Google’s wildly popular mobile Android operating system claimed 46.9% of the smartphone market from September-November 2011 - up 3.1 percentage points from the prior three-month period.
According to ComScore, Apple maintained its #2 position, steadily increasing by 1.4 percentage point to 28.7 percent of the smartphone market.
RIM ranked third with 16.6 percent share, followed by Microsoft (5.2 percent) and Symbian (1.5 percent).
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Apparently nobody really knows whether Google+ is dead or not. One day, we’re told its a “ghost town,” the next day somebody claims Google+ is here to stay. And back and forth and back and forth it goes…
Enter the latest installment in this argument: Google+ will surpass 400 million users by 2012. This comes from an independent analysis by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and the self-appointed “unofficial statistician” of the service. He says that growth of the service has really accelerated in recent weeks. This growth rate would put it not far behind Facebook in second place, with about half the users of its bigger competitor.
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Intel on Wednesday started shipping the latest Atom chips for netbooks, an important step to sustain growth of the low-cost PCs in the wake of the tablet onslaught.
The dual-core chips, part of the platform code-named Cedar Trail, bring better battery life and overall improved performance to netbooks, Intel said in a statement. Top PC makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus and Samsung will ship netbooks with Cedar Trail chips beginning in January starting at US$199.
Intel has doubled graphics performance on the chips while reducing power consumption by up to 20 percent compared to Atom predecessors introduced two years ago, the company said. The new chips will help netbooks provide up to 10 hours of battery life on one charge, Intel said.
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Despite years of development and countless millions in marketing, Windows Phone 7 still has gained no traction with consumers. Charlie Kindel, former general manager of Windows Phone 7, recently blogged about why the device remains a failure — and he says it has absolutely nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the malleability of consumers.
Kindel, who left Microsoft this year to start his own company, wrote a blog post “Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?” detailing the reasons he believes that Windows Phone 7 sales “appear so lackluster.” It has nothing to do with technology, he says, because he believes that Windows Phone 7 is superior to Android, even though Android sales have skyrocketed, while Windows Phone 7 sales have lagged.
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Domain registrar Go Daddy has pulled its support for SOPA, the controversial “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently circulating in Congress.
Go Daddy’s initial endorsement of the highly contentious legislation sparked online protests and apparently prompted the loss of approximately 72,000 domains.
“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better,” Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman acknowledged in a statement.
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Google has reminded its users that the flagship platform to allow anyone to create an Android app will permanently shut down at the end of the year.
App Inventor was an ambitious project that replaced complex app coding with an intuitive graphical user interface. It was fantastic in allowing anyone to create an app.
However, App Inventor never left beta form and many extensions of the project just never happened. For example, users were not able to publish their creations to the Android Market and there were severe limitations on how complex the app could be.
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Here is a little bit of trivia – did you know that Google and Mozilla do talk to one another, so much so that they have come to an agreement where the former pays the latter $300 million annually? All that moolah did not exchange hands for nothing, don’t get me wrong, but it is there so that Google will be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser as part of the search royalty agreement for three more years. Not bad for $300 million a year, no? We do know that this sum is far higher than what was originally agreed on, due to competing interest from Google’s other two rivals, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
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