In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends. In a June 10 article in the New York Times, women have emerged as eager buyers of not just iPhones but of all so-called smartphones — BlackBerrys, Treos and other models. Read more.
According to a front-page story in today's New York Times, Microsoft is again considering a new Yahoo takeover effort. Interesting statistics include that Google has 58% of the search advertising market. Microsoft's annual profit is $4.39 billion, and Google's is only one-third as much, just $1.31 billion. Microsoft's strategy to "disrupt the marketplace" seems like Goliath setting out to crush David.
May 19, 2008 NYTimes article By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and MIGUEL HELFT details how on-line display advertising at AOL declined 18% and that large Web publishers face even more dramatic declines in on-line display advertising. PubMatics study of large ad networks show prices dropping 52% from a year ago. Text advertising, like the sponsored links that appear on Google, seem to be holding steady. This chart shows advertisers responses to online spending plans for this year.
There has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere on how to unlock an iPhone so that it can work on networks other than AT&T's rather slow network. Sprint and Verizon have faster CDMA networks, and new handsets that are not network-specific are expected in 2008. These handsets will use the open source software that Google is releasing that is java-based.
Google is lobbying the FCC to require the 700-megahertz spectrum that is coming on the market (as soon as UHF TV moves to digital) be open to to any device. These wireless networks are expensive to build and Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T are entitled to be paid for their work, but people should be able to use the handset they want. I am eager to try the linux/java handsets in my continuing effort to free myself from Microsoft. I'm glad that Verizon is going to give me a shot at it. I think they have the fastest, most robust wireless network. Expensive, though...!
The NYTimes article today followed yesterday's Sunday magazine article about the Googlephone. Google will not be making hardware, they will be providing phone software using open-souce linux and JAVA from Sun Microsystems to members of the Open Handset Alliance. More than just phones, hand-held touch-screen devices are predicted. Intel, an alliance member, has been promoting a new hardware category that they call Mid that is halfway between a cellphone and a laptop. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, predicts that advertising on mobile phones was likely to eventually bring the cost of making calls to zero. That might not include AT&T and Verizon which together account for 52 percent of the wireless market in the US.
The rumored Google phone may turn out to be software rather than hardware, according to the NYTimes article Oct. 7. They speculate that the core of Google's phone efforts is an operating system for mobile phones that will be based on open-source Linux software. Members of Google sit on the Board of Directors for the MIT Media Lab's One Laptop Per Child project (Laptop.org). The Google phone software on Linux could be an interesting tie-in for the XO's meshed technology which enables users to connect with one another without access to a network like Verizon or Cingular (AT&T). And the Google mobile operating system is likely to be free, something very attractive to children in developing nations. more
In August 2007, Google accounted for 56.5 percent of all searches in the United States, a gain of nearly 10 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the Web audience measuring firm ComScore. Yahoo was a distant second with 23.3 percent of the market, followed by Microsoft with 11.3 percent, and Ask.com and AOL with 4.5 percent each. AOL’s searches are performed by Google’s technology.
Ask.com is offering innovative Ask3D which displays results in three panels that combine standard search results with suggestions for related queries, blog items, videos, photos, news articles and shopping information. Yahoo has quietly introduced a similar set of features, calling them shortcuts, and is expected to deliver more updates soon.
Over the next month, Microsoft will deliver more than "10 blue links" for searches related to products, local businesses, health information and entertainment. It will be interesting to see if they can make inroads to Google's increasing market share. See the full NYTimes article.