Amidst stiff competition in the exploding mobile image-sharing sphere, Twitpic announced the release of its first iPhone app for editing and sharing photos.
Twitpic is best known as the go-to photo sharing service for Twitter users, making it possible to upload directly to Twitter and not via a third party service.
“Twitpic is hoping that free and simple-to-use editing features will be enticing enough to stay relevant” in the market, according to The New York Times.
“A free built-in photo editor will allow people to polish photos through a number of tools, including cropping and visual filters. People can also see the most popular pictures shared each day,” details the article. The photos will be shared on Twitter.
However, Twitpic is facing an increasing number of competitors, including “dozens of free photo-editing apps and social image-sharing services available for the iPhone,” notes NYT. Additionally, Instagram (recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion) is adding millions of users per month.
Google is trying to push the boundaries of email, a typically static communication medium. Rolling out to users throughout the week, its Google+ notifications in Gmail promise to be more interactive.
“This is actually Google’s second step in this direction. Since March, Google+ users were already able to add people to their circles from inside the Google+ notifications email,” details TechCrunch.
But Google is going a step further this week, “basically bringing the full interactive Google+ experience to these messages. Users can now view, comment on and +1 posts from their inboxes. Responses from their friends will also appear in real time right inside the message,” according to the post.
Other start-ups, including PowerInbox are also attempting to convert email into more of an interactive platform. “The PowerInbox browser plugin, for example works with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook and its API is already being used by a number of other email clients, including Unified Inbox,” adds TechCrunch.
Google launched Hangouts On Air this week, which is essentially an extension to Google+ group video chat that allows users to stream live to large audiences around the world.
The company has already used this for special broadcasts by David Beckham, the Muppets and President Obama. Moreover, it is training media companies like The New York Times and Wired to run their own broadcasts.
“This is a much more efficient and pervasive way to organize a conversation,” Hangouts product manager Nikhyl Singhal told AllThingsD. “Maybe I needed satellite trucks and switchboards for something like this in the past.”
To initiate, users simply flip the “enable Hangouts On Air” switch, and the video chat converts from private to public view — and not only for an audience of Google+ users. Hangouts On Air can be embedded into Web pages and even a YouTube channel.
Google will be leveraging YouTube’s methods for addressing copyrighted content, hate speech, illegal activity and pornography.
MosChip Semiconductor Technology introduced its Personal Computer Virtualization System last week, which allows users to play games, surf the Internet and stream videos on their TVs.
The PCVS box is built around the company’s MCS8142 chip that “facilitates video streaming, gaming and also virtual functioning of multi-purpose home networking,” reports Business Standard. “While the PCVS box is driving the PC to churn out a movie, games or other entertainment applications to your TV, the PC is still available for serious business work.”
The company is pursuing possible bundling deals with manufacturers of set-top boxes, TVs and PCs.
“We will be launching the product in countries like China, the U.S., India, Japan and Taiwan. Revenues from this product are likely to trickle in from the second quarter of the current financial year,” explained Ramchandra Reddy, chairman and chief executive officer of MosChip.
“Even if we can ship about 500,000 units, we will be doing good business. China alone has the appetite to consume about 20 to 30 million units because of higher adoption levels,” he said.
LinkedIn announced it will acquire presentation service SlideShare for $118.8 million in cash and stock.
SlideShare will continue to operate as a standalone service, while LinkedIn will integrate some of its features.
“The SlideShare acquisition is comprised of about 45 percent cash and 55 percent stock, and is slated to close this quarter, LinkedIn said. Founded in 2006, SlideShare hosts more than seven million presentations and fits LinkedIn’s mission of ‘making professionals more productive,’ executives said during a conference call,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Revenue has surged at LinkedIn, which sells recruiting tools to businesses and offers premium subscriptions to users eager to network,” adds the article.
LinkedIn’s net revenue more than doubled in Q1 to $188.5 million. Revenue from premium subscriptions jumped 91 percent and revenue from recruiting services more than doubled.
Microsoft has announced that its new Windows 8 operating system will not play DVDs unless users purchase an upgrade.
“Users will either have to pay to upgrade to the ‘Media Center’ or download extra, third-party software if they do want to play films,” reports The Telegraph.
According to the official Building Windows 8 blog, the change is in response to television and DVD use on PCs being “in sharp decline”. “It claims that Microsoft would have to spend ‘a significant amount in royalties’ to offer support for optical media in future software,” explains the article.
Microsoft will support online media including standards such as H.264, VC-1, MP4, AAC, WMA, MP3, PCM and Dolby Digital Plus codecs. Ultrabooks and tablets running Windows 8 will not have DVD drives.
Nokia plans to include tablets and hybrid mobile devices in its future product offerings, Jorma Ollila said in an interview before stepping down as chairman last week. However, a timetable was not provided.
“Nokia lost its place as the world’s largest handset maker to Samsung Electronics Co. last quarter,” reports Businessweek. “The company still hasn’t produced inexpensive smartphones with broad developer support to compete with Google Inc.’s Android, more than a year after announcing its shift to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone.”
Ollila was CEO from 1992 to 2006, during which Nokia became the world’s largest handset maker. Finnish entrepreneur Risto Siilasmaa will succeed Ollila as chairman.
In a related Computerworld article, Nokia announced that it would ship a 41-megapixel camera phone to Russia and India this month. The company says availability of the Symbian-based phone in other countries will be announced in the near future.
The PureView 808 was developed with lens-maker Carl Zeiss. Nokia has extended its deal with Zeiss to continue developing PureView for future smartphones.
“The search engine and online advertising giant replaced its popular Google Docs service with Google Drive, a cloud computing storage service designed to directly compete with start-up Dropbox,” reports Patexia. “This raises the question, has Google become the new Microsoft?”
The commentary suggests that Google Drive is an example of how a company waited for others to innovate and then essentially copied the innovation (as Google arguably did with its Dropbox-like Drive service).
Due to the company’s size and resources, Google can offer their version of the product at a loss for years, effectively starving the competition out of business.
By having large companies like Google effectively compromise smaller competitors, innovation suffers.
“Google can’t bully everyone. Its main competitors in the world of tech are Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. Google can try to push those companies around, but it likely won’t do a whole lot,” comments Nick Pell via Patexia. “Only companies with the resources and connections of Google are able to push back against them. This hardly makes for a good environment for innovation.”
Microsoft has begun a campaign to tackle software piracy at both the state and federal levels. The Redmond, Washington-based company hopes to make foreign manufacturers certify they are using legal software.
In its home state of Washington, Microsoft got the backing for a law that bans manufacturers using pirated software. It is now seeking legislation in the California State Legislature that will require state contractors to certify they do not use pirated software. And in Washington, DC, it has spent more than $7 million to lobby for federal legislation.
“Microsoft contends it is simply seeking to level a playing field whose tilt has accelerated the offshoring of manufacturing jobs over the last decade,” reports Fortune. “It points to a study by the Business Software Alliance showing that reducing piracy by 10 percent over four years would generate nearly $38 billion in new economic activity and create 25,000 new tech-industry jobs.”
Interestingly, other major tech companies including Apple, Cisco, Dell, HP, Google, IBM, Motorola, and Xerox are opposed to Microsoft’s efforts. They are concerned about the cost and complexity of certifying their worldwide supply chains.
A partial verdict has been issued in Oracle’s copyright infringement case against Google. The federal jury has determined that Google violated some Java copyrights owned by Oracle while building the Android operating system.
However, the jury was at a deadlock regarding whether Google’s practices fell under the fair use provision, which “allows excerpts of copyrighted work to appear in other creative expressions, such as books, movies and computer software,” reports Businessweek.
Arguing that the verdict has no legal standing without the question of fair use answered, Google is expected to pursue a mistrial.
“The impasse reached Monday in San Francisco hobbles Oracle Corp.’s attempt to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Google on grounds that the search leader pirated parts of Android from Oracle’s Java programming system,” explains the article.
In a statement, Google said it realizes “that fair use and infringement are two sides of the same coin. The core issue is whether the APIs here are copyrightable, and that’s for the court to decide.”
Oracle’s statement reads: “The overwhelming evidence demonstrated that Google knew it needed a license and that its unauthorized fork of Java in Android shattered Java’s central write once run anywhere principle.”
According to a new report by advertising network Chitika, Apple not only dominates the tablet market in terms of sales, but also in regards to usage.
The report indicates that 94 percent of ads are viewed on the iPad, outpacing the Web usage of its competitors by an impressive margin.
“For every 100 iPad impressions, Chitika is serving slightly more than one ad to a Samsung Galaxy and Asus Transformer Prime and under one ad to the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook and Kindle Fire,” reports AllThingsD. “The Nook Tablet share is even lower, though clearly both the Nook and Kindle are marketed less as Web browsing devices and more as media consumption tools.”
“It shows that not only are iPads outselling their rivals, but each one that is sold is also more heavily used, at least when it comes to Web surfing,” explains the article.
“Going forward the competition is going to be hard pressed to find a way to overthrow the seemingly omnipotent Apple,” adds Chitika. “Not only do they offer a great product, they have the undying devotion of their enthusiasts.”
At the end of 2011, Amazon sold 4.8 million Kindle Fires, showing it was the “right product at the right price at the right time,” ReadWriteWeb suggests. But the online retailer’s luck stopped there.
“According to IDC, Amazon’s share dropped from nearly 17 percent of the tablet market to 4 percent, with fewer than 700,000 units sold compared to Apple’s 11.8 million,” explains ReadWriteWeb.
While Amazon still beats out Barnes & Noble’s Nook by a fair margin, it now sits in third place, lagging behind Samsung Android tablets and Apple’s iPads.
The first quarter of 2012 was good to Apple, which increased its market share to 68 percent (up from 54.7 percent in Q4) with the sale of its new iPad and continued success with cheaper versions of older models.
Overall however, the tablet market has slowed quite a bit. “IDC had predicted overall tablet sales to be 1.2 million units higher than they were this quarter, with the shortfall mostly attributed to Amazon’s slip,” the article states. “Tablet sales have grown 120 percent from last year, but were still lower than IDC’s predictions. Whether tablet sales continue to slow in Q4 will be interesting to see.”
IDC predicts Amazon will try to come back with a larger-screened model. Android continues to stagnate at about one-third of the market, unable to reproduce the same adoption it has secured in the smartphone sphere.
Tablet sales are expected to reach 424.9 million by 2017 and will surpass shipments of notebook PCs by 2016, suggests a new report.
“According to NPD DisplaySearch Senior Analyst Richard Shim, a growing diversity of operating systems is driving the increase in demand for tablets, as well as rapidly evolving features,” TG Daily reports.
Shim says, “as the market matures and competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground, we expect the landscape to change dramatically, giving consumers more choices, which will drive demand for more devices.”
The iOS platform is expected to drop off in dominance by 2017 but will still hold half of the market — the rest to be taken up by increasing Android adoption and Windows growth.
Already, estimates for 2013 have jumped from 168.9 million to 184.2 million.
Although consumers are using both smartphones and tablets for shopping, Nielsen has found that the devices are used for different reasons.
“For instance, U.S. consumers are most likely to use their smartphone to find a store and check prices, whereas tablet owners are more likely to do PC-type activities, such as researching products and reading product reviews,” reports AllThingsD. “Owners of both devices report frequently making purchases, including 42 percent of tablet owners and 29 percent of smartphone owners.”
“Last Christmas, the mobile shopping category first started to get retailers’ attention in a big way, leading to new vernacular such as ‘m-commerce,’ or more fun things, like ‘couch commerce,’ which conjures up images of consumers shopping while sitting in front of the TV,” adds the article.
A new forecast from eBay predicts purchases made on apps or mobile browsers will increase 60 percent this year to $8 billion in gross merchandise volume, up from $5 billion in 2011.
Researchers from Disney Research, Pittsburgh University and Carnegie Mellon have collaborated to develop Touche, a touch-sensitive technology that has the potential to turn anything from doorknobs to kitchen appliances into touchscreens.
“The technology uses Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing, or SFSC, which lets objects interpret the body position and how it is being touched and reacts accordingly,” reports Mobiledia. “Users can coat the surfaces of ordinary objects with transparent conductors programmed to respond to the body’s electronic frequencies, making them touchscreen-enabled.”
“This might enable us to one day do away with keyboards, mice and perhaps even conventional touchscreens for many applications,” suggests Munehiko Sato, one of the researchers.
Touche has the ability to revolutionize smart home technology with the ability to convert regular devices into smart devices. It may also shake up the gaming industry, turning practically anything into a controller.