Online retailers were expecting hoards of shoppers on Black Friday, the biggest shopping holiday of the year. Earlier today PayPal released data that proves the "couch commerce" predictions right. More people were shopping from their smartphones and tablets than ever before. As of 11am PT, PayPal found that mobile payment volume was up 538% from Black Friday 2010.
There is a general thought going around the Internet that by making Android open source, Google has lost control of the platform as companies like Amazon and Facebook use to source code fork to create their own devices. It has been said that Google has lost the keys to Android and it was a mistake to let anyone outside of Google-approved original equipment manufacturers build off the platform.
Has Google really lost control of Android? By forking Android to their needs, have Amazon and Facebook really taken money out of Google's pockets? Probably not. In fact, with the Kindle Fire and rumored Facebook Phone, both Facebook and Amazon may have unwittingly become platform evangelists for the Android platform.
It has been a little more than a week since the Kindle Fire has been available to the general public and fundamental approach that Amazon has taken to the device is beginning to take shape. This is not exactly a question of iPad vs. Kindle Fire nor the notion that the Fire is "a service, and not a product." Amazon's approach to the Android code is addition by subtraction. What has the Fire done to the Android platform and is it ultimately a recipe for success?
SCVNGR, by its nature, is a social-based location game. It has partnerships with brands and universities, but, as CEO Seth Priebatsch will admit, it does not inherently lead to sales at the register. Location-based social game mechanics are not inherently transactional. That is where the company's newest product, LevelUp comes into play. Take merchant offers, location, game mechanics and make then transactional and you have an idea what LevelUp is trying to do in the mobile payments space.
SCVNGR takes a lot of heat for not having a direction. Yesterday article on SCVNGR's "path" got some sneers from the Boston startup community because the "path" is apparently that there is no path. LevelUp is the path and it dives deep into the fundamental nature of payments, merchants and how people interact with money.
There is a brewing controversy surrounding the data that cellular operators and cellphone manufacturers know about users. It has started with researcher and coder Trevor Eckhart, known as TrevE on the XDA Developer forums, digging into the code of a company called Carrier IQ (CIQ). According to Eckhart's research, CIQ has the ability to know just about everything a user does with a cellphone, from when and how a dropped call took place at a certain time and location to what input method a consumer is using and even what they user is inputting.
The depth of the allegations are startling. Does CIQ really have the ability to key log everything that a user types? The fight has now gone legal with CIQ sending Eckhart a cease-and-desist letter and removal of his research while the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has come to his aid. CIQ claims copyright and false allegations of Eckhart's research while the EFF says the researcher is protected under Freedom of Speech and Fair Use doctrines. Make no mistake, this battle is more than just about copyright and the free speech. It is the first step of unveiling exactly what companies know about their cellphone customers and how they use that data.
Several years ago, three location check-in based startups stormed the tech world. Since then, Foursquare has taken off to somewhere near 15 million users, Gowalla has essentially died and the third and always the little sister, SCVNGR, has quietly maintained. Now two million with two million users and some strong brand partnerships, SCVNGR is not going to fade away. Will it thrive though? That remains to be seen.
The head of SCVNGR, 22-year-old Seth Priebatsch, understands that SCVNGR plays in the sub-domain of a realm, inside a niche. By that he means that SCVNGR is a social game (not everyone's type of fun) with a location-based bent, the niche inside the realm. Inherently, that limits the area of growth for SCVNGR. Yet, teamed with the company's new LevelUp mobile payments strategy, the roadmap for SCVNGR becomes clear.
In all the rumor-crazed lead-up to the launch of the iPhone 4S, one feature that was speculated about but never that likely was the inclusion of near field communications. Next year, when the iPhone 5 is actually, finally released, there's a very good chance it will have NFC, according to a report from DigiTimes.
Citing sources at Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturers, DigiTimes says Apple's new iPhone will be one of several devices to ship with NFC in 2012, although we expect the sometimes faulty iPhone rumor mill to churn on until the device is unveiled next year.
Yesterday AllThingsD announced the launch of the Facebook phone, again. Codenamed Buffy, this Android HTC phone will feature deep Facebook integration and support for HTML5. It is expected to arrive in 12-18 months. Facebook had to do something mobile if they really want to compete with Google and Apple, right? Facebook chose Android as its platform, and Buffy as the name. Here are 5 ways Android phones are like Buffy. We're calling on all Buffy fans to add to this in the comments. Now, prepare thyself!
Advertising and data analysis firm Millennial Media issued its monthly mobile trends report this morning for October. It showed that the iPhone was the most used single device for the month with nearly 13% of all use across its network. While Android might dominate the ecosystem, the iPhone as a singular device is the most used smartphone on the market.
Today, AllThingsD announced that the Facebook HTC phone is really coming. It's called Buffy, and is expected to arrive in the next 12-18 months. It is "planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, according to sources familiar with the project."
While the Buffy news seems striking, it is actually just confirmation of Facebook's serious leap into the mobile space, which has already been in the works for more than a year.
