Your kids will demand Brazilian apps: Movile, Brazil’s largest app developer and a Latin American leader in mobile payments and products, is looking to go global in 2014. The company recently opened U.S. offices in Silicon Valley. This year it wants to dramatically expand its customer base outside South America, with popular apps like PlayKids—which offers streaming, mobile-optimized videos and games for children—and FreeZone, which finds and automatically connects mobile devices to open Wi-Fi networks.
Teens ditch Facebook: Facebook’s CFO recently let it slip that teens are using the social networking site less frequently. And an independent study by iStrategy Labs published in January said that 3.3 million fewer teens use Facebook today than did three years ago. That trend is only going to continue this year, but it won’t hurt Facebook much at first. As the company figures out how to squeeze money from Instragram, improve ad quality and better integrate mobile advertising, Facebook will keep booming financially.
Snapchat will regret not taking that $4 billion: Snapchat, an app that lets you take pictures on your phone that disappear after a few seconds, doesn’t make any money, but it sure as hell turned down a lot last year. Reportedly, Snapchat rejected a $3 billion offer from Facebook and a $4 billion one from Google. For a company that makes no money, those numbers are astronomical, and Snapchat will regret not taking the paycheck when it had the chance. Sure, the app is hugely popular with teens, but at the end of the day it’s a one-trick pony. And with Facebook’s new service, Instagram Direct, it’s no longer the only pony of its kind.
