Anybody with a passing interest in the headlines pouring out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas cannot help but identify one major theme: 2012 is the year that the TV will converge with mobile platforms. For all of the talk that CES has lost its clout, it is still a good source for identifying trends that will drive the innovation of major technology companies in the new year. Last year tablets and dual-core processors were all the rage. This year, developers have something bigger on their minds.
When technology pundits say mobile is exploding, many people just shrug and say "of course." Many people might not fully comprehend just how big mobile is growing and the enormous ecosystem that it now encompasses. Mobile computing through smartphones and tablets is growing four times faster than the PC and Internet evolutions of the 1980's and 90's. People are now using mobile apps more than the Web and the gap continues to widen.
In research done by mobile analytics company Flurry, users are spending 94 minutes a day with their mobile apps versus 72 minutes on the Web. Author Charles Newark-French attributes the drop to people using mobile apps to access Facebook more often than the Web. Can Facebook really have that type of affect on user behavior?
The Stop Online Piracy Act. The mere thought of the controversial Internet regulation bill passing even one house of Congress keeps you up at night. You've already transferred all of your domains from GoDaddy, even after they flip-flopped on their SOPA stance. You instinctively click on every anti-SOPA story on Reddit and Hacker News, voting up the best of them. On the Internet, you've eagerly joined the growing army of digital activists opposing the law, but what about the real world? What about when you go to the store?
A new Android app called Boycott SOPA aims to help bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds and keep users in tune with which companies support SOPA and thus which products to avoid. The app scans barcodes on real-world products and then checks against a database of 800 SOPA supporters, letting you know if buying that box of tissues is going to ruin the Internet or not.
2011 was a great year for apps. Both the Android Market and the Apple App Store grew exponentially and users now have so many choices that it is hard to sort all of them out. December was an especially big months for apps as publishers revved up for consumers to unwrap new devices during the holiday season. Christmas is the biggest app-downloading day of the year for many publishers. From empirical observations, publishers started ramping up a few days before the holiday with Dec. 22 one of the biggest days of the year fo the App Store, with literally thousands of apps published. What was new and exciting in the last month of 2011? Check out our selections below.
After several months of putting app updates in the column, we have noticed a trend: about a third of your apps will be issued updates on any given month. See the popular updates section at the end of the column.
The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.
The Google Wallet has been available to select users for several months. By select, we mean users that just happen to use a CitiBank MasterCard with an Android Nexus or other NFC enabled device on a carrier that supports it. Given those very specific limitations, there are really not many users that have actually put the mobile wallet through its paces.
One observer hacked Google Wallet onto his Verizon Galaxy Nexus device and took it on the road during his Christmas holiday travels. What he found was that as a dump-pipe processing system, Google Wallet works just fine. But, there is a lot that can be improved upon.
While visiting relatives over Christmas I was faced with the rather grim prospect of being in New York, where the New England-Miami game was locally blacked out.
A generation ago I would have been forced to wait for halftime updates during the Jets-Giants games, but Twitter and a slew of apps designed specifically for sports fans allowed me to follow the game in real time (I also got to watch the Jets lose, which wasn't a half-bad consolation prize).
But these apps aren't just for when you can't watch the game -- they're great supplements when you're glued to the television or in the stadium and worth downloading before the NFL Playoffs kickoff on Saturday, as they help cut through a lot of the clutter and deliver the information most relevant in helping you understand (or vent) about what's happening on the field.
There is one word that comes to mind when I think of mobile communications startup Twilio: powerful. Twilio has one of the most robust APIs in the technology industry. The API helps connect users via voice or messages from any client they are using. That includes adding voice and messaging functionality to the browser or within a mobile app. Twilio is taking the notion of communication, bringing it to Web technology and unleashing it to a new class of developers.
The startup and hacker community has known for some time that Twilio has a great product with simple, robust APIs. Yet, I have felt for quite some time that there was something I was missing from the company's model. Sure, Twilio is unique and dynamic, but the true potential of the platform eluded me. Yesterday, it all clicked: Twilio has the potential to put a huge dent in the mobile carriers' basis of power.
With each new iteration of Apple's iPhone, we expect to see the addition of new features like speedier processors and better cameras. What isn't necessarily expected is that each subsequent device will consume way more data than its predecessor. But, in fact, this is the case.
The iPhone 4S uses about twice as much data as the iPhone 4 and three times the data than the iPhone 3G, according to a new study by Arieso. What causes the 4S to hog so much data? Just ask Siri.
In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money.
The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT's existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.
After years of struggling, photographic services giant Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which was long known for selling film and other photography-related products, had tried everything from branching out into more modern offerings to using its trove of patents to sue others. Alas, the times have caught up with Kodak.
The news comes almost exactly one year after the last roll of Kodachrome film was developed and at a time when the most widely-used camera on Flickr isn't even one of the many digital point-and-shoots or SLR's that had already chipped away at Kodak's dominance; It's the iPhone 4.
