Shipments of ebook readers by year-end will fall to 14.9 million units, down a steep 36 percent from the 23.2 million units in 2011 that now appears to have been the peak of the ebook reader market. Another drastic 27 percent contraction will occur next year when ebook reader shipments decline to 10.9 million units. By 2016, the ebook reader space will amount to just 7.1 million units—equivalent to a loss of more than two-thirds of its peak volume in 2011.
Category Archives: Marketing
For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business
Once Riot Games opened up a European base of operations, it couldn’t fit all its data into one instance of mySQL. “So we created a separate instance. That was a bad precedent and we needed to change that,” Livingston added. “We moved quickly to Hadoop as a scalable low-cost storage system. We use Hive to overlay an SQL-type interface on top of the Hadoop File System.” That helped scale up, but “the downside is that it takes a long time to spin up to do your queries, some taking a minute or more to complete, so it is difficult to iterate and build complex queries using Hive.”
via For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business.
Part of the challenge is to maintain a level playing field for all players, yet constantly tweaking game play and game mechanics to make it more interesting for returning players: “We need lots of insight so that competitive play will continue to happen. We don’t want different versions of the game for pros and noobs, for example.”
Drawbridge, From an Ex-Google Scientist, Lets Ads Follow You Between Devices
“We are triangulating the user’s behavior,” says Sivaramakrishnan. “As we observe the user, we are able to hone in.” Once they reach a threshold of certainty that two cookies represent the same person, they call it a match.
via Drawbridge, From an Ex-Google Scientist, Lets Ads Follow You Between Devices | MIT Technology Review.
Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share, Windows 8 Passes 1%
While the 1 percent share for Windows 8 is completely expected, it’s interesting to note that less than half of users have chosen to stick with the default IE10 browser: just 0.51 percent. Everyone else appears to be using Chrome, Firefox, or yet another browser.
via Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share, Windows 8 Passes 1%.
Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes)
Facebook’s power, and its curse, is this holistic treatment of personhood. All the careful tailoring we do to ourselves (and to our selves) — to be, say, professional in one context and whimsical in the other — dissolves in the simmering singularity of the Facebook timeline. The circumstantially mediated relationships typical of IRL interactions — you see your boss at work, your friend after work, your mother-in-law at Thanksgiving — are mediated instead by one overarching, and overpowering, circumstance: Facebook.
via Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes) – Megan Garber – The Atlantic.
Patience is a network effect
Now, a new study of online video viewing (via GigaOm) provides more evidence of how advances in media and networking technology reduce the patience of human beings. The researchers, Shunmuga Krishnan and Ramesh Sitaraman, studied a huge database from Akamai Technologies that documented 23 million video views by nearly seven million people. They found that people start abandoning a video in droves after a two second delay and that the abandonment rate increases 5.8 percent for every second of further delay:
Feature phones dwindle as Android powers ahead in third quarter
But Samsung dominated that field as it does the rest of the market: Apple made up 13.9% of the smartphone market, slightly down in share even though its shipment numbers grew by 36%, giving Samsung 32.6% of the entire smartphone market.
via Feature phones dwindle as Android powers ahead in third quarter | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
Africa’s Wireless Gold Rush
It’s no surprise to find multiple network expansion investments, given the rate of mobile growth in the region: According to a new report issued by the GSM Association (GSMA) , sub-Saharan Africa is “the fastest-growing mobile market in the world,” with an average annual growth rate of 44 percent since 2000. The region now has 475 million mobile connections, compared with 12.3 million fixed lines.
via Africa’s Wireless Gold Rush – 4G/LTE – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading Mobile.
Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands – Starting With Mine
“We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook,” Cuban says, via email. “We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first.”
via Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands – Starting With Mine.
“The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or subscribers because we can’t reach them all. Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That’s crazy.
The original link has a few programming problems but the article can be read after hitting the stop button on your browser.
Hard drive prices one year after the flood
Only a quarter of the drives we’re tracking cost less now than they did before the flooding. A couple have come full circle, but the vast majority have higher prices.
via Hard drive prices one year after the flood – The Tech Report – Page 1.