Leo Mirani

Facebook is pleased with its growth on mobile devices, especially outside the US, and it wants everybody to know. It recently sent out a publication to its advertisers which breaks down user numbers by country for the first time, and includes a wealth of data about daily and monthly users as well as those who access the service from mobile devices. TechCrunch has the details as well as the full publication, but we’ve broken down some of the key numbers into this chart.

Shinzo Abe isn’t the only one stirring up Japanese-Chinese tensions.

It’s common currency in internet punditry circles that Google won the battle to dominate search while Facebook won the battle for social, and that Google+ is just a failed competitor to Facebook. But Google hasn’t given up.

Every so often in Dave Eggers’s The Circle, a disturbing novel about the future as imagined by tech companies, the characters talk about going “retinal.” Eggers never explains what that means, though some readers might assume it’s a more advanced version of Google Glass, which sticks a mini-screen right in front of your eyes.

That heartwarming/nauseating Apple advertisement left out one very important aspect of what has become a 21st-century holiday tradition. On Christmas day, when people open their presents and find shiny new smartphones or tablet computers, the first thing they will do is start downloading apps. First will come the regulars—Facebook, WhatsApp, Angry Birds—and then they will hunt for more, generally games. More apps will be downloaded tomorrow than on any single day before it.

We’re down to two mobile operating systems. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android control 94% of the market, while their competitors have lost ground.

The numbers: Disastrous. BlackBerry lost $4.4 billion (pdf) on revenue of $1.2 billion in the quarter to Nov. 30. That almost makes the previous quarter seem like the good old days, when the company lost a mere $965 million. To put this quarter’s number in perspective, BlackBerry’s losses over the past three months exceeded its net income for the 16 quarters before that put together: In the four years to the end of August, Blackberry made a total of $4.2 billion.

When Hilde Charlotte Blomberg reached the University of Oslo last Friday, the first thing she did was to send a mass email to the Department of Informatics:

The European Union wants every cell phone sold in Europe, whether smart or otherwise, to come with a standard charger. Today the EU came one step closer to that goal. Members of European parliament, the supra-state’s legislative body, finally convinced the Council of Ministers, another powerful body, of the importance of the legislation, which the parliament sees as reducing waste as well as making life easier for consumers who switch from one phone to another.

Last month, Quartz wrote about Scanadu Scout, a nifty little device that can measure your vital signs—temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and more—simply through contact with your skin. The catch was that you have to hold it up your forehead to get a reading. Stephane Marceau, founder of the Montreal-based OMSignal, takes the idea of self-tracking further: Why measure your health every now and then when you can do it all day long?

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has a hefty new report out this week looking at the app economy. The report’s authors studied what privacy permissions are requested by the most popular Android apps in the Google Play store.

There’s a lot of junk on the web. There is also a lot of good stuff on the web. And then there is the stuff that’s been lifted from the good and dropped amid the dross—the aggregation, the block-quotes, the straight-off copy-paste jobs.

The creators of Kano, a kit to assemble your own mini-computer, asked for $100,000 on Kickstarter. One day short of the end of the company’s campaign, they’ve raised $1.35 million from nearly 12,000 backers including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler. Alex Klein, one of the three creators of Kano, says people from 44 countries have chipped in (though the majority—some 40%—are American).

Nobody likes auto-playing videos, most of which tend to be ads in one of the dozen or so tabs you have open. Such a scourge are they that Google is testing a version of its Chrome browser that helps users find where the sound and video is coming from—presumably so users can immediately close the offending tab. That has not discouraged Facebook, however. If the Wall Street Journal is to believed, Facebook will announce today (paywall) that it is to start rolling out auto-playing video ads in newsfeeds—and fullscreen on your mobile phone—starting Thursday.

Last week, Abhinav Chokhavatia, a 32-year-old app developer from India, released his company’s latest offering, “Modified.” Built for Android devices, the app is a game that allows users to dress up Narendra Modi, the leader of the opposition and the man most likely to become India’s next prime minister, in a variety of guises.

Indonesia doesn’t get a lot of attention for its internet commerce, but as the world’s fourth most populous country—after China, India and the US—the potential size of the market is staggering, and an e-commerce war is heating up.

It’s been a fun couple of weeks for Microsoft watchers. First Ford CEO Alan Mulally dominated headlines as a favorite for the top job at Microsoft, even as his board publicly said he would stay at the auto manufacturer at least through the end of 2014. Then, last night, Bloomberg reported that Steve Mollenkopf, chip-maker Qualcomm’s chief operating officer was in consideration. This morning Mollenkopf was promoted to CEO (paywall) of Qualcomm.

At the end of August, Hugo Barra left his position at Google as the man in charge of Android, its mobile operating system, to move to Xiaomi, a Chinese phone manufacturer with big ambitions. This week, he appeared at the Le Web conference in Paris with a presentation that anybody interested in either China or technology—or both—would do well to watch.

Last year, Americans spent about a third more on apps from Google Play and Apple’s App Store than the Japanese. By October this year, Japan’s 127 million people were outspending America’s population of 310 million by about 10%, according to a new report from App Annie, a research firm. Per capita, the Japanese were spending 2.5 times as much on apps as Americans.

One thing that unites Facebook users in Asia, Europe and America: They all love Disneyland, and want everybody to know about it. Four of the top 25 locations that were most checked-in to by Facebook users this year—excluding transportation hubs such as airports—were Disneyland Tokyo, Disneyland Hong Kong, Disneyland Paris and Disneyland California. (Facebook’s top 25 consist of the single-most checked-in location in 25 countries, not the top 25 overall.)

In the early days of smartphones, apps that layered data over the real world—”augmented reality” apps—were all the rage. Point your phone’s camera at the street and the screen would show nearby restaurants and bars. Aim at a building to learn about its history. Or view a magazine through an augmented reality (AR) app and watch the ads comes to life (and who doesn’t want more from their ads.) It seemed like a nice idea. But it never really took off. The technology didn’t work very well. Content was limited in its scope. Users got bored once the novelty wore off. And it didn’t exactly change our relationship with ads.

How does a company keep growing when it’s reached pretty much all the customers it can? Digicel, a mobile operator with nearly 14 million subscribers, is no behemoth by telecom standards; but having specialized in small countries, it has hit the limits of its expansion. The solutions it has found could be instructive for larger rivals that face the same conundrum.

This morning, the British government announced an infrastructure plan (pdf) that, somewhat optimistically, projects £375 billion ($612 billion) of spending by public and private entities over the next decade or so (the timeline is fairly vague). Some of the headline announcements include £25 billion in investment spending from the insurance industry, not a sector known for its impact on infrastructure, and that the British government will sell off the 40% stake it owns in Eurostar, the train company providing high-speed services between London and the continent.

David Cameron’s latest effort to boost British exports—this time with a massive trade delegation to China—has produced some good, if unexpected, news: China agreed to allow imports of pig semen from Britain, thus far banned due to safety regulations. The prime minister’s office says the deal, which covers both semen and live pigs, could be worth £45 million ($74 million) per year.