Mobile Grows Faster than Expected, Says Eric Schmidt

Employers Expect Flexible Work Trend

CEOs, senior HR professionals and workplace decision makers from across the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries, including Spain, Argentina, El Salvador, and India, believe 50 to 80 percent of employees would move to time or location flexible work within five years, driven largely by the need to attract and retain superior talent. This is up from a reported 25 percent today

Email Not "Dead"

It might not be the case that any application or service actually is waning when stories about the "death of X" start to appear, or when "X is not dead" stories also start to appear. Email is among the latest applications to get the treatment. Obviously email is not "dead." It remains among the top applications used on either mobile or tethered devices. But there also is greater use of alternatives, such as text mesaging, instant mesaging and even micro-blogging.

Verizon Wireless Sold 60% of iPhone Online

Some reports have suggested that relatively sedate traffic at Verizon Wireless retail locations indicated less-robust demand for iPhones than some might have expected. Verizon Wireless CEO Daniel Mead points out that more than 60 percent of iPhone sales occurred online.

That heavy activity online contributed to short lines on launch day, he maintains. "If we had not done online, you would have seen a much different flow in the pictures," says Mead. Mead also says that Verizon deliberately phased the introduction, to avoid potential problems with a sudden rush of buyers.

Verizon deliberately limited the number of locations where iPhones could be purchased, in addition to using the online channel quaite heavily In a few days, Verizon Wireless also will double the number of stores that sell the iPhone, going from 4,000 to 8,000.

Verizon Wireless CEO Says iPhone Sales Strong - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Mobiles, Tablets Gaining Gaming Share?

As smartphones and tablets gain greater share of the installed base, one would expect to see some changes in end user behavior. The whole point of ebook readers, after all, is to create new ebook reader consumption, and displace reading of physical books.

Among the early trends with tablets is that they are displacing other devices for purposes of content consumption, ranging from email to video. TechCrunch, in fact, already sees a shift of its readership from Windows PCs to other devices, and mobiles seem to account for about 14 percent of activity. Read more here

But gaming experiences also might be shifting towards general-purpose devices such as smartphones and tablet. Many games available for smartphones and tablets now appear to be "good enough" to displace use of a dedicated game-playing system.

It's unofficial: dedicated gaming devices may be losing out to phones

Mobile Alters TechCrunch Reader Habits

In four years, Windows share among TechCrunch readers has fallen 30 percentage points, TechCrunch reports. Up to this point, the bulk of the shift has been from Windows PCs to Apple PCs.

The new wrinkle is that mobile devices now represent about 14 percent of user visits, and the mobile share is growing.

In Two Years, Most Of You Will Be Reading TechCrunch From An Apple Device

Seniors Bigger on Mobiles than PCs

Seniors (those over 65)traditionally have lagged younger users in terms of Internet and mobile adoption, but the mobile gap is no longer huge, and the Internet gap likely will continue to close as Boomers replace their parents in the "senior" demographic.