Analytics

Android, iOS growing 10 times faster than PCs did in the 1980s

The Android and iOS operating systems may be even more popular than you think.

Research firm Flurry Analytics today announced that iOS and Android adoption is ten times greater than PC adoption at that technology's rapid-growth phase in the 1980s. The mobile platforms have amassed users twice as quickly as the Web during its go-go period in the 1990s, and three times faster than recent social networks. The company is basing those figures on the first five years of widespread adoption across all of these technologies.

According to Flurry, 640 million iOS or Android-based devices were in use last … Read more

Topsy tailors tool to tease out Twitter trends to a 'T'

Topsy, a real-time search engine that draws on Twitter's huge stream of information, today launched a new tool for businesses.

Aimed at marketers and journalists, Topsy Pro Analytics is a beefed-up version of Topsy's free service, which lets you search for Twitter's most popular tweets.

While other developers are slamming Twitter for its recent API shakedown, Topsy and Twitter have never been tighter. Topsy's analytics tools lets companies use tweets to identify trends or gauge how consumers feel about products and brands.

One of the companies to get a thumbs-up in Twitter's announcement last week … Read more

Flurry launches AppCloud with help from mobile startup Trestle

Venturing out of its typical terrain Flurry announced today that it is launching a collection of cloud services to "empower developers to build better apps faster."

To accomplish this feat, the mobile app analytics company acquired the mobile startup company Trestle (it bought Trestle back in May but didn't announce the acquisition until today). Together they worked to create the data driven app built on cloud infrastructure. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The way AppCloud aims to work is by letting developers put cloud-driven capabilities into their apps, such as user account management, scalable … Read more

Google discontinues old version of Google Analytics

In a largely expected move, Google has announced that tomorrow it will discontinue the old version of Google Analytics, which it has continued to support for much of the past year after introducing a new version.

Google released a new version of the Web visitor statistic service last September that focused on real-time results but kept a link to the old version at the bottom of the page. That link will be retired tomorrow, Google announced today in a company blog.

"We have received some really great feedback over the last year on what's working and what's … Read more

Five years later, iPhone revenue hits $150 billion

Apple's iPhone has been a sales juggernaut since its launch. And a new study from research firm Strategy Analytics seems to drive that point home.

Since the iPhone's launch in June 2007, Apple has generated cumulative revenues of $150 billion, according to Strategy Analytics. Neil Shah, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, told CNET in a phone conversation today that the number only includes hardware sales. Accessories, apps, and software and services, which typically represent 3 percent to 5 percent of Apple's iPhone revenue each quarter, were factored out.

Moving on to hardware units, Strategy Analytics said that … Read more

Missile tracking cameras: The NBA's Moneyball data mine

It's clear that we are moving into a faintly disturbing period of human history. Thanks to technology, everyone is following us around. Thanks to Facebook, we're following everyone else around.

However, when it comes to the NBA, which tonight might enjoy the last game of its season, surveillance has reached a fascinating extreme.

For, thanks to cameras first developed to track missiles, each NBA player can now have his moves recorded 25 times per second. The system, from a company called STATS, is known as SportVU, which does not, I believe, stand for Sport Voyeurs United.

But perhaps … Read more

Samsung tops Apple in global mobile phone shipments

Samsung's smartphone shipments soared over the same period last year, allowing it to easily grab the lion's share of the global market, while Nokia's share plummeted, a market researcher said Thursday. Another market researcher put Samsung No.1 in the overall cell phone market.

The South Korean electronics giant's share went from 12.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to a whopping 30.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Strategy Analytics (see chart below).

Apple's growth isn't too shabby either: it jumped from an 18.1 percent … Read more

Why 'big data' is here to stay

Eight years ago, a friend and I were researching a book we would later call "Inescapable Data - Harnessing the Power of Convergence." We were after an understanding of what kinds of new information one could produce by blending data of different types and from different sources -- GPS data, combined with RFID, combined with data from a shipping manifest could be used to track shipments in real time for example.

In the process of doing our research, we interviewed many CEOs, CIOs, and others in leadership positions to see if they were aware of the new variety … Read more

Twitter buys social-media analytics startup Hotspots.io

Twitter has acquired social-media analytics startup Hotspots.io for an undisclosed price, the companies confirmed today.

The company, which touts itself as delivering "social media intelligence you actually use," appears to still be in beta mode and its Web site lacks much in the way of product details. However, there is demo of data collected during the Super Bowl measuring social-media interaction with TV ads.

Hotspots.io said in a statement posted to its Web site that it would be joining Twitter's revenue engineering team:

We're incredibly excited to announce that Twitter has acquired the Hotspots.… Read more