Credit: Evert F. Baumgardner / Apple

Rumor has it Apple is about to start making the the world's favorite gadget.

In a note sent to clients earlier this week, Piper Jaffray analyst (and longtime Apple TV enthusiast) Gene Munster said he’d spoken to a major television component maker that has been contacted by Apple about the capabilities of its display components.

Some people wonder whether Apple would really choose to enter a market that’s so crowded, and that offers such slim margins for manufacturers. But similar doubts were raised before Apple launched the iPhone, and, of course, it went on to take over that market, primarily by delivering a remarkably simple and intuitive user interface and experience.

With any luck, Apple will bring similar innovation to the living room. The television interface is a huge mess, and a huge opportunity. Instead of a multitude of remote controls for different devices and several poorly thought-out graphical interfaces, imagine a simple, intuitive way to navigate the lineup for an evening's entertainment. Even diehard Apple holdouts would surely welcome that.

I can't think of a better way to do this than putting Siri, Apple's intelligent assistant for the iPhone, into a television. I’ve been experimenting with Siri for a while, and talking to experts about how it works. It seems perfectly suited to a relatively narrow range of tasks like searching for shows, scheduling recordings, and answering simple questions about the week's schedule. By syncing with iCloud, a Siri-enabled TV could even be used to dictate e-mails, create calendar entries, and set reminders. 

Apple could, of course, also innovate when it comes to delivering content, as it did with music through iTunes. In his note, Munster lays out three ways that the company might approach the TV market: with 1) a device that offers a better software interface for managing television content, “much like TiVO”; 2) a device that combines TV from network channels with Web-based content; and 3) a device that offers monthly subscriptions to content from various providers.

Apple may well try strategy 2 or 3. But I still think the biggest opportunity lies in solving the perennial problem of the televisual user experience. Look at Google TV; its disappointing sales have largely been blamed on a bewilderingly complex control and interface.

As Munster wrote in his note to clients: “Apple only enters mature markets with the goal of revolutionizing them, as it did with the smart phone.”

But don’t just take his word for it. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes of the late Apple CEO:

“He very much wanted to do for televisions what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” he told me. “It will be seamlessly synced with all your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Let’s hope he did.

In an announcement that Facebook hopes will be “liked” by many, the world’s largest social network filed to become a publicly listed company late Wednesday. Documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission provide investors and Facebook users the first public glimpse of the company’s financial state, technological challenges, and ambitions.

In its S-1 filing, Facebook said it is trying to raise $5 billion through an initial public offering of shares, which would make it the biggest Internet IPO to date. The stock will trade on either the Nasdaq Stock Market or New York Stock Exchange, most likely under the ticker symbol “FB.” The $5 billion figure may change by the time Facebook's stock begins trading— something that typically happens several months after a company files its registration statement.

A company’s S-1 filing contains details of the company’s financials and statements about its goals, assets, and any potential dangers to the business. Technology Review read Facebook’s and found these interesting tidbits:

• A total of 845 million people used the site every month, as of the end of 2011—an increase of 39 percent over 2010. A total of 483 million people used Facebook daily, as of the end of 2011—an increase of of 48 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.
• Facebook is making money. The company reported in its filing that its net income totaled $1 billion in 2011, compared with $606 million in 2010. In 2011, revenue rose 85 percent to $3.7 billion. Mobile use of Facebook is big, and getting bigger. In December, over 425 million of the company’s monthly active users accessed Facebook through a mobile device, such as a phone or tablet. The company expects its ranks of mobile users to grow faster than its active monthly user count “for the foreseeable future,” partly because it is so focused on getting more mobile users. Facebook doesn’t currently bring in much revenue from its mobile apps, though, so it will need to find ways to change that as this growth continues.
• Facebook is concerned about its dependence on Apple’s iOS software and Google’s Android operating system, which power mobile phones and tablets, saying that its mobile growth depends on its apps being able to work on those platforms. The social network said that it would suffer if Apple of Google made changes that hinder the functionality of its mobile apps or favor competitors.
• Last year, 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue came from one source: Online games company Zynga, which itself went public in December. This revenue, which comes from the sale of virtual goods in Zynga’s games and ads Zynga bought, is up from less than 10 percent in 2010 and 2009. Having such a large chunk of revenue come from a single source could concern investors, because if Facebook’s relationship with Zynga sours it could significantly hurt Facebook’s financials. Zynga’s own S-1 filing noted its dependence on Facebook as a risk.
• In a letter to investors contained in the filing, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 27, said that his company doesn’t “build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” He also noted the company’s “Hacker Way” culture and management style, which involves constantly improving and iterating.
  
• Facebook’s headcount rose to 3,200 as of December 31, from 2,127 a year earlier. The company expects this growth to continue, and said it plans to hire a “significant” number of engineers and salespeople this year.
• The company, which last year opened its first data center to cut the cost of the computing power required to run its website, has big plans to ramp up its infrastructure spending and to design and own more data centers. This is a complicated undertaking, though, and the company warned that any issues could raise anticipated costs and hurt its user experience.

The Patriots' official website. Credit: Technology Review

Social media analysis reveals that Giants fans show more online gusto than do their Patriots counterparts.

The analysis comes from the analytics firms Nielsen and NM Incite, and shows that Giants fans look at almost twice as many pages on the team website than do their Patriots counterparts. What's more, Giants fans are far more prolific bloggers. 

As 781vicci recently put it on Twitter: "I hope the #GIANTS WIN THE SUPERBOWL IM COUNTIN ON THEM BOT CUZ IM FROM NY OR IM A FAM JUS SO I CAM WEAR THAT @BRIDGEBOISE #CRUNECK ON TV."

Thanks to such missives, the Giants have been garnering about 59 percent of the buzz on Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms. The Pats have only been getting 41 percent. (True, in terms of quarterbacks, fans talk about Tom Brady more than Eli Manning, and more people visit the Pats site—644,000 unique visitors during the playoffs compared to 574,000 for the Giants.)  

Social media analytics is a fast-evolving field that promises to revolutionize advertising, politics, and more. Someone, somewhere, is working on way to translate all of this into a point-spread prediction.

The info-graphic below summarizes the results of the Nielsen study: