According to research firm IDC, the global mobile phone market ballooned in the first quarter of this year, growing 19.8 percent year-over-year, mostly due to the meteoric rise of smartphone shipments, especially in emerging markets.
According to the firm’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped 371.8 million units in Q1 2011 compared to 310.5 million units in the first quarter of 2010.
IDC posits that smartphone growth worldwide, particularly in Asia/Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America, helped lift the overall market to a record first-quarter high. → Read More
Any cyclist in the city knows how essential a lock is for your bike, but they’re often bulky and heavy. This Kickstarter project aims to create a unique, lightweight lock that I would buy in a second.
More details inside. → Read More
While I think we all knew, deep down inside, that at some point there would be an Android 3.1, it hasn’t actually been mentioned by anyone except as a potential future upgrade. But Adobe let the cat out of the bag today with an update to Flash: the changelog to 10.2 includes a few features with “(requires Android 3.1)” on the end – or at least, it did until they fixed it. Luckily, Droid-Life got a screenshot. → Read More
The patent nonsense out there is very deep water for humble bloggers like ourselves, so we’re just going to point you in the right direction and wait for the dust to settle a bit before offering an opinion. It seems that Samsung has seen fit to retaliate on Apple, citing 10 patents it alleges are being infringed upon. It’s not much of a surprise, really — they filed lawsuits in other countries last week, but likely were taking a little extra time to harden the US case. FOSS Patents has links to all the patents in question and some other useful information. → Read More
Yesterday was a big day for hot mobile payments startup Square. The company announced that it received a strategic investment from Visa, giving the company a big stamp approval. And it also announced something that got far less attention: Square will be releasing a new card reader (the thing you plug into your phone) this summer, and it will use encryption at the read head. The news was announced with little fanfare by Square Security Lead Sam Quigley during a panel at the Visa Security Summit. But it’s important for a couple of reasons.
First is the fact that just last month, rival (and much larger) payments company VeriFone lobbed a heated accusation at the startup: it said that Square should recall all of its readers because they didn’t encrypt credit card data, making it easy for thieves to skim the information. Square CEO Jack Dorsey battled back, stating that VeriFone’s accusation that their reader was insecure was “not a fair or accurate claim and [that] it overlooks all of the protections already built into your credit card.” Dorsey also outlined all the ways that credit card fraud could still be committed, regardless of encryption, and explained that users aren’t responsible for fraudulent charges regardless.
But now we have Square doing almost exactly what VeriFone was crying foul on. So what gives? → Read More
The latest interface on the block, Thunderbolt, is barely on the market and there’s already talk of its replacement. It’s a good four years down the road, of course (companies like Intel have to think ahead), but there are already prototypes and Intel is already talking it up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a cool code name yet, but they’ll fix that soon. → Read More
This is cute — but sad. After all, the short-lived Flip line of camcorders was popular and fun, and little doodads like Blue Microphone’s Mikey made it that much better to have around. RIP Flip, and RIP Flip accessories. → Read More
I’ve been thinking a lot about the popularity of tablets and the problems manufacturers face coming up against the iPad. The devices that we see here at CG are all pretty amazing – even the Playbook was a cool, if flawed, device – but no one device seems to be able to grab any traction. In looking back, I see echoes of the netbook craze of the oughts, and the parallels with this “fad” (along with the distinct differences) are very telling. → Read More
Ah, lawsuits. When it rains, it pours. One was filed hastily last week after the Apple tracking file was found, and now two women are filing against Google for more or less the same thing, even using the other lawsuit’s language word for word. If there’s any wrongdoing here by either party, I don’t think these opportunistic lawsuits are going to be the vehicle of justice. [via The Register] → Read More
You know the drill … You open iTunes and there’s a popup that asks you to download a new version. You download the newest version and there’s another popup asking you to agree to Apple’s Terms of Service. But it’s over 55-pages long! You scroll to the bottom and hastily click “Agree,” because what’s the worst that can happen right? Right?
Well in South Park’s out-of-control genius premiere last night (which you’ve probably already seen but I’ll repost clips of for the three of you who haven’t) creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone took iPhone Location-gate to the next level in a plot line that was a mashup of a Stevenote and the horror film “The Human Centipede.” → Read More
When Color came out with its $41m play, a rather lesser known startup had planned to launch around the same time – as these things go. How often does that happen? Pretty darn often no doubt. But while Color got all the press – not least for its funding – the lesser known Pixamid has had to wait for its time in the sun. But while I have struggled – really I have – to get into Color, Pixamid has given me pretty much exactly what I wanted out of this kind of app [iTunes link] from the word go. Today at the (sixth annual) Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I met CEO and founder Bart Denny who demo’d the app to me. → Read More
Just about a year ago, when Apple passed Microsoft in market cap, the Redmond loyalists were out in full force: that means nothing — look at the revenues! When Apple passed Microsoft in revenues last October, it was: who cares — look at the profits! We were looking, and we projected that this quarter just ended would be the one in which Apple passed Microsoft in that regard too.
Sure enough, they have. Easily.
Microsoft has just announced their Q3 2011 results. The numbers appear to be good, beating analysts’ expectations. But with net income now at $5.23 billion, Microsoft now comes in well behind Apple, which had a net income of $5.99 billion last quarter. → Read More
TweetDeck’s new iPhone app came out a couple days ago. It is completely redesigned from the ground up and looks more like it’s Android cousin than the first TweetDeck for iPhone. Instead of cramming as much as possible into an iPhone screen, TweetDeck stripped everything out but the essentials. The result is a spare mobile stream reader that packs a lot of punch. We take a look at the new TweetDeck for IPhone in this episode of Fly or Die, along with Soundtracking, and Zapd. As usual, the CEO behind one of these products appears as a surprise guest during the show.
With Twitter rumored to be negotiating a $50 million acquisition of TweetDeck to keep it out of the hands of Bill Gross’ UberMedia, it is not clear whether this brand new product will survive such a deal. After all, Twitter has its own iPhone client, among others. It doesn’t need two. → Read More
In its second acquisition in two weeks, eBay’s PayPal unit has bought mobile payments startup FigCard. Terms of the acquisition, which was announced on the PayPal blog, were not disclosed.
Boston-based Fig Card allows merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. All the consumer needs is the Fig app on his or her smart phone. The connection with PayPal is that when consumers setup their payment information, they could add PayPal as a payments option. You can see the video below for a demo of Fig Card’s technology → Read More
Two days ago, we removed the Google Buzz button from the top and bottom of each post on TechCrunch. No one noticed. Not a single person said a word about it. It wasn’t until earlier today when I tweeted about it that we got some feedback on the change (most of it being: “oh, I didn’t even notice”). As I tweeted, that in and of itself says a lot.
The issue of Buzz being a viable sharing platform used to be somewhat of a hot-button issue. When I wrote a post last March noting that traffic coming our way from Buzz appeared to be less than that of a dead man, FriendFeed, many folks got up in arms. It turns out, my data was flawed — but it wasn’t necessarily wrong. You see, since Buzz runs within Gmail, which defaults to HTTPS, it scrubs the referrer data before sending the traffic our way. So, conveniently, the only way to measure Buzz traffic was to infer it. Like a black hole. → Read More
Arkadium, the casual and social game developer, is announcing today the release of the Arkadium Stadium, a suite of 12 Flash-based games that users can post and play right from their Facebook walls. Now you don’t have to deal with the hassle of playing the game in-app. I joke, but this functionality is very cool, as it allows you to quickly publish the game app to your profile, or your friends’ profiles and play right there. No fuss, no muss.
Arkadium Co-founder and President Jessica Rovello told me that few gaming companies have yet explored this method of “wall play”, so through the Arkadium Stadium, the company hopes to begin setting the groundwork for people to be able to enjoy and share games like they would videos, photos, and links. → Read More
The Motorola Xoom isn’t exactly off to that hot of a start, but maybe Sprint can push a few more out the door. The wireless carrier just posted a fact sheet on its website touting the Xoom specs and features. Curiously said fact sheet is void of anything pertaining to Sprint. There’s no talk about WiMax, the launch date, or the price (assuming it’s going to be different than VZW’s) Sigh.
Update: May 8th it is. → Read More
I can’t be the only one that occasionally prefers the look of scanlines to the pixelated or filtered upscaling one sees on modern emulators and virtual consoles. I mean — think what you played Metroid on originally. It sure as hell wasn’t a 50-inch LCD TV upscaling using a proprietary algorithm and doing inter-frame interpolation.
If you want that old look while playing your classic games, there are two options: get an old TV, or get this SLG 3000 doodad. → Read More
Fashion news site Refinery29 is on a roll. The hyperlocal fashion site is expanding to San Francisco today, its fourth city after New York, LA, and Chicago. The site covers high-end local fashion designers, and it launched a sister group deals service called Refinery29 Reserve last November.
CEO Philippe von Borries tells me the company’s is on track to do $8 million in revenues this year, based on the first quarter run-rate. It ended 2010 with $2 million in sales, up from %600,000 in 2009. “Our formula is to engage users with content and convert them into shoppers,” he says. Still, he expects advertising to make up 75 percent of his revenues this year, and the commerce business to make up another 25 percent. The Reserve business is only in New York right now, but will soon launch in San Francisco as well. → Read More
