ReadWriteWeb

There will be two battles fought simultaneously in defense of Megaupload, the cyberlocker site accused by the U.S. of hosting and publicizing illicit copyrighted material. One is in the public arena, where we can expect the defendant to portray itself as Robin Hood, not so much stealing content from the rich as repurposing it for the poor, the meek, the 99%. It may even get some traction in that arena, but those same tactics may not play so well to a jury. That will be a separate battle whose defense strategy may not be so populist.

With the help of technology industry attorney Richard Santalesa and a team of researchers at New York City-based Information Law Group, ReadWriteWeb has examined the possible strategies a Megaupload defense may adopt, and analyzed their chances of success.

We've written here before in ReadWriteWeb about the bad side of Android platform diversity: multiple phone manufacturers with one or more carriers apiece, simultaneously supporting more than one active version of the operating system. One can't help but think that Microsoft has handled Windows platform transitions better than this, but then again, Windows doesn't have to appease the interests of carriers and manufacturers.

Now, an intensive 12-month study by mobile communications analysis firm WDS Global has come up with a quantifiable metric for the cumulative effects of platform fragmentation on carriers, and subsequently on consumers, based on estimates of 2011 Android smartphone shipments: The frustration from customers who have been unable to resolve their hardware and software issues through customer support, and end up returning their phones for replacement, ends up costing U.S. carriers a combined total of $2 billion annually.

Now that we've seen Research In Motion's vision for a vivid, rich mobile operating system for some kind of device -- probably a PlayBook, maybe a phone or two -- does BlackBerry have a chance by 2013 to regain the level of relevance it had in 2009? ReadWriteWeb talks at length with the world's best telecom and mobile platform analysts (pictured above, left to right):

Ross Rubin, Executive Director and Principal Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence

Al Hilwa, Program Director for Applications Development Software, IDC

Jan Dawson, Chief Analyst, Ovum

Carmi Levy, Technology Analyst, CTV News Channel

At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, the analyst firm rolled out its top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 this week. It should come as no surprise that cloud is one of the technologies tapped for top ten.

What's a "strategic technology"? The short version is that a strategic technology is one that has the potential for "significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years."

Unlike Johnny Carson's Carnac character (pictured at left), there are serious and legitimate ways to predict how your traffic will respond to your site's content. A new service from Adobe's SearchCenter+ and features from the existing service from Visual Revenue are both trying to be more helpful in optimizing your content and ad buys for your site. Both services can boost your traffic by a 25% or more, which is a welcome note for just about everyone concerned with their site stats these days.

Social media data company Rapleaf recently investigated the profiles of users who "fanned" the iPad on Facebook in order to get a better sense of the type of users who are interested in Apple's upcoming slate device. After analyzing the top three Facebook pages and their respective fanbases, Rapleaf discovered that there were some common themes among these users. The prospective iPad buyers on Facebook are young - much younger than the overall Facebook population, in fact.

New statistics about baby boomers' usage of the mobile web are here, and the news, sadly, is not surprising. This generation of users (ages 45 and older) has been slow to adopt mobile Internet technology. However, that's not to say they aren't getting on board with the mobile web revolution - they're just taking a little more time to get here than the other demographic groups surveyed.

Today, only 55% of boomers consider their mobile phone a necessity, a number which likely shocks younger generations whose attachment to their handheld device is so strong, they claim to "feel naked without it."

Earlier this week, Juniper Research published a report which said the market for location-based services (think mobile check-in games like Foursquare, social networks like Loopt, location-enabled apps like Google Maps, etc.) will bring in revenues of more than $12.7 billion by 2014. Spurring this growth are a number of factors, including the increased number of App Stores, handset improvements, access to high-speed mobile Internet and improvements to positioning technology.

While it's clear that location-based services are on the move, pinpointing a dollar amount to their market is a trickier subject. Has Juniper overestimated? U.K.-based consultancy Broadsight thinks so. "These numbers are way overstated," says firm co-founder Alan Patrick, who concludes that's it's far too early to tell the market's true size at this time.

According to the latest study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014. The market was just over $400 million this past year, says Juniper, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise.

After being saturated with blog posts from every blogger, tech pundit and average Joe about Apple's newest entry into the tablet PC game, the iPad, we finally decided to seek out the opinions of those who know best (well, sometimes, that is): the tech analysts. Numerous sites have quoted from this analyst or that and a few have even done round-ups of their own, but we never found a comprehensive resource providing all the analyst opinions in one post. So we made our own.