The mobile market continues to expand. According to research from Gartner, there will be nearly 46 billion mobile app downloads this year alone, nearly doubling the 2011 total of 25 billion.
“Among those downloads, free will continue to reign supreme: 89 percent of those downloads worldwide will cost nothing. That is also appearing to have a knock-on effect on apps that are sold for a price: 90 percent of paid apps will cost less than $3,” reports TechCrunch.
And those numbers are only predicted to increase. According to Gartner, by 2016, there will be 310 billion downloads, with 93 percent of those offered for free.
The Apple App Store is predicted to stay atop the mobile market in the years to come, even as its numbers somewhat dominish, according to the research.
Gartner’s research also indicates that third-party app stores like Amazon and Facebook could become “powerful competitors.”
Millennial Media released its September 2012 Mobile Mix report, “the latest edition of the industry’s most reliable source for mobile device and OS trends,” according to a post on the company’s site.
The report contains data from Q2 of this year and breaks down data regarding the Top 20 mobile phones, Top 10 mobile application categories and Top 5 tablets.
According to the report, Apple was the leading manufacturer and the iPhone was the leading mobile device. Samsung came in as the second leading manufacturer and had eight different devices included in the Top 20 mobile phones.
“The iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire were the top three tablets ranked by impressions, and all three tablets were in the top 20 overall mobile devices on the Millennial Media platform,” explains the press release. “95 percent of tablet impressions came over a Wi-Fi network, showing that many tablet owners are using their devices at home or work, where they have reliable Wi-Fi connections.”
“The report also found 46 percent of all impressions on the Millennial Media platform were on the Android operating system, compared to 34 percent for iOS, 15 percent for the BlackBerry OS and 4 percent for Windows,” according to the report.
CBS, the most viewed network, is benefiting from its older audience — averaged at 57 years old.
While the oft-targeted and prized consumers aged 18-24 are delaying the start of their own households and families, and commonly living without TVs, the youngest members of the Baby Boomer generation are just turning 48 and are often financially stable.
Luxury cars, financial services and pharmaceutical companies represent the three largest ad categories for CBS and play well with older viewers.
This year, CBS expects to generate more money though ads targeted to 25-to-54 year olds than any other age category.
“Reaching younger consumers, assumed to be more open to new products, has been the primary preoccupation of advertisers since the 1970’s,” notes Businessweek. “Now the relatively better-off consumers in their 50’s are willing to try new products — and have more cash to buy them.”
While advertisers still pay a premium for younger audiences, the older viewers are gaining more importance in the advertising realm with the realization that the struggling economy hasn’t affected them as much as younger generations.
The Atlantic got a behind-the-scenes look at Google’s “Ground Truth” system, which is responsible for the creation and sustaining of its intricate Google Maps.
These maps are widely used within today’s mobile infrastructure. “Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for,” writes The Atlantic.
Google realizes this and continues to expand its mobile reach, with an ongoing and tight focus on maps.
Former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who works on Google Maps, said of the creation process: “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”
The truly impressive aspect of Google Maps is that “humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made,” explains the article.
“I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company,” writes Alexis C. Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic. “The secret to this success isn’t, as you might expect, Google’s facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world.”
Hewlett Packard, known for its long history of technological innovation, released its Spectre One desktop computer over the weekend. And according to The Next Web, it looks like an Apple iMac replica.
“The phrase ‘Redmond, start your photocopiers’ was used to market Mac OS X Tiger back in 2006 and referred to Microsoft,” notes the post. “Microsoft is pushing something new and original with Windows 8, but the OEMs making computers for it seem to have done just that.”
“Note that even the keyboard and touchpad are nearly complete clones of Apple’s offerings,” writes TNW. “This is just a sad day for HP. There are nearly infinite combinations of components and design to choose from here and it decided to effectively clone Apple.”
Steve Jobs warned of this happening to HP during his interviews with biographer Walter Isaacson. He hoped he’d left a stronger legacy at Apple than Hewlett and Packard had at HP.
According to Engadget, the Spectre One desktop will be available November 14th starting at $1,299.
20th Century Fox has joined Disney to become the second major studio to support Dolby Laboratories’ Atmos audio platform to change “the way films sound at the megaplex,” reports Variety.
“The Fox deal is significant for Dolby as a sound system battle is quietly tuning up inside the world’s movie theaters,” notes the article.
“Dolby hopes the Atmos rollout will help it control a larger share of the in-theater surround sound biz as it competes with rivals like Barco, Immsound, Iosono and Illusonic 3D, which are also promoting new systems to exhibs, especially as more theaters make the transition to digital projection.”
Atmos has received high praise from sound designers and filmmakers thus far, and could end up saving theaters money in the long run because it “automatically creates mono, stereo and 5.1 and 7.1 mixes of a movie, optimizing distribution of one version of a film to most theaters and homevid formats,” according to Variety.
If Dolby can continue to encourage theater chains to convert, “Atmos is expected to be used by exhibitors as a marketing tool to fill more theater seats the way they promoted screenings with THX in the 1980s and DTS and Dolby Digital in the 1990s.”
The e-commerce battle between Amazon and Google continues to escalate. As more people are using the Amazon store to discover products, Google has begun to charge retailers for spots within its Google Shopping service, making each product listing an ad.
Charging is a way for Google to ensure that retailers keep their ads relevant and accurate, also ensuring a way to compete with the Amazon store.
According to Michael Griffin, founder and chief technology officer of online retail marketer Adlucent, Google needs to be making such moves: “Google and Amazon both have the same end goal, to be the destination that people go to do their product searches, and Amazon’s winning that battle.”
On Amazon’s side, the company has removed all of its listings from Google Shopping.
According to a Forrester Research study, about one-third of consumers start their shopping research on Amazon, while 13 percent start on a search engine. That’s a dramatic change from 2009, when nearly 25 percent began a search on a site like Google and just 18 percent started on Amazon.
Copyright “bots” are becoming more prevalent, leading some to worry about the effects they could have on freedom of speech.
Wired reports that the bots (or systems) “can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast,” when they detect possible copyrighted material.
The problem here is that the machines cannot take into account instances of fair use or otherwise legitimate use of material.
In a recent example, “a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them,” explains the article.
While a “notice-and-takedown” system is in place within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it doesn’t work well for live streaming. The notice would be too late and the opportunity for takedown would be over by the time the paperwork went through.
“It’s likely that this collision between algorithmic defense of copyright versus spontaneous speech isn’t going to be resolved soon,” writes Wired.
In the world of competitive search engines, Google continues to reign supreme. However, Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to make progress. Bing’s market share has nearly doubled to reach 15.4 percent, according to comScore.
Mike Nichols, corporate vice president and chief marketing officer for Bing, spoke with Fortune about what Bing is doing to continue its steady rise and hopefully compete with Google in the future.
Nichols claims that Bing’s searches are now preferable to Google’s by a 2-to-1 margin, according to independent research.
To prove these numbers, Bing is hosting the nationwide “Bing It On” challenge, an ad campaign which asks users to search for something on both Bing and Google and rate which answer is better.
“What we’re trying to do here is [encourage] people to compare Bing and Google head-to-head, and we believe that as people do that increasingly they will see that Bing is worth breaking… that Google habit,” says Nichols, “because of the quality of the search results, because it’s the only search service that includes useful information from your friends and experts from Facebook, Twitter, etc.”
A California judge rejected Hulu’s motion in August to dismiss a lawsuit regarding the sharing of its users’ viewing habits. “The Hulu privacy case is now one step closer to trial, and the question of who can share your video playlist is about to break wide open,” according to ReadWriteWeb.
“The plaintiffs, a handful of Hulu users in what is now a class action suit, argued that by contracting with a tracking company called KISSmetrics to install code that revived deleted cookies and shared viewing records and personal data with the third parties like Google Analytics, DoubleClick, and Scorecard Research, the video streaming service went beyond expected uses of browsing data,” explains the post. “Instead, the plaintiffs argued, Hulu’s actions amounted to a ‘hack’ of their online experience.”
Companies like Hulu and Netflix are currently trying to get the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) changed. “The VPPA, the argument goes, puts video streaming businesses at a serious disadvantage on the social web, especially when you compare them to, say, audio streamers like Pandora and Spotify,” notes ReadWriteWeb.
According to Hulu, even under the current VVPA, providing companies like Google with user data is just “incident to the ordinary course of business,” which is permissible under the law.
However, the judge “decided that whether Hulu’s sharing of user data is an ‘ordinary’ part of its video streaming business is a question of fact, not law — precisely the sort of thing trials are meant to determine,” suggests the post.
“Using an ultrathin wafer of silicon and gold to focus lightwaves, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have created a revolutionary new kind of camera lens that completely eliminates the image distortion created by traditional glass lenses,” reports Gizmodo.
This could pave the way for lighter cameras as capable as the swappable lens models available today. This could even create an environment in which a camera phone could produce images as impressive as a DSLR.
The new lens measures 60 nanometers thick and is “made by plating a thin wafer of silicon with a layer of gold that’s then etched away to create a series of V-shaped structures across its surface,” explains the post.
The light hits the structures and is slightly slowed, changing its direction. Then, “by carefully tuning the angle, size, and spacing of these V-shaped structures across the surface of the lens, it can capture wide-angle or telephoto images without the distortion that’s seen from something like a traditional fish-eye lens,” notes Gizmodo.
The invention has the power to serve as “a death blow” to the heavy cameras currently used by professional photographers, according to the post.
Analyst and journalist Rakesh Agrawal predicted a year ago that the Groupon business model would not be successful. Dismal second quarter numbers suggest he may have been right.
As Agrawal wrote then and Slate now summarizes: “Groupon was riding high because its most important constituency — the small businesses who slashed their prices to entice Groupon’s customers — was getting ripped off.”
“Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business,” wrote Agrawal in an editorial from June 2011.
The small business has to agree to a reduced price on its product or service, along with agreeing to provide Groupon with an often 50 percent chunk of the proceeds.
“For instance, if my fast-food shack normally sells a burger-and-shake combo for $10, Groupon will want me to offer it for $5, and then take half of the $5 sale — so I’ve just sold $10 of merchandise for $2.50,” explains Slate.
Businesses were attracted to the pitch because of the promise of being paid their cut immediately, along with the proposed exposure that would have customers returning again in the future, at full price. But many owners never considered that these deal-hungry consumers would never come in again.
For some businesses, it can work, like new companies, or those offering long-term deals or ones that have had previous success with Groupon.
“Agrawal sees this as evidence that Groupon’s merchant base is narrowing down to just the businesses that can do well with such promotions,” notes the article. “That’s certainly good for the small business community, but it isn’t good for Groupon, which sold itself as a company with limitless growth potential.”
Four years ago, researchers at IBM created Watson, the computer that went on to beat two “Jeopardy!” champions at their own game.
“Now they’re trying to figure out how to get those capabilities into the phone in your pocket,” the San Francisco Chronicle writes.
Bernie Meyerson, the vice president of innovation at IBM, “envisions a voice-activated Watson that answers questions, like a supercharged version of Apple’s Siri personal assistant,” according to the article.
Beyond its winning performance on “Jeopardy!”, Watson’s system has worked on crunching financial data for Citigroup Inc. and cancer data for WellPoint Inc.
The next version is to be called Watson 2.0 and is aiming for the mobile market. “IBM expects to generate billions in sales by putting Watson to work in finance, health care, telecommunications and other areas,” notes the article.
However, there’s a lot of work to be done before Watson could be ready for public consumption, including voice and image recognition.
SecurityWeek writes of a “new malware intelligence system developed at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)” that’s “helping government agencies and private companies share threat intelligence and work together to understand attacks.”
The system is called Titan and allows “member organizations to submit threat data and to collaborate on malware analysis and classification,” according to the article.
The data is contributed anonymously. “You are asking people to submit information about targeted attacks, so anonymity is built-in to the platform,” says Chris Smoak, project leader and branch head for malicious software analysis at GTRI’s Cyber Technology and Information Security Lab.
According to Smoak, Titan can do more than the average malware detector like VirusTotal.
“Generally speaking, people can upload suspicious files to VirusTotal to find out if it is malicious, and whether existing security tools can detect it,” explains SecurityWeek. “However, there is no way for VirusTotal to look at two variants of malware and correlate it to say they are the same, while Titan can do that, Smoak said.”
The system has been in public beta since May collecting data from members across the industry including government agencies. “There is no push to add new members for the remainder of the beta period, Smoak said. The system will be expected to be final in ‘a few weeks,’ at which point the platform will likely be expanded to add more.”
While Windows 8 is receiving high praise for its tablet experience, “many feel that the operating system’s ‘Modern-style’ UI makes life more difficult for PC users,” according to a Laptop review.
Usability expert Raluca Budiu of the Nielsen Norman Group “has used the new OS enough to conclude that, for productivity tasks on the PC at least, Windows 8 is less user friendly than its predecessors,” notes the review.
“Windows 8 is optimized for content consumption rather than content production and multitasking,” says Budiu. “Whereas content consumption can easily be done on other media (tablets and phones), production and multitasking are still best suited for PCs. Windows 8 appears to ignore that.”
Budiu goes into further detail throughout the Q&A, explaining her issues with start-up menus, displays and functionality.
“Users will need to remember two different interfaces,” she notes. “They will learn Windows 8, but won’t be able to forget Windows 7. And they will need to keep track of which app goes with each framework. [It’s] definitely a cognitive burden, but not an insurmountable one.”
