What will Facebook unveil at itsmystery event?

San Francisco: Facebook's stock opened
on Monday above $32 for the first time
since July as anticipation about
upcoming products and financial results
underscored Wall Street's renewed
confidence in the online social network.
Facebook will on Tuesday host its first
major press event at its headquarters in
Menlo Park, California, since its troubled
initial public offering in May, triggering a
guessing game among technology
observers and online blogs about what it
could unveil - everything from a
smartphone to a search engine.
"There's a lot of speculation. Nothing to
me seems to be that certain," Jefferies
& Co analyst Brian Pitz said. "If I were
to bet, I'd think it was something that
was ad-platform related. I'm not
convinced on the phone," said Pitz,
citing previous comments by Facebook's
leaders including CEO Mark Zuckerberg
that making a smartphone would be the
"wrong strategy" for Facebook.
In an email to reporters last week,
Facebook invited the media to "come
and see what we're building" without
providing details. Some analysts said the
stock's recent gains - shares are up
roughly 17 per cent since the start of
the year - may have more to do with
the company's upcoming fourth-quarter
financial results, slated for January 30.
"The stock is up because they have
driven a dramatic increase in the ad
load of their mobile app which is giving
investors hope that they exceeded
expectations," BTIG analyst Richard
Greenfield said. Shares were down
about 1.3 per cent to $31.30 in mid-
afternoon trading.
The world's No.1 social network with 1
billion users, Facebook became the first
US company to debut on stock markets
with a value of more than $100 billion.
Its value subsequently plunged by more
than 50 per cent on mounting concerns
about slowing revenue growth and the
challenges of making money as users
shift from personal computers to mobile
devices.
Facebook surprised Wall Street in the
third quarter by announcing that mobile
ads accounted for 14 per cent of its
total ad revenue. Some analysts expect
the company to report further growth in
its nascent mobile ad business for the
fourth quarter.
Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in
his Harvard dorm room, has said that
mobile is the "most misunderstood
aspect" of Facebook. But he has
repeatedly poured cold water on
rumours that Facebook would build its
own smartphone to compete against
Apple's iPhone and smartphones based
on Google's Android operating system.
During an on-stage interview at a
conference in September, Zuckerberg
said that he believed search could be a
ripe area of growth for Facebook.
"Facebook is really uniquely positioned
to answer a lot of the questions that
people have," Zuckerberg said, such as
finding a good restaurant or learning
more about a job opportunity.
Still, many technology observers believe
that Facebook is more likely to improve
the search capabilities within Facebook
than to develop a full-fledged search
engine that indexes all the Web's
content and competes head-on with
search leader Google.
Among the other items that technology
blogs and analysts speculate might be
unveiled on Tuesday were new
standalone apps for Apple's iPad tablet,
new features to display video ads and
even a new wing of corporate
headquarters.