More than one billion smartphones are now in use worldwide, according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm also projects there will be over 2 billion smartphones by 2015.
The numbers mean that one in seven people worldwide now uses a smartphone. This represents a 47 percent increase since last year.
Nokia is credited with introducing the first “modern” smartphone in 1996. The industry exploded following the rapid adoption of Apple’s iPhone.
“The growth of the smartphone market, estimated by Bloomberg Industries to be worth $219 billion last year, has helped Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. rack up record earnings as they take sales from rivals including Espoo, Finland-based Nokia,” reports Bloomberg.
Apple set a new record last month when the company sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s during the product’s debut weekend. “Samsung, the Suwon, South Korea-based maker of Galaxy smartphones, ended Nokia’s 14-year reign as the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones this year,” notes the post.
While the U.S. smartphone industry has already boomed, Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawson explained that “Most of the world does not yet own a smartphone and there remains huge scope for future growth, particularly in emerging markets such as China, India and Africa.”
The social gaming space has become increasingly crowded, and customer attention spans for games have become shorter.
This has resulted in a dangerous scenario for game developers, as investors do not want to put money into a game when the life span can “be clocked with an egg-timer rather than an old-fashioned desk calendar,” writes Fortune.
Robert W. Baird & Co. researcher Colin Sebastian notes that while the social gaming market is still growing, the pace has slowed considerably, and the uncertainty inherent in the genre makes it a tough sell for investors. “Games are a hit-driven business,” he says, “so it’s really hard to have a crystal ball and know what games are going to be successful and for how long.”
Zynga’s purchase of OMGPOP for $200 million underscores the uncertainty in social gaming. Zynga wanted OMGPOP’s hit game “Draw Something,” but just as Zynga bought the game, the user base tanked, as users got bored and moved on to new games.
PopCap Games has also struggled since Electronic Arts purchased the company in 2011 for $1.3 billion.
“We’ve seen a dramatic change in the way people play and pay for games,” explains PopCap founder John Vechey. “The change in consumer tastes requires us to reorganize our business and invest in new types of games on new platforms — it’s a completely different world from when we started.”
Analysts warn against the acquisition of “one-game companies” like OMGPOP because of the quick turnover in what games are popular at any given time. Other analysts suggests companies should hire individual developers rather than companies.
While primetime television consumption is as high as ever, the percentage of viewers watching live programming has dropped. People are watching more content either on DVR playback or on demand through streaming services, according to research firm GfK.
This has resulted in live television viewership during the 8:00-9:00 pm time slot (among those watching some sort of television) to drop from 83 percent in 2008 to 64 percent in 2012.
Recorded program viewing has risen 10 percent to 26 percent of total viewing during this time slot. Video game playing and streaming video services have also increased their share.
The trend is more dramatic for viewers in the 13-32 age bracket, where live television viewing only accounts for 57 percent of the current 8:00-9:00 pm slot.
“The GfK research also noted that the number of viewers using smartphones while in front of their TVs during primetime is at 20 percent, a habit that wasn’t on the radar four years ago, which could speak to the potential of second screen applications,” writes Variety.
While Web companies have become obsessed with tracking Facebook and Twitter for traffic, Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that most traffic for many sites still comes through “dark social” sources like email and chat messages.
When tracking programs show that traffic comes through “direct” or “typed/bookmarked,” it suggests users actually typed the URL into the browser. But many times, argues Madrigal, the traffic actually comes through a chat message or an email from a friend.
Chartbeat, which provides analytics for publishers, breaks down the “direct” category into sub-categories. When analyzing The Atlantic website, for example, Chartbeat found that 60 percent of social traffic comes from these “dark” or hard to track social sources.
The data suggests that many websites see close to 70 percent traffic from hard to track social sources.
“This problem is compounded by the shift to mobile content consumption, since chat apps and instant messaging and other direct communication methods are even more prevalent in the mobile world than on the desktop,” writes GigaOM. “Links are passed from social network to apps to chat to email, and tracking them quite quickly becomes almost impossible.”
One way to optimize page views is to follow the model of “content is king,” explains Madrigal. Since most traffic comes through person-to-person referrals, then simply writing interesting pieces should spark sharing.
Amazon has begun negotiations to acquire the mobile chip arm of Texas Instruments, according to Isreali newspaper Calcalist. Amazon will likely pay billions of dollars in the deal, reports Business Insider.
Purchasing a mobile chip business would allow Amazon to rival Apple and Samsung as manufacturers who design their own chips for electronics. Amazon already competes in the tablet industry, and may break into the smartphone business within the foreseeable future.
Last month, Texas Instruments said it would shift from wireless chip development for consumer products to larger industrial products, such as the development of chips for cars. TI sees the move as a more stable and profitable business plan.
“TI’s chips are used in Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire tablet,” notes the article. “TI told investors it would continue to support its customers but its mobile application chip business, which supports features like video, will not invest in supporting its customers future roadmap for tablets and smartphones to the same degree as before.”
Neither Amazon nor Texas Instruments has commented on the report, but Gartner analyst Carolina Malanesi expressed doubt, telling Reuters that she does not think Amazon would want to “become that intimately involved with hardware.”
Juniper Networks and Forrester Research surveyed 150 senior IT executives to help analyze how trends in cloud computing and big data have affected enterprise networks.
The survey found that 58 percent of respondents had to upgrade their network hardware because of increased demand from cloud services.
Mobile device usage also rose as a result of cloud services, as 47 percent of respondents indicate that more employees have begun bringing devices to work.
“The complications for networks have grown past the point where you can simply add more bandwidth and hope for the best,” writes AllThingsD. Eighty-six percent of those surveyed said they could not start new services or support business demand because of an overmatched network.
The main takeaway from the report is that networks are now often under too much demand.
Networks can no longer just add more bandwidth when they struggle, but rather need to “be built with overarching business objectives in mind, with teams that are usually separate — security, manufacturing, quality control — getting more intimately involved with building the network than they have been before,” explains AllThingsD.
4G LTE is changing the landscape of mobile video, as increased bandwidth allows users to watch videos with greater ease. “Mobile video is quickly becoming a mass consumer phenomenon, much as digital photos were earlier in the smartphone adoption cycle,” suggests Business Insider.
The mobile video audience has grown 77 percent to 36 million over the last two years. While the U.S. smartphone industry is largely established, the global industry is still growing rapidly.
“4G subscribers in the U.S. are 33 percent more likely to watch a video on their smartphones than the average mobile user” according to a new report from BI Intelligence. As 4G LTE expands across the nation, mobile video consumption will continue to grow, suggests the report.
The larger screens on new smartphones are also more conducive for video viewing, and are expected to contribute to the rise of mobile video.
But the BI Intelligence report indicates that as consumers demand more bandwidth for mobile videos, carriers could start limiting data either through tiered plans or high data costs. This could reduce the growth of mobile video.
Since Facebook went public, it has been under significant pressure to accelerate its revenue growth. This led Facebook to launch its own mobile advertising network, which Business Insider says could “dramatically increase the amount of money media and tech companies are able to make in the next decade.”
Many Web publishers can create targeted advertising because they can track cookies on Web browsers. But mobile presents a more difficult challenge, as iPhone browsers do not download cookies.
This leads mobile applications to follow an outdated model. Advertisers do not like to spend money when they do not know specifically who they are targeting, the result of which could impact the mobile advertising business.
But the Facebook advertising system could solve these dilemmas. When Facebook users connect to mobile, Facebook can use the username to cross-reference with the version of the user. This means Facebook can transfer the cookie-data to its mobile entity.
This development could also help users, argues Business Insider, because app developers will have more money, and will be able to create better applications.
Modern editing software can confuse directors by giving them too many choices, argues Academy-Award winning French editor Francoise Bonnot, who has worked with Julie Taymor, Roman Polanksi and Michael Cimino.
Final Cut Pro and Avid allow editors to compile multiple versions of scenes, but Bonnot says this can impede storytelling, as the different versions serve only to confuse the narrative structure of the film.
“Nowadays people who haven’t started out working with film don’t take the time to think about what they’re doing. I refuse to do three, four or five different versions. If you give a director so many choices, often the director loses his way,” she says.
While Bonnot criticizes what she sees as “the American way” of filmmaking, she also questions the French premise that the director has complete power over the editor. “Editing is collaboration,” she explains. “Sometimes you will see a French film where the director has fallen in love with the shot and refuses to cut it.”
She believes editing needs to effectively splice together a sequence of events. “Each sequence has a beginning, middle and end. The trick is to get as late into the sequence as possible rather than lose it completely,” she says.
Bonnot also emphasizes that editing should not draw attention to itself, and that the best editing will not be noticed.
A report from Pandora says the Internet radio service will pay more than 2,000 artists over $10,000 during the next year. More than 800 artists will earn more than $50,000 — and very popular artists like Lil Wayne and Drake will earn about $3 million.
Pandora founder Tim Westergren claims Pandora accounts for 6.53 percent of radio listening in the U.S. He argues that if this number were higher, artists would receive much more money from royalties.
He also says his fight to lower royalty fees is not anti-artist, but rather an argument for Pandora to invest more in its development. This would allow Pandora to offer a better product and gain more customers. So although royalties would be lower, the scale would help to ultimately pay artists more.
When asked about Spotify’s impact on Pandora, Westergren remained defiant: “The only thing that’s worrying me is the royalty situation in Washington.”
According to recently published statistics, Spotify’s “revenue grew 151 percent to $244.5 million from 2010 to 2011, [yet] its net losses went up 60 percent to roughly $59 million,” reports TechCrunch.
As Myspace hopes to become relevant again in the crowded Internet ecosystem, CEO Tim Vanderhook recognized the site needed a new design.
“You couldn’t just put a new coat of paint on this thing,” he explains. “You really had to build everything from scratch, you had to rethink what the brand was actually going to stand for, and then you had to give people a totally different experience.”
While Facebook crushed Myspace in the social media realm, nothing really ever took over Myspace’s position as a place to cultivate young musical artists.
The new Myspace features a horizontal screen to accommodate the widescreen laptops and TV’s that are more prevalent in today’s technological landscape. The redesign focuses primarily on creating a “social network for the creative community,” reports Fast Company.
Another interesting development is the inclusion of “a smart, multivariable search function that pulls in all the results across artists, albums, and users,” explains the article.
The site also places importance on playlists and mixes, and will include a drag-and-drop tool for making the lists, according to a promotional video tweeted by Myspace co-owner Justin Timberlake.
Ultimately, Myspace hopes to become a “platform where finding music, playing music, and sharing music are all seamless, coherent parts of the greater experience,” notes Fast Company.
Traditional American newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post have been exploring new ways to produce valuable video content that does not simply emulate television.
The presidential election has provided each with valuable opportunities to experiment with new video techniques.
WSJ has bolstered its video content by using a filterable reverse chronological stream of videos called WorldStream. The application allows reporters to submit videos quickly, and allows for instant editing. This eliminates the time consuming process of calling editors and describing video.
The paper says there is no optimal length for video content. Tablet users prefer longer videos usually, but mobile users prefer short, quick sound bites. This means video producers must cater to both interests.
The New York Times produced more than 20 hours of video surrounding the political conventions, but said the largest challenge was to create unique content in such a saturated market. The paper also experimented with new ways to show viewers that the videos existed, such as tweaking the design and presentation to encourage video clicks.
The Washington Post used Google+ Hangouts as a way to reach users in an attempt to promote a “more casual, living room-style” for its videos.
The video departments for these newspapers are not as large as big cable companies and do not have similar production budgets, so they have to get creative to be successful in video content.
Microsoft’s impending releases of its Surface tablet and the Windows 8 operating system suggest a fundamental shift in the company’s structure. While Microsoft traditionally worked with hardware partners, its new focus on the Surface tablet signals a renewed sense of autonomy.
“This is a significant shift,” writes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in this year’s letter to company shareholders. “It impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses.”
Ballmer stresses the fact that while Microsoft has positioned itself as a premium hardware company, it will still continue to work with partners on CE devices such as PCs, tablets and phones.
Microsoft will focus on building devices for specific needs. Ballmer highlights the Xbox and the Surface as Microsoft-made items that address specific needs in the market. Ballmer explains that Microsoft plans to “‘establish one platform’ around Windows across the PC, tablet, phone, server, and cloud,” reports The Verge.
“While Ballmer doesn’t say whether Microsoft is looking to expand Surface hardware beyond the tablet, it’s a safe assumption that if the brand is successful then it will continue to fuel additional devices in future,” notes the post.
“It truly is a new era at Microsoft,” says Ballmer. “We see an unprecedented amount of opportunity for both this year and the long term… I couldn’t be more excited and optimistic.”
Microsoft may be redefining itself as a hardware company with the release of its Surface tablet, but Fast Company suggests this could be a risky move, as “Windows has long been Microsoft’s bread and butter.”
Surface could complicate this, as it pits Microsoft directly against its partners in many other areas; the companies that buy Windows for their PCs will now compete in the competitive tablet market against their partner Microsoft.
And just as Microsoft is re-imagining itself as a company, the newest Windows also pushes boundaries of innovation. The new system uses grids of tiles that essentially bring the tablet experience to both mobile devices and PCs.
“Microsoft has united around a set of design principles that it dubbed Metro, a slick, intuitive, and playful visual language that is seeping into the company’s product portfolio, from Office to Bing to Windows Phone to Xbox, creating a common platform for hardware of all types,” explains Fast Company.
Windows 8 provides a stripped-down interface to emphasize what Microsoft calls an “authentically digital” experience. “It’s not about adornments,” says Sam Moreau, director of user experience for Windows. “It’s about typography, color, motion. That’s the pixel.”
“Windows 8 could also transform the nature of the software giant’s competition with home-run king Apple, potentially reversing a string of embarrassing defeats, especially in the mobile market,” notes the article. “Even more improbably, Microsoft is building this comeback attempt not on its traditional strength — engineering — but on, of all things, design.”
Camera review website Digital Photography Review has launched a new platform called Connect which is “dedicated to the fast growing world of mobile photography,” reports Wired.
DPReview promises to provide detailed reviews of cell phone cameras that focus not only on resolution, but on the “sensors, lenses and software that all contribute to the look and quality of the images,” explains the post.
Connect “will be combining DPReview’s qualitative assessment of performance and image quality with technical testing,” through its partnership with DXO Labs.
Editor Barney Britton says a new studio will help create objectivity for the nine to ten page cell phone camera reviews.
“We’ll be able to test cameras and phones using a common scene which greatly improves on our current setup,” he says. “This means we can shoot from a reasonable distance away on cellphones, avoiding issues with distortion and sharpness that plague attempts to shoot smaller scenes with fixed wide-angle lenses/cameras.”
As reports indicate that the iPhone 4 is the most used-camera in America, DPReview will fill a much needed void of analyzing which cell phone cameras are best. The detailed, respected reviews could incentivize cell phone companies to improve their cameras, speculates Wired.