OpenKit hopes to head off Google with capable and open mobile social platform for games + MORE

Facebook has become a central way for some of the sports world’s biggest stars to share intimate looks at their lives off the playing field with fans around the world
Daily doings, thoughts on current events and peeks at family time are all highlights of this still relatively new type of fan access…

Facebook has hired Nicola Mendelsohn as VP, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, filling a void being temporarily filled by VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson after Johanna Shields left in October 2012.
Mendelsohn was most recently partner and executive chairman at Karmarama agency in London…

Facebook added 17 new positions to its careers page this week, including a Manager of Public Policy for Instagram and a number of openings on the user operations, finance and sales teams.
New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

Manager, Public Policy (Instagram) (Menlo Park)
Financial Analyst, FP&A – HR (Menlo Park)
International Payroll Lead (Dublin)
Privacy Counsel (Washington)
Data Product Manager (Menlo Park)
IT Operations Lead (Menlo Park)
Security Engineer (Menlo Park)
HR Specialist (Austin)
Data Center Facility Operations Engineering Manager (Altoona)
Associate, Risk Ads (Hyderabad)
Specialist, Risk Operations (Hyderabad) (Hyderabad)
Analyst, User Operations, Site Integrity (Hyderabad)
Team Lead, Product Operations (Menlo Park)
Global Account Manager (Mexico City)
Head of CPG (Sydney)
Vertical Client Partner, Retail (London)
Vertical Client Partner, Telco (London)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry…

Twitter competitor App.net (ADN) has progressed from a paid members-only platform to a freemium model (a few months ago), with free accounts available only to those invited by paying members.
And now it announced it is allowing anyone to join with an App.net Passport account.
Is the next step a free toaster with every sign up?
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media…

Facebook has begun to roll out its new mobile page layout to Android, a spokesperson from the company tells us.
Two weeks ago the social network debuted a redesign for business and fan pages on iOS, putting more actionable information about a business, brand or personality near the top of the screen…

“I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium.” – Federico Fellini
As Apple’s App Store nears its five year anniversary, a new kind of storyteller is rising in importance: The App Director. This isn’t an official title, but it’s definitely a state of mind and an important trend to take note of as we enter the app ecosystem’s pupae stage…

In a tweet this afternoon, Yahoo revealed that it had grown its mobile team by 22 employees and four startup acquisitions this month.
Wait four?
That’s right, in addition to Astrid, MileWise and GoPollGo, the lumbering Internet giant bought Loki Studios.
The Palo Alto-based mobile gaming company, whose major game is Geomon, has a eight-person staff, most of whom are Stanford alumni…

Developers are speculating that Google is about to launch a Game Center for Android, or a meta app for games that will improve discoverability in the vast Google Play app store and make mobile games into a more social and lucrative experience.
So OpenKit is heading off that news with an announcement of its own: a universal social graph that makes games more social across both Apple and Google mobile platforms…

This is a guest post by Bill Hankes, a director at Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
The amount of data Facebook ingests every day is roughly equivalent to the total amount of Internet traffic at the height of the Internet bubble. Think about that. The amount of data back in 1998 was so immense that search technology couldn’t keep up, and a company called Google was founded to help people access this burgeoning corpus of information…

Following the introduction of social sidebar last year, Microsoft has been working on ways to make it more interactive. Today the company announced that it has expanded Bing’s integration with Facebook, allowing people to engage with content right from the sidebar.
Initially, Bing’s social sidebar included only Likes, photos, and profile information from Facebook…

“House Of Cards” proved that great, exclusive content can create loyal customers. While Facebook isn’t about to produce TV shows, it tells me that it plans to ramp up production of its Facebook Live original programming starting with a talk with Star Trek celebrities today at 5:15 p…

Facebook breaks into Fortune 500 – Facebook has made its first appearance on the Fortune 500 list at No. 482 this year. The Fortune 500 is a yearly list of top U.S. companies. Facebook ranks sixth out of the seven companies in the category of Internet services and retailing, joining Amazon (No…