The Web is singing this morning. The coming death of Flash on mobile devices has made a lot of tech pundits and developers very happy. There is a big fat "I told you so" coming from all corners the of Internet while all Adobe can do is quietly sit back and rue the day the original iPhone was announced.
There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.
If you happen to be in Manhattan in the near future, head over to 34th Street Herald Square and take note of the giant Windows Phone that has taken up residence there. It is huge. It is also a perfect representative of what Microsoft is willing to do to push Windows Phone on the public.
There have been concerts, shows and even a marriage proposal in the six-story Windows Phone in the middle of Manhattan. It is gaudy Microsoft marketing at its best (anybody remember the ProjectNatal/Kinect announcement?) and will be one of the first signs of wave of marketing coming from both Microsoft and Nokia. How will much will this matter for Windows Phone going forward?
The perception among younger adults is that everybody owns a smartphone. When numbers like 50% of U.S. cellphone owners have apps, the reaction inevitably comes, "only 50%?" It is easy for adults, say those from 25-44 years old, to forget that there is a significant portion of the U.S. population that does not own cellphones, let alone those of the smart variety. Mobile penetration in the United States is at 77%, which lags behind many other developed countries.
Nielsen came out with its third quarter mobile numbers today and the demographics are intriguing. The reason that young people feel like everybody has smartphones is because they do. 62% of people 25-34 years old have smartphones. Of all cellphones in the U.S., 43% of them are smart.
Bing has updated its mobile app today, launching an HTML5 app that provides (more or less) the same experience across mobile platforms, whether on the native app or the website. The native apps for Android (for Verizon users here) and iOS now provide a new, Web-based HTML5 experience also available on m.bing.com.
The update adds a split view for maps and lists, making it easy to see the locations of search results. The Android version now features transit routing and real-time transit news, previously only available on Bing's mobile site. The iPhone version gets Bing's mobile Web video content, which launched on the Web version last month. The update also adds Bing Deals to the search experience, an interesting move that adds a revenue stream for Microsoft and a convenience for consumers.
Nokia phones are not coming to the United States this year but when they do in 2012 it will be a series of devices differentiated by from carrier to carrier. According to Chris Weber, the head of Nokia's North American operation, there are some tricky obstacles to rolling out in the U.S. and Nokia is working with the cellular operators to bring unique Windows Phone devices to each.
When Stephen Elop said that the U.S. would have a "product portfolio" at the end of the Nokia World keynote, what he really meant was that each device at each U.S. individual carrier will be different. Think of it in the same guise that Samsung takes with its original Galaxy S series - ubiquitous and everywhere.
When people discuss "company culture," they usually do so in terms of employment or sales. How will the way this company has developed to solve problems affect my chances of successfully working for them? How will the timbre of their daily work influence the approach I take to sell to them? But in Africa, the company culture of three big tech firms continues to influence how they treat both an emerging market and the growing human resource they have to draw from in the continent.
I spent a day talking with leaders from IBM, Microsoft and Google about their operations and goals in Africa. We spoke in their offices in Kenya, increasingly important as a gateway to East and Central Africa, as well as to the content as a whole. It turns out that each company's culture has significantly tinted how each sees Africa, and how they operate.
The much-anticipated Nokia Windows Phones are coming this year ... if you live outside the United States. Nokia announced its two Lumia devices today at Nokia World 2011 in London and said that the devices will be almost immediately available in most Western European countries and in Asian-Pacific countries sometime later in November. Yet, the Lumia devices will be announced with a new "product portfolio" in the U.S. in early 2012.
What gives, Nokia? The product release schedule sounds a lot like the Nokia of old. The one that hardly exists in North America smartphones. We know that Nokia is counting on the U.S. market to bolster its hype cycle for the new Lumia devices and that phone makers and Microsoft are going to throw huge marketing dollars behind it. If there are Nokia Windows Phones ready to ship from the factory in Finland, how can the company justify missing the lucrative U.S. holiday shopping season?
Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.
Not suprisingly, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying "We can't give you a score for your browser." Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.
Facebook now offers an option to translate pages, including comments, into any language via a link that appears under public pages' posts. The feature works through Microsoft's Bing Translator, and is yet another example of Microsoft and Facebook teaming up to utilize the data-rich Facebook social graph.
Microsoft has begun to push out its newest update to its "Mango" Windows Phone, to users today. Microsoft has been working on Mango for most of the summer and we finally get to see some of the updates that were only theoretical during the development process. The biggest push though is the brand new Web Marketplace, which will be the Windows Phone app store that will be the de facto repository of Windows Phone native apps.
Microsoft has also teamed up with the original equipment manufacturers and carriers to push out a tethering option to all Windows Phones. Called "Internet Sharing" (yes, Microsoft can be quite dull). Mango beats both Apple's iOS 5 and Android's Ice Cream Sandwich to the market, but can it turn the early lead into holiday sales?
