Friday, March 30, 2012

Google Drive screenshot hints at 5 GB of cloud storage for Android smartphones and tablets

Google Drive

Following up on rumors that Google would be offering a cloud service to access files and multimedia no matter what screen you're looking at, some pictures with details of Google Drive have emerged. Apparently Google Drive will be giving away 5 GB for free with the option to upgrade for more, and the source of this shot claims that it will be launching on April 16.

Google Drive (or something like it) has been rumored for a long time; if this service is actually nearing a launch, it's taken its sweet time. Obviously Google already has a ton of cloud services already synced up with Android, but the only real file locker they've pumped out for Android is Google Music. Being able to wirelessly sync individual files between mobile devices and computers is bound to garner lots of interest, not because it hasn't been done before, but because Google will be able to feed it deeply into the Android OS and make it make it completely seamless.

So, any of you already hooked up with sync services like DropBox - would you be willing to switch to Google Drive for the sake of something a little more native? 

Source: TalkAndroid










Oliver Yatco

With Apple and Nokia at war, nano-SIM vote is postponed

The group in charge of arbitrating the battle over the future of mobile SIM cards appears to have choked — by postponing the contentious vote for at least a month.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute, ETSI, was due to vote on Friday over which standard to adopt for the nano-SIM card — the smaller, next generation chip that is likely to become the norm in mobiles over the coming years.

Adopting an even smaller card will allow manufacturers to make thinner handsets, store different sorts of information or use the space for larger batteries or other technology — and at a meeting this week ETSI's members were faced with a choice between two competing ideas — one backed by Apple, and the other supported by Nokia and RIM.

Both sides had been lobbying hard to get their standard adopted: Apple suggested that it would offer the technology royalty free to carriers, but Nokia responded angrily by saying it would not license its applicable patents if that happened.

It quickly became a vicious battle, with control over the future of mobile at stake — particularly given that Apple is thought to be considering embeddable SIM cards that would eventually allow it to sidestep carriers and other parts of the mobile industry.

In the end, the clash appears to have been too hot for ETSI to handle, as the organization eventually decided that it was better to postpone the vote since there was a clear failure to reach an accord. ETSI rules suggest it will be at least 30 days until a vote can be held — so expect to see both sides going at each other over the next month as they try to politick their way to success.

Comparison of SIM card sizes by Giesecke & Devrient

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Oliver Yatco

RIM rumored dropping BlackBerry access fee to boost sales

RIM might counteract its recent poor results by dropping its longstanding BlackBerry server access fee. A rumor from a "senior source" at RIM speaking to BGR had the company exploring the possibility of dropping the cost it normally passes on to carriers in order to get wider adoption. It would cost over $1 billion in revenue a quarter, but the gamble would be that carriers would drive more sales without that fee to pay or factor into their prices....









Oliver Yatco

Spotify Keeps the Free Music Party Going in the U.S.

Good news for American Spotify users who don't want to pay for their music: The streaming service will continue to let them listen to anything they want, without restrictions, for a while longer.

The free-music party was supposed to end three months ago, which would have meant that nonpaying users would face a 10-hour-a-month cap.

But the company extended the promotion, which it introduced during Spotify's U.S. launch last summer, and it's announcing today that it's extending it again.

Meanwhile, in some European countries, Spotify has also removed another limit on free music — a restriction that meant free users could only hear a single song five times, period — though the 10-hours-a-month restriction still stands.

The various restrictions are a result of negotiations with the big music labels, and are designed to give users an incentive to upgrade their free accounts to premium ones, and/or actually buy music from Spotify or other sources. Paying users get to listen to Spotify without ads, and can access the service from iPhones and Android handsets.

Why lift the limits? Feel free to speculate. Here are two guesses, which aren't mutually exclusive:

  • Both Spotify and the music labels are pleased with the service's results, which have been producing free-to-paid conversions of around 15 percent, at least during the U.S. launch. If that's still working, it may be worth it, from both sides' perspectives, to lay off the limits.
  • Spotify is in the midst of a giant funding round that could value the company at some $4 billion. That pitch is premised on the company's "extraordinary" growth.  If it did clamp down on free listening, that growth would presumably slow, which makes that pitch harder to make.







Oliver Yatco

Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on

Touching me, touching you
Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 0

Microsoft Surface, in its initial version one form, was more an experiment than anything else. Designed as an interactive display that could be incorporated into things like coffee tables, it definitely was an exciting concept.

The software has now re-surfaced, ahem, in second-gen form, boasting a heap of improvements and much more stable touch technology. The result is the Samsung SUR40 table and Pocket-lint has been lucky enough to have a play with one.?

Combining a full HD 40-inch display with 178-degree viewing angles, the table packs an entire PC inside it. The whole setup is powered by an 2.9GHz AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM and an AMD HD6750M GPU. Not hugely powerful specs then, but definitely more than enough to keep the Surface ticking along smoothly, at least from what we saw.?

Surface is now aimed firmly at businesses, being largely too expensive for a consumer to afford to stick in his or her home. These Samsung displays represent the cutting edge of technology, using PixelSense to detect a possible total of 50 touch interactions at once. This means you and plenty of others can all tap away at the surface at the same time, without it slowing down. The result of this is quite a diverse feature set with which application developers can play.?

Samsung had a pretty plentiful supply of applications pre-loaded on to the SUR40 table we played with. It would take us forever to go into detail of each, so we have picked out our three favourites which show off what Surface can do: Absolut, Bing and Fujifilm. The last of the three, Fuji's application, takes the SUR40 and puts it into its own custom-build table with company branding, designed to appear in photo printing shops.?

With Bing, Surface can do things like pick up on specially built tags, a bit like Sony's Smart tags but without the NFC. These can then be programmed to make Bing search for specific products. Results will then appear in a small window which you can resize using pinch to zoom. You can fill the whole surface with results and do things such as play embedded video or scroll through pictures. The tags in particular can be put to use in all different ways. Red Bull, for example, had stuck them in the bottom of drinks cans which would then search for extreme sports videos should you place them on the table.?

Absolut Vodka had come up with something slightly more exciting, turning the table into a touch-sensitive mixing desk - fully functional, we might add. Along the side of the desk was a list of cocktails, that changed depending on what speed the record was being played, to suit the mood. It made for quite a compelling interactive experience and something we would definitely want to see in a bar.

Finally there was Fujifilm, which was a basic photo-manipulation tool. You could build photo albums by grabbing shots from a camera and dragging them on to a page, resize them using multitouch and then send them off to be printed. We liked the custom-built table and could see how, if it were to turn up in a shop, it might persuade customers to make the extra purchase.

In the end though, Kinect is still a lot more exciting to us than Surface. Having the likes of the Xbox and Windows behind it, the software which is compatible is just much more formidable. That and it costs a whole heap less. Still expect to see the odd Surface display turning up in a shop near you soon.?

Tags: Microsoft Microsoft Surface Microsoft Surface 2 Samsung

Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 0  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 1  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 2  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 3  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 4  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 5  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 6  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 7  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 8  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 9  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 10  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 11  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 12  Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on. Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface 2, Samsung 13 

Microsoft Surface with PixelSense pictures and hands-on originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:00:00 +0100








Oliver Yatco

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Snapguide App Lets Users Create How-To Guides on the Go

Snapguide today launches to the public a mobile service for creating and consuming step-by-step guides. The app helps users contribute how-tos on topics like cooking, gardening and repairs, by using a template that allows for photos, videos and supply lists.

For now, Snapguide's main offering is an iOS app, though it also works for the Web and mobile Web. Some sample guides I found while perusing included "how to make tofu," "how to catch Dungeness crabs" and "how to make French macarons."

(That last one consists of 29 intricate steps, resulting in delicious and perfect-looking cookies that I'm sure I could never equal.)

Despite how intimidating some of the individual lessons may seem, Snapguide is one of those apps that feels good in the palm of your hand. It is nice-looking, functional and snappy.

San Francisco-based Snapguide, which raised $2 million in seed funding last year, is far from the first company of its kind. For instance, there are structured competitors like Mightybell and Instructables, plus all sorts of free-form recipe and DIY communities. Perhaps the biggest differentiator is that Snapguide is mobile-first.

"Creating on a device that is always on you simplifies creation and encourages real-time documentation, which is very different than coming back to something later," Snapguide co-founder and CEO Daniel Raffel told me.

Despite the polish of their first release, Raffel and his co-founder, Steve Krulewitz, weren't previously known for their mobile work; Raffel formerly worked on Yahoo Pipes, while Krulewitz worked on Google Chrome.

Another thing: Snapguide's highly structured format asks a lot from its guide creators — versus something like Pinterest, where users can contribute content without doing much work.

"We've simplified it as much as is possible," Raffel said. "I think people enjoy sharing the things they do. This is a visual way to do that, and it's easy to broadcast to other social networks."

Raffel said his goal is to make Snapguide a community "where people are learning together."

If only I could find the time and patience to make those macarons.








Oliver Yatco

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/03/29/google-has-only-made-550m-from-android-so-far-while-earning-billions-on-the-iphone/





Google has made some $550m from Android since 2008, according to numbers included in the recent Oracle settlement and crunched by Charles Arthur of The Guardian. By contrast, a huge amount of Google’s revenue in mobile comes from ads delivered to users of App

The figures in the Guardian report come from testimony given by Google in the Oracle trial, so we’re depending on the company to be accurate about revenue which could affect its damages to the database company. This means that it could have skewed the numbers in its favor with clever bookkeeping. But this is what Google is currently saying that it makes on Android.

Arthur calculated the revenue numbers by working backwards from the potential payout to Oracle:

The $2.8m offer, at a combined rate of 0.515%, suggests that Android’s total revenue since the launch of the first handsets at the end of 2008 through to the end of 2011 was $543m. Patent payments relating to phones are generally made on a per-handset basis at a fixed licence fee for any phones that would be judged to infringe the relevant patents.

Right now Google makes some $2.5B a year in revenue in mobile, most of it from mobile ads, and the search numbers mean that a large chunk of that comes from iOS devices. This means that the earnings from Android are dwarfed by the chunk of those earnings that come in via iPhone.

By some numbers, Google accounts for 97% of all mobile search queries, which is a massive, if not incredibly surprising number. But according to Google testimony, some 2/3 of that number originates on iOS devices, not Android.

If you do the math, figuring that it has been three years since 2008, Android is extremely likely to have made in the millions in revenue from Android in 2011, making its earnings from the iPhone somewhere over $2B mark in the same year as the majority percentage.

But it’s not just volume of searches that is the issue. Remember that Google is a company that makes its primary living on search ad revenue, period. While Google’s desktop search business is in good shape, it is clear that mobile is going to become the default way that most of the people in the world access the internet, sooner rather than later.

The revenue from ads isn’t a 1:1 correlation to search queries, of course. But it does give us a basic yardstick that we can use to gauge how much of a market Google stands to lose along with the iOS platform. Android is growing at a rapid clip, with some 550K activations every day, and every one of those is a potential source of advertising revenue for Google.

But iOS is growing too and the numbers show that far more browsing is done on iOS devices than on Android. Due to this, the impact on Google’s mobile revenue from Apple devices is massive, even bigger than that “2/3″ number would imply.

Android is a huge part of the market, but it earns Google almost nothing in comparison to the money that the search giant earns on desktop search. Whether the Android business is sustainable at this point is only something that Google can answer, but so far it doesn’t seem to be paying dividends. The problem, really, is that Google can’t afford not to be in the mobile business, but it’s costing it billions in revenue to stay there.

This also illustrates just how dangerous it could be to Google’s mobile business if Apple succeeds in divorcing itself from Google as a mapping provider, and throughout iOS.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Hulu Plus arrives on 7 Android tablets, but no Galaxy Tab 10.1 yet

asus eee pad transformer 520x245 Hulu Plus arrives on 7 Android tablets, but no Galaxy Tab 10.1 yet

Hulu Plus is now available on seven Android tablets, the online film and TV service Hulu announced today. As part of the launch, the company is also introducing a new user interface for its Hulu Plus app. As for the redesign, its ambition is to make the most of the tablet's visuals.

The newly supported devices are the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Motorola Xoom, Motorola XYBoard 10.1, Toshiba Thrive, Acer Iconia and LG G-Slate.

However, Hulu still isn't compatible with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 – though the company points out that "This is just the beginning of [its] Android tablet rollout."

As for the redesign, its ambition is to make the most of the tablet's visuals.
hulu library1 520x535 Hulu Plus arrives on 7 Android tablets, but no Galaxy Tab 10.1 yet

As an added bonus, Hulu does point out one very cool feature:

"When building this app, we looked for ways to grant you instant access to exactly what you want to watch. Once you decide on a show, hold your finger down on the show's thumbnail and the latest episode of the series will automatically start playing. If you've been following a show for a while, hold your finger down on the show's thumbnail and the next episode will automatically launch based on where you are in the series."

Hulu Plus for Android

Here's a video introduction if you are in the US:

More to follow, please refresh for updates.








Oliver Yatco