Category: Mobile

Best Education iPhone and iPad App Lists. http://t.co/aSTQF7Y—
Steve Yuen (@scyuen) May 06, 2011

Filed under: Mobile Learning Tagged: apps, ipad, iphone, itouch, mlearning, mobile

I recently found two great YouTube videos presenting interesting statistics as well as future predictions about mobile technology and mobile media.

Filed under: Media, Mobile Technology, Social Media Tagged: future, media, mobile, statistics, technology

I came across two excellent presentations delivered by Stephanie Rieger in Dallas and London recently. These presentations provide very good overview of the current development and future trend of mobile devices.

Beyond the mobile web

It’s about people, not devices…

Filed under: Mobile Technology Tagged: devices, future, mobile, smartphones, trend

Some 2.6 million unique iPhone owners are using Opera Mini, according to its maker’s latest State of the Mobile Web report, the first full dataset since the browser arrived for Apple’s iPhone last month. In fact, the iPhone now tops the U.S. list of devices on which Opera Mini is used and is No. 3 on a worldwide basis. But while that sounds good, some of the numbers don’t seem to add up.

For starters, in light of the Opera Mini’s reported 58.9 million users in April, 2.6 million of them using the browser on an iPhone is nothing to sneeze at. And given historical data showing iPhone web use to be high, even when its worldwide market share is low, I’d expect them to greatly boost the overall page views served by Opera Mini. But that’s not the case as shown by Opera’s own graph of PVs in April:

In fact, the browser’s page view trend showed higher growth rates prior to the availability of Opera Mini on the iPhone, not after it. February is an outlier, but that’s likely due to having fewer days in the month. Opera says that in April, the 26.3 million page views transcoded was a scant 1.6 percent higher than in March. Wouldn’t you expect that the web-hungry iPhones would cause April’s numbers to jump? They would — if iPhone users were actually using Opera Mini. Much as I suspected would happen, I believe that Opera Mini is getting installed on iPhones, but it’s not actually being used for browsing in any significant way.

At last check, Opera Mini was ranked as the No. 3 free productivity application in Apple’s iTunes Store, which adds credence to the installation base. But the current version of Opera Mini has a solidly mediocre three-star rating, with 1,495 users giving it five stars and a nearly equal 1,424 users rating it with just one. Notably, you can’t make Opera Mini the default browser on an iPhone.

Opera’s data is on one side of the ring, while my own thoughts are in the other. Maybe this is a good time to for our readers that own an iPhone or iPod touch to cast the final punch. Forget what Opera says about who uses Opera Mini on the iPhone — the real question is: Do you?

Related content on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Mobile Market Overview, Q1 2010
• What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?
• Why Feature Phones Are the New Black for Mobile App

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Is Geolocation a Real Business or Just a Feature?

Infographic by Column Five Media

Apple’s iPhone production is ramping up to levels that suggest it’s “increasingly becoming carrier-agnostic” and could mean we’ll see a Verizon iPhone sooner than previously expected, Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar alleges in a note to clients today. Up to 12 million iPhones are already in the supply chain for the September quarter — a huge amount considering Apple has sold some 50 million of the devices worldwide since June of 2007. Kumar believes that if such production trends continue, Apple will move 40 million iPhones this year. He further believes that if Apple inks a deal with Verizon Wireless by the end of 2010 — which may be the last year of iPhone exclusivity with AT&T in the U.S. — pent-up demand for a Verizon iPhone could drive quarterly sales to 17 million.

Although Kumar is throwing around what sound like large numbers and what-if scenarios, his numbers may actually be in line when you look at several other key bits of information:

• Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones in the first three months of 2010. That’s a yearly run-rate of 35 million handsets, not far below the 40 million Kumar expects.
• Love it or hate it, Apple sold more than a million iPads in the first 28 days after launch, there are reports that 200,000 are being sold each week and in many retail locations, there aren’t any currently left. The halo effect of a successful iPad could help iPhone sales.
• Recent documentation confirms AT&T’s exclusive relationship to carry the U.S. iPhone until 2012, but Kumar sniffed out other supply chain details earlier this year that signal a potential change to that deal. In January, Kumar reported that Qualcomm had been tapped by Apple to supply CDMA radio chips — there’s no iPad model with CDMA support, so the only other reasonable explanation is a CDMA iPhone.
• Apple surely knows that there’s pent-up demand for its phone the largest carrier network in the U.S. — in a recent survey, more than 50 percent of cellular customers said they’d be “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to purchase an iPhone on Verizon’s network.

Given that Google claims the activation of some 100,000 Android devices per day, the game is clearly on between it and Apple. In 18 short months, Android has proven itself to be a force against Apple’s mighty iPhone and is catching up in terms of market share. And according to a recent AdMob report, much of the Android army is based in North America, so Apple could use another iPhone brigade in the form of Verizon.

And the fact that AT&T recently jacked up the price of its early termination fee to $325, effective next week, is just further evidence that AT&T expects to soon be losing its cash cow. Perhaps the big news at Apple’s WWDC event next week isn’t what we already know — there’s a new iPhone coming soon — but instead is what many hope for: at long last, a Verizon iPhone.

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Prepaid cellphones have long been used by unsavory criminal types, which is understandable! They’re anonymous, inexpensive, and did I mention anonymous already? But now that we know the alleged Times Square bomber one, regulators have gotten out their regulatin’ stick. More »










Times Square – Health – Mobile phone – Support Groups – Addictions

By Mark Sweney: Daily Mail (LSE: DMGT) & General Trust has said that it expects its regional newspaper business to return to revenue growth in the second half of 2010 for the first time in two years, as the company unveils plans to launch 150 apps in the next 12 months.

DMGT, which has just unveiled Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPad apps for the Metro newspaper and property site Primelocation, also said that the freeze on the government’s £200m-plus ad spend would not have a major impact on the business.

The DMGT chief executive, Martin Morgan, told journalists and analysts yesterday that public sector ad spend accounted for about 3% of total business to consumer revenues and within that, 7% to 8% of revenues at the Northcliffe Media regional newspaper division. This equates to a total public sector ad spend of about £18m, with about £10m spent on Northcliffe Media titles, according to revenue figures published by DMGT yesterday.

“Local media should move into year-on-year revenue growth in the second half of the year,” said Morgan, adding that it would take something “very major to blow us off course” from achieving that prediction. “Government-related advertising is actually a small part of overall advertising, we are not a major recipient of government spending.”

DMGT added that growth in private sector advertising was “taking up the slack” of any drop-off in bookings from the government and that the company’s business division expected to capitalise globally from moves to outsource public sector services.

Morgan said that the regional newspaper division, which has borne the brunt of the 500 job cuts DMGT said it made between September and 4 April, experienced a “bumpy April”. Overall trading during April and the first three weeks of May had seen property advertising up 9% and recruitment up 2% – the first growth in the recruitment category recorded in over two years.

The company said there would continue to be some job cuts at the Northcliffe division, but that “far and away the majority of job losses” are over, with DMGT expecting overall headcount to stabilise this year.

Separately AND, the consumer digital subsidiary of DMGT, has announced that it intends to launch 150 apps in the next 12 months. The digital division originally said in January that it would launch 15 apps in 2010.

However, after achieving this target in the first three months of the year the new, far more ambitious goal has been set.

AND uses the Teletext Mobile division to run DMGT’s mobile strategy and product development. The plan is for Teletext Mobile to act in the same way as, for example, a games publisher that makes its own products but also launches those of other developers.

The AND chief executive, Richard Titus (pictured), said that about half of the 150 apps would be developed for DMGT products and the remainder will come from third-party developers with ideas that the company believes are worth backing. Revenue will come from paid-for products and the significant critical mass of apps to sell ads across.

AND is home to websites including Jobsite, Findaproperty, Primelocation, Teletext Holidays and Motors.

“The Teletext Mobile team have impressively accomplished their goal of launching 15 apps in their first quarter of operation, so we’ve decided to raise the bar – targeting a total of 150 apps on a variety of platforms within the next 12 months,” said Titus.

This time it is Facebook that allowing developers to integrate social networking into their Android applications. Last week, it was MySpace that released a software developer tool kit.

Facebook made the announcement on their blog today, saying that their SDK—which already supported iPhone and mobile websites—is now up to speed on Android. TechCrunch notes that there have been ways to integrate Facebook into Android applications before now, but that these have really been hacked together from the iPhone SDK, and weren’t really official.

The SDKs are helpful for things like letting users login into your app using their Facebook account, and in the case of MySpace (NYSE: NWS), updating their statuses without leaving the application.

Although the impressive Opel Insignia/Buick Regal is offered around the world in no fewer than three body styles (sedan, five-door hatch, and wagon), with nine engines (four gas four-cylinder, three 1.8-liter diesel fours, and naturally aspirated and turbocharged versions of its 2.8-liter V-6), with front- or all-wheel drive, and a choice of three transmissions, here in Buick’s home market, just how many of those permutations we’ll get remains a mystery.

In the States, of course, we’re used to being denied most of the choices offered in “world cars” such as the Regal; At this point, the only way we can get our Regal on is with the sedan body and front-wheel drive, with the 2.4-liter four available first, the 2.0-liter turbo later, and, in 2011, the GS with a 255-hp version of the 2.0-liter turbo four mated to all-wheel drive. Manual gearboxes will also be part of the mix eventually.

Happily, according to GM’s Regal guru, Jim Federico, we are pretty well assured to get even more. First, in terms of additional body styles, it sounds like we’re going to get at least one, if not both, of the other Regal shapes, with the hatchback being the easiest to bring over from an engineering standpoint and the wagon being slightly more complex to federalize due to its Audi Q5–esque wraparound tailgate, but it’s hardly impossible. We’ve recently spied Buick-badged Insignia Tourers in Michigan, something Federico willingly acknowledges. “I’ve got a bunch of ‘em,” he said. Should either additional body make it stateside, the cars would come from GM’s German plant due to the low volumes they’d expect to build. (North American Regal sedan production is shifting from Germany to a plant in Ontario soon.) “We designed flexibility into the [Russelsheim] plant specifically for that,” he said.

Federico also suggested that, since wagons sell particularly well in the Snowbelt, that version would pretty much have to come with all-wheel drive. And since many wagon buyers also love diesel engines—Americans order a predominate number of their Jetta SportWagens with the TDI engine—Federico says one of the Insignia’s diesel fours would definitely be offered, though not until the motor is engineered to meet the strict new Euro 6 emissions regulations in 2012 or 2013. The required changes, which could include an exhaust-scrubbing urea-injection system, would in turn allow the motor to meet emissions standards in all 50 U.S. states.

As for something more, uh, stirring? Federico suggested that we shouldn’t be at all surprised to see the hallowed Grand National nameplate make a comeback sometime in the future, although he wouldn’t provide any more specifics. Don’t expect it soon, however. Buick has a lot on its plate, with an upcoming compact SUV and a Cruze-based sedan also in the works. “We’ve got a plan to move fast,” said Federico, “but carefully.”

No related posts.

The last piece of the Android puzzle appears to be in place — Matias Duarte has joined Google as user experience director for Android, according to All Things Digital. If you’ve ever witnessed or experienced the elegance of Palm’s webOS smartphone operating system, then you’ve seen Duarte’s work first-hand. His deft touch is the icing on the cake for Android, one of the fastest-growing smartphone platforms today, but Duarte isn’t new to the Google team — he had ties to Android before Google ever owned the platform.

Instead of speculating on the future, in particular what Duarte might do to revamp Android’s utilitarian interface, it’s worth looking at what he’s done in the past. Under his leadership as Palm’s VP of human interface and user experience, the webOS team created a beautiful palette for interaction between a user and a smartphone. If webOS had only offered more tools in the form of software, I never would have dumped my Palm Pre in favor of a Google Nexus One. Not a week goes by when I don’t miss the webOS interface. I’ve even gone so far as flash cooked ROMs on my Nexus One to gain the HTC Sense interface and pretty up Android, but even that pales next to webOS.

Duarte also in the past worked with members of the current Google Android team. According to his LinkedIn profile, from March 2000 to August of 2005, Duarte was the director of design for another phone maker, Danger, which like webOS, provides a slick, fun user experience in its Sidekick line of devices. Coincidentally, Danger was co-founded by Andy Rubin, but Rubin left in 2003 to start Android Inc. Two years later, Android Inc. was sold to Google, Rubin became the VP of engineering in charge of Android, and…well, the rest is history, as they say. Another bit of detail to close the Danger-Android loop — while BlackBerry phones are often the corporate norm, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page reportedly wore Danger Sidekicks on their belts as recently as 2002.

Android would have likely benefited with Duarte’s involvement from the beginning, however the platform is doing just fine even without a stellar interface. At last week’s Google I/O event, Google reported that 100,000 Android phones are activated daily, so consumers appear willing to concede some design prettiness for functionality and customization features. With that kind of momentum, Google wasn’t completely hurt by a marginal UI and in fact, the user experience is enhanced with Android 2.2, aka Froyo, which I’ve been using on my Nexus One for nearly a week.

But Froyo is no webOS. I anticipate that much of Duarte’s visual influence won’t appear on Android devices until the end of this year at the earliest. Gingerbread, the next version of Android, is already in progress, so it could be tricky to make major interface changes at this juncture. Google would be wise to allow Duarte as much input as time allows on Gingerbread, but a full revamp of the interface would be a challenging deliverable in under six months. I doubt Google is worried, though — the Android juggernaut is rolling along just fine, even if it has been battered around with the ugly stick.

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Nearly eight months after saying it would buy mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has finally closed the deal. The announcement comes a week after the FTC unanimously gave the deal the green light, after closely scrutinizing it for months.

Google says little new in a blog post announcing that the deal is done, although it does confirm that it will now be buying back $750 million of its stock in order to offset the share dilution caused by the acquisition.

Related

• Requests May Signal That FTC Will Block Google’s AdMob Purchase
• Google Can Thank Apple For FTC’s Approval Of Its AdMob Purchase
• Google To Acquire Mobile Ad Network AdMob For $750 Million In Stock
• Google To Buy Back Shares For First Time In Wake Of AdMob Purchase

Andy Lees, the man at Microsoft tasked with turning around mobile—and essentially saving the company—has an impossibly difficult job. To succeed, it’s going to take patience, tenacity, and the ability to invent a whole new business model. More »










Microsoft – Apple – Companies – Microsoft Corporation – Steve Ballmer

»  Verizon Wireless CEO says Sprint’s stabilization will be good for everyone because a wounded company “does desperate things.” [WSJ.]

»  Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is not appearing at Apple’s WWDC despite rumors started by Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research. [Engagdet.]

»  2ergo posts half-year loss after investing heavily. [MobileMarketing.]

»  New proposal would require identification to buy prepaid cellphones. [Washington Post.]

»  Palm’s mobile user interface guru Matias Duarte has left and has been hired on at Google (NSDQ: GOOG). [Digital Daily.]

The BlackBerry Partners Fund has expanded to China with a $100 million fund through a new joint venture with China Broadband Capital Partners, a four-year-old investment firm.

The two companies said The BlackBerry Partners Fund China will invest exclusively in opportunities supporting “the emerging mobile ecosystem in China,” which is considered the world’s largest mobile market. The fund is expected to officially close at the end of August.

No word on whether the Chinese start-ups must have a BlackBerry component or not, but it likely won’t be a requirement. Back in May 2008, the original $150 million BlackBerry Partners Fund was launched for the purpose of investing in mobile applications and services for BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.

Verizon Wireless customers can expect tiered pricing when the carrier implements its LTE mobile broadband network later this year, the carrier’s CEO confirmed this week. Gone will be the monthly plans that Verizon currently offers — instead, customers will pay for pre-determined buckets of wireless data each month. It’s currently unclear if those buckets can be altered to higher or lower data amounts during a customer contract, but one thing is clear: Offering various pay-per-use plans allows Verizon to insure high margins.

In today’s 3G world, one could argue that carriers already provide tiered data plans, typically in two tiers: roughly 200-250 MB for one price, and an “unlimited” plan at a higher price — though the so-called unlimited plans are typically capped at 5 GB and can include overage charges (T-Mobile recently eliminated such fees and may reduce bandwidth after 5 GB of data is used). The smaller buckets work just fine for basic daily web activities such as email, light browsing and social networking updates. But add in video content, music streaming or other bandwidth intensive uses and you’ll quickly see the bucket overflow. The same applies to the unlimited 3G plans — you can burn through a monthly 5 GB plan with just 5.68 hours of video. The issue with today’s pricing is that carriers like Verizon have no idea how customers will use the network, so they can’t plan for demand, which varies by activity and device type.

With tiered pricing, however, the burden of forecasting demand shifts to the consumer. I suspect that Verizon will allow customers to routinely modify the size of their data bucket for this reason — multiple tiered choices with no room to change won’t help the demand forecasting problem. In this case, if you expect to be on the road for a few weeks and plan to stream a season of “Heroes” on Netflix, for example, you can plan to purchase enough data throughput in order to watch it from start to finish. Whereas if your travels are confined to the home office or the local Starbucks where you can use Wi-Fi, the purchase of a smaller data bucket makes more sense — both for you and for the carrier providing the network. The carriers’ argument to the consumer is that she will benefit from less network congestion — and that you don’t expect an all-you-can-eat buffet experience at an à la carte restaurant, so why expect it from a mobile broadband network?

The benefit to carriers, of course, is in the form of fatter margins. As Chetan Sharma, a wireless industry consultant and GigaOM Pro analyst explains:

“LTE will help force costs down 60 percent on a per-megabyte basis, but usage might go up by the same amount. Most of the gains [for network upgrades] are in the cost savings, but with faster throughput, things will download faster and people will do more of it, and since the price of the service is fixed, the cost of delivering the content will only go up.”

Indeed, tiered pricing offsets the cost of delivering content because all customers will pay for what they’re truly using, which helps moderate the delivery costs while also hedging the profit margin for Verizon. Stacey expands on that point in her GigaOM Pro report, “Metered Mobile: Pricing for Profits” (subscription required). She also underscores the expected Verizon pricing model, noting the carrier is “trying to figure out how to encourage usage and keep margins for mobile broadband high without overloading their networks or driving users back to the bad old days when everyone was too afraid to open the web browser on their phone for fear of exorbitant data fees.”

While we don’t yet know the details of the LTE pricing buckets, we shouldn’t have long to wait. McAdam expects three to five LTE handsets to launch in the first half of 2011 as Verizon plans to bringLTE to nearly 30 U.S. markets before the end of 2010.

Mobile payments are an incredibly promising phenomenon — set to reach $633 billion by 2014 — so much so that many of the top venture capital firms are lining up against each other for a fight. Now, the teams are basically complete, with newcomer VC firm Andreessen Horowitz taking its spot next to San Francisco-based Boku.

How Boku works (it still uses the Paymo brand, which it acquired)

Boku is almost the definition of a “fat startup,” said co-founder and SVP product and marketing Ron Hirson in an interview this week. The company was founded at the beginning of last year, quickly raised funding to buy two of the biggest competitors in the space of mobile payments for virtual goods — Paymo and Mobillcash — and now is facing off against the third, Zong.

Boku had already raised $38 million, and Andreessen Horowitz belatedly jumped into the previous round, which closed in December 2009. So now the company’s investment team is Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, DAG Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Meanwhile, Zong’s backers are Matrix Partners, Advent Venture Partners and Newbury Ventures. Other firms have looked farther afield to places like Europe and India where mobile payments markets are further along, with enStage backed by Accel; PayMate backed by Mayfield Fund, Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures; and Klarna backed by Sequoia Capital (the PayPal investor, back in the day).

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Report: Monetizing Digital Content

Is the window of opportunity for e-book readers with embedded broadband going to close not long after it just opened? That’s the forecast being made by UK research firm Informa Telecoms & Media — it believes device sales will peak in 2013 and then decline by 7 percent the following year because instead of purchasing dedicated e-book readers, consumers will shift towards other multifunction devices with mobile broadband, such as Apple’s iPad or an anticipated Android tablet, to read e-book content.

Indeed, one of the key reasons for the recent success of readers like Amazon’s Kindle or the Barnes & Noble Nook is also a limiting factor in terms of multipurpose functionality — today’s  E Ink displays that make such devices attractive aren’t as effective for activities like browsing the web or viewing video. New display technologies are needed to support those use cases. Two that come to mind: Qualcomm’s Mirasol low-powered color panel and Pixel Qi’s innovative dual-mode screen, which can use ambient light instead of a power-hungry backlight as needed. With its next-generation “E Ink mode” you can watch a fast-frame movie on the Pixel Qi screen — skip to the 9:30 mark of my CES video to see how well this display works.

As a voracious reader and former Amazon Kindle 2 owner, I see both sides of the page when it comes to dedicated e-book readers. On the one hand, I love the paper-like reading experience a dedicated E Ink reader provides. Combine that with a light device that doesn’t require a battery recharge for weeks and it’s no wonder I took my Kindle everywhere I went. But after just one day with my iPad, I sold my Kindle, mainly because I didn’t want to tote both devices and the Kindle for iPad application provides the same experience as the original. Plus, although everyone’s eyes are different, I don’t buy into the eye-strain argument in favor of E Ink. I’m already looking at an LCD display for 10-12 hours a day on my computers — what’s another hour or two?

In other words, I didn’t wait until 2013 to switch from a dedicated reader to a multifunction device. And with the expected onslaught of slates and tablets this year — by and large, e-book devices use a slate form factor — I imagine I won’t be the only one. One portable device with embedded broadband for web, social networks and other online activities appears to be the future. There’s still a market for standalone e-book devices — folks that prefer E Ink over LCD or people who would rather check email or visit the web on a traditional computer will opt for an e-book — but these consumers will be in the minority as people will opt for converged connected devices. For continued growth and success, e-book readers have to add new functionality in order to compete for consumer dollars.

This market isn’t really about hardware, anyway; it’s about the sale of content — and Amazon is still expected to earn a billion dollars on digital books, even if its Kindle hardware doesn’t continue to sell well. That explains why Amazon created a Kindle for iPad application and why Barnes & Noble today outed its reader software for Apple’s slate: More content on more devices equals more money.

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Hot Topic: e-Books