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.
Although Google does not publicly report financial information about Android, some figures have come out through the company’s legal battle with Oracle concerning copyright violation in the mobile OS’s programming.
In 2010, the mobile platform reported a net loss in each quarter even though it did earn Google $97.7 million in revenue in Q1.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup said, “that adds up to a big loss for the whole year,” although he did not announce specific loss figures.
“Oracle sued Google in August 2010, saying Android infringes on its intellectual property rights to the Java programming language,” Reuters explains, adding the company, “contends that Google should not be able to deduct certain Android expenses for the purposes of copyright damages in the case.”
Google has denied any violations on the grounds that Java is open-source software language.
It might be interesting to see what Oracle stands to gain from the lawsuit if Google has been posting significant losses on the platform.
Telecommunication operators will be gathering at the CTIA Wireless trade show in New Orleans this week and expect to hear complaints about spectrum shortages and consolidations, according to Reuters.
U.S. mobile carriers have been challenging the FCC for more spectrum to meet the ever-increasing demand on bandwidth with the expansion of mobile video viewing and other usage. The top providers are also calling for mergers that will eliminate the fierce competition over resources.
The FCC has shown opposition to consolidations with its denial of AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. The failed merger was very costly for AT&T, leaving other providers weary. Additionally, AT&T has been vocal regarding Verizon’s proposed spectrum deal, still being reviewed by regulators.
“Everybody is going to be talking about the fact that in the U.S. we have a spectrum crisis. That crisis is everywhere and it’s a crisis that is hitting everybody,” says Glenn Lurie, AT&T’s president of emerging enterprise and partnerships.
“Because of the uncertainty around spectrum availability, analysts expect vendors to use this year’s CTIA to aggressively promote technologies that promise to improve management of existing wireless network capacity,” adds Reuters. “One key topic will revolve around how operators manage the growth in demand for bandwidth-hungry services like video streaming, according to Mark Lowenstein, managing director at consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem.”
Just as other online services such as Hulu and AOL have ventured into the content creation business, Google is pushing forward its original programming on YouTube channels.
“YouTube said Wednesday it would spend $200 million to market original content through a variety of channels,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “So far, YouTube’s strategy isn’t to own content outright but partner with those who produce it and generate advertising revenue.”
The investment has created film-quality productions like the channel WIGS, which offers scripted dramatic series and short films featuring stars like Jennifer Garner and Julia Stiles. Impressively, WIGS has done all this on a tight budget.
“But with only modest funding from YouTube — it is giving channels only up to a few million dollars each, far less than the cost of a typical TV production — it is impossible to pay average industry salaries,” the article explains, adding actors and crew usually work for a $15/hour wage.
While YouTube isn’t looking to replace other sources of entertainment, the site definitely attracts a wealth of viewers — 750 million unique visitors a month, according to a recent comScore report.
In spite of the rise of streaming video on the Web, Americans are still watching 5 hours of television content daily on traditional TV sets.
Some 98 percent are watching on systems connected to cable or satellites, according to Nielsen’s latest Cross Platform report.
Still, new technologies are making it easier for people to access their daily TV diet at their convenience.
American consumers are “shifting to new technologies and devices that make it easier for them to watch the content they want whenever and wherever is most convenient for them,” indicates the report. “As such, the definition of the traditional TV home will continue to evolve.”
“TV watching, in total, appears to be rising, not falling,” reports Fortune. “Which is remarkable (and perhaps depressing, depending on your point of view) given the rise in non-television Internet use, video game playing, and other entertainment options.”
With the convergence of TV, personal computing devices and the Internet, a new media revolution is upon us. Where is it headed? CNBC interviews CEOs, producers, and Internet leaders to discuss their ideas for “Stay Tuned: The Future of TV,” which premieres Monday, May 7 at 6:00 pm PT, with a re-air at 9:00 pm PT.
According to Barry Diller, chairman of IAC and investor in Aereo: “If you’re not experimenting, or innovating, and not risking your ‘so to speak’ closed business to new business models and ways of behavior, you’ll inherit the wind.”
Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast says his company’s next-gen X1 interface “brings the best of the Internet and the navigation and the search so you can integrate easily with Facebook, with Twitter. You can create a sports app as we’ve done. It can work on a PC, on the TV or on your iPad or your tablet. So it feels very relevant, very fresh, like the Internet.”
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo comments: “We used to have the few people in your living room that you were having a shared conversation with about what you were watching, it’s now exploded beyond the bounds of the living room and it’s the world that’s having a conversation about what we’re all watching… The next evolution is to bring that conversation back into the programming so that these two things start to feed off each other. I think what we’ll see then is the conversation on Twitter starts to actually impact what’s happening during the program itself in a real-time feedback loop.”
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney suggests: “The big picture philosophy is not look at the business as one platform, and then another platform, and another. It’s to look at it first — for this company as the investment in and the creation of branded, high-quality intellectual property product.”
Robert Kyncl, VP of global content at YouTube adds: “Quality can come from anywhere. It can come from users, pros, semi-pros. We want to make sure that we have all of them, that we don’t have just one class of content creators, that we have all of them.”
With Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the popular photo-sharing app Instagram, is a video version next on the horizon?
ReadWriteWeb profiles two such social video apps — Socialcam and Viddy.
Socialcam is an iPhone and Android app that claims to have 20 million users. Viddy is an iPhone-only app with some 16 million users. Both apps allow you to take video from your smartphone and apply filter effects, add music and upload to your favorite social network such as to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Tumblr.
“Both services are polished and nicely designed apps,” suggests the review. “But forget the filters and cheesy music, the real value will be in how many users each can get — and how active those users become. It’s too early to tell which has the upper hand on that front. Both are heading towards the user numbers that Instagram had when it sold (about 35 million).”
Will video become the next big thing on social networks?
ListenLater is a new cloud-based automation tool from streaming specialist StreamOn that helps radio stations create podcasts.
The digital archive/content management program sorts content for podcasts and pulls material that can’t be used due to copyright issues.
Basic editing tools offer stations the ability to manually customize content before posting to iTunes or websites.
“ListenLater also operates as a DVR by archiving all of a station’s output and then making much of it available as on-demand programming,” reports Radio World. “Stations can flag clips for distribution as social media. According to a release, the program provides flexible advertisement placement options and swapping for replayed programming.”
According to StreamOn President Roger Charest, broadcasters can use ListenLater to redistribute live content and expand revenue with digital advertising. “For listeners, we’re giving them the ability to replay live radio broadcasts and capture and share memorable radio content and experiences with others via social media,” he said.
One day after Microsoft announced its $300 million investment in the Nook, Barnes & Noble chief exec William Lynch unveiled plans to add NFC hardware to future versions of the e-reader.
“By adding NFC chips into the next generation of Nooks, consumers will be able to take the new Nook into any Barnes & Noble retail location and simply scan any print version of a book to bring up a synopsis as well as customer and editorial reviews,” explains Digital Trends.
“This would allow anyone that’s interested in buying the print version to immediately read feedback about the quality of the book before purchase,” adds the post.
Digital Trends notes that NFC technology is faster than QR code scanning: “Consumers with smartphones can scan a QR code or a barcode in order to bring up information about a product, but that process is more time consuming than scanning with NFC. While it’s clear that Barnes & Noble management is attempting to gain an advantage over Amazon by leveraging approximately 700 physical locations with this new concept, it’s unclear how many Nook owners will make a trip into the store instead of simply browsing titles at home through the e-reader.”
Ongo is a news curation platform that leverages a team of editors to combine automation with manual curation.
“While content curation platforms are using algorithms to recommend the news, Ongo has a different tactic in mind,” reports Digital Trends. “It uses a team of editors to handpick the latest, need-to-know news for its paid subscribers.”
The article suggests that Ongo is unique in two ways:
“First, it has built its platform based on authoritative sources of news from the New York Times and Reuters. It prides itself on a strict standard of quality for news delivered to Ongo users, while boasting partnerships with the top content providers within each genre of news.”
“Second, Ongo is run using an internal algorithm recommending a selection of 10,000 articles daily for its editors to choose from. The editors will then curate authoritative and must-know news. It’s a daunting number, but with 40 publishing partners representing just over 100 publications, 60 RSS titles curated from the Web, plus 80 more publication deals in the works, this is just the beginning.”
Ongo currently has 20,000 subscribers. Ad-free use is available for a base subscription price of $1.99/month.
LG plans to introduce two smart TV models later this month based on Google TV software. They are the first among a series of Google TVs expected from manufacturers such as Sony, Samsung and Vizio.
The 3D-capable LG sets will feature Web access and gesture-based remote controls that include a QWERTY keyboard.
“Priced at $1,699 for a 47-inch model and $2,299 for another measuring 55 vertical inches, LG’s so-called ‘G2 Series’ televisions were unveiled in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas,” notes paidContent.
“Google is hoping that Korea-headquartered LG, which is the second biggest manufacturer of TVs, can help kickstart its Google TV platform, which saw one of its two initial hardware partners, Logitech abandon the technology after disappointing early sales last year,” explains the article. “LG, meanwhile, is hoping that connected TVs based on the popular Android software architecture will boost TV sales.”
The post includes a 17-minute video featuring Mario Queiroz, VP of product development for Google, at last year’s paidContent Entertainment conference.
