According to August data from The Nielsen Company, Android has passed the iPhone and BlackBerry to become the popular operating system for people who bought a smartphone in the past six months. Over the past six months, 32 percent of new smartphone owners chose an phone with an Android operating system, while 25 percent chose the iPhone OS and 26 percent chose RIM’s Blackberry smartphones. The data, which covers a period that includes a full-month of iPhone 4 availability, also shows that Blackberry still holds largest share of the smartphone market with 31 percent of the market. Twenty-eight percent of smartphone owners have Apple iPhones, compared to 19 percent who have Android devices. While consumers may have a peaked interest in Android phone, Apple’s iPhone marketshare remained steady from Nielsen’s June findings. While Apple’s marketshare is still up by a significant amount (ten percentage points) over Android phones, it’s impressive that Android is surpassing the iPhone in terms of new interest and recent adoption.

The New York Times is offering a platform that other publishers can use to produce their own apps for devices starting with the iPad and iPhone.

The first publishers to sign up to use the platform, which The Times is calling Press Engine, are the Telegraph Media Group and three A.H. Belo newspapers: Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and Press-Enterprise in Southern California. The publishers keep any advertising and circulation revenue the apps bring in; they pay the Times a one-time license fee for the platform and then a monthly maintenance fee.

New revenue
The platform is the latest bid by a media company to derive revenue from sources beyond the traditional core streams of ad sales and circulation. Most often the recent attempts along those lines have involved providing agency-like services -- whether built up internally or acquired, as Meredith and Hearst have done -- but this platform is a new way for a media company to provide services to other media companies. And it's a new way for a media company to make money from the booming app economy beyond making its own apps. The Times decided to offer the product after inquiries started coming from other publishers, said Christine Topalian, a director of the News Services division at the Times. "Over the last year there's been a particular amount of interest from different clients asking whether we would be willing to license the code of our own New York Times application," Ms. Topalian said. The Times is not exactly replicating its apps for others, however, Ms. Topalian said. "We're taking, for lack of a better word, the DNA of them and the functionality of them."

Decisions about paid content
The Dallas Morning News was one of the papers that sought out the Times to see if it could help with an iPad app, said James Moroney, CEO and publisher at the Dallas Morning News. "When a company like ours, that doesn't have the resources and scale of The New York Times, went looking for a partner, the first place we looked was to The New York Times because of their track record and because they are in the same business we are in." The Dallas Morning News plans to introduce its iPad app, built using the Press Engine platform, near the beginning of next year, Mr. Moroney said. First it has to decide how to reconcile charging for the iPad app, as it plans to do, with posting all its content free on the web, as it currently does. Consumers aren't likely to pay for an iPad app to access the same content they can get free on the iPad's web browser. "We are looking at how and what we might do about taking some of our content and making it available only to people who have either paid for a print subscription or who are paying for some kind of digital access," Mr. Moroney said.

Motorola shares are up 2% today as investors start to feel better about the company's comeback efforts. But one thing from Motorola's report still sticks out like a sore thumb: The company shipped fewer phones than Apple for the second quarter in a row, despite a much larger product line. That's a HUGE change from three years ago, when Motorola was outselling Apple by 35+ million phones per quarter. So what happened?

For part of the collapse, you can blame Apple's iPhone, which made everything Motorola and many other vendors were selling look like garbage, and other smartphones like RIM's BlackBerries. But Motorola had plenty of internal problems, too, including too much clutter, not enough focus, and the inability to follow up its big hit -- the Razr -- with anything even remotely as popular. Unit shipments don't tell the whole story of Motorola's collapse or Apple's rise. Even more impressive is the share of the mobile phone market's revenues and profits that Apple has taken. Consider that while Motorola still sold almost as many phones as Apple did last quarter, Apple's $5.3 billion in iPhone revenue was more than three times as much as Motorola's $1.7 billion in mobile devices revenue.

The iPhone has been slowly losing its dominance in the minds of marketers as Google’s Android operating system gained share over the past year or so. While the complication of creating apps for multiple operation systems has been an issue for marketers for some time, but as Android becomes a major player in the app world marketers may also have to start thinking about the way those apps are monetized and how that fits in with the norms of different user groups.

There is evidence across several studies that Android users are less willing to pay for apps than their iPhone-loving counterparts. AdMob found in February that while 50% of iPhone owners worldwide purchased at least one paid app each month, just 21% of Android users did the same. Credit Suisse reports that Android is the only smartphone operating system where users have downloaded a majority of free apps. Just 43% of apps downloaded by Android users in the US were paid, compared with 75% of apps downloaded by owners of Apple devices.

According to a May 2010 report from Distimo, an analytics tool for mobile developers, those percentages track closely with how many apps overall are offered for free—or for a fee—in each app store. Again, the Android Market is the only store with a majority of free apps.

The rise of an operating system whose owners rely on free apps could mean a user base that is more open than average to receiving the advertising support necessary to support those apps. In-app advertising and app sponsorships tend to be especially effective forms of mobile marketing, and are also found less annoying or intrusive by mobile users. An expanding base of Android users may mean not only a larger audience of smartphone owners, but also a growing share of that audience receptive to marketing messages that support their app habit.

Posted By: Nicole Perrin

Yes, we know you know that in the space of three short years Apple's iPhone has humiliated the entire cellphone industry. But we bet you won't FULLY APPRECIATE just how completely Apple has laid waste to incumbents like RIM, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson until you look at these two charts from Goldman Sachs (via FT).

First, a chart comparing the total handset industry profits since 2005 captured by:

1) Apple (light blue), and

2) Everyone else (RIM, Nokia, HTC, Sony Ericsson, etc.)

Image: Goldman Sachs

That's just astounding. The folks at Nokia, RIM, etc., should hang their heads in shame. 

And now consider the next shocking chart.  Apple will generate 2X as much handset profit as the rest of the industry combined this year DESPITE SELLING ONLY 3% OF THE HANDSETS BY UNIT VOLUME:

And now, when you finish chewing on that, consider that Apple's iPad might have the same impact on the PC industry.

Curt Carlson, the president and chief executive of SRI International, is very excited about the Siri intelligent agent technology that his organization sold to Apple in April for a rumored $150 – $250 million.
He expects it will show up in future iPhones, but he also believes that SRI’s additional technologies from virtual assistant research will become part of even more rich applications in the future.

SRI was spun out of Stanford University more than 60 years ago to commercialize research. First named Stanford Research Institute and later renamed SRI International, it became independent from Stanford University in 1970 and now has more than 2,200 researchers working on things such as the cool artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, location information, and agent technology that is part of Siri. Siri, spun out of SRI 18 months ago, is a virtual personal assistant technology. Its first application launched in February as a free iPhone app that lets you perform tasks such as making dinner reservations by speaking into your phone and letting a virtual assistant do the rest. Apple bought Siri for an undisclosed price, and Carlson likens the event to Steve Jobs’ prescient move in adopting the computer mouse — invented by SRI researcher Doug Engelbart four decades ago. “Siri was bought by Apple before it had any revenue for a very nice premium,” said Carlson (pictured at top) in an interview. “You can guess what will be in the next iPhone. This technology could be as ubiquitous as the PC-mouse user interface that was created by Doug Engelbart here more than 40 years ago.”

“I think Doug transformed every personal computer with his invention,” Carlson added. “I believe this technology has the potential to be seen 15 or 20 years from now as the next big revolution in personal computing. Steve Jobs is always prescient. He was one of the first to get a license from us for the computer mouse too.” Siri can do interesting tasks now. You can speak into your phone that you want to find a romantic restaurant for two in Menlo Park. Siri will ask you if you want it within walking distance of your hotel or if you want Italian food as you liked before. Once you answer, it will send back to your iPhone an Open Table reservation for two at a restaurant that it recommends. It’s somewhat surprising that something that makes its debut as a free iPhone app could come from SRI, which is known for its heavy-duty research and development that gave us things like automated check processing, the PC, wireless communication, robotics, ultrasound, speech recognition and high-definition TV. But Carlson, who has been CEO for 11 years at SRI, says that the institute’s focus on innovation has never been sharper. He drills lessons about market relevance and the fundamentals of creating value into every new employee — even the janitors. And today, with more than 200,000 iPhone apps, there’s never been a better way to get an immediate read on how useful a technology is.

Siri came from a collection of inventions. SRI had a very famous artificial intelligence group that created a solution with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). SRI started doing intelligent agent research in the early 1990s. In 2001, it started a program called Vanguard aimed at making mobile phones into the next computers.

In 2003, SRI got a $150 million grant to start CALO — the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes — to develop virtual assistant technology over five years. The effort included 25 world class partners and it incubated ideas from government and commercial researchers. One of the projects that the military is interested in is the Command Post for the Future. It is an assistant for generals in a command post that helps make decisions about how to fight wars or skirmishes. Commercialization of ideas started four or five years ago under the lead of Norman Winarsky, vice president of ventures, licensing and strategic programs at SRI. In that process, SRI takes its ideas and finds an entrepreneur in residence to make the idea into a startup. If they can figure out a big market opportunity and a compelling business model, they launch it. That’s what happened with Siri. Upon being spun out, Siri got another $24 million from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. But Siri isn’t the end of SRI’s research. It is just one part of it. Another startup using the SRI technology is Chattertrap, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup that will apply the personal assistant concept to online content. The idea is to create a personal information service by figuring out what kind of news you like and delivering a personalized newspaper to you. At some point, you want the virtual assistant to be as smart as someone talking to you on the phone and doing Google searches to answer your questions. Speech recognition is a part of the solution, but SRI hopes to aggregate a bunch of technologies that can answer your questions in real-time, even when you are speaking in a conversational manner. Winarsky said in an interview that “this technology is intended for many more markets than just a phone. I think this is the dawn of the age of the virtual personal assistant. You will be able to use it in everything from healthcare to shopping to sales. Apple bought what they needed to do Siri. But that is just the spark of what could happen here. There are many more applications coming.” Will it work as advertised? Carlson said, “Even professor John McCarthy at Stanford was working on this 40 years ago. It hasn’t been realized because it turned out to be a really hard problem. This is the Holy Grail.”

It’s all the rage these days. You fire off an email to Apple’s Steve Jobs, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest and most secretive technology companies, and to your astonishment, the great man himself replies. You then publish said email, sit back and watch as the tech press dissect each and every word. It’s quite the media spectacle, especially when you factor in that Steve can’t (and doesn’t) reply to every email he receives. Instead, he gets to pick and choose, using those email replies to get the message out in-between official press releases and product launches. Those replies are usually sparse and occasionally cryptic.

Steve’s reply to my lengthy email was no different.

We will keep making the best computers on the planet. We love it.

Sent from my iPhone

 

 via http://techcrunch.com