Mike McCarthy

This article talks about HP’s decision to re enter the race of tablets running open source operating systems. They hope to get back into it in 2013 after discontinuing all tablets and smart phones running Palm’s webOS platform. I thought it was very interesting to me to see them pulling the tablets in the first place. I read good reviews on the HP tablets and many people were disappointed to see them go. I wonder if this comeback with new features will be enough for them to compete with Apple or Amazon in the tablet game.

Some of you may have noticed the new layout of Youtube. They have completely redone the homepage, most notably adding a big activity feed in the center of the page. The company calls it their biggest redesign in history. They have laid it out a lot like a social networking site. They added logins for Google + and, surprisingly, Facebook on the left side of the page. The activity feed in the middle closely resembles Facebook and Google+, showing you when your friends like, comment, or suggest videos. They also have allowed you to select different templates for you page. I hope this is one of the last changes they make, I personally don’t want to see Youtube become like Facebook. Youtube has always been reliable with the same theme and the same easy navigation, messing with the basics can start to annoy users. Hopefully, they are content with what they have now and don’t decide to change it every week like Facebook. 

This Tech Crunch article talks about the increased mobile traffic from Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The internet saw more traffic on Thanksgiving than Black Friday surprisingly. A lot of the mobile traffic on Black friday was researching different deals and product information. Apple’s iOS devices were 42% of the traffic, beating Android’s mobile devices. The article also noted that Black Friday online shopping is up almost 25% from last year.

This is a really interesting article TechCrunch did on the shift in the way people share through Facebook. It used to be work for us to show our friends and family something we have done and where we have been, but now everything on Facebook seems to be shared whether you want it to be or not. The article talks about how people now focus on what not to share. They withhold certain posts because too much is being shared and it takes emphasis away form the things we actually want our friends and families to see. 

This Tech Crunch article talked about the expected rise in online shopping. Forrester estimates that online shopping for the holidays will grow 15%. Many people did not think that there would be any increase in shopping because of the economy. Forrester attributes the shift to an increase in tablet use and more online deals. Many people are now using their tablets to check out various items, and as I posted last week, 91 out of the top 100 companies have apps in either the Android app store or the Apple app store. Companies have been avidly trying to increase online shopping. Many of them are having online only specials and including things like free shipping. This pertains to class in a lot of ways. We can obviously see how online media and advertising can change things. The apps the companies are releasing are actually making a difference in sales and are expected to help stimulate the economy. Online shopping has been steadily rising since 2003 and shows no signs of slowing down. The predicted $60 billion dollars in spending would be a record for holiday online spending. 

HP announced it would re enter the tablet race. They are bringing forward their newest tablet, the Slate 2. This is really surprising because it doesn’t seem like anyone can bring down the iPad. The specs aren’t anything astonishing either, still running the same Windows 7. It is rather pricy, starting out at $699 and appears to be pretty thick for the tablet market.

Tech Crunch wrote an article about the increase in apps from Top 100 brands recently. 91 of the 100 brands listed on Interbrand 2011 Best Brands list have apps out in at least one app store. These are brands like Disney and General Electric. They are finding that, oddly enough, the higher the companies are rated, the more apps they have. This is not to say that the two correlate, but it is interesting.

This article talks about the remarkable first week sales for the iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S sold a staggering 4 million units in its first week of release. This makes it on track to easily beat the previous fastest selling consumer device, the Microsoft Kinect. This article really surprised me because many people seemed to be disappointed by the lack of changes in the new iPhone. A lot of people seemed to be expecting the iPhone 5 and instead were disappointed with the small upgrades of the new iPhone.

The merger of Google and Motorola Mobility has been set in motion. Motorola Mobility have set a record date and a meeting date so that the stockholders can vote on whether they are interested in this. This would be a huge acquisition and both sides are hoping it goes through. They are set to vote in November and hopefully ready to move forward by the end of this year. Google wants to assure other phone companies that they will not show preferential treatment to Motorola Mobility in terms of their Android software. The move still has to be approved by the Anti Trust Boards.

It is official, Microsoft was officially approved to buy out Skype. they will be absorbing the company and making it a section of Microsoft. The US approved the buyout a little while ago and the two companies were just waiting on the European Commission to approve. This is interesting because the deal has been criticized saying that Microsoft is over paying for Skype. The article points out that Google and Facebook have been trying out their own VoIP services. The current CEO of Skype will take over as the President of the Skype Division at Microsoft.  

This article is a publication of recent statistics form Nielsen. The results are about the type of phones customers bought in the last three months. Android phones outsold iPhones 56% to 28%. The article points out that this stat is a little misleading because an Android phone can be hundreds of different phones going up against the one iPhone. I still thought it was interesting that Android sold so well in a seemingly iPhone dominated market.  

This article explain’s a new company called Mintigo. It’s a very interesting idea, taking unstructured data from many different websites all over the internet and turning them into leads for different customers. It helps identify target customers and businesses. So far it has proven very useful, yielding 4 to 8 times better results from direct emails. 

It appears the site HootSuite received a substantial investment of $3 Million. HootSuite is a site that allows people to organize their social media accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. The site allows people to manage updates simultaneousness on the different websites. They have been doing very well over the past couple years, even getting an app for the Firefox browser. With well over a million users and this much capital, you can expect HootSuite to do very well. 

This article is about a recent Facebook update to their app. They make the Post Status interface almost exactly like Twitters. This is really relevant to our class because this is one social media site that is declining in popularity trying to compete by just copying strategies. The article was interesting because it mentioned how Facebook had done this before when copying off of 4Square. I think it is Facebook trying its best to stay relevant. It reminds me a lot of when Myspace went through all the changes to keep up with Facebook.  

This article is about how certain applications and businesses take different approaches towards targeting their markets. This pertains to class because it addresses popular applications and businesses people use everyday, like Foursquare and Facebook. It points out that it would generally be better to pick out your target market and attract the brands after getting users.