Gartner has just released its Q1 figures for mobile handset sales, and the key takeaway is that Android continues to steal the show, led by handset maker Samsung. Google’s mobile platform now accounts for nearly 75% of all handset sales, a jump of almost 20 percentage points on a year ago, and equating to 156 million devices sold in the three-month period. Smartphones sales grew by 63 million units to 210 million for the quarter, making up nearly half of all mobile phone sales overall, at 425 million. With the number of mobile handset sales up by a mere 0.7% on a year ago, it’s clear that higher-end devices are very the much growth engine for the mobile industry at the moment.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the more interesting figures from Gartner.

Although Samsung does not release exact sales figures for its devices, Gartner estimates that the Korean giant is the biggest of them all: it accounted for almost 31% of all smartphones sold in the period, with Apple in number-two with 18%. It’s quite a change from last year, when the two were nearly level, with just 5 percentage points separating them. The widening gap, and Samsung’s growth, will continue into the quarter ahead, it seems, led by the popularity of the company’s newest flagship model. On the other hand, the fact remains that at least some appear to still be holding out for the next iPhone rather than going for the iPhone 5; and Apple meanwhile is still holding back from releasing new, low-cost models that might help it along more in emerging markets and compete more comprehensively against the huge range of Android devices out there.

“We expect the new Galaxy S4 to be very popular despite being more of an evolution than a truly revolutionary device compared to the S3,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The gap between the two biggest brands and number three continues to be a big one, with Samsung very much taking the lead here. “There are two clear leaders in the OS market and Android’s dominance in the OS market is unshakable,” Anshul writes.

Together, Apple and Samsung accounted for 49 million handset sales. This is down by 1.1 million from a year ago, and as the smartphone market continues to grow, the players who are vying to be the next big challengers continues to churn. LG swapped places with Huawei, and is currently at number-three at 4.8 million units (with a strong showing from some of its newer 4G handsets and its lower-cost smartphone range). Huawei’s 4.4 million, however, shows that it continues to press ahead, as does fellow Chinese handset maker ZTE, which rounds out the top-five:

Samsung, unsurprisingly, is also leading in the overall mobile category, which also counts sales of lower-end feature phones. Its share there is now 23.6%, topping 100 million units.

Just as Samsung is widening the gap against Apple in smartphones, it’s doing the same with Nokia in the overall rankings. The Finnish giant is still number-two but with a 14.8% share, a drop of 5 percentage points on last year.

Looking at mobile platform prominence in smartphones, Android’s current 74.4% market share is nothing short of astounding in terms of its increase, particularly considering that at this point there is no sign of it slowing down.

Gartner’s numbers, it should be noted, are some 10% higher than those from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech that were released at the end of April: a sign of the margin of error between different analysts’ estimates resulting from different counting methods. Here are yet more numbers from IDC, which claims that smartphones outshipped feature phones, and Canalys, which was also more bullish than Gartner on smartphone numbers at a 300 million estimate.

Back to Gartner: the 156 million units sold in the quarter is actually almost double what was sold in the same period a year ago. Android is without a doubt riding the very crest of the smartphone wave: Gartner points out that smartphones accounted for 49.3% of sales of mobile phones worldwide, up from 34.8% in Q1 of 2012, and 44% in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Apple continues to grow but at a slower pace, managing to increase its share by a “mere” 5 million. BlackBerry (still called RIM by Gartner: hello rebranding!) continues to drop, indicating that at least so far, its big BB10 attack has yet to bear significant fruit. Microsoft is showing a respectable doubling of growth to nearly 6 million units, but that is pretty tiny when you look back to Android and its 156 million. It shows that a significant amount of work remains to be done by Microsoft and partners like Nokia if it expects to get anywhere within spitting distance of Android, or even Apple.

Still, the cautionary tale of Symbian remains a sign of how fast a handset maker can fall from grace. It’s now at 0.3 percent of sales now that Nokia has discontinued its production of the once market-leading devices — although its share was falling fast even before that.

Gartner points out that Asia is currently the market driver for mobile phone sales worldwide, accounting for more than half of all sales, with China remaining the biggest single market.

“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia/Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 per cent year-on-year,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5% in the first quarter of 2013, and its sales represented 25.7 per cent of global mobile phone sales, up nearly 2 percentage points year-on-year.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TenFarms, a startup working on a couple of interesting mobile product ideas, just announced that it has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.

The company has already released its first product, Photopoll, which allows users to share photos (you can pull them from your camera roll, Amazon.com, or Instagram), tell stories around those photos, and ask their friends for opinions. There are lots of other polling apps, but when founder and CEO Nils Forsblom showed me Photopoll, he emphasized the ease with which users can share multiple photos. The app has attracted a largely female audience, he said, and it will be tailoring the experience to that audience with future releases.

More interesting to me is what TenFarms is working on next — Adtile, which delivers mobile ads that don’t interrupt the user experience until someone chooses to view them. If you’re browsing an app with a stream of content, some of that content might have an Adtile icon, and if you tap on, say, that photo, it will flip over and show a related ad.

Will anyone actually tap on the ads? Forsblom said that he’s been happy with the results from the early tests, though he declined to offer any specific numbers.

Forsblom said this approach has some big advantages over other types of mobile advertising. For one thing, he said the ads themselves offer a good user experience. For example, one ad he showed me not only highlights a relevant product, but also maps out the location of nearby stores and allows users to call those stores. He said the experience is designed natively for iOS, and he argued that it’s almost wrong to call it an ad — it’s more of “an app within an app.”

The other advantage is targeting. Adtile will allow advertisers to advertise in apps in a specific topic or vertical, and they can also target by geography. Even better, Forsblom said, “We understand what’s the product or thing that it’s showing — when you flip [the content] around, there should a very, very close relationship with with the ad itself.” At the same time, he cautioned, “None of these things are ever perfect.”

Forsblom said he won’t be selling Adtile units directly, but instead working with ad networks. He also said that he wants to experiment with different pricing models, so that it’s “more democratic” and the ad that gets served isn’t always the one that comes from the advertiser with the biggest budget.

Before TenFarms, Forsblom founded Fruugo, a shopping startup that seems to have flamed out despite raising $48 million in funding. In a recent interview, Forsblom said that after taking on investors at Fruugo, he was “basically powerless”: “That was my biggest mistake, giving those voting powers to the investors and basically just being an employee of the company.” That’s why he said he’s being careful and retaining control this time around.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi.

Volpi, who makes investments in both enterprise software and consumer internet companies, serves on a number of boards, including Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. We asked Volpi what his biggest challenge is as the board member of a startup, and what entrepreneurs should be looking for in a board member.

He also had some interesting perspective on the latest buzz word du jour, big data, and where we’ll see the most innovation taking place in the enterprise data space.

Tune in above for more!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kickstarter-funded Bitponics was showing off its finished product at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Hardware Alley today in New York, which is shipping out to backers in the next few weeks according to company cofounder Michael Zick Doherty. The Bitponics system is a cloud-based hydroponic garden manager, complete with a web-based dashboard that’s accessible anywhere and can control every aspect crucial to the process, like the pH of the soil, temperature, light and moisture level.

The Kickstarter project from the Brooklyn-based company managed to pass its $20,000 goal back in June of last year, as people seemed drawn to the idea of a platform that takes a lot of the guesswork out of setting up and managing a hydroponic garden. It’s designed to be dead-simple, with guides for how much sun, water and nutrition your plants need. It collects data via sensors that plug into a base, which connects to your local Wi-Fi network, and then logs data in a dashboard and can send you notices when things aren’t going exactly as they should. The base has two power outlets built in which feature timers that allow you to set schedules for components like lights and pumps.

“I was working for a company called Windows Farms doing the hydroponic systems, who do the growing and the plumbing and all those aspects of it,” Doherty said of how Bitponics came up with the idea. “My issue with hydroponics is that there are a lot of things that you have to know well to be able to grow well, and there’s a lot of time put into monitoring the conditions of the plans.”

As a hardware and software platform startup, I asked what the biggest challenges Bitponics has faced in terms of actually delivering a product. Doherty said that there were challenges with manufacturing and getting that right, but that the biggest challenge was making sure the entire process was engineered correctly in terms of user experience, so that literally anyone could pick it up and use it, and grow things well.

“Probably the biggest challenge was figuring out a user flow that was something that anyone could do,” he said. “Building something that someone who had never tried hydroponics, or someone who had never touched a computer would be able to just follow these instructions and get running in a reasonable amount of time, that was a huge challenge.”

Bitponics is going to start shipping to the general public once it gets all of its backer systems out to Kickstarter supporters, when it’ll be available for $499 for the base station, with service available on a recurring subscription basis. If you’re looking for a way to manage your in-home herb or cannabis farm even when you’re away on business, this could be one to check out.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Check out this must-read deck on digital brand strategy from ad agency giant Wieden + Kennedy (198K views). It’s particularly relevant to social commerce because it tackles one of the biggest myths in social media – that people actually care about you as a brand or service.

Coming from the ‘get-real’ camp of Byron Sharp (How Brands Grow), Wieden + Kennedy suggest that the fastest way to fail in digital is to use the language of human relationships to frame what you do.  Terms like ’engagement’, ‘commitment’, ‘communities’, ‘love’, ‘fans’ are vanity terms and bad metaphors for self-deluded brands who think consumers buying from them or clicking their like buttons actually really care about them.  They don’t. Get over it.

Human relationships are complex and vital, brands are trivial and incidental. Which is way only 1 in 5 people (the desperate, lonely and compulsive) think they have ‘relationships’ with brands.  The digital challenge is not about creating ‘relationships’ – it’s about serving people.

We couldn’t agree more.

Pointless Digital

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Brother, a Japanese document imaging company, has bought Kodak’s imaging business for $210 million, according to a company release. Kodak sought bankruptcy protection in January 2012 and has been restructuring itself since.

The document imaging side of the company – namely a portfolio of professional scanners, capture software, and services – has long been a mainstay for enterprise clients looking to streamline document design and production.

“Document Imaging has many differentiating strengths, including an outstanding global customer base, award-winning software and hardware solutions, strategic reseller partners and a comprehensive service and support network,” said Antonio M. Perez, Kodak Chairman and CEO. Brother makes copiers, printers, and, as the release notes, sewing machines.

The company recently sold its online photo service and will soon stop selling digital cameras. Kodak, once the biggest name in photography, will focus on commercial printing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s time for CrunchWeek, that very special time each week when a few of us writers gather around the TechCrunch TV cameras to shoot the breeze about the biggest and most interesting stories from the past seven days.

Greg Kumparak, and Ryan Lawler joined me in the studio this week to talk about Facebook Home, the social network’s huge mobile announcement from Thursday. Facebook Home replaces your standard Android’s homescreen with an immersive Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications. Facebook also announced a special version of Home will come pre-installed on the new HTC First phone on AT&T.

Home is by some accounts a bold move from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It essentially turns Google’s open Android platform into a Facebook-dominated experience and puts some of Google’s premier apps like search and Gmail in the background. What’s more, some have questioned the privacy implications around Facebook Home. We tackled all of these issues around Facebook Home and much more–tune in above!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Companies like Google, Twitter and Nielsen — who respectively make money from digital advertising, want to make a lot more from digital ads, and get paid to provide data to justify ads online and offline — are putting some significant effort into showing the connection between how consumers watch TV and use their tablets and smartphones to shape that experience in the U.S.. Now the BBC — via its commercial operations of BBC World News TV and BBC.com — is also weighing in, with an international study out from BBC World News and BBC.com looking at how news is consumed today. It shows that the role that tablets are playing in TV usage — which we already knew was strong in the U.S. — is actually an international phenomenon.

The survey, BBC says, polled some 3,600 consumers across Australia, Singapore, India, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Poland, Germany, France and the U.S., the BBC, working with InSites Consulting, says this is the biggest study of its kind. The geographical reach complements the ongoing work from Pew Research Center on digital media usage, which focuses on the U.S. only.

Specifically, the BBC notes that it found the following:

– Some 43% of tablet owners say that they watch more TV now than they did five years ago. 83% say they use tablets alongside TV.

– 25-34 year-old professionals are the biggest “news enthusiasts.” But that enthusiasm is still TV-first, other screens second, with tablets remaining distinctly in a secondary, not primary, role. Across all age groups, 42% of news consumption is still happening on TV, with laptops (29%), smartphones (18%) and tablets (10%) scoring in significance.

– Advertising may be appearing in different formats, but users are not surprised by that. The BBC found that “news audiences expect to see advertising nearly as much on mobile.” The exact figures: 79% tablet and 84% smartphone were unsurprised with ads compared to 87% on TV and 84% online. But response times on mobile are still less good. 1 in 7 users said they responded to a mobile ad in the last four weeks with responses to TV and desktop are 1 in 5 and 1 in 4 respectively.

– TV remains first screen. “In breaking news situations, users turn to television as their primary and first device (42%), with the majority (66%) then turning to the internet to investigate stories further. Users rated national and international news of most importance (84%, 82%), closely followed by local news (79%). Financial and business news (61%) were more highly valued than news about sports (56%) and arts/entertainment news (43%).”

“Avid news consumers are hungry for information wherever they are and expect to stay in touch on all the devices they now own. There’s been speculation for years that mainstream uptake of smartphones, laptops and tablets will have a negative impact on television viewing, but this study has found that the four devices actually work well together, resulting in greater overall consumption rather than having a cannibalising effect,” said Jim Egan, CEO of BBC Global News Ltd, in a statement.

But while these conclusions are definitely interesting and will continue to shape what consumer tech services get rolled out, there are two provisos to note.

The first is that the BBC, like Twitter, Google and Nielsen, has a vested interest in showing how well these services work together. For the BBC, it runs a pretty extensive multi-screen operation. The BBC says its “24-hour news and information channel is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, and over 350 million households and 1.8 million hotel rooms. The channel’s content is also available on 151 cruise ships, 40 airlines and 23 mobile phone networks.” Maximizing advertising across that is a priority.

The second is that the BBC and InSites only talked to consumers that were deemed “high earners” and who already owned at least three of the devices in question: TV, smartphone, tablet and laptop. That effectively skews this survey and demonstrates that although there are some strong correlations, at this point in time, they are only true for a part of the population.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Happy Sunday! I hope you’ll agree with me when I say TGICW (Thank goodness it’s CrunchWeek) — that very special time each week when a few of us writers gather around the TechCrunch TV cameras to shoot the breeze about the biggest and most interesting stories from the past seven days.

Our usual host with the most Leena Rao was out of the office while we were filming this edition, so Ryan Lawler and Anthony Ha joined me to look back at the week in tech headlines. Watch the video above to hear us discuss the developer conference “dongle” joke that spun way out of control and all the surrounding drama, tech bloggers’ brush with Hollywood glamour at the Game Of Thrones premiere here in San Francisco, and the rumors that basically every technology company is now working on a smartwatch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

According to the Internet, Theodore Zeldin said this:

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

And that sounds like a great place to start talking about the Game Developers Conference, which is on all next week in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Although at first it seems like just another of many events on the gaming calendar, GDC is the one that people travel from halfway around the world to attend. The folks who can’t afford it or can’t convince their companies to send them look on wistfully. To those of us going, on the other hand, it’s game-dev Christmas.

There are several reasons the event is considered so special. One is the people. Games are a far-flung kind of industry where you make a lot of friends at various companies but don’t actually see them very often, so the conference is a great place to reconnect, share war stories and celebrate. Aside from catch-ups you also meet people whom you admire from afar and those who likewise admire you.

Another reason is the lack of a specific agenda and the high degree of cross-pollination. Most industry events tend to either center around one topic (such as social, monetization, gambling, casual, education, etc.) or function as consumer shows like E3 in LA or Gamescom in Cologne. However, at GDC you can float from talks about monetizing on the Kongregate platform to round tables about the successes and failures of AI design, and on to something else. It’s a big tent full of ideas and game makers who want to share them.

And while the industry certainly loves to get together and party, there’s more going on at GDC than just drinks, schmoozing and biz-dev (of which there is a lot). For example this year one of the big summits (mini-collections of talks) is about narrative. There are also panels covering issues, such as the #1reasonwhy meme regarding women in the games industry, and less serious sessions, including the Experimental Gameplay Workshop.

GDC talks are also often very open and forthright. At many games events the talks tend to be more about advancing agendas or essentially doing PR by pivoting every question back to how awesome your company is. Not so much at GDC though. One example that really stood out for me was a talk about a game called Shadow Physics, which had been highly anticipated in the community for a startling concept but then fell apart as a project. The talk was blunt, honest and open rather than suave or trying to manage a message.

Finally there is the sensation of being on the frontline of the future. GDC tends to be less the place where ideas crystalize into marketing stories. Considering how many of the major gaming news outfits are present at the event, and the quality of the content, GDC tends to be the launch point for new movements in the industry. Streaming cloud games from Onlive are one example, as was the genesis of the book Reality is Broken.

As Zeldin said, it’s all about creating new cards.

This year’s GDC will perhaps be more important than those of the last five years. While last year’s centered around ideas of general transition, few could say what the shape of the next phase of the industry might be. Kickstarter had only just started to be influential thanks to Double Fine, and new console platforms were still mostly ideas rather than emerging realities. Social games had yet to have Draw Something rise and fall, Retina display iPads were announced over the course of the show and gamification had yet to be told that it was 85 percent unsuccessful. Nobody had ever heard of Supercell, seen a local game like Spaceteam or really realized how big Skylanders would become.

A year later, so much has changed. Where platform transition was more an idea last year, this year it’s becoming and bruising reality. For many big game publishers, 2012 was not a good year and sales of even some of the biggest franchises were markedly down. One publisher (THQ) has already gone into total meltdown, and another (EA) has just seen its CEO resign over poor performance. With Sony having recently announced their PS4 and Wii U having launched and then gone through a very tough patch, many eyes are on Microsoft to see what (if anything) they’ll have to say. Many are wondering whether social games are tapping out, what future directions they may take and even whether the PC will survive in the wake of Windows 8.

However it could also be a conference where the biggest idea of the year starts to take wing and fly. Microconsoles, those small, mostly Android-powered consoles that want to turn your TV into an app platform, are likely to make a strong showing. I remain very hopeful that microconsoles are going to shape the future for the next five years. Whether it’s Ouya, Gamestick, Steamboxes or some other as-yet unannounced entrant, there is something very disruptive about the idea of the console that costs $99 and distributes free-to-play or cheaply priced games. Many in the industry are dubious, but then again many in the industry were dubious about the whole Facebook gaming thing and then ended up scrambling to try and get their piece.

Either way, the future is coming to the Moscone Center very soon. Sleep tight.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch