At home and want to watch the classic New Years Eve celebration in Time Square commercial free? Well, here you go. Livestream has partnered with the organizers of the Times Square New Year’s Eve Celebration to bring you just that: A six-and-a-half hour commercial free webcast of the evening’s festivities. The livecast will include a bunch of musical guest, like the Biebs, Lady Gaga, Cee Lo, the Ball Drop, a midnight celebration, etc. You can check out the full schedule here. → Read More
Millions of new iPhones and Androids got activated during and after Christmas this year — and what have people done with their new devices? They’ve downloaded Facebook’s mobile apps, of course.
I’ve been watching this trend for a few years, and the past week has been the biggest yet, based on the numbers visible in the AppData app tracking service. Facebook’s iPhone app grew by 4.1 million monthly active users and 1.7 million daily actives, which was beat out by its Android app, which gained 5.2 million MAU and 2.2 million DAU. This follows the ongoing trend of Facebook’s Android usage outgrowing iOS, even as both operating systems have surged in recent years. → Read More
In terms of regularly posting news, Google has been one of the more frequent bloggers out of most of the major technology giants, often forgoing releasing press releases in favor of posting on the company’s blog. And Google’s blog is probably one of the most visited company blogs in general. So it’s interesting to see data on how many visitors Google’s blog sees and which posts drew the most traffic. In fact, looking back on 2011, Google has been more prolific on its blog than any previous year. The search giant published a number of stats today on how many posts were published via the company blog, number of visits, most popular posts, and most popular posts on Google+.
In 2011, Google published 471 posts, which is 17 more than 2010. The company’s main blog saw 19,905,679 unique visitors between January 1 and December 31, 2011. The post that saw the most traffic was one that recognized the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001 with 1,731,280 unique pageviews. And this post was linked to from Google’s search portal, which helped draw increased traffic.
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In order to get startups and entrepreneurs thinking about the most effective ways to pitch their businesses, Adeo Ressi of Founder Institute has been encouraging his founders to boil their mission statements down to one sentence, using a simple formula. George Zachary of Charles River Ventures asked Ressi to come up with a format for startup pitches, because he has been hearing so many different people pitching in umpteen different ways. Tech bloggers, investors, partners, founders, and many in between are intimately familiar with this: The seemingly infinite permutations entrepreneurs have devised for their pitches. Some work, and many don’t. → Read More
Honours and medals from Queens and Kings may be an alien concept in Silicon Valley, but they are a delightfully steam-punk tradition, still continued in a Britain which long ago said goodbye to its Empire, yet still has Knights and ‘Commander’ orders to hand out. Thus, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, has been knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list, principally for his work in industrial design and championing British talent abroad. Ive was already made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006. Being a Knight means he is now Sir Jonathan Ive – a moniker which should, at the very least, bump him to the front of the average restaurant queue when he’s in London. → Read More
Company founders are the quintessential cheerleaders, promoting their vision and company every chance they get. But that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily the best at two core functions: selling and fundraising (and many are bad at both but excel at other functions, like technology).
While generating revenue and raising capital require a lot of the same traits, in my experience those who are good at one tend to be poor at the other. → Read More
One of the defining trends of modern web companies is that the top ones have been choosing to raise giant, private late-stage funding rounds instead of going public. Look at the ten companies that raised the most money last year, in CrunchBase.
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The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — wound up the Old Year and previewed the next one. In fact, we are already well into Social Spring, what with SOPA, Go Daddy, the media scramble, Louis C.K. and the $5 download, Spotify and the independents, Apple AlmostTV, Microsoft irrelevancy, and the end of email. → Read More
I got this email the other day:
“Just saw you on CNBC. Shocked! I thought for sure I read you had hung yourself.
Well, now I have a new wish for Christmas!”
It was signed kosoverh@bellsouth.net and he was referring to a recent TV appearance I made where I was bullish on the economy in 2012. A lot of people get upset that I’m very bullish for 2012. A lot of people want America, capitalism, the Internet, Facebook, the economy, all of our established insitutions, to go down in flames. I don’t know why they want this. They think it will be fun. Like we’ll party like it’s 1999. That sort of thing.
And I’m very bullish. You can stop reading here if this makes you irrationally angry for some reason.
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2011 was the year of Android. A little over a year ago Andy Rubin tweeted that 300,000 Android devices were being activated each day. In January we reported that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of US smartphone market share. In June Android’s activations-per-day reached 500,000; this month they hit 700,000. That’s more than double the rate at which it was spreading when it overtook iOS.
By comparison, UBS estimated in December that Apple would sell 30 million iPhones in 4Q 2011. Sounds like a lot, until you realize that Android devices — almost all of which are phones, as Rubin’s numbers don’t include Kindle Fires or Nooks — are being activated at a rate of five million a week, or 65 million in a quarter. In other words, Android phone sales were probably close to double Apple’s during the quarter in which Apple’s flagship iPhone 4S was released. I expect Apple outsold Android at Christmas, given that they boasted this year’s three most wanted gifts, but Android will make up that difference in a few short weeks.
How did this happen? Certainly not because Android is better. Almost no one disputes that Apple’s user experience is superior. Thanks to Android’s horrific fragmentation problems, the Android version that developers write apps for – 2.2, which was released in May 2010 – is distinctly inferior to iOS 5. The iPhone 4S is a fantastic high-end phone, the 4 a terrific mid-level one, and the 3GS still a respectable player in the free-with-contract market. So why has everyone gone Android? → Read More
Honours and medals from Queens and Kings may be an alien concept in Silicon Valley, but they are a delightfully steam-punk tradition, still continued in a Britain which long ago said goodbye to its Empire, yet still has Knights and ‘Commander’ orders to hand out. Thus, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, has been knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list, principally for his work in industrial design and championing British talent abroad. Ive was already made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006. Being a Knight means he is now Sir Jonathan Ive – a moniker which should, at the very least, bump him to the front of the average restaurant queue when he’s in London.
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The holidays for most people who read this site involve answering a cornucopia of tech support questions for their relatives. Honestly, I’ve watched friends field the most frustrating 45 minute IT department-level questions during holiday time with the family, which inevitably devolves into more of those types of conversations in between “Pass the gravy.”
These conversations will only increase in frequency as the average consumer wakes up to smartphones and the app economy. According to Flurry, nearly a quarter of a billion app downloads this year occurred on December 24th and again this Christmas Day, more than 2x any other day thus far, ever. → Read More
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Those words seem to encapsulate Apple’s 2011 perfectly. The year saw the company both became the most valuable company in the world and lose its founder, savior, visionary, and leader.
Earlier, Erick published his roundup of the bigger stories and themes in tech this year. Topping that list is the passing of Steve Jobs, a story so big that it far transcended typical tech news. But even without that sad news, 2011 was all about Apple. There was certainly enough news to constitute its own roundup. So here we go. → Read More
Upstart digital cinema company RED, which has been the bane of many established camera companies for several years now, has filed suit against Arri, a leading camera manufacturer. They allege that Arri employed one Michael Bravin, a former employee of camera kit maker Band Pro, who hacked the email account of his former employee and stole confidential information relating to RED — and astroturfed for Arri on the official forums to boot. They also take exception to some claims Arri made in advertising disparaging RED’s cameras. → Read More
In case you haven’t noticed ;), it’s an especially slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow time for the tech industry. So slow that some Aol employees — the only one I recognize is Sol Lipman — made a video about the recent Aol talent exodus, using ZOMBIES as a metaphor for all the people who’ve decided to leave Aol.
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It is remarkable to think that we’re in the early days of the app era, when there are already close to 600,000 iOS applications and nearly 400,000 on Android. The growth of these app ecosystems has been rapid, exponential and shows no signs of slowing down. As well it shouldn’t: the untapped, addressable market for mobile apps involves hundreds of millions of users.
And yet, app discovery remains a challenge. Whether in an app store, on the device itself, or via a third-party service. Whoever cracks the nut of app discovery will have the potential to be the next Google: the search engine of the modern age. The search engine for a web of apps. → Read More
One of the most interesting trends in comScore’s 2011 social networking report is the new growth of social sites that cater to users’ interests, rather than their real-life social graphs. In particular, according to comScore data, microblogging platforms Twitter and Tumblr have had break-out years, and they’ve been joined by new online pinboard site Pinterest.
But all this growth doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of Facebook. That site’s traffic growth has only appeared to slow (but not fall) in places where it is running out of new users to add. The site that has been taking a beating is MySpace. It may be that users who previously used that site to express themselves and follow the celebrities they care about are now doing the same thing across these other sites. → Read More
Back at Google I/O in May, members of Google’s Android team unveiled a new initiative that’s going to extend the mobile OS beyond smartphones and tablets — and take us one step closer to Back to the Future II.
Dubbed Android@Home, the project aims to bake special hardware and software into a variety of gadgets, which will allow users to control these devices from their Android phones. Think alarm clocks that fade in with your favorite music, lighting systems that blink based on events in the game you’re playing, and more. Eventually the @Home project will include everything from home stereos to dishwashers, but the first planned device was something a bit more modest: the lightbulb.
At the event, Google said that it had partnered with LightingScience to launch Android@Home LED lightbulbs by the end of 2011. I’ve been waiting patiently since then, scowling each time I had to get up out of bed to flick off one of my ‘dumb’ lightbulbs when I should have been able to simply tap a button on my phone. I may have even boasted to my iPhone-toting friends about my impending luminescence superiority. → Read More
Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after word got out that Verizon Wireless planned to introduce a painfully ironic “convenience” fee of $2 for anyone paying their bill online, the carrier has just officially confirmed that such plans have been cancelled. → Read More
This is a guest post by Richard Holdsworth, Wapple CEO.
Flash is on the endangered species list, already extinct on mobile, and Silverlight has been all but aborted. HTML5 is being heralded as both the cause and the solution but what is it and are we getting caught up in a game of buzzword bingo that has spiralled out of control? → Read More
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