News tagged ‘mobile’

This week Apple revealed new patent application that describes its new superior advertisement technique. The document entitled "System and method for providing contextual l advertisements according to a dynamic pricing scheme."

Its main idea is that the effectiveness of the modern mobile advertisements can be improved with using unique pricing scheme (when advertiser pays variable price that based "on the likelihood of influencing user behaviour") and special marketing factors that can determine the effectiveness of the ad.

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Recently Billboard published a report that reveals new information on Apple's share on music sales market. When the first generation iPhone was presented, iTunes had only 12,7% of American music market. In 2008 Apple almost doubled it and made 21,4%. 2009 reveals five percentage points increase - now iTunes has 26,7% of music sales.

Such mobile providers as AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless on the contrary lose their positions, downing from 6,6% to 4,9% in 2009. Partly it is explained by lower priced ringtones in iTunes and its free tools for making custom ringtones. Both of these factors eventually attracted more people.

Physical media music in turn loses its popularity from year to year. Numbers reveal its share fell from 57,5% in 2008 to 49,3% in 2009. That means that iTunes actually makes a half of all digital music downloads overall.

iTunes' closest rival Amazon also increased its sales. But in digital MP3 sales the company's share grew from 0,8% in 2008 to 1,3% in 2009, which is not even close to Apple's 26,7% share. Such results, according to Billboard, were "still well short of where major labels had hoped Amazon's download store would be by now, dimming earlier expectations that it will be able to significantly reduce the labels' heavy dependence on iTunes for digital sales."

It is interesting to look forward for Google which recently acquired Simplify Media to expectedly turn it into iTunes rival for Android users. But for now the company's subsidiary AdMob reveals the amount of media bought or even downloaded by Android users is still so small that it cannot be compared with iTunes success.

This Wednesday HTC accused Apple in infringing of five their patents. The countersuit was filed with the International Trade Commission and now asks to halt the importation of the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad into America.

Vice President of HTC in North America Jason Mackenzie says the action was taken to protect its partners and customers.

"HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible".

The press release given by HTC underlines that the company created the most advanced smartphones in the world for the last 10 years.

At this moment there are twelve HTC phones available in America, including the HTC HD2 for T-Mobile, the HTC EVO 4G for Sprint and the Droid Incredible for Verizon.

Still there is no information revealed about the patents that are involved in the suit.

Recently The Wall Street Journal had reported that Verizon collaborates with Google to create new tablet device that will compete with the iPad. The information was confirmed by Lowell McAdam, who is a Verizon CEO, in his interview to the paper.

"What do we think the next big wave of opportunities are? We're working on tablets together, for example. We're looking at all the things Google has in its archives that we could put on a tablet to make it a great experience."

Still there were no information revealed about the device's hardware and its manufacturers. McAdam said that collaboration with Google has already led to success in company's efforts to combat the iPhone with Android-based handsets, so he's looking forward for the same result in creating new tablet device.

Verizon CEO also told that the company now will close the gap with AT&T which offers exclusive only 3G data plans for the iPad in the USA. In early 2011 Verizon will present 4G-capable device along with its new high-speed network, which by the end of 2010 will cover 25 to 30 cities. It is planned that there will be more price plans for every selling device, and it may be more expensive than current offers of other carriers who have 3G network.

AT&T seems to not support such policy (at least the company have been repeatedly denying such information), though its CEO Randall Stephenson thinks the industry will be proposing variable pricing once.

"For the industry, we will progressively move towards more of what I call variable pricing. The heavy consumers will pay different than the lower consumers."

ADR Studio, which is an Italian design firm, recently tried to create another "Apple style product" and called it iWatch. As you see, it's a new kind of watch with aluminum casing, 16 Gb capacity and ability to connect to any mobile iDevice via Bluetooth or Wi-fi. The idea of iWatch is that it should answer calls coming to iPhone in your pocket, and internet access should allow reading RSS feeds and even viewing photos and weather. There is also a pico projector built-in to project images and videos.

More photos are given below.

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NPD Group had recently revealed their new study, which shows that iPhone OS became the second most selling OS last quarter in US. To be precise 28% of all handsets sold were Android phones, and iPhones made only 21%. Research In Motion's Blackberries hold 36 percent of market.

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iPad USB Camera Connection Kit is much more useful as it seems. Max Sha, an experienced user, was able to access external hard drive with this kit. All you need is a jailbroken iPad, an external drive, a split-USB cable to give the drive some power and a terminal of some sort (f.e. MacBook) to mount the external storage. While it is a little unwieldy, it shows that Terabytes of external storage for iPad is possible.

Here is a complete step-by-step guide from Max Sha:

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According to TechCrunch, Wireless Quattro had recently contacted iPhone app developers to introduce their new "Verification of iTunes Purchase" program. The company is an Apple subsidiary,and it currently develops forthcoming iAd program.

ViP helps developers to promote their apps in App Store via ads which appearing in iPhone apps. With this feature they can track download conversion rates in real-time. Such information is proprietary to Apple, so Quattro promotes the product and its "exclusive integration with the App Store", because such a feature is unavailable to other ad networks, and such information mentioned in the e-mail:

"Verification of iTunes Purchase uses no SDK or server-side integration — this cannot be duplicated by any of our competitors".

Other advertisement companies such as Google's AdMob can only estimate conversion rates, but such data cannot be as precise and detailed as Quattro's one. For enabling conversion tracking every developer that uses AdMob must integrate the company's advertising API into his code.

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According to a report by Marketwatch (which in turn refers to a figures revealed by Strategy Analytics), smartphones now take 18% share on the market of all mobile phones.

"Sales are driven by healthy operator subsidies, competition between vendors, and a rising number of cheaper models built around operating systems such as Google Inc's Android and Nokia Corp's key smartphone platform Symbian."

It is interesting that different smartphone makers sometimes compete on different markets. Strategy Analytics reveals that Nokia shows good results in India and China while Motorola focuses more on US.

As we wrote before, Motorola raised up its profits after producing its Android-based Droid/Milestone, which is frequently called the closest rival to Apple's iPhone.

Nokia's purpose is to gain the leadership on the markets that are only emerging. In the first quarter the company has 21.5 million smartphones sold, but these are mostly cheap models that were shipped primarily to South America and China. North America remains a "problem child" for Nokia. The company's sales make 40% of all the sales in this quarter.

RIM has 10.6 million BlackBerries sold and takes second place with its 19.7% share.

Globally Apple has 16,4% market share in selling smartphones in this quarter and became a mobile vendor number one in the US. The company made record 8.8 million iPhone sales. Among all mobile phone makers Apple hold 3% global market share.

Finally the jailbreak for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch from the Dev Team is available for download. It's free and untethered and it's called "Spirit". The jailbreak supports every iDevice with firmware version 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.2.

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This spring quarter Motorola had reportedly sold 8.5 million phones, which makes it the second biggest US phone maker after Apple that sold 8.8 million iPhones in the same period.

According to a Forbes report, one year ago Motorola had better results - 14,7 million phones sold. But the profit this year is down only by 9% because the company had changed its strategy and now successfully sells more sophisticated smartphones instead of cheap phones.

Motorola had best selling results four years ago when it was selling Razr model. In 2006 it was releasing 46 million phones per quarter. But these days mobile providers push companies to deliver cheap phones and because of it Motorola's profits are falling down.

The company  had big plans on its Milestone/Droid device which ships with Android OS. It was heavily promoted by Motorola and Verizon as the best Android phone available, but the company sold only 2.3 million devices in the spring quarter, which is only 27% of the total phones sold.

As you remember, this Thursday Steve Jobs wrote a letter about his thoughts on Flash. In responce to such a public attack Adobe decided to give its employees mobile phones running on Android OS which support Flash.

CNet reports it has information from three sources close to Adobe that the company is going to give Android phones, but the exact model is not specified yet (though HTC phones and Google Nexus One were mentioned). There is also no information about whether Adobe is going to give devices to all 8,600 employees or just to developers.

Flash 10.1 will be presented in May at Google's I/O conference. Every its attendee will receive Motorola Droid or Nexus One from Google.

This week's sensation was a Steve Jobs' letter published officially on Apple's site. If you didn't read it or want to remind it to yourself, here are its main tent poles:

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Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported that this year Apple is going to charge companies 1$ million for iAds on its mobile devices. Citing an unknown but reliable source familiar with the matter those companies that want to become a part of the iAds launch will pay $10 million to be first in the door.

The pricing policy of iAds is pretty simple. Every time user sees an ad the advertiser is charged a penny. If he's tapping the banner, Apple charges $2. So $1 million ad buy will provoke a big amount of its views and user taps.

In addition to a higher price Apple wants to take more control over marketing campaigns of its clients. But still it doesn't reduce companies' interest in iAds:

"Despite the high price, ad executives at agencies from Boston to New York and San Francisco to Los Angeles have crowded into conference rooms in recent weeks to listen to the tech company's pitch for iAd".

One of the advertisements that is already developed is an ad for Nike's Air Jordan basketball shoes. It includes iAd logo and animated banner. If you select it, you'll see an interactive store locator, special videoclip and exclusive offers taking place at local stores. This iAd was also shown by Apple on its iPhone OS 4 preview event.

Some experts think Apple's appearance at the market of mobile advertisement may convince some other selling ads companies to switch to other mobile platforms (for example, Google Android).

With a growing popularity of apps for Apple devices advertisers and developers see iAds as a potential opportunity to reach a wide audience and raise more money on it.

According to the US FTC, today Apple has purchased a virtual assistant application Siri. The cost of the deal is $200 million.

Scobleizer's author Robert Scoble thinks the purchase is very important to Apple:

"The value in unlocked is huge. This shows Apple is very willing to buy its way into the new mobile web and the new API-driven web. This also could be a major cornerstone in how it competes with Google."

Siri is a voice-guided application that acts as a concierge or personal assistant. It helps you to interact with your mobile device via your voice only.