Archive for February, 2010
The iPod Touch Is This Generation’s Tamagotchi
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/SM6HjEBs9Ok/the-ipod-touch-is-this-generations-tamagotchi
All these wonderful things we’re learning today, from data! First, we find out that Android is a guy thing. Now, we discover that the iPod Touch shares more demographics with glittering vampires than smartphones. iPod Touch: Kid stuff.
The age distribution makes a lot of sense, especially with the direct available comparison of the iPhone: the iPod Touch is a good gift, a plausible purchase, and a good investment for a young person right now. An iPhone with a $70-a-month minimum contract is a tougher sell, either to parents, or to kids mostly supported by their parents.
And these kids don’t just buy different gadgets than adults—they use them differently, too. For example, they looooove apps:
But they’re stingy little bastards, these kids:
Buying an app can be tough without a credit card, so again, this isn’t shocking. But it does poke a little hole in the idea of the iPod Touch as a massive moneymaker for Apple. Hardware sales are tremendous and highly profitable, sure, but once the devices are in users’ soft little baby hands, they don’t keep raking it in like the iPhone does. [AdMob]
the American phone subsidy model is a RAZR way of thinking in an iPhone world
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/editorial-the-american-phone-subsidy-model-is-a-razr-way-of-thi/
The concept is simple enough — pay more, get more. So it has gone (historically, anyway) with phone subsidies in this part of the world, a system that has served us admirably for well over a decade. It made sense, and although it was never spelled out at the customer service counter quite as clearly as any of us would’ve liked, it was fairly straightforward to understand: you bought a phone on a multi-dimensional sliding scale of attractiveness, functionality, and novelty. By and large, there was a pricing scale that matched up with it one-to-one. You understood that if you wanted a color external display, a megapixel camera, or MP3 playback, you’d pay a few more dollars, and you also understood that you could knock a couple hundred dollars off of that number by signing up to a two-year contract. In exchange for a guaranteed revenue stream, your carrier’s willing to throw you a few bucks off a handset — a square deal, all things considered. So why’s the FCC in a tizzy, and how can we make it better?
Editorial: the American phone subsidy model is a RAZR way of thinking in an iPhone world originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Evidence for Increasing Online Use that is also Accelerating
If you sum up the total unique user sessions in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, and Jan 2010, you get
Jan 2008 – 285M
Jan 2009 – 337M
Jan 2010 – 413M
That is a year-over-year increase of 18% and 23% respectively. Assuming the population of the world does not change that much year to year, the change in total unique sessions leads to the conclusion that online usage continues to increase noticeably.
The Compete.com chart below shows nearly identical number if unique users monthly — Google at 148M uniques and Yahoo at 132M uniques. And Facebook alone achieved another 134M uniques. So while the unique visitors across these 3 sites are not mutually exclusive, there are 414M unique user sessions in the month of January 2010
Well, this is strange. January 2010 numbers from Nielsen reveal Google has 66.3% of the search market, while Yahoo has 14.5% and Microsoft has 10.9% across its various properties. Google is 4x more than Yahoo and 6x more than Microsoft.
Inside Google’s Secret Search Algorithm
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/zzkIcilnJp4/inside-googles-secret-search-algorithm
Wired’s Steven Levy takes us inside the “algorithm that rules the web“—Google’s search algorithm, of course—and if you use Google, it’s kind of a must-read. PageRank? That’s so 1997.
It’s known that Google constantly updates the algorithm, with 550 improvements this year—to deliver smarter results and weed out the crap—but there are a few major updates in its history that have significantly altered Google’s search, distilled in a helpful chart in the Wired piece. For instance, in 2001, they completely rewrote the algorithm; in 2003, they added local connectivity analysis; in 2005, results got personal; and most recently, they’ve added in real-time search for Twitter and blog posts.
The sum of everything Google’s worked on—the quest to understand what you mean, not what you say—can be boiled down to this:
This is the hard-won realization from inside the Google search engine, culled from the data generated by billions of searches: a rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around. “The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”
Oh, and by the way, you’re a guinea pig every time you search for something, if you hadn’t guessed as much already. Google engineer Patrick Riley tells Levy, “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously.” It lets them constantly experiment on a smaller scale—even if they’re only conducting a particular experiment on .001 percent of queries, that’s a lot of data.
Be sure to check out the whole piece, it’s ridiculously fascinating, and borders on self-knowledge, given how much we all use Google (sorry, Bing). [Wired, Sweet graphic by Wired’s Mauricio Alejo]
Additional Information on Real Time Bidding
Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/gartner-apple-android-and-rim-winners-in-2009-smartphone-os-g/
Gartner just released its annual numbers for worldwide mobile phone sales to end users in the year known as two thousand nine. Looking at smartphone OS market share alone, Gartner shows the iPhone OS, Android, and RIM making the biggest gains (up 6.2%, 3.4%, and 3.3% from 2008, respectively) at the expense of Windows Mobile (down 3.1%) and Symbian (down 5.5%). Although Gartner says that Symbian “has become uncompetitive in recent years,” (ouch) it concedes that market share is still strong especially for Nokia; something backed up by Nokia’s Q4 financials and reported quarterly smartphone growth of 5%. Regarding total handsets of all classifications sold, Nokia continues to dominate with 36.4% of all sales to end users (a 2.2% loss from 2008) while Samsung and LG continue to climb at the expense of Motorola (dropping from 7.6% to 4.5% of worldwide sales in 2009) and Sony Ericsson. See that table after the break or hit up the source for the full report.
Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
"We Are Not Prepared"

The Policy Center’s vice-president reports “”The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks.”
The nightmarish scenario that unfolded represented a worst-case example. As former secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff noted, many cyberattacks can be stopped if individual cell phone or Internet users simply follow the best practices and use the right tools. Similarly, another participant pointed out that private Internet companies would not sit idly by as a virus ran amok.
A collapse of power across the U.S. also only took place when the simulation brought in factors such as high demand during the summer, a hurricane that had damaged power supply lines, and coordinated bombings that accompanied the cyberattack and subsequent failure of the Internet.
Still, the war game highlighted crucial issues about the government’s own reliance upon communications that might go down during a real-life scenario. One of the biggest problems was how the President ought to respond to a situation that caused damage like warfare but lacked an immediately identifiable foreign adversary. Smaller-scale cyberattacks have already complicated real-world diplomacy, such as the alleged Chinese cyberattacks on Google and other U.S. companies.
Ares Defense Blog questioned a curious missing element from the simulation, in that there was no mention of what happened to phone or Internet service in the rest of the world. Surely a nation that decided to launch cyberattacks against the U.S. would take safeguards to protect its own crucial communication services, which would possibly help U.S. officials narrow down the list of suspects.
Another question seemed more mundane but equally important — how would the government activate the National Guard with cell phone service down?
The Pentagon’s DARPA science lab recently pushed for a “Cyber Genome Program” that could trace digital fingerprints to cyberattack culprits. But identifying whether a cyber attack came from individual civilians, shadowy hacker associations or government cyber-warriors has proven tricky in the meantime.
[via Ares Defense Blog]
Windows Mobile’s Incredible Death Spiral
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/YplxNHBy8r0/windows-mobiles-incredible-death-spiral
Before Windows Phone 7 was even an embryo of a concept, Windows Mobile was king: It powered nearly half of smartphones in use, a led the industry in features. Then, in 2007, things started to go wrong. Very, very wrong.
Silicon Alley Insider has charted Windows Mobile’s platform share, which is to say the proportion of users who were using it at a given time, over the last four years. For showing decline, figures like these are more telling than sales—they mean that, for years now, people haven’t been buying Windows Mobile phones nearly as fast as they’ve been ditching them.
More interesting than what it shows is what it projects: Windows Mobile 6.x phones have been collectively kneecapped by Microsoft’s announcement yesterday, and rendered spectacularly unbuyable outside of enterprise circles. In other words, that line—the one that dragged down past RIM in 2008, and that dropped past Apple last year—is going to keep plunging for the rest of this year, until Windows Phone 7 tries to haul it back up. And until then, it’s only going to get steeper. [Silicon Alley Insider]
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