The Big App

Welcome to the connected consumer. This person most likely has a tablet and smartphone, and is constantly connected to their friends via Facebook. Today, more than 60% of 25-34 year-olds (Gen-Y) own a smartphone. One in three online consumers will buy a tablet by 2014. That’s a lot to digest at once, right? A new survey from Zmags investigates the connected consumer and their digital habits.

Only 4% of these consumers use branded apps. Eighty-seven percent prefer to use websites and mobile sites. This is good news for the so-called tablet commerce revolution (can a consumer movement be rightly called a “revolution”? I shudder), which suggests that tablet owners are using tablet-optimized websites like Amazon.com. But this connected consumer is not a Gen-Y. She is…wait for it…a 40-something-year-old woman.

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—	87% Of Connected Consumers Prefer Websites & Mobile Sites Over Apps - via readwriteweb

Information Arbitrage: Evolving the technical organization »

informationarbitrage:

You and a pal have what you think is a great idea. You hack some code together and build a simple prototype. You get some feedback, like what you’re hearing and decide to go all-in on a start-up. You build some more, maybe convince another jiujitsu developer to join your little cadre on the come,…

The rise and fall of personal computing

Windows Phone Marketplace Beats Android Market to 50,000 Apps

Though it’s still dwarfed by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has been posting some decent growth lately. In mid-November, it hit the 40,000 app milestone, and now, a little over a month later, it’s hit another.

According to All About Windows Phone, which tracks Windows Phone app submissions, the Marketplace has seen more than 50,000 apps published to it — 50,126, to be exact.

Notably, Windows Phone reached that 50,000 app milestone in 14 months, faster than Android, Symbian, or BlackBerry (but slower than iOS, which hit that mark in about a year).

Read More…

Why Is Windows Phone Failing?

A former GM who used to work on Windows Phone 7 for Microsoft, Charlie Kindel, took to his personal blog today with some thoughts on why Microsoft’s mobile efforts seem so stagnant.

It boils down to carriers, manufacturers, and the companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft who make the operating system are all locked in this big three-way pissing contest to see who gets the most say in marketing a device.

According to Kindel, Android is crushing iOS and Windows Phone 7 when it comes to marketshare simply because its open platform allows manufacturers and carriers to get away with whatever they want, while cranking out dozens of devices a year.

Why Berlin is poised to be Europe’s new tech hub

The entrepreneurship is rampant in this city. Some say there are somewhere between 100 to 400 startups in Berlin. I was in Berlin for about 70 hours and I met with over 40. I am pretty sure – if I stuck around for another week — I would have met many more. The central Mitte district that is home to many of these is called Silicon Allee (aka Silicon Avenue.)

The year in mobile apps: Where we’ve been, where we’re going

Smartphone and tablet purchases have been on the rise for several years, but 2011 was a turning point: This was the first year that these mobile devices outsold desktop and laptop PCs. The effect — and perhaps some of the cause of this — is a love affair with mobile apps, leading to more apps sold than ever and more time spent with them than ever. We mobile consumers demonstrated this very clearly both in the U.S. and abroad: Apple this month hit 18 billion downloads total on its iOS App Store, and Google’s Android Market likewise hit 10 billion.

Study: Apple’s iPhone, iPad account for 90 percent of mobile purchases

If people are buying through mobile online retail site, they’re most likely doing so on Apple devices, according to a new report this week from retail analysis firm RichRelevance. iPads and iPhones accounted for over 92 percent of online retail sales not originating from a desktop device occurring in December, according to the study.

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Fuck You, Pay Me. »

parislemon:

James Kendrick has an interesting idea to combat Android fragmentation: charge users to get updates.

I’m reminded of Steve Ballmer’s thoughts about Android being “free”. I’m also reminded of a drug dealer: “first taste free”.

Bottom line: this will never happen. Even if it did, how would that $400 million be divided? The OEMs would probably fight about that for several months — before they released it to the carriers to fight about for several months.

I Was Wrong about Apple’s iWatch

By Mike Elgan

“In my old post, I wrote that Apple is unique in the industry in that it has three criteria for entering an entirely new market:

1. There are glaring problems or inadequacies among all major players in the market that can be solved by Apple’s core competency of elegant design.

2. The new market area enables Apple to control a new platform that supports an ecosystem of content, such as media or apps.

3. Both the potential market and the marketplace for content must be huge, mainstream and central to how most people live.”