A Tough 5 Years for Nokia

Nick Bilton writing for the NY Times – The End of an Era in Mobile:

In the summer of 2007, Nokia was on top of the world. The company had a market valuation of around $120 billion, $10 billion more than Apple. Nokia’s share of the global smartphone market was an astounding 48.7 percent.

But by the third quarter of 2012 — just five years later — Nokia was worth a paltry $8.2 billion, $624 billion less than Apple, and its share of global smartphone sales had slipped to just 3.5 percent.

Take a look at the chart Bilton shares - scary!

Everybody Abandoning Landlines

… even the elderly. From Rob Beschizza ...The long slow death of the landline:

The CDC reports that more than one third of American homes are now landline-free, with six in ten adults aged under 30 living in households with only wireless phones.

In a study carried out as part of the National Health Interview Survey, 35.8 percent of all respondents reported having only cellular telephones. A further 15.9 percent reported that while they had landlines, they received all or almost all their calls on their mobiles.

While 34 percent of all adults now live in households with only cellular phones, the number jumps to 40.6 percent when limited to households with children. Fifty-eight percent of renters and 76 percent of adults living with roommates reported having only cellphones. The growth is slowing, though, with the 1.8 percent six-month increase in landline-less homes being the lowest jump since 2008.

Even the elderly are abandoning their landlines, albeit slowly: for the first time, more than 1 in 10 of those aged 65 or more reported living mobile-only.

Six Social Digital Trends ...

… from David Armano. Read the article this is based on here.

Six Social-Digital Trends for 2013 from David Armano

Mobile Devices Driving E-Commerce

Especially for the holidays!

From Leena Rao … Black Friday Online Sales Surged 21 Percent Thanks To Mobile Shopping, More Retailer Promotions And Personalized Deals:

After a particularly strong Thanksgiving for online sales, shoppers continued to look for e-commerce deals on Black Friday. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark is reporting the final tally for Black Friday online sales: a surge of 20.7 percent growth in spending from last year. The biggest surge on Friday came from mobile consumers, with sales reaching 16.3 percent, led by the iPad.

A Hand Turbine Generator for Your Phones

I think this will be a popular holiday gift!


Eton Boost Turbine

Keep your electronics going through the next power outage with the Eton Boost Turbine ($60). This portable power pack features a 2000 mAH lithium-ion battery pack, a durable aluminum body, an LED charge indicator, a Micro-USB DC input for use with standard phone chargers, and your choice of one of four exterior colors. The big deal, however, is the built-in hand turbine power generator, which lets you juice up the battery, no electricity required.

Via daringfireball

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Charge Your Devices by Walking

Very cool! From Roberto Baldwin … This Charger Is Made for Walking:

More than two years after the nPower PEG arrived on the scene with promises of kinetic charging for our devices, it’s finally available for purchase.

The nPower PEG (personal energy generator) contains a weight, springs, an inductive coil and a battery. As you move, the weight moves up and down and generates energy that is stored in the internal battery. The more you move, the more energy is created. After you’ve gone for your evening jog or hiked up a mountain, you can unleash the stored electricity via the USB 2.0 port. Tremont Electric ships the charger with a USB cable and micro USB adaptor. iPhone and iPod users will need to purchase an additional adaptor

Just don’t try to charge your laptop. The company notes that laptops require more power than the nPower PEG generates. Tablets like the iPad can be charged, but only to about 15 percent.

Create Ebooks from Wikipedia Articles

Great resource from Thorin Klosowski … Create Ebooks from Wikipedia Articles for On the Go Reading Anywhere:

Ever wanted to take a few Wikipedia articles with you offline? You can now export any Wikipedia article, or a collection of articles, into a personal ebook that's readable on any device that can use the EPUB format.

To enable the create a book function, click the "Print/export" button the left side of a Wikipedia page, and select "Create a book." This starts up the book creator. From here, you can add as many pages as you like to you book by clicking the "Add this page to your book" button at the top of the Wikipedia articles you're on.

RIP Flash for Android

Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Flash – was right!

From T.C. Sottek – Flash for Android dies tomorrow, long live the 'full web experience':

In November of last year, Adobe made a surprising about-face on its popular Flash plugin, announcing that it would stop development of Flash for mobile devices. Tomorrow, Adobe will disable new installs of Flash on Android, effectively cutting it off from the future of the mobile web — despite the company's historical assertion that Flash would enable the "full web experience" on mobile devices. Instead, Adobe surrendered the major mobile battlegrounds and pledged allegiance to HTML5.

What's Nokia Thinking?

Andy Patrizio Nokia preps to sell Qt, but not before Elop screws it up:

Word from Australia is that Nokia is shutting down the Brisbane office that has worked on the open-source graphical interface framework Qt in preparation to sell off the framework.

...

A Nokia senior software engineer told ZDNet Australia that he and 50 other employees have received notices of termination and Nokia plans to close the office.

...

what the hell is Nokia CEO Stephen Elop thinking? He’s firing all of the engineers and QA people, THEN trying to sell off the company? No one in their right mind is going to buy a DVD-ROM full of code without staff who actually know what's what and where. That's worthless.

Source code is only half the value, and perhaps even less than that. The team that built it, integrated it with other platforms, tested it, that knows it cold, is the real asset.

Does Your Organization Do Mobile?

Madeline Bennett observes that Social Media Access Via Mobile Grows. If your college, university, etc is not mobile-ready, you might get left behind – stuck on the desktop!

Mobile users are continuing to turn more frequently to their cell phones for social and gaming purposes, according to the latest data from analyst Comscore.

For the quarter ending in June, 36.9 percent of mobile users accessed a social networking site or blog on their handset, up almost a percentage point from 36.1 percent compared to the first quarter 2012.

Mobile gaming increased by the same amount, up from 32.6 percent to 33.4 percent quarter on quarter.

The numbers might only be slowly creeping up, but the overall pattern shows a greater proportion of mobile subscribers are using their handhelds for traditional desktop tasks.

The Rumored Amazon Phone

MG Siegler on the rumored Kindle Phone:

A joint effort by Amazon and Google to make a truly killer phone makes a lot of sense to me on paper. Sadly, that’s where it will stay.

Windows Phone 8 – Apps Cannot be Installed to MicroSD Cards

John Chan … Apps cannot be installed to microSD cards on WP8 - Mobile Phones:

During the TechEd 2012 event, a session on the new features of Windows Phone 8 (WP8) clarified the use of microSD cards for apps. When announced last week, the slide for microSD support showed that the new feature supported storing media (photos, music and videos) and "installing apps". This refers to installing apps from the card to the phone, and not to the card directly.

Primarily a feature targeted at enterprises, this feature allows companies to bypass the Marketplace (the Windows Phone app store) when installing apps specifically for the organization's use. This makes it easier for IT departments to create and deploy programs.

Microsoft is selling to the IT department not to the end user.

Forrester CEO – Facebook Is Toast

Facebook really has to make a big move in mobile!

From Mike Simons … Facebook Is Toast, Forrester CEO Says:

Apple and Google will dominate the emerging digital economy while Facebook "is toast," claimed George Colony, CEO of Forrester, in the opening key note of the analyst group's European forum in Paris.

Colony's provocative predictions came at the conclusion of a session where he challenged IT leaders to "disrupt or be disrupted" and pushed Forrester's theme that Chief Information Officers and the departments they manage need to transform themselves to focus on business technology

The Forrester CEO focused on the accelerating pace of innovation and predicted that mobile engagement will bring as profound a change to business technology as the client-server revolution of the 1980s.

Photo by oskay - http://flic.kr/p/HHCnT

Time to Leave the MacBook Air Home?

Andy Ihnatko thinks that in Apple's post-PC world you can leave the laptop at home and function with just an iPad. I don't have the 3rd generation iPad, but Ihnatko's not far off. Accessing your home PC with a retina display sounds like an amazing experience. The LTE connection doesn't hurt either.

Slow-roast revolution

Whatever we want to call it we’re definitely in some sort of slow-roast revolution. I can tell because over the past six months, I’ve let go of my last shreds of desire for an 11in MacBook Air.

You may recall the little passion play I went through last year. I had a review unit for a month or two and the first time I travelled with a full-featured MacBook in the magazine pocket of my smallest satchel instead of in a special bag filled with accessories, I fell deeply in lust. I might have pulled the trigger and bought one, if not for the fact that I’d upgraded my MacBook Pro just a few months earlier.

Two things have happened since then. First, iOS app developers have become much bolder. On Day One, they were writing apps that treated the iPad as a content consumption device. By the time the iPad 2 was released, they thought of it as a machine that could handle many functions of a ‘real’ computer, during those specific instances when it’s just not worth hauling around a full-sized notebook.

Today, more and more developers are confident that the iPad is indeed a real computer, and are expressing that confidence by making desktop-class iOS apps – with Apple leading the way, of course. The new iPad edition of iPhoto isn’t just competitive with the desktop version, the tactile nature of the iPad makes it superior to most of the available consumer-grade image editors for Mac OS and Windows.

The second thing was the arrival of the third-gen iPad. Dammit, this is a sweet display. I expected that the Big Win of the Retina display would be crisper text and sharper graphics. Naw. It turns out that the 2,048 x 1,536 screen opens up the iPad to new functions that it couldn’t really handle very well. VNC sits at the top of that list. VNC was a bit clumsy on the iPad 1 and 2. On the new iPad, it’s damned-near perfect. The iPad’s display exceeds the resolution of your MacBook back home, and the LTE mobile broadband dramatically reduces the range of situations under which you won’t have a decent internet connection.

No, I no longer wish I had an 11in Air. What I have here – a third-generation iPad and an Apple Wireless Keyboard – is better. I have better-than-good native iOS apps to handle almost all of my mobile needs. When only a desktop app will do, I have VNC, and/or the wonderful OnLive Desktop service that allows me to run Microsoft Office on a virtualised Windows 7 server.

Study Shows College Students Who Text Not Paying Attention to Lectures

According to Leanne Smith, New study shows college students who text during class not paying attention to lectures. I don't think anyone disputes this fact. What I – and like-minded faculty – aim to do is to engage these students, so they have no interest in texting in class or even better involve their mobile devices (cell phones, smart phones, tablets, etc) in the learning process.

Don't blame technology for students' lack of interest ing class – without a cell phone, these same students would be doodling on a notepad and daydreaming.

A university professor in Pennsylvania has completed a study and written a soon-to-be-published paper on the effects of text messaging by college students during class.
A new study says texting in class decreases students' ability to pay attention.
The results?
Students who send and receive texts during class have a hard time paying attention to lectures and risk not learning as much as they would if they weren’t texting and were paying attention.
Yes, this is a real study highlighted in a press release from Washington, D.C.’s National Communication Association, which will publish the paper in its July print issue of its journal Communication Education.
The study’s principal author is Fang-Yi Flora Wei, assistant professor of broadcast communications at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. In the release, she says, “Now we see that in-class texting partially interferes with a student’s ability to pay attention, which prior studies show is necessary for effective cognitive learning.”

Photo by Bradley Wind - http://flic.kr/p/bv5Dk

Baby Boomers and Digital Technology

Baby Boomers and Digital Technology

View more presentations from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

(7) Baby Boomers and Digital Technology:

Director Lee Rainie will dicuss how Baby Boomers use technology at the What’s Next Boomer Business Summit. He’ll explore generational differences in use of the internet and mobile devices and how coming developments in technology might affect their activities and attitudes.

Mozilla's Mobile OS Built Using HTML, CSS and JS

Chris Smith reporting … An entire Mobile OS built using HTML, CSS and JS:

Mozilla was out showing off their web-based phone at the Mobile World Congress last month, and IDG News Service posted this video of Jonathan Nightengale, Senior Director for Firefox Engineering, demonstrating the phone in action.

The device runs Mozilla's Boot2Gecko (B2G) operating system, which runs all of the phone's applications on the web, and is demoed on the Samsung Galaxy S2.  As Jonathan points out, B2G uses APIs for all of the smart phone functions that typically require a native application, such as: phone dialer, camera, text messaging, and geolocation.

More on Draw Something

I posted earlier on Draw Something's popularity – how do we measure that financially? $100k a day – wow!

From Rob Crossley … Draw Something craze 'banks dev $100k per day':

Draw Something, the newest App Store sensation that brings Pictionary-like gaming to mobiles and tablets, is reportedly making more than $100,000 each day for its creators.

Mobile is the Needle … Social is the Thread

Great presentation from the Pew Internet Project

The State of Mobile America

View more presentations from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Mobile Phone Market Evolution

Another great video from Horace Dediu - best to watch full screen:

Mobile Phone Market Evolution:

The evolution of Shipments, Revenue, Profitability and Cost structure of eight vendors selling mobile phones between second quarter 2007 and second quarter 2011.