Business

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More As they get older, lots of software engineers dread the seemingly inevitable move from being a programmer to being a manager. After all, if your true passion is writing code, taking on the responsibilities of managing other people may be a bit more lucrative, but it will obviously take away the time you can spend doing what you love the most. That’s ultimately why Steve Wozniak decided to make the move from Hewlett-Packard to Apple full-time, back in the company’s earliest days, according to Walter Isaacson’s autobiography of Steve Jobs, which read: “[An old friend told...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Why is mobile such a challenge for Facebook? Well, for starters, 7,000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day. At today’s Facebook Ecosystem Conference, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer said that part of the difficulty Facebook faces in reaching mobile users is just that there are so many different SKUs. As a result, Facebook can’t re-build mobile apps and iterate on the experience in the same way it does for the web. Now that Facebook is on so many platforms, most of its focus is on refining the apps and making them better. Facebook generally pushes updates to its platform on the web every day or even twice a day, but that’s not something that the company can do for mobile. So the company is working on a new release schedule specifically fo...