The big surprise was the rise of Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific which took third place. Yulong sells smartphones under the brand name Coolpad. The company is largely unknown outside China, but has seen its shipments in the country steadily increase as a result of its broad product profile and low-end handsets, which reach prices below US$100, said Nicole Peng, an analyst with Canalys.
Category Archives: Marketing
The Game Console Is Dead. What Will Replace It?
The pressure to evolve even further has become immense now that the quality gap between cheap-or-free games and full-price ones is narrowing. The best iPad games look like middle-of-the-road Xbox 360 games. Your smartphone is quickly getting to the point where its hardware could display good-looking games in 1080p on your television, and it won’t be long before your phone and TV can sync up without cables.
via Consolation Prize: The Game Console Is Dead. What Will Replace It? | Game|Life | Wired.com.
Gaming aficionados will pay up, they say, because the bigger games are of higher quality. But only a handful of developers can now afford to play in this rarefied and risky space, and even for these few, the returns will be smaller. The new leaders in the game, insiders predict, will be those who can shift resources into less ambitious, higher-return products, leaving the future of high-end games in serious doubt over the long haul.
Inside social media’s fake fan industry
Even the already famous seem to have enjoyed an artificial boost. In August, UK social media management firm StatusPeople scanned several massively popular Twitter accounts using a service it developed called Fake Follower Check. According to StatusPeople, more than 70 percent of President Barack Obama’s 19 million Twitter followers were either fake or inactive accounts. Fake Follower Check returns roughly similar results for Mitt Romney, Lady Gaga, and Justin Bieber.
via Almost Famous: Inside social media’s fake fan industry | ITworld.
“It used to be the main metric of social media success for many companies was how many Likes or fans they had,” says Mike Nail, vice president of operations for the company. “But what really matters is engagement, and when you’re buying Likes to pad that number, your engagement rate actually goes down. You can’t have engagement with people who don’t exist. The real reason to use social media is to get leads, and you can’t get leads from fake people.”
The Future of Mobile News
Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet, significantly more than a year ago, and this has major implications for how news will be consumed and paid for, according to a detailed new survey of news use on mobile devices by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) in collaboration with The Economist Group.
via The Future of Mobile News – Pew Research Center.
News remains an important part of what people do on their mobile devices-64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly, tying news statistically with other popular activities such email and playing games on tablets and behind only email on smartphones (not including talking on the phone). This means fully a third of all U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device at least once a week.
Shopping or browsing on Main St? India’s Big Data firms know
The business of storing, decoding and analyzing unstructured data – think video, Facebook updates, Tweets, Internet searches and public cameras – along with mountains of facts and figures can help companies increase profits, cut costs and improve service, and is now one of the world’s hottest industries.
It’s called Big Data, and although much of the work is done in the United States, India is getting an increasing slice of the action, re-energizing an IT sector whose growth has begun to falter.
via Shopping or browsing on Main St? India’s Big Data firms know – chicagotribune.com.
Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods
HDD shipments in 2012 for the overall computer market, including PCs, are forecast to reach 524 million drives, up 4.3% percent from 502.5 million units last year, according to an IHS report.
Hard drive prices, however, will remain high, and prices are not expected to fall to pre-flood levels until 2014, IHS stated in a report earlier this year.
via Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods – Computerworld.
Hard drives sales will also get a boost from ultrabooks, including machines that use hybrid drives, which combine spinning disk with solid state storage. Those drive shipments are flat now but will take off in the fourth quarter of this years, according to IHS.
How video games are becoming the next great North American spectator sport
They’re all here to watch professional gaming teams battle it out in the North American regional finals in League of Legends, a PC action-strategy game that has exploded in the competitive video gaming scene over the past year. The tournament’s winning team will take home $40,000 and a trip to the World Championship in October, where the victor will net $2 million and international fame.
via How video games are becoming the next great North American spectator sport | Ars Technica.
In the last year or so, though, eSports has undergone a sudden exponential growth. The Major League Gaming Spring Championship in June (which featured tournaments in four high-profile games like Starcraft II and Mortal Kombat) attracted 4.7 million online viewers over three days in June, peaking at 437,000 concurrent viewers. That’s substantially more than all of their 2011 events combined. Over 2.2 million viewers tuned in to Ustream internet broadcast of the 2011 EVO fighting game championships from a packed ballroom in Las Vegas.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD
The Nook HD features a 7-inch display (1440 x 900 resolution), a dual-core 1.3GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, expandable microSD storage, an 11.1-ounce weight, and advertised battery life of 10.5 hours of reading and 9 hours of video. In its publicity materials, Barnes & Noble didn’t exactly pull its punches against archrival Amazon, claiming the Nook HD is 20 percent lighter, a half-inch narrower, and armed with a sharper-resolution screen than the Kindle Fire HD.
via Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD.
Huawei’s High Hopes for Handsets
Wan Biao, CEO of Huawei Device, has told Reuters he expects the company’s consumer device business to achieve revenue growth of 30 percent next year, while smartphone revenues are expected to grow by at least 40 percent.
That would put the Huawei Device unit’s 2013 revenue target at about US$11.7 billion, as the Chinese vendor has forecast its device sales to hit $9 billion this year. In 2011, Huawei’s device unit generated $6.9 billion in sales, about 22 percent of the company’s total revenues. (See Huawei, ZTE Look to Handsets for Growth.)
via Light Reading Mobile – Wireless Bits – Huawei’s High Hopes for Handsets.
IPv4 address transfer markets are forming where we least expected
And indeed, in the APNIC region, 191,744 addresses were transferred in 2011 with another 713,216 in the first half of 2012. In the RIPE region Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East, the researchers couldn’t find any address transfers. But surprisingly, in the ARIN region North America—where there is no immediate shortage—no less than 821,504 addresses were transferred in 2011 with 4.22 million in the first half of 2012.
via IPv4 address transfer markets are forming where we least expected | Ars Technica.
But we now know there are other players than ISPs looking to secure enough IPv4 addresses for the medium term. There’s also the possibility that address trading will take off once trading between regions becomes a possibility, so that address-starved Asians can buy up addresses from North American companies such as HP. That company happens to be sitting on more than 33 million addresses. Or consider the US government, which has more than 168 million. Ultimately, maybe the money is better spent upgrading to IPv6 instead.