Windows Phone Marketplace passes 40,000 apps

After celebrating its first anniversary by passing the 35,000 app mark in mid October, the Windows Phone Marketplace has now passed the 40,000 app and games submission mark. Content is being added at the rate of 165 items per day. In the last 30 days, 85% of submissions were apps and 15% were games; 68% were free, 23% were paid and 9% were paid with free trial.

At the time of writing, 40,189 items have been published. Of these, 10,882 were added in the last 90 days and 4,770 were added in the last 30 days. These items come from 10,731 different publishers.

These numbers are from our own tracking system, which is also used to power the All About Windows Phone Apps & Games section, where you can browse all of the applications and games, and install them via links to Zune Desktop, the web based Marketplace, or install them directly by scanning the QR Code with Bing Vision on your smartphone.

At the current growth rate, we estimate that Windows Phone Marketplace will reach the 50,000 app mark in the second or third week of January 2012. However, it is possible that this mark may be reached before the end of the year if submission rates accelerate.

The graph below shows the growth in the total number of applications published to the Windows Phone Marketplace over the last year.

Growth of Windows Phone Marketplace. Note: November 2011 is not complete. Figures up to November 16th.

In common with other application stores, the total number of published items is not the same as the number of items available to consumers. Of the 40,198 items published to the Marketplace, just over 5,500 are no longer available (removed by Microsoft or withdrawn by the publisher). In addition, some apps are only available in select markets. This means the number of available items to a consumer, in a given market, is lower than the number of published items. The current approximate figures are: US (33,950), UK (32,332), France (31,672), Spain (30,482), Italy (30,346), Germany (30,260), Australia (30,2650), India (30,371) and Singapore (29,423).

During the last four weeks, an average of around 165 new content items have been added each day. This number is significantly higher than in the summer. The most likely explanation for the increased number of apps being added is a growing momentum behind the platform, and the release of Mango which roughly coincided with the start of the increase. The end of the quiet summer season and the announcement of the first Nokia devices may also be contributing factors.

Apps and Games added each week to Windows Phone Marketplace. Note: Week 46 is not yet complete. Figures up to November 16th.

Content by category

The chart below shows the proportion of content in each of the Windows Phone Marketplace's top level categories. As you might expect, games is the single biggest category (15%). The next three biggest categories are books + reference (15%), tools + productivity (14%) and entertainment (13%). This means the four biggest categories (out of 17) make up 57% of the content.

How Facebook is ruining sharing

CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes how Facebook will connect people to media based on the strengths of their connections to other people.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

I'm afraid to click any links on Facebook these days.

No, it's got nothing to do with the spam attack and the flood of nasty images making their way into news feeds all last week. Instead, it's because the slow spread of Facebook's Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing.

I know you've seen this at the top of your news feed: a list of stories your friends have been reading. Or, simply, a single post with a great headline leading to a story that you'd really like to read. So you click it, because your friend shared it, and you really want to read it. And instead of the story, you get this:

I want to read a story, not install an app.

(Credit: Molly Wood, CNET)

If your friends are using an app like The Guardian or The Washington Post's new Social Reader, you'll get an intercept asking you to authorize the original site's app so that you can read the story. And, of course, so that every story you read will start being shared automatically on Facebook, thanks to the magic of Open Graph!

Now, it's tempting to blame your friends for installing or using these apps in the first place, and the publications like the Post that are developing them and insisting you view their stories that way. But don't be distracted. Facebook is to blame here. These apps and their auto-sharing (and intercepts) are all part of the Open Graph master plan.

When Facebook unveiled Open Graph at the f8 developer conference this year, it was clear that the goal of the initiative is to quantify just about everything you do on Facebook. All your shares are automatic, and both Facebook and publishers can track them, use them to develop personalization tools, and apply some kind of metric to them.

So, publishers and Facebook in particular really, really want you to click those little Add to Facebook buttons so that everything you read, watch, listen to, or buy will get shared to friends who also authorize the app and share to friends who also authorize the app and so on and so on into eternity and hopefully riches. It's all just part of the plan.

Log in with Facebook... and start auto-sharing everything you read.

The problem, really, is that the plan is turning out to be really annoying in practice. Spotify song sharing is like the new FarmVille, and its auto-sharing turned out to be an unpleasant surprisefor folks who didn't quite understand just how frictionless Open Graph sharing would be.

Just as that furor died down (a little), we all started noticing the block of "recently read" stories at the top of the news feed, and OK, some of them looked interesting, so... click! And... app.

Each of these story links is sitting there like a juicy, delicious trap. Don't be fooled!

In search of "frictionless" sharing, Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see--that is, they're creating friction. Even if it's just a onetime inconvenience, anybarrier to sharing breaks sharing. The barriers will keep popping up as more content publishers create social apps that have to be authorized before you can view their content. For every five people who authorize an app, I'd guess five will turn away, and eventually get annoyed enough to stop clicking links at all, and maybe eventually annoyed enough to stop visiting Facebook so often, and go searching for somewhere easier and less invasive to simply post a link and have fun with your friends.

And hurting sharing is a disaster for a social network. Sharing is the key to social networking. It's the underlying religion that makes the whole thing work. "Viral" is the magic that every marketing exec is trying to replicate, and Facebook is seriously messing with that formula. Plus, it's killing the possibility of viral hits by generating such an overwhelming flood of mundane shares.

Let's say all of us jump on the Open Graph bandwagon and allow app after app to passively post our every Web move. We'll simply have opened the door to a horde of zombie posts that will overwhelm our interest and deaden us to the possibility of organic discovery.

Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.

Frictionless sharing via Open Graph recasts Facebook's basic purpose, making it more about recommending and archiving than about sharing and communicating. That's a potentially dangerous strategy--not just because oversharing diminishes our interest in sharing but also because it's tweaking the formula that made the site a winner in the first place.

I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery. I also hope that you, sweet social networker, will do your part to keep Facebook pure of trickster links, intercepts, and passive floods of sharing. Keep copy-paste alive, I beg you: please don't install these "social reader" type apps. Troll the Web as you usually do, and post the links you want to share. Hopefully, if enough of us demonstrate that we don't want our lives to be Open Graph open books, this will all just go away. And if it doesn't... there's always Google Plus.

For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper

Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books

Parents also say they like cuddling up with their child and a book, and fear that a shiny gadget might get all the attention. Also, if little Joey is going to spit up, a book may be easier to clean than a tablet computer.

“It’s intimacy, the intimacy of reading and touching the world. It’s the wonderment of her reaching for a page with me,” said Leslie Van Every, 41, a loyal Kindle user in San Francisco whose husband, Eric, reads on his iPhone. But for their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Georgia, dead-tree books, stacked and strewn around the house, are the lone option.

“She reads only print books,” Ms. Van Every said, adding with a laugh that she works for a digital company, CBS Interactive. “Oh, the shame.”

As the adult book world turns digital at a faster rate than publishers expected, sales of e-books for titles aimed at children under 8 have barely budged. They represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books.

Many print books are also bought as gifts, since the delights of an Amazon gift card are lost on most 6-year-olds.

Children’s books are also a bright spot for brick-and-mortar bookstores, since parents often want to flip through an entire book before buying it, something they usually cannot do with e-book browsing. A study commissioned by HarperCollins in 2010 found that books bought for 3- to 7-year-olds were frequently discovered at a local bookstore — 38 percent of the time.

And here is a question for a digital-era debate: is anything lost by taking a picture book and converting it to an e-book? Junko Yokota, a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Through Children’s Books at National Louis University in Chicago, thinks the answer is yes, because the shape and size of the book are often part of the reading experience. Wider pages might be used to convey broad landscapes, or a taller format might be chosen for stories about skyscrapers.

Size and shape “become part of the emotional experience, the intellectual experience. There’s a lot you can’t standardize and stick into an electronic format,” said Ms. Yokota, who has lectured on how to decide when a child’s book is best suited for digital or print format.

Publishers say they are gradually increasing the number of print picture books that they are converting to digital format, even though it is time-consuming and expensive, and developers have been busy creating interactive children’s book apps.

While the entry of new tablet devices from Barnes & Noble and Amazon this fall is expected to increase the demand for children’s e-books, several publishers said they suspected that many parents would still prefer the print versions.

“There’s definitely a predisposition to print,” said Jon Yaged, president and publisher of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, which released “The Pout-Pout Fish” by Deborah Diesen and “On the Night You Were Born” by Nancy Tillman.

“And the parents are the same folks who will have no qualms about buying an e-book for themselves,” he added.

That is the case in the home of Ari Wallach, a tech-obsessed New York entrepreneur who helps companies update their technology. He himself reads on Kindle, iPad and iPhone, but the room of his twin girls is packed with only print books.

“I know I’m a Luddite on this, but there’s something very personal about a book and not one of one thousand files on an iPad, something that’s connected and emotional, something I grew up with and that I want them to grow up with,” he said.

“I recognize that when they are my age, it’ll be difficult to find a ‘dead-tree book,’ ” he added. “That being said, I feel that learning with books is as important a rite of passage as learning to eat with utensils and being potty-trained.”

Some parents do not want to make the switch for even their school-age children. Alexandra Tyler and her husband read on Kindles, but for their son Wolfie, 7, it is print all the way.

“Somehow, I think it’s different,” she said. “When you read a book, a proper kid’s book, it engages all the senses. It’s teaching them to turn the page properly. You get the smell of paper, the touch.”

There are many software programs that profess to help children learn to read by, for example, saying aloud a highlighted word or picture. Not all parents buy in; Matthew Thomson, 38, an executive at Klout, a social media site, has tried such software for Finn, his 5-year-old. But he believes his son will learn to read faster from print. Plus the bells and whistles of an iPad become a distraction.

“When we go to bed and he knows it’s reading time, he says, ‘Let’s play Angry Birds a little bit,’ ” Mr. Thomson said. “If he’s going to pick up the iPad, he’s not going to read, he’s going to want to play a game. So reading concentration goes out the window.”

No Flash at launch for Ice Cream Sandwich

f you lucky owners of the Galaxy Nexus in these first days of its release complete with the first iteration of Ice Cream Sandwich, you’ll notice that you do not have Adobe Flash Player installed, nor do you have access to a download on the Android Market – Google has just confirmed with us that this is normal and that Flash support will only come once Adobe makes the call to update the mobile version for Android 4.0. You currently will not have the ability to load either a new version or one of the older versions of Flash Player for Ice Cream Sandwich until Adobe makes the call to update their app to be compatible with this newest version of Android. Don’t get too frazzled quite yet though, that’s not the whole story.

Those of you about to have a heart attack over this would do well to note that it was inevitable as Adobe announced that they’d be axing the mobile version of Flash in favor of HTML5 earlier this month. Then if you’ll go ahead and read what Google has let us know, you’ll see that the story isn’t necessarily completely over for Adobe’s mobile version of Flash. Even though the app and support for Flash will be ending relatively soon, Google had the following to say:

“Flash hasn’t been released for ICS yet so as far as we know, Adobe will support Flash for ICS.” – Google

Have a peek at the gallery below to see several signs that Adobe Flash Player isn’t active in Ice Cream Sandwich, and note that these screenshots are taken on the non-Verizon version of the Galaxy Nexus. You can see the rest of our Galaxy Nexus coverage by heading to our giant and ever-expending [Galaxy Nexus Portal] while the same situation is true for Android 4.0 in our [Ice Cream Sandwich portal].

And of course above all – don’t forget to check our our full reviews of the OS and the device separately this weekend here on SlashGear!

IPad rivals have better chance in Europe: Forrester

(Reuters) - Would-be rivals to Apple's iPad have more of a chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to cut prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday.

Apple's relatively small retail presence in Europe -- with 52 stores compared with 238 in the United States -- offers a chance to the likes of Samsung, Acer and Research in Motion, Forrester said.

But their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain. Forrester said emerging challengers from China and Taiwan would likely step in soon with cheaper offerings.

"There is this opportunity for iPad challengers, but the competition is very fragmented. Competing with Apple will require a different approach from what we've seen so far," said analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, the author of the Forrester report.

Apple still has the tablet-computer market almost to itself after launching the iPad a year and a half ago. It has sold close to 30 million iPads, whose prices start at about $500.

Forrester expects Apple to sell 80 percent of all consumer tablets in the United States and 70 percent in Europe this year.

It expects 2011 worldwide tablet sales to reach 48 million units, with half of those sold in the United States, 30 percent in Europe, 15 percent in Asia and 5 percent in Latin America.

Epps said local content and good retail outlets, along with lower prices, were essential to succeed against Apple.

"A competitor to Apple would have to put together the right content, the right price and the right channel strategy. There isn't anyone that has all three," she said.

Tablets are on sale in Europe from Acer, Archos, Asus, HP, Motorola, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Samsung and Toshiba.

Dell has not launched its new, 10-inch Streak tabloid in Europe or North America yet but is concentrating on China, where it is number two behind Lenovo and distributes its products through 10,000 retail outlets.

"Manufacturers, retailers and operators we spoke with all commented on the failure of the first 7-inch tablets that attempted to compete with the iPad," Forrester wrote.

"The newer generation of iPad challengers, such as the 10-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Acer Iconia Tab, are getting better reception, but they're still at a disadvantage to Apple in terms of channel strategy."

Forrester surveyed almost 14,000 online adult consumers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Britain, and also interviewed product strategists from manufacturers, telecommunications operators and retailers.

Between 2 percent and 7 percent of the consumers surveyed, depending on the country, said they owned a tablet, and a further 10 percent to 14 percent said they were interested in buying one.

Spain had the highest ownership and France the lowest, while Germans were most interested in buying a tablet. In Britain, where Apple has 30 of its European stores, ownership was relatively low at 3 percent.

Source

AMD Sitting out Smartphone Market

Advanced Micro Devices is not immediately chasing the market for smartphones as it does not align with the company's strength in technologies like graphics, an executive said on Monday.

Smartphones are constrained on battery, pixels and screen space, and AMD has other areas it can focus on in order to grow, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager for AMD's product group during the Pacific Crest Securities Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. The company sees an opportunity to apply its graphics and chip technologies to tablets, where customers are demanding better video and battery life.

"We haven't announced any plans to go in that handheld space. We've got plenty of opportunities... in server, notebook and now tablets, that's our immediate focus. But if the right circumstances come up and we can see a way to impact the market, we'll obviously continue to look," Bergman said.

AMD has faced criticism for not aggressively pursuing the booming smartphone or tablet markets. The company in June rushed to release its first dedicated tablet chip, called the Z-series. The chip is a low-power variant of PC chips based on the Fusion microarchitecture, which includes a graphics processor and CPU on a single chip. Based on the x86 architecture, the chip can help tablets deliver a full PC and graphics experience, the company has said.

AMD will join Intel in an attempt to unseat ARM, which dominates the tablet market. Intel is also pushing the x86 architecture to tablets with its Atom chips, and hopes to reduce chip power consumption over the next few years to a point where it can match ARM, whose chips are considered more power efficient. Intel is also entering the smartphone market with Atom, though there is no "Intel Inside" smartphone yet, and the company is considered to be many years away from making any meaningful impact.

Earlier this year, rumors emerged that AMD was pursuing an ARM license, which was ultimately denied by AMD. AMD has not announced anything related to ARM, Bergman said, also reiterating the company's commitment to x86 architecture.

"We're excited about what the tablet market can do for AMD," Bergman said.

Beyond tablets, AMD this quarter will release server and desktop chips based on its new Bulldozer architecture, which has been in development for around five years. The Opteron server chip based on Bulldozer, code-named Interlagos, has up to 16 cores, and will be up to 40 percent faster than existing chips with up to 12 cores, while consuming the same amount of power, Bergman said. The desktop chips include up to eight cores and will be used in high-end desktops aimed at uses such as gaming.

The Interlagos chip provides AMD with an opportunity to gain back server market share from Intel, Bergman said. Beyond more cores, Opteron chips will provide a power-performance advantage for tasks ranging from cloud to high-performance computing, Bergman said. AMD's Interlagos chips could also reach market earlier than Intel's newer Xeon server chips, which could help gain back some market share.

"We frankly look back over the last couple of quarters, we've been disappointed with the results we've seen from our server businesses as we ceded some market share there," Bergman said.

AMD gained processor market share during the second quarter, but lost server market share, IDC said in a study last week. AMD had a 20.4 percent overall microprocessor market share, gaining from 19 percent in last year's second quarter, while Intel had a 79.3 percent market share, down from 80.7 percent. However, AMD's server microprocessor market share slipped to 5.5 percent from 6.5 percent a year, while Intel dominated with a 94.5 percent share.

Source

The fate of mobile phone brands

The violence with which new platforms have displaced incumbent mobile vendor fortunes continues to surprise.

• Nokia’s Symbian platform has gone from 47% share to 16% in three years
• Microsoft’s phone platforms have gone from 12% to 1%
• Other platforms have gone from 21% to zero
• Although far less dramatic, RIM’s decline from 17% to 12% is causing acute pain and anxiety

This while entrants have grown share in spectacular fashion:

• Android from zero to 48% (A two year period)
• iOS from 2% to 19%
• Bada from zero to 4% (two quarters only)

The picture of platform share over time looks like this:

The platform volume growth is shown in the following graph:

SHOCKING

Or is it?

The surprising thing is that it should not be surprising. When the iPhone re-defined the basis of competition (at the beginning of the time frame of these charts) it unleashed forces which are still spinning the industry into a new configuration.

In that context, Android is a natural consequence. As iPhone created a threat, the response from all other vendors (other than Nokia and RIM) was to seek something that would sustain their business. Android was salvation.

It enabled the pursuit of better margins and hence better returns. So much so that Android offers the escape up-market they have always sought. It enables vendors to abandon the profit-free feature phones to low-end entrants like ZTE and Huawei.

LG, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson all took the bait. They are racing as quickly as possible to turn their feature phone portfolios into Android portfolios. This is certainly something that Google also wants to see happen and has been planning all along.

However one of the consequences of the modular (aka “open”) approach is that the low end disruptors gobbling up low-end share are also motivated to move into the Android business as soon as it comes within reach. The only reliably predictable consequence of Android will be the postponement of displacement of the existing brands by the low-end entrants.

IS THIS FATE UNAVOIDABLE FOR ALL BRANDS?

Clearly some vendors see the trap. For all its apparent failings, Nokia saw this outcome and chose to attempt a “Hail Mary Pass” with Microsoft. The strategic point being that because they no longer had faith in their ability to execute on an independent platform, they would pick a platform that gave them at least some control or leverage. There are serious risks and problems with this approach–something which has been covered here already–but the bet being made is a clear rejection of the slippery Android slope.

RIM is trying to resist with QNX which is a similar approach but timing may also be the undoing of this strategy. HP’s approach with WebOS and Samsung’s Bada are also hedges to avoid this fate.

And what about Apple?

Apple is always skating in a different direction. iOS needs to be seen as not so much a phone platform but a computing platform. Given what we know, iOS was always conceived as the future of computing. Voice, after all, is just an app on iOS. So my expectation is that Apple’s iOS will continue its attack on the mobile computing market, skimming (or carving as the case may be) profits from the phone business to sustain its ultimate target of reclaiming the computing universe.

By this thinking iOS lives only by improving more rapidly than anything else in dimensions that redefine the basis of performance. In other words, doing more of what the iPhone did in the first place to set off this disruption.

Source