Posts tagged Effects
Network Effects: How Google & Apple Dominate Mobile
Nov 28th
The mobile platform wars are in full swing. Android and Apple dominate the landscape but a new report from VisionMobile says that there will be no clear winner in the battle for supremacy over the mobile market. Android controls the numbers, Apple controls the profits and everybody else is fighting for scraps and third place in the ecosystem.
Developers are the front line soldiers of the platform wars. “iOS and Android are winning not only by virtue of technological sophistication, but primarily by the strength of their application ecosystems,” the VisionMobile report states. The “network effect” drives the ecosystem, more sales equals more developers and more applications which in turn drives more developers. We take a close look at the platform wars through VisionMobile’s report below.
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First Is Relative
The VisionMobile report is one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of the entire mobile ecosystem that has been published this year. The 68-page report (PDF) looks at smartphone vs. feature phone adoption, developer trends, how each OS differentiates itself and what tools are available, the importance of app stores and how HTML5 could deflate that market, among other topics.
Applications drive ecosystems. It is something we have known for several years but 2011 has really brought the importance of the app environment to clarity. Apple has more than, 500,000 apps while the Android Market has near 330,000 (up from the time frame that VisionMobile used for its survey, ending before October 2011). It is an Android and Apple world and the two platforms share a few key characteristics:
- Both originate from non-telecom partners.
- Both are monetized indirectly. Apple through high-margin devices or advertising for Android.
- Both are driven by companies that can pump billions into development of the operating system, create online services and drive application ecosystems.
It is hard to say which platform is No. 1. If we are talking about sales volume, Android takes the cake in almost every way. At the same time, Apple has created an environment where it makes, by far, the most amount of money for a single corporation in the mobile ecosystem.
We can see why Android does so well in the chart below. It is the only company that gains the green check mark in all four categories while iOS and webOS are the only two platforms that are for “high end devices” and “tablets” at the same time. Since Hewlett-Packard completely flubbed its webOS implementation and has more or less dropped the notion of making tablets and smartphones, that end of the market is left to Android and Apple.
“There isn’t and won’t be a single winner in the smartphone race. Both iOS and Android platforms reached a critical mass of hundreds of millions of users. Their long-term positions are secured by strong network effects between users and developers, making it almost impossible to displace them.
The jury is still out on whether there is a place for a third platform player, and whether Microsoft, with the help of Nokia, will be able to wrestle the third position away from Blackberry,” the report states.
Adoption & Battle For Third
More than one and four global cellular users have a smartphone. Developed countries have the highest adoption, with sales to the channel reaching 65% in the United States and 50% in Europe. Sales to channel drop significantly in developing worlds with 19% in Asia-Pacific, 17% in Latin American and 18% in Africa and the Middle East. Overall, 27% of the world has smartphones.
The battle for third in the platform wars comes down to three main contenders. Two come from established tech innovators while the third is a suite of developer tools that can be employed by anybody.
Research In Motion currently holds the third spot almost by default. It has 70 million handsets deployed worldwide and has grown 40% year-over-year. That does not mean it is growing as well as RIM would like though as its percent of market share has been evaporating as its sales stale in the face of competition from Apple and Android. Microsoft should come on strong with Windows Phone especially that it now has Nokia on its side and the company’s large brand presence across the world. In terms of platform, HTML5 is creeping up on each in terms of developer attention because it is the one platform that can truly cross the bridge between all of the platforms. Each of the major players – Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM – have professed a dedication to HTML5 development.
What it comes down to is developer attention. The BlackBerry App World has near 30,000 apps while Windows Phone recently surpassed 40,000. Yet, each has weak “network effects” according to VisionMobile’s definition of the term. Symbian also falls into this category though application development for Symbian now primarily falls to publishers working towards making a dent in smartphone adoption of emerging markets.
“Apple and Google turned the mobile industry on its head by creating vibrant product ecosystems encompassing devices, content and on-line services. The battle of ecosystems, however, is still far from being decided. We expect continued evolution of this dynamic market driven by entry of new players, such as Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, as well as expansion of the experience ecosystems across screens, shifting the battleground from smartphones to tablets and finally the living room,” the report stated.
We will break down the developer aspects of the VisionMobile report on ReadWriteMobile later today. What do you think will be the third-place ecosystem outside of Android and iOS? Will third place eventually go to the most unique platform (Windows Phone) or will it devolve into whatever system runs HTML5 the best? Let us know your thoughts on VisionMobile’s report in the comments.
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Weekly Wrap-up: Effects of the Internet Blacklist Bill and More
Nov 18th
HR 3261 has riled up the internet and with good reason. We take a look at the effects of the new bill, in an easy to follow infographic from the folks at AmericanCensorship.org. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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Top Stories of the Week
Infographic: Effects of the Internet Blacklist Bill (SOPA) [Updated]
Trying to keep up with every threat to privacy online is a never-ending race on the hamster wheel. For that reason, when someone jumps up and down and tells us to pay close attention to the latest threat, many of us shrug our shoulders because we just don’t have the time to learn about each and every major privacy threat in the tech new cycle. To help us cut through the overwhelming amount of information we’ve already received about SOPA, the Stop Internet Piracy Act, the team at AmericanCensorship.org brings us this simple to follow infographic that very clearly details the risks of SOPA.
ReadWriteWeb commenter COV summed it up best:
The Brand Pages Face Off: Google+ vs. Facebook
In this corner, veteran marketing tool, Facebook brand pages. In the other corner, newcomer to the social space, Google+ brand pages. Richard takes a hard look at both offerings by checking out the brand pages of luxury auto makers BMW and Mercedes-Benz on each.
Comment from Diane Gomez:
Here’s a review of DataSift, the second licensed reseller of tweets. More likely a business offering than a consumer tool, DataSift has great potential and a confusing UI. Read Marshall’s post for a look at the possibilities of Twitter data mining with robust data tool.
Vijay Hanumolu tweeted:
9 Innings worth of MLB on ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb coverage of the MLB.com College Challenge, a 14 hour Hack Day open to only a few students but with impressive VC potential.
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- Tumblr Censors Our Dashboards In Opposition To SOPA
- So This is Openness, Google X, and What Have You Done?
Comment from Les Orchard:
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Infographic: Effects of the Internet Blacklist Bill (SOPA)
Nov 16th
If you’ve been living under an Internet-free rock the past couple of weeks, you might have managed to miss the steady drumbeat of opposition to HR 3261, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Then again, if you’ve been living under an Internet-free rock, you’ve already had a preview of what we’re facing if SOPA goes into effect.
I’m exaggerating a little, but not by much. We’ve covered SOPA earlier this week and the EFF’s efforts to rally opposition to the bill. But today is American Censorship Day and a hearing for the bill in the U.S. House that’s stacked in favor of the bill.
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AmericanCensorship.org has pulled together an infographic that explains in very basic terms the services and sites that are at greatest risk from SOPA. This includes Facebook, Reddit, The Onion Router (TOR), Alternative DNS services and a lot more. DNS blocking, which is what the proponents of SOPA want to use to block any site that might be considered infringing – before a court has even ruled – is also used in China, Iran and Syria to try to block political sites.
American Censorship Day is organized by Mozilla, the Free Software Foundation, PublicKnowledge, Demand Progress, the EFF, Creative Commons and a number of other organizations. I happened on the page thanks to a “censored” logo in the Disqus dashboard while moderating comments. If you’d like to get your own “censored” logo, or if you want to learn a bit more, head over to AmericanCensorship.org.
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Visualizing the Local Effects of Recovery Spending on Job Loss [Interactive Map]
Sep 9th
In the wake of U.S. President Obama’s speech on jobs last night, we present this mapping of Recovery Act spending. Development Seed, the same folks who mapped the famine in the Horn of Africa, have turned their attention on America.
Development Seed has mapped Recovery Act spending on a county-by-county basis and compared it with county unemployment figures over the same time period. So, does government spending have a positive effect in job recovery? That would be telling and we’re going to abide by the doctor’s prescription not to tell when you can show. The map is after the jump.
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The change in unemployment over the last year is reflected in the colors, with red indicating an increase and green indicating a lower unemployment rate, or job growth. Counties that received under $10 million in recovery funds show a white hash pattern. The counties with the most spending – about a third – are shown in solid colors.
Dave Cole discussed the results of the mapping on Development Seed’s blog.
“Overall, it’s impossible to tell for sure how much recovery spending improved the economic situation, because we just don’t know how bad things could have been. It may be the case that without spending, this map would have a lot more red. Or maybe not. What’s interesting here is the local impact and information we are able to see from processing a few sets of open data.”
If you liked this, you may also be interested in the data visualization mapping Audrey Watters covers in her post for O’Reilly’s Radar. That one maps U.S. job losses by location since 2004.
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Spur Reveals The Subconscious Effects of Web Design
Sep 8th
Silicon Valley design firm ZURB has just launched a free, simple Web design tool called Spur, which lets users play with a Web page or image and think about its visual design. The app is based on a ZURB blog post called “Critique a Web Page in 30 Seconds or Less,” which lays out some basic principles to evaluate the effectiveness of a Web design.
“Learning to view websites critically is an important skill to hone,” writes ZURB’s “fearless leader,” Bryan Zmijewski. “Too many companies spend needless time arguing over details of a website before the larger picture is fully developed. This puts users, and ultimately your business, at a disadvantage because the ‘big picture’ is what creates the users perception of your service or website.” Spur seeks to democratize these skills by helping anyone break down a Web page design to its fundamental visual elements.
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The landing page of Spur displays a toolbar to input a URL. There’s also a link to flip the toolbar to upload an image instead. After clicking ‘Spur it on,’ the app analyzes the page or image carefully while displaying an absolutely epic animation of a cowboy meandering across a field as the sun gently sets.
When the analysis is finished, a scrollable image of the Web page appears underneath the Spur toolbar, which offers a few tools for playing with the image to assess the design. The options are grayscale, intersections, contrast, blur, mirror, rotate and zoom.
Each of these lets you test the principles outlined in the blog post in different ways, and a drop-down from each button offers more information about what this tool can teach people new to design. In the top right, Spur offers a URL for the image for sharing and collaborating.
It’s very simple app, but it’s a thought-provoking introduction to thinking about the effects of visual experiences on the Web, which we may often take for granted.
What are some websites you think are especially well (or poorly) designed? Share some examples – maybe even using Spur – in the comments.
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Effects Of Choice Positioning On Social Purchasing Behavior
Jul 26th
As I discussed in How Prototype Theory Influences a Social Strategy, they way that people influence others and their decisions is based on their associations with certain words and phrases. For example, the word tree will most likely bring up an image of an oak or maple tree in a person’s mind,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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The Strategies SEO Experts Are Using to Reduce Effects of Google Panda Updates – Search Engine Marketing (blog)
Jul 24th
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The Strategies SEO Experts Are Using to Reduce Effects of Google Panda Updates
Search Engine Marketing (blog) This has left many SEO consultants and webmasters asking why is Google penalizing some good sites to get the bad ones? There has been widespread discussion amongst webmasters and SEO experts as to what is the best approach to get their sites out of … |
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Google, ICANN’s Dot-Anything-Goes and Its Possible Effects on SEO – Business 2 Community
Jun 22nd
 USA Today |
Google, ICANN's Dot-Anything-Goes and Its Possible Effects on SEO
Business 2 Community How Google reacts to the new domain suffix ruling in their algorithm will either create new barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, a $185000 barrier, or just merely add a new wrinkle in the SEO work being done currently. The weight Google attaches to the … What The New ICANN Domain Names Mean For Google Rankings & SEO: Nothing SEO Marketers Shrug at ICANN's Move My One Concern with ICANN Domain Suffix Expansion |
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New Version of Google Chrome is “Snazzier,” Offers 3D Effects
Jun 7th
Google released a new version of its Web browser Google Chrome to its stable channel today, the main channel favored by many, if not most, of Chrome’s 160 million users. The updated version offers improvements in security and stability, says Google, most of which will function behind-the-scenes for a better browsing experience.
However, improvements to the browser’s graphics capabilities will be more noticeable to users. With added support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, Web applications using 3D effects will be “snazzier,” Google says. So, what does that mean?
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3D CSS
With 3D CSS, which is now available in Google Chrome, the browser has access to the computer’s hardware to speed up the experience of viewing 3D effects. To see what this looks like in action, Google offers a link to a Chrome experiment called “Shaun of the Sheep.” This cute cartoon (which works only in Chrome), demonstrates how 3D CSS lets you rotate a video, scale it up and down, turn the reflection on and off and activate a rotating carousel of videos.
In addition to 3D CSS Transforms, the experiment also takes advantage of hardware-accelerated HTML5 and the new audio-video format, WebM, open-sourced by Google last year.
More Security Tools
Also new in this release are enhancements to Google’s Safe Browsing technology, which has now been improved to warn you before you download certain malicious files. Chrome has improved this detection process so that it can detected the malicious files without having ever seen what URL you visited. More details on that process are described here.
Bye-bye, Flash Cookies!
Google’s close relationship with Adobe has allowed it to integrate Flash LSO (local shared objects) deletion right into the Web browser, so you can better manage your online privacy. These objects, often referred to as “Flash cookies” are similar to their “browser cookies” counterparts, in that they contain information used to customize your Web browsing experience, or hold data like your login info for a website. Unfortunately, Flash cookies are harder to delete than regular cookies – until now, Chrome users were only able to manage or delete cookies using this online tool. Now, you’ll be able to delete the cookies from your browser Settings. Just click on the Wrench, go to Tools, Clear Browsing Data and select “Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data.”
And More…
You can also launch your Chrome Web apps by name within the Omnibox in Chrome 12, the Settings pages have been updated, there’s improved screen reader support and finally, you can say farewell to Google Gears. The Gears plugin will no longer be supported in this or any future releases of Google Chrome to provide offline access to Web applications. Those duties will be taken over by HTML5 going forward, starting with Gmail Offline, expected by Q3 2011.
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Developers Can Add In-app Photo Effects With New Aviary API
May 4th
Developers are always looking for a good API to hook their applications through to provide rich functionality to their applications. Photo editing company Aviary is releasing Aviary Effects API today to help developers add filters, effects and functionality to applications.
Aviary has also gone live with a new developer site to detail the functionalities of all of its APIs. In addition to the new Effects API, Aviary has had its Suite API and Feather API. The site has a simple explanation of all of Aviary’s APIs with documentation and implementation details, code samples and the ability to test the tools.
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The Effects API can bulk-process users’ photos behind the scenes. Effects API can auto-correct images, create watermarks and apply filters and effects. Software development kits (SDKs) are available in Python, PHP, Ruby and .Net.
Aviary’s APIs are a cool service that the company extends past its own tools that it offers. Aviary provides an image editor, screen capture, vector editor and more as extensions to Firefox and Chrome. The Effects API will allow developers to create functionality for both browser and mobile applications.
The effects come in various flavors such as coffee-stained and pixelated Old News and Toy Camera to the more utilitarian like Fixer, Beauty Farm and Simplicity. Aviary offers a sandbox on the developer site to test out the filters and copy the code of filter parameters.
Currently Aviary says to contact them “if you need more than 1000 photos processed in a month.” A spokesman said that pricing plans would be rolling out in a couple of weeks.
Aviary has a variety of partners such as Pixable and HyperPublic. Image sharer Imgur will be using Aviary APIs shortly but has not yet released and announcement.
There are a plethora of camera applications that provide filtering and editing functionality. Instagram and PicPlz are probably the most popular that offer filters and sharing. Retro Camera and FxCamera are some favorite stand alone point-and-shoot applications on Android. Aviary is looking to be one of the go-to sources for providing application camera functionality for this robust sector of the app ecosystem.
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