These days, the smartphone wars are typically viewed as a competition between the platforms of two companies: Apple and Google. Despite its years-long dominance of the desktop, Windows has hardly been a blip on the smartphone marketshare radar, where it clocks in at just under 2% of the market.
That's all set to change within three years, according to a growing chorus of analysts. The latest to vouch for the impending growth of Windows Phone is iSuppli, who last week predicted that the platform could outperform Apple's iOS by 2015.
In a live poll published by CNBC.com yesterday, readers were asked whether the tightening of technology product cycles is rendering the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas passé. After some 1,471 votes were cast, some 62% of respondents voted yes.
When my colleague David Strom pointed it out to us here at ReadWriteWeb, I made one of my artificially erudite remarks: I wonder how many RWW readers, I said, would consider CNBC passé?
Surprise! You know that free, unlimited Spotify account you eagerly signed up for when the service first launched in the U.S. over the summer? That was a six-month trial, in case you missed it in the fine print. Next week will mark the half-year anniversary of Spotify's long-awaited U.S., which means that those who were first in line to get a free account will start to see limitations fall into place.
Spotify's free accounts are normally restricted to ten listening hours per month. If you really, truly love a particular song, you'll only be able to stream it five times in a given month. These caps will come on top of the usual limitations of free accounts: You have to listen to advertisements and there's no mobile access.
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.
Every day behind the scenes, investors and startups are putting their heads together to make new bets on what they hope will become the technologies of the future. Today three very different kinds of tech companies, each related to the topics we cover here at ReadWriteWeb, revealed new investments.
One wants to make the battery power on devices we use to access the Web last longer. The second is a company that helps others navigate the world of Facebook advertising. The third is a stealthy provider of anti-malware services that models its Web traffic analysis software off of the workings of biological science. These three companies just got a boost to keep working to bring their technologies to market. As we often like to do in rounding up funding news, we'd like to ask in a poll: which of these companies intrigues you the most, readers?
While reading RSS feeds today, I was struck by the number of consumer and enterprise web technology startups announced that they have raised money from investors - all in one day! Fundings aren't usually the kind of news that ReadWriteWeb covers, but these are some very interesting companies - and they all just got a big infusion of cash to continue and expand their work.
Which of the following ten companies that announced funds raised today do you think are most likely to make it? To really make an impact on the web and the world? We've embedded a poll below and I'm very curious to see who gets the most votes. Below that poll I've also embedded another poll asking ReadWriteWeb readers whether a feature like this would be of interest if we ran it regularly. Let us know what you think!
It's done. The battle between Facebook and Myspace is finally over. Yesterday, the two companies made a joint announcement introducing "Mashup with Facebook", a feature that brings all of your Facebook "likes" and interests to Myspace by way of Facebook Connect.
We can't help but wonder if this announcement marks the end of an era or the beginning of a new one for the once-dominant social network, and we're looking to you, our readers, to find out.
Yesterday we published an overview of social shopping in 2010, one of the year's top trends. Social shopping is a form of e-commerce in which you can share and access information about retail products through your friends or other users. Social shopping products often have a crowdsourcing component too, enabling you to get the best price or the most relevant data. Groupon and Woot are good examples, but there are a lot of other social shopping products out there.
So we'd like to know which social shopping products you used or liked the best in 2010. There are 12 options below. If one of your favorites is not listed, then select 'Other' and mention it in the comments. You may choose up to 3 options.
2-3 years ago, so-called "startpages" were all the rage - online dashboards where users could store links and quickly scan important news feeds. Startpages were also an evolving platform for "widgets," mini web apps inside of a web page. The big Internet companies had startpages: iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Microsoft's Live.com. Among the startups, Netvibes managed to establish a foothold. Other startup battlers included PageFlakes and Protopage.
In 2007-08 startpages were viewed as the second coming of portals and some even thought they might be the next social networks. Now of course many people use Facebook or Twitter as their place to "start" on the Web. So what will become of the startpage - does it have a future? Let us know in our poll whether you still use a startpage product. We have some initial survey results and further analysis below.
This week we ran a poll asking you to vote for the Web product or platform that has most impressed you in 2010. The overwhelming winner was the Apple iPad, launched in January. This isn't a surprise, but the fact that the iPad garnered over twice as many votes as the second-place getter shows just how much impact the iPad has had on the Web landscape this year.
Second was the Nexus One, an iPhone challenger that runs Google's mobile OS, Android. This shows another significant trend of 2010: the increasing market penetration of Android as a smart phone platform competing with the iPhone. Full poll results below...
