More than one billion smartphones are now in use worldwide, according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm also projects there will be over 2 billion smartphones by 2015.
The numbers mean that one in seven people worldwide now uses a smartphone. This represents a 47 percent increase since last year.
Nokia is credited with introducing the first “modern” smartphone in 1996. The industry exploded following the rapid adoption of Apple’s iPhone.
“The growth of the smartphone market, estimated by Bloomberg Industries to be worth $219 billion last year, has helped Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. rack up record earnings as they take sales from rivals including Espoo, Finland-based Nokia,” reports Bloomberg.
Apple set a new record last month when the company sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s during the product’s debut weekend. “Samsung, the Suwon, South Korea-based maker of Galaxy smartphones, ended Nokia’s 14-year reign as the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones this year,” notes the post.
While the U.S. smartphone industry has already boomed, Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawson explained that “Most of the world does not yet own a smartphone and there remains huge scope for future growth, particularly in emerging markets such as China, India and Africa.”
Despite the attention cord-cutting has received, several recent studies suggest that consumers are in fact much too comfortable with their pay TV subscriptions to switch.
According to a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, “The reluctance to opt out of pay TV subscriptions may be less about enthusiasm than about inertia,” reports Variety. “Nearly three out of four surveyed indicated they had no plans to change providers in the next year, and 59 percent hadn’t bothered switching providers within the past year, which PwC chalked up to complacency.”
Another survey of 2,000 online respondents by Digitalsmiths found that keeping customers could however be difficult. “Of the four-fifths who registered satisfaction, 38 percent said they would consider changing services within the next six months,” explains the article. “But rival pay TV services are likelier to benefit from that switch than so-called over-the-top apps like Netflix; 65 percent of those surveyed didn’t use those services at all.”
Rising fees was the main reason for dissatisfaction among the remaining one-fifth. Although nearly double the rate of inflation, pay TV fee increases still lag behind the price growth of a gallon of gas, a cup of coffee or pet food.
“You don’t often hear of pundits warning of a pending crisis because the cost of dog food is spiraling out of control,” Bernstein Research analyst Todd Juenger notes.
Cord cutting isn’t entirely out of the picture though. “Younger demos showed significantly less devotion to multichannel brands and more willingness to switch, particularly when it came to new features. Half of respondents ages 18-29 told PwC they were ‘likely to use the Web to satisfy their entertainment needs,’ which could bode well for the Hulus of the world,” the article states, warning pay TV providers from getting too comfortable.
The next generation 4K HDTVs will be known as “Ultra High-Definition” or simply “Ultra HD,” according to a decision made Thursday by the Consumer Electronics Association’s Board of Industry Leaders.
The first Ultra HD models are slated to go on sale this fall and are expected to be a major theme at January’s CES in Las Vegas. LG launched its $20,000 84-inch Ultra HD model in September, followed by Sony with its competing 84-inch model for $5,000 more.
“Earlier this year, the CEA Ultra HD Working Group was formed to discuss how best to define and educate consumers about this new technology,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. “The organization also undertook extensive consumer research on the best way to explain to consumers the new technology and its value.”
To meet the requirements of Ultra HD status, products such as TVs, monitors and projectors need to feature at least eight million active pixels.
“Displays will also have an aspect ratio of 16×9 and must have at least one digital input capable of carrying and presenting native 4K format video at 3,840 x 2,160 resolution,” notes the post.
“Ultra HD is the next natural step forward in display technologies, offering consumers an incredibly immersive viewing experience with outstanding new levels of picture quality,” says Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CEA. “This new terminology and the recommended attributes will help consumers navigate the marketplace to find the TV that best meets their needs.”
“All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing,” the service stated on its Facebook page with the announcement that it has traded out its physical servers for virtual machines on cloud services.
“By hosting its infrastructure in multiple data centers and even multiple countries, the widely used torrent site says it will avoid being shut down by authorities targeting BitTorrent sites,” Ars Technica writes. “It has been the target of raids on previous occasions, and has suffered downtime because of the types of IT hassles that afflict most businesses. Moving to the cloud will help on both counts.”
In a related article, TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay is now hosted by several cloud hosting providers in two countries, and providers don’t know they’re hosting the service. “All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be reinstalled at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world,” notes the post.
Converting to the cloud also has IT benefits, such as avoiding going offline for reasons like broken power distribution units — a problem The Pirate Bay faced in the past.
“If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider,” a Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak. “Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”
There are still ways for authorities to take The Pirate Bay offline despite the service’s claims. ExtremeTech also notes that installing a new load balancer is not easy or cheap.
The social gaming space has become increasingly crowded, and customer attention spans for games have become shorter.
This has resulted in a dangerous scenario for game developers, as investors do not want to put money into a game when the life span can “be clocked with an egg-timer rather than an old-fashioned desk calendar,” writes Fortune.
Robert W. Baird & Co. researcher Colin Sebastian notes that while the social gaming market is still growing, the pace has slowed considerably, and the uncertainty inherent in the genre makes it a tough sell for investors. “Games are a hit-driven business,” he says, “so it’s really hard to have a crystal ball and know what games are going to be successful and for how long.”
Zynga’s purchase of OMGPOP for $200 million underscores the uncertainty in social gaming. Zynga wanted OMGPOP’s hit game “Draw Something,” but just as Zynga bought the game, the user base tanked, as users got bored and moved on to new games.
PopCap Games has also struggled since Electronic Arts purchased the company in 2011 for $1.3 billion.
“We’ve seen a dramatic change in the way people play and pay for games,” explains PopCap founder John Vechey. “The change in consumer tastes requires us to reorganize our business and invest in new types of games on new platforms — it’s a completely different world from when we started.”
Analysts warn against the acquisition of “one-game companies” like OMGPOP because of the quick turnover in what games are popular at any given time. Other analysts suggests companies should hire individual developers rather than companies.
The Isis consortium has announced that its mobile-payment service using smartphones with NFC chips will launch Monday in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas. The test launch was originally scheduled for the summer.
The consortium includes wireless carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Isis confirmed via an email statement that 20 Isis-ready phones would be available by the end of 2012 to use the network.
T-Mobile USA Mobile Commerce is offering the Isis Mobile Wallet application through the Google Play online store. AT&T will provide five phones: the Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One X, Samsung Exhilarate, LG Espace and Samsung Rugby Pro. The other carriers have yet to announce specific models.
“Isis previously confirmed a number of retailers, gas stations and transit providers that will be equipped to handle the NFC payments,” reports Computerworld. “The NFC phones also contain special security, known as a ‘secure element’ inside, which protects a customer’s credit card information.”
“There has been a debate between banks and other parties to mobile commerce as to whether the secure element should remain in the phone — either on a SIM card or embedded in the phone’s core — or be should located in the cloud,” notes the article.
Earlier this year, Apple controlled 72 percent of smartphone traffic and Android accounted for only 26 percent.
This week, the tables have turned and Android now holds the majority — even with the impressive traction of the new iPhone 5.
All of Apple’s phones (from the original 2007 model to the latest release) represent 46 percent of traffic. The new iPhone 5 has taken up three percent of North American mobile Web traffic, quickly surpassing the Galaxy S III at two percent.
Non-Samsung Android phones are responsible for 34 percent of North American mobile Web traffic. Samsung phones (almost exclusively Android) control 17 percent. In total, Android now accounts for 51 percent of traffic.
“We are right at the tipping point between majority iPhone and majority Android Web traffic,” VentureBeat writes. “That’s big news, and while it was likely to come for some time given the fact that Android out-sells iOS, it’s a milestone event. The question now becomes: How high will it go?”
Netflix rolled out second screen features for the PS3 a few weeks back that provide users with game console controls from their Android or iOS handset. The company is now looking to expand this offering to other devices, enabling users to control their TV apps and connected devices with mobile handsets.
“Our overall strategy around second screen control is that Netflix on TV devices is a great viewing experience, but Netflix on mobile devices makes activities like browsing, searching, rating and social easier,” explains a Netflix spokesperson. “We see our users doing this naturally today and are trying to support and optimize for that behavior.”
“It makes a lot of sense for the company to use phones and tablets as remote controls for the TV screen,” GigaOM writes. “Netflix’s catalog now consists of roughly 50,000 titles, which is hard to navigate and search on a TV or connected device. Tablets on the other hand in particular make for great programming guides, and the ability to beam a video with one click to the big screen could be a great addition to the company’s apps.”
In order to take advantage of the second screen controls, Netflix viewers “need to be logged into the Netflix application on both devices with the same Netflix account, and also have their mobile phone connect to the same Wi-Fi network as the game console,” the post explains.
Google TV could be the next platform to get second screen support. The company has been working on its own second screen experience for Google TV apps.
While primetime television consumption is as high as ever, the percentage of viewers watching live programming has dropped. People are watching more content either on DVR playback or on demand through streaming services, according to research firm GfK.
This has resulted in live television viewership during the 8:00-9:00 pm time slot (among those watching some sort of television) to drop from 83 percent in 2008 to 64 percent in 2012.
Recorded program viewing has risen 10 percent to 26 percent of total viewing during this time slot. Video game playing and streaming video services have also increased their share.
The trend is more dramatic for viewers in the 13-32 age bracket, where live television viewing only accounts for 57 percent of the current 8:00-9:00 pm slot.
“The GfK research also noted that the number of viewers using smartphones while in front of their TVs during primetime is at 20 percent, a habit that wasn’t on the radar four years ago, which could speak to the potential of second screen applications,” writes Variety.
While broadcasters continue to challenge the legality of Aereo, the TV-over-Internet service is expanding its availability.
“Aereo is still limited to residents of New York City, but it’s now available on additional devices including Windows computers and on a wider selection of Web browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer,” reports USA Today. “Before, access was restricted to selected Apple devices such as the iPhone and the iPad, as well as the Roku streaming set-top box.”
The company is expected to launch in additional markets in a few more months and may be available on Android devices by the end of this year.
“Aereo lets customers capture over-the-air broadcasts from 29 local channels for viewing on devices, with subscriptions starting at $8 a month,” explains the article. “Aereo has created a dime-sized TV antenna and crams hundreds and perhaps thousands of them into dishwasher-size boxes located at the company’s offices in Brooklyn. A customer who watches or records a show is temporarily assigned an antenna, which picks up the show and streams it over the Internet.”
Networks including Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit claiming Aereo illegally copies and retransmits their content, but Aereo believes that assigning individual antennas to customers makes it legal.
A federal judge denied broadcasters a preliminary injunction to stop Aereo in July. However, the case is still pending.
Approximately 20 percent of televisions shipped in North America are Internet-connected TVs, a penetration rate significantly lagging behind Asia and Europe, according to NPD DisplaySearch.
While Smart TV shipments are actually up 15 percent worldwide this year, adoption in North America has been slower.
“North American households consume the highest levels of Internet video, averaging over 30GB per household every month (according to Cisco), yet they don’t seem attracted to connected TVs,” explains NPD’s Paul Gray. “We find that North America leads by far in paid on-demand services, which tend to be tied to set-top boxes.”
“Smart TV shipments are tightly linked to content consumption habits,” reports Home Media Magazine. “For consumers in China, there is plenty of free content on the Internet and few structured services. This favors TVs with built-in browsers. Furthermore, Chinese consumers consider a TV to be a prestigious purchase and are prepared to invest more in them.”
“Terrestrial broadcasters’ repurposed content aggregators are beginning to dominate in Western Europe,” notes the article. “These broadcasters have no interest in hardware, so connected TVs are flourishing with open standards such as HbbTV rapidly gaining acceptance and evolving with new features.”
An estimated 43 million open Internet access smart TVs are expected to ship in 2012, a number predicted to grow to 95 million in 2016.
According to new Nielsen data, more than 75 percent of U.S. homes now have HDTVs, marking a 14 percent increase over 2011. Additionally, 40 percent of homes have more than one HD set.
There are 115 million U.S. homes with televisions. However, the data also shows that a surprising amount of viewing is not HD quality.
Despite 61 percent of primetime viewing experienced on an HD set in May, only 25 percent of cable primetime and 29 percent of English-language broadcast primetime occurred in “true HD” — when an HD set is connected to an HD signal and HD channels are being viewed.
“The Nielsen study was based on usage of 17 networks — five English-language broadcast networks and 12 ad supported cable networks — in May 2012,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. “As expected, sports and entertainment genres are more likely to be viewed in HD than news and kids programming,”
“Some analysts believe consumers are still confused about HDTV — that just buying an HDTV set means getting HDTV-quality programming,” notes MediaPost in a related report.
Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown has announced that the 80-year-old publication will abandon its print magazine at the end of December. Starting next year it will be offered exclusively online and as a mobile app.
“Founded in 1933, Newsweek’s ‘turn of the page,’ as Brown calls it, comes just two years after its merger with Web-only outlet The Daily Beast,” reports Digital Trends. The December 31 issue will be the magazine’s final physical edition in the U.S.
“The publication will be renamed Newsweek Global, with a single edition created for the world market,” explains the post. “Like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the majority of Newsweek Global’s content will only be available with a paid subscription, though select content will still be accessible for free on The Daily Beast.”
Newsweek has reportedly been losing $40 million a year. The digital transition is expected to include staff reductions and streamlining of business operations.
“Currently, 39 percent of Americans say they get their news from an online source, according to a Pew Research Center study released last month. In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format,” notes Brown. “This was not the case just two years ago. It will increasingly be the case in the years ahead.”
“This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism — that is as powerful as ever,” contends Brown. “It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution.”
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a warning against malware on Android devices last week.
“The IC3 has been made aware of various malware attacking Android operating systems for mobile devices,” it notes. “Some of the latest known versions of this type of malware are Loozfon and FinFisher.”
Loozfon is information-stealing malware, used by criminals to steal address books and phone numbers. FinFisher is “a spyware capable of taking over the components of a mobile device. When installed the mobile device can be remotely controlled and monitored no matter where the Target is located,” explains Fortune.
IC3 offers suggestions for consumers to protect themselves:
“When purchasing a smartphone, know the features of the device, including the default settings. Turn off features of the device not needed to minimize the attack surface of the device.”
“With the growth of the application market for mobile devices, users should look at the reviews of the developer/company who published the application.”
“Passcode protect your mobile device. This is the first layer of physical security to protect the contents of the device. In conjunction with the passcode, enable the screen lock feature after a few minutes of inactivity.”
While Web companies have become obsessed with tracking Facebook and Twitter for traffic, Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that most traffic for many sites still comes through “dark social” sources like email and chat messages.
When tracking programs show that traffic comes through “direct” or “typed/bookmarked,” it suggests users actually typed the URL into the browser. But many times, argues Madrigal, the traffic actually comes through a chat message or an email from a friend.
Chartbeat, which provides analytics for publishers, breaks down the “direct” category into sub-categories. When analyzing The Atlantic website, for example, Chartbeat found that 60 percent of social traffic comes from these “dark” or hard to track social sources.
The data suggests that many websites see close to 70 percent traffic from hard to track social sources.
“This problem is compounded by the shift to mobile content consumption, since chat apps and instant messaging and other direct communication methods are even more prevalent in the mobile world than on the desktop,” writes GigaOM. “Links are passed from social network to apps to chat to email, and tracking them quite quickly becomes almost impossible.”
One way to optimize page views is to follow the model of “content is king,” explains Madrigal. Since most traffic comes through person-to-person referrals, then simply writing interesting pieces should spark sharing.