Category: Mobile

…and other interesting smartphone statistics.

When compared with some of the other smartphones on the market, owners of phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system are predominantly male. This finding comes from analytics firm AdMod’s latest Mobile Metrics Report, which revealed that 73% of Android users are male. Meanwhile, on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Palm platforms, the ratio of male to female owners was more even. However, males were still in the majority even on those devices, accounting for 54% to 58% of the users.

This was only one of the findings from the firm’s January report, which also examined ages of smartphone owners, propensity to download and pay for mobile applications and interest in purchasing the upcoming Apple iPad.

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Kids Love the iPod Touch and the Free Apps

Most of the statistics AdMob revealed weren’t all that shocking. For example, iPhone owners are more likely to purchase an iPad than owners of other smartphones. 16% said they intend to buy Apple’s new slate computer when it arrives in March, while only 11% of Palm webOS users and 6% of Android owners said the same. This finding can easily be attributed to the so-called “fanboy” syndrome among Apple hardware owners – that is, the tendency of those who own Apple products to want to buy more Apple products. Sometimes described as fanaticism, it’s really just a testament to popularity of the brand and it’s repeat customer business.

Another interesting, but still explainable, statistic involves the buying habits of iPod Touch and iPhone owners. Those who own the less expensive iPod Touch devices tend to download more free applications than those who own an iPhone. And they download a lot of apps, too. On average, Touch owners download 12 apps per month – that’s 37% more apps than iPhone and Android users. They also spend more time playing with their apps – 100 minutes per day, 25% more time than iPhone or Android users.

At first, those figures may have you scratching your head – after all, isn’t the iPod Touch the exact same mobile operating system as the iPhone? And doesn’t its Wi-Fi-only connectivity actually limit the functionality of a lot applications since so many require an Internet connection to work? The answer to both questions is yes. But the reason why the iPod users appear to be more active and engaged is explained in another section of the report. According to the demographics, they’re much younger. 78% of iPod Touch users are under 25 (compared with 25% of iPhone users) and they’re often students, too. These are very sort of users who have time to play with a ton of apps. They’re also, not surprisingly, the least likely to pay for them. iPod Touch owners download an average of 10.5 free apps per month and only 1.6 paid apps during that same time. iPhone owners, however, download 7.0 free apps per month and 1.8 paid ones.

Why are So Many Android Owners Male?

The only truly odd statistic to arise from this report is the gender variance among Android owners. With a 78%/22% male-to-female ratio, the question that comes to mind is why are so many owners male? There is a wide range of Android-powered smartphones for people to choose from, including everything from sleek-and-shiny HTC devices to keyboard-ready Droids from Motorola and Verizon. In other words, there’s an Android handset out there for everyone.

Our only guess as to why the statistics are skewing male for Android may have something to do with the latest Droid marketing efforts. Commercials for Verizon’s Droid send the message that the phones are the equivalent of having a “robot in your pocket” and the latest show a robot’s finger quickly typing out searches on the phone’s on-screen keyboard. While arguably, some females are sure to love robots too (especially those interested in reading about smartphone statistics here!), a campaign that uses robots and reminds you of all the things the Droid does that the iPhone doesn’t is a non-too-subtle attempt to play to the male ego and that gender’s stereotypical desire for constant one-upmanship among their peers. And that’s not the worst of it, either. Another Droid ad, spotted by CNNMonney blogger Elmer DeWitt in December, targeted the male demographic in the “most testosterone-heavy TV commercial to date,” he noted at the time.

The ad copy read:

Droid. Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast. We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth? No. It’s not a princess. It’s a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.

So congratulations, marketers. It appears you have successfully attracted the males to your handset. But in ignoring the potential female users, you’re doing smartphone owners a disservice. The Droid, and other Android-based phones too, are powerful, attractive and easy-to-use handsets that should have a broad appeal. It may be time to remind the women of that.

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Is ‘checking in’ at places using location-based mobile apps like Foursquare and Brightkite resulting in us enjoying life a little less? Is there such a thing as too much data for a fun activity such as running? We address these and other questions in the final installment of our interview with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

Modern web applications are packed with features that ostensibly connect us more to the real world and our activities in it. Foursquare uses location data to connect us with places and people. Nike+ shoes deliver data from your feet to your iPod. All of this new data from the real world is good progress, right? Yes, the more data the better! On the other hand, is our focus on data distracting us from actually enjoying life?

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Adam Greenfield doesn’t like Foursquare, a location-based social networking mobile app that has become popular over the past year. He told me that he loved Foursquare at first and enjoyed ‘checking in’ at places. But then he found that he spent the first few minutes of going into a place updating Foursquare with his location, which he realized could be time better spent actually enjoying the place and socializing with the people around him.

Technology has always had an anti-social element to it. For example, Twitter. When you’re in a social situation and you stop to tweet it, that disconnects you from the real world (at least for 30 seconds while you tap out 140 characters on your mobile phone).

Step back further into the mists of technological progress and there is the issue of cellphone calls in social situations. When you’re talking with someone and that person’s cellphone rings, then they answer it and have a conversation with someone else on their cellphone – is there anything more annoying than that from a social point of view?

So technology can be anti-social; nothing new in that. But is a mobile location-based app like Foursquare not only anti-social, but also distracting us from enjoying our surroundings because we’re so intent on documenting where we are?

The counter argument is that products like Foursquare make it easier for you to meet up with your friends in real life, particularly if you’re young and socializing a lot. For example you might see that a few of your friends are at a local cafe or pub, so you go out to join them there. That definitely makes Foursquare a fun product. But it’s a use case that mostly applies to young, highly social people.

It’s not just location-based apps that are potentially killjoys.

Greenfield also spoke about his experience with Nike+ running shoes, which come with a sensor that tracks your run and sends the data to your iPod. As we explained earlier this month, Nike+ has its own social network. Nike+ can also send updates to Twitter and post a status report on Facebook.

According to Adam Greenfield, Nike+ changed the way he ran. Because the shoes could quantify his running performance, he said that they made him faster and more competitive. However, he also began to feel guilty if he missed a run – because the data would suffer as a result. So despite making him a better runner, the Nike+ shoes resulted in him "not having as much fun."

What do you think – are you finding that modern web apps, whether location-based mobile apps or products with sensors or something else data-driven, are making you enjoy life just a little less? Are you focusing too much on the data, rather than just living life? Let us know in the comments.

See also Part 1 of our interview with Adam Greenfield, in which we discussed the impact of the iPhone and other smartphones on the Internet of Things. We also talked about the differences between the U.S. and Asia in adoption of these technologies. In Part 2, we focused on how the iPad may become the missing link between Internet-connected items in your home, for example the Internet fridge, and the Web.

Photo credits: whatleydude; Ed Yourdon

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Apps on the iPhone, there are so very many of them – how’s a person to find the best ones? We look at a whole lot of them here at ReadWriteWeb and we’d like to share with you some of our favorites we’ve discovered in the month of February.

Some of us on the team are proud Android users but most of us are still using iPhones. I just discovered how incredibly effective the Genius recommendations on the phone can be, so I’ve been going nuts downloading new apps. Here are the ones our staff is most excited about this month.

A semantic personal assistant, health and fitness apps, some great news apps, location based social networking apps and more are included this month.

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Excited about iPhone apps? Don’t forget to download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. It’s a great way to read all our articles while on the go.

Here are the ten apps we discovered this month and are most excited about.

• Siri – A semantic smart virtual personal assistant, chosen by Frederic Lardinois. “Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow,” we wrote in our review.
  
• OboPay – A mobile payment app, chosen by Dana Oshiro. Lots of big companies are putting millions of dollars behind this startup that they believe could be the future of money transfers on the go.
• Google Voice Mobile Web App – An HTML5 mobile web app for Google Voice, chosen by Richard MacManus. When this app launched at the end of January, we ran a poll asking readers if it was good enough to use as a phone. 65% said it was. A month later, Richard still feels that way.
• iFitness – A mobile fitness app, picked by Richard, who wrote 2 weeks ago: “Described as ‘a personal trainer for your iPhone,’ the app lists over 260 exercises. It has text and photographic instructions for all of those exercises, with video for 100 of them… iFitness features exercise logging and graphing. In addition it has 12 routines for various goals; including weight loss, strength, golf program, and more. The app also allows you to create your own custom workout.”
• Data Logger from Pachube – An “Internet of Things” feed tracker, chosen by Richard. Pachube is an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We covered it in depth this Fall.
• iWriteWords – A much celebrated app to help kids learn to write, chosen by RWW’s Production Editor Abraham Hyatt.
• Gowalla – A design-centric location based social network, chosen by me, Marshall Kirkpatrick. I wrote about Gowalla in depth yesterday. I love it, I just with there were more people in Portland that were using it.
• Etsy Adict – An awesome 3rd party iPhone app for browsing Etsy listings. I love this app! I regularly spend hours strolling through listings for ceramic and fiber arts items. If you’re not familiar with the wildly popular site Etsy, check out this coverage of the company. The app is built on top of a Mashery-powered API and (disclosure) Mashery is a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb.
• SitbyUs – A mobile web app I reviewed last week and am really excited to use. It’s a seat-level check-in system for SXSW. It will tell you in which rooms and what sections your Twitter friends are sitting, so you can find them after a panel, etc.
  
• Guardian iPhone App – This daily news app is the best I’ve ever seen. It’s fantastic. It’s like $5 but it’s worth it, if only to see how they made it. But it’s lots of fun to use too. If you like this kind of thing, see also the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) app.
  

Those are our favorite new iPhone apps, what are yours? Stay tuned for next month’s selections.

Discuss

Palm’s recent launch with Verizon Wireless has failed to generate any momentum for the company, putting the company’s long-term prospects into question.

So, what can Palm (NSDQ: PALM) do? Given that its new webOS is a worthy contender and stacks up nicely against the iPhone, Android and others, it must have options. One solution could include identifying a buyer or partner for the company. Right now, it’s largely a niche player, and should be looking for a company with deep pockets, strong relationships with developers and a good distribution network.

That shouldn’t be so hard given that so many companies are looking to get a piece of the smartphone action. In fact, it’s no wonder something hasn’t happened already.

There’s three potential suitors that immediately jump to mind, and likely there’s others, too. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Dell have long been rumored to be potential buy-out candidates. Those are still attractive options. A third one could be HP, which despite its line of iPaq smartphones running the Windows Mobile, has been completely overshadowed.

In particular, Nokia remains a strong prospect for buying Palm, or licensing its software. At Mobile World Congress last week, it announced it was merging its Maemo operating system with Intel’s Moblin operating system to create MeeGo. Both operating systems are based on Linux, like Palm’s. In doing so, both Nokia and Intel (NSDQ: INTC) will just fall further behind, and confuse the market further. The first release of MeeGo is expected in the second quarter of this year with devices launching later in the year. In contrast, Palm’s webOS is already a fully baked product with a small, but growing ecosystem. And, while Palm has accumulated debt while trying to get off the ground, together Nokia and Intel should be able to cover it.

Another candidate is HP, which continues to say that it is serious about smartphones, even though handset sales have fallen about 80 percent over the last five years, reports the NYTimes. “We are committed to the phone space,” said Phil McKinney, the CTO in HP’s personal systems group.

HP has declined to discuss the company’s future smartphone products or plans, but if it doesn’t move quickly it will miss the next great phase of the computing revolution. Its competitors, including Acer, Dell, Lenovo and Asustek, all are jumping into the smartphone market and had phones on display last week, whereas HP was virtually absent.

However, it’s likely that any potential suitors are looking for just a minuscule sign that Palm’s gaining some momentum or able to achieve some level of repeatable success. Both of those seem to be just out of Palm’s grasp.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya recently trimmed his estimate for the third-quarter to 900,000-1.2 million phone shipments from a prior range of 1.1 million-1.5 million. “We are concerned the window of opportunity may be closing,” he told the WSJ. And, Palm’s marketshare hardly registers at .7 percent of the total market, according to Gartner. By comparison, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) had 14.4 percent, and BlackBerrys represented nearly 20 percent.

In less than a month from now, the FCC will deliver a National Broadband Plan to Congress and the President, which may include a way to free up additional spectrum for wireless broadband services.

The lack of additional airwaves has been a concern as more consumers adopt smartphones and access the internet while on the go. In September, Blair Levin, the FCC’s top broadband official, said: “The demand curves from uses like smartphones suggest it’s going to increase dramatically, for spectrum…there is not enough of it.”

Now, there’s the beginnings of a plan: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said today at a broadband event hosted by the New America Foundation that it will encourage broadcasters to voluntarily give up unused blocks of spectrum in return for a share of the typically very lucrative auction proceeds. The plan is expected to be unveiled on March 16.

Reuters reports that Genachowski is arguing that the plan could work given that “the highly valuable spectrum currently allocated for broadcast television is not being used efficiently—indeed, much is not being used at all.” (Full speech here.)

The goal would be to free up 500 megahertz, which is in line with the amount the Department of Commerce proposed in President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget proposal. Clearly, broadcasters are not using all of the spectrum allotted to them. Of the 300 megahertz of spectrum set aside for broadcasters, only 36 megahertz are typically used in markets with less than 1 million people, and only about 100 megahertz are used in cities with more than 1 million people. He said: “Even in our very largest cities, at most only about 150 megahertz out of 300 megahertz are used.”

While Sprint (NYSE: S) and Verizon Wireless likely have enough spectrum for their 4G roll-outs, carriers like T-Mobile USA, are less fortunate. In Sept., T-Mobile USA asked lawmakers to allow the FCC to sell airwaves to them that were initially designated for police officers and firefighters. That chunk of spectrum failed to be successfully sold in the last auction. It’s still unclear what that fate is of that block.

Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe, also known as TAT, has been developing a rather astonishing augmented reality application for mobile phones. Originally built as a software concept, the Android app called “Recongnizr” is a mobile prototype that allows you to use your phone in order to “see” who a person is and what web services and social networks they’re connected to. App users can also associate traditional address book details with their profile like their full name, address, phone number and email, for example.

And all of this data can be accessed just by aiming your mobile phone at someone’s face.

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We first looked at TAT’s mobile concept back in July of last year. At that time, the application was called “Augmented ID.” Using facial recognition and tracking technology from Polar Rose, a photo tagging startup, the app is able to match 3D models of faces captured with the phone’s camera to those stored in a database on remote servers. This matching technique, which captures the shape of the face and other distinctive features like the contour of the eyes, the nose, and the chin, is one of the three methodologies for performing facial recognition. It’s ideal for mobile interfaces such as those found in Augmented ID/Recognizr because it’s not one that’s affected by low-lighting scenarios, a very real possibility for mobile interfaces such as this.

Improvements to the App

Since our last look at Augmented ID, it’s clear that the company has been making great strides in the development of this mobile application. Most notably, the interface’s design has been greatly improved. It now has a much cleaner layout and looks to be far easier to use. The social networking icons, for example, now appear big and bubbly, casually overlaid on top of each other in a row at the bottom of the screen, ready for dragging upward when you go to create your own profile. The same icons, all evenly sized, also float around people’s heads after the app recognizes them. You can then tap the icons to see the profile information they contain. For example, a Twitter icon could showcase the user’s latest tweets when tapped.

The recognition process, too, seems improved. A square shown by a broken line appears on your mobile’s screen around the face you’re trying to recognize. This closely resembles the autofocus systems found on most digital cameras today. When the app “sees” the face, the square’s outline turns from grey to green and the social networking icons zoom in from all sides to float around that person’s face.

The only downside to Recognizr (besides the fact that the prototype isn’t available for use today!) is that it requires both participants to use the mobile application in order to work. That makes the app far less creepy than some all-knowing “Minority Report”-like technology, but severely limits its potential at the same time. Since the prototype is currently Android-only, too, the database of users available for facial matching would only include those who have installed the application on their Android phone and have taken the time to set up their own profile.

That’s not to say that some future version of the application couldn’t scour the web for faces to match – implementing this feature would be challenging, but not entirely impossible. There are plenty of photos on social networks to pull from in the case that a particular person wasn’t already a Recognizr user. However, whether or not the company plans to develop their app to that point is unknown at this time.

Coming Soon to Android

After demonstrating Recognizr at the recent Mobile World Congress, Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT, announced that his company plans to partner with someone who can help bring the mobile concept app to market. He anticipates having a commercial application available in a little as a month or two.

You can watch video demos of both Augmented ID and Recognizr on YouTube, here and here.

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Clearwire today reported fourth-quarter and 2009 results showing how heavily the carrier is spending to gain customers. As part of its efforts to triple its subscribers this year,  Clearwire reiterated its plans to cover 120 million people by the close of the decade and said it will spend up to $3.2 billion. For Clearwire, 2010 is the year it makes it or breaks it.

After this year, not only will other carriers start heavily promoting their own 4G service, but some $2 billion of Clearwire’s debts will start to come due, up from $586 million in payments it’s obligated to make in 2010. Plus, Wall Street needs fast proof that Clearwire and Sprint didn’t bet on the wrong technology. Everyone is waiting for them to fail.

But despite our skepticism about WiMAX vs. the Long Term Evolution mobile broadband that carriers like Verizon and AT&T are deploying, Clearwire does have two opportunities to survive. The first is if it can sign up a lot of customers quickly on the network, through aggressive promotion and pricing.

When I tested WiMAX in Austin, I was frustrated by the giant holes in coverage, but where there was coverage, it was a much better downloading experience than 3G. Given that Clearwire uses Sprint’s 3G network to blanket those holes, the service isn’t a bad deal. With its cable partners promoting it and most consumers unaware of the differences between WiMAX and LTE, there’s a market for fast, which Clearwire will certainly provide. T-Mobile is hoping to take advantage of this with its HPSA+ rollout as well.

The other advantage Clearwire has is spectrum. For more on the importance of spectrum check out our report, Everybody Hertz: the Looming Spectrum Crisis on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d). The company has up to 120 MHz of spectrum available and is currently deploying its WiMAX service in large, 30 MHz chunks which it can fill with customer’s bits. In contrast, those deploying LTE in the 700 MHz band will use 10 MHz chunks, which can’t offer the same capacity. For now, it means Clearwire doesn’t have a data cap and can offer a better user experience even as more customers join the network.

So can Clearwire deploy quickly, get customers, and then keep them as its competitors roll out LTE? If so, finding success with WiMAX may not be an impossible dream.

Image courtesy of Flickr user omniNate

Scribd, the document-hosting service that calls itself “the largest social publishing company in the world,” has launched a series of mobile services and features for sending books and other documents to any portable device, including a set of open APIs, and according to CEO Trip Adler, the company plans to launch mobile apps for the iPhone, Android and iPad in the next few months. He also said that Scribd, which has about 50 million unique visitors a month, will soon have published more books than the entire U.S. publishing industry did last year.

“We’ve spent the last few years building a repository of 10 million documents,” Adler said in an interview in advance of the launch. “Now we’re launching a way to really easily read these documents on any mobile device. So whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation or a book or a homework project, you can now send that to any mobile device and read it there.” One of the problems with the e-reader market, he says, is that “people don’t really know what to buy, or what to read on them — with these new services, as long as it’s on Scribd you know that you can read it on any device.”

Scribd’s launch involves three separate products:

• A “send-to-device” option that will now appear at the top of every document the service hosts, which pulls up a list of all the devices Scribd can send to, including the Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader, etc.
• The Scribd Open Platform for E-Readers (SOPED), a development platform and set of application programming interfaces that companies can use to integrate with Scribd’s mobile services.
• A series of mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Kindle, iPad and other portable devices that make it easier to send and receive Scribd documents and books.

Adler told me that Scribd briefly thought about coming out with its own e-reading device, but “only for about a minute. It didn’t really make sense, because we’re a web software company, not a hardware company. So we decided to embrace as many different devices as we could.” Through a variety of different protocols — email, text messaging, etc. — the new “send-to-device” service supports the Kindle, the Nook, the iPhone, the Android, Windows Mobile devices, the BlackBerry, the Palm, the Onyx, the JetBook, the EZReader, the IRex and the Cool-ER. Adler said support for other devices will be coming soon.

In contrast to companies like Apple and Amazon, which are concentrating on signing deals with major publishers for established authors, Adler said that Scribd focuses on what the company calls “the long tail of content.” That means anything from a student’s PhD thesis or a PowerPoint presentation to a self-published children’s story or a cookbook. “We specialize in all kinds of material that isn’t being published by traditional publishers,” he said. “About 95 percent of the content on Scribd is free.”

That said, Scribd spokesperson Michelle Laird noted that the company is also working with major publishers such as Simon & Schuster and Random House. Although some publishers have criticized the company in the past for hosting copyright-infringing copies of their works, Adler says that Scribd has “made tremendous progress with our copyright management system.” Laird noted that Wiley & Sons — publishers of the popular “Dummies” series of self-help technical books — has also agreed to put some of its content on Scribd, after being satisfied by the company that it would be protected.

Adler said that the number of books published through Scribd is “doubling every six months or so,” and that soon the company will have published more books than the entire U.S. publishing industry did last year, a number he estimated at about 300,000. The Scribd CEO also said that he isn’t concerned about competitor DocStoc’s recent launch of an online store for selling documents. “Jason at DocStoc has been saying that we’re just a book publisher, but we’re really not,” he said. “We host all kinds of documents.”

Laird noted that while DocStoc requires those who sell through its store to be approved, Scribd “allows anyone to sell in our store.” Among the document services that Scribd has deals with, she said that ProQuest provides hundreds of thousands of graduate-level theses that students can read and use to study for a graduate degree. The service also has a branded, embeddable reader that is used by publications such as the New York Times to host documents related to new stories.

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Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Here’s Kate

Apple’s iPad, which is soon going to find its way onto the market, has drawn criticism and scorn from many a technorati. But Neil Young, chief executive and co-founder of San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup ngmoco, isn’t one of them. Not only does he think that the iPad will make netbooks pointless, he believes it will usher in new opportunities for companies such as his to build new experiences.

“Most negative reviews are from people who I think who were expecting a fundamental new technology, not a new user experience,” he said in a conversation with me. “I remember the same type of commentary around when the iPod touch launched.” Of course, as we all know Apple has since sold many millions of those iPod touches.

Young, who just closed a $25 million round of financing from Institutional Venture Partners and previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners and Maples Investments, believes that a big portion of the mass market of buyers are going to find the iPad “magical.”

“The iPad is going to occupy a different part of a user’s life — it will be at the intersection of your home laptop and netbook and personal game console,” he said. Unlike most, who are going to rebuild their apps for the larger screen resolution, ngmoco has devised a three-step strategy for targeting the iPad:

• Adapt six of its major titles to iPad specifications and have them available for download alongside the device’s launch.
• Enhance its games to take advantage of the large screen real estate and also augment them with other iPad-specific features.
• Once iPad has scale or shows a trajectory of scale, build new applications specifically for that platform.

Young isn’t the only CEO of an iPhone games company who is thinking differently. William Volk, CEO of San Diego-based PlayScreen, explained to me that the iPad represented an opportunity to create a whole new kind of game. In a recent blog post Volk wrote,”The big screen and connectivity makes it a natural for social and team gaming. Think of board games, MMORPG’s and card playing.”

Like Volk and Young, I am very excited about the iPad, and am wondering what different types of apps can be developed for this new platform.

If you want to talk to me about these new experiences, apps or the iPad, drop me an email, connect with me on Twitter or simply leave a comment.

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Security services firm ZScaler is out with its “State of the Web” report for the fourth quarter of 2009, which presents a number of views — many of them graphical — of the top level domains in various tech categories most often sought out by web users. While some results are predictable, there are quite a few surprises.

ZScaler’s data largely lines up with reports from analysts and others in most technology categories it tracks. Its survey numbers show that search engines remain “a three-horse race,” as seen here, with Google leading at 57 percent, well ahead of Yahoo, with 18 percent of the search engine market. Microsoft’s Bing comes in at third with 10 percent, while Disney’s Go.com search engine, which is powered by Yahoo, is actually in fourth place, but has only 1.22 percent of the market, according to the survey.

A whopping three quarters of the huge and growing volumes of traffic on the web aimed at social networks are headed for Facebook, according to ZScaler’s numbers. MySpace still commands 15 percent of traffic to top social networking sites, but we’ve written about the dark clouds hovering over it.

Among the top file-sharing and torrenting sites around the globe, there are some surprises in the ZScaler data, as seen below. Si@mBIT, a Thai web hosting provider that specializes in serving torrents, led with 37.49 percent of all file-sharing traffic online in the fourth quarter. The third-largest domain, tb.in.th., is also controlled by Si@mBIT, and commanded about 13 percent of file-sharing traffic.  Without a doubt, non-U.S. sites dominate the file-sharing scene.

In addition to becoming the most trusted brand in America, Amazon is the top shopping site online, according to ZScaler’s data. However, there is healthy competition among shopping sites. ShopLocal.com is right behind Amazon in this survey’s results, and Macy’s and Shop.com are very competitive too.

There are quite a few other interesting data points in the ZScaler report, which is available online.

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Mobile applications are often blamed when behind-the-wheel multitaskers put fellow drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians at risk, but some apps are intended to keep drivers’ attention on the road and away from their phones. Launched last summer to deliver real-time traffic reports as audio rather than text, Aha Mobile’s newly revised mobile application includes news, podcasts, social media streams, and information about nearby businesses, with minimal finger gestures and onscreen reading required in an effort to ensure the safety of both drivers and the people around them.

Aha wants consumers to construct their own stations at home, not in the driver’s seat — in fact, there are some tasks the app won’t perform when it senses that you’re cruising down the highway. The Aha Radio app’s channels include real-time, location-based traffic information that can be customized for a specific commute, tweets and Facebook status updates, restaurant data culled from Yelp, and news from NPR and Fox -– all read aloud, often by a robotic “cyber-human.” Users can also contribute to the service by notifying fellow drivers about car wrecks or other developments via brief voice memos; there’s also a somewhat silly “caraoke” channel of people singing along to their radios. The company’s first app is available free of charge for the iPhone, and CEO Robert Acker says an Android app is likely later this year.

Aha pays for very little of its content, save for a contract with Inrix that delivers traffic data; the rest comes from existing APIs. Acker said Aha is still pre-revenue, although it expects to add 10-second advertisements “after 2010.” What’s more, he said he envisions Aha as a platform company that expects to work with carmakers as they develop in-dash or steering wheel controls that will allow drivers to operate or manipulate apps remotely, without handling their smartphones –- and eventually enabling them to do away with phone and apps completely while driving. That’s the model Pandora’s Tom Conrad described to me last fall, in advance of that company’s fruitful CES trade show in Las Vegas last month.

Acker said Aha won’t be offering a music channel, although it may seek to syndicate its customizable content streams into existing mobile music services, so that a user can switch to a non-music channel for traffic reports or other data (just as a driver might tune in an all-news terrestrial AM station for a few minutes after listening to FM music for awhile). The company could also add driving directions or other services, as well as premium information for which it could charge money.

Venrock led Aha’s $3 million Series A round last year, and Acker said the company is aiming to complete a second round in the coming months.

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Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

What a difference a year-and-a-half can make. That was the view presented by NBC Universal’s research head Alan Wurtzel regarding the contrast in the number of mobile users accessing the network’s Winter Olympics coverage. “We knew going into Vancouver that mobile would be ready for primetime,” he said during a conference call with reporters on the research the company’s gleaned half-way through the current games. “Not only is the growth huge, but it’s mainstreaming.”

Among the main stats:

—11 million mobile visits in Vancouver in 11 days versus 8 million for the complete Beijing games.
—55 million mobile pageviews for NBCU’s Olympics coverage this time out versus 35 million total pageviews for Beijing.
—1.4 million mobile video streams versus 300,000 for Beijing.
—7 out of 10 users who are now employing mobile to watch the Olympics didn’t use their phones to view the Beijing games.

“The difference is that just 18 months ago, the quality of the experience of watching mobile video was so poor. But now, one out of four handsets is a smartphone and the experience is greatly enhanced.” In addition, Wurtzel credited the popularity of mobile apps for the increased mobile viewing. There have been 1.1 million mobile app users to date for the Olympics. Of course, NBC anticipated that mobile would perform better, and in return invested more heavily in the platform for the Vancouver games, by adding two iPhone apps, a smartphone version of the NBC Olympics mobile site, and new social media features.

Some other app-related stats:

—60 percent of those who downloaded the Olympics app have rated it “very good.”
—Mobile users are also more likely to use the app than the website. So far, two-thirds accessed the mobile Olympics coverage via the app.
—67 percent of mobile users accessed the site and the app from their home, not on the go, as would have been assumed, Wurtzel said.

—Muse: Another band joining the app bandwagon: Muse is now offering fans an app on Apple’s App Store with music, a video archive, tour info, and access to the band’s fan forum. It also offers an aggregation feature for the most dedicated, collecting all Muse-related posts from sites like Twitter, Delicious, fan sites and muse.mu; and an integrated camera feature for fans to share geo-tagged images from Muse’s current tour. It’s selling for £1.79 ($2.76).

—AOL/FanHouse: One more iPhone app tapping into the nexus of sports/drinking/socialising. FanHouse’s UK app (there is also a U.S. version covering American teams) lets users keep up with news for their favorite Premier League football teams, and linking up with other like-minded fans, with content sourced from the FanHouse website as well as sites like Facebook. On game days, a user can set his/her location at home, the pub, or the stadium, and then find corresponding information such as food and drink options (including home food delivery), transport links and venue information if you’re at the game itself.The FanHouse app is ad-free and is downloadable from iTunes or the Fanhouse site at no charge.

—Vodafone/Qik: The mobile video streaming company has inked a distribution deal with Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) in the UK. Users can send a free text to 97886 (message: Qik) to get the relevant app for their devices (it’s available for iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) handsets, among others). Users can then record videos and post them to YouTube, Facebook or Twitter; send them as video messages; or upload them to other sites like WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger. (Vodafone UK’s snappy video on YouTube describing the service is here.)

—Guardian: The publisher is reporting that its iPhone/iPod Touch app has been downloaded 101,457 times between its launch on December 14, 2009 and February 21, 2010, compared to around 69,000 downloads as of mid-January. The publisher also says the app has been shortlisted for a British Press Award. The app retails for £2.39 (and $3.99 in the U.S.).

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media

According to the latest study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014. The market was just over $400 million this past year, says Juniper, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise.

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Cloud Apps in your Pocket

Mobile cloud computing is a term that refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing happen outside of the mobile device from which an application is launched. To the typical consumer, a cloud-based mobile application looks and feels just like any app purchased or downloaded from a mobile application store like iTunes. However, the app is driven from the “cloud,” not from the handheld device itself. There are already a few well-known mobile cloud apps out there including Google’s Gmail and Google Voice for iPhone. When launched via iPhone homescreen shortcuts, these apps perform just like any other app on the iPhone, but all of their processing power comes from the cloud.

In the future, there will be even more applications like these available, but they won’t necessarily be mobilized web sites like those in Google’s line-up. Cloud-based mobile apps are perfectly capable of being packaged in a way that allows them to be sold alongside traditional mobile apps in mobile application stores, with no one but the developers any wiser.

HTML5 Paves the Way for Mobile Web’s Future

Earlier this year, ABI Research released a future-watching report called Mobile Cloud Computing which comes to many of the same conclusions as the new Juniper Research report. Where they both agree is on how HTML5 technology and the mobilized enterprise will help drive this trend forward. Specifically, HTML5, the proposed standard for the next version web markup language (the core language used to create the web), offers offline data caching. That means cloud-based mobile apps can behave just like their device-based cousins: when the Internet connection goes down, the app still works. In addition, HTML5-enabled apps resuming from cached mode only pull down the data from the server that changed during the time they were offline. That reduces server load which is a critical need in delivering mobile apps to developing nations and other regions where network coverage and connectivity is poor.

Enterprise Drives Mobile Growth

Like the earlier report from ABI, Juniper also sees the enterprise as a major force behind the move to the cloud. 75% of the mobile cloud-based application market is enterprise, notes the report. Mobile apps allow corporate users to access company data, share files, collaborate on projects and more via their smartphones. This business need will help fund the growth and development of the mobile cloud-based app market.

However, although enterprise will drive this growth, consumer-oriented apps will benefit, too. Over the next four years, these apps will comprise an increasing proportion of the total revenues with business plans that involve subscription-based content and mobile advertising.

The Power of the Cloud: Scale

Finally, the Juniper Report notes that the processing power of the cloud itself is also key to the future of mobile. Cloud-based mobile apps can scale far beyond the capabilities of any smartphone. Instead of being limited to the data storage and processing power contained in a mobile device, cloud apps have all the power of a server-based computing infrastructure accessible through an app’s mobile interface. This not only allows owners of low-cost “feature phones” (non-smartphones) the ability to access the same mobile applications used on more advanced platforms, it also allows the apps themselves to become more powerful and capable of more.

Cloud Apps in Relation to the Mobile Marketplace

What’s interesting about the dollar amount assigned to this trend – $9.5 billion by 2014 – is how that number compares to other analyst estimates for the mobile application store business as a whole. At the beginning of this year, Gartner researchers estimated that the app store businesses would generate nearly $7 billion this year and would reach $29.5 billion by 2013. Assumingly, it will grow even more by 2014 when the mobile cloud-based application market is expected to near $9.5 billion. In light of that comparison, the mobile cloud-based application trend seems impactful but perhaps less disruptive to the market as whole as is being purported. It appears there will still be plenty of room for both traditional, device-based apps and mobile cloud-based apps in the near future. 

Discuss

Skyhook Wireless today announced that Gowalla, the location-based social networking service, has added its Core Engine to its Android application for location results. Up until now, Gowalla officials have been disappointed with location-based apps on Android, but they say that’s changed.

On the iPhone, Gowalla uses built-in Skyhook location data by default. While working on an app for Android, though, developers claim they noticed big performance differences compared to the app on the iPhone

“Location-aware social networking apps cannot succeed without reliable positioning results,” Kate Imbach, vice president of marketing at Skyhook Wireless, said in a statement announcing the deal acquisition. “Gowalla’s disappointment with Android location is a common frustration that can only be resolved by integrating Skyhook.”

Gowalla’s Android app is currently in beta and will be widely released to the public in March. Skyhook also offers a publicly available SDK for Android developers, available here.

Meanwhile, in Austin last night, Stacey caught up with Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook  and Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, from Skyhook for a chat about check-in and location features in social networking apps. See their thoughts in the video below.

Apple’s ban on some sexually-suggestive content in the iTunes App Store was due to an increasing number of complaints from women’s and parent groups, a top exec tells the NYT. But the policy is selective, as not all apps featuring scantily-clad women have been bannished. For example, Sports Illustrated’s free Swimsuit app is still available for download—though Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) asks that users certify they are over 17 years of age before loading—as is a related game app. Playboy (NYSE: PLA) has several paid apps still on sale in the App Store.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s head of worldwide product marketin, explained to the NYT why those apps remain available, while others, such as On the Go Girls’ 50 adult-themed apps, have been blocked: “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format.”

In the meantime, makers of other banned Apple apps such as Dirty Fingers and others of that ilk still have a place in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android’s app store, allowing users to flag certain items. Google also reserves the right to remove apps that violate its terms, but at this point, considering the Android app store is still much smaller than Apple’s, it will exert a much lighter touch on what sort of material gets removed.

Handango, one of the original mobile app distributors, has been acquired by PocketGear in a deal announced this morning, the terms of which were not disclosed. An 11-year-old Dallas-area firm, Handango — like its rival Handmark — helped pioneer the app store model by distributing apps to devices running Palm, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian before expanding to Android. PocketGear in 2008 was founded as a spinoff from Motricity, which is now hoping to raise $250 million through an initial public offering.

The combined company hopes to better compete with Apple’s App Store and the Android Market as well as content aggregators such as GetJar, which delivers titles to a wide variety of devices. But the move also scores how dramatically the mobile app space has evolved in the last few years thanks to Apple and its rivals, which have made it much make it easier for consumers to find and download mobile apps. Early players like Handmark gained traction among some tech-savvy smartphone users, but because their storefronts were never embedded on devices most users were blind to them. And users who were aware of them had to create standalone credit card accounts and jump through other hoops to download apps to their handsets, which often weren’t great at running apps anyway.

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Image courtesy Flickr user Finnur.

The mobile advertising consolidation continues: Baltimore-based Millennial Media, which is one of the largest U.S. based mobile ad networks, is acquiring TapMetrics, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In recent months, Millennial’s closest competitors have either been acquired or have merged with other rivals. Companies left in the space are feeling the pressure to either gain scale or additional skills. Millennial said that TapMetrics provides developers analytics in order to better manage application sales and revenue. Michael Avon, Millennial’s EVP and CFO, said the acquisition will be funded with the $16-million round the company raised in November, and will continue to “to actively evaluate other potential acquisitions to further expand our business.”

Millennial said TapMetrics will continue to be based out of its San Francisco headquarters.

Millennial already releases quite a few key metric figures. In an annual review, it said it’s average deal size increased 353 percent, and non-U.S. impressions increased 175 percent year-over-year.

The company, which is known for having large U.S. operations, is having to go up against even bigger competitors as of late. Google purchased AdMob for $750 million, which is still under review, and Apple bought Quattro Wireless. Lesser known mobile ad networks, Amobee Media Systems bought RingRing Media in the UK, and Flurry and Pinch Media, two companies that provide analytics to the space, also merged.

For now, the mergers are mostly speculative as the mobile advertising industry has yet to really be a substantial market, compared to other mediums, such as online or TV or print. However, because of the personal nature of cellphones, the always-on aspects, and the potential for location-based services, everyone is banking on it being a large opportunity. But for now, the mergers are outpacing the growth: For example, following’s Google’s purchase of AdMob and Apple’s purchase of Quattro Wireless, the mobile advertising industry passed the $1 billion in value—which is quite the accomplishment given that the total U.S. mobile advertising market was only worth $416 million in 2009.

Related

• The Mobile Advertising Industry Is Worth At Least $1 Billion Now
• Google: Apple’s Quattro Buy Is Proof Of A ‘Competitive’ Mobile Ad Market

Is Danish newspaper Information taking the honour of being first to unveil an app for Apple’s forthcoming saviour-of-media tablet?

Your eyes deceive you, sadly. What looks like an Information.dk iPad application was actually the front page of yesterday’s printed edition, whose cover story, was devoted to examining which digital paths might lead news economics out of its gloomy uncertainty.

While the piece itself ran the numbers of Danish media decline and an accompanying piece heard Liberal party calls for for state handouts to be widened from print publishers alone, the mock-up allows us to imagine how first-wave publishers might approach the iPad…

Information.dk’s fake app holds to a principle I forecast recently – that iPad apps will look a lot like their print forebears – but pares down front-page stories and ads to one apiece. That’s unlike the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) app, which will load its front page with stories; another move that’s not unlike its printed counterpart.

Via Innovations In Newspapers and TUAW