Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers.

For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse-over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell.

It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against OpenSignalMaps — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user.

That there are gobs of Android devices floating around out there isn’t exactly a shocker, but data like this really drives home the issue. With so many devices running so many versions of Android with who knows many carrier- and manufacturer-mandated tweaks onboard, how is a developer supposed to make sure that all of their users gets a consistent experience? They can’t, unless they’re willing to test like crazy.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt famously downplayed the term “fragmentation” at this year’s CES, suggesting instead that people call it “differentiation.” It’s hard not to agree with sentiment on some level — after all, one of Android’s key strengths is how easily it fits into different niches and price points. But according to him, as long as every Android user is able to use the same apps, there’s no problem here.

That strikes me as a rather shortsighted way of looking at it. Downloading and installing apps is one thing, but what I think really counts — the user experience — can still vary from hardware configuration to hardware configuration. Not a day goes by without new Android hardware (or rumors of new Android hardware) making the rounds — hell, just an hour or so ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google will soon be filling out the new Devices section in the Google Play Store with new, unlocked “Nexus” hardware thanks to cooperation from up to five hardware manufacturers.

That’s why developers like Animoca have invested what I can only imagine is a sizable amount of money and effort testing their apps with something like 400 Android devices before pushing them out into the world. And of course, fragmentation isn’t just a hardware issue — the OSM post points out that the two most used versions of Android now only account for 75% of the devices they surveyed, down from 90% last year, yet another issue for developers to grapple with.

Does every developer need to go through a process that outlandish? Certainly not — OpenSignalMaps seems to test on a tiny fraction of that, and smaller developers can cover most of their bases with a handful of carefully chosen devices. At the end of the day though, despite the sheer amount of choice and flexibility that Android has provided users, those developers still have a choice to make — do they want to strive for perfection, or do they want to keep their sanity?

TechCrunch » android

Smule has been churning out scores of popular music-making iOS apps for years now, but they’ve been notoriously gun-shy about bringing those apps to other platforms.

As of today though, that streak has finally come to an end — the company has just released their auto-tuning Songify app into the Google Play Store.

Originally developed by Khush (whom Smule acquired toward the end of last year), Songify turns user-recorded speech into surprisingly listenable songs by tuning those voice inputs to go along with preset background music. The iOS version peaked at #1 on Apple’s Top Free Apps chart shortly after its launch in July 2011, and Smule now hopes for similar success as it expands into new territory.

For a while though, it seemed like this day would never come. Late last year, Smule co-founder and CTO Ge Wang told InsideMobileApps that Android app development was under consideration by the company, but issues of audio latency in certain devices meant that not every user would have a consistently solid musical experience. Though company representatives are quick to note that latency is becoming less of an issue over time, Songify sort of side-steps that issue because it doesn’t rely on instantaneous audio feedback like some of Smule’s other apps (say, Ocarina for example).

Still, that didn’t stop the company from testing the waters ahead of today’s official launch. A preview version of Songify was recently published in the Google Play Store to generally positive reviews, though they did point to a few issues that were addressed in the final build.

So what’s next for the team at Smule? In case Songify doesn’t provide you with quite enough musical mirth, Smule has also revealed that their Magic Piano app is set to make its Android debut in just a few weeks, though it too is currently available in preview form for those who just can’t wait.

For now though, Smule is content to hunker down on Android and iOS — company representatives confirmed (again) that expansion into platforms like Windows Phone isn’t in the works at this time.

TechCrunch » android

We know smartphone and tablet owners like to buy games. But if you go by a new ABI exploration of user habits, most of us aren’t buying much of anything. More than 70 percent of the crowd spends little to nothing on mobile apps, dragging down the average of $ 14 spent per month among paying customers to a median of $ 7.50 when you include the skinflints. As you might imagine, that leaves the remaining 30 percent making up for a lot of slack: three percent of downloaders represent a fifth of all the spending in the mobile app world. Researchers suggest that developers focus on a long-term strategy of freemium pricing or utility apps to get more customers buying, but we imagine that writing more games about catapulting frustrated birds might just work out on its own.

Continue reading More than 70 percent of mobile users pay little for apps, big spenders make up for us cheapskates

More than 70 percent of mobile users pay little for apps, big spenders make up for us cheapskates originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 May 2012 02:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last month, mobile marketing company Velti reported that iOS had pulled slightly of Android in mobile ad impressions, after being tied at the end of last year. Now, apparently, iOS has taken widened that lead, if not by much — it accounted for 55 percent of mobile ad impressions in April, compared to 45 percent for Android.

The data is based on data from Velti’s Mobclix Exchange, which serves ads to more than 33,500 apps, the company says.

The iOS lead is also evident when you look at the top devices. 20 percent of impressions happen on the iPhone, 15 percent on the iPod Touch, 13 percent on iPad — only then do you get to the top Android contender, the Samsung Galaxy S2, with 2.3 percent. (That also reflects the device fragmentation within Android.)

But not everything looks rosy for Apple. The report also says that impressions from the new iPad, which exploded out of the gate in March, had also slowed compared to the growth of the iPad 2 after its launch. The new iPad currently accounts for 8 percent of all impressions, while the iPad 2 had 13 percent at the same point in its release cycle.

Or if you want things broken down by carrier, AT&T is dominant, with 53 percent of impressions, compared to 24 percent for Verizon and 19 percent for sprint.

Finally, the report breaks down CPMs by advertising category. Women/mothers was the most lucrative category, with CPMs of $ 15.15, followed by finance ($ 10.21) and automotive ($ 9.51).

You can read more about the report here.

TechCrunch » Mobile

There’s no shortage of ideas on how we can revitalize our flagging space endeavors. Neil deGrasse Tyson says we should invest in NASA. Planetary Resources plans to mine asteroids. And one systems and electrical engineer wants us to build the Starship Enterprise by 2032. BuildTheEnterprise, launched last week, is an audacious call to construct a working version of the first-generation USS Enterprise within 20 years. The proposed ship would have an artificial gravity wheel, three ion propulsion engines, and nuclear reactors; it would be able to reach Mars within 90 days. The author, known as “BTE-Dan,” isn’t an expert in the field, but he’s put together a huge wealth of information on current research that could be used to build the ship,…

Continue reading…

The Verge – All Posts

While EVs come in all shapes and sizes, one thing seems to remain constant — a witty electricity pun. This time up its Ample, and its “Eo” e-quadrimotorcycle. A quadri-ma-whatcycle? Basically, a light, low-powered four-wheeled electric vehicle. The Eo’s 40 miles per hour top speed might not be teeth-rattlingly fast, but it means it can eke out 124 miles on a single charge. Essentially, it’s a single seated vehicle, but there are two fold-out chairs in the back if you want to make things even more cosy, while other gizmos on board include backward-facing cameras that pipe into a screen on the dash, replacing the need for mirrors. The Eo was on display at EVS26 in California, but no word on if, or when, we can expect to see this cutting us up on the school run.

Ample’s cute ‘Eo’ EV is the world’s first e-quadrimotorcycle, we hope not the last originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 May 2012 02:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ask Apple’s speech recognition software Siri, what the best smartphone ever is, the answer would surely be its own champion handset the iPhone 4S right??

Wrong! According to Siri the answer is actually the Nokia Lumia 900, well at the time of writing at least. Go on, try it for yourselves.

Siri’s answers are actually based on results from search engine Wolfram Alpha, which itself takes information from user reviews.

With the Nokia Lumia 900 recently being launched it’s perhaps understandable it has so many hits.

That said we’re sure the folks at Apple won’t be best pleased to hear it’s software is advising people to look elsewhere.

The Nokia Lumia 900 was launched with a huge lightshow in New York’s Times Square in April.?

A white version of the Windows Phone is actually already in stock UK branches of Phones 4u, though its arrival has been far more low-key after some confusion to the official on-sale date.

Read

Tags:
Phones iPhone Siri Nokia Lumia 900 Apple iPhone 4S

Nokia Lumia 900 is the “best smartphone ever” according to…..Siri originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Fri, 11 May 2012 18:07:00 +0100

Pocket-lint : phones : Latest News

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.

Facebook’s Week In Wall Street Hell

This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I refer to stated that Facebook wanted to acknowledge a trend; that trend is the declining ARPU (average revenue per user) being seen in its current quarter. This trend is being driven, Facebook said, by the growth in its usage on mobile platforms and its inability to monetize those platforms in the same way, or at the same rate, as its desktop/laptop offerings.

The previous iterations of the S1 had all contained the possibility of this trend. Even the likelihood of it. But the actuality of the trend was noted here for the first time in the S1.

The Street Knows The Truth

This is a company about to sell shares at a multiple of earnings that dwarfs companies with massive revenues, profits and growth rates – like Apple’s. Facebook’s multiple is of a size that is traditionally only justified by high growth rates. And now “the street” has picked up on the fact that the rate of revenue growth is declining as traffic migrates to mobile. It is even feasible, if this rate accelerates that revenues could fall in absolute terms, as they did in Facebook’s most recent quarter. The street is not happy.

This is a historic event. A high growth company entering its IPO whilst its revenue growth decelerates amidst a huge and structural change in the usage patterns of its product is not the norm. Especially when it is the biggest IPO in US history.

Amidst the rhetoric that the IPO is over-subscribed, one wonders if the shares can possibly be worth what people are being asked to pay for them. I am not a stock analyst but I think buyer beware is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw from these events and the fact that more than $ 5 billion of insider money is selling at the IPO price may mean that there are some smart insiders who know the risks.

It isn’t about Facebook, or the IPO, its about Mobile and the future.

Yet, this weeks events are about more than Facebook’s IPO and the issues are far from new. Here on TechCrunch we have documented the impact of the rise of mobile and the end of Web 2.0 for some time, stressing that Web 2.0 era companies, running SAAS like cloud services, will be threatened by Apples success in driving large numbers of us to primarily use mobile devices, in an app-centric, message-centric world. In Google’s case they are contributing to and suffering from the problem simultaneously through the success of Android.

On August 27th 2011, I wrote “Smart Mobile and the Thin Cloud” in which I said that there is a trend in play that:

“…will transform the entire software ecosystem over the next 5 years. The changes will be so dramatic that the current discussions of a bubble will appear silly. Huge companies will fail and even bigger new companies will be formed”.

The article predicted Facebook will be challenged by the growth of mobile devices and the impact of that on the way users interact with data.

On January 26th this year, in “Google, Look out Behind you” I said:

“Apple has a platform that will soon be numbered in the hundreds of millions. Every device has communications built-in, personalization built-in, media capture built-in. And with iCloud, there is now a place to store the output of each device. How relevant is the Facebook hosted social graph in that world? How relevant is the web ecosystem that Facebook connect has helped penetrate? It seems likely that Facebook will have many of the same challenges as Google as it contemplates the rise of Apple, and the rise of mobile.”

A few days later – on February 4th – in “Facebook – Run from the Bulls” I said:

“Google’s present – and Facebook’s future – involves the painful fact that the very success of mobile platforms in helping human beings be productive, on the go, has a negative impact on the desktop-based advertising programs of the past 10 years. Mobile growth impacts web advertising revenues, except of course for Apple who make money from hardware and software and so benefits from these trends. The reason is simple. We do less ad-centric activities on mobile than we did on the web. And we are less likely to click away on an ad when we are focused on a specific goal on a largely single window device.”

Then, on April 15th in “The Mobile Paradox” I wrote:

“I believe what we are seeing here is the start of a secular trend that represents nothing less than the end of the web 2.0 era where we all consumed services through a browser on a computer. Replacing that era is a new, app-based, message-centric mobile Internet. In this new era the essential unit of advertising (a page based ad, whether text, display or anything else) is simply the wrong monetization vehicle. Something new has to emerge.”

Death or Mobile?

Facebook is not alone in being threatened by these trends. Google has missed its “Cost Per Click” numbers two quarters in a row now – for similar reasons.

The real question is whether Facebook and Google understand the scale of the problems and how to address them.

There are only two possible answers.

1. Despite all of the above Facebook (and Google) know well what the problems are and will figure them out in time.

Or

2. Facebook and Google go the way of the Dodo (as predicted in Forbes last week). Just as Web 2.0 killed Yahoo as a growth company –  due to its inability to adapt – so Mobile will kill the Web 2.0 giants

I think 1 is more likely than 2.

Why the belief? Facebook did another thing this week that is highly relevant to this issue. It launched its own app store. Facebook’s app store enables an app developer on either Android or iPhone to use Facebook to trigger users to visit the iPhone app store, or the Google Play app store, and install an app. Facebook becomes possibly the primary way that happens. It may drive millions of app installs across many platforms. These installs are not free, they are pay to play.

I think of the app center as providing Facebook with a new type of advertising format – an ad, with an action (an install), and a price on success.

As Larry Page noted on Google’s earnings call this quarter, mobile demands new types of ad format. He cited “click to call” as an example. Both Facebook and Google will begin to evolve ad units that are a better fit with the user experience on mobile, and ones that reflect the customer goals or the advertiser better. So far, ad formats on mobile have been simply copies of tried and trusted web formats, poorly suited to the new environment.

Option 2 – death of the Web 2.0 giants – only seems to be likely in a scenario where these companies fail to understand that their web pasts count for nothing in this new mobile world. This week, if anything, has served as a huge reminder of that.

Facebook (and Google) will most likely, by building or buying, evolve their monetization strategies to better suit the mobile future. It may take time, it may be painful, they may even fail. But try they will and try they must. Facebook 2.0 will try to kill Facebook 1.0 and Google 2.0 will try to kill Google 1.0. It’s not a good time to be going public, or to be public. But, mobile is the future – they can’t live with it, and they surely can’t live without it.

TechCrunch » Mobile

All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up. Time spent on Facebook’s mobile site and apps per month (441 minutes) has finally surpassed usage of its classic website (391 minutes) — for Americans who use both Facebook interfaces according to the latest report from comScore. And that’s actually a big problem for the social network.

Facebook usually shows four to seven ads per page on its website, but only a few ads per day in its mobile news feed. That means it makes a lot less money when you visit from your little devices. In fact, this week Facebook had to warn potential investors in its IPO that the more people who access it from mobile instead of the web, the worse its business is doing.

Can Facebook get away with showing more ads on mobile without turning us off?

Way back when Facebook launched in 2004 it was just a website, and it hardly showed ads at all. Over the years it launched a special mobile website called m.facebook.com, and apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and just about any device you can think of.

At first these smaller interfaces were just a way to glimpse Facebook while away from home. But as our phones grew more powerful and Facebook’s apps got better, we could help but friend, chat, and Like no matter where we were. Now there’s 78 million Americans age eighteen and older who use Facebook mobile, and they spend 7.3 hours per month there on average, compared to the total 160 million Americans who use Facebook and spend an average of 6.5 hours on its website per month. That’s a big shift from when the web was king.

Facebook realized it had to start making money on mobile, but people hate traditional mobile ads. CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want annoying banners that took up most of your Facebook screen. so Facebook’s solution was mobile Sponsored Stories –stories in your news feed that could appear there anyway, but that companies pay to have appear more prominently and frequently.

First showing up in March, these ads are marked “Sponsored, and could be about a friend Liking a company’s Page, a game your friend started playing, or a post by a Page you already Like. Seeing them occasionally isn’t bad, but if Facebook shows too many it could make people angry and less likely to visit.

Now Facebook must walk the tightrope. Inject too many ads in the mobile news feed and people will stop visiting, inject too few and it will lose money. No pressure, there’s just a half a billion mobile users watching.

TechCrunch » Mobile

While visiting the Innovation Showcase at CTIA 2012, we ran into Nick Pudar — OnStar’s VP of Business Development — who was kind enough to give us a few minutes of his time. We sat in the LTE Skype-enabled Chevy Volt on display and discussed such topics as OnStar FMV, RelayRides and smart grids — wherein power utilities can (with the customer’s consent) send a signal to a vehicle to control when it charges. The idea is to allows utilities to maximize grid efficiency and minimize power spikes while giving customers options for when to charge the vehicle — like when the rates are the lowest or when the power generated is coming from renewable energy, for example. Pretty neat stuff, eh? Watch our video interview for all the (pardon the pun) juicy details.

The Engadget interview: OnStar’s Nick Pudar talks smart grids at CTIA 2012 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 May 2012 10:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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