokia has been on a steady decline in its mobile phone business — and has struggled particularly in the area of smartphones, where it has lost market share to Apple and to Android handset makers like Samsung. This quarter, by many estimates, Samsung overtook Nokia as the world’s biggest mobile phone company.

Under its latest CEO, Stephen Elop, Nokia has been trying to turn that trend around and has put his former employer Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS at the core of that strategy, although judging by its latest quarterly earnings, where sales fell by more than $4 billion, that plan has yet to bear significant and ripe fruit.

Since launching in mid-2011, doxo has been on a mission to make your life paperless. With its “digital filing cabinet” software, the Seattle-based startup aims to create a single place for users to manage their bills, be they phone, cable, or credit card.

Of course, the world is quickly going mobile, and payment solutions are going right along with it. So, in an effort to close the loop between web and mobile services, Doxo is today launching a new mobile payment and management solution, along with a new Android app, to finally allow users to both receive and pay bills from their mobile devices.

Doxo’s new Android app complements the updated iOS app the startup launched last summer so that the pair of apps now allow users to take advantage of mobile bill payment and management on top of its flagship “digital file cabinet” and secure backup offerings.

Both apps now include the startup’s new so-called “doxoPAY,” a feature that allows users to receive and pay bills with one account and one password from a single app. This means that you no longer have to set up separate usernames and access credentials to manage payment accounts across multiple websites, instead, you can simply create a free Doxo account to start organizing your household accounts and docs, connecting with service providers that include AT&T, Sprint, Puget Sound Energy, and Sound Community Bank — to name a few.

The startup is currently hard at work on expanding this list, signing up as many banks, public utilities, and major phone and cable carriers as it can. Obviously, while the value proposition is evident, for Doxo to truly become your default digital file cabinet and bill payment solution, it has to be integrated with all the providers you’re using. That’s half the battle, and it still has a ways to go there.

That being said, Doxo has the potential to significantly mitigate a huge pain in the ass for consumers. For most people, whether you receive bills electronically or in good old paper form, payment is a three step process: Read the bill when and wherever you receive it, open it again when you’re ready to pay, and then file through another system. Doxo’s mobile payment solution condenses that down to a single step by embedding payment options in the bill itself.

Users simply connect with their providers to pay bills, directly on Doxo Mobile, receiving bills from those providers while uploading documents and bills from home or on the go, with the added benefit of being able to manage, upload, and organize account information, important documents, and bills by account. Plus, you can use the apps to snap photos and upload bills and receipts into Doxo’s digital filing cabinet, while automatically backing up those critical documents to their hard drive or cloud providers like Box.com and Dropbox.

On the flip side, for businesses, Doxo is trying to eliminate the hurdles most often cited by consumers in regard to going paperless. Not only that, but it can streamline and reduce the additional costs inherent to most customer-provider interaction by speeding collection, cutting credit card fees (like overdue payments), and make it easy to go paperless. Which, for businesses, can mean eliminating the need for custom software — or having to develop their own standalone app.

According to Doxo CEO Steve Shivers, this translates to businesses saving an average of 80 percent on the cost of mailing documents, bills, and accepting payments. And, of course, the best part is that, because Doxo saves businesses money on paper, its mobile apps are free for the consumer — and available in the App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store.

Founded in 2008, Doxo seemed to miss the memo on the whole “ship or die” approach, taking its sweet time to go to market, testing and developing for over two years before finally coming out of invite-only beta last summer. Better safe (and market ready) than sorry. Of course, it also helps one’s slow and steady method when there’s $15 million in venture funding from Sigma Partners, Mohr Davidow, and Jeff Bezos to fall back on.

For more, check out Doxo at home here.

Facebook had another tough day today in the public markets, with shares now trading at around $28 after debuting less than two weeks ago at $42.05. Good timing, then, for a new slideshow report out today from the boutique French consulting firm faberNovel, which encourages us to look at the bigger picture, and why, in its words, Facebook is “the perfect startup.”

The mammoth slideshow (after the break) is an annual thing for faberNovel, which picks one company to tackle each year — others have included how Amazon controls e-commerce, how Apple dominates, and what could go wrong with Google. Like those before, the one out today on Facebook is a deep-dive into the company, and it looks not just at the origins of the social network, but what sets it apart from other attempts at global social networks — and other startups. (And by the way, faberNovel sees all this drama and attention on the IPO as just “one point on a startup trajectory.” Some investors may not feel quite the same.)

In 94 fairly packed slides (no Kreiger approach here), there is a huge amount of data, occasionally usefully visualizing some of the biggest challenges the company faces. (Example: Facebook’s monetization issue. It is getting ten times more traffic than YouTube, but only one-tenth the revenue of YouTube’s owner, Google.)

A little later, looking back at Facebook’s different tests with advertising, faberNovel makes a good argument for how a lack of success with more traditional models has contributed to it being such an innovative company. Specifically, around new, social ad formats (that’s slide 34), even if some of those formats have yet to pay off when compared to how much time users spend on the site.

“Facebook has no choice but to change the game’s rules,” faberNovel explains, which is perhaps the crux of why it has done so well.

What caught my attention the most — possibly because of all the news of the past week swirling around Facebook and its mobile plans — was faberNovel’s take on Facebook’s mobile business.

Facebook already has a huge amount of users on mobile (more than 400 million of its 901 million active users are accessing by mobile), but it could quite possibly get squeezed out of mobile altogether because of Apple and Google’s own control of the ecosystems, and the fact that eventually other and better mobile apps will come along.

That has left Facebook with no choice but to beef up with acquisitions, more features and its own beginnings of a mobile platform. Specifically, faberNovel believes the App Center could really become a game-changer and the lynchpin for how Facebook begins to “own” its users on mobile devices.

FaberNovel then takes this one step further and proclaims that, with its large mobile user base and variety of services, “Facebook is a new breed of telco.”

It even idly wonders if the company could, one day, even operate its own ad-hoc Mesh network to put the final piece into the puzzle. Is that a speculation too far? In a world of $100-billion-plus valuations for largely free services, perhaps anything is possible.

Canadian smartphone manufacturer RIM has briefly ceased trading of their stock today in order to issue a “business update” from CEO Thorsten Heins to their stockholders.

Though the release takes the time to outline some of the company’s recent personnel changes, Heins also points out that the company has enlisted the services of both the Royal Bank of Canada and J.P. Morgan to help the company evaluate their financial strategies going forward.

To quote Mr. Heins:

To further enhance our commitment to successfully completing our transformation, after the release of our year-end financial results, we engaged J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and RBC Capital Markets to assist the Company and our Board of Directors in reviewing RIM’s business and financial performance. These advisors have been tasked to help us with the strategic review we referenced on our year-end financial results conference call and to evaluate the relative merits and feasibility of various financial strategies, including opportunities to leverage the BlackBerry platform through partnerships, licensing opportunities and strategic business model alternatives.

For those still unfamiliar with Mr. Heins’ M.O., he’s made it very clear in the past that he will consider all potential options to ensure that the ailing smartphone company has a future. That includes the possibility of licensing their still-incomplete BlackBerry 10 operating system to other hardware manufacturers down the line, as well as the extreme possibility of selling the company entirely. Whether or not either of the financial advisors the company has been consorting with will prod him in either of those directions is still unclear, but at this point it seems like Heins needs a bit of help plotting the company’s course.

There are a few other juicy tidbits to be found as well — Heins notes that the transition period RIM is currently attempting to wade through has been a tricky one, and that the company (perhaps unsurprisingly) will likely report an operating loss in their forthcoming Q1 earnings report. On the upside, the BlackBerry World conference seems to have done a decent enough job driving developers to BlackBerry 10 — the free hardware probably didn’t hurt — and the company now reports that there are 80,000 BlackBerry apps floating around in their App World.

While we shouldn’t get too hung up on numbers, the Windows Phone Marketplace hit that milestone last month, and that platform has only been around for roughly two years. In short, RIM still has a long to go to prove that their platform is still one to keep our eyes on.

RIM thought the news big enough to temporarily ceased all trading activity, a move they’re rather familiar with. They pulled something similar back in March just ahead of the release of their disappointing fourth quarter financials and the announcement that co-CEO Jim Balsillie was stepping away from the board of directors.

The full release has been reproduced below:

Research In Motion Limited (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM)(TSX:RIM), a world leader in the mobile communications market, today provided a business update from Thorsten Heins, the Company’s President and CEO.

“During the Q4 2012 and fiscal year-end financial results conference call on March 29, I said that I would provide our shareholders with candid and timely updates when possible on the progress and challenges RIM is experiencing. While we are no longer giving quantitative financial guidance, I wanted to provide a brief business update at this time, and will provide more details when our Q1 financial results for the quarter ended June 2, 2012 are released on June 28.

In terms of challenges, as I mentioned on the March financial results conference call, RIM is going through a significant transformation as we move towards the BlackBerry 10 launch, and our financial performance will continue to be challenging for the next few quarters. The on-going competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace, and we expect our Q1 results to reflect this, and likely result in an operating loss for the quarter. We are continuing to be aggressive as we compete for our customers’ business – both enterprise and consumer – around the world, and our teams are working hard to provide cost-competitive, feature-rich solutions to our global customer base. On the positive side, we expect to further increase our cash position in Q1 from the approximately $2.1 billion we had at the end of fiscal 2012.

Despite the current challenges, we have made significant progress on a number of fronts in the past few months:

Our annual BlackBerry World conference and BlackBerry 10 Jam took place earlier this month and both were tremendously successful. More than 5,000 developers, partners, carriers and enterprise customers from 115 different countries saw the first glimpses of our next-generation BlackBerry 10 platform and their response was encouraging.

Our developer partners have been enthusiastic with the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha prototype unit we distributed at BlackBerry World and many are well underway in developing applications to be ready for the launch of BlackBerry 10 in the latter part of calendar 2012.

The support and enthusiasm from our developer community is also reflected in our app growth, where we now feature more than 80,000 apps, which represents a 220% increase from one year ago, and more than 15,000 apps for PlayBook compared to less than 2,000 last year. We believe this bodes well for our ecosystem as we get set to launch BlackBerry 10.

We are making steady progress with the innovation of our next-generation BlackBerry 10 mobile computing platform, which is still on track to launch in the latter part of calendar 2012.

Our global subscriber base continued to grow this quarter to approximately 78 million, driven primarily by growth in international markets, which is partially offset by high churn in the United States, and our BBM user base has grown to approximately 59 million users globally.

Our strong brand internationally was recently enhanced with the successful launch of two new BlackBerry 7 phones in India and Latin America.

We continue to make strategic changes to RIM’s senior management team with the hiring of two key new members to RIM’s executive leadership team. Kristian Tear, our Chief Operating Officer, whose background also includes extensive experience in international sales in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and Frank Boulben, our Chief Marketing Officer, who will provide our team with deep experience in the mobile computing and communications industry. Both will assist me and the existing executive team as we continue to make the organizational changes necessary to position RIM for the future and prepare for the launch of our new BlackBerry 10 platform.

The CORE (cost optimization and resource efficiency) program we told you about previously is focused on delivering key operational savings through various initiatives. The financial objectives for the CORE program are targeted to drive $1 billion in savings by the end of fiscal 2013, based on our Q4 run rate. We are targeting better efficiency and use of resources in our sales and marketing initiatives to effectively leverage marketing windows and evaluate our country portfolio to determine where it makes sense for us to prioritize our efforts. We will also continue to review RIM’s organizational structure and clearly define accountabilities for all key businesses and business processes with a goal of eliminating fragmentation, duplication and inefficiencies. While there will be significant spending reductions and headcount reductions in some areas throughout the remainder of the fiscal year, we will continue to spend and hire in key areas such as those associated with the launch of BlackBerry 10, and those tied to the growth of our application developer community. We will share more details regarding our progress throughout the year as programs are implemented or changes are completed.

To further enhance our commitment to successfully completing our transformation, after the release of our year-end financial results, we engaged J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and RBC Capital Markets to assist the Company and our Board of Directors in reviewing RIM’s business and financial performance. These advisors have been tasked to help us with the strategic review we referenced on our year-end financial results conference call and to evaluate the relative merits and feasibility of various financial strategies, including opportunities to leverage the BlackBerry platform through partnerships, licensing opportunities and strategic business model alternatives.

Although we are facing challenges, we remain excited about BlackBerry 10 and believe that this platform coupled with the results of the strategic review will create long-term value for our stakeholders. We will provide another more detailed business update when we report our first quarter results in June.”

Developing…

Evo.

It’s one of the few HTC/Sprint product lines to make a splash in the mobile ocean, and after a brief stay at U.S. customs, the latest iteration should do the same.

The Evo 4G LTE is the most powerful Evo to date, with a 4.7-inch 720p display, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and 1GB of RAM under the hood. But these specs are in no way novel, which means that quite a bit comes down to HTC’s software offerings and design language.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is running the show on this puppy, with HTC’s now-usual 25GB of free Dropbox storage and Beats Audio integration also in tow. The former two are excellent features to have and should be considered when you’re weighing your various mobile options, but I can’t honestly say that the Beats Audio makes much of a difference.

In the design department, there’s quite a bit going on. The front of the phone looks like any standard Android phone that’s come out in the past six months: a large touchscreen, three capacitive buttons within a black bezel, and black edges with rounded corners. In short, the Evo 4G LTE face is nothing to write home about, though I am impressed with the way that HTC managed to squeeze a 4.7-inch display onto a comfortably compact body.

The back of the phone tells a different story. It’s a bit like a mullet — business up front, party in the back.

You’ll find a really nice soft-touch black finish along the bottom two-thirds of the phone’s backside, divided with a bright red, metallic-y kickstand, and finished up top with shiny plastic. The plastic grabs prints like that’s its sole purpose in this world, but the overall aesthetic is quite nice, and the soft-touch finish along the bottom is pleasant as can be.

I haven’t noticed any glaring issues in performance and battery life seems to be pretty good, but we can’t be certain of anything until I complete official testing. In other words, stay tuned for our full review which will go live this week.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has been planning to kill off the carrier’s aging iDEN network since 2010, but now Sprint has finally delivered a date for iDEN’s demise. The carrier has just announced that they plan to pull the plug on their iDEN network as soon as June 30, 2013.

Thankfully, from the ashes of the company’s near-dead 2G network will rise enhanced 3G service and Sprint’s new 4G LTE network.

The announcement comes just days after the FCC amended the rules that govern the ESMR 800 MHz spectrum band, meaning Sprint (and little guys like SouthernLINC Wireless) can now deploy their 3G and 4G network technologies in the same slice of spectrum that their iDEN networks previously occupied.

While Sprint still plans to launch their LTE network in a handful of markets any day now, refarming their existing spectrum holdings to help bolster that 4G network will help more customers latch onto a high speed signal. It’s a good thing, too — Sprint has already begun to push out LTE-capable hardware, and if they want to keep up pace with their larger competitors, they’re going to need to hit the ground running with regard to LTE network expansion.

Fear not, you chirp fans — Sprint has been fleshing out their device portfolio with CDMA Direct Connect handsets to appeal to users who still need their fix of instantaneous communication, but the era of wonderfully bulky flip phones is finally drawing to a close. Over the next few months, Sprint will be reaching out to their business and government customers in an effort to switch them over to their new Direct Connect service, and we’ll soon see the carrier discontinue all of their existing iDEN hardware.

Mobile app downloads continued to decline in April and the cost to acquire loyal users picked up, reports mobile marketing firm Fiksu in its latest report out today. This downward trend was expected, as no major events sparked app discovery during the month, explains Fiksu CEO Micah Adler. However, mobile app marketers were particularly aggressive in the social networking and games categories during April, both of which experienced volatility throughout the month. With the former (social networking), the reason had to do with the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, which drew increased attention to the category. There were also a number of new game releases in April, which led to increased interest and competition among the developer community in that category, as well.

This data comes from the measurements known as the Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which tracks the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps, and the Cost per Loyal User Index, which tracks the ever-changing cost to attract loyal users to an app. Fiksu defines “loyal” as people who open and app three times or more. The data is sourced from over 24.9 billion mobile app actions – which includes things like app launches, registrations, and in-app purchases – and more than 357.6 million downloads recorded by apps marketed via the Fiksu for Mobile Apps user acquisition platform.

In April, the App Store Competitive Index, dropped by 4.9% to 4.23 million downloads, which is down from 4.45 million in March, 6.35 million in February and 6.79 million in the first month of 2012. “App marketers continued to scale back their use of robotic install tactics in response to Apple’s policy on third-party marketing services,” said Adler of the drop in downloads.

March saw the biggest decline in terms of the impact of the download bot ban, with a huge 30% drop that month. The drop was in part due to exiting the busy holiday season when app installs spike, but was also due to Apple’s new policy on the use of these automated tactics designed to boost app’s rankings. In February, Apple warned developers to not use services like this to manipulate the chart, saying:

“Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

Clearly, the impact of the bot ban is still being felt, if perhaps on a smaller scale.

Meanwhile in April, the Cost per Loyal User Index rose by 12.3% to $1.46, up from $1.30 in March. February was practically the same as March at $1.31, a bump up from January’s $1.14. Typically the first quarter is a quieter period for marketers, says Fiksu, so April’s aggressive spending by marketers is not that unusual, especially when combined with the dynamics in the top categories of games and social networking in the month.

Now look: these are probably fake as all get-out, but bear with me. These handsomely watermarked photos are purported to represent a brand new iPhone design with a sort of two-tone brushed and chromed casing. Whether they are real or not (they’re definitely going to get UBreakIFix plenty of SEO juice), there is still a bit more to this story than just some blurry-cam shots (and these nice shots on 9to5mac). The most important thing to note is the size of the dock connecter. That’s right: it’s a micro USB port (or, less likely, a Thunderbolt port).

Arguably most major manufacturers have settled on micro USB as the standard. This is, in short, one of the best things to happen to the industry in the past decade. That Apple still clings to their jolly 30-pin slot is quite odd, especially considering how much real estate these things take up in the casing. A lot of those pinouts may have seemed like a good idea a few years ago, things like a dedicated S-video connection are probably outmoded these days. Sure they’re great for backwards compatibility, but why not offer a teeny adapter and call it a day?

Whatever happens in the next few weeks before WWDC, rest assured we’ll see plenty more iPhone 5 mockups. The glut of cases we’ve seen in the past hour is pointing to something brewing in Cupertino. Here’s hoping there is a solution for the constellation of iPhone-compatible devices already set up for 30-pin connectivity.
Click to view slideshow.

Rumblings of a new, Google-free iOS Maps app have been winging their way around the web for a few weeks now, and just in time to whet our appetites before WWDC, an early version of the revamped app has apparently been caught on film.

The folks at BGR managed to score a handful of (extremely blurry) photos depicting the new in-house Maps application that Apple will reportedly unveil alongside iOS 6 next month.

Putting Apple’s shift away from using Google map data aside for a moment, one of the bigger changes being forecast is the addition of a new 3D map view. It certainly jibes well with Apple’s purchase of 3D mapping company C3 Technologies in 2011, and BGR’s source claims that the feature is currently being tested on iOS 6 beta builds.

Enabling the new 3D view is a simple enough process — after tapping the button on the screen to bring up the map display settings, selecting the 3D option will cause a new toggle to appear in the bottom left corner of the main map. From there, users will be able to locate themselves and toggle between 2D and 3D views as desired.

Sadly, though the folks at BGR have cobbled together a mockup of what the updated app will look like (above), there’s still no clear shot of what the 3D map view will actually look like running within the application. For now though, we’ll have to make do with some early demos of the company’s impressive maps running on iOS hardware as we wait for WWDC to kick off.

One more Y Combinator startup from the March 2012 class has bagged a seed round of funding. PlanGrid, which has created a groundbreaking app for the construction industry, has raised $1.1 million from a notable list of backers. They include Suleman Ali, founder and CEO of TinyCo; Sam Altman, founder of Loopt; Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail; Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, Ray Levitt, Director of Stanford University’s Construction Engineering department; building-sector-focused Navitas Capital; as well as 500 Startups and Y Combinator itself.

Plus, here’s a twist: the funding marks the first investment in a startup (outside of acquisitions) by the cloud-services company Box, as part of its /bin Box Innovation Network initiative.

Ryan Sutton-Gee, one of the co-founders and CEO of PlanGrid, tells me that the motivation for Box is to foster cloud-based enterprise apps. “Box and PlanGrid initially started talking simply to discuss possible integration,” but they were impressed enough with the product and team, and so they offered to help with fundraising, he said. Since launching its first app in March, PlanGrid’s customer base has shot up. Sutton-Gee says that it is now being used by over 2,900 construction projects worldwide.

The app, which we detailed in length we first covered PlanGrid, in its basic concept is aimed at taking away some of the pain points and costs in creating blueprints for construction workers, in itself, $5 billion industry, Sutton-Gee says. The idea: transfer the whole “analog” process of printing out and distributing costly blueprint sheets into a slick and easy-to-update iPad app. (And expensive/inefficient it is indeed: for every $1,000,000 in building costs, there are $3,500 of printing costs, Sutton-Gee says.)

The funding will be used to expand PlanGrid’s team and add more features to the app. “Raising this round is a major milestone for us, and it will add a lot of fuel to our fire in bridging the gap between good, intuitive software and the construction industry,” says Sutton-Gee.

At the time of the launch, I wondered aloud whether the construction industry would be a challenging market — the iPad doesn’t seem like the most rugged of gadgets — but PlanGrid’s calculations that their product would be a game-changer have borne out:

Apart from the fact that their customer base is growing, it seems like PlanGrid is actually changing user perception. “Customer feedback has continued to be really great, especially from our in-field users,” says Sutton-Gee. “We’ve had many customers tell us that PlanGrid is the reason they decided to buy iPads, and that we are the killer tablet app for the construction industry. We’ve even  had a couple customers tell us they were going to buy Android-based tablets until they found us, and decided to change their IT strategy to incorporate our product.”

And there will be more features to make PlanGrid even more sticky: since launching Sutton-Gee says his team has added several new features, including the ability to pin photos taken with the iPad to blueprints (“finally a sensible use for the iPad camera!” he quips), the ability to attach any .pdf to individual blueprint sheets, and adding retina support for the new iPad (“which makes blueprints look really fantastic”), in addition to a redesign of the UI of the app.

He notes that a new version of the app is now with Apple with more enhancements. Users will be able to share markups across iPads and back up to the web (similar to Google Docs sharing, he says). Plus photos taken with the camera will automatically upload to the PlanGrid cloud (“a la Instagram”). Users will also be able to build an automatic archive, and PlanGrid has created a web-based version of its .pdf renderer to keep track of everyone’s documents.

Sutton-Gee says that in terms of take up, PlanGrid is seeing the most usage in California, Texas and Massachusetts in the U.S., “but have paying users in pretty much every state, and we also have paying users in Australia, Mexico and Canada.”  The app is being used on a wide variety of projects, he says, with the biggest on large buildings such as hospitals and manufacturing facilities.

No, NFC still hasn’t come to the iPhone — or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.

Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services.

SMS, Gartner research director Sandy Shen notes, remains the “dominant” access technology for making payments in developing markets, while in more mature markets, the vast majority of transactions are made via mobile internet portals. In North America in 2012, 80 percent of all mobile payment transactions will happen via Web/WAP routes, Gartner predicts; the figure in Western Europe is an even higher 88 percent.

That’s not to say near-field communications — the technology that will let people wave their phones in front of a payment terminal to pay for goods and services — is completely absent, but use of it will remain “relatively low” through 2015. (My theory is that if Apple puts an NFC chip into an iPhone and activates a service with it sooner than 2015, these forecasts could change: I’ve heard more than one mobile payments industry person tell me they are “just waiting for the iPhone to get NFC” before things really take off.)

Interestingly, Gartner doesn’t put slow adoption of NFC on the doorstep of handset makers, but does seem to refer to challenges among other players: ”NFC payment involves a change in user behavior and requires collaboration among stakeholders that includes banks, mobile carriers, card networks and merchants,” Shen notes.

Her prediction: NFC will be used but not for payments: “Tticketing, rather than retail payment, will drive NFC transactions,” she says.

– Fragmentation. This seems to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fragmentation in offerings — both from the point of view of service providers and technologies (NFC, SMS, dongles from the likes of Square and Paypal among them) — seems to keeping any one solution or group of providers from properly scaling up as the de facto standards for mobile payments. That has a knock-on effect for merchants and consumers, of course, who trust such solutions less. Gartner believes these kinds of fragmentation issues will continue for the next two years.

But on the other hand, fragmentation may be a necessary evil for success. Gartner points out that as mobile payments continue to mature, providers will need to tailor offerings to local markets, or “local demand patterns to customize their offerings,” says Shen. That goes not just for regulation and getting approval to offer services in specific markets, but also different retail business models, existing embedded technology, and local preference. For example, while U.S. customers may love Square, the jury is still out whether Jack Dorsey and Co. will be able to take that solution further afield with such success.

That’s not to say that there will not be behemoths in mobile payments are there are in the world of credit cards, but that local companies may have a stronger role in mobile payments than we have seen in credit up to now. “There will be a few global players that have the scale and resources to serve large customers and the mass market whose requirements can be readily satisfied by standard solutions,” Shen notes. “However, there will always be segments that cannot be sufficiently served by the global players. The demand of these segments can only be satisfied by specialized or local players who can better understand the segment and have specific solutions to meet the unique challenges.”

– Who is in the driving seat? In North America and Western Europe, it will be merchants, says Gartner, who will be seeing mobile payment transactions both in physical stores as well as in online payments. Online it will be led by companies like eBay and Amazon, who are already going at a fast clip in mobile payments. Offline, the Starbucks model of using an app to work as a payment method/loyalty card will be the route that others will also take.

Developing markets are another story. It won’t be merchants as such setting the pace for and using mobile payments. Rather m-payments will be used mainly for other kinds of services like money transfer and top-ups of mobile calling and text minutes. An interesting area I’ve not seen mentioned before is ticketing: apparently mobile payments are used to improve the efficiency of buying tickets for public transportation in markets like Africa and South Asia, Gartner says.

– Regional breakdown. North America may make the most noise, but by 2016 it will only be the third-largest market for mobile payments, Gartner says. Asia Pacific will be the biggest region, with Africa at number-two, with the pair accounting for more than 60 percent of all mobile payments in four years. The full table below

[Image: Steven DePolo, Flickr]

The Facebook IPO was supposed to be Silicon Valley’s shining moment. It’s the book-end for the decade of recovery that followed the first wave of consumer Internet companies. It was the debutante ball for the next great Silicon Valley company, the one with the most potential to last a generation or longer.

Instead, it’s turned into a public relations disaster. If we look a little more closely though, the Facebook IPO probably has more devastating consequences for the rest of the late-stage private market than it does for the company itself.

The late-stage market may have to reprice: Facebook is the latest major consumer Internet IPO that has underperformed compared to where it traded in secondary markets. In the final weeks of secondary market trading, we were seeing shares change hands at $40 and $44 a piece. Even though trading volumes aren’t that high in these secondary markets, Facebook had the most activity and it had years of pricing history.

The thought was that those prices were probably close to the public market prices. It was going to be hard to gauge what turned out to be an abnormally high amount of interest from retail investors. Those secondary markets may have helped convince Morgan Stanley and Facebook to raise the range from to the original $28 to $35 to the higher $34 to $38 range.

But actually, later-stage valuations were kind of wrong. Zynga and Groupon are in similar positions. Investors like T. Rowe Price who went in on Zynga’s Series C round in February 2011, bought shares at $14.03 a piece. They’re now at $6.61. (Sad face.)

Secondary market buyers just need to be a little more cautious about investing in pre-IPO companies if they are not in it for the long haul. It’s still possible to make money. It’s just that public markets are not blindly going to 2X or 3X a late-stage valuation. Investors that gave Groupon, like, a billion dollars a year and a half ago are still in the black. They paid what is now $7.90 a share, if you factor in stock splits. Now the shares are at $12.05. The last big financing round in Facebook is also up by about 80 percent from a year ago, when Goldman Sachs went in on Facebook at a $50 billion valuation.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson said, “Wall Street is going to value your business on your growth rate and your cash flow. Once you go public, you’re going to have to deal with a different kind of investor.”

He added, “The IPO market is back. But what people have to recognize is that companies are not going to get valued in public markets the same way they were valued in the late-stage market. The late-stage market is giving higher valuations than the public market is, so that means that the late-stage market is going to have to settle down.”

So investors need to be more conservative about how they think public markets will ultimately value their late-stage deals. Evernote at $1 billion? Dropbox at $4 billion? Spotify at $4 billion? These companies can only go out to public markets at those valuations if they have the current run-rate and growth trajectory to support them.

Facebook can overcome this if it has another “Calm down. Breathe.” moment:

If we’re debating about whether this was a “good” IPO or a “clusterfuck” of an IPO, it really depends on whose point of view you’re taking.

If you’re looking at the long-term picture for Facebook, the IPO was not bad at all. They raised $16 billion, with about $7 billion going directly into the company and the rest going toward early shareholders. Even though Facebook had the worst five-day start for an IPO out of the largest deals of the last decade, the company is washing out more of the short-term speculators, leaving room for believers who will hold the stock for the long-haul.

Also remember: Pissing people off, then apologizing and iterating your way out of it is classic behavior for Facebook. Facebook usually does one thing a year ago that really pisses people off. Then they fix it. It’s what they do. It’s never really intentional either. The euphemism for this is, “Move Fast. Break Things.” The only reason they can’t address the situation is because of the quiet period, but they’ll have a strategy once they’re out.

If we’re looking at Morgan Stanley, it’s complicated (hah). They’ve demonstrated to pre-IPO candidates in Silicon Valley that they will stand by their clients, support the price and take some bad publicity. If I were a company thinking of going public, it might be pretty attractive that Morgan Stanley appears willing to eat dirt for Facebook. But on the other hand, if I were a retail investor, I would be more skeptical of technology offerings they bring to the market in the future.

The next several quarters will be tough. Facebook has to prove it has more than display advertising:

While some analysts have already lowered second quarter estimates, I’ve also heard that the third quarter is projected to be soft too.

Chris Dixon said it best. Advertising that is about generating intent has lower value because it’s farther from the point of purchase. For a few years, Facebook’s theory has been that the sheer number of ads that generate demand on the web is something like 10X larger than the amount of ads at the bottom of the funnel (e.g. Google’s search ads). They believe the volume makes up for lower cost-per-click numbers.

But the sequential quarter-over-quarter decline in advertising revenue suggests that Facebook will need more legs to stand on. Flat quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in payments also suggests that the gaming vertical is mature and that Facebook will have to expand payments to other areas very, very soon.

The company will have to rebound on other business models. The Karma acquisition could lay the groundwork for a real gifting service across the entire site tied to birthdays. If even a single-digit percentage of Facebook’s 901 million users start buying birthday gifts for their friends multiple times a year through the site or mobile app, that’s not an insignificant revenue stream.

They could also launch a web-side display advertising network, an AdSense-killer if you will. But it’s not clear how much extra revenue that would add since Facebook already has a significant share of all display impressions across the web.

Even though mobile is tough right now, Facebook actually has a notable competitive advantage over rival mobile ad networks. If Apple fully removes the UDID soon, it will damage everyone else’s targeting abilities. But since Facebook knows who its users are and has recorded their tastes and preferences for years, that’s not as much a problem for them. They could launch a mobile display advertising network for all apps. Again, mobile display advertising is a tough business that isn’t producing that much revenue for anyone (even Google and Apple), but Facebook could take the lead if it pushed hard enough.

But remember that Facebook is a company that is built for the long-term: Despite the noise right now, Facebook is the one company out of the last generation of Silicon Valley startups that has enough untapped opportunities and is sufficiently mission-driven to keep attracting the best talent for years to come. Apple CEO Tim Cook even said that Facebook is the company that’s “closest” to being like Apple, according to Fortune.

If the shares fall too much by the six-month lock-up date, I would not be surprised if the company did something to make its employees feel more comfortable with their compensation (especially as the headhunters come out). This is an industry where it only takes a decade to become a geriatric company (see Yahoo). Facebook is eight. Talent is everything.

Internally, it doesn’t sound like Facebook employees are paying too much attention to the media fracas surrounding the IPO. It’s funny because the Hackathon leading into the IPO actually had a dual purpose. It wasn’t just to celebrate and maintain Facebook’s culture. One source told me it was to tire the employees out so much that they wouldn’t be able to pay attention to stock fluctuations the next morning. Good advice, indeed.

The images in this post are from CalmingManatee.com, because what is more calming than a manatee?

There goes another one — RIM announced today that Chief Legal Officer Karima Bawa will soon be leaving the company. This is RIM’s second major departure in as many weeks, with RIM sales head Patrick Spence leaving the ailing smartphone maker last Wednesday.

At the time, sources pointed to audio electronics company Sonos as his likely landing spot, though neither Spence nor Sonos have officially commented on the situation.

Unlike Spence, who reportedly jumped ship after being passed over for the company’s vacant COO spot (Sony Mobile EVP Kristian Tear eventually got the job), Bawa’s situation seems much less contentious. After spending nearly twelve years with the company (two of which were in her current spot), she’s finally looking to retire.

According to Reuters, Bawa’s departure was no surprise — she apparently revealed her desire to leave months in advance, and will be sticking around long enough to get her successor up to speed.

Still, a loss is a loss, and if recent reports are to be believed there are plenty more to come. Rumblings of a new round of layoffs have making the rounds lately, with the Financial Post reporting yesterday that nearly 6,000 employees are said to be on the proverbial chopping block.

RIM laid off 2,000 employees as part of a drastic cost cutting measure in July 2011 which acccounted for 11% of the company’s total workforce at the time. If these latest layoffs indeed come to pass, RIM will (for better or worse) be smaller than it has been in years. The Waterloo-based company needs to put as much of their effort as possible into crafting their forthcoming BlackBerry 10, and it remains to be seen whether or not this new, lean RIM is up to the task. Their early focus on luring developers to the platform with developer-friendly hardware and tools was a smart one, but market share shrinking and a launch window that could put it up against stiff competition, RIM can’t really afford for it to be anything other than a homerun.

Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off rumors that it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when we asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s user base shifts away from desktops.

In fact, about 45% of users of Face.com’s app KLIK end up sharing their photos on Facebook, which shows how popular mobile facial recognition could be.

For the record, Face.com people are keeping their cards close to their chest. Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch flatly tells TechCrunch: “We have nothing new to announce or share at this time.”

But even while Facebook has been pushing a lot of fancy new enhancements to its mobile offerings (its Camera mobile app being the most recent) there are still a surprising number of features that have yet to be covered by the company.

So, perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, we’re now getting a full whack of reports of what the company might buy or launch to make up for that, including today’s Face.com news that Facebook is looking to buy mobile/PC browser company Opera and hiring ex-Apple hardware engineers to work on its own phone. (Btw Opera is also giving a similarly no-news line: “Everything I’ve read has been news to me,” one Opera person told me.)

We may just, quite possibly, be in the middle of a Facebook news bubble and that half of what we are reading about Facebook and mobile may never come to pass — or could take ages to come to fruition: Buffy the Android slayer is reportedly still six to 12 months away going by the timing in the AllThingsD post from November. And this is not the first time we’ve heard that Face.com is in the Facebook acquisition line.

But, if you swallow that large grain of salt, there is a huge amount of sense in the social network looking at beefing up its mobile arsenal with companies like these, which offer features that Facebook currently does not, and therefore offer the promise of getting mobile users to spend more time on the social network — something that is a concern for the company.

At the moment, Facebook’s popular photo tag suggestion feature does not work from mobile, only on web uploads on PCs; on mobile, users can tag by starting to type a name for tagging options to appear, a spokesperson notes to us.

Face.com meanwhile offers facial-recognition software both for PC-based and mobile usage, with the key being that it covers mobile.

Face.com has its own iPhone mobile app, KLIK, beta-launched in January, and then rolled out as a 1.0 version in the app store earlier this month, which shows off the full range of its features.

These include facial recognition, facial-friendly photo filters and a location-based photo network — all services you could see sitting naturally in Facebook’s existing services.

Face.com tells us that Klik had over 100,000 downloads of the app in the first three days — signs of stickiness and popularity.

Equally interesting, Face.com also offers an API to integrate its technology into other apps. (One company suggested for an integration: Path.)

The API functionality could come in handy as Facebook looks at more ways of extending its functionality and touchpoints outside of its walled garden, especially since an Android version is likely to come soon from Face.com.

Opera, last week’s acquisition rumor, offers a similar promise of covering new ground for Facebook.

In its case it’s about a web browser — which, as others have reported, would be an essential feature if Facebook were to launch its own mobile platform.

That would be to compete against the likes of Android from Google and iOS from Apple in smartphones. But having web browsing capabilities could also help Facebook make more of a push in the lower-end feature phone space — an area where it has already made advances with services like Facebook Zero and its acquisition of Snaptu to improve the feature phone experience to target users in developing markets.

Coincidentally, Opera pushed itself as a “social mobile” company in February, when it launched the Opera Mini Next browser, offering “Smart Page” social media sharing features specifically for feature phone users.

Opera says it has some 200 million users of its browsers today, but if its social functionality that Facebook is after, there may be others worth watching, too. For example, the social mobile browser company Rockmelt, which has raised nearly $40 million from Andreessen-Horowitz, Accel, Khosla Ventures and others, currently offers an iOS app.

In the meantime, Opera has seen a little lift in its fortunes since the rumors broke last week: today its share price appears to have been its highest in a year, rising by 24.4 percent and closing at €5.70 a share.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]