Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Flurry: iOS and Android devices are being adopted faster than any consumer technology in history


According to a report by mobile app analytics company Flurry, iOS and Android devices are being adopted quite fast. They’re growing so fast, in fact, that the current growth rate has surpassed that of any other consumer technology in history.
The first aspect of this report is fairly obvious: smartphones have been gaining ground for quite some time and continue to spread far beyond the US and Europe. What’s special here is what Flurry found when pitting this revolution against others in our industry. The company reports that iOS and Android devices are being adopted “10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption.”
Out of all this, with a claimed 90% reliability in device detection, Flurry states that an estimated 640 million iOS and Android devices were in use during last month alone.
TopCountries byActiveDevices resized 600 520x398 Flurry: iOS and Android devices are being adopted faster than any consumer technology in history
As you can see, the report details exactly where this growth has occurred (above), and where it appears to be heading (below).
FastestGrowingCountries byActiveDevices resized 600 520x398 Flurry: iOS and Android devices are being adopted faster than any consumer technology in history
We’ve followed Flurry’s reports (and covered them) for quite a while now, and while it’s impossible for a third-party to track this sort of information with 100% accuracy, its reports tend to hold some truth when taken with a grain of salt. In this case, the message is clear: Mobile continues to be the future of computing and for the time being, statistics show this is a two player game.

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Saturday, August 11, 2012

Test-Test


Remember how blown away people were when Gmail launched in 2004?
Google Fiber feels like the same leap of innovation. It's been a long time since we saw anything like this from the search and advertising giant.
Back when Gmail launched, the other free email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were offering less than 5MB of storage -- that's five megabytes. Google trumped them all with 1GB of free storage. With so much storage, there was no need to trash anything. You could archive it and keep it forever.
Better yet, Gmail's search meant you could easily find any email you wanted, even from years ago. There was no reason to put things into different folders, use flags, or any of the other tricks we used to keep track of mail on other platforms. Threaded conversations, while hated by some, were nonetheless a new and innovative way of keeping track of email chains with multiple parties. 
broadband vs compute vs storage
Google
Gmail also paved the way for Google's gradual move into business apps -- most Google enterprise sales still lead with Gmail. Apps is more of a nice but not entirely necessary add-on.
Google Fiber is like Gmail on many levels:
  • It exposes how slow the incumbents have been to innovate. Google Fiber makes the cable-based ISPs look pathetic. It promises to offer speeds up to 1,000Mbps downstream and upstream, for only $70 a month. That's theoretically fast enough to download a high-definition movie in under a minute, although speeds could still be constrained by bottlenecks on the distribution servers or elsewhere in the network. Comcast's best home package offers 50Mbps downstream and 10Mbps downstream. All Google Fiber customers also get 1TB of free storage. If they buy TV service for an extra $50 a month, Google will throw in a $200 Nexus 7 tablet to be used as a remote control. Google is also giving away -- for free -- a package that offers 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Google even thumbed its nose at the incumbents with a slide showing how slowly Internet access speed has been growing compared with compute power and storage (see above) -- which is exactly what one would expect to happen given the lack of competition most broadband ISPs face in most parts of the country. 
  • Google used its hardware expertise. Google was able to get prices so low, in part, because it designed and built all the hardware for the system itself. This is a good reminder that although Google wasn't a consumer electronics company until recently, Google has actually been designing hardware for its data centers for more than a decade. It was this data center efficiency that allowed Gmail to offer way more free storage than competitors back in 2004.
  • It paves the way for new business areas. For Google, the main business purpose of Fiber is to give people faster Internet access, so they'll spend more time online -- where they're more likely to use a Google product and click a Google-sold ad. But just like Gmail unlocked an enterprise business, Fiber could unlock a whole new business as an ISP and TV provider. This isn't a loss leader -- Google CFO Patrick Pichette said yesterday that Google intends to make money on it. 
This is what Google products used to be like before they started chasing Facebook with one social experiment after another.
It had been a long time since Google blew me away with any of their new. Yesterday, they did.
Now, we just need Google to roll out Fiber to the rest of the country.

 
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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Lenovo Unveils the Windows Tablet We’ve Been Waiting For



If you thought the Microsoft Surface was only Windows tablet worth talking about, think again. Lenovo just unveiled the first Windows 8 tablet to pack an Intel mobile chip, making it a full-on Windows PC in a very light form factor.
The product is called the ThinkPad Tablet 2 (Lenovo has never been good at naming things), and it’s an impressive piece of hardware. It has a 10.1-inch screen, is 0.39 of an inch thick and weighs just 1.3 pounds.
The star of this show is Intel’s Clover Trail processor, though. Before the Tablet 2, Windows 8 tablets had to be either Windows RT machines, which can’t run older Windows apps and look to deliver less than the full Windows experience, or devices with power-hungry Intel Core processors, necessitating more bulk and cooling fans.
Clover Trail, in theory, gets you the best of both worlds. It’s an Intel Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor, meaning it’s designed for power efficiency and portability, negating the need for extra bulk and cooling fans. But it has none of the weaknesses of Windows RT, meaning this is fully featured Windows PC, able to run Windows 8 Pro, the “proper” version of Office, and all your Windows 7 apps as well.

Besides its mighty chip, the Tablet 2 has mini HDMI and USB 2.0 ports, a microSD card slot and stereo speakers. Options include 3G/4G connectivity, an NFC (near-field communication) chip, a fingerprint reader and a keyboard dock.
Handling the Tablet 2 for a few minutes, we found it to be shockingly light. It’s hard to believe you’re handling a real PC. Tapping and scrolling through a few apps, the machine was very responsive to the touch with not stuttering. The bright 1,366 x 768 anti-glare display looked great.
Sadly, Lenovo hasn’t revealed the one spec that really matters: the price. It’s still a big question mark what a full-featured Windows 8 tablet is going to cost. Microsoft has said the Surface Pro — which is based on an Intel Core processor, not Clover Trail — will be “on par” with Ultrabooks, but we’re hoping the lack of keyboard might shave off a decent amount. We probably won’t know until late October, when both Windows 8 and the Tablet 2 will be on store shelves.


                                                                                                           





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Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Twitter Followers For Sale -- $17 for 1,000


Let’s say you’re new to social media. You use it in a professional capacity. You want to have a substantial Twitter following so that
you can look impressive and attract even more followers. Do you:
A)   Work hard at building your online presence, slog through tweets and retweets, cruise popular hashtags, think of interesting, insightful things to say and give people real reason to want to subscribe to your feed.
B)   Shell out a couple of bucks.
For a lot of people, this isn’t a hard decision. Somebody’s Twitter following may be an indication of social clout but a growing industry of undergroundEbay resellers and websites are putting a fairly cheap price tag on new followers – I found a few websites selling for $17-18 for 1,000. I ran a quick experiment, and buying them couldn’t be simpler — just put in your name and payment info, and the followers are delivered a few days later.  A source that asked to remain anonymous said that he recently purchased 225,000 followers for a corporate account.
Jason Ding at Barracuda Labs ran a more extensive experiment. His team took to Ebay and Google to purchase between 20,000 and 70,000 followers for three accounts, then analyzed where all this traffic was coming from. The report found around 72,212 fake accounts in total, all following just under 2001 people – indicating that Twitter might use that number for detecting spam abuse. It also found 78 separate dealers offering this service.
Some of the followers are obvious fakes – no followers, pictures, or tweets. Others are quite convincing. Here’s a description of a fake follower that says as much as anything about the way people portray themselves on Twitter:
“News hound, super sleuth, yoga girl, wannabe foodie, resturant snob, world traveler.”
A representative from Twitter pointed out that these sorts of services could be in violation of these bullets in Twitters Terms of Service.
  • If you have attempted to “sell” followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn;
  •  Creating or purchasing accounts in order to gain followers;
  •  Using or promoting third-party sites that claim to get you more followers (such as follower trains, sites promising “more followers fast,” or any other site that offers to automatically add followers to your account);
These violations don’t seem to be slowing down the market. Youtube views,Facebook likes and all manner of stats and numbers are on the market as well. Some sellers operate right out in the open, others have ways of staying undetected. Some accounts follow a few famous people or average accounts to avoid suspicion, and abusers buy from different sources to keep trends from emerging. The more expensive the followers, the more real they’re likely to appear.
Abusers may be in good company, as well. Ding’s Report analyzed Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney’s impressive one-day 17% jump in Twitter followers. It found that of those new followers, 25% were less than three weeks old, and 23% had never tweeted. Newt Gingrich has also been accused of similar Twitter fraud.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone – social media clout is big business, and it fuels legitimate operations and underground scams alike.  Take this along with the recent news that Facebook is flooded with phony likes and fake profiles, and think a little bit harder about just what those numbers are saying – if anything.


                                                                                                           





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Tuesday, August 7, 2012

MIT Emotion-Sensing Start-Up Affectiva Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Horizon Ventures


Affectiva, a start-up that develops products that detect people’s emotional states, has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures and Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins.
The company spun out of MIT and develops products such as a Webcam-based facial-coding tool and a wristband biometric sensor. The big idea here is that by measuring things like tiny movements in a person’s facial muscles, it’s possible to detect how they actually feel about something, rather than asking them to try to describe it.
Affectiva might have big-time backers now, but its technology was originally developed by MIT professor Rosalind W. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby to help children with autism understand facial expressions. Now it is primarily used for market research by brands with partners like WPP Millward Brown (WPP is also a backer) and the IPG Media Lab.
The company is broadening its application to any sort of video content — for instance, measuring audience reaction to movie trailers and TV shows — and adding mobile and social support.
CEO Dave Berman said Affectiva has also set up a charitable trust with a big chunk of company stock for the benefit of people who have difficulty regulating their emotions, and that autism spectrum research continues through MIT.
As Affectiva has gathered more data, it has become more adept at detecting subtle expressions, like a smirk, and can now mine data to understand the contrasts in emotion between people of different genders and countries, among other things.
“We have the largest repository of facial responses ever collected in the world,” contended el Kaliouby.
Affectiva customers can see a moment-to-moment score of each participant’s emotion while experiencing their content. (You can try how “Affdex” works by watching Super Bowl ads with your Webcam turned on in a demo on Affectiva’s Web site.)
El Kaliouby said Affectiva tries to be highly conscious about user privacy, and may actually retain less data over time. “We’re less ‘big brother’ than helping people,” she said.
Currently based in Waltham, Mass., Affectiva is also planning to open a San Francisco Bay Area office with the new funding. It had previously raised $7.7 million from WPP, Myrian Capital and the Peder Wallenberg Charitable Trust, and won grants from the National Science Foundation.



                                                                                                           





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Monday, August 6, 2012

You Know What’s Cooler Than A Billion Dollars? A Billion Users.

[Full disclosure: I have never worked at Facebook, and own no Facebook stock, but I do know and respect many people who work there.]
The sharp declines in Facebook’s stock price since their IPO have lead to a frenzy of alarmed comment, some going as far to declare the company in a state of emergency. I’m not sure I agree.
First, the facts: Facebook has been around for only 8 years, has a mere 4000 employees, and yet has over half a billion daily active users almost a billion monthly active users.
Think about that. 500,000,000 people interact with Facebook every day. And these aren’t involuntary corporate connections, like when it turns out that your entire country’s water supply is owned by Bechtel. Facebook users choose, daily, to have an intimate, personal and emotional relationship with the brand. A brand that, it bears repeating, didn’t exist eight years ago. And all this is as true at $40B as it was at $80B. True, Silicon Valley is known for successes of this scale, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable.
Entire companies piggyback off Facebook’s success. The site has spawned a completely new way for businesses to connect with their customers. On the technology side, Facebook has created innovative systems to reliably handle their phenomenal amounts of very rich data, and has made many contributions to the open source community. Facebook is absolutely huge, a success story so rapid, radical and planet-changing that it inspired an award-winning Hollywood movie.
So about that stock price? That seems to me like a Wall Street issue, not a Silicon Valley issue. Sure, Facebook has monetization challenges to overcome. And the company would do well to sort out their developer relations and ensure a stable and cooperative environment, so that 3rd parties can add value to the Facebook platform. But they have incredibly smart and capable people who will surely figure all this out. But just because analysts’ pre-IPO valuation guesses may have been off by a factor of two doesn’t mean Facebook is anything less than a phenomenal success, one that I am confident can be monetized successfully.
And anyway, since when do we turn our noses up at $40B companies? That’s more than the market cap of the entire US airline industry combined, I believe. And was achieved with one hundredth the number of employees.
As long as Facebook makes enough money to keep operating successfully, and there’s no indication that they won’t, we in the tech industry should look at Facebook as a product, not a ticker symbol. Will the stock price hurt retention? Maybe. But it’s no less likely, then, to help with new hiring. So while it is, of course, relevant to report on it, let’s not overly focus on short-term stock performance. Leave that to the stock market blogs. We’re supposed to be in this business not because we love money but because we love technology and its transformative power, and Facebook has both in spades.



                                                                                                           





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Thursday, August 2, 2012

8.7% Of Facebook Users Accounts Are Fake


So…8.7% of Facebook accounts are fake, as CNET noted earlier today. That translates into 83m users, if we’re using the 955m figure announced by Facebook recently.
How does Facebook figure this out? Well, in its 10-Q filing (more info. on what that is here) yesterday, the social networking giant said:
“The numbers of our MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and DAUs (Daily Active Users) and ARPU (Average Revenue Per Users)  are calculated using internal company data based on the activity of user accounts. While these numbers are based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our user base for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring usage of our products across large online and mobile populations around the world. For example, there may be individuals who maintain one or more Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service, despite our efforts to detect and suppress such behavior.”
By Facebook’s reckoning, duplicate accounts likely represent 4.8% of its global MAUs, as of June 30, 2012. In addition to this, Facebook sub-divides ‘false’ accounts into two categories:
(1) user-misclassified accounts, where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet (such entities are permitted on Facebook using a Page rather than a personal profile under our terms of service); and (2) undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming.”
Facebook estimates that so-called “user-misclassified” accounts could have represented around 2.4% of its MAUs globally, with “undesirable accounts” accounting for 1.5%. It also asserts that the percentage of duplicate or false accounts is “meaningfully lower” in developed markets such as the United States or Australia, and it’s higher in markets such as Indonesia and Turkey.
Facebook also acknowledges that its figures may not be entirely accurate, as they’re based on an “internal review of a limited sample of accounts, and we apply significant judgment in making this determination.” But assuming that this figure is roughly correct, what does all this mean for you?
Well, unless you’re prone to accepting invitations from ‘friends’ you’ve never heard of before, you’ve little to worry about. If you’re a business owner trying to leverage the might of Facebook’s online omnipresence, well, this perhaps isn’t great news.
There have been a number of reports in recent weeks that a significant chunk ofFacebook Ad clicks come from bots, meaning that the company is paying for essentially ‘nobody’ to click on a link. Indeed, Facebook Ads generally aren’t being all that well received by many companies, and the social network is actively exploring other ways to make money, such as sponsored search results.
So…83 million fake accounts may sound like a lot, but that’s still leaves 872m bona fide accounts, which isn’t bad.







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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Google Buys In To Social With Wildfire Acquisition


Even though Google’s own social efforts shouldn’t be mistaken as direct competition with a social network like Facebook, the company announced an acquisition that makes us go “hmmmm” today. The company has acquired social marketing platform,Wildfire. The service lets brands manage pages, apps, tweets, videos, sponsorships, promos and ads all in one place.
Here’s what the Wildfire team had to say on its blog:
Four years ago, we set out on a journey to make social media marketing easier and more effective. We thought our idea had potential, but little did we know what an incredible ride it would be. Not only have we helped to define and build an entirely new industry, but we’ve created a company that’s larger (from 5 to almost 400 employees in two and a half years!) and more successful (we’re proud to serve 16,000 customers including 30 of the top 50 brands) than we ever imagined.
That means that Google is now inside of Facebook and Twitter. Literally.
Blog Image 520x292 Google takes the trojan horse approach to social with its acquisition of Wildfire
Is this enough to cause a regulatory stir? Probably not, but its an acquisition worth noting, especially if Google’s existing customers turn to the service to manage their brand throughout the web. How deep does Wildfire go? Have a looksy at this:
For now, we remain focused on helping brands run and measure their social engagement and ad campaigns across the entire web and across all social services — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more — and to deliver rich and satisfying experiences for their consumers.
Google now has a literal “in” with all of the most popular social services on the web. Yesterday it didn’t, today it does. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, or how the other social services react to the news. This could get ugly.
What did Google have to say? Have a peek at how it led off the news:
Businesses around the world—from neighborhood restaurants to major retailers—are embracing social media to share information and forge stronger relationships with their fans and customers. We know because we are one of those businesses—on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Yes, the company was quick to point out which services the company has now “infiltrated” with the Wildfire snap-up. Wildfire says it will be business as usual, which isn’t surprising at all. It’s this business as usual that Google wanted.


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