The Web has quickly become America's playground. A new study from Nielsen finds that more U.S. Web users are using broadband, going social, and checking out Web videos.
According to Nielsen, of the 195 million active Web users in the U.S, 160.3 million, or 93.3 percent, access the Web with a broadband connection, representing a 16 percent increase over 2008 figures.
Nielsen also found that more Americans than ever are consuming online video content. The research firm said 138.4 million unique viewers watched online video in 2009, up 11.4 percent from 2008. All told, they average 11.2 billion video streams per month. The typical U.S.-based Web viewer watches 200.1 minutes of video per month.
U.S. Web users are also going social in a big way. According to Nielsen, 56 percent of active U.S. Web users spend an average of six hours on Facebook per month. The social network is also the third-most-visited site by users who are 65 and older. Nielsen said Twitter's growth has topped 500 percent year-over-year. All told, the amount of time Americans spent on social networking sites in 2009 increased by 277 percent.
U.S. Web users are accessing those social networks just about anywhere. Nielsen found the average U.S. worker spends five hours per month browsing social networks from the office. It also found that 32 percent of all mobile Web users visited a social network in 2009.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Apple is set to announce that it has acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, several sources confirmed.
The announcement might come as soon as Tuesday, upping the ante in the mobile advertising business significantly.
Google recently forked over an astonishing $750 million for AdMob, a Quattro competitor, which Apple had also made a bid to acquire.
Both start-ups are aimed squarely at the fast-growing market to advertise on smartphones, such as Apple's iPhone and Google's Android devices. In fact, Google will unveil the Nexus One tomorrow, a Android-powered mobile phone it designed and will sell on a Web site instead of via telecom companies.
Waltham, Mass.-based Quattro has raised close to $30 million from two main venture investors-Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners. Founded several years ago, its clients include Ford, Disney, and the National Football League.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment to BoomTown and e-mails to Quattro have not yet been returned.
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eBay is playing virtual Santa this holiday season with a free "Deals" app for the iPhone that leads consumers to the better buys on the auction site.
Launched Tuesday, eBay Deals is designed to deliver a stream of the best deals on the site from across hundreds of millions of listings. Like eBay Mobile, the company's regular iPhone app, Deals lets you search, shop, and pay for your items from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
All featured deals spotlight items with no bids, no reserve price, free or fixed-rate shipping, and less than four hours remaining to bid.
You can browse deals across eight categories, including apparel, computers, electronics, and collectibles. If you spot a deal you like, just tap on it, and its listing pops up where you can watch it or bid on it. Not crazy about the current deals? Just shake your iPhone or iPod Touch, and a new set of deals appears.
If you spot a deal that may be better for someone else, you can e-mail it or share it via your Facebook or Twitter account.
Besides browsing eBay's virtual aisles, you can search for your own deals by entering a product name, category, and price range. You can save your customized search results to return to them later.
Starting Friday, eBay will also be unveiling a "12 Days of Deals" feature promoting a new promotion each day until December 8. Friday's deal will offer Samsung's N120 Netbook.
"As the world's leading online marketplace we have insights into how people really want to shop...and they clearly want to shop on their phones," eBay Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington said in a statement.
Though designed for the mobile crowd, eBay's daily deals can also be found online at the auction site's Deals page.
eBay has been busy lately sprucing up its mobile auction site for the holidays. The vendor recently added social networking to its eBay Mobile app, letting you share a listing through e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.
Since its launch in 2008, eBay's mobile app has been downloaded more than 5 million times, said the company. With a purchase made every two seconds, the company said, more than $500 million worth of items are likely to be traded through eBay mobile this year.
Popular tech news aggregator Techmeme has launched a new mobile version of the site built for the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid. The new version, which can be found at http://techmeme.com/m, is a lot easier to read on your phone than the regular site. It even includes individual pages for each Techmeme headline, which show all of the relevant discussion links. Separate pages for each story is something that even the full Techmeme site doesn't currently provide.
New mobile versions are also available for Gabe Rivera's other sites, Memeorandum, Ballbug, and WeSmirch. Techmeme has been ramping up its efforts lately, hiring three additional editors for the site. That brings its headcount to six employees.
I tend to check Techmeme throughout the day as I'm sure many of you do. A lot of the time, I am looking at the site from my phone. This new mobile update makes browsing Techmeme on the go a far more pleasant experience. Since this is not a native app for any platform, the new mobile site is viewable from a variety of phones, widening the potential audience. I can say with almost certainty that the release of Techmeme Mobile will increase the site's mobile readership.
Video game developer Electronic Arts announced on Monday that it has acquired social-gaming company Playfish, paying $275 million in cash and $25 million in "equity-retention arrangements." Playfish also is entitled to up to $100 million if it meets performance milestones by December 31, 2011.
EA also announced later Monday that it planned to eliminate 1,500 jobs, or about 17 percent of its workforce, as part of a plan to reduce annual costs by about $100 million.
The acquisition of Playfish falls in line with EA's desire to be more than just a developer for traditional gaming platforms, like consoles and the PC. The company said in a statement that the acquisition "strengthens its focus on the transition to digital and social gaming."
Thanks to the explosive growth of social networks and games made for those platforms, Playfish is enjoying strong performance in the social-gaming space. The company has more than 150 million games installed on several platforms, including Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, and Android-based devices. According to Playfish, more than 60 million active players per month are playing titles. Its Facebook titles include Pet Society, Restaurant City, and Country Story--all three are among the most-popular games on the social network.
The EA Interactive division, which Playfish will join, has done a fine job of capitalizing on the trend of online and mobile gaming. That division includes Pogo, one of the top casual-gaming sites on the Web. The Mobile side of EA Interactive has captured 34 percent market share in the U.S. with the help of Madden NFL 10, The Sims, and Tetris.
Updated at 10:20 p.m. with details of job cuts.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Although technology and the Internet have taken a beating in the past for potentially limiting people's social interaction, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that the opposite might be true.
According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their life."
That said, Pew did find that Americans' "discussion networks"--a measure of people's "most important social ties"--have shrunk "by about a third since 1985" from three people to two. However, Pew found no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with mobile phones or the Internet. In fact, the organization's study found that mobile-phone use and active Web participation yields "larger and more diverse core discussion networks."
Social media is also helping people expand their social interaction. According to Pew, those who use the Internet frequently "are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race." Users who share photos online are more likely to discuss political topics with someone of a different party, the organization found.
Do you know your neighbor?
Frequent Web users are more likely to communicate with neighbors in person than those who don't use the Web as often, Pew found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents said that they talk to a neighbor at least once per month. The study also found that bloggers are 72 percent "more likely to belong to a local voluntary association" than those who don't blog.
Perhaps most important, Pew found that just because someone is a heavy Web user, that doesn't mean they remove themselves from traditional social activities like visiting a restaurant or hanging out at a bar on a Friday night. According to the study, Web users are "45 percent more likely to visit a cafe, 52 percent more likely to visit a library, 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant, 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants, and 42 percent more likely to visit a public park." Later on, the study reported that social-networking users "are 40 percent more likely to visit a bar, but 36 percent less likely to visit a religious institution."
So, next time your grandmother tells you that the Web is ruining the world, you might want to tell her to check out Pew's study. For more on these figures and many more, click here.
Apple's iPhone and Android-based smartphones have both seen solid growth throughout the world this year, says a report released Wednesday by AdMob.
The iPhone's worldwide market share jumped from 33 percent to 40 percent over February to August, according to AdMob's "August Mobile Metrics Report," which tracked smartphone usage for that six-month period. AdMob, which serves ads for mobile Web sites and apps, bases its numbers on data from ad requests, impressions, and clicks.
Phones running Google's Android OS picked up a 7 percent market share by August versus only 2 percent in February, thanks to rapid gains in North America and Western Europe, said AdMob. Since its debut this summer, T-Mobile's Android-powered MyTouch has been a top seller in both of those regions.
(Credit:
AdMob)
With the launch of the Pre, Palm's WebOS has also taken off, grabbing a 4 percent slice of the smartphone market in August.
On the downside, older smartphone systems have witnessed a drop in market share, according to AdMob.
The global share for Nokia's Symbian OS fell from 43 percent in February to 34 percent in August. However, Nokia smartphones remain hot sellers, accounting for 12 of the top 20 smartphones tracked by AdMob. Nokia's N97 and 5800 XpressMusic units were the fourth and fifth most popular smartphones in the U.K. for August.
Research In Motion's slice of the market dropped slightly from 10 percent in February to 8 percent in August. Still, RIM's Blackberry devices accounted for three of the top 20 smartphones around the world. The Palm OS, running on older units such as the Centro, declined in share from 3 percent in February to 1 percent in August.
Finally, Microsoft's Windows Mobile also lost share, falling from 7 percent in February to 4 percent in August, according to the report.
AdMob sells and tracks ads on mobile Web pages and applications to more than 7,000 publishers. The company compiled the data for this report based on its analysis of more than 10 billion monthly ad requests from over 160 different countries.
Could Intel's new Moblin 2.1 OS make a dent against Windows in the mobile and desktop markets?
At this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the chipmaker debuted a beta version of its Moblin 2.1 open-source operating system targeted to run on a variety of devices, including smartphones, Netbooks, nettops, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), and in-car systems.
Moblin 2.1 will compete with other open-source operating systems like Google's Android and bump up against Microsoft in the burgeoning nettop arena.
Originally developed for Netbooks, Moblin 2.1 (short for mobile Linux) will come in three flavors--one for handhelds, another for Netbooks, and a third for nettops.
In the market for handheld gadgets such as smartphones and MIDs, Moblin 2.1 will run on Atom chip-based devices. The beta demoed by Intel at IDF showed off capabilities for touch-screen and gesture input. The new interface will also let users switch among different open applications and will provide shortcuts to social-networking apps.
The Moblin 2.1 Web browser will also support Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight 3 technology to run interactive Web-based apps.
... Read MoreAfter inking a deal with Samsung last month to deliver movies directly to your home, Blockbuster announced on Tuesday that its OnDemand service is also coming to your mobile phone.
Blockbuster OnDemand, to be available on "select" Motorola mobile phones, will provide users with access to "thousands" of films, the company said in a statement. Users of the upcoming application, whose release date is yet to be announced, will also be able to choose films for home delivery or reserve titles for in-store pickup.
According to Blockbuster, the Motorola deal is yet another element in its strategy of providing consumers with options to get its movies anywhere, at any time.
For its part, Motorola believes that offering Blockbuster movies on its handsets will help it regain some of its appeal. The company once sat atop the mobile-phone industry. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. And it's trying desperately to regain some market share.
That might be coming through Android-based devices. Motorola has already signed on to deliver Android phones. Blockbuster's app might become a component in that strategy. But by competing with the iPhone and its many multimedia capabilities, Motorola and Blockbuster will be facing an uphill battle.
... Read MoreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
(Credit:
Meraki)
Meraki, a known mesh network provider, released Tuesday its first Wireless Census for North America and the results, though dramatic, seem nothing of a surprise. Basically, there has been a huge increase in the number of wireless-capable devices, among which Apple's handheld devices had the biggest jump.
The Meraki Wireless Census surveyed 10,000 randomly selected Meraki access points deployed in North America for two 24-hour periods: June 2, 2008, and June 1, 2009. The study measured the number of distinct client devices that sent probe requests in each 24-hour period. The purpose of the survey was to identify macro-level traffic and end-user device trends.
In details, the number of mobile devices including laptops and handheld devices grew from some 149,000 in 2008 to more than 211,000 in 2009, a 41 percent increase.
Apple's devices played a huge role in this increase. The company's Internet-enabled devices now account for 32 percent of all devices, represented in the survey, in 2009, compared with only 14 percent in 2008. The survey also showed that the popularity of Apple laptops, iPhones and iPods increase an impressive 221 percent just in one year.
Other than Apple's products, there have been an increasing amount of Wi-Fi-enabled handheld devices from other well-known vendors. According to the Meraki's census, the number of Research In Motion (RIM) devices, best known for the BlackBerry smartphones, observed in North America grew by 419 percent from 2008 to 2009, while Nokia devices grew by 114 percent.
In 2008, RIM devices represented just two percent of all devices observed, but grew dramatically to 8 percent for 2009. In 2008 and 2009, Nokia represented one percent and two percent of all devices, respectively.
These shifts in types and numbers of wireless devices are to be expected. In the past few years, more and more highly Internet-capable smartphones have been introduced and more and more Web services are tailored for mobile users.
Personally, while I wish the survey was done in larger than 24-hour periods, the trends seem right and definitely represent the way I access the Internet. Apart from sitting at work writing on my desktop, when on the go, my almost exclusive way to access the Internet is via my iPhone.
How about you? How often do you access the Internet via your phone? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
