Facebook smartphone

Facebook hopes to release its own smartphone by next year, as the newly public social networking giant looks to boost its revenue in the mobile Internet market, the New York Times reported Monday. 

The company has hired more than half a dozen software and hardware engineers who have worked on Apple's bestselling iPhone and one engineer who has iPad experience, the paper said, citing employees and other unnamed sources. 

 It has also expanded a group working on a partnership with Taiwan's HTC to create a smartphone codenamed "Buffy" -- a project first revealed last year by technology blog All Things Digital. 

Facebook smartphone could come by next year:

One former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone and was recruited said he had met with Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg "who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smartphones," the report said. "Mark is worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms," a Facebook employee told the New York Times. 

Facebook IPO: Who's going to make money?

It's almost exactly eight years since then-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched "The Facebook" from his dorm room. Now, Facebook's filing for its IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that Zuckerberg - still only 27 years old - still owns a just over a 28% stake in Facebook. At the expected $100billion valuation, that means he'll be worth over $28billion - which is handy, as he's also pledged to only take a salary of $1 a year in future.