Facebook No. 1 Mobile App Of 2013 But Google Has 5 Of Top 10

Nielsen published a range of year-end data today. Among other things the measurement firm said that 65 percent of American cell phone users now own smartphones. By comparison comScore says the figure is 62 percent. Regardless it means there are now more than 150 million smartphone users in the US.

Nielsen also reported that 29 percent of US households have at least one tablet. If there are roughly 115 million US households that argues there are roughly 33 million tablets in American homes. However this number undercounts the actual number of tablets in the market.

A previous Pew survey found that 35 percent of Americans over 16 owned tablets. The Pew data, if extrapolated, argue that there are more than 80 million tablets (as of September 2013) in US households. After the holidays are over that number could swell to over 100 million.

Not counting iPads and iPod Touch devices, Nielsen found that Apple had a 41 percent OS share of the smartphone market compared with 52 percent for Android. The most recent comScore US smartphone data reflect a very comparable 52.2 percent (Android) to 40.6 percent (Apple).

Nielsen also reported that Facebook was the top mobile app of 2013 and the Facebook-owned Instagram came in seventh but it was the fastest-growing app of the year. The second-fastest growing was Apple Maps.

Google dominated the rest of the list with five out of the top 10 apps. It takes up the most mobile app “shelf space.” Twitter came in at number 10.

Source: http://www.marketingland.com/

AT&T seeks to defend Austin, Texas, market with faster Internet

(Reuters) - AT&T Inc plans to start speeding up its Internet service in Austin, Texas, in December, to defend itself against a planned ultra-high-speed Internet and television service to be launched by GoogleInc in the same city next year.

Texas' capital city, with a population of 840,000, has a reputation as a high-tech industry hub.

After Google said in April that it would bring a service of 1 gigabit-per-second to Austin users,AT&T followed with a promise to match the offer if it obtained the same regulatory terms granted to Google by local authorities.

AT&T said on Tuesday that it would start by offering a 300 megabits-per-second service in December, and that by mid-2014 the speed would increase to up to 1 gigabit per second. It said this would allow users to download an entire high-definition movie in less than 2 minutes.

The AT&T service promised for December is almost seven times faster than AT&T's fastest existing home broadband offering.

Google had initially billed its first "Google Fiber" broadband offer, launched in Kansas City, Missouri, last year, as a test project to spur development of new Web services and technology.

But it has since suggested that high-speed Internet could be a viable business for the company, causing traditional broadband rivals such as AT&T to prepare a response.

AT&T's chief executive, Randall Stephenson, told investors at a conference on September 24 that AT&T was working on the Austin project and that he expected the company to do "multiple marketslike this over the next few years."

AT&T said it will reach "tens of thousands of customer locations" in Austin and the surrounding areas this year with its new speeds and will expand to more neighborhoods in 2014.

Google's Fiber service, which the company says provides Internet speeds 100 times faster than today's average broadband service, will be available in Austin by mid-2014. Google began offering Fiber in Kansas City in late 2012 and will make the service available in Provo, Utah, by the end of this year.

Source: http://www.reuters.com

Nexus 4 16GB showing as sold out on Google Play, Nexus 5 expected soon

 It looks like the curtain is slowly coming down on Google’s flagship Nexus 4 handset, with the 16GB version of the popular device on Monday showing as ‘sold out’ on the US Google Play store. The 8GB version sold out at the start of the month.

Of course, the “we’re out of inventory, please check back soon” message doesn’t rule out the possibility that new stock will come in, but recent price cuts for the handset make it look very much like a stock-clearance move prior to the launch of the expected Nexus 5.

The timing looks about right too – the Nexus 4 hit the market in November last year, while its predecessors, the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, were also both released at the tail end of the year (December 2010 and November 2011, respectively).

In addition, a report from the Australia-based Ausdroid site over the weekend said Google’s new phone will be announced on October 14, though the site didn’t name the source of its information.

It’s widely believed the new handset is being manufactured by LG – also the maker of the Nexus 4 – despite LG’s vice president appearing to claim earlier this year that the company was done with building Nexus devices.

The current Nexus 4 smartphone launched in November last year sporting a 4.7-inch display with a 1280 x 768 resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera and 1.3-megapixel front one, and 2GB of RAM. The new model is rumored to be based on LG’s new G2 flagship smartphone, and come with a larger display, Snapdragon 800 processor and LTE support.

Google itself has remained tight-lipped about Nexus 4 successor, although it seemed to make an early appearance a couple of weeks ago when it apparently turned up in a Google video promoting the next version of its Android operating system, 4.4 KitKat. In a short piece documenting the unveiling of a KitKat-esque statue on the company’s Mountain View campus, we get a glimpse of a guy holding what appears to be the Nexus 5. Google pulled the video when word got out about the boo-boo.

Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com

Bump Mobile Contact Sharing App Acquired By Google, Will Stay Alive For Now

After raising nearly $20 million and becoming one of the most downloaded mobile apps but failing to find real revenue, Bump Technologies has been acquired by Google. Its namesake app Bump lets you physically tap phones together to share contact info and more, and it will stay open for download. Congratulations might not be the right word, but Bump could have a bright future at the Googleplex.

Bump’s David Lieb writes “We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms. So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google.” It appears that the whole 25-person team including Lieb and fellow co-founder Andy Huibers will be coming aboard at the search giant.

Bump and the collaborativephoto sharing app called Flock it released last year “will continue to work as they always have for now; stay tuned for future updates.” The blog post doesn’t mention what will happen to the Bump Pay app the startup built on top of PayPal that lets users make peer-to-peer mobile payments by knocking fists.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, so it’s hard to tell exactly how strong of an exit this was for Bump and its investors, which include Y Combinator, Sequoia Captial, Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and many angels.

Bump gained huge popularity by being an early App Store hit. Instead of having to clumsily type out a new friend or professional colleague’s contact information, you and someone else could both open Bump, bump fists together while holding your phones, and the contact info, photos, audio, video, or other selected files would be shared between you instantly. As of March it had hit 1 billion photos shared and 125 million downloads, up from 100 million in August.

With time, though, other ways to quickly share contact information emerged. Meanwhile, Bump remained free and wasn’t earning any meaningful revenue so paying its strong mobile engineering team may have burned through the $16.5 million round led by Andreessen that the startup raised in November 2011.

Then Apple dropped a bomb on Bump. It announced a new feature called AirDropfor iOS 7 that would make sharing files between nearby phone a native feature. That could have curtailed Bump’s steady growth. It was time for Bump to throw in the towel.

Based on these factors, the acquisition may have been more lucrative than a basic acquihire, but not big enough to be considered a home run.

From one perspective, the sale might be considered a failure. Bump could have minted if it found a way to monetize its huge user base, but couldn’t find a way to go it alone and so instead folded into a tech giant. From a different perspective, Bump’s soft landing could be said to have kept investors from losing money while giving its team an opportunity for greater impact thanks to Google’s resources.

What may have interested Google actually isn’t Bump itself, but Flock. The app uses geolocation to determine which of your Facebook friends you’re nearby, and then offers to create a collaborative photo album with them that includes all the shots any of you took at that party, concert, or day in the park. The idea is that your friends might not broadcast all those photos to social media, but you’d still want to see them as you all shared the experience together. The Flock design philosophy was to strip as much out of the photo sharing process as possible to make it seem almost automatic.

Google might look to turn Flock into a part of Google+ as a way to simultaneously compete with Facebook’s photo sharing and Dropbox’s photo saving services. Google+’s Party Mode was a pioneer in collaborative photo sharing centered around events, but the late-comer social network has still failed to gain serious engagement. Facebook recently launched shared albums, making it more dire for Google to get deeper into the space.

The acquisition also scores Google a trove of mobile communicationpatents that it could use to help nearby devices sync up. These include an app noticing that sensors on two devices share similar readings to determine that they’re in proximity. Google could use these patents to improve Android and create richer alternatives to near-field communication (NFC).

With Bump and Flock’s features combined with Google’s built in-audience, the ideals of“irreducible” design the startup embodied could make a bigger impact without having to generate revenue directly.

Source: http://techcrunch.com

Behind Microsoft Deal, the Specter of a Nokia Android Phone

SEATTLE — Before Microsoft reached a deal to buy Nokia’s phone business, there was a possibility that Nokia could have switched its smartphones to Google’s Android operating system sometime after late 2014.

And now, it is clear that a Nokia Android phone was more than a possibility. It was real.

A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company’s Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. 

Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.

Another person said the idea of Nokia using Android wasn’t a part of Microsoft’s discussions with the company about an acquisition, even though that was widely recognized as a possibility.

On one level, Nokia’s Android effort is not shocking. Companies often have “plan Bs” in the works in case they need to change course on strategy or want to help negotiate better terms with partners. Getting Android to run on Nokia’s hardware was not a Herculean engineering effort, according to the people familiar with the project.

Still, a functioning Nokia Android phone could have served as a powerful prop in Nokia’s dealings with Microsoft, a tangible reminder that Nokia could move away from Microsoft’s Windows Phone software and use the Android operating system, which powers more than three out of every four smartphones sold globally.

Susan Sheehan, a spokeswoman for Nokia, declined to comment, as did Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman.

Nokia reached a deal with Microsoft in 2011 to use Windows Phone on its smartphones, but Nokia had an option to exit that partnership at the end of 2014. Unraveling that deal would have been painful for both parties. It would have been devastating to Microsoft’s mobile phone efforts since Nokia accounts for more than 80 percent of the Windows Phone handsets sold. For Nokia, changing such an important ingredient in its products would have been a costly setback too.

Nokia has faced criticism that it made the wrong decision in choosing Windows Phone over Android several years ago. Nokia’s share of the smartphone market fell to 3 percent during the first half of 2013, from 32.8 percent in 2010.

There is no telling for sure whether Nokia would have been better off with Android over that time. It is possible the design of the operating system and greater abundance of Android apps might have put Nokia in a better spot.

The current status of Nokia’s Android project is unclear. Presumably, after Microsoft completes its acquisition of Nokia’s phone business early next year, there won’t be much future for it.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Google Launches ‘Chrome Apps’ for When the Web Falls Short

Ever since Google and its hardware partners launched the first Chromebooks in 2011, they’ve argued that a browser-based operating system could be enough to serve your computing needs.

Now it’s the fifth anniversary of the Chrome web browser, and Google is admitting, in a sense, that the first Chromebooks were a little too idealistic. The company has just launched “Chrome Apps,” a set of applications that run within the Chrome browser, but look and behave like the kind of apps you’d see on a tablet or PC. You can find these apps in the Chrome Web Store on both Windows and Chrome OS, with Mac support coming in about six weeks.

“Our hope really is to dispel the notion that Chrome OS is just a web browser,” Erik Kay, a product lead on Chrome Apps, said in an interview. “We always thought that just a web browser was actually not a bad thing–it’s immense and powerful–but there are legitimate uses that people … can’t do today on their Chromebooks, and our hope is to really open that up.”

This is not Google’s first attempt at offering apps in Chrome. In 2010, the company opened the Chrome Web Store, with the goal of promoting websites that were app-like in nature. Some of these apps even worked offline.

But Chrome Apps go a little bit further. They open up in their own windows without the usual address bar and browser navigation buttons. They support additional features such as USB and Bluetooth device connectivity, and they’re all made to work without an Internet connection.

“There are some things the web can’t do, and so in order to make it a full-featured desktop operating system we needed to bring richer app capabilities to Chrome OS,” Kay said.

A few examples: Pocket lets you save articles from around the web and read them offline in a low-clutter format; Pixlr Touch Up lets you crop, resize and tweak photos without an Internet connection; Until AM is a DJ app for mixing local and online music files; and Cracking Sands is a racing game with Xbox 360 controller support.

It’s sort of weird to hear people from the Chrome team extol the virtues of offline, native apps, and I do wonder if some of the purity of Google’s browser-based operating system is being lost. Why bother with Chrome OS if it’s just going to become another app-driven operating system? For that matter, why use Chrome apps on a Windows PC or Mac when those platforms already have their own app stores?

Kay insisted that the team’s philosophy hasn’t changed. The allure of Chrome, he said, is that users can work in the browser on multiple devices–Mac, PC or Chromebook–and have all their apps and data travel with them. Chrome provides app developers with tools to enable that kind of syncing across devices. “These apps are still going to be cloud-enabled by default,” Kay said.

Google also brushes off the notion that it’s trying to supplant the open web with its own native apps. “We are not trying to have every bit of functionality people can imagine be running on our platform,” Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, the lead product manager for Chrome Apps, said in an interview. “We want to make sure we exist and interoperate seamlessly with the web.”

On some level, I agree. Several Chrome Apps, such as Pocket’s offline reader and The Economist’s slick new app, weren’t available in the browser before, and Chrome now gives these developers a platform to work with. That’s good for users, and good for Google.

But I still remember being idealistic about web apps that worked in any browser, not just Chrome, and thinking they might some day have all the capabilities of native apps. To hear Google’s Chrome people admit that web apps aren’t always enough–well, it’s a strange new direction as Chrome turns five.

Source: http://techland.time.com

Microsoft has gone ahead and made it official by slipping a $7.2 billion ring on Nokia's finger to acquire the Finnish company's phone business. The deal, which had been rumored for some time, puts that last big piece into place for Microsoft to have end-to-end control over the Windows Phone ecosystem. In essence, Microsoft has become Apple.

Except it isn't Apple. Certainly, the Nokia deal is basically an admission that Apple's approach in mobile — that is owning and operating the hardware, software and services around its devices — are best one. But Microsoft and Windows Phone are different animals from Apple and iOS. Besides ecosystem and market share, the companies have wildly different cultures.

True, Microsoft is undergoing a top-to-bottom organizational shift to adapt its culture, and having 32,000 Nokia employees (including 18,300 who are "directly involved" in manufacturing) will inject a little Finnish sauce into Redmond. But you don't just become Apple by adopting its strategy. And if Microsoft needs reminding of that, it should look no further than its own Surface tablets, which have failed to become the viable iPad competitor they were meant to be.

Apple, Google and Microsoft

In other ways, the deal makes Microsoft more like Google, since both companies acquired a hardware partner (in Google's case, Motorola) to give them some device clout and beef up their patent and IP portfolios (Microsoft's was actually already pretty big). At the same time, they have to keep existing partners happy. HTC, Samsung and Huawei can't be as excited about Windows Phone today as they were yesterday.

But when Google acquired Motorola, it was a struggling player in the crowded field of Android handset manufacturers. By contrast, Nokia is by far the biggest maker of Window Phones — again making Microsoft more like Apple in bringing that manufacturing in-house.

There is another pesky problem that some others have already pointed out: We already have an Apple. Smartphone users who are willing to pay a premium to buy a device with a tight ecosystem (not a healthy app catalog) have, for the most part, already done so. How can Microsoft hope to make future gains with less of the market to work with?

Rising From Asha

The answer lies in a key part of the deal, which is Nokia's feature phone business. As part of the acquisition, Microsoft gets Nokia's Asha-based handsets and the right to market them under the Nokia brand. Microsoft says it wants to use Asha phones as an "on ramp" to Windows Phones.

The Asha phones could play an important role in overseas markets, particularly places like India, Brazil, China and Russia, which a Nielsen study recently found were areas ripe for smartphone growth. While it's hard for any smartphone maker to stand out over others in these areas, there are two brands that have some pre-existing clout in those markets: BlackBerry and Nokia.

BlackBerry obviously has its own problems, and the generational shift from the old BlackBerry OS to BlackBerry 10 hasn't been much of an on ramp for those phones, at least not yet. Looking at some recent numbers, however, Windows Phone is having better luck, and if Microsoft could come up with some key services that cut across the Asha/Windows Phone divide, it could push the platform even further.

That's a big if, though, and looking at Microsoft's previous attempt at creating robust feature phones, the ill-fated Kin line, doesn't give much hope. But that product failed because it targeted the wrong market (kids) at the wrong time (the iPhone was ascendant). Played right, Asha could help solidify Microsoft's mobile game.

The Last Mobile War

Buying Nokia's device business isn't a genius move. In fact, it's incredibly obvious — but at least it puts Microsoft on par with the other major mobile platforms. That's a good thing for Windows Phone, but the question is: Is it forward-looking enough?

By emulating Apple's ecosystem strategy, I can't help but think Microsoft just put into place a great strategy for winning the last war. The smartphone market certainly still has lots of opportunity, but it's much closer to a finished work than a blank canvas. Microsoft's now ready to put its mark on mobile with Nokia's phone business, but what about wearables, data-based services and in-car integration? The biggest innovations yet to come in mobile have nothing to do with phones.

It's an interesting coincidence that Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia phones comes about a day before Samsung will debut one of the most anticipated gadgets of the year: the Galaxy Gearsmartwatch, which connects with your phone to open up entirely new experiences with apps. Which story do you think will better define the mobile in the years to come?

Source: http://mashable.com

Google Announces 1B Total Android Activations, Names Next Version ‘KitKat’

Apple made waves this morning when it announced its oft-rumored September 10 event, but Google isn’t giving up the day’s limelight without a fight — according to a post on Sundar Pichai’s Google+ page, more than 1 billion Android devices have been activated to date. That’s not exactly a shock considering the sort of momentum we’ve seen in activations over the past few months. CEO Larry Page said there were 1.5 million Android activations a day back in July and Android device activations hit the 900 million mark earlier this year.

Even more puzzling than that is the name of the next version of Android, which bucks the long-standing trend of generic dessert names. As it turns out, Android 4.4 is going to be called “KitKat”and not “Key Lime Pie” as earlier thought, though at this point there’s still no official word on when we can expect to see the build go live. Kit Kats are of course a popular chocolate treat made by Nestle, and at this point we’re trying to determine how much this crazy little deal is worth, but the promotional blitz has already begun.

UPDATE: Google has confirmed to the BBC that the idea for the name originated with them, and that no money is changing hands as part of the deal.

Nestle has already kicked off a bizarre cross-promotion strategy that will bestow Nexus 7s and Google Play credits on those who find specially branded Kit Kat candy bars emblazoned with the Android logo, à la Willy Wonka. Yes, this is really happening. Apparently the agreement was finalized behind closed doors at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and all parties involved amazingly managed to keep the name under wraps (I slay me) for six months despite the fact that Nestle has been churning out that Android-laden packaging for 50 million candy bars.

Though the name itself is enough to get Android fans and mobile pundits talking, Google may be looking to expand its scope with this latest update. The newly anointed Android KitKit landing pageclaims that it’s the company’s goal “to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody,” which may hint at an expansion into different hardware segments. Google already has some skin in the smartphone and tablet games thanks to its acquisition of Motorola Mobility and hardware partnerships with Asus and LG, but it’s possible we could see Android KitKit powering a smartwatch — a move made partially possible by Google’s quiet acquisition of WIMM Labs last year.

Source: http://techcrunch.com

Google Plunges Deeper Into Smartwatch Wars With WIMI

Google, oft rumored to be working on a smartwatch, quietly bought WIMM Labs last year to light a fire under the effort.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed to CNET that Google has acquired smartwatch maker WIMM. The takeover was first reported by GigaOm.

Smartwatch maker WIMM went dark last year, posting a cryptic thank-you message on its Web site citing "an exclusive, confidential relationship" for its technology.

Similar to previous reports of a coming Google smartwatch, the latest says the company has the work on the product -- including WIMM's employees -- centered in the Android unit, rather than its X Lab. That could mean a Google watch comes to market faster than the wearable Google has been trumpeting all year, Google Glass, which was a product of X Lab.

Though upstart tech companies have already introduced a slew of watches, giants are lumbering into the field too. Samsung is expected to unveil a smartwatch on September 4 called Galaxy Gear, and Apple has been rumored to be coming out with one.

Source:http://news.cnet.com

Google and Microsoft Spar Again Over YouTube Windows App

 Redmond, Wash., and Mountain View, Calif., are at it again, leaving Windows Phone users inconvenienced. 

Just two days after a new YouTube app for the Windows Phone debuted, Google has blocked the app — again. Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed to Mashable in a statement that it has disabled the app over grievances with a terms of service violation:
 

We’re committed to providing users and creators with a great and consistent YouTube experience across devices, and we’ve been working with Microsoft to build a fully featured YouTube for Windows Phone app, based on HTML5. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully-featured YouTube experience, and has instead re-released a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service. It has been disabled. We value our broad developer community and therefore ask everyone to adhere to the same guidelines.

A Microsoft spokesperson also told Mashable the app has been blocked but did not elaborate: “Google is blocking our updated YouTube app for Windows Phone. We are working with them to resolve the issue.”

This is not the first time this has happened. Earlier this year, Google and Microsoft bickered over Microsoft failing to include advertising on the YouTube app for Windows Phones. Google then demanded that Microsoft take YouTube off the Windows Phone OS because of its lack of ads. The tech giants eventually made amends in May, and Microsoft released its latest app Tuesday.

Thursday's new inconvenience appeared to baffle and irritate some Windows Phone users: customer reviews on the app's page in the Windows Phone store clearly showed customer frustrations. "Pathetic," said user Matthew. "Not working after last update," user Sara said. "Waited ages for this app and it doesn't work ... Thanks Microsoft. It just says 'something went wrong ... We don't know what,'" said user Stanley.

Source: http://mashable.com