"tablets" entries

Update Mobility: The Year in Mobile

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As the end of December approaches, it’s time to take a look at the year that was. In a lot of ways, 2013 was a status quo year for mobile, with nothing earthshaking to report, just a steady progression of what already is getting more, um, is-y?

We started the year with Apple on top in the tablet space, Android on top in the handset space, and that’s how we ended the year. Microsoft appears to have abandoned the handset space after a decade of attempts to take market-share, and made their move on the tablet space instead with the Surface. In spite of expensive choreographer board room commercials, the Surface didn’t make a huge dent in Apple’s iPad dominance. But Microsoft did better than Blackberry, whose frantic flailing in the market has come to represent nothing so much as a fish out of water.

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Four short links: 31 January 2013

Four short links: 31 January 2013

Courier Prime, Lethal Education, Internet Numbers, Mobile Numbers

  1. Courier Prime — tweaked Courier “for screenplays” (!). (via BoingBoing)
  2. The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society (PDF) — education is dangerous to female extended family members. As can be seen in Table 1, when no exam is imminent the family death rate per 100 students (FDR) is low and is not related to the student’s grade in the class. The effect of an upcoming exam is unambiguous. The mean FDR jumps from 0.054 with no exam, to 0.574 with a mid-term, and to 1.042 with a final, representing increases of 10 fold and 19 fold respectively. (via Hacker News)
  3. Internet: 2012 in Numbers — lots of surprising numbers, with sources. Three that caught my eye: 42.1% – Internet penetration in China; 2.7 billion – Number of likes on Facebook every day; 59% – Share of global mobile data traffic that was video.
  4. 2013: The Year Ahead in Mobile (Business Insider) — Mobile is already 1/7 of global Internet traffic and growing its share quickly […] on pace to top 25% by year end. Interesting prediction that rich people already have devices, so everyone’s working on low-cost units so they can sell to new customers in “growth markets” aka developing world.
Four short links: 15 January 2013

Four short links: 15 January 2013

Gadgets Over Time, Telco Evil, Open Source Savings, and Plus-Sized Husky Tablet

  1. Electronic Gadgets in the NZ Consumer Price Index — your CPI is just as bizarre, trust me. (via Julie Starr)
  2. Captive Audience: Telecom Industry and Monopoly in the New Gilded Age (Amazon) — Foo camper and former Washington insider, now truth-teller about broken telco industry in the US. From Time’s review of the book and interview with her: Meanwhile, Comcast has sharply reduced its capital expenditures, which have now fallen to 14% of revenues from over 35% a decade ago, even as it enjoys a whopping 95% profit margin on its broadband service. “They’re not expanding and they’re not enhancing their service,” Crawford says. “They’ve done their investment, now they’re just harvesting.” Not surprisingly, Comcast’s stock price increased over 50% in the last year, and nearly 200% over the last four years. “Shareholders are doing well,” Crawford says. “The rest of the country, not so great.”
  3. Barclays Cut Software Expenditure 90% With Open Source (The Inquirer) — “We’ve been making significant savings in our technology platform by doing a lot of the work in-house to develop and launch our own applications rapidly,” he said. “It means we can write new applications once and then develop them using an open source model, rather than rewriting them again for legacy systems.” (via The Linux Foundation)
  4. Lenovo Has a 27″ Tablet Due This Summer — USD1700 and I want one. The label “tablet” is a tough pill to swallow (ho ho) but it’d make an awesome table. That you could never put anything on. Hmm.

Commerce Weekly: Predicting 2013

Industry executives predict commerce trends, mobile shoppers are Apple users, and the genius of the barcode.

Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week.

Predicting the 2013 commerce space

As 2012 wraps up, industry executives are looking ahead to what 2013 might bring. In a report at eCommerceBytes, executives at e-commerce and Internet service company Rakuten pulled together five trends to watch in 2013, including increased use of video on e-commerce sites; a market shift toward specialized retailers, both brick-and-mortar and online; and the advent of curated commerce, or “shopping for a lifestyle” as opposed to shopping for individual items.

Executives also highlighted mobile integrations, noting that they expect an increase in in-store integration via apps, QR codes and augmented reality. Predicted trends also included a change in the way consumers pay: “Services like PayPal and Apple’s iTunes have already begun to centralize payments on mobile, but the next step will be services such as Square that offer sellers the ability to receive card payments with their existing smartphone and a simple plug-in device,” the report says.

PayPal president David Marcus also took a look ahead. He sees cash registers going mobile, with customers able to pay from the store aisle or even the changing room, and predicts location-aware and context-relevent shopping and payments will be more disruptive than many now expect. In the payment space, he sees mobile wallets, consumer loyalty programs and coupon platforms merging into one efficient and convenient business. He also predicts NFC will die a slow death in 2013: “it’s not solving a real consumer problem,” he writes at the PayPal blog, “and it’s not providing additional value to encourage me (or anyone else, for that matter) to change my behavior.”

In related news, Square COO Keith Rabois pulled together some predictions for what consumers and retailers can expect from Square in 2013. In an interview with CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, Rabois said Starbucks’ customers haven’t seen anything yet, that they can “expect full Square Wallet functionality” in 2013 as well as new features and “major enhancements” — Rabois said Square’s partnership with Starbucks is in its “first inning.”

Rabois noted, however, that Square is just the beginning, that “anything new that’s developed in the coming months will also be rolled out for use at every single merchant that’s part of the Square Wallet program” and that additional retail partnership announcements can be expected in the coming year. Looking further ahead? “Rabois said that the company envisions Square Wallet working ‘everywhere,'” Terdiman reports, “from personal trainers to interactions between friends to contractors working people’s homes.”

Read more…

Four short links: 2 November 2012

Four short links: 2 November 2012

Tablet table, Google contest for students, watch your incentives, research on web search abandonment.

  1. Latest Tablets (Luke Wroblewski) — table showing the astonishing variety of tablets released in the last two months.
  2. Google Code-In Contest for High Schoolersan international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. (via Andy Oram)
  3. Watch Your Incentives — NASDAQ added two new incentives programs, and robotraders responded. On November 1st, there were 369 seconds where the number of quotes in BAC exceeded 17,000; a total of 6.6 million quotes. During those seconds, only 1,879 trades executed. Between market open (9:30am) and 12:45, BAC had 7.8 million quotes and 116,000 trades. Which means 85% of all BAC quotes occurred in those 369 seconds. Which means it is likely that one algo from one firm (all of this quote spam is from Nasdaq) is responsible for 85% of all canceled orders in BAC. (via Robert O’Brien)
  4. Predicting Web Search Abandonment Rationales (PDF) — Microsoft Research paper on how to predict why people cease to search or to click through on the search results. I’m really impressed by how well they could distinguish “bah, the Internet doesn’t have it, I’m giving up” from “oh, the answer was in a search result snippet, my work here is done.” (via Mark Alen)
Four short links: 1 May 2012

Four short links: 1 May 2012

Self-directed Education, Bunnie Huang, ssh in the Browser, and Screen Size

  1. Sugata Mitra: Beyond The Hole in the Wall (YouTube) — great talk by the education researcher Sugata Mitra whose big kick is self-directed learning. Great stories about the deployments and effects he’s had with technology and supervision rather than teaching, but the end is a real kicker: the core skills we have are literacy, search, and belief. Of the three, the most problematic is belief: when and how do/should we turn something we’ve read into something ingrained, accepted, and built-upon? (via Tara Taylor-Jorgenson)
  2. Interview with Bunnie Huang (Makezine) — fascinating interview with the hardware guy behind the Chumby. It’s all gold, from rapid iteration at early stages of hardware through to the need to simplify. I think one of the most gut-wrenching realizations that small companies have to make is that they aren’t Apple. Apple spends over a billion dollars a year on tooling. An injection molding tool may cost around $40k and 2-3 months to make; Apple is known to build five or six simultaneously and then scrap all but one so they can evaluate multiple design approaches. But for them, tossing $200k in tooling to save 2 months time to market is peanuts. But for a startup that raised a million bucks, it’s unthinkable. Apple also has hundreds of staff; a startup has just a few members to do everything. The precision and refinement of Apple’s products come at an enormous cost that is just out of the reach of startups.
  3. ssh as Chrome Extension — can’t help but feel that building a secure login system on top of web browsers on top of operating systems isn’t going to be more secure than building a secure login system on top of the operating system.
  4. (Tablet) Size Matters (Luke Wroblewski) — as the screen gets bigger, we use the Web more.

Publishing News: Ereader ownership doubles, again

Two surveys bode well for digital publishing, HMH teams with Amazon, and books aren't the library's only game.

One survey said ereader and tablet ownership doubled during the holidays; a second showed that Amazon may not be losing money on its Kindle Fire sales. Also, Amazon got a new print edition distributor and the library discussion elevated beyond ebooks.

Publishing News: Amazon's Kindle Format 8 dashes hopes for EPUB3 compatibility

Amazon launches KF8, The Guardian becomes more engaging, and tablet users don't discriminate between print and digital.

Any hopes of EPUB3 becoming an across-the-board publishing format standard were dashed by Amazon's new KF8 format. Also, The Guardian launched two new features and a Pew study looked at tablet user behavior.