Facial recognition company Face.com has just released a new mobile application that takes advantage of its technology to identify the faces of your friends in photos. Called “KLIK,” the app is a real-time, facial recognition mobile camera app for iPhone that automatically identifies your friends by name before or after you take their their photo.
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On Monday of this week, RIM’s new CEO made a statement that set off a bomb on the blogosphere, and I’m not sure he understood its repercussions at the time. “I don’t think any drastic change is needed.”
If you’ve been paying attention to RIM and its numbers, you know that what the company desperately needs is change. Sales are declining, platform market share is dwindling, and the BlackBerry brand, to a large extent, has lost the power it once had behind it. So in a recent interview with CrackBerry, Heins made sure to clarify exactly what he meant by “no drastic change is needed.” → Read More
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According to the latest report from Strategy Analytics, Apple has now overtaken Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume. Apple achieved 23.9% market share during Q4 2011, narrowly beating out Samsung’s 23.5% share.
In addition, Apple shipped 37 million units in Q4, again going neck-and-neck with Samsung and its 36.5 million units shipped during the same time. → Read More
Android adoption is growing rapidly in Japan, with local handset manufacturers doing everything they can in order to meet the demands of customers in all segments of the population. One particularly attractive target group seems to be women, given how many Japanese companies say they design Android phones specifically for female users.
Here are three recent examples. → Read More
It looks like publishers and advertisers are warming to mobile ad startup Moolah Media. The company says that in 2011, it generated 7 million leads for its advertisers — and 1.9 million of those leads (27 percent of the year’s total) came in December.
Also in December, Moolah says its ads reached 45 million Americans. And interest in the company is growing — Moolah projects that traffic to its website will triple this month, as pictured in the chart above. → Read More
Motorola Mobility released their fourth quarter and year-end financials today, and now we can see why they made it a point earlier this month to downplay analyst expectations. The company’s new figures reveal that while Motorola raked in $3.4 billion in Q4 2011, they also incurred a net loss of $80 million. → Read More
As a gamer with admittedly poor impulse control, the newly-released Steam app for iOS and Android has me very worried. On the one hand, it seems like an ideal way to to keep tabs on the popular gaming service on the go.
On the other though, I could easily see myself going overboard on buying games I don’t need when I should be pretending to be a productive member of society.
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HTC has gotten to be remarkably good at churning out phone after phone these days, but it’s gotten to feel like each new release is too little too soon. Thankfully, the godfather of Android hardware has come to its senses, as revealed by Mobile Today.
According to HTC UK head Phil Roberson, 2012 is going to be all about giving their customers “something special.” To that end, HTC plans to focus on a smaller number of “hero” smartphones and dial back their presence in the tablet market. → Read More
Earlier this morning, we looked at the findings from analytics provider Distimo‘s latest report, which examined what happens when mobile apps go on sale. (Spoiler: when priced correctly, revenue goes way up). The second part of the report looked at the ranking gains that occur when an app achieves “featured” status in a mobile app store like iTunes or the Android Market.
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In a new research report from Distimo, the app store analytics provider examined two different ways that allow mobile developers to get a bump in both their download numbers and revenue. One way, which is within the developers’ control, is putting the app on sale. Within the first day, iPhone developers see an average increase of 41% in revenue using this method, and see revenue increases of 22% by the sale’s end. Android apps, however, rose just 7% on day one, but closed out the sale with higher percentage gains than either iPhone or iPad.
The second method Distimo looked into is getting the app featured in the app store. This is up to the app store’s operator, like Google or Apple, of course. (We’ll examine Distimo’s findings on featured apps in a subsequent post). → Read More
ShoeBox, the mobile app that lets you scan old photos and post them online, is today announcing Facebook Timeline integration. Using the newly released version of the ShoeBox iOS application, users will be able to scan photographs of family and friends using their smartphone, tag users by name, and then share those photos to Facebook.
But here’s the really cool part: ShoeBox is one of the first Timeline-integrated apps that’s letting you post photos into the past. By that, I mean you can edit the date on your photo, and it will post to the correct place on your Facebook Timeline. Nifty! → Read More
Sprint has been spending the past few weeks quietly pumping out software updates that remove Carrier IQ from affected devices, and now it looks like Sprint’s flagship Android device (for now) will be able to run wild and free.
Thanks to an update that started making the rounds yesterday, Samsung’s Epic 4G Touch joins a handful of Sprint devices to get the Carrier IQ cleanup treatment. → Read More
Every once in a while something comes along that’s worth a wait, and I think the Samsung Galaxy S III will be one of those things. We’ve all been expecting Samsung’s next flagship to show its face at MWC in February, but according to the Verge, Samsung may have other plans.
Anonymous sources who spoke with the Verge claim that the SGSIII will still be available “before summer,” but that Mobile World Congress in Barcelona may not be the most beneficial launch venue. → Read More
Google has been fighting the threat of Facebook for some time. It is now fighting for its life on two fronts! Facebook and now Apple loom large as it attempts to chart the future.
Google missed the streets numbers for its Q1 earnings last week and has seen its stock decline from $670.25 to yesterday’s close of $569.49. Apple, by comparison, has just beaten, no annihilated, the Street’s predictions and its stock has gone from a low of $363 to yesterday’s close of $446.66 in the same period.
Google’s reliance on search revenues derived from web searches in a browser, its former strength, is now not sufficient to guarantee growth. → Read More
Nokia earnings are out, and the contrast with Apple’s blow-out quarter results is astonishing. The Finnish phone maker, still the largest in the world by volume, reported a Q4 net loss of 1.07 billion euro, down from a 745 million euro profit in the fourth quarter of 2010.
The company’s smartphone sales decline paints an even bleaker picture: Nokia sold 19.6 million units in Q4 2011, down a whopping 31 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago (even though it’s up 17 percent from Q3 2011 thanks to somewhat decent Lumia sales).
Nokia says it sold “well over” 1 million Lumia devices to date (not just in Q4) and that it plans to bring the Lumia series to additional markets – including China and Latin America – in the first half of 2012. → Read More
AT&T this morning released its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011. Consolidated revenues clocked in at $32.5 billion, up 3.6 percent compared to the year-earlier quarter. They recorded a huge net loss for Q4 2011: $6.7 billion, or $1.12 per diluted share.
Zooming in on smartphone sales, it’s worth noting that AT&T delivered its best-ever quarter to date, hands down. → Read More
955 Dreams, the startup behind Apple’s iPhone App of the Year Runner Up “Band of the Day,” is today releasing the new tablet-optimized version of the app for the iPad. In addition, the company announced it has closed on a $3.25 million round of seed funding. Investors participating in the round included 500 Startups, m8 Capital, Kapor Capital, Felicis Ventures and CrunchFund (Disclosure: TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington is an investor in CrunchFund).
As a part of the funding, Dave McClure of 500 Startups will join the company’s board, filling the first seat held by an outside investor. → Read More
Founded in 1945, California-based Kaiser Permanente is one of the largest not-for-profit managed care consortiums and health plan providers in the country, with 9 million members, nearly 170K employees, 15K physicians, 35 medical centers, and 430+ medical offices under its fold. Yesterday, the health care organization announced the release of a free Android app and mobile-optimized website through which its millions of members can access their own medical information on the go. → Read More
It seems like ages ago that HP announced that webOS would continue to live on as an open source project, probably because they’ve been awfully quiet on the subject since the big reveal in December.
Well, consider that silence officially broken. HP took to their webOS developer relations blog to tell what faithful users still remain all about how their open-source rollout is going to work, and the whole process has begun with the release of their Enyo application framework. → Read More
Does the term S40 mean anything to you?
It’s a mobile operating system built by Nokia for its feature phones back in 1999, and first appeared on the 7110. Well, apparently a lady over in São Paulo, Brazil has today purchased the 1.5 billionth phone running the operating system in the form of the Nokia Asha 303. Nokia is calling it “one of the most significant milestones” in company history. → Read More
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