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Android 3.0, Honeycomb Designed to Drive Tablets

Honeycomb is the next version of the Android platform, designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets.

Honeycomb will feature a brand new, truly virtual and holographic user interface, refined multi-tasking, elegant notifications, access to over 100,000 apps on Android Market, home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive, Google says.

The web browser includes tabbed browsing, form auto-fill, syncing with Google Chrome bookmarks, and incognito mode for private browsing.

A Sneak Peek of Android 3.0, Honeycomb - Official Google Mobile Blog

Text content sales grow with 4G

Apps for content are one area where consumers are downloading and continuing to use apps, say researchers at the Yankee Group. A new forecast from Yankee Group predicts that e-book sales will reach $2.7 billion by 2013, an annual growth rate of more than 70 percent.

Researchers believe more than 380 million e-books will be purchased by 2013, four times the amount purchased in 2010. One negative: e-book prices are expected to drop to about $7 on average, a $2 decrease over 2009 prices.

Yankee Group believes that growing 4G mobile penetration is going to help.

Yankee Group: How connectivity, content is changing the game

Isis CEO: Mobile payments making "good progress"

"If you're going to make payments work in the United States on a mobile phone, you're going to need a lot of players to come alive in the ecosystem to make that happen--everything from the merchants to the OEMs to the phone manufacturers," says Isis CEO Michael Abbott.

"The point of why we made the announcement about Isis before we were out there marketing it is to let all of the ecosystem players know, here is the place you can come to talk about the open standards we're developing, what we'd expect people to adopt and that we're bringing the wherewithal of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and the 200 million subscribers they have and the 100 million who re-up their phones every year," says Abbott.

Isis CEO: Mobile payments making 'good progress,' but no specifics yet

Corning Incorporated to Acquire MobileAccess

These days, if you run a business in the fixed-line business, in any way, and you don't have a mobile play, you have a problem. So it is that Corning has signed an agreement to acquire MobileAccess, a leading provider of wireless network solutions.

With headquarters in Vienna, Va. and a technology center in Tel Aviv, Israel, MobileAccess provides distributed antenna system solutions for flexible wireless coverage in the rapidly growing wireless market.

Corning Incorporated to Acquire MobileAccess

Skype Competitor Viber Hits 10 Million Downloads

An Android version is said to be coming.

Charge Anywhere for Android Updated

Charge Anywhere, a provider of mobile payment solutions and payment gateway services, has released an updated version of "Charge Anywhere for Android," a free payment application for Android smartphones. The application can be downloaded from the Android Market.

read more here

Galaxy Tab Return Rate 15%, Study Finds

The Galaxy Tab, Samsung's answer to the iPad, was found in one study to have a return rate of about 15 percent, compared to a two-percent return rate for the Apple iPad.

'Consumers aren't in love with the device,' said Tony Berkman, a consumer tech analyst with ITG.

Samsung says it has shipped two million Galaxy Tabs, which run Google Android software.

The problem with the Galaxy might be attributed to use of an operating system not originally designed to run a tablet.

Galaxy Tab a dim bulb - NYPOST

Groupon’s Hyperlocal Play

Groupon has a partnerhip with JiWire that provides "hyperlocal" targeted ads.

Ad formatting will roll into the JiWire Compass template, which initially appears as a standard display ad, but when clicked on, opens up into a richer, app-like experience with geo-fencing and mapping capabilities.

JiWire’s network automatically determines a user’s location and then searches for locally-relevant deals. Results show how many local deals were found and their distance from that location.

Social Local Media: Groupon’s Hyperlocal Play – A Next Step for Deals

How Twitter Makes Money

Twitter now offers three "advertising format. The promoted tweets program offers classic cost-per-click pricing.

The promoted accounts program uses a cost-per-action format, while the promoted trends program uses a flat-rate, daily sponsorship that drives huge amounts of impressions, engagements, and clicks.

jHow Twitter Makes Money | ClickZ

Sony Reader Banned from Apple App Store

Apple has rejected Sony’s Reader app from its App Store because it sells content within the app, and lets users access content that they purchased outside Apple’s own App Store, the New York Times reports.

Apple has told Sony that from now on all in-app purchases have to go through Apple. That's the downside of curation. On the other hand, few would quibble about a news stand, bookstore, cable network or radio or TV broadcaster selecting the content it wishes to carry, so long as the content is legal, tasteful and generally accurate. Okay, at least legal.

Apple Rejects Sony Reader App

Amazon, Apple, And Their Future In Steaming Video

Not everybody thinks Apple or Amazon, not to mention others such as YouTube or Wal-Mart, can make a serious business out of streaming video. For that matter, perhaps it might be said that Time Warner doesn't think most media companies can really do so, either.

Nor is Netflix likely to have an easy time, from now on, getting access to the compelling content it needs to remain a viable provider of top -notch video programming. Content owners now see "streaming" as the key new business to protect, rather than the DVD business, as important as that latter business has been, over the last decade or two. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13bewkes.html.

In the late 1990s the media industry embraced Netflix as a new distribution outlet for renting DVDs. Perhaps nobody clearly understood that the move might accelerate the decline in the sales of DVDs, which for years had been the lifeblood of the film industry. Now, with its success online, Netflix has raised fears that consumers may stop paying for cable television as well.

That new perception is likely to put the brakes on Netflix, to some extent, as well as others that might like to participate in the streaming business.

The studios and networks will see to it that the streaming business is not handed to Netflix, much less to Apple, Amazon or anybody else.

Amazon, Apple, And Their Future In Steaming Video - 24/7 Wall St.

Video Will be 66% of All Mobile Traffic in 2015

Worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month or an annual run rate of 75 exabytes by 2015 due to a projected surge in mobile Internet-enabled devices delivering popular video applications and services, according to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index.

This traffic increase represents a compound annual growth rate of 92 percent over the same period. Two major global trends are driving these significant mobile data traffic increases: a continued surge in mobile-ready devices such as tablets and smart phones, and widespread mobile video content consumption.

The Cisco study predicts that by 2015, more than 5.6 billion personal devices will be connected to mobile networks, and there will also be 1.5 billion machine-to-machine nodes -- nearly the equivalent of one mobile connection for every person in the world.

Mobile video is forecast to represent 66 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2015, increasing 35-fold from 2010 to 2015, the highest growth rate of any mobile data application tracked in the Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast.

Mobile traffic originating from tablet devices is expected to grow 205-fold from 2010 to 2015, the highest growth rate of any device category tracked.

Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast Projects 26-Fold Growth in Global Mobile Data Traffic From 2010 to 2015

Next Jump Powers Enterprise Loyalty Programs

Next Jump, still a private company, will go public soon. Perhaps the most-notable partner Next Jump has is MasterCard, which in 2010 signed a three-year partnership with Next Jump to enhance its payment services.

Will Big Carriers Take Over CDN Business?

There's a general rule in the communications business that a specialist wants to find a niche that is unattractive to the tier-one telcos, but big enough to be very interesting for the specialist. Lots of services start out small, but then get big enough to draw the interest of the tier one providers, typically with unpleasant results for the niche providers.

Mobile phones, digital subscriber line (broadband access) and SIP trunking are just a couple recent examples of services the big tier one providers avoided until it was clear they were going to be significant.

One wonders whether the content delivery networks business, which has been such a niche, now is becoming big enough to matter to tier one telcos.

Light Reading Cable - IP & Convergence - Rumor: Akamai Got Kicked Out of France