"The phone just doesn't make any sense," said a smiling but adamant Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when asked whether he was working on the mythical Facebook smartphone. The rumor that the social network is working on a physical phone has been bouncing around for years. As recently as July, Bloomberg reported Facebook was working with HTC on a smartphone for 2013, citing sources with knowledge of the matter. Zuckerberg insisted that the number of users the company could reach with a hardware offering "doesn't move the needle for us."
make sense: 有意义
work on: 从事于
move the needle: 改善
Many factors have been blamed for the stock's dismal performance, including Facebook choosing the wrong market, waiting too long to go public, overpricing shares and issuing too many shares. Analysts and investors have been waiting to hear from the young chief executive himself, looking for new products or at least more information on what, exactly, the company's plan is for the next year.
be blamed for: 因... 被指责
issue share: 发行股票
This event gave Zuckerberg an opportunity to brush off the company's recent troubles and drop vague hints about future products.
brush off: 洗刷
"It was not where we wanted it to be before," he said of the app. "And to be honest, even what we have now is not as good as it can be."
Other teams have been working "in parallel" on new features for the native app, he said. While Zuckerberg didn't specify what those unreleased features were, he did touch on a few areas he's excited about, including search, a field dominated by Google and Bing.
in parallel: 平行的
"We do on the order of a billion queries a day already, and we're basically not even trying," said Zuckerberg.
Facebook will continue to let Instagram be Instagram, helping it gain users without trying to integrate the photo app into the larger Facebook infrastructure. Facebook recently purchased the company for $1 billion.
integrate into: 成为一体,融入
But the topic Zuckerberg hammered on the most was mobile. One of the biggest concerns investors have had is Facebook's ability to make money off of mobile users. The company makes money on the desktop version of its site by serving simple square ads on the right hand side of the site. When the company went public in May, there were no ads on the mobile version of its site or on the iPhone, iPad and Android apps.
hammer on: 钉牢