Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially “enchat, simplify and amaze,” but there’s much more to those principles that that relatively slippery and non-scientific language might lead you to believe.

In fact, Garb and Roeber have based the ADP on compelling recent research that suggests eliciting negative emotional responses have an outsized effect on user experience, and require lots more counterbalance in terms of positive experiences to achieve a net positive, or even net zero lasting impression.

The Math Of Joy

They cited a John Gottman study that found successful marriages maintain around a 5:1 ration of pleasant feelings to bad, whereas those with more like a 1:1 ration have a far greater chance of ending in divorce. Another study they cited offers insight into team productivity, which suggests that positive-to-negative interactions in a work group setting operating in at least a 3:1 ratio result in much more productive teams than those with more negative experiences. Finally, they suggested that humans need three positive experiences to compensate for every bad one.

A lot of that may sound obvious when simplified; it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that designers and app builders should strive to please their audiences. But the execution of enacting that pleasure is where things get interesting, and where Roeber and Garb’s insight really shone through. It’s one thing to say “okay, we won’t anger a user here, and we’ll make them happy instead,” and quite another to actually do it.

Putting Theory Into Action

Hearing them describe it, the ADP almost came about under a sort of moral obligation. Roeber described how the teams in charge of Android UX and interaction found that tech now has “a profound impact” on all of our lives, and as such, when things go wrong, we have a tendency to blame ourselves, and that can have a subtle but ultimately strong impact on people’s wellbeing.

“All those non-ideal implementations eroded people’s confidence in their own abilities and caused frustration,” she said, describing how even small things that you might not think that much about ultimately leave you with a tick in the negative column if left unresolved. So if you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong in setting up Gmail on your phone, for instance, that’s something you’ll carry, and something that requires that much more to negate in terms of the overall karmic balancing act.

The example offered by the presenters of how exactly this works in action in Android right now is the visual signal given for when you’ve hit the last of your home screens. Android users will know that you’re greated with a blue glow animation and a visual representation of a page turning up to suggested nothing underneath. It’s clear in what it indicates, but it’s less accusatory or finger-pointing than a text alert, Roeber explained, which can still make users feel admonished and leave them internalizing some blame.

Another example meant to explain how interface elements can not only minimize or eliminate bad feelings, but actually generate good ones was the Google Now art which occupies the search box when you call up Android’s digital personal assistant. It changes based on both location and time of day, and Roeber and Garb explained that in testing, the produced a reaction of wonder and enjoyment not just the first time it was encountered by users in testing, but every time after that as well, thanks to its dynamic nature. Experiences like this rack up positive emotions on the part of the user.

The Interface As The Ultimate Customer Service Rep

Essentially, what Roeber and Garb described in their chat is a means of combining the best possible way of tiptoeing around a potentially negative interaction with positive ones that excite and delight. It’s a simple calculus designed to result in an overwhelmingly net positive experience, the ultimate aim of which isn’t just to minimize the negative impact of the tech we now use constantly, but also to add points in the wins column that can be used to offset negative interactions that happen anywhere in our lives. The ADP isn’t conceived as a way to make using apps not suck, in other words; it’s actually designed to turn Android into a means of spreading happiness.

That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s impossible to deny that the experience of using Android on a daily basis has improved dramatically since the introduction of the ADP. And all of these improvements serve to illustrate how mobile software is perhaps at its best when it’s acting as the idealized customer service representative: friendly and informal, but not overly familiar; attentive to and anticipatory of your needs; gentle and kind when you’re barking up the wrong tree. A truly great customer service experience leaves you feeling lifted, capable, intelligent and happy. It’s more than fair to expect the same out of our device interactions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cisco today announced the results of its study into consumer’s thoughts about connected and driverless cars. While a large part of the study focused on the role of technology in the car shopping experience (unsurprisingly, nobody likes car dealerships), the study also looked into drivers’ attitudes about driverless cars. Surprisingly, 57% of all of the respondents said that they would trust driverless cars to drive them around, but there are some clear differences between different markets.

Acceptance for driverless cars seems to be especially strong in emerging markets. In Brazil, for example, 95% of respondents said they would trust a driverless car, in India 86% would do so and in China, 70% of drivers would be willing up to give control.

In the U.S., however only 60% said they would trust these cars, and 57% of Russians (who may have good reason to think that they need to have full manual control over their cars) said they would consider these automated vehicles. Germans – who still love their manual transmissions – are far more skeptical (37% would trust them). Japan, a country that seems relatively at ease with robots, comes in dead last with 28%.

All of these numbers, by the way, are lower when the researchers asked if drivers would let their kids ride in these vehicles. Still, this clearly shows that there is a market for driverless cars if they ever become available commercially.

With regard to trusting technology, the study also found that 74% of drivers would be fine with their car tracking their driving habits if they could save on insurance and maintenance cost. About 65% of them would also share their height, weight, driving habits and entertainment preferences with the car manufacturers in return for a more custom driving experience.

Bypassing Car Salesmen With Technology

When it comes to buying cars, most people would also be perfectly comfortable doing so without dealing with sales people directly. Half of the respondents in the study said they would prefer an interactive kiosk at the dealership when they have the option to each a live person (in case they really, really, have to talk to somebody). More than half (55%) said they would be happy to use virtual technology, including video chats, to go through the complete purchasing process. Again, consumers in emerging markets are generally more comfortable with this idea than car shoppers in the U.S. or Germany.

Interestingly, shoppers in developing markets like Brazil, India, Russia and China seem to be more comfortable with these technologies. U.S. shoppers usually end up somewhere in the middle when it comes to these stats and German and Japanese shoppers are the least willing to use virtual technologies to buy their cars.

Cisco’s researchers also used this study to stress that a connected car has to offer more than just a router in the vehicle. Cars themselves have been more or less commoditized, so the area where manufacturers (and startups) have a real chance to differentiate themselves is in services, be that helping drivers find parking spots or creating better (and more automated) service networks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As millions of 20-somethings defy the age-old tradition of young marriage for another decade of baby-less romance, one study suggests that the Internet is responsible for boosting holy matrimony 14% among 21-30-year-olds. In a deliciously dry economic assessment of romantic partnering, University of Montreal Professor Andriana Bellou finds a surprisingly strong relationship between broadband Internet penetration, dating website use, and youngins gettin’ hitched. “Exploring sharp temporal and geographic variation in the pattern of consumer broadband adoption, I find that the latter has significantly contributed to increased marriages rates among 21-30 year olds,” she writes [PDF].

Two graphs, in particular, help explain the boost in digitally facilitated permanent hookups (the first figure is a poll of spouses the second figure the linear trend between broadband and marriage)

Econometrics For Novices

How do we know these marriages wouldn’t have happened anyways, regardless of whether residents had Internet access? Internet service providers roll broadband around the U.S. for mostly business purposes, provided that local bureaucrats don’t make deploying it a regulatory nightmare. Unless regulators were snuggling with young lovers as they teased their marriage intentions with each other, there’s no reason to believe broadband deployment was following regions ripe for lots of marriage.

So, if we see a see a spike in marriage rates in only states with ubiquitous broadband penetration, the Internet is probably playing some role (econometricians call this an Instrumental Variable). Of regions with similar composition in race, socioeconomic status, population density, unemployment, and age, the author finds the Internet is associated with a sizable 13-30% boost in first-time marriages.

The Hottest Marriage Talk You Can Handle

Readers can imagine how an available pool of hot-and-heavy eager singles facilitates marriage, but the way in which an economist describes romance may just be the hottest thing ever. Nestle an ice-pack between your legs, because this is NSFW.

1. Dating sites increase the chance you’ll find your one true love.

“In a basic infinite horizon search model, individuals search for suitable marriage partners and receive offers drawn from some known distribution. Search continues until a partner is found whose “quality” equals or exceeds an endogenously determined reservation value…Standard search theory predicts that, all else equal, higher search costs lower the reservation value and increase the probability of marriage”

2. It’s hard to meet people in a new city.

“In an offline, decentralized environment searching for a suitable partner can be a lengthy process accompanied by uncertainty regarding match quality and psychological costs associated with personal encounters and potential rejections. An online centralized marriage market instead has the potential to resolve a number of these issues. This is because it allows for targeted search along certain desirable characteristics while the users retain a degree of anonymity”

3. Sometimes, a girl just needs to be asked.

“greater exposure to potential mates will increase the frequency of offers and therefore the likelihood of marriage”

4. Yo, it’s a sausage fest out there.

“The potential of the Internet to affect matching is probably the greatest for those perceived as facing thinner markets or those who experience difficulties in meeting potential mates”

A Word of Caution

A few cautionary notes before we all hail Match.com as the savior of the institution of marriage.

First, these are a percentage of a percentage. Marriage rates increased about 5% for 21-30 year olds, but it went from 0.36 to .412, or a 14% relative increase. This jibes with a 2005 Pew Poll which found that 5% of all marriages began online.

Second, this study says nothing of the quality of the marriage. As I personally investigated, hyper-focused romantic searchers are a mixed blessing. Sometimes we find that the person we thought we wanted is actually the worst possible match.

The truth is, the Internet is probably playing some role in boosting marriage. Speaking as a guy who is part of the new 20-something trend of moving away from home and delaying domestic life to focus on career, online dating helps me sort through the sea of strangers. Now, if it could only make those first dates a little less awkward. Get on it, Internet!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him @nireyal.

How do products tempt us? What makes them so alluring? It is easy to assume we crave delicious food or impulsively check email because we find pleasure in the activity. But pleasure is just half the story.

Temptation is more than just the promise of reward. Recent advances in neuroscience allow us to peer into the brain, providing a greater understanding of what makes us want.

In 2011, Sriram Chellappan, an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri University of Science and Technology, gained unheard of access to sensitive information about the way undergraduates were using the Internet. His study tracked students on campus as they browsed the web. Chellappan was looking for patterns, which not only revealed what students were doing online, but provided clues about who they were.

“We believe that your pattern of Internet use says something about you,” Chellappan wrote in the New York Times. “Specifically, our research suggests it can offer clues to your mental well-being.” Chellappan concluded that there was, in fact, predictive power in the data. He found students with early signs of clinical depression used the Internet differently and he could identify students most likely to face mental health issues simply by looking at how they clicked.

“We identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression,” wrote Chellappan. “For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage.”

Chellappan developed the technology in hopes of creating an early-warning system to identify struggling students. But his study raised another question, why do people with depression check email more?

Alleviating Pain

The answer may provide clues about why all of us use the products and services we do in our everyday lives. Psychologists believe people with depression feel negative emotions, like anxiety, more frequently than other people do. There is evidence that the depressed students in Chellappan’s study were using the Internet more because they experience negative mental states more often. To try and feel better, they turned to the web to boost their mood.

Finding ways to make ourselves feel better is not something only depressives do. We all seek relief from feeling bad and the brain is primed to help us learn where we can find escape. Just as we might take a Tylenol to relieve a headache, we turn to products to relieve emotional pain. In fact, these two biological processes are so closely linked that taking a Tylenol has been shown to ease both physical and emotional pain. The drug is effective in treating headache and heartache.

Having a pain to cure is a necessary prerequisite to using products. Recent neuroscience reveals the brain even adds pain to things that were previously pleasurable to push us to get what our bodies want. When temptation is activated in the brain, it induces a biological process that not only turns on the pleasure response, but also the body’s physiological stress response.

Consider a 2005 study which looked at the physiological response of women exposed to images of chocolate. Researchers observed that the women experienced a subconscious reaction of alarm similar to seeing a threatening animal in the wild. The women, who had identified themselves as “chocolate cravers,” described feeling not only pleasure at the thought of consuming the chocolate, but also agitation, angst, and a feeling of a loss of control in the face of their desire. For these women’s brains, temptation was stressful.

Since the 1950s, researchers have explored how the brain’s reward system compels behavior. Our understanding of the complex circuitry shows that pleasure and pain work together. Once the brain learns something good is about to happen, it induces a craving we feel as stress. The fastest relief from this discomfort is to get what we want.

Exaggeration and Fear

Companies, of course, are masters of temptation. If marketing is defined as, “the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers,” then implicit in this practice is accentuating the positive aspects of what being sold. This technique is used not only in hawking goods, but is also found in nature. Animals have been tricking each other by accentuating desirable traits for millennia. The process is called “super-normal stimuli” and it is a key to enticing action by creating the stress of desire.

Another way products induce intense desire is through a certain kind of fear, particularly our innate need to have as much as the next person. The phenomenon is exhibited with a simple experiment conducted by Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University.

In the study, de Waal rewarded two capuchin monkeys with a cucumber when they completed a simple task, in this case, handing a rock to the researcher. When both monkeys were given the same reward, they completed the task as prescribed.

But when the researcher gave one monkey a grape while offering the other the standard cucumber, the results were very different. The stiffed monkey, who was perfectly content just seconds before with his cucumber, began shrieking, baring his teeth, thrashing in his cage, and pounding on the table to show his anger. Known in the vernacular as FOMO, or “fear of missing out”, marketers utilize this inborn trigger to incite pain akin to what the capuchin monkey felt in de Waals cage.

Marketers tasked with increasing consumption of their company’s products have a difficult job; they are often charged with manufacturing desire. To do that, they need to find the customer’s problem, their pain, in order to alleviate it. Without the biological basis spurring our desire, there would be no sales. So marketers must at least accentuate, if not induce, a level of discomfort to make us crave their wares.

Like in the undergraduates in Chellappan’s study exhibiting signs of depression, we all seek to escape feeling bad. The products and services that provide immediate relief are those we come to depend upon most.

Photo Credit: Orofacial

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wildfire, the social media marketing platform owned by Google, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its self-serve Promotion Builder product.

The company will instead offer promotions solely as part of its Social Marketing Suite for enterprise clients. Basic, Standard and Premium promotions will be retired June 30. Promotions data will be available for export up until July 31.

The Social Marketing Suite covers ad buying, page management, conversation monitoring and analytics, in addition to promotion development. Previously, anyone could visit Wildfire’s site, sign up for an account and start creating and running social promotions, such as sweepstakes, coupon offers or user-generated content contests. Now, Wildfire doesn’t offer any pricing information on its site and asks potential customers to contact the company directly.

Smaller brands and businesses could look to alternatives like Offerpop, North Social or Heyo, which give marketers a range of tools for running social promotions and creating other custom experiences across social, mobile and web properties, but without the cost and commitment of an enterprise contract.

Forrester assesses social relationship platforms

Forrester Research released a report Tuesday evaluating eight top social relationship platforms in terms of their current offering, strategy and market presence. Shoutlet received the highest score for current offering and Spredfast had the top score for strategy. Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media led in market presence.

Forrester looked at Adobe, Hearsay Social, Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media, Shoutlet, Socialwave, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Syncapse, rating each on 49 criteria. Overall, the study found no clear leaders in the space, but most were “strong performers.” Socialware and Syncapse were in the lower tier of “contenders.”

Shoutlet led the current offering category largely because of its comprehensive feature set and easy onboarding. Spredfast excelled in strategy because of its highly satisfied customer base, which found its measurement and reporting capabilities to be the strongest of all platforms.

The full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013,” is available for purchase here.

ShopIgniter updates rich media advertising platform

Social marketing and commerce company ShopIgniter this week announced an update to its Igniter platform, which helps companies create rich media posts on Facebook, as well as its entry into the paid media management space.

The combination gives brands an end-to-end solution for running interactive advertisements in the Facebook News Feed. For instance, a company could show off a new product line with a video and image gallery that link to the retailer’s website or includes an entry form for a related sweepstakes. ShopIgniter provides templates, but experiences and design are fully customizable.

Instead of hosting these experiences in page tab applications that users hardly visit, ShopIgniter presents them in-stream so users can interact with and share the posts directly from News Feed. ShopIgniter says rich media posts generate more engagement and less negative feedback than traditional posts.

ShopIgniter now has a small media buying team to manage campaigns for clients. Sr. Director of Strategy Justin Kistner, who recently joined the company after leading product at Spruce Media, says he’s bringing on more media buyers and a product team is in the works but for now the company is mostly advising clients on how to apply paid media to their rich media posts created with ShopIgniter.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Amazon has launched a new store catering to mature adults and seniors, the company announced today. But while “Amazon Seniors” would have a nice ring to it, Amazon went with a more polite, if wordy, branding: “50+ Active and Healthy Living Store.” As the name implies, the new store will be focused on a variety of “healthy living” needs, including nutritional products, wellness, exercise, fitness, medical, personal care, beauty and entertainment items and more.

The site also serves as another smart extension of one of Amazon’s lesser-known features: subscription-based ordering. Today’s its “Subscribe & Save” program allows Amazon customers to schedule automatic deliveries of household products (cleansers, paper towels, etc.) and other replenishable goods, including baby products (diapers, wipes, etc.), personal care items (deodorant, lotions, etc.), and more.

With the new Amazon 50+ store, that same type of automatic re-ordering is possible for products aimed at the older crowd, like vitamins, incontinence care products, shampoos, and the like. When ordered via Subscribe & Save, customers are entitled to a discount – up to 15 percent – on items purchased.

Targeting seniors’ interest in clipping coupons to save, Amazon’s senior store – oops, sorry, it’s 50+ store – also includes a “Coupons” section promoting items which are discounted by either a percentage off or dollars off. This section, featured prominently on the store’s homepage, lets consumers virtually “clip” the coupon, then receive the discount at checkout.

The senior store isn’t only an e-commerce site, Amazon notes in its announcement this morning – in addition to the usual product info, ratings, recommendations and reviews, it will also offer a “Resource Center,” which provides tips on beauty, healthy eating, caregiving, and other topics, designed to aid shoppers in product discovery. The content provided here is powered by GrandParents.com, and includes articles on things like “Boosting Brain Power” or “Losing Weight,” for example.

“We’re excited to offer customers in the 50+ age range a place to easily discover hundreds of thousands of items that promote active and healthy living,” said Chance Wales, Director of Beauty and Health & Personal Care for Amazon in a prepared statement. “This is a destination where a customer can purchase anything from vitamins and blood pressure monitors to skin care items and books on traveling the world,” he added.

Though older consumers tend to be late adopters of online services and the web in general, they’re still a powerful part of the Internet population. According to Jupiter Research, one-third of the U.S. 195 million Internet users are over 50, per a study put out a couple of years back. As of last spring, Pew Internet found that 74 percent of those 50-64 use the Internet, and 41 percent of those 65+ do, up from 41 percent and 12 percent in 2000. However, at the time, the study found that purchasing products online was “significantly less popular” with adults over 65. By catering to this group’s desire for savings and convenience, Amazon may have a chance to grow its demographically older user base.

The new store will be available from the web here: www.amazon.com/50activeliving.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Israeli app developer golden fingers has taken to Indiegogo to raise cash for its first app: a social game called WriteOn!. The crowdfunding campaign is not to fund the creation of the app itself — which is already available for (free) download on the App Store. Rather the developers say they need the money to pay for marketing and advertising. Their goal is to raise $10,000, with the first $3,000 to $5,000 going on app promotion, and some feature updates. If they raise $10,000 they will also create an Android version of the app. At the time of writing, they’ve raised just over $3,000 (with 26 days left in the campaign) so have already funded their “basic marketing campaign” milestone.

WriteOn! is an extension of the consequences parlour game concept, with users taking turns writing a few lines to collectively create a funny story. The developers are likely hoping to do for words what OMGPOP’s DrawSomething did for pictures (at least, until Zynga acquired it). So it sits in a category of apps (social gaming) that needs to amass a tipping point of users to provide the full gaming experience to keep people hooked — hence its keen need to get the word out.

Getting an app noticed has never been an easy task for developers but with hundreds of thousands of apps in the dominant Android and iOS marketplaces the challenge of standing out from the crowd is tougher than ever. Google’s Play Store is predicted to hit a million apps this summer, while Apple’s App Store is on a similar trajectory, with 800,000+ apps reported late last month. Smartphone ownership is growing but the odds of getting noticed are also shrinking as more apps crowd in and clamour for attention.

According to a recent Flurry study of the Android and iOS app landscape, there are no signs that consumers’ ardour for apps is cooling off. On the contrary, the study found consumers were using more new apps than two years prior, and concluded that ”the app market is still in early stages and there remains room for innovation and breakthrough, new applications”. But room for new apps is one thing. Actually getting your app discovered and downloaded en masse is quite another.

Android and iOS remain the platforms to aim for if developers want to reach the largest possible audiences but getting the word out in such a noisy environment requires developers to get creative about how they push their app. In the case of golden fingers, that means asking potential users to help pay for marketing costs — and also using Indiegogo itself as a marketing channel to gain the craved for exposure.

“It’s our first app. However, we know the market for some time now and it just feels like the market is totally packed right now,” said Dan Oren, golden fingers’ CPO, via email. “The way we figured it, the Indiegogo campaign can ‘feed’ the app marketing and vice versa. Were we right? I don’t really know to say right now. We need a few more weeks and some media coverage for an honest answer.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

App analytics company Flurry, which measures monthly usage on more than a billion active smart mobile devices, has taken a look at how U.S. consumers are splitting their time between mobile apps and browsers. The company found the iOS and Android app economy is in rude health: with consumers spending 80% of the average two hours and 38 minutes per day that they use smartphones and tablets spent inside apps, while only a fifth of that time (20% — or 31 minutes) is spent using mobile web browsers.

When it comes to app categories, games take a big bite out of consumers’ mobile device time — with around a third (32%) of daily average usage spent flinging fowl or similar. Facebook was the next biggest time-sink, cutting itself an 18% daily usage slice. Add in a further 6% of time spent on other social network services and activity within social media apps accounts for almost a quarter of the average user’s mobile day, according to Flurry’s data.

But it’s not just social networking that is driving Facebook app usage. Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf speculates that the large proportion of time spent inside the Facebook app is down to users viewing web content from inside Zuckerberg’s walled garden. He notes: “We can assert that Facebook has become the most adopted browser in terms of consumer time spent” — and goes on to add that mobile has “become Facebook’s biggest opportunity”, with consumers spending almost 39 minutes per day using the Facebook app on average.

Facebook has become the most adopted browser in terms of consumer time spent.

“Five years into its existence, the app economy is thriving,” Khalaf writes on the company blog. “We looked for possible signs of slowing, we could not find any, largely due to the fast adoption of tablets just after smartphones… Tablets and smartphones are eating up desktops, and notebooks and apps (including the Facebook app) are eating up the web and peoples’ time.”

iOS browser Safari also took a biggish chunk (12%) of mobile users’ time. Flurry’s data suggests iPhone and iPad owners might be doing a little more mobile browsing than Android users (unless Android users are more prolific Facebookers than iOS device owners) — since even collating the Android native browser with Opera Mini and other unnamed browsers picked up by Flurry’s analysis yields only around half the proportion of time spent in a browser vs Safari use. The iPad may be the cause of Safari’s dominance here, being as it’s well suited to browsing the mobile web (and Android tablets are not (yet) as dominant as the iPad).

Elsewhere, Flurry’s data shows entertainment and utility apps took 8% apiece, while productivity and news apps only accounted for 2% of usage each. It also found that U.S. consumers — far from being bored of apps, as third mobile ecosystem platform contenders sometimes try to argue — are actually using increasing numbers of apps per day. Comparing three years of worldwide data, Flurry found the number of apps launched per day has risen steadily from 7.2 in Q4 2010, to 7.5 in Q4 2011, to 7.9 in Q4 2012.

“To us, the steady growth rate indicates that the app economy is not yet experiencing saturation, as consumers steadily use more apps over time,” Khalaf writes. “And while there are more apps in the store, large numbers of them have short lifespans, such as books, shows and games. Assertions that people are using fewer apps in 2012 than they did in 2010 appear to be incorrect.”

Flurry also compared new vs existing app usage and found that the proportion of new apps being used almost doubled between Q4 2010 and Q4 2012 — see chart below. This portion of the study was based on a sample of more than 2.2 million devices that have been active for more than two years. The positive takeaway for developers here is that the market is still very dynamic and open to newcomers.

“We believe that with consumer continuing to try so many news apps, the app market is still in early stages and there remains room for innovation and breakthrough, new applications,” Khalaf notes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung lost out big to Apple last year in a mobile patent blowout in the U.S., but it’s been slowly building up an arsenal of patents that potentially will keep it from falling into the same situation again. Samsung, also currently the world’s biggest mobile company, received the most mobile patents in 2012, and it now holds the most mobile patents of any company worldwide, according to the latest patent report out from mobile analyst Chetan Sharma, which lays out a thicket of companies scrambling to put a legal seal on their intellectual property in the fast-moving world of wireless communications.

For his study, Sharma looked at more than 7 million mobile patents awarded in the U.S. and Europe, the two biggest markets for patents globally at the moment. He found that the U.S. has stolen a march over its old world counterpart since 1996. The U.S. accounts for nearly three-quarters (72%) of all mobile patents across the two regions.

Within the wider world of technology patents, mobile in particular is on the rise. In the U.S., Sharma believes that by the end of this year mobile patents will account for 25% of all patents granted, compared to just 5% in 2001. In Europe, mobile patents will be 10% of the whole patent pool.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Not only is mobile in a rapid period of development at the moment — the growth of smartphone and tablet usage is fuelling a massive market for services, hardware features, networking innovations and more. But in addition to that, mobile patent litigation has, for better or worse, proven to be lucrative for those who win — either by way of licensing fees (one example: the cut that Microsoft gets on Android devices) or court victories (the $1 billion Apple/Samsung case perhaps being the most notable example, even if it is still getting contested).

On the European side, the fact that the proportion is lower could be due to fewer companies in the region putting as much emphasis on R&D as in the U.S., but also it is a comment about the wider shifts in gravity that we see in the tech world. On that note, it’s also interesting to note that 2011 was the first year that China outstripped the U.S. in patent growth — 22% that year compared to 3.3% for the U.S. and 3.8% worldwide — although it is still far behind the U.S., Europe and Japan in terms of actual patents. “The numbers of foreign filings are now in the majority for both the applications filed as well as the patents granted,” Sharma notes.

Sharma notes that Samsung’s rise to the top has bumped Nokia from its traditional position as biggest mobile patent holder. Others that are still making the top-10 include Sony, Microsoft, RIM, LG, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Panasonic, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia. The full ranking for mobile patents granted in 2012 is as follows:

Among mobile operators AT&T, NTT Docomo and Sprint took the top-three slots — but their numbers were too low to get them to compete against vendors.

Part of Samsung’s prominence in patents, meanwhile, is down to fact that it covers a wide range of business pieces, similar to Nokia in its heyday. It led not only in device patents, but also infrastructure and platform — the one category where Apple also made it into the top-10:

For a look at what may be coming on the horizon, Sharma also looks at patent applications. He notes that patent applications grew by some 61% in 2012 compared to the same period 10 years ago. Taking into account granted and pending patents, IBM stands out ahead of the group, with Microsoft and Samsung closing in.

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