Is Facebook's 'Paper' A Game-Changing iPhone App?

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FacebookFB
will launch its newest app on Monday, February 3. Will this be the one that changes everything? Around the Web, tech publications like
The Verge
are offering early praise, indicating that the social network might be onto something special. But what does it mean for Wall Street? "I think what moves the Facebook stock price is mobile revenue," Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin told Benzinga. "Their growth in mobile revenue is a big deal because most of the Internet connections in the world are via smartphones. The more mobile revenue you can generate, the more Wall Street values it."
Facebook's Strategy
Martin is very excited about the "upside potential" for Facebook's video initiative once the company figures out how to properly bring video to Instagram. In the meantime, she thinks that Paper is "completely consistent" with Facebook's strategy. "It's worth a try because they can cross-promote," she said. "They have 700 million active users a day. Every day they can run an ad pushing you to Facebook Paper."
Related:Did Facebook Lose More Teen Users In Q4 2013?
Some have speculated that Facebook will release multiple apps, but Martin expects the company to focus on Paper for a while. "If you're a customer and you go there and it's a sh*tty experience, you never go back," said Martin. "You take the app off your phone. So I don't expect more than one. But I expect iteration around the one to make it better and better and better." That said, Martin does think that Facebook could have a separate app for video.
iOS Exclusivity
There are a number of reasons why Facebook may have chosen to launch Paper on iOS before coming to Android. "What we have with iOS is a closed system, which means everyone's experience can be identical," said Martin. "You get to the biggest number of people fastest on iOS. If you're talking about Android you've got different screen sizes, different [manufacturers] -- it's a sh*tload more programming. "They reach the most people on iOS first, they can iterate, iterate, iterate, and then after they get the da*n thing perfect, then they can roll it out to all the different Android [devices]. But you don't want to be making all of those changes on 50 different Android devices globally." Disclosure:
At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.
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Posted In: Analyst ColorAnalyst RatingsTechInterviewAndroidAppleFacebookiOSLaura MartinNeedham & Co.paper
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