adoption

The surge in adoption of Apple's iOS 6 may be due more to new users in China than users upgrading to the operating system while grabbing Google's new mapping app.

Adoption of the mobile operating system, which was released months ago, has increased by 30 percent since Google Maps was released to the Apple App Store on December 12, according to data from mobile ad exchange MoPub. iOS users unhappy with the in-house substitute Apple supplied after dumping Google earlier this year flocked to Google's new iOS app, downloading the software more than 10 million times in … Read more

Just a day after the release of Apple's iOS 6 mobile operating system, 15 percent of iOS users have upgraded to the new version, a new report says.

Advertising and analytics company Chitika today says that 15 percent of iOS devices are now running iOS 6, which was released for download in the early morning Wednesday.

That number comes from what Chitika says is "a sample of millions of mobile ad impressions" from its advertising network between yesterday and today.

"This level of adoption is a significant development and a testament to the vertical product structure … Read more

3D glasses are a double-edged sword for TV manufacturers. According to NPD's 3D 360° Monitor, an aversion to wearing glasses is the second most popular reason consumers give for not wanting to purchase a 3D TV. But for those who do buy 3D TVs, glasses represent one of the best accessory sale opportunities TV manufacturers have had since the flat-panel mount. Ring up a family pack of four glasses and you can easily reach the price of what some manufacturers charge for a flat-panel 2D television by itself.

Indeed, rather than treat glasses as a throwaway, Samsung recently revamped its 3D glasses, cramming an impressive amount of technology into a wearable product 25 percent lighter than its predecessor.

The electronics giant has added a circular frame that now easily grasps around various head sizes, enables a brighter 3D picture, accommodates prescriptions, switches to Bluetooth, and adds a charging gauge, all while keeping the price to about $100 per pair.

But what if there were a way to sell an accessory to go with those accessories? Samsung is taking a crack at just that, introducing a product at CES and showing it once again at the IFA Global Press Conference in Alicante, Spain.

It's a $200 black "top hat" charger--so nicknamed for its cylindrical shape centered atop a base plate about a third of the way from its bottom--that enables owners to inductively charge up to four pairs of Samsung's new, lighter-weight 3D glasses. The high-tech spectacles surround the glossy cylinder, one atop the next, in a spiraling statue of tolerated technology. … Read more

Income can dictate how often a person accesses the Internet, a new study has found.

According to Pew Research, 95 percent of Americans living in households with $75,000 or more in annual income are "at least occasionally" likely to access the Web. That figure drops to 70 percent of people in homes with less than $75,000 of annual income. About 57 percent of those with less than $30,000 in annual income use the Internet. Pew also found that 99 percent of people in higher income households access the Internet from home, while 93 percent of … Read more

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has written a memo that has generated tremendous buzz among the cloud-computing community. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Ozzie's impending retirement from the company last week, and Ozzie took that opportunity to write "Dawn of a New Day," which outlines a future for computing that is both a challenge and opportunity for the software maker.

Don Reisinger has excellent analysis of that post, so I won't break it down in detail for you here. However, Ozzie's post is interesting to me because it highlights a key nuance of cloud … Read more

Certain ideas lurk largely at the boundaries of the IT industry, periodically making a push for a more central role. One such is the appliance or integrated stack--an assembly of hardware and multiple layers of software from a single vendor.

The argument for this concept revolves around simplifying the acquisition of technology and optimizing its operation.

Of course, vertical stacks were once simply the-way-systems-were-built. This model largely gave way to horizontal layers such as microprocessors, operating systems, and databases developed by different specialist vendors and brought together at the end user. (Former Intel CEO Andy Grove describes this shift in … Read more

Understanding the economics of cloud computing is critical to driving the right operations decisions for IT organizations of all sizes.

Some months ago Joe Weinman, vice president of corporate strategy at AT&T, posted a primer of sorts explaining the mathematics of computing utilities. When should an IT organization choose a public cloud computing or storage utility? Should you select dedicated systems for your application, or perhaps a hybrid cloud envionment, combining public clouds with internal cloud computing resources? Weinman's post has formulas that can help answer these questions and more.

Last week, Weinman followed up that post … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The claim has been made in the last couple of weeks that cloud computing has reached the top of analyst firms' famous hype cycle and is a top-of-mind issue for most IT organizations.

That's a bit misleading, as the interest in cloud computing is often taken out of context, and when you bring virtualization into the picture, that interest seems to remain exploratory rather than strategic.

Amazing innovation is happening in both public- and private-cloud offerings, and the overwhelmingly positive response to cloud computing--in particular to Amazon's top-notch Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and related offerings, … Read more

Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity … Read more