"Sadie Network News" March 30, according to foreign media reports, Facebook recently acquired nearly 2 years ago the mobile application development platform parse added to the Internet equipment support. The move will help Facebook tap into the emerging internet of things. IDC, a market-research firm, estimates that the IoT market will grow from $1.9 trillion trillion (about 11.7 trillion yuan) in 2013 to $7.1 trillion (about 43.6 trillion yuan).
Parse is a very important reason.
Unlike Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, Facebook does not have its own mobile operating system. This means Facebook cannot launch its own app Store, which is 30% split from App Store sales like the companies mentioned above.
But Facebook has found other ways to generate income through its application. In 2012, Facebook allowed developers to use open graph to add share to the application, and then to publish application installation ads in the information flow. Despite the inability to get a split from application sales, Facebook gained advertising revenue.
Parse is a bass (back-end service) solution that can add user authentication, push notifications, social media consolidation, location data, and data analysis to any application. These features help the application to gain more audiences and understand the user's behavior.
Parse provides services for over 500,000 applications and uses free value-added mode. Free developers can use 30 API requests per second and receive 1 million push notifications and 20GB of storage space per month. The price of paid services is between hundreds of and thousands of dollars a month.
Facebook wants to connect all objects
Parse has become a reliable solution for traditional mobile apps and game developers, but now more and more wearable devices and IoT applications are starting to use parse.
James Yu, founder of Parse, said the James Yu synchronizing devices such as sleep and insulin trackers to the cloud environment "may make the world a better place", but he also notes that "connecting these devices to the cloud can be difficult" because of back-end compatibility and "constrained environments".
Facebook Smart Home
James Yu points out that with the newly released SDK (software Development Kit), developers "can develop intelligent thermostat controlled by mobile applications, store video surveillance cameras every minute, and control music services through Web applications."
Once all the devices are connected to Facebook,facebook will become a major competitor for Apple, Google and Samsung in the future smart home wars. For the three companies, the focus of the smart home War is to connect devices to Apple TV, Google Nest intelligent thermostat and Samsung SmartThings Control center.
But Facebook's goal is to connect things to networking devices without an entity control center. If Facebook collects data from these devices via parse and then connects apps via Facebook, it can expand the eco-chain of smart homes without a mobile operating system. That could push Facebook into the smart home market. Market research firm Juniper estimates that the smart home market will grow from $33 billion trillion (about 202.6 billion yuan) in 2013 to $71 billion in 2018 (about 435.9 billion yuan).
Conclusion
Facebook should not be considered a major competitor for Google or Apple in the Internet of things. These companies benefit from application sales and the growth of the eco-chain, and Facebook acts as a "gatekeeper" for information. This information helps Facebook better target advertising. So the parse is an interesting way to connect things to Facebook and a new growth point that Facebook investors should not overlook.