A new study from BBC.com and Starcom MediaVest finds that tablets do wonders for news consumption. Tablet owners report reading more stories from more sources on more topics than non-tablet users, they enjoy the experience more, and they go straight to the source more often, rather than relying on aggregators.
But the study also found that the benefits of tablets extend beyond news. Subjects reported a range of improvements tablets brought to their lives, and many of them were unexpected. The study broke down tablet owners based on how long they've had tablets and found that all of the positive effects increased over time. Tablets aren't a fad; they're fundamentally changing the way people use the Web.
According to new data from comScore, 6.8% of Web traffic in the U.S. comes from "non-computer" devices such as smartphones and tablets. This is an increase from 6.2% in the previous quarter.
Phones account for the majority of non-computer traffic. Mobile devices drive 4.4% of total digital traffic, tablets contribute 1.9%, and other non-computer devices send 0.5% of traffic.
The term "Web 2.0" isn't often used these days, but it signifies the era of the Web in which social, read/write technologies came to the fore. Google was the golden child in Web 2.0, whereas Facebook is the equivalent today in the 'Social Media' era. Regardless of the terminology, the leading Internet companies of today are more competitive with each other than ever before. Whether it's Google+ vs. Facebook in social networking, Microsoft vs. Google in search, Yahoo! vs. itself in just about everything else, it's good to step back and take a higher level view of the current Web era.
That's what the Web 2.0 Map aims to do. It's updated annually by the organizers of the Web 2.0 Summit, one of the leading tech events on the calendar. New in this year's map is The Data Layer, which represents the major Internet companies as "cities of data."
In a bold first move into social commerce and daily deals FriendFinder Networks, which runs a series of dating sites, has purchased the company behind the daily deals site JigoCity.
This is another big player diving into the daily deals scrum, attempting to pair the popularity of social commerce with an unrelated core business. But there's no word on how FriendFinder will use JigoCity. Ideally, they could use it to pair up partners with daily deal date coupons.
Yesterday I wrote about the lack of big ideas in tech media, in response to a New York Times op-ed about the "post-idea world." I basically complained that there is too much mindless pap on Techmeme these days, most of it about business deals and rumors. Where are the "big idea" articles about technology, I wondered.
It's all very well moaning about the state of things, but we at ReadWriteWeb aspire to be a part of the solution too. So I'm going to ask an open question and I'd really appreciate any and all responses to it. Ideally by leaving a comment here on RWW. Alternatively: reply on Twitter (to @RWW), comment on the RWW Facebook Page, or leave a comment on my Google Plus profile. The question is simply this: what technology topics or ideas would you like to read about?
Location-based media company JiWire reports seeing increases in the sharing of and the demand for local deals, like those offered by Groupon, LivingSocial and others, since last quarter. According to data from a recent survey, sharing of deals has increased by 21% and demand is up 20% from Q1 2011.
In addition, only 8% never buy local deals, up from 28% who said they never buy them just a few months ago.
Today Nielsen is reporting that Google's mobile operating system Android now has the largest smartphone operating system (OS) market share here in the U.S. The top three mobile operating systems, according to this new data, are Android (39%), Apple's iOS (28%) and RIM (20%).
However, Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. This claim is mainly due to the fact that Apple ships its own phones, while Android is spread out across a number of OEM's, including leading manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.
With Nokia's company earnings call now behind us, one of the most startling figures indicative of the decline of the mobile phone maker was this: for the first time ever, the Apple iPhone surpassed Nokia in smartphone sales.
Nokia says it sold 16.7 million smartphones in the previous quarter (April through June). During that same time, Apple sold over 20 million iPhones.
This morning, another new startup launched a mobile social networking application where location is the primary feature and friends comes second. Banjo, which shows you all the people nearby upon first launch, is one of many similar services now arriving to fill a void in the social networking space. These services are identifying the disposable, the elastic and the ephemeral social networking that occurs - or could occur, given the right technology - when tied to a particular location at a particular point in time.
But does Banjo have the winning formula? What about the others? And will anyone really use these services?
According to a new report from network management and video optimization firm Bytemobile, mobile video now accounts for between 40% to 60% of the total mobile data traffic on operators' networks. Half of the video consumed comes from laptop computers, iPhones, iPads and Android devices, the company found.
But here's an interesting side note to that data: When broken down by device, iPhone users see more video data traffic than those on Android, or even on laptops.
