Jolla’s Sailfish OS is ready for commercial release, which will see its smartphones going on sale in more places including Russia, India and Hong Kong.
Jolla’s Sailfish OS And Devices Are Ready For Commercial Release
Tag Archives: mobile
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“This caters specifically to the target segments that primarily want to use their apps on their smartphones and only secondarily use their phone to talk & text, which probably by now is the majority of the smartphone users.”
This is very much me. I still use SMS a lot but at the same time switch almost hourly through Skype, WhatsApp, GroupMe (yes, still), and several others since I have friends scattered across the networks.
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By analyzing the behavior patterns of its digital and mobile users in 3 million locations worldwide—along with the unique climate data in each locale—the Weather Company has become an advertising powerhouse, letting shampoo brands, for example, target users in a humid climate with a new antifrizz product.
“THE WORLD’S TOP 10 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES IN BIG DATA” via FastCompany
I traded off the Weather Company’s mobile app a while back and sort-of forgot about them. It’s incredible to see how big they’ve become and what they’re doing with the piles of mobile data they’re getting from their millions of users.
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Millennials don’t want to talk on the phone. It’s 2014. They don’t want to say, ‘Hi, my name is so-and-so,—’ and talk for 30 seconds before asking the real question. It’s too much overhead. They want to be able to go on a site and type very quickly, ‘Hi, I’m John Doe, what’s my order status?’ and boom, there’s the answer,
via Brian Park, “Goodbye Call Centers, Hello Cloud”
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Considering that Twitter, as a much bigger company with 241 million monthly active users, just revealed that it generated $242.7 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, Line’s financial figures are pretty impressive.
“Line shows the potential for chat apps as platforms, after chalking up $338m in revenue for 2013” via TheNextWeb
It’s all about the stickers.
“Through efforts such as the release of stickers featuring popular soccer stars in Mexico and the cultural highlights of Diwali, a major festival in India, the stickers business concentrated on producing highly localized products and was successful in further entrenching the culture of sticker communication in markets across the world.”
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The Line messaging app that spent last year pushing beyond its home market of Japan has inked a deal aiming to bolster its presence in markets in Latin..
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So what does a minnow like Mxit have that makes it so confident it can crack India? The answer is simple: a vision beyond smartphones. Unlike its bigger, richer, more established competitors, Mxit offers connectivity to old fashioned “feature phones,” of which there remain many users in India.
“An African messaging app could beat out WhatsApp, Line and WeChat in India” via Leo Mirani at Quartz.
As a mobile app company we know (and love and hate) the choices you have to make when supporting multiple devices and OS’s. It’s easy to get tunnel vision and think about amazing experiences that we can build on the latest, high-powered devices; Mxit’s potential success is another great reminder that for large portions of users in developing countries, feature phones remain the primary (and sometimes only) way they experience the mobile internet.
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You have to have innovative ad units … and we’re probably the most innovative in the marketplace.
“10X growth in 18 months: StartApp hits 1.5B downloads, 70K installs, and 200M daily impressions” via VentureBeat
Eighteen months after it reached the 150 million download plateau, mobile ad platform StartApp announced today that it has now hit over 1.5 billion downloads. And while the official release says the company’s ad software is now embedded in 60,000 apps, CEO Gil Dudkiewicz told me the number is actually higher.
Impressive growth and great platform; their ad quality and display flexibility is going make them a strong player on iOS.
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As the high end segment of the smartphone market is becoming increasingly saturated, Apple is starting to feel the pressure from its smaller competitors in the smartphone market. While Apple increased smartphone shipments by 13% in 2013, its competitors managed to realize much higher growth rates.
Good summary of 2013 phone shipments from Statista.
Infographic: Apple Is Lagging Behind in Terms of Smartphone Growth
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Looks like there won’t be any big new challengers for iOS and Android this year, after Japan’s NTT DoCoMo shelved plans for a Tizen launch and Canonical conceded that no big manufacturers will release Ubuntu phones this year.
Major setbacks for two new smartphone OSs, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch
#neato 