Facebook owner speaks on mobile developments

Delegates to the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this week were treated to a rare appearance by Facebook founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg, who was candid about some of the mistakes his company may have made, especially regarding its excursion into the mobile sector.

Speaking onstage with TechCrunch’s founder and venture capitalist Mike Arrington, a relaxed Zuckerberg opined that his company possibly lost two years devoted to developing mobile internet technology instead of going with native iOS apps, and observed that mobile will outstrip the Web when it comes to generating advertising revenues.

Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook’s biggest mistake was a focus on HTML5, but that this had been addressed and things are looking good for Facebook’s relatively new iOS native app, which is generating twice as many feed stories, and is the source of big expectations for the company.

Judging by Zuckerberg’s comments, mobile is at the heart of his company’s ambitions for expansion; he said that with 5 billion users globally and counting, mobile represents a massive future potential in terms of advertising, generating traffic and increasing visit frequency.

He accepted that the Facebook IPO and subsequent decline in the share price has been disappointing, but stressed that the company was “fundamentally good”, took a long term view in generating value for investors, and had attractive enhancements in store for users, mobile being key among them.

The youthful Facebook founder gave Zynga a boost during the discussion, describing it as a strong company with massive user support despite its unfortunate decline on the stock market.

View the interview here:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on html5/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29