Author: Brad Reed

We know that Google has been toying around with developing its own games for Android devices but a new report from Android Police indicates the company may be looking to expand even further into the gaming realm. Essentially, Android Police conducted a teardown of the MyGlass companion app for Google Glass and found “what looks like the entire Google Games Service feature list.” Android Police makes clear that this gaming service will not run through Glass but speculates that “the Glass team accidentally shipped the full suite of Google Play Services with their new app, which is not normal.”

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The ongoing crash of the PC industry hasn’t just affected Windows-based vendors such as Dell and HP — it’s also reportedly taking a toll on Apple. Supply chain sources have told Digitimes that Apple “stopped placing component orders for its Mac series products recently,” an indication that the company had significantly overestimated how many Macs it would sell in the first half of 2013. The most recent numbers from IDC show that PC shipments in the first quarter of 2013 fell by 14% year-over-year, while big-name vendors such as HP and ASUS saw their shipment numbers decline by more than 20% year-over-year. IDC also said that while Apple “fared better than the overall U.S. market,” it “still saw shipments decline as its own PCs also face competition from iPads.”

Although Google’s Android platform has been wildly successful, the company’s efforts to make its own consumer electronics have often faltered. While we’ve heard a lot about anemic Chromebook sales recently, Enders Analysis strategy consultant Benedict Evans has done some detective work and found that sales of Google’s Nexus 10 tablet likely aren’t doing that much better. Essentially, Evans has extrapolated traffic data from the Google Play store to produce a rough estimate that there are currently just 680,000 Nexus 10 tablets in use, versus around 6.8 million Nexus 7 tablets currently in use. As Evans notes, this estimate means that Nexus 10 sales were bested by Microsoft’s Surface tablet, which has almost universally been regarded as a flop.

With PC sales crashing and burning, it’s not surprising that several PC OEMs are still fuming about Windows 8, the operating system that has so far failed to reignite the PC industry. And now two unnamed OEM sources have told ZDNet that Microsoft and Windows 8 are primarily to blame for the accelerated decline in PC sales, with one source claiming that Windows 8 is “destroying” the PC industry and another claiming that the new operating system has “handed over millions of customers to Apple.” These criticisms of Windows 8 from OEMs are nothing new, of course, as a Samsung executive earlier this year called the new operating system “no better than Vista” while the CFO of Asus said that “demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now.” And unless PC sales start turning around later this year, Microsoft should expect to hear a lot more of this sort of criticism from its manufacturing partners.

Apple’s shares got hammered again on Wednesday and one major reason was the lackluster earnings guidance provided by chip vendor Cirrus Logic, which Apple has long used as a supplier for iPhone audio chips. Barron’s points us to a new note from Needham & Co. analyst Vernon Essi Jr., who claims that one big reason Cirrus will miss consensus on its quarterly revenues is because Apple is “losing its mobility mojo.” In particular, Essi says that the guidance “indicates that the recent fears of Apple’s lackluster iPhone demand in 2013 are warranted” and that sales “are more likely in the 55M range for 1H2013 vs. Street forecasts that are above 60M units.” Earlier this week R.W. Baird analyst William Power projected that iPhone sales were likely to come in lower than previously projected because of increased competition and because Apple may not launch a new version of its iPad, as it has done in previous spring quarters.

As we’ve said before, the entire tech industry should be fearful of Samsung. And now The Associated Press reports that “a number of Taiwanese manufacturers are carving out alliances with high-tech companies in Japan and the United States that are also facing off against Samsung, in an effort to safeguard market share and give a boost to Taiwan’s economy.” The most prominent of these American companies is Apple, which has been searching far and wide for component vendors capable of replacing Samsung as its top display and chipset supplier, and which AppleInsider notes has reportedly considered using TSMC as an alternative.

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If Windows RT is a “lemon” as some have suggested, then what does that make the Chromebook? ZDNet’s Ed Bott took a look at the latest numbers from NetMarketShare and found that there’s absolutely no mention of Google’s Chrome OS anywhere in its statistics for the most-used desktop operating systems. When Bott asked NetMarketShare why Chrome hadn’t made an appearance in the rankings, the firm replied that Chromebooks accounted for “0.023 percent weighted worldwide usage,” which put them below the minimum 0.1% threshold required to make an appearance on the charts. To put this into perspective, Bott notes that “in nearly two years on the market, all of those Chromebooks have achieved a smaller percentage of usage than Windows RT earned as of January 2013, after only three months on the market.”

iOS Maps was obviously not one of Apple’s better efforts but that doesn’t mean the executive who oversaw its implementation has nothing to contribute to the tech world. Bloomberg reports that Facebook has hired Richard Williamson, the former Apple executive who headed the development of the ill-fated iOS Maps, to work as part of its mobile software team. Although iOS Maps was certainly a disaster for Apple, it doesn’t tell the full story of Williamson’s career — as Bloomberg notes, he worked at Apple for more than 10 years and was “one of the engineers assigned by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to build software for the iPhone.” So unless Facebook hired Williamson to oversee the creation of its own mapping application, it seems safe to say the company has found itself an experienced executive who can help improve its mobile offerings.

Microsoft may not be tearing it up in the consumer mobile electronics market these days, but the company hasn’t lost its acumen for rent seeking. Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it has reached an agreement with Foxconn parent company Hon Hai in which Microsoft “will receive royalties” for all Foxconn-produced “devices running the Android and Chrome OS.” Horacio Gutierrez, the deputy general counsel at Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Group, said that the company is “pleased that the list of companies benefitting from Microsoft’s Android licensing program now includes the world’s largest contract manufacturer.” Microsoft has long padded its balance sheet with Android licensing fees and starting in 2011, the company is reportedly making more money from Android devices than it makes from its own Windows Phone platform.

Good news for Google Fiber subscribers who want to follow the adventures of Tyrion Lannister and the Stark family: Google on Tuesday announced that its Fiber television service will now offer HBO for an additional $20 per month. The entire $20 monthly package includes not just HBO but also HBO2, HBO Signature, HBO Family, HBO Latino, HBO Comedy, and HBO Zone. A similar Cinemax channel bundle is also now available for $10 per month. Google has been slowly working to add more channels to its Fiber television service to compete with cable operators such as Time Warner Cable by delivering both a comprehensive pay television service as well as the fastest broadband Internet service in the United States.

Facebook seems intent on testing its users’ patience for annoying and invasive content. Unnamed sources have told AdAge that Facebook is working with ad agencies to bring video advertisements to users’ Facebook timelines that will likely “be autoplay and presented in a video player that expands beyond the main news-feed real estate to cover the right- and left-hand rails of users’ screens.” AdAge says that Facebook hopes to make more than $4 million a day just from the new video ads, which it says “could be eagerly sought after by agencies that have plenty of TV ad creative on their hands and not enough TV-like web inventory to place it in.”

The Wii U has been one of the least successful product launches in Nintendo’s history so far and Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter believes that there’s very little hope sales of the console will pick up anytime soon. Per Benzinga, Pachter says that “only 55,000 Wii U consoles were sold domestically in March,” which is down from the 66,000 consoles Nintendo sold in February and the 57,000 consoles it sold in January. What’s more, Pachter doesn’t think there’s much Nintendo can do to boost sales in the future as the Wii U’s “fortunes appear unlikely to improve for several months, even if Nintendo decides to drop [the] price, as there are an insufficient number of core titles that are generating interest in the console.” In other words, it’s not even clear at this point that issuing a PS Vita-style price cut can spark interest in the Wii U until the game selection for the console significantly improves.

In some ways, Google Glass sounds like a web marketer’s dream since it can conceivably project advertisements directly onto users’ eyeballs. But thankfully for all involved, Google is having none of that. Google this week released a new Glass development guidelines video that helpfully instructs developers to not “get in the way” with their applications. In the video, Google Senior Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan explains to Glass developers that “the user’s life comes first” and that “users want Glass there when they need it, but out of the way when they don’t.” As CNET notes, Google is also specifically telling developers that they may not “serve or include any advertisements” in their apps, so it seems that Glass users won’t get bombarded with ads for miracle weight-loss drugs while they’re crossing the street. A full video of Google’s Glass guidelines is posted below.

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