Posts tagged mobile
Smart Phones Shipped, First Quarter 2013
Researchers at IDC report that 216 million smart phones were shipped in the first quarter of 2013, up 63 million from the same period in 2012.
Via Reuters:
Sales of the iPhone 5 helped Apple’s volumes grow 6.6 percent to 37.4 million phones in the quarter from a year earlier, but that was not enough to stop its share of the market dropping to 17.3 percent from 23 percent, research firm IDC said.
A flood of cheaper Android-powered devices from the South Korean maker lifted its shipments about 60 percent to 70.7 million, giving it a 32.7 percent of the market, up from 28.8 percent a year earlier.
During the first quarter Samsung shipped more smartphones than the next four vendors combined, IDC said.
Image: Smart phones shipped worldwide, first quarter 2013.
Pushy Notifications
AdAge reports that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are using more push notifications on their mobile and tablet apps than they did in the past.
The move reflects a strategy to increase user engagement with the apps that while downloaded, sometimes sit dormant on people’s devices. Specifically, each newsroom is using notifications for breaking news.
Via AdAge:
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal — No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in terms of U.S. digital circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media — are putting more emphasis on using mobile alerts to distribute breaking news stories and promote their mobile apps.
News publishers have long considered push notifications, which pop up on phone and tablet screens, too intrusive to use more than sparingly. In recent months, however, The Journal and Times have reconsidered that stance and started using them more often.
“We felt comfortable that our breaking news alerts have been well-received by readers and that we may have been a little too stringent about what alerts we should have been sending,” said Jonathan Ellis, deputy editor of digital platforms at The Times, which has revised its guidelines on the subject. “More frequently, we’re asking ourselves the question ‘Should this be a mobile push alert?’”
FJP: The strategy is similar to one used by app developers and their frequent updates, no matter how small. It’s a reminder to the User that the app exists and hopefully prods him or her to use it again.
AdAge reports that those that opt in to push notifications are five times more likely to use an app but does take this warning from Brent Hieggelke, CMO at Urban Airship, “Push is not a channel to nag your customer. That’s a terrible experience.”
Yesterday’s Electronics in the Palm of Your Hand
Singularity Hub wins in the picture’s worth a thousand words department as it reflects on Moore’s Law and consumer electronics.
Singularity Hub, Moore’s Law is No Joke — Pile of Electronics from 1993 Fits in Your Palm Today.
News Is Bad For You
Apparently, the more mobile devices you have, the higher your perceived value of media is. According to BCG’s recent study, Through the Mobile Looking Glass, when you get a second mobile device, there is a 41% increase in perceived media value, a 40% increase when you get a third, and a 30% increase when you get a fourth.
Which makes sense, if you’re spending your days juggling four mobile devices and consuming media on all of them. What could be more important than the information nuggets you’re eating all day long?
Hopefully a lot of things, considering that the nutritional value of all the information we’re consuming could be very low.
The Guardian’s Rolf Dobelli explains:
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
Dobelli goes on to provide illustrative examples of the following:
- News misleads.
- News is irrelevant.
- News has no explanatory power.
- News is toxic to your body (literally).
- News increases cognitive errors.
- News inhibits thinking.
- News works like a drug (you begin to crave it).
- News wastes time.
- News kills creativity.
Dobelli wants us to go without news. To be clear, he’s not arguing against ALL journalism. He supports investigative journalism, long-form, and books, but for the last four years has entirely removed the consumption of other (shorter) news from his diet. He’s since experienced: “less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, and more insights.”
FJP: Firstly, journalists simply can’t afford that kind of lifestyle and anyone active on a social network can’t avoid it. And great, illuminating, informative, well-reported, well-presented journalism is out there. But if we set aside the details of his argument (over which we could debate at length), Dobelli’s larger point (that our news consumption habits aren’t very healthy), coupled with the fact that we of the mobile generations perceive the value of media so highly, raises the most important question of all for people living in 2013: How can we construct healthy, anxiety-free, informative, enjoyable news diets that help us live better lives and understand the world better? News literacy. Just like we ought to do with food, practice consuming with balance and intention.—Jihii
Books on the Train
Here’s an interesting library tech concept by students from the Miami Ad School. Lend library books to people who are riding the subway. Or, at least, the first 10 pages of them.
The idea is to use a technology called Near Field Communication that’s embedded in contemporary phones to swipe a bar code in a subway car to download a book sample. NFC is a low powered wireless communication system that allows devices to talk to and share information with each other.
Again, the idea is conceptual, but a fascinating innovation to introduce people to new books — and their local libraries — during the daily commute. When a person leaves the subway, they’re alerted to the nearest library branch that has the book so they can continue reading.
And it’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. The technology exists, and people are already shopping by cell phones and QR codes in South Korean subways.
A little fact checking moment on the above video though: public library use is increasing, not decreasing, according to a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future (PDF). Matter of fact, as the New York Times reports:
Over 40 million visits were paid to the New York, Brooklyn and Queens systems in the 2011 fiscal year, the center said, or more than the combined attendance at all the city’s professional sports games or major cultural institutions. The libraries circulated 69 million books and other materials and responded to 14.5 million reference questions.
But we’ll let that error slide. They are, after all, advertising — and not journalism — students.
Video: The Underground Subway, by Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez.
Tibetan Jailed For Having Photos of Self-Immolators on Mobile Phone
Via Radio Free Asia:
A young Tibetan traditional artist was sentenced to two years in jail with hard labor for having photos on his mobile phone of two compatriots who self-immolated in protest against Chinese rule, according to exile sources Saturday.
Ngawang Thupden, 20, was detained in October last year in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), but relatives learned of the prison sentence for “subversion” only four months later, the sources said, citing contacts in the Himalayan region…
…Chinese authorities have been cracking down hard on any efforts by Tibetans to publicize self-immolation protests after steps taken by Beijing to stop the burnings failed.
Thupden was accused of “subversion, propagating incorrect political messages, and causing disharmony among ethnic minorities.”
The decadence and corruption associated with [Rightel’s] use outweighs its benefits. It will cause new deviances in our society, which is unfortunately already plagued with deviances.
Grand Ayatollah Makarem-Shirazi in a fatwa against Rightel, a 3G mobile operator that’s bringing video calls to Iran. AL Monitor, Fatwa Issued Against 3G Internet Operator in Iran.
FJP: A second Ayatollah says the video calls “jeopardize the public chastity”.
A petition signed by some residents in the city of Qom says that services like Rightel are a part of “enemy culture” and “facilitate access to sin and decadence”.
No, But Ask Me Again Every Time
Via XKCD
Your Omnidirectional Camera
It’s a prototype but it’s nerd alert cool. Shoot with the camera and it sends the image over wifi to your phone where you can pinch, pan, twirl and explore.
The developers are waiting to see if there’s interest in it before trying to release it publicly.
I smell a very successful Kickstarter. — Michael
STUDY: More people than ever use apps!
STUDY: Smartphone users rely on GPS and map functions so they won’t get lost.
STUDY: Small but growing number of people use their tablets as coasters for cold drinks.
STUDY: Men consume a whole lot of porn.
STUDY: More people than ever use emoticons in text messages.
STUDY: Consumers compare prices online while shopping at big box retail stores.
STUDY: Majority of Americans can’t find Mali on a map.
STUDY: Tech blogs and newspapers always happy to publish results of inane studies.
The children and teenagers huddled over their devices at McDonald’s Corp. restaurants and Starbucks Corp. coffee shops across the country underscore the persistence of the Internet gap in education. McDonald’s has 12,000 Wi-Fi-equipped locations in the U.S., and Starbucks has another 7,000. Together, that is more than the roughly 15,000 Wi-Fi-enabled public libraries in the country.
Anton Troianovsky, Wall Street Journal. The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald’s.
Besides being interesting for its numbers, the article above is another good one on the digital divide — the term for the inequality between groups based on their access to the internet and technology.
In the US, Alabama and other nearby states are regularly noted for their low broadband access.
But some are not as concerned as others. See this article from Salon, which postulates that mobile phones may help fix the problem in America’s rural areas:
As far as the “digital divide” is concerned, the smartphone is something of a unique product in the history of personal technology. It simultaneously represents the cutting edge of the technology business — the most computing power packed in the smallest box — and it is the obvious choice for members of any economic class to adopt as the most ounce-for-ounce efficient and economic answer to how to get connected in an era where connectivity is — after food, water and shelter — an almost universal top priority.
Why Do Americans Hate Android And Love Apple?
ReadWrite’s Dan Lyons points to a disturbing trend in tech journalism as he tries to unwrap why iPhones have such significant US marketshare while the rest of the world runs 75% Android.
Android, goes a coverage tick, is for poor people:
But Apple and its cheerleaders in the States don’t just criticize Android phones; they also criticize Android users, depicting them as low-class people who are uneducated, poor, cheap and too lacking in “taste” (a favorite Apple fanboy word) to pay for an Apple product and instead willing to settle for a low-price knockoff.
See, for example, a recent story by Sam Biddle on Gizmodo called “Android Is Popular Because It’s Cheap, Not Because It’s Good,” illustrated with a photo of a homeless man sleeping next to a shopping cart and bags full of collected cans. Nice touch!… Apparently inspired by this article, John Biggs of TechCrunch picked up the “Android is cheap” meme and ran with it too…
…[I]n America, a noisy chorus of pro-Apple bloggers keeps repeating the mantra about Android being cheap and crappy and second-rate, and people keep believing it and insisting that they must have an iPhone. American consumers have been told that those Android smartphones are hard to use, or complicated, or geeky, or unreliable, and, worst of all, on top of all that, they’re made for poor people.
And that’s where the rhetoric starts to border on something ugly. Look at what Apple fans were saying in April 2012 when Instagram became available on Android. Cult of Mac had a nice roundup which included sneering tweets about Walmart and “poor peasants” and “riff raff” and “poor people,” but also included these:
- “It’s like when all the ghetto people started coming to the nice suburbs. Instagram was our nice lil suburb.”
- “Instagram just got a whole lotta ghetto.”
The italics are mine, and I’ve added them for a reason. Yes, it’s the dreaded G word, and it comes up again in a Dec. 13, 2011 article by Glenn Derene, who wrote that “Android’s Cheap, Low Quality Apps Make It Feel Like A Technological Ghetto.”
Related: Henry Blodget, founder of Business Insider, writes about the horrors of flying economy. Evidently, he couldn’t charge his laptop, there was no wifi and the food was bad.
An inside peek into the Polygon design process
Via voxmediaproduct:
It’s not every day you get to design a big ass new editorial site from scratch. This is a look into the design process for Polygon, the second of two huge projects tackled by Vox Product in 2012. Be warned: this is a deep look at our process and our work. Grab a beer or three, and join me for a walk through the past.
Like design? Like news? Then read how Vox Media created the gaming culture site Polygon.
Ted Irvine, Vox’s design director, walks through the original creative brief, choosing typefaces, creating the logo, developing the overall brand identity, and designing a responsive site for Web, mobile and tablets.
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