Posts tagged mobile

6 reasons why most journalists are underestimating the mobile revolution

Via corybe:

Most newsrooms know that mobile is growing fast.  Everyone can see mobile usage (phones and tablets) creeping up on their desktop numbers. For example, The Guardian recently said mobile visits hit 35%, outpacing desktop at certain hours of the day.  A growing handful of media brands — including where I work at Breaking News — have watched mobile soar over desktop in audience.  And we’ve all seen the stories about the unprecedented growth of tablets, the fastest-growing product in the history of consumer electronics.

Soon, mobile will be the primary way people get their news.

If that’s really the case, then why isn’t mobile dominating journalists’ discussions on Twitter?  Packing sessions at journalism conferences?  Sitting at the top of “most popular” story lists on journalism blogs?

I have a few theories:

Cory Bergman is the general manager of NBC News’ Breaking News and points to social media’s ease of use; the overall newness of mobile as a form factor for delivering news; and the potential threat mobile poses for advertising dependent organizations among other factors that many news organization have been slow to enter mobile. 

Read through for his explanations of each.

See also Jason Pontin’s great article from last year in Technology Review about why publishers don’t like apps. This isn’t to say they don’t like mobile. Instead, Pontin explains why TR ditched their native app in favor of HTML5.

Fidgital Lizzie Skurnick coins a term in the New York Times. Over at Salon, Katie McDonough reminds us of a recent study “that found smartphone users exhibit actual withdrawal symptoms when forced to abstain from using their devices. The study also found that many subjects felt physical discomfort after not checking their phone for extended periods of time.” As someone with a New Year’s resolution that no laptops, phones or tablets can enter the bedroom, I’m glad to be able to put a word and idea to it. — Michael

Fidgital

Lizzie Skurnick coins a term in the New York Times.

Over at Salon, Katie McDonough reminds us of a recent study “that found smartphone users exhibit actual withdrawal symptoms when forced to abstain from using their devices. The study also found that many subjects felt physical discomfort after not checking their phone for extended periods of time.”

As someone with a New Year’s resolution that no laptops, phones or tablets can enter the bedroom, I’m glad to be able to put a word and idea to it. — Michael

The Text Message Turns 20 Computerworld: How the SMS got its start in a Danish pizzeria. Forrester: More than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the US in 2011, or 6 billion SMS messages per day. Pew Internet: The average US teen sends 60 text messages a day. Falkvinge: How it costs more to send an SMS to someone next door than the equivalent data information from Mars to Earth. Ryan Kearney: Why it would cost $35 million to send a 4.6 gig HD video through AT&T via SMS (while roaming).

The Text Message Turns 20

Computerworld: How the SMS got its start in a Danish pizzeria.

Forrester: More than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the US in 2011, or 6 billion SMS messages per day.

Pew Internet: The average US teen sends 60 text messages a day.

Falkvinge: How it costs more to send an SMS to someone next door than the equivalent data information from Mars to Earth.

Ryan Kearney: Why it would cost $35 million to send a 4.6 gig HD video through AT&T via SMS (while roaming).

Getting in Bed with Gadgets: Your Technology is Keeping You Awake 

world-shaker:

Among the key findings:

  • 90% of 18-29 year olds sleep with their smartphones
  • 95% of people use the phone for something just before going to bed
  • Half of people check their phones immediately if they wake up during the night

FJP: Those key findings are all too familiar.

Google Launches Worldwide, Mobile Alternate Reality Game

Via AllThingsD:

Meet Ingress, a new free mobile app and alternate reality game made by Google launching today (on Android first, available as soon as it makes it through the Google Play release process).

Ingress is a project of former Google director of geo John Hanke and his Niantic Labs, a start-up team wholly inside of Google…

…Ingress also aims to get people out in the physical world, both for physical activity and to see their surroundings in a new way.

Users can generate virtual energy needed to play the game by picking up units of “XM,” which are collected by traveling walking paths, like a real-world version of Pac-Man. Then they spend the energy going on missions around the world to “portals,” which are virtually associated with public art, libraries and other widely accessible places.

“The concept is something like World of Warcraft, where everyone in world is playing the same game,” Hanke said.

AllThingsD reports that Google plans to eventually turn the game tools into a platform for developers to build upon.

Game site. Ingress on Google Play.

Video: Ingress promo. Run Time ~1:40.

Building USA TODAY’s Election Night Maps MapBox General Manager Dave Cole walks us through the realtime election mapping platform it created for USA Today for last week’s election. Via Mapbox: Throughout the 2012 election cycle, we’ve been fascinated with idea of visualizing realtime election results. On election day starting when voting concludes on the East Coast, newsrooms race to process and visualize vote totals in each of the 50 states, 435 congressional districts, and 3,200 counties across the country. The Associated Press provides a feed of results data aggregated from staff deployed across the country on eight minute intervals. Since nearly all news outlets subscribe to this data, the race to report results first is really about having an incredibly short time to publish, while maintaining a steadfast focus on reliability during what’s often the highest traffic night for news websites. The excitement of the night and availability of a reliable source of fast data make this a really exciting problem to solve. The stack includes: Live rendering tile server Server-side static map image generation Client-side dynamic image manipulation SVG vectors with VML fallback Map Rendering Geodata Processing Ultimately, MapBox and USA Today developers then created a JSON API to pull the AP’s XML data in to the application for both Web and mobile display. Read through to learn how it was done and what tools were used. Image: iPad view of USA Today’s live election results, via MapBox.

Building USA TODAY’s Election Night Maps

MapBox General Manager Dave Cole walks us through the realtime election mapping platform it created for USA Today for last week’s election.

Via Mapbox:

Throughout the 2012 election cycle, we’ve been fascinated with idea of visualizing realtime election results. On election day starting when voting concludes on the East Coast, newsrooms race to process and visualize vote totals in each of the 50 states, 435 congressional districts, and 3,200 counties across the country. The Associated Press provides a feed of results data aggregated from staff deployed across the country on eight minute intervals. Since nearly all news outlets subscribe to this data, the race to report results first is really about having an incredibly short time to publish, while maintaining a steadfast focus on reliability during what’s often the highest traffic night for news websites. The excitement of the night and availability of a reliable source of fast data make this a really exciting problem to solve.

The stack includes:

  • Live rendering tile server
  • Server-side static map image generation
  • Client-side dynamic image manipulation
  • SVG vectors with VML fallback
  • Map Rendering
  • Geodata Processing

Ultimately, MapBox and USA Today developers then created a JSON API to pull the AP’s XML data in to the application for both Web and mobile display.

Read through to learn how it was done and what tools were used.

Image: iPad view of USA Today’s live election results, via MapBox.

Designers, especially those transitioning from print to web, yearn for [a consistent canvas size]. We’re lucky to have it on phones, but the varying sizes of desktop browsers throw us in a loop. Despite that, I was bullish on keeping the width of the desktop text at a comfortable 65-70 characters per line no matter how long your browser becomes. I was steadfast in keeping the content on top—not hugged by filters, settings, search bars and ads. More space in your window doesn’t mean you have to fill it.

Mig Reyes, designer, 37signals, on redesigning the Signal vs Noise blog (but don’t call it a blog). 37signals, The Typography and Layout behind the new Signal vs. Noise redesign.

Let’s repeat: More space in your window doesn’t mean you have to fill it.

Via shaneguiter.

Tech Talk: iPhone 5

SNL with a look at what happens when tech reporters meet the gadget makers.

Making the News (more) Mobile

A new mobile news app called Circa has dedicated itself to aggregating content and slimming it down to the facts and nothing but — all to present bits of information from several sources on a mobile screen without exhausting its users. 

Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame has a lot on his mind, news-wise, and he’s a co-founder.  So are Matt Gilligan and Arsenio Santos, and the rest of the team and their investors can be found here.

It’s a fine idea, and the presentation fits mobile’s tiny screens. Some, however, may scratch their heads at it as they did at fellow newcomer Quartz for its reliance on aggregation.

via PandoDaily:

Galligan and Huh believe to save journalism you need to kill the article. Instead, news from Circa is arranged on digital flash cards you page through on your mobile phone. “Stories” are simply facts strung together across these cards, and most of those facts link to a third party original source.

The art of creating a good Circa piece is in finding news and piecing it together, but there is no writing, per se. There is no analysis and there is no reporting either. Galligan’s view is there’s too much of that in the world. It’s original work in that the “stories” are written by Circa’s newsroom of about a dozen people, but the facts are all aggregated from elsewhere. There are no bylines, which isn’t a big surprise since the innovation here is sucking much of the reporting and writing out of journalism.

We Sense A Trend

Via the Globe and Mail:

Everybody knows that RIM is in a tough spot. The company’s market share has collapsed, and with a withered market capitalization of less than $4-billion, takeover rumours are rife.

Ahead of the January launch of BlackBerry 10, RIM has little to do but focus its weary workforce on perfecting the new phones, slash costs and lean on the growth RIM is seeing in fast-paced emerging markets. The company could update investors on the results of a strategic review conducted with help from investment banks, but analysts are not anticipating a sale any time soon, or a radical new course of action beyond trying to license the new BlackBerry 10 operating system to other handset makers…

…Mike Walkley, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity who is bearish on RIM, said his research indicates that cheaper BlackBerrys are still selling well in markets such as Indonesia and the Middle East, but that RIM’s higher-end Bold and Torch models are faring poorly. Indeed, low-margin growth in international markets may be the only high point left for RIM these days, despite increased pressure in these markets from Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei Technologies selling cheap Android devices.

Images: Research in Motion’s US subscriber base (top), via Pingdom. RIM’s share price for the last two years (bottom), via MarketWatch.

Who’s Suing Who Yesterday we noted the case of a voice recognition startup called Vlingo that was sued for patent infringement and — even though exonerated — eventually had to sell itself to the very company that sued it. The anecdote is from a long, frustrating and very important investigation by the New York Times into our very broken patent system. Here, a visualization by the Times shows who’s suing who among the big players in the smartphone industry. If you select the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that just about everyone is suing everyone. Just follow the orange arrows as each “represents a lawsuit involving a mobile patent. In some cases, when multiple firms are plaintiffs or defendants, a single suit is represented with multiple arrows.” Better, view the original and set aside the time to read the actual article. It’s a highly readable and follows the how and why of current smartphone patent wars: The number of patent lawsuits filed in United States district courts each year has almost tripled in the last two decades to 3,260 in 2010, the last year for which federal data is available. Microsoft has sued Motorola; Motorola has sued Apple and Research in Motion; Research in Motion has sued Visto, a mobile technology company; and in August, Google, through its Motorola unit, sued Apple, contending that Siri had infringed on its patents. (Google dropped the suit last week, leaving open the possibility of refiling at a later date.) All of those companies have also been sued numerous times by trolls. And as you read, keep in mind that software patents are often “aspirational” rather than attached to a tangible product. That is, they describe broad concepts of an interface system, or a way to calculate payment, before they’ve ever been created. Another way to put it, they’re patents on ideas. In a weird analytical disconnect, Malcolm Gladwell once celebrated this practice in a New Yorker piece about a company called Intellectual Ventures. “As a result,” the Times notes about the current smartphone wars, “some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.” — Michael Image: Partial screenshot, Fighters in a Patent War, by the New York Times.

Who’s Suing Who

Yesterday we noted the case of a voice recognition startup called Vlingo that was sued for patent infringement and — even though exonerated — eventually had to sell itself to the very company that sued it.

The anecdote is from a long, frustrating and very important investigation by the New York Times into our very broken patent system.

Here, a visualization by the Times shows who’s suing who among the big players in the smartphone industry. If you select the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that just about everyone is suing everyone. Just follow the orange arrows as each “represents a lawsuit involving a mobile patent. In some cases, when multiple firms are plaintiffs or defendants, a single suit is represented with multiple arrows.”

Better, view the original and set aside the time to read the actual article.

It’s a highly readable and follows the how and why of current smartphone patent wars:

The number of patent lawsuits filed in United States district courts each year has almost tripled in the last two decades to 3,260 in 2010, the last year for which federal data is available. Microsoft has sued Motorola; Motorola has sued Apple and Research in Motion; Research in Motion has sued Visto, a mobile technology company; and in August, Google, through its Motorola unit, sued Apple, contending that Siri had infringed on its patents. (Google dropped the suit last week, leaving open the possibility of refiling at a later date.) All of those companies have also been sued numerous times by trolls.

And as you read, keep in mind that software patents are often “aspirational” rather than attached to a tangible product. That is, they describe broad concepts of an interface system, or a way to calculate payment, before they’ve ever been created. Another way to put it, they’re patents on ideas. In a weird analytical disconnect, Malcolm Gladwell once celebrated this practice in a New Yorker piece about a company called Intellectual Ventures.

“As a result,” the Times notes about the current smartphone wars, “some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.” — Michael

Image: Partial screenshot, Fighters in a Patent War, by the New York Times.

New Pew Report: More Mobile = More News Consumption via paidContent: The findings, conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Economist Group, were presented Monday at an advertising week event in New York. They showed that news was the second most popular activity after email on smartphones and tablets, and that people who used both types of devices were likely to consume more overall news than before. In practice, this means that publishers are adapting to what Denise Warren of the New York Times calls the “multi-platform news user.” Warren says this user is likely to read the Times on a tablet in the morning and in the evenings, and to use their phone as an “interstitial” news device during the day. Warren added that these trends have led the company to increase its engineering team by 40% in an effort to produce an optimal mobile experience for roving news consumers. Read the full PDF of the report here. FJP: Another interesting finding studying news consumption trends, also from Pew, shows that for American adults under 30, social media has surpassed newspapers and equaled TV as their primary source of daily news. via Poynter: The study found 33 percent of those young adults got news from social networks the day before, while 34 percent watched TV news and just 13 percent read print or digital newspaper content. Images: Selection from the report.

New Pew Report: More Mobile = More News Consumption

via paidContent:

The findings, conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Economist Group, were presented Monday at an advertising week event in New York. They showed that news was the second most popular activity after email on smartphones and tablets, and that people who used both types of devices were likely to consume more overall news than before.

In practice, this means that publishers are adapting to what Denise Warren of the New York Times calls the “multi-platform news user.” Warren says this user is likely to read the Times on a tablet in the morning and in the evenings, and to use their phone as an “interstitial” news device during the day.

Warren added that these trends have led the company to increase its engineering team by 40% in an effort to produce an optimal mobile experience for roving news consumers.

Read the full PDF of the report here.

FJP: Another interesting finding studying news consumption trends, also from Pew, shows that for American adults under 30, social media has surpassed newspapers and equaled TV as their primary source of daily news.

via Poynter:

The study found 33 percent of those young adults got news from social networks the day before, while 34 percent watched TV news and just 13 percent read print or digital newspaper content.

Images: Selection from the report.

It is estimated that 380 billion images were taken last year, most with a camera phone. A total of 300 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every month. Instagram is growing exponentially and had four billion photos uploaded as of July 2012.

Almost everyone has a camera and is a photographer.

Just as access to pens and paper hasn’t produced thousands of Shakespeares or Nabokovs, this explosion of camera phones doesn’t seem to have led to more Dorothea Langes or Henri Cartier-Bressons. But it has certainly led to many more images of what people ate at lunch…

…The question is not so much whether this is a good thing for society (or a bad thing for photographers). It is happening, a billion times a day, and there is no going back.

The question is: How does the photographic community harness this explosion of visual energy to expand its audience? This is what needs to be focused on.
James Estrin, New York Times Lens Blog. In an Age of Likes, Commonplace Images Prevail.

The Perils of Free Messaging Apps, Specifically WhatsApp

via Worldcrunch:

WhatsApp is set up to make the service friendly to new users who don’t have to provide their own combination of user name and password – they just use the existing info relating to their phone as login data. Telephone numbers are simply and clearly the basis for user names, and WhatsApp passwords — at least on Android phones — are clearly based on a phone’s IMEI serial number.

Granger discovered that to generate a password out of the IMEI number the app just changes the order of the digits – “your password is likely to be an inverse of your phones IMEI number with an MD5 cryptographic hash thrown on top of it.” What that means is that anybody who knows a phone’s IMEI number can figure out the password.

Many apps use IMEI numbers to identify phones, and any installed program can access that information and pass it on to an external database. In the event that what happened to iPhone this week (a hacker group released one million Apple UDIDs) happens to WhatsApp, and a database generated from the phone serial numbers were to be made public, WhatsApp user accounts would be compromised and become targets for spammers. Not that hackers have lost any time — on gray market sites, databases of Android phone serial numbers and corresponding cell phone numbers are sold under the keyword WhatsApp.

FJP: Filing this under- be smart and secure about your online and mobile life.