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By Zach Miners

January 29, 2014 05:15 PM ET

IDG News Service – More than half of Facebook’s ad sales came from mobile devices in the fourth quarter, showing continued strength in the site’s ability to monetize its service on smaller screens.

Total revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 was US$2.59 billion, a 63 percent increase from the same period the previous year, the company reported Wednesday. Facebook’s sales beat analysts’ expectations of $2.33 billion, as polled by Thomson Reuters.

Net income for the social media company was $523 million, a more than 700 percent increase from the fourth quarter in 2012. Earnings per share was $0.20. Excluding share-based compensation expenses and related payroll tax expenses and adjustments, earnings per share was $0.31, topping analyst expectations of $0.27.

Facebook generated sales of $2.34 billion from advertising, a 76 percent increase from the previous year. Of its total ad sales, 53 percent came from […]

Facebook’s fourth-quarter earnings, published Wednesday, beat analysts’ estimates on all fronts. The company came in with a fourth-quarter report card of $2.59 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings per share of 31 cents.

As expected, mobile played an increasingly important role in Facebook’s business with 53 percent of advertising revenue, or $1.24 billion, coming from its mobile products.

Here are some highlights from the report:

• 1.23 billion monthly active users (MAUs).
• 757 million daily active users (DAUs).
• 945 million mobile MAUs and 556 million mobile DAUs.
• Revenue of $2.59 billion in the fourth quarter, an increase of 63 percent over the fourth quarter of 2012.
• Revenue from advertising was $2.34 billion, a 76 percent increase from the same quarter last […]
  

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News

By James Niccolai

January 28, 2014 08:13 PM ET

IDG News Service – If you thought Netflix and iTunes would make optical discs a thing of the past, think again. Facebook has built a storage system from 10,000 Blu-ray discs that holds a petabyte of data and is highly energy-efficient, the company said Tuesday.

Facebook said last year that it was exploring Blu-ray for its data-center storage needs, and on Tuesday it showed a prototype system at the Open Compute Project summit meeting in San Jose.

It designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be accessed, or for so-called “cold storage.” That includes duplicates of its users’ photos and videos that Facebook keeps for backup purposes, and which it essentially wants to file away and forget.

The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50 percent and energy use by 80 percent compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives, […]