Crystal ball-gazing time from Gartner… The analysts, which last night published some stats on how PCs continue to reign as the woolly mammoth of the tech world, today followed up with a list of predictions for one of the areas still on a big upswing: mobile services, and specifically on smartphones and tablets (AKA the devices that are causing all that doom and gloom for PCs). Gartner predicts… → Read More
Web-clipping service Clipboard, which recently underwent a major redesign, is tweaking things yet again. While previously, the company focused only on serving as an outlet where users could clip web content, organize it, and share it with others, today’s update now allows users to import local content, specifically images and text files, and create rich text notes online. → Read More
Forrester Research earlier today put out its latest forecasts on online display ad spend, and the picture looks relatively positive for digital media: online display ad spend in the U.S. will reach $12.7 billion this year and will grow by 17% annually to be worth $28 billion by 2017, with CPMs almost doubling in that time to $6.64. But those numbers are still not big enough to offset declines in… → Read More
With Apple and Samsung still duking it out in the patent courtroom, a survey of U.S. consumers conducted by Morpace has taken a look at how the dispute is playing out among the gadget-buying public. Apple, it found, comes out pretty rosy, but ultimately the survey delivers some discouraging conclusions about where cases like these are taking the mobile industry overall. → Read More
The battle for gender equality is played out on many levels, from the workplace to the playground — and, as it turns out, the world of TV viewing: a new study out from Nielsen indicates that when it comes to TV, women watch significantly more than men, but it’s also finding that the rise of connected (seventh-generation) gaming consoles like the Xbox is changing that. → Read More
comScore today released its latest U.S. mobile market rankings, covering usage by 30,000 consumers over a three-month period ending August 2012 — that is, in the period just before the launch of Apple’s newest iPhone, and during the time when Samsung was slapped with a $1 billion+ fine over a patent suit brought against it by Apple. In that time, Samsung retained its position as the country’s… → Read More
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the WPP-owned market research group, today released its latest 12-week smartphone sales figures across the key markets in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere, and the figures show that Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is definitely making some progress, and in at least one case, in Italy, overtaking RIM as the fourth-largest smartphone OS in terms of actual sales. But it… → Read More
Google’s Android smartphone OS is facing a lot of challengers in the low-cost smartphone segment, from Huawei, ZTE, Samsung and Nokia at the vendor end to Mozilla coming from its position in browser software. But for the short term it appears that there is little for Android to worry about from any single contender. Research out today from Strategy Analytics notes that one of these, Firefox OS… → Read More
A sign that all the TV advertising dollars in the world can’t always buy you market share (useful lesson for politicians, too): a list of top ads in the U.S. for tablets puts Samsung way into the lead among vendors — but Apple, which actually is the best-selling tablet at the moment, doesn’t even make the top-10.
The rankings, from ad analytics company Ace Metrix – a startup backed… → Read More
Square’s $200 million Series D and $3.25 billion valuation yesterday may have risen expectations massively for where mobile payments will ultimately go, but for now the vast majority of us are still pulling out our cash, cards and checks to buy things. A study from Deloitte, notes that today in the UK only 1% of mobile consumers have ever used a handset to pay for something in a retail location. → Read More
When it comes to conducting research for papers, homework assignments, etc., students primarily turn to the Web for information despite its inherent academic dangers. Naturally, with the diversity of content out there, keeping track of pertinent links and bibliographical data is difficult when jumping from source to source. Citelighter launched in the fall of 2011 to address this problem by… → Read More
Fake fans, fake “likes” and fake reviews are some of the worst aspects of social media — or at least for those of us earnest enough to take user-generated content and the will of the crowd seriously. Now, new research from Gartner lays bare the fact that it’s only going to get worse, as paid social media interactions become a more established industry unto themselves. The analysts predict that by… → Read More
One day after Apple’s big iPhone 5 news day, an accolade for Apple in the tablet category: J.D. Power and Associates has put the brand at the top of its annual tablet customer satisfaction survey. This is the first time that the influential pollster has tracked U.S. consumers on tablet usage — it is known for its mobile handset rankings, which Apple also topped for smartphones last week. Amazon… → Read More
The mobile app market, currently still led by app trailblazer Apple, is continuing to grow at a rapid pace: according to new research from Gartner there will be nearly 46 billion mobile app downloads made this year, nearly double the 25 billion downloads in 2011. Among those downloads, free will continue to reign supreme: 89% of those downloads worldwide will cost nothing. That is also appearing… → Read More
The researchers at eMarketer have put out their latest figures on mobile advertising revenue in the U.S., and while they are holding firm on their forecast that they will bring in $2.6 billion this year (it’s a number they actually put out in January 2012), they have drilled down a bit more into who is making what. Unsurprisingly, Google is still at the top of the pile: it will account for 56% of… → Read More
We’ve seen a lot of images of an (alleged) iPhone coming soon with a bigger screen, and some numbers out from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the WPP-owned market analysts, underscore how a bigger iPhone may not be coming a moment too soon. In the last 12 weeks, it found that Android-based smartphones have continued to extend their lead over the rest of the pack, and the charge is being led by the big… → Read More
Here’s one reason why Apple may not be producing a television with its name blazoned on it in the near term: it doesn’t look like people have, so far, shown that much interested in them yet. According to a new report out from consumer researchers GfK, connected TV televisions are faring much better in markets like China, Brazil and India compared to the U.S., UK and other developed markets — with… → Read More
The latest figures out from IDC confirm that this is the year that China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market, with its 25.5% share a significant lead over the U.S.’s 17.8%. The tipping point has been a long time coming: China is the world’s most-populated country, so it was only a matter of time before it would overtake the U.S. But the trend has been accelerated in the… → Read More
New research out from Google, working with market analysts Ipsos and Sterling Brands, puts some hard numbers behind the often-noticed trend of how people in the U.S. are using a combination of phones, tablets, computer and TVs to consume digital content.
While each of these has a significant place in our consumption today, their real power lies in how they are used together — in combination… → Read More
Gartner is the latest of the big analyst houses to release its numbers for smartphone and overall mobile sales in Q2. The picture it paints is one of a market that has, effectively, one winner at the moment: Android — and more specifically Samsung — with growth for Apple’s iPhone “paused” as users hold out for the next iPhone and ride out the tough economy.
Worldwide, there were 419 million… → Read More
Tablets and smartphones may be gradually ushering us into a post-PC world, but for now the bigger machines continue to dominate the market. Figures out today from Gartner, focusing on PCs in Europe, note that shipments in the economically-troubled region declined by 2.4% to 13.6 million units in Q2, in a wider global market where growth was flat. Within that, HP kept its lead as the biggest PC… → Read More
Figures out today from eMarketer estimate that in the U.S., just under 82 million consumers, or 26% of the population, will access social networks from their phones this year, rising to nearly 117 million by 2014. But if you are a social networking startup that sees that low-penetration figure as an opportunity, be aware that at the moment Facebook has all but cornered the market, and that the… → Read More
As mobile payments continue to become more commonplace among retailers, smartphone consumers are already showing a pretty strong appetite for mobile shopping on their devices. According to a June 2012 survey among 5,000 Android and iPhone users in the U.S., Nielsen found that just over 50% of them have used a native shopping app on their phones. The analysts say that in total some 48 million U.S. → Read More
We have seen reports from Strategy Analytics, IDC and Canalys detailing how many smartphones that handset makers shipped in the last quarter (the takeaway: Android is still on top, with Samsung the chief benefactor); today, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, WPP’s market analytics business, has released its rolling monthly update on how that translates into on-the-ground sales in some of the biggest… → Read More
After Amazon launched its $199 Kindle Fire tablet last autumn, a lot of observers thought it could prove to be the competition to Apple’s iPad that other Android tablets had so far failed to deliver. Some numbers out from IDC today, however, show that as Amazon continues to sell the device in the U.S. alone, that has failed to become the case, as Apple continues to increase its worldwide market… → Read More
One more analyst house, Canalys, has released its numbers on global smartphone sales in Q2, and unlike Strategy Analytics and IDC, it has focused on sales by platforms rather than OEMs. In that light, Google’s Android was the clear, all-out winner: in a market that saw 158 million smartphone shipments worldwide, Android accounted for 68% of them, with its 108 million units an increase of 110% over… → Read More
ComScore today released its latest quarterly figures on the state of the mobile market in the U.S. based on active users, and while the exact numbers are different, the basic picture is the same as the one that Strategy Analytics painted earlier in the week around smartphone sales: Apple’s iOS continues to see the strongest gains and Android has remained in the lead but with its lead reduced… → Read More
Yesterday Paris-based analytics firm Semiocast noted that Twitter had passed the 500 million user account mark, with some detail on how that is playing out on a country-by-country basis. Today, we have some numbers that spell out what that actually means in terms of active Twitter users.
Paul Guyot, the founder of Semiocast, says its analysis indicates that on average, less than one-third, 27%… → Read More
A milestone for Twitter today, according to the Paris-based analyst group Semiocast. The social network has now passed the half-billion account mark — specifically 517 million accounts as of July 1, 2012, with 141.8 million of those users in the U.S., still about half as many users as Facebook has but positioning it as the second-biggest social networking site.
And just as most of Twitter’s… → Read More
Have we reached a state of “peak Android” in the same way that the energy industry can reach “peak oil”? This is an idea being floated today by Strategy Analytics. Last week the firm noted that Android partner Samsung was the world’s leading smartphone seller last quarter, taking just over 50% of the market. Today, it’s broken out what’s happening in the key U.S. market: Android sales actually… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
