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
Now that all the big handset makers have put in their quarterly sales figures, Strategy Analytics has done the number crunching for an overall picture of what happened in the mobile market. The upshot: just as many predicted, mobile as a whole — facing wider economic slowdown and “shifting consumer tastes” – remained largely flat, growing by just 1%. But smartphones, still at a less mature… → Read More
One of the strong points in Apple’s quarterly earnings report yesterday was sales of the iPad. Globally, they were up 52% by revenue and 84% by unit sales, respectively to $9 billion and 17 million. In some new figures out today, Strategy Analytics notes that this translates to an increase in overall tablet market share for the company: Apple now controls 68.3% of the market, compared to 62% in… → Read More
You know a brand is doing something right when people go a little crazy for its products even before they’ve been announced. A new survey out from 451 Research/ChangeWave on consumer smartphone sentiment found that Apple’s iPhone 5 — whatever that may turn out to be — is seeing an “unprecedented” wave of advance demand — higher than any other iPhone model has had before, with 14 percent of… → Read More
Android is now most-used smartphone platform worldwide, and that swing is being reflected in other areas like mobile advertising. Today some numbers out from Adfonic indicate that in Q2, Android accounted for the majority of mobile ad impressions on its network worldwide, with 46 percent compared to iOS’s 34 percent of impressions. This is the first time Adfonic says it has recorded Android being… → Read More
Revenues from mobile ads are only a small fraction of the overall digital advertising pie — and an even smaller slice of overall advertising revenues, but some research out today from the Interactive Advertising Bureau underscore why that may well change in the future: ads that appear on touchscreen devices like tablets and smarphones are showing some of the highest levels of engagement of all… → Read More
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, a market analysis division of WPP, has today published its latest figures on mobile device sales across a number of key markets, and it looks like something of a milestone for Android: this is the first time in ComTech’s recording of sales that Android has accounted for more than half of all smartphone sales in the U.S., the biggest markets in Europe, and… → Read More
When it comes to revenue generation, online advertising may still be one of the smallest of all ad mediums, but it remains the fastest-growing, outpacing other non-print formats like TV, radio and cinema — as well as printed advertising formats like newspapers and magazines. New numbers out today from Nielsen, covering Q1 of this year, indicate that advertisers are spending 12.1 percent more on… → Read More
A report out earlier today from NPD highlighted how tablets are taking over from notebooks as the mobile PC of choice. By coincidence, a survey has been published by Gartner today that sheds some light on the “how” behind that shift: more people are using tablets for the functions that used to be the preserve of PCs, such as checking email, social networking and checking the weather.
The survey… → Read More
Tablets, and specifically the iPad from Apple, have been one of the big drivers for growth in mobile in the last couple of years, but figures out today from NPD indicate that their popularity is going to get even bigger: the market for tablets, its researchers predict, is set to boom from 121 million shipped tablets today to 416 million devices by 2017, when they will overtake notebooks to become… → Read More
The swing to smartphones and more immersive experiences using apps is having a major knock-on effect with how mobile handsets now figure in our lives. The Mobile Mindset Study, a new survey from mobile security developers Lookout using data commissioned from Harris Interactive, has found that three out of five smartphone owners in the U.S. do not go for more than one hour without checking their… → Read More
Apple has captured mindshare in the tablet market with its iPad, but when it comes to actual usage, in the U.S. it is actually neck-and-neck with its chief rival, Android, according to a new study out (direct link here) from the Online Publishers Association. The group found that while iPad ownership outweighed that of Android tablets in 2011 — 72 percent to 32 percent — this year those shares… → Read More
Global spend on entertainment and media services, according to a new Global Media and Entertainment Outlook report out from PwC, will reach $2.1 trillion by 2016, from $1.6 trillion in 2011. But the continuing shift to digital over physical distribution will mean that growth will come at a slower pace than in previous years — and at a rate slower than that of overall GDP, 5.7 percent versus 6.6… → Read More
Today PayPal opened up a new front in its strategy to expand its role in mobile payments, a business PayPal projects will generate it $7 billion in revenue this year. The eBay-owned payments company today launched a new retail mobile payments app for iOS and Android devices, PayPal InStore, where users can create barcodes that get scanned to deduct payments from users’ PayPal accounts. → Read More
Do you regularly use your cell phone to coordinate meetings, solve an unexpected problem, decide which restaurant to eat at, look up the score of a sporting event, check traffic, call help in an emergency situation or find information to help settle an argument? These activities make you a “just-in-time” cell user according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. → Read More
Samsung doesn’t break out actual unit sales figures for its mobile handset business, but among analyst houses, many are estimating that it is the brand to beat anyway. The latest comes from ComScore, which today released the results of a poll of 30,000 U.S. consumers. It found that Samsung accounted for 26 percent of all handsets — smartphone or otherwise — used in the U.S. in the last three… → Read More
The mobile industry will reel in more than $1.5 trillion in revenues in 2012, with 28 percent of that, $400 billion, attributable to mobile data, according to new research out from analyst Chetan Sharma.
He notes that within the revenues expected for mobile data, non-messaging revenues led by apps, mobile web browsing and streaming media have finally overtaken those of traditional messaging… → Read More
Attention TV world: consumers, it appears, are not as tech-friendly as you might think. According to a new survey out in the UK, the vast majority of the public is not interested in fancy new 3D or mobile TV services, and even less of them care about TV apps. What they would like are better players to watch on-demand content on their main TVs and better TV guides for discovering what is on… → Read More
The new iPad from Apple has so far smashed all of its own sales records for previous tablet models, selling 3 million units in its opening weekend, with total sales projections for 2012 at up to 66 million.
But according to some early (possibly too early?) figures from the mobile ad network Jumptap, that is not yet translating into a surge of traffic from the devices.
On the opening day… → Read More
In some of the old science fiction stories I remember from Weird Tales and Ray Bradbury and the like, robots always figured. But they always came the way you might expect a new dryer or hot water heater to arrive. In a big box, packed in straw or foam, heavy and metal of course as they always were back in the day. But the world of robots is different from the way they imagined it then: the… → Read More
As developers hunker down and get into the business of trying to work out how to get consumers to buy more of their product on mobile devices, some revealing numbers out from Nielsen on what people are willing to pay for on tablets already.
The upshot: paid content, it seems, is alive and well, but some media categories are doing a lot better than others. → Read More
With real-time translation of text common on the web and instantaneous speech-to-text gaining popularity, it seems that transliteration is cool again. But less obvious, and more difficult, methods of input are yet to be implemented. Case in point: sign language. The complicated and often contextual gestures form a vast visual vocabulary that isn’t easily captured or interpreted.
A team of… → Read More
The issue of information privacy around free services like some mobile apps and social networks has often been met with a rebuttal from the other side of the argument: if the service is free, you the user are the product, and so you shouldn’t be surprised when your information is “sold” as part of that business model, the so-called “hidden cost” of free.
That can seem like an uncomfortable… → Read More
On the eve of what is very likely to be the launch of a new iPad from Apple comes some new analysis from Forrester Research on the current competitive landscape — or lack thereof, as the case seems to be.
In short: despite the rush of tablets that have come out in the past year, many built on Google’s Android OS, Apple has managed to continue to run away with the competition, and how has 73… → Read More
Much was made of the news last week from Apple that its businesses had effectively created over 500,000 jobs in the U.S. not just directly at its company but at the many that link into the ecosystem it has created. Today, Microsoft teamed up with IDC to publish some research that took that one step (or actually 13.5 million steps) further:
The two say that cloud computing services will generate… → Read More
Android has become the most popular platform in smartphone sales, and that domination is slowly but surely making itself felt in other aspects of the mobile experience — just as Google would have wanted it to be.
Some figures out from the number-crunchers at StatCounter have found that Android’s native browser has finally overtaken Opera to become the world’s most popular mobile web browser. → Read More
Say the Mayans are right, and a meteor or some other catastrophe strikes the Earth sometime later this year. Assuming we’re not all wiped out by the impact, emergency services worldwide are going to need to do some serious canvassing to assess damage, resources, and form a picture of the disaster.
DARPA is running a little game, called CLIQRQuest, to look into how such a network of people might… → Read More
It’s a tipping point of sorts: smartphones are not (yet) being used by the majority of U.S. residents, but among mobile users, it looks like they have now outnumbered those on lower-end devices — or so consumers think — according to research out today from Pew.
As of February 2012, 46 percent of the 2,253 adults surveyed said they are now smartphone owners — growing 11 percent in the last… → Read More
A research team with members from University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania has been investigating the feasibility of what they call “computational sprinting,” a technique by which existing chips could be made to operate at hugely increased speeds for short periods of time. They have concluded that “it is indeed possible to engineer such a system.”
Not the best of news to readers… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
