metrics

More than half of iPhones in the U.S. and Canada are already on Apple's latest operating system, a new report says.

Advertising and analytics company Chitika today released updated metrics on ad impressions dating back to when iOS 6 came out last month. The company found that 60 percent of iPhone users are now on iOS 6. Meanwhile iPad users trail at 45 percent, and iPod users at 39 percent.

"Overall, this data points to Apple doing an outstanding job of keeping their user base up-to-date with the latest OS," Chitika said in a blog post. &… 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

More companies seem to be discovering that crowdsourcing is more than just a cheap way to have other people do your work for you, it's a cheap and potentially cool way. Or so the conversation likely went with Sony's marketing folks when they came up with the idea to demo the HD camera on the Sony Xperia Ion smartphone by creating a music video entirely from footage shot by a crowd full of the phones.

Sony got Metric, one of the bands signed to its recording label, to perform in a hotel penthouse and handed out 25 of the company's new LTE phones for the audience to film the one-take performance. … Read more

At 10:30 in the morning a few weeks ago I hopped into a plain white van, a mysterious briefcase carefully laid out on the passenger's seat abuzz with phones.

Into the afternoon, the driver answered my probing questions about long hours on the road, awkward run-ins with the cops, and flashed guns. This was no police surveillance ride along; my driver was merely sharing a day in the life of an independent cell phone network tester.

Meet RootMetrics A few miles away from Microsoft, a small company called RootMetrics (formerly Root Wireless) sends out a tiny squadron of … Read more

NEW ORLEANS--Theoretical speeds are one thing, but the majority of smartphone owners will agree that real-life data speeds are what count.

Comprehensively charting each carriers' data network is the subject of RootMetric's quarterly report.

So far, the company scouts have systematically combed 42 urban and suburban markets to compare 3G and 4G data speeds.

Their methodology includes test calls, data downloads, and texting. Scouts record how easily they could get onto the network and perform tasks, and then run diagnostic speed tests through RootMetrics' automated software. They never use jailbroken devices.

On the LTE front, RootMetrics found that AT&… Read more

Big Data is in vogue, with a glut of startups and numerous large installations appearing in corporations. At CBS Interactive, we process almost one billion events a day that flow from our Web and application servers over message queues to a cluster of 80 twelve core Hadoop nodes that then feed a Teradata data warehouse.

Processing and analyzing such a large volume of data helps us ask important questions: Which pages on which properties are most profitable? Who goes where across our various sites? What types of content generates the greatest number of advertising conversions?

But here's the thing: … Read more

Apple frequently touts the number of applications available to iOS users, which now sits north of 350,000. But that number could be in danger of coming in second place to rival Google in just a few months time.

In a new report by market research firm Distimo for the last month of activity on Apple's various App Stores, the BlackBerry App World, GetJar, Google's Android Market, Nokia's Ovi Store, Palm's App Catalog, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, the group found Google and Microsoft's efforts to be growing the fastest.

"If all … Read more

Today RootMetrics brings its free Cell Phone Coverage Map app to Android. Like Speedtest.net, the RootMetrics mobile app tests your phone's signal strength and upload and download speeds at any given time. It also goes a step further to compile the voice and data strength of other RootMetrics users across carriers into a single coverage map of major urban centers in the U.S.

CNET Senior Editor Kent German and I used the iPhone version of the RootMetrics app to pit the Verizon and AT&T iPhone 4 against one another in a data speed showdown around … Read more

Verizon's 4G network proved the fastest and most consistent among those of the four major U.S. carriers, according to a study (PDF) out today by mobile testing company RootMetrics.

With the four (but soon to be three, what with yesterday's surprise announcement that AT&T plans to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion) major carriers all trumpeting the respective performance of their own high-speed mobile networks, RootMetrics set out to determine which was truly the speediest by testing 4G-capable phones from each one.

Included in the study were the HTC Thunderbolt running on Verizon's LTE network, … Read more