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comScore released smartphone manufacturer and operating system data today for the first quarter of 2013 in the U.S. market. The numbers show Android continuing to dominate with 52 percent market share for operating systems. This was down slightly from December 2012 when Android held 53.4 percent of the market. Blackberry also slid down to only 5.2 percent of the market and Symbian took a small dip. Apple’s iOS was the big gainer for the quarter jumping 2.7 percent to grab 39 percent of the market and Microsoft also gained slightly.

While Android enjoyed  the top spot in terms of operating platforms, Apple continued to hold a grip in terms of manufacturer market share with their 39 percent share of the market. The 2.7 percent jump outpaced Samsung’s gain of 0.7 percent of the market. HTC, Motorola, and LG all saw their market share slide during the quarter.

2013′s first quarter did not see any major smartphone releases from the major Android manufacturers. That situation will change during the second quarter with devices like the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S 4 hitting the market. While Apple fans and investors will rejoice over this latest shot of positive news, the happiness may only last until second quarter numbers are released.

source: comScore

Come comment on this article: Latest numbers show Android maintaining smartphone OS dominance in U.S. market for first quarter

Mozilla is out to show that it wasn’t just blowing smoke when it said it wanted to bring console-quality games directly to your web browser. Per Engadget, Mozilla has posted a demonstration video of Android game Epic Citadel that’s been ported over to Firefox using the Unreal Engine 3. While the video is just a straight scenic walk-through with no combat or interaction with non-player characters, it does show that it’s possible to have high-quality graphics run at a solid frame rate of 16 frames per second within a desktop browser. The Unreal Engine 3 is used to power such A-list games as Bioshock Infinite, Mass Effect 3 and Batman: Arkham City, and porting it to a browser would be a major accomplishment for Mozilla engineers. Mozilla’s full demonstration video is posted below.

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Slowly but surely Google’s Photo Spheres continue the march toward general availability and usability throughout the web with Google’s release of a widget enabling them to be embedded on any web site. Up to now, Photo Spheres could only load on Google+ and Google Maps along with a couple third-party services that had figured out how to make them viewable. The new widget is not the easiest thing to deploy as web site owners will have to add a call to the Google+ API and then add some extensive code on their site where the Photo Sphere should appear. The Photo Spheres themselves have to be hosted on either Google+ or PicasaWeb. No doubt it will not be long before other developers streamline this process to make it easier for site owners to both deploy the widget and quickly grab the proper URL and parameters for a Photo Sphere.

In the meantime, Android users continue to wait for progress on making Photo Sphere capable camera apps as widely available so they can start to contribute to the library of Photo Spheres.

source: +Google+

Come comment on this article: Google Photo Spheres widget now available for any web site

Remember those artificially intelligent robotic bees I wrote about in October? Well, it turns out they’re already on a good pace toward being reality: The RoboBees project at Harvard has been flying prototype bees for months, and the next step is equipping them with brains.

That the bees, which are described as being half the size of a paperclip and weighing less than a tenth of a gram, can fly at all is an engineering marvel in its own right given their minute size. However, the next parts of the project could actually prove to be even bigger challenges.

According to a Harvard University press release:

[T]he next steps will involve integrating the parallel work of many different research teams that are working on the brain, the colony coordination behavior, the power source, and so on, until the robotic insects are fully autonomous and wireless.

The problems are that building AI-powered brains won’t be easy and that there’s not yet an energy source small enough and dense enough to power a wireless bee.

On the brain side, though, the RoboBees team might have some help. As we explained in October, there’s a team from the Universities of Sussex and Sheffield in the United Kingdom working on a project called Green Brain that aims to develop a brain that could let robotic bees like those RoboBees is building act autonomously and respond to sensory stimuli.

Again, though, the small scale of the Harvard project could pose some initial challenges depending on how advanced it wants the brain to be. The plan is for the Green Brain project to run on a GPU-powered supercomputer and, presumably, communicate with sensors on the robot. Even if it were possible for a single GPU processor to run the Green Brain at operational speed, that could still prove too big for the tiny RoboBees, which need to do their own processing.

The key to success, however, might lie in RoboBees’ focus on colony behavior, which is somewhat akin to the concepts underlying distributed computing systems. Because the team expects the robotic bees to function like real honeybee colonies, individual bees can get by with less computer power.

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Cyberattacks hitting one company after another — including defense contractor QinetiQ — have garnered plenty of headlines in recent months. And while that’s got to cause headaches for victims, it might not be such a bad thing, because it makes governments and other businesses notice. It turns out that venture capitalists have taken note, too, and have been putting more of their dollars behind security startups in hopes that those companies go big.

The numbers bear out the trend. In the first quarter of 2013, VCs dumped nearly $353 million into IT security deals, up 90 percent over that quarter the previous year, according to MoneyTree Report data provided to GigaOM by the National Venture Capital Association. If you divide the total funding by the number of deals, the average amount was more than $16 million, up 125 percent over the $7.1 million amount in the first quarter of 2012.

Security startups that have taken on VC funding rounds this year include Cylance, TraceVector and vArmour Networks, among others.

The intersection of big data and security has been a hot space, as companies move to collect lots of information and analyze it all as fast as possible, just as companies want to derive insights on increasing and more complex data sets that can lead to overhead reductions and new revenue streams. For example, in October, EMC said it would buy Silver Tail Systems, which tracks web and mobile-app traffic and points to unusual behavior and violations that customers can set. To separate the wheat from the chaff of vulnerabilities that multiple security systems might discover and to use security staffers efficiently, Risk I/O prioritizes issues. Last year it got $5.25 million.

Are the cyberattacks nudging VCs to shell out millions? Shirish Sathaye, a general partner at Khosla Ventures, which has invested in Cylance and TraceVector along with Lookout and DB Networks, thinks the cyberattack news onslaught is making a difference.

“The first reason is, yes, every time you open a newspaper, you read about somebody being attacked,” he said, whether against consumers or companies. The likelihood and complexity of attacks only become greater as more people get online, often with multiple devices.

The multiplicity of devices accessing a network — a trend in its own right — could pose security challenges on its own, and Tenable Network Security picked up $50 million last year following the addition of features that look for vulnerabilities popping up as mobile devices and provide information on devices such as whether they are jailbroken. Last month Ionic Security, which keeps data encrypted as it moves to devices, said it had raised $9.4 million in new funding.

Another reason for the security funding boom, Sathaye said, is the success of network security player Palo Alto Networks. Prior to its public offering last year, threats might well have helped its appeal.

From Sathaye’s point of view, it’s critical to nurture the ecosystem of options for strengthening network and endpoint security. “As bad guys keep innovating, good guys have to innovate at least as fast as them, if not faster,” he said. With more money going toward IT-security startups, it does seem that plenty of other VCs think there’s an opportunity here.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user LeventeGyori.

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The extent of human creativity/weirdness always baffles me, but I have to say the Internet really won my heart this week. Here are some staff picks of weird, beautiful, smart stories and videos from the interwebs this week.

• Today was the final day to tweet #TornadoWeek to turn up the winds on interns at the Weather Channel. It seems the Weather Channel is embracing climate change with reckless abandon as it turns to an aggressively hilarious editorial strategy. [The Weather Channel] UPDATE: Unfortunately the livestream of the interns getting blasted is over, but you can watch a clip at CNBC »
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• If you were a kid growing up in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, or raised a kid during this time, PBS was a testament to the power of good educational television. A satirical trailer-making group called Gritty Robots published a heart-warming video this week of beloved PBS personalities Carl Sagan, Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye the Science Guy (see his TED-Ed lesson above) and Bob Ross as as the Avengers, saving us from bad TV. [Gizmodo]
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• Did you know that being annoyed at the incorrect use of “literally” is about as old as the heinous act itself? Ben Yagoda has a literal breakdown. [Lingua Franca]
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• In response to Amanda Filipacci’s New York Times op-ed piece last week on Wikipedia’s creation of a separate category for American Women Novelists, James Gleick takes a detailed look at Wikipedia’s women problem. [NYRB]
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• New science magazine Nautilus launches its first issue, on the topic “What makes you so special.” We’re excited to see what’s next from this awesome publication. [Nautilus]
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• IBM puts out an animation of epically small proportions, moving atoms with extreme precision. The film holds the Guiness World Record for smallest stop-motion film. [YouTube]
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• How many countries are there in Africa? Answering the question isn’t as easy as it sounds. [Africa Check] Watch Chimamanda Adichie’s classic talk, “The danger of a single story” »
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• A quick, surprising synthesis of an extensive study published by PLoS One, about differences in learning between the sexes. [io9]
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• An inside story on the future of Guantanamo Bay and its history of hunger strikes, by Shihab Rattansi. [Al Jazeera]
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• The painted turtle is on the path to extinction. A sad, strange story of how it may soon become a 100 percent female species, due to the fact that its eggs are more likely to hatch as females if they are in warm nests. [New Scientist]
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• Behold: Nature. Donald Trump. … What? [io9]

Bitcoin is back in the news again following last month’s epic crash in which it lost 70 percent of its value in two days. This week, the online currency was at the center of a video game zombie operation and a $75 million lawsuit between a Japanese exchange and a Seattle startup that provides Bitcoin services to American merchants.

The recent events are the latest in a never-ending series of crimes and controversies tied to Bitcoin, which is mined by computers and can be used for payments or exchanged into dollars and other currencies. The money is popular with libertarians because it isn’t subject to deflation by central banks, but has also been criticized for attracting criminals and hackers.

The controversy raises the question of whether America’s leading financial regulator, the Securities and Exchanges Commission, will attempt to control the spread and use of Bitcoin.

“We are decling comment,” said an SEC spokesman by email, in response to questions regarding whether the agency had a position on the currency or if it had jurisdiction over Bitcoin trading in the first place.

The silence may be due to the fact that the SEC can exert little regulatory control over Bitcoin. According to Dan Nathan, a securities lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, the agency can oversee trades of financial instruments like stocks and bonds but, for the most part, not currencies.

Nathan said the SEC could exert indirect control through imposing capital requirements on trading houses that hold Bitcoin, but any direct trading regulation would likely be restricted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — a separate agency that overseas futures contracts.

Major financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have reportedly been visiting online Bitcoin exchanges as often as 30 times a day, but have refused to comment about whether they are holding the currency.

The only direct attempt at regulation by the U.S. so far has been guidelines issued in March by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which targets money laundering.

Want to learn more about Bitcoin and whether it’s viable as a mainstream currency? Join us on May 16 in San Jose where engineers from Google and Facebook, and executives from Expensify and Lemon will share their perspectives — it won’t cost you a single Bitcoin.

And to learn more about Bitcoin, see my colleague David Meyer excellent overview: “Yes, you should care about Bitcoin. Here’s why.“

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Watch the West Wing Week here.

Mexico & Costa Rica Trip: On Thursday, President Obama started a three day trip to Mexico and Costa Rica for his first visit to Latin America of the second term. During the trip, the President hopes to reinforce the deep cultural, familial, and economic ties we share with Mexico and Central America.

Yesterday, the President had a bilateral meeting with Mexican President Peña Nieto at Palacio National in Mexico City. The bulk of his discussions in Mexico will cover the economy, and in Costa Rica, the President will meet with Central American leaders, who are important partners in improving foreign policy and the economy.

Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, previewed the trip before leaving Washington. Check out the video on YouTube.

Transportation Secretary Nominated: On Tuesday, the President nominated the Mayor of Charlotte, Anthony Foxx, for Transportation Secretary.  As mayor, Foxx modernized the electric train service to Charlotte’s downtown area, expanded the international airport, and extended the city’s light rail system. The President hopes cities can mimic the work done in Charlotte to attract more business, create more jobs, and stay competitive in the global economy.

Our top priority as a nation right now is doing everything we can to grow our economy and create good jobs and rebuild opportunity for the middle class. And one of the best ways we can do that is to put more Americans back to work rebuilding our infrastructure.

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Apple’s worldwide iPhone’s sales may be may have slowed during the last quarter from its formerly rapid pace, but in the U.S. the device still picked up market share against competition that remained mostly static, according to ComScore’s MobiLens survey published Friday.

ComScore found Apple’s share of the smartphone market, already tops in the U.S., grew from 36.3 percent to 39 percent between December and March. In second place was Samsung, which stayed about the same during the quarter, rising a smidge from 21 percent to 21.7 percent. Meanwhile, the rest of the top five smartphone makers didn’t fare as well:

There were 136.7 million people who owned smartphones in the U.S. — 58 percent of all mobile subscribers — and Apple and Samsung’s dominance of that market continues mostly unchallenged. Together they now own 91 percent of smartphone users as HTC, Google-owned Motorola, and LG lost share, ComScore’s survey says.

On the smartphone software front, Apple’s iOS remained No. 2 behind Android, but made modest gains. iOS picked up about 2.7 perent share to reach 39 percent of all smartphones, while Android dipped a bit from 53.4 percent to 52 percent.

In other words, the U.S. smartphone story didn’t change too much in the first quarter of 2013: Android is still used by more than half of all smartphones and the iPhone is still by far the most popular smartphone in the U.S. The momentum, which was nominally in Apple’s favor last quarter, may shift a bit when we look at this survey three months from now though. Several flagship Android phones will start selling in larger quantities during that time, including the Samsung Galaxy S and the HTC One.

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Google shared a new video to its Project Glass YouTube channel today, featuring physics teacher Andrew Vanden Heuvel, one of the Google Glass “Explorers,” visiting CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He uses Glass to conduct a Google Hangout with his class from the site.

Vanden Heuvel discusses his adventure further on his blog.

It’s usually a bad thing when rappers get a game based on their musical persona. 50 Cent Bulletproof is widely regarded as one of the worst games ever made, and its sequel is known as one of the most unintentionally funny games ever made. Now Snoop Dogg Lion is trying his hand at the whole video game thing.

In Way of the Dogg, our protagonist, America Jones, finds himself with a dead girlfriend or something. Vowing revenge, he seeks training from Snoop Dogg at his mystical temple. What follows is a rhythm combat game where players hit buttons in time with Snoop’s classic beats.

While Way of the Dogg is a rhythm fighter, some are going to make the comparison to Shaq Fu. The good news is that Snoop’s new game can’t be anywhere near as bad as Shaq Fu. The bad news is that it will probably still be a lousy game, as most licensed games are.

Way of the Dogg is coming to the PS3, Xbox 360, Android and iOS sometime in the near future.

Mozilla has teamed up with Hollywood rendering company OTOY to create a new codec to stream video and apps from the cloud directly to the browser. The JavaScript library ORBX can render apps, gaming platforms or an entire operating system in any HTML5-capable browser, including Chrome, Safari or Firefox, even on a mobile device. The announcement is another attempt at destabilizing the hegemony of the H.264 video-compression standard, famously advanced by Apple over Flash and present in all iOS devices, after the promotion of WebM by Matroska and Google.

The impacts of the purely JavaScript-based system are multiple: for end users, the ability to run native PC apps on any device with an internet connection and to purchase and protect content without digital-rights management (DRM); for content creators, cheaper, faster rendering and the ability to distribute anywhere viewers can type in a URL; and for open web or cloud-computing advocates, a push away from proprietary or legacy plug-ins and an embrace of HTML5. With the presence of William Morris Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel at the launch on Friday, the creators of the ORBX.js technology were also seeking to emphasize its piracy-fighting powers for the movie and TV industries: with video streams or apps watermarked in the cloud, DRM in the browser becomes unnecessary.

OTOY and Mozilla came together recently with the realization of a shared goal: trying to turn the web into the platform for all apps. Mozilla’s effort to implement H.264 in Firefox inspired OTOY to rewrite their own codec to run in JavaScript, said OTOY founder and CEO Jules Urbach at the launch event in San Francisco on Friday, and the partnership has now culminated in an optimized rendering experience that is approaching native app speeds in Firefox. Among the capabilities demonstrated at the launch were a virtualized Windows desktop running in Safari, lag-free gaming in a browser and streaming that can be adaptively encoded based on a user’s bandwidth.

“Web is the medium,” said Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski, who was very upbeat about the possibilities of the new tech for increasing work collaboration and creativity, and reducing delays through real-time rendering. Besides investing in OTOY, Autodesk’s interest is in providing 3D apps to their customers using cloud resources. The implications for agility — both for individuals and for enterprises — are freeing: a low-power home device can drive the centralized, high-power cloud machine, eliminating the need for a high-end workstation or provisioning of hardware assets to employees or contractors. Kowalski’s suggestion, in fact, was that such a move will allows users to downgrade their hardware, because it no longer has to match the needs of the software.

So what is needed for ORBX.js to work? Any HTML5 browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE10 or Opera) will do, but it needs to have WebGL technology to take advantage of the codec’s full decoding speed. Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich predicted that Apple will eventually come around to more fully accept WebGL. When asked if Apple, Google, or big streaming providers can do anything to stop the use of ORBX, Urbach said nothing short of getting rid of the browser would stop the tech from being used.

The central issues with streaming all of your computing are bandwidth and money. Video seemed to stream well on an iPhone over 4G, and with the adaptive streaming and superior compression of ORBX, Urbach projects a 25 percent bandwidth savings for, say, Netflix streaming. For that to happen, Netflix, Amazon and other providers have to adopt ORBX, something that the Mozilla-OTOY partnership is actively working on. They are hoping that their solution will be the one to put the format wars to rest, and allow consumers to collect the highest-definition content possible in a way that is format-agnostic. With respect to pricing, a ballpark figure suggested at the launch was $300 per year for OTOY’s cloud-rendering engine to take over one person’s computing needs. Pricing is still up in the air, but Urbach expects an AMI to launch later this year with the second generation of ORBX that will also include HDR encoding capabilities.

The videos below show streaming video and gaming through a browser using ORBX (via Mozilla).

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This is a kid. If you have a kid, and it’s not this kid, congratulations. Right now, this kid is probably calling you a queer on Xbox LIVE. When this kid grows up, he’s probably going to make people feel very uncomfortable in subways.

Despite what the title of this video says, this is not the funniest thing ever. I don’t even have a problem with the kid’s foul mouth. F*ck it, he’s right. Flamin’ hot cheetos are awesome. But don’t hate on banana chips, bro. They’re sweet, plus they have, like, mad potassium. Plus, who ever told him to drink ketchup? That’s just bad parenting.

[via HyperVocal]

Slayer guitarist and songwriter Jeff Hanneman passed away on Thursday leaving one of the biggest holes in the metal community since the loss of Pantera’s Darrell Abbott. Interestingly, Thursday also saw a partial reunion of Pantera, when vocalist Phil Anselmo and bass player Rex Brown joined Anthrax at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards to perform the Pantera classic, “This Love”.

This is a pretty big deal for Pantera fans holding out for a reunion, which appears highly unlikely as long as Anselmo and Vinnie Paul (Pantera drummer and Darrell’s brother) aren’t talking. At least it was something.

The performance was dedicated to Hanneman, and once “This Love” concluded, they launched into Slayer’s “Raining Blood”.

For someone with a serious leg injury, Lindsey Vonn sure moves around quite a bit.

Last month, Vonn was seen at the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia cheering on her new boyfriend, Tiger Woods. This week, Vonn attended a fundraiser in New York City for the Delete Blood Cancer bone marrow donor center, though Woods was nowhere in sight.

According to a New York Post report on the event, Vonn stated that Woods is preparing for the PGA’s Players Championship, which begins on May 9.

Vonn posted about the fundraiser on her Facebook page, stating that the cause is important to her because her uncle had multiple myeloma:

According to the Post report, Vonn was not wearing her leg brace underneath her long dress.

Vonn’s leg was injured in February following a horrific crash she endured at a competition in Austria. Since that time, she has been chronicling her physical therapy on her Facebook page. Vonn has stated that her recovery goal is to compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics.

NewSpring Capital said it closed its third growth equity fund, NewSpring Growth Capital III, with total commitments of $250 million. The fund exceeded its target of $200 million and is larger than the firm’s $136 million first growth equity fund, NewSpring Growth Capital, and $163 million second fund, NewSpring Growth Capital II.  The firm has combined assets under management of over $950 million.

PRESS RELEASE

NewSpring Capital Raises $250 Million Growth Equity Fund

Radnor, PA – May 3, 2013 – NewSpring Capital (“NSC”), a leading U.S. private equity firm, announced today the closing of its third growth equity fund, NewSpring Growth Capital III, L.P. (“NSG III” or the “Fund”), with total commitments exceeding the Fund’s target of $200 million and reaching its hard cap of $250 million.  NSG III will seek to build upon the successes of its predecessor funds, NewSpring Growth Capital, L.P., a $136 million growth equity fund and NewSpring Growth Capital II, L.P., a $163 million growth equity fund.  Since its inception in 1999, NSC has raised seven funds across its growth, healthcare and mezzanine platforms, with combined assets under management of over $950 million.

“We are extremely pleased with the continued support we receive from our existing investor base and are excited to have attracted a well-diversified group of new highly regarded institutional investors,” said Michael DiPiano, co-founder and Managing General Partner of NewSpring Capital.  The Fund’s Limited Partners consist of leading asset management firms, endowments, entrepreneurs, family offices, foundations, fund-of-funds, insurance companies and public pension plans.

NSG III will maintain its unique approach of partnering with leading growth stage businesses in the information technology, enabling technology and business services sectors, with an emphasis on the Mid-Atlantic region.  The NSG III investment team will leverage well established industry sourcing networks to identify and partner with the Mid-Atlantic region’s top entrepreneurs, providing capital and guidance to assist them in turning their visions into reality.  Successful historical partnerships include: eCount, Inc. {sold to Citigroup (NYSE: C)}, a leading electronic payments platform company; NitroSecurity, Inc. {sold to Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC)}, a prominent provider of security information and event management solutions; Nutrisystem, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTRI), a leading ecommerce based weight loss provider and TMG Health, Inc. (sold to Health Care Service Corporation), a major business process outsourcing company focused on government sponsored health insurance plans.

Marc Lederman, co-founder of NSC and General Partner of NSG III stated, “Since our founding, we have strived to position NewSpring Capital as the preferred partner of the top management teams in the Mid-Atlantic region.  We are truly excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for NSG III and its investors.”

“Through our operational backgrounds, we strive to deliver value added insights and guidance while maintaining a consistent, long term view of each investment,” added Glenn Rieger, General Partner of NSG III. “We are looking forward to building out NSG III’s portfolio and rewarding the faith our LPs placed in us by providing them with strong returns.”

NSG III is led by a stable team with more than 80 years of combined operational and investment experience.  Along with the three General Partners, Messrs. DiPiano, Lederman and Rieger, the Fund team also includes Eric Jensen, Principal, and eight investment professionals.

Similar to its predecessor funds, NSG III’s investment criteria consists of: i) Growth Stage Businesses focusing on capital efficient, scalable and disruptive business models typically with revenue at the time of investment of between $5 and $50 million; ii) transaction size of $5 to $25 million in equity capital, typically with minority ownership, with the ability to syndicate larger investments and iii) investing in Business Services, Enabling Technologies and Information Technology industries.

NSG III completed its first portfolio company investment in the fourth quarter of 2012 with an $8.2 million investment in eXelate, Inc., a leading provider of offline and online data sets for digital advertisers.

The post NewSpring Raises $250M For Third Growth Equity Fund appeared first on peHUB.