The Nieman Journalism Lab considers The Daily Beast’s original app strategy, including “The Daily Breakdown” -- an individual analytics console that shows readers their recent media diet. With Breakdown, Mike Dyer, co-managing director and chief product officer of the Beast, “believes he’s found a vital engagement driver, with page consumption per session up 2× to 3× since August,” NiemanLab reports. “Fully 80 percent of mobile users swipe at least once per session.” 

Despite its early success about some influential early adopters, Secret has fallen no hard times. “Download rates at home and abroad have plummeted [and] its web visitor and mobile app user numbers are so low Comscore doesn’t track them,” GigaOm writes of the anonymous messaging app. In response, the company is planning some big changes. Details remain a secret, but co-founder and CEO David Byttow told GigaOm to expect something “dramatic” within the week. 

Cybersecurity firm ThreatStream just raised $22 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst Partners. ThreatStream CEO Hugh Njemanze previously co-founded security information management (SIM) vendor ArcSight, which HP bought in 2010 for $1.5 billion. “Steve Herrod, who is a managing partner at General Catalyst … joins the company  board of directors as part of the deal,” TechCrunch reports. 

Analytics startup Chartbeat thinks a large share of “dark social” traffic comes from mobile apps, so it’s adjusting its tracking services accordingly. After making changes to recognize the traffic for it is, “we saw mobile Facebook traffic increase by about 40% on sites with big Facebook presences,” Chartbeat’s chief data scientist Josh Schwartz tells Marketing Land. “On sites that are very, very heavy on mobile facebook we saw even larger increases.” 

Thanks to the success of its latest iPhone 6 models, Apple has seen its share of smartphone sales grow in nearly every market in recent months, according to new data from Kantar Worldpanel. Even more impression, those gains occurred amid lower or even declining sales of Android handsets. As TechCrunch points out, however, Android is “still leading the market overall by some margin.”

Microsoft’s $300 million in Nook investment doesn’t appear to have panned out. About two and a half years after betting on the e-reader business, the software giant is selling its stake back to Barnes & Noble’s for $62 million and around 2.7 million Barnes & Noble shares -- “a clear loss on Microsoft’s original investment,” The Verge points out. Worse yet, “Very little has resulted from the partnership.” 

Video platform Vimeo is rolling out a new mobile site that, as TechCrunch reports, “reduces clutter, improves performance and lets users interact with the service while logged out.” Along with additional sharing options, Vimeo also plans to show users more recommendations in an effort to increase time spent on the site. “The site’s layout is different, too, featuring a search box at the top,” TC notes. 

Mozilla is finally ready to bring its Firefox browser to Apple’s mobile devices, Lukas Blakk, Mozilla’s release manager, announced this week in a tweet. “With iOS usage growing strong since 2007 and its users among the most engaged web surfers, why hasn’t Mozilla done this sooner and why is it now choosing to work with iOS?” GigaOm asks. In response to its own question, its adds: “Until Apple released iOS 8 a few months ago, third-party browsers for the platform were hobbled by comparison to Apple’s own mobile Safari app.”

The rest of the world will have to wait, but Google is finally bringing its high-speed Internet service, Fiber, to South and Southeast Austin. “The long anticipated announcement comes a year following the initial debut of Google’s plans to make Austin the second city in the country (after Kansas City, Kansas) to host the ultrafast fiber network,” The Austin Chronicle reports. “While mid-December was tossed around, an exact start date of the fiber rollout was not defined until now.”

TechCrunch's Josh Constine explores the rise of mobile app ads, which have been a boon for Facebook and Twitter. Constine partly attributes this trend to the failure of Apple and Google to make apps more searchable and easy to discover without advertising. “The critical need for app install ads stems from [Apple and Google's] negligence around app discovery,” Constine suggests. “The App Store and Google Play provide search engines and Top 10 charts, but little in the way of personalized, social-proofed browsing or discovery.”