The Korean tech company brought in Broadway performers for a mammoth production at New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall, which seats about 6,000. The hour-long spectacle was broadcast in Times Square, where chairs were set up for people to watch a talented young boy tap dance and actors crack lame jokes. Oh, and there was also a new phone.

The Galaxy S4 is being generally well-received by gadget hounds. It’s packed with whiz-bang features you can show off at the dinner table, like movies that automatically pause when you look away, taking photos using both cameras at the same time, and hand gesture controls.

The Samsung executives on stage at the event did their best Apple-marketing shtick to play up the Galaxy S4′s specs. The 5-inch screen is “unbelievably sharp,” said Ryan Bidan, a director of product marketing at Samsung Telecommunications America. “It’s mind-blowingly thin.” And the “polycarbonate” case (that means plastic) is strong and “simply amazing,” said J.K. Shin, the head of Samsung’s mobile unit.

That’s about where the similarities end. Sure, Apple has had Coldplay and John Mayer perform songs live at its events, but Samsung upstaged Apple with unapologetic extravagance.

“I don’t recall ever seeing a full orchestra for when an Apple executive took the stage,” Michael Gartenberg, a Gartner analyst who watched the Samsung event and has attended numerous Apple conferences, said in an interview. ”If the Apple philosophy is ‘less is more,’ then Samsung’s is ‘more is more.’”

The corny gags and skits — sandwiched between dense recitations of technical specifications — didn’t go over well with the armchair critics on Twitter. But the tourists in Times Square and the people watching the live-stream video at home got a free taste of something vaguely resembling Broadway. As many as 462,000 people tuned in to watch the official stream, according to the YouTube page, and that’s not counting those following the live blogs and other videos.

Samsung spent $401 million on marketing its phones last year in the U.S. alone, while Apple spent $333 million, according to ad research firm Kantar Media. By taking over Radio City and Times Square tonight, Samsung shows it’s not about to slow down. And no matter how lame the actual performance was, the company got what it wanted.

“This was not a subtle product launch,” Gartenberg said. “There’s no doubt that everyone is paying attention to Samsung.”

Original post is Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Launch Was From Another Planet by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died today, championed a mobile phone called the Vergatario.

Hugo Chavez, who died today, will be remembered as the socialist who transformed Venezuelan politics and helped mobilize his country with anti-American rhetoric. However, his bizarre misadventures in the mobile-phone industry will probably not make it into the history books.

In 2009, President Chavez held a news conference to announce the Vergatario, the first mobile phone assembled in Venezuela. The device had a camera, FM radio and digital-music player costing 30 Bolivar (about $15 at the time). During the unveiling, Chavez used the phone to call his mom.

The handset resembled the candy-bar-shaped devices popularized by Nokia about a decade earlier, and certainly didn’t look cutting edge next to the iPhone, which predated the Vergatario by two years. But Venezuela hoped to boost mobile adoption in the country and other parts of Latin America by offering a low-cost product.

The Vergatario, like many Chavez initiatives, was controversial from the start. Some people took offense to the name, which sounds similar to a Spanish slang word for a certain part of the male anatomy, the Guardian reported then. Chavez didn’t help his case by snickering each time he said Vergatario during the news conference.

Chavez quickly addressed the controversy in a televised speech. He cited the Real Academia Espanola dictionary, which defines vergatario as quality. He also called the UK newspaper that ignited the controversy “ignorant.”

The Vergatario was assembled by Vtelca (Venezolana de Telecomunicaciones), a state-owned handset maker in partnership with China’s ZTE. Customers snapped up the 5,000 units made available on the device’s launch day in 2009, the Associated Press reported.

By 2010, Vtelca still hadn’t gotten all the hardware kinks figured out. The company managed to only assemble about one-quarter of its annual target, the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal reported. In 2011, the government said Vtelca produced more than 1 million phones.

The Vergatario II hit the market in August 2011. About 45,000 were purchased on the day it came out,  Nestor Gonzalez, a vice president at Movilnet, the mobile operator that carries the phone, told Radio Nacional de Venezuela.

“Within a couple years, we’ll be exporting a good-quality phone at a low cost,” Chavez said in 2009.

The late Chavez did not live to see his Vergatario challenge the iPhone.

Original post is Hugo Chavez: Known for Mobilizing Country, But Not His Mobile Phone by Tech Blog.

As the online streaming service tries to become the next HBO by focusing more heavily on original content, such as the critically acclaimed “House of Cards,” Netflix sees speed as its advantage.

“Everything moves faster online,” Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, said in an interview on “Bloomberg West.” He said Netflix has built a sizable subscriber base rapidly and expects that pace to continue.

One rival, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen, said Netflix’s strategy is working. He said yesterday that Blockbuster was too late to challenge Netflix in streaming video, and he feels “stupid” for not chasing original programming.

Last week, Jeffrey Bewkes, the chief executive officer of HBO parent Time Warner, praised Netflix for its success with ”House of Cards.” He described the series, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher, as “pretty good” during his company’s earnings call.

“The cycle of making breakthrough original programming, and having people find it and use it — which HBO’s been doing for 20 years, and Netflix is now joining — it takes a while to get that up to scale,” Bewkes said. “I forget. What does HBO got — 10 or so hits here?”

“House of Cards” has been Netflix’s first big splash. The show about American politics is poised to become the sort of reputation-builder that “The Sopranos” was for HBO. In 1999, the mob drama was nominated for several Emmy Awards in its first season. Netflix recently learned that “House of Cards” would be eligible for all categories of the Emmy Awards, Sarandos said.

“We entered into it under the assumption that it wouldn’t be eligible,” he said. “David (Fincher) loved the idea of trying something new and shaking the system up. Originally, when we talked about it, I said, ‘You know, one of the downsides of this show on Netflix would be if it’s the best work you ever do, we’re going to have a really star-studded Webby Awards.’”

(Watch the video interview at the top of this post for more on Netflix’s content strategy.)

Original post is Netflix Sees the Need for Speed in Becoming Next HBO by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Noah Berger/Bloomberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism about mobile, but the numbers aren’t there yet.

Mark Zuckerberg described Facebook today as a “mobile company,” but he has a long way to go to prove that mobile is a viable business.

Zuckerberg’s opening statements on Facebook’s earnings call lasted about seven and a half minutes, and the chief executive officer spent more than half of that time talking about mobile. He touted the effectiveness of advertisements on mobile phones, and how more users are checking the social network each day from their phones than from a computer.

“More people are starting to understand that mobile is a great opportunity for us,” Zuckerberg said. “Today, there is no argument. Facebook is a mobile company.”

Investors seem to be arguing about whether that is a good thing. The stock is down 3.5 percent in after-hours trading. Facebook executives had a lot of promising numbers to back up the bet on mobile, but the ones that matter — revenue and market share — aren’t there yet.

Mobile accounted for 23 percent of Facebook’s total ad revenue last quarter, the company said. Considering it was 14 percent in the third quarter, growth is going in the right direction. But mobile revenue still significantly lags actual usage as 680 million people, or 64.2 percent of Facebook users, are browsing the service on their phones.

Competition will also be tough. In the U.S. mobile ad market, Facebook is estimated to have a 12 percent share this year, which would be dwarfed by Google’s 57 percent, according to EMarketer.

None of these signs should cause investors to unfriend Facebook in droves, but the top executives shouldn’t necessarily be jumping up and down over the results.

“We were hoping for a little bit more,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said in an interview on Bloomberg West. “The mobile business is in tact. So I think that that’s a good part.”

There is, of course, plenty of room for Facebook to grow. Zuckerberg expressed optimism about refining the mobile ads that appear in the News Feed and making those more personalized based on usage.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, talked about measuring how the network’s ads convert into purchases in stores, which, if proven, could allow the company to charge more. She was unusually cagey about discussing a mobile version of Facebook Exchange, the ad-bidding tool that was successfully rolled out for the website last year. (One thing Facebook isn’t doing: “We’re not going to build a phone,” Zuckerberg said.)

The question about whether the great shift to mobile computing would unravel Facebook’s business has dogged the company ever since its initial public offering last year. Despite the intense optimism from its executives, who all mentioned the inroads being made in mobile advertising, Facebook’s performance last quarter doesn’t put those concerns to bed. Facebook acknowledged as much in today’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which lists the familiar risk factor: “our ability to monetize our mobile products.”

Original post is Facebook Is a ‘Mobile Company,’ But Is That a Good Business? by Tech Blog.

Source: iResearch, MRG as of 2012

In China, more shoppers are buying from established retailers instead of individual consumers selling goods.

(Updates comment from Alibaba in the 5th paragraph.)

Right now, China’s e-commerce industry looks like a bazaar where shoppers roam around for independent sellers who have the items they’re looking for. However, trends in the nation’s online buying habits show that the Chinese are moving away from small merchants and gravitating toward their own sorts of superstores such as 360buy Jingdong Mall.

The shift signals that the market is maturing, and it threatens to shake up the industry led by Alibaba Group Holding, China’s biggest e-commerce company. According to a report by Multimedia Research Group that was commissioned by Bloomberg, Chinese consumers made an estimated 35 percent of their online purchases at retailers last year. That’s up from 24 percent in 2011 and 14 percent in 2010, the report said.

As the chart shows, businesses are expected to continue to capture more market share this year and account for the majority of e-commerce transactions by the end of 2014. This type of e-commerce, dominant in mature Internet markets, “is the future of China’s online shopping,” Julia Zhu, an analyst at MRG, wrote in her report. “Chinese consumers shop online for a better price and accessibility to more products,” both of which are better served by big retailers than individuals.

Seemingly, that would be bad news for Alibaba, which owns the dominant consumer-to-consumer retail site Taobao Marketplace. 360buy, which describes itself as an “online shopping mall,” had been attracting millions of shoppers with perks such as free shipping and quality assurance.

John Spelich, a spokesman for Alibaba, said the company had foreseen this shift and has taken steps to address it, including spinning out its own superstore called Taobao Mall in 2011. Alibaba’s two largest e-commerce sites have collectively accumulated more than 1 trillion yuan ($161 billion) in sales, and Tmall continues to experience triple-digit growth, Spelich said.

Since launching Tmall in 2008, Alibaba has capitalized on the growing preference for an all-in-one shopping experience. Tmall is now the leader in that market, according to research firm Analysys International. Within the next decade, Alibaba plans to set up a logistics network that can support 10 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) in transactions, the China Daily newspaper reported last week.

In preparation for a brave new world of e-commerce in China, Alibaba has been arranging for several drastic changes to its business just in the past few weeks. The company said on Jan. 10 that it will divide itself into 25 units from seven in an effort to become more flexible. Then Jack Ma said he will step down as chief executive officer in May. Ma said last June the company could sell shares in an IPO within five years.

As the massive Chinese Internet market continues to evolve rapidly, all eyes are on Alibaba to see whether it can stay ahead of the trends without Ma, its billionaire founder, at the helm.

Original post is What the Big Shift in China’s Online Buying Habits Means for Alibaba by Tech Blog.

Photograph by AP Images

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said changes to how it reports earnings forecasts are designed to increase transparency.

For 34 consecutive quarters beginning in April 2003, Apple easily beat analysts’ estimates on its earnings per share. Then on Oct. 18, 2011 — less than two months after Tim Cook took over as chief executive officer — Apple missed.

Cook’s record is 3-2 in the quarters since that whiff. The company reported earnings today for its first fiscal quarter of the year, barely beating estimates by 2 percent. The stock fell as much as 11 percent in late trading.

Some may interpret this as a dynasty that’s peaked or a company that’s lost its way in the absence of its visionary co-founder, Steve Jobs. An alternate story line is that since Apple has been disclosing more to Wall Street analysts, they’ve finally found their way out of the reality-distortion field.

On today’s earnings call, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer announced a change to how the company provides earnings forecasts. Instead of picking a single number that Apple always seemed to blow past, the company will report a range. Next quarter’s is $41 billion to $43 billion. This is part of a push to “increase transparency into our business,” Oppenheimer said.

“Beginning this fiscal year, we are reorganizing the presentation of our results to provide greater transparency,” Oppenheimer said. “In recent years, our guidance reflected a conservative point estimate of results every quarter that we had reasonable confidence in achieving. Going forward, we plan to provide a range of guidance that reflects our belief of what we are likely to achieve.”

So does that mean Apple was purposely setting expectations low so that it could knock them out of the park? During Jobs’s earnings streak, when forecasts were “conservative,” Apple beat earnings per share estimates by an average of 30.2 percent. Now that’s magical.

From now on, can we expect Apple to be more realistic with its forecasts? Or, as Toni Sacconaghi put it on the call, “We’re actually getting the real planning range for Apple?”

“Was the guidance before something that you felt reasonably confident in achieving, or was there an implicit buffer in there?” Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., asked Oppenheimer on the call. “Your historical precedent was that you eclipsed it enormously on an ongoing basis.”

Sounding a bit impatient, Oppenheimer responded, ”Um, I’ll go through it again,” and rephrased his canned statement from earlier in the call.

There’s no question that Cook is more friendly with Wall Street than Jobs had been. Cook speaks with analysts and sat for an interview a year ago at a Goldman Sachs conference. He talks a lot about transparency.

Of course, the guidance process isn’t the only factor in the post-Jobs performance story. While Apple set a record of $54.5 billion in revenue, the company’s sales growth last quarter was the lowest it’s been in 14 quarters, and profit growth was the lowest since 2003.

The electronics maker may have a tougher time hiding these troubling signs when it’s no longer crushing Wall Street’s estimates.

Original post is Apple Shuts Down Reality-Distortion Field on Earnings Forecasts by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Globe Photos/Zuma Press

Ben Curtis, Dell’s pitchman a decade ago, is now an actor and producer. But he’s open to returning to his glory role.

Ben Curtis, the actor made famous by his role in Dell commercials early last decade, says he’s got the solution to the problems that led Michael Dell to seek a leveraged buyout: Resurrect the “Dell Dude.”

Dell was an unstoppable force in the early 2000s when Curtis was the PC maker’s television pitchman. Steven the Dell Dude, as he was known, would show up unannounced during shopping excursions and graduation ceremonies to utter the catchphrase, “Dude, you’re getting a Dell.” It was both memorable and effective. Lots of dudes and dudettes got Dells.

Now, the company is at a crossroads. Dell has dropped to third in global PC sales after holding the top spot at the height of its marketing blitz in 2002, according to research firm IDC. Bloomberg broke the news last week that Dell is in talks with private-equity firms to take itself private. Silver Lake Management and partners are close to lining up about $15 billion for the deal, my colleagues reported. Microsoft is discussing providing part of the funding, people with knowledge of the matter said.

“I think they’re making a huge mistake and simply need to bring back the Dell Dude!” Curtis wrote to me in an e-mail. “That’s it. That’s all they need to do. If they brought me back, their sales, stock and media presence would skyrocket. That is by FAR the smartest move they could make.”

Curtis was 19 when he won the Dell Dude role in 2000. He lost his job in 2003 after he was arrested in New York while trying to buy a bag of marijuana. He also happened to be wearing a kilt at the time. Since then, Curtis has done some voice acting, including for the game “Bully,” and has appeared in NBC’s “Law & Order,” among other projects.

While Curtis still clearly has some emotional ties to Dell, as Felix Gillette’s “Branded for Life” feature in Bloomberg Businessweek illustrates, the actor is convinced that he’s not the only one who believes in his marketing power.

“America agrees,” Curtis wrote in the e-mail. “My fans are the ones that say and know this. I’m just the messenger.”

Original post is ‘Dell Dude’ Says He Can Fix Dell by Tech Blog.

Photograph by ImagineChina/Corbis

China has been the top source of cyber-attack traffic since the last quarter of 2011, according to a study by Akamai.

About one-third of the world’s cyber attack traffic was traced back to China, according to a report by Akamai Technologies to be published today.

Between July and September of last year, about 33 percent of the attacks originated in China, double the percentage in the previous quarter, the report said.

The U.S. was the second-largest source with 13 percent. Next came Russia, Taiwan and Turkey, which each accounted for less than 5 percent of the attacks, according to the report by the Internet services company.

Corporate espionage, especially computer-data heists, has become a common practice in China, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year. In 2010, Google accused China of staging an attack on the company’s network. China has been the top source of cyber attacks since the end of 2011, the Akamai report said.

Most of the attacks originating in China targeted a particular database system made by Microsoft, according to David Belson, who edited the report.

“It may have been a flareup in some sort of exploit that is trying to spread,” Belson said in an interview.

The Akami report also contains the most recent list of countries and regions with the fastest Internet access. Check out the Bloomberg.com slideshow to learn more about the top 10.

Original post is One-Third of Cyber Attack Traffic Originates in China, Akamai Says by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Noah Berger/Bloomberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Graph Search at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

If you follow directions, Facebook’s new search engine is pretty amazing. But veer off course, and the results reveal just how limited the tool is right now.

During an event today at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Facebook introduced Graph Search, a drastically revamped version of the social  network’s search function. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called this feature as important to the site as the News Feed on the homepage and the Timeline profiles. It’s also the most nascent.

The promise of social search is compelling. For example, I might be more interested in movies my friends enjoy rather than whatever gets the highest ratings from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

A tiny slice of Facebook’s 1 billion users were provided with a beta version of Graph Search today. For the past few hours, I’ve been testing the tool on my profile, sifting through my groups of friends.

When first clicking on the search box, which now takes up most of the blue toolbar on the top of the website, I’m presented with a personalized tour of the new search features. It starts by showing me how I can search for people who went to the University of Maryland (my alma mater). Then it shows my unique results and a bunch of familiar faces.

From then on, the search box presents six sample queries whenever I activate it, such as “my friends,” “music my friends like” and “restaurants nearby.” I can choose any of those, click to see more suggestions or enter my own search terms. Once on the results page, a list of optional filters guides me on how to further refine my search.

The search engine currently handles four main categories: people, photos, places and interests. There are lots of options within those groups. For example, I can find friends who like Coldplay (so that I can unfriend them), or I can look up pictures taken before 1990 or at the Empire State Building. I can also find movies my friends like or search by genres such as rock music, comedy films and Italian restaurants.

The results are surprising because there was previously no good way to unlock Facebook’s trove of data about my contacts. However, the system is a little slow. First, the natural-language processing needs to figure out what framework my query fits into, and then display that beneath the search box. Then it needs to dig through all of my data. Multiply that by a billion. To be fair, those are challenging tasks. “We have years and years of work ahead of us,” Zuckerberg said at the event today.

Facebook’s search engine, as in previous versions, can pull in Web results from Microsoft’s Bing. The pages look a little different from those you might see on Bing.com, and they include additional data that Facebook sprinkles on top, said Lars Rasmussen, a former Google executive who is a director of engineering on Facebook’s search project.

But if you were hoping to use this as your one-stop search shop, look elsewhere. The method for doing a Web search on Facebook is fairly cumbersome. If I type “weather,” the system suggests I check out the Facebook pages for the Weather Channel or Weather Underground, or people whose last names have the word “weather” in them. I need to click “See more” in the auto-complete list, and then scroll down before even getting the option to do a traditional search.

For Facebook, building its own Web-crawling technology is “nowhere” on the company’s list of priorities, Rasmussen said in an interview after the presentation today. This effort is about tapping into all the information Facebook has locked away on its servers.

In addition to making the whole process snappier, Facebook plans to add more languages, open it up to applications from outside developers and bring in more types of data. Facebook’s own events and messages apps aren’t integrated yet. A search for “parties next week” returns a suggestion for “people who party.” (The people on this list aren’t as cool as you might expect, judging by their profile pictures.)

“We need to start getting data on how people use it in order to improve the product,” Zuckerberg said. But that won’t be a quick process. “We’re going to start rolling it out very slowly,” he said.

During the news conference, Facebook executives emphasized their attention to privacy. Before the search feature is rolled out widely, users will be prompted to review their settings on what content is shown publicly, they said.

Facebook’s search engine is an impressive first effort, but like other recent entrants, it has a long way to go before you can expect to rely on it. Just ask Siri. If she’ll understand you, that is.

Original post is First Impressions of Facebook’s New Graph Search by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

Facebook plans to show off what it’s been working on during a news conference at its headquarters.

Please refresh your browser every few minutes to see my updates.

11:15 a.m. Facebook’s searchapalooza event has come to an end.

11:12 a.m. Hey, Zuck! Remember that company you agreed to spend $1 billion on? Will we be able to search for Instagram photos? “That should be on the list of things that we will hopefully one day get to,” Zuckerberg said.

11:09 a.m. Facebook added search suggestions on the right of the screen based on user testing, Stocky said. “Like all products, we have a way of testing it with users.” Facebook has to adjust to people having been trained to formulate search queries in weirdo computer speak, like, “friends new york,” Zuckerberg said. Facebook’s search was designed to handle queries that sound like something you might say out loud, not just to a computer.

11:06 a.m. Zuckerberg said Facebook held exploratory talks with Google about the search engine. “Microsoft was more willing to do things that were specific to Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “That was the biggest stumbling block.” He added: “That is, at least, where the discussion fell apart the last time that we talked to [Google] about it.”

11:04 a.m. The new Facebook search will only work in English for now, Zuckerberg said. Facebook “had to draw the line” about what it wanted to accomplish, and natural-language computing is tough, Zuckerberg said.

11:03 a.m. People aren’t going to stop using Google in favor of the search box. Sure, the Facebook search will include results from Bing, Zuckerberg said. “We don’t have any concept that people are going to come to Facebook to do Web search,” he said.

11:01 a.m. My colleague Brian Womack asked whether there was any consideration whatsoever of working with Google on the Facebook search tool. “I would love to work with Google,” Zuckerberg said with a smirk. “We would love to work with any search company … as long as the companies are willing to honor the privacy of the folks that are sharing their content on Facebook.”

10:57 a.m. So … you run a public company now, right? How is this going to make money? “This could potentially be a business over time,” Zuckerberg said. The search engine will follow the same philosophy that made Facebook a money-losing business — until it wasn’t. ”You build a good business over time by building something people want,” Zuckerberg said.

10:56 a.m. Uber tech blogger Robert Scoble asked if developers will be able to tap into Facebook’s search engine for their applications. Not at the start, Zuckerberg said. “We have years and years of work ahead of us.”

10:54 a.m. First question is about privacy. Expect many more of these. Zuckerberg said no new data is being surfaced in the search engine that’s not already available somewhere in the rest of the Facebook site.

10:53 a.m. After a brief video set to the tune of a Sigur Ros song, Zuckerberg concluded the presentation. “Graph Search is the kind of product that we love to build at Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “What you’ve seen today is a really different product from what’s out there.” Facebook executives will begin taking questions from the journalists in the room.

10:50 a.m. Don’t expect to use the new Facebook search feature any time soon. “We’re going to start rolling it out very slowly,” Zuckerberg said. “We need to start getting data on how people use it in order to improve the product.” Facebook will turn search on for more people “over the coming weeks and months,” Zuckerberg said.

10:48 a.m.  ”There’s one more thing,” Zuckerberg said. Like the old Facebook search engine, the new one will integrate with Microsoft’s Bing. So if you search for weather, Bing steps in.

10:46 a.m. Zuckerberg took the stage again after the demo. ”This is one of the coolest things we’ve done in a while,” he said. Zuckerberg emphasized the privacy protections, and said the company will allow people to tinker with their settings before the feature rolls out. “We’re going to put an encouragement on the home screen of everyone’s account,” he said.

10:44 a.m. Now for the requisite bit about privacy. “We realized that people are going to care about what shows up about them in search,” Stocky said. Pay careful attention to this lesson, kids. You’ll probably be walking your parents through this at the next holiday get-together. On the site’s “privacy settings” page, users can see what shows up in search and turn things off selectively.

10:41 a.m. Many of these features don’t seem very useful unless you and your friends use Facebook religiously. For example, Rasmussen types in: ”restaurants liked by my friends in India.” How many Facebook friends do you have in India?

10:39 a.m. Rasmussen took over for the “places” portion of the demo. His expertise in building Google Maps surely came in handy with this. Facebook’s place search appears to be the feature that aims most directly at Google’s Maps and Zagat. The tool enables users to find restaurants based on friends’ recommendations. “But it doesn’t have to be limited to your friends,” Rasmussen said.

10:34 a.m. The “interests” portion of Facebook search offers lots of recommendations. Stocky searched for movies and television shows his friends have “Liked” on Facebook. The page also lists programs that are similar to the shows his friends like, based on other data. “For people like me, who spend hours staring blankly at my Netflix queue, this is the solution to that,” Stocky said.

10:30 a.m. More use cases: Rasmussen was planning a hypothetical hike, and searched for: “Photos of my friends taken in national parks.” And in case you want to see pictures of your friends when they were babies or had awesome feathered hairdos, search for: “photos of my friends taken before 1990.”

10:25 a.m. OK, this is starting to make sense. Let’s say you meet someone at a party, and can’t remember her name, but you know some other details. Search for, say, “people who are friends of Lars and went to Stanford.”

10:20 a.m. Stocky and Rasmussen ran a search query to find out which of their friends like both “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter.” Hopefully there are more uses for this besides organizing “cosplay” parties.

10:19 a.m. Zuckerberg gave the example of throwing a “Game of Thrones” party. But he didn’t know who of his friends are fans of the HBO show. So he did a Facebook search. Simple enough. Rasmussen and Tom Stocky have taken the stage to demonstrate more.

10:16 a.m. The search engine is called Graph Search. Lars Rasmussen, a Google Maps co-founder, worked on it. (Bloomberg Businessweek broke that news almost a year ago.) “I want to emphasize how early we are in Graph Search,” Zuckerberg said. The initial version will cover content about people, photos, places and interests, he said. “These cases are really useful.”

10:13 a.m. “We spent a long time working on this, and we came up with an interface that we think is unique,” Zuckerberg said. “Filters.” A slide shows a page full of tags, like the old Delicious. The crowd is a bit confused for a moment. “No, that’s my joke,” Zuckerberg said. More nerd humor.

10:12 a.m. Zuckerberg’s first example to demonstrate the difference between Facebook’s social-networking search and Google’s Web search is, ”What is hip hop?” Something tells me he’s not a rap fan.

10:10 a.m. The third pillar of Facebook will be a search, Zuckerberg said. But this isn’t Web search, like Google, he added. “The search that we wanted to build is privacy-aware,” he said.

10:08 a.m. Zuckerberg’s version of nostalgia is pretty geeky. He said Facebook is all about “queries.” Zuckerberg introduces the concept of “the pillars of the Facebook product ecosystem.” News Feed, for example, is “what is going on in the world around you.” The second pillar is the Timeline profiles. He said Facebook is announcing its third pillar.

10:06 a.m. Zuckerberg said he’s excited to be hosting the company’s first news conference at its spiffy new offices. And he’s getting nostalgic on us, and will take us back to Facebook’s “roots.”

10:04 a.m. The stark white room here at Facebook’s Building 13 is full of journalists tapping away at keyboards. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has just taken the stage.

9:50 a.m. In about 10 minutes or so, Facebook will finally unveil its latest projects. Executives have remained mum about what to expect since the company sent out invitations last week. Investors are sure to watch this event closely for potential moneymakers, especially those catered to smartphone users. And the 1 billion or so people who check the site regularly should be curious to see how Facebook will try to suck up more of their time. I’ll be posting updates here from the news conference at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California — in between refreshing my News Feed.

Original post is Live Blog: Facebook Event by Tech Blog.