On the first day of the F8 developer conference, Facebook finally pulled the trigger on something we had expected for months. Facebook messenger is now a platform along the lines of WeChat and other Asian messaging apps. While this isn't necessarily "novel", it tells us something about Facebook's vision for mobile.

The change in Google's narrative over the past few months has been very interesting to watch. The recent "Peak Google" proclamations remind me of Facebook's post-IPO narrative in 2012. Conventional wisdom back then was that Facebook's decline was imminent as mobile was not a meaningful part of their revenue. Of course, Facebook's app install ads and other mobile initiatives disproved that narrative in short order.

A few months ago, I wrote a post comparing the early sales of smartwatches to those of tablets and modern smartphones (early iPhone and Android models). As I expected, the numbers didn't bode well for smartwatches. Now that we have another year's worth of data to play with (from Canalys this time), we have an opportunity to test the validity of my previous analysis.

Last week, Google announced that it would integrate third party apps into Google Now. While this may seem like just another update to Google's contextual search offering, it has the potential to deeply influence interaction models and app discovery in the mobile age. But in order to understand its potential, we first need to understand how search evolved on the web.

Microsoft made some long expected announcements today -- the return of the start menu, one version of Windows 10 across all devices and an attempt to make Windows apps work across those same devices. Unfortunately, the limited overlap between Windows PC developers and mobile developers makes the latter a weak proposition. On the other hand, Microsoft's HoloLens headset may have some potential.

In this episode, we discuss the following topics:

• New Questions in Mobile by Ben Evans with different perspectives in Asia from Sameer Singh & Bernard Leong.
• Uber and Google and Uber's recent troubles in India and South Korea.
• Xiaomi's revenues, pricing vs. engagement and recent funding of $1 billion at a $45 billion valuation. We also discuss Xiaomi's business model, whether it can avoid Samsung's fate and also rumors about Xiaomi's interest in the Firefox OS.
• Messaging Apps Disrupt Advertising

One of the biggest announcements of CES was Dish Network's OTT TV service, coined Sling TV. The announcement created palpable excitement about the potential of unbundling the TV industry. In my opinion, Sling TV has potential but it isn't quite the disruption to TV that some have been hoping for.

Valuations are very useful tool to gain insight into a company's future (or at least what investors think that future might look like). As we begin 2015, let's look back at the some of the highest valuations in consumer tech services and attempt to understand their drivers.

Benedict Evans recently wrote an insightful piece exploring new questions for the mobile industry. Among the 5 questions he brought up, I believe that the evolution of interaction models and messaging will end up being the most important. I don't have anything to add there as think Benedict's analysis here was excellent. However, I do think that three of his questions could benefit from deeper analysis. I also think that he may have missed a crucial question brought on by the scale of the mobile industry.