Google improve before end of the year

Android crushes the competition in China as it passes 90% smartphone market share: Report

Android has established a clear monopoly in China after achieving more than 90 percent market share there, up from 58.2 percent a year ago, according to a new report from Analysys International (via Tech in Asia). The data combines estimates from both devices sales and ownership.
Google’s mobile OS soared to 83 percent last quarter, and it has continued its run, capturing an estimated 90.1 percent of the market. It’s possible Android’s overall share is even higher than estimated, as the firm doesn’t count knock-off phones, many of which are powered by the platform.
iOS also dropped from 6 percent to 4.2 percent. However, it may be underrepresented, as Analysys notes that it doesn’t include grey market imports. Since the iPhone 5 is not yet officially available in China, many sellers have resorted to having the device smuggled in from Hong Kong.
 
Nokia’s Symbian continued its tragic decline, dropping from 6 percent in the second quarter to 2.4 percent in the third. Just a few years ago, Nokia had the dominant position in the Chinese mobile market. With Nokia’s transition to Windows Phone, Symbian is on its way out, but sales of its Lumia devices are still getting off the ground.
Smartphones based on the Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Linux operating systems took up a negligible share of the market.
Budget smartphones continued to gain momentum, as the average price for Android devices fell yet again, this time to ($223) RMB 1,393 down from $251(RMB 1,560). The average price for a Symbian smartphone came in at $179 (RMB 1,114) and iOS dropped slightly to $726 (RMB 4,523).
With Android taking over almost the whole market in China, at least according to Analysys’ estimates, the country is becoming a stronghold for the platform. Google. however, is unable to properly capitalize on its growing user base there, as many of its services are blocked or constricted.
Local Internet companies have moved in to take advantage of the opportunity. Baidu, for instance, has built its own software that works on top of Android, while Alibaba is pursuing its own mobile operating system that may or may not be based on Android, depending on who you talk to. Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has also thrown its lot in with Android for its MIUI ROM and Mi-One and Mi-Two smartphones.
Estimates from Analysys are worth noting because of their consistency, its interpretation of the Chinese smartphone market is just one of many. Recent third-quarter data from app analytics firm Umeng put Apple’s smartphone distribution on its platform at 33 percent.

 

Google Launches Ingress, a Worldwide Mobile Alternate Reality Game

 Liz Gannes

What’s the wackiest thing you can imagine Google launching? How about a game to fight for control of the minds of everyone on earth?
Or maybe that’s not so wacky.
Meet Ingress, a new free mobile app and alternate reality game made by Google launching today (on Android first, available as soon as it makes it through the Google Play release process).
Ingress is a project of former Google director of geo John Hanke and his Niantic Labs, a start-up team wholly inside of Google.
“This grew out of us thinking about notions of ubiquitous computing,” Hanke told AllThingsD this week. “The device melts away.”
Ingress also aims to get people out in the physical world, both for physical activity and to see their surroundings in a new way.
Users can generate virtual energy needed to play the game by picking up units of “XM,” which are collected by traveling walking paths, like a real-world version of Pac-Man. Then they spend the energy going on missions around the world to “portals,” which are virtually associated with public art, libraries and other widely accessible places.
“The concept is something like World of Warcraft, where everyone in the world is playing the same game,” Hanke said. Players are on one of two teams: “The Enlightened,” who embrace the power, or “The Resistance,” who fight the power. Anyone can play from anywhere in the world, though in more densely played areas there will be more local competition for resources.
Outdoor physical activity is a big component of this, though driving between locations isn’t banned. “You’re like a rat in a maze on the phone,” Hanke said. Then, back at your computer, you can review the larger area and gameplay.
If self-driving cars or computer glasses are a head-scratching fit for Google, Ingress is perhaps even more so, because it’s a content project that’s expressly askew from reality. The company has hired game writers and artists, and hopes to stay a month or two ahead of the audience, Hanke said.
(You have to admit, this might be pretty fantastic to play from the point of view of those Google glasses.)
But Hanke contended that the game will be good for Google’s business from the beginning. That’s because of advertising. Ingress incorporates real physical stores and products in the game, and has brokered relationships with Hint Water, Zipcar, Jamba Juice and Chrome apparel and messenger bags.
And eventually, Google plans to make these real-world game tools available as a platform for developers to make their own.
Hanke said he wants the game to be a living creation that’s shaped by its players. Some early public teasers of the game on a dummy Niantic Project Web site had generated a lot of interest in Russia, Hanke said, so the team wrote some “aspects of Russia” into the game.
Niantic also wants the game to end at some point, or at least have a good stopping point in a year and a half or so.
“We were definitely inspired by JJ Abrams,” Hanke said, “but we don’t want to leave people in a ‘Lost’ situation where they get into the fiction of a world but then it never ends.”
Niantic’s first public product was Field Trip, also a mobile geo app for Android, released in September. Hanke described the factoid-finding Field Trip as “more of a mainstream Web tool” and Ingress as an option for people who are more comfortable with gaming and sci-fi.
The project, which was internally named Nemesis, has been tested by Google employees for the past six months.

Google announces new Shopping experience coming to Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Japan

Google today announced it is bringing its new Google Shopping experience to Australia, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. The new version will be rolling out gradually to give merchants some transition time and let them optimize their campaigns.
The first major change (cleaner results for shopping queries and Sponsored results) will take place on February 13, 2013. These new queries, which will let shoppers refine a search by brand or price and will feature larger product images, are available on a small percentage of searches starting today. Google is hoping to complete the rollout with all the changes intact by the end of Q2 2013.
If you’re sitting there scratching your head, let me explain. Yes, Google Shopping is available internationally already, but it was a very basic product search service (in fact, it was formerly called Google Product Search). What we’re talking about here is the company’s commercial model, built on Product Listing Ads, which tweaks the ranking in Google Shopping to be based on a combination of relevance and bid price, as well as throws in a few actually useful features.
Back in May, Google announced a new service that lets shoppers research products better, compare them based on features and prices, and connect with merchants to make their purchase. In other words, what a shopping service should do in the first place. This new model fully launched in the US on October 17, and now the company is pushing it out to the rest of the world.
Why did Google make the change? Here’s what the company says:

We made this transition because we believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will lead to better, more up to date product data — which will mean better shopping results for users and in turn, higher quality traffic for merchants. We think this will bring the same high-quality shopping experience to people — and positive results to merchants – around the world.

In other words, Google Product Search sucked and the company was getting trampled by the competition (not to mention the lawsuits). Now Google claims to have come up with something that benefits both shoppers (products in one convenient place where they can compare and check out reviews) and merchants (advertisers get more granular control over product listings and traffic). Oh, and Google gets to make more money, of course.

An Amazon engineer had a little idea that turned into a billion-dollar business

Once upon a time, Amazon was a dot-com-era technology company best known for selling books. Then, in 2003 and 2004, Amazon wanted to streamline its internal process between the programmers and the hardware engineers. It was a move that many other companies were taking, but an Amazon engineer had a brilliant idea: Why not use the same project to design an application that could rent chunks of Amazon’s computing facilities to customers?
On August 24, 2006, the public beta of Amazon’s “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). And so, the ability to rent computing capacity managed by someone else was born. It was a gamble that has, so far, paid off. Amazon includes IaaS revenue in a larger unit called Amazon Web Service, which includes other cloud products. That, in turn, is under a part of the financial reports that includes non-cloud  products called “other.” Besides Amazon Web Service, Amazon’s other revenue includes non-retail activities, such as marketing and promotional activities, co-branded credit card agreements, and other seller sites. Yet most analysts studying the industry believe that the mass majority of the “other” is cloud computing, and the growth is stunning:

IaaS at Amazon went from a thought project in 2004, to a startup in 2006 and it is almost certainly heading toward a billion-dollar business, if it is not there already.
Renting computers, called servers, that were managed by someone else, somewhere else, was not a new concept. What was new was the pricing that allowed customers to buy servers by the hour with a click of a button. That rental concept allowed businesses with uncertain future demand to buy computing capacity rapidly, 24 hours a day, as needed. Other companies followed Amazon’s lead. Rackspace, Terremark, CSC, Savvis, among others have similar options now, and technology research-firm Gartner estimates that businesses will spend $6.2 billion, or 45.4% growth, in 2012 on IaaS.
Here’s why server space matters. In 2002, Friendster was the first site to introduce social networking to millions. The demand grew exponentially as news outlets jumped on the new phenomenon, yet the code behind the site was asking too much of the servers. (In comparison, Facebook uses a programming paradigm called AJAX that taxes servers less.) Its popularity stressed Friendster’s computing capacity and eventually, for a period of time, the site became unusable because it was too slow. It is unknown whether Friendster could have innovated rapidly enough to remain dominate over the more nimble MySpace and Facebook, but it never had a chance. Other companies were forming while it was down.  Years later in 2007, Zynga combined gaming with social networking into online applications that became known as social gaming. It first received venture capital in 2008 and by April 2009 it was the largest app developer for Facebook with 40 million monthly active users. In 2011, Zynga brought in 12% of Facebook’s revenue. Unlike Friendster, Zynga was able to handle the explosive demand of its service. It did so while not owning most of its own servers or hardware infrastructure. It was almost completely in the cloud. In Amazon’s cloud.
IaaS cloud computing is not always cheaper than owning your own hardware, but it provides liquidity for compute capacity. No longer does a company, researcher, or individual need to invest large amounts of capital to purchase hardware that will be used and amortized over three or four years. Now they can buy computing capacity by the hour. That allows websites to increase the ability to handle rapidly growing demand like Zynga did. Other sites have been able to avoid going down from 375 million page views a month for only $15 a month. In fact, the instructions to avoid a Friendster-like site slowdown are so easy to digest that someone right out of high school or college can use the technique. IaaS means that pioneering companies can start small yet still grow rapidly while other websites do not need to go down just because they posted something popular.
For startups, Infrastructure as a Service’s cloud computing increases the amount of money that can be returned to investors (salvage value), reduces the time to set up equipment, and cuts the amount of capital that needs to be raised. Servers and other computing components that run websites and are used for research no longer need to be bought outright, saving money and time. Indeed, most of the tech startups I know use cloud computing and it is exciting to see the rate of innovation increase as classical deterrents are removed. And cloud computing is not only changing business. Academic and corporate researchers can  now rent the 102nd fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites through Amazon.
Ten years ago, if asked what company would revolutionize computing, a book merchant with a tech edge probably did not come to mind. However, that is exactly what Amazon has accomplished. Infrastructure as a Service is now widely available in many forms. While other cloud vendors have developed their own systems from scratch or are working with open (free) software, Amazon’s continues to grow rapidly and change the way businesses form and run—while reaping larger and larger revenue streams for vendors in the market.

Meet the PC that will be the death of the PC

 

 

 

Acer C7 Chromebook, the web-based laptop from Google that happens to have the guts of a PC.Google

Apple may have invented the tablet computer that now threatens the existence of the PC, but it’s Google, with the help of a variety of hardware manufacturers, that wants to finish off the PC  for good.
Today, Google announced a new $199 PC that’s the latest and cheapest in a line of machines that run the Chrome operating system (OS). Unlike Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s OS X, Chrome OS hardly deserves to be called an OS; it basically consists of a web browser and not much else. The idea behind a Chromebook, as they’re called, is that you do everything through a web browser, using the growing array of web-based apps that have been built to do word-processing, photo-editing and just about anything else you might want to use a computer for. By moving 100% of your computing to the web, you are no longer tied to any one computer. And because everything you use and store is in the cloud, software need never be updated, and, absent a snafu on Google’s end, data can never be lost.
The new Chromebook is manufactured by Acer, the Taiwan-based manufacturer better known for laptops that run Windows. But here’s the funny thing about it: In many ways it’s inferior to its cousin, an even more web-centric device announced in October, known as the Samsung Chromebook.

Samsung Chromebook, a PC in name only.Google

The difference between the two is that the new Acer C7 is still a traditional PC, albeit one not running Windows. It has an Intel processor, the same workhorse that has powered PCs for a generation, and a capacious, spinning, 320-gigabyte hard drive. Samsung’s device has the same kind of processor, made by Intel competitor ARM, that appears in almost every smartphone and tablet on earth, and a mere 16 gigabytes of solid-state (flash) memory, like a smartphone or tablet. In every respect save its laptop-like appearance, the Samsung Chromebook isn’t a PC; it’s a mobile device.
What’s more, the Acer C7 may have a faster processor and bigger hard drive, but it’s bulkier, has a battery life 2-3 hours shorter and, for many tasks, it’s slower. When booting up, loading apps and switching tasks, solid-state drives are noticeably faster than regular ones. Reviewers have observed that Samsung’s laptop does a lot more with its “limited” hardware than a one-to-one comparison with a PC would suggest.
So why did Google just release an inferior machine based on dated technology?
Probably because, although Samsung’s Chromebook has in its short life become the most popular PC on Amazon.com (indeed, it’s sold out), Chromebooks as a whole have been slow to take off since they first went on sale in mid-2011. Most people, it seems, aren’t yet ready to move to Google’s somewhat radical vision of computing’s future. Even if Google is much less likely to lose your data than you are, there’s something comforting about having your own hard drive with your own stuff on it. The thought of relying on the cloud has led to a sort of “range anxiety” for computer users, analogous to the anxiety some drivers feel about the limited range of electric cars—only this is anxiety about being out of range of a wifi signal. For people who are used to trusting the Intel brand and evaluating laptops based, in part, on the size of their hard drives, the Acer C7 is comfortingly familiar, even if it doesn’t run Windows.
In other words, the latest Chromebook is like training wheels, or more cynically, a Trojan Horse. If Google can lure cost-conscious buyers or tech buffs with a spare $200 to spend with this ultra-cheap laptop, it can train them to think of a PC less as a home for storing your life than as a window for viewing it. And that, of course, gives Google a good deal of control over what you see through the window.