Month: December 2013

Screenshot of Instapaper on the iPad.

Instapaper, the granddaddy of “save this web article for later” readers, is free for a limited time. I’ll let Wade “World Wide Wade” Roush explain it, as he did in his Xconomy summary of reading apps, 10 Apps & Sites That Bring Back the Joy of Reading:

Instapaper works like this: Once you’ve signed up for the service, you go to the Instapaper website and grab the “Read Later” bookmarklet, a little button that you can drag and drop into the bookmarks bar of your browser. Then when you come across a Web page that you want to read later, you just click on this button, which activates a script that extracts the article text and saves it on Instapaper’s cloud servers (or, optionally, sends it straight to your Kindle reading device).

…

I love the iPhone version of the app and I use it a lot when I’m standing in line at the grocery store or killing time in between other activities. I use the iPad version for longer, more intense reading sessions at home. My favorite feature: tilt-scrolling, which uses the accelerometer in the iPhone/iPad to scroll the text up or down, depending on which way you tilt the device.

If you’d like to see a review of the latest version of Instapaper, check out this one at MacStories: Instapaper 5.0: Sorting and Filtering Options, Tweaked Interface for iOS 7 and this Lifehacker “read later” app comparison.

There you have it: Instapaper, free for a limited time. Go get it!

Let’s see if we can make the future better than this, shall we?

(In case you don’t get the reference, here’s the relevant scene from WALL-E…)

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Internet analytics firm comScore recently released their data from their MobiLens and Mobile Metrix services, creating a snapshot of smartphone usage in the United States for October 2013. There’s nothing particularly surprising in this snapshot: the current numbers reflect the same general trends over the past year.

62% of the U.S. population has a smartphone

Click the picture to see the source data.

As of October 2013, there were 149 million smartphone users age 13 and older in the U.S., which accounts for 62.5% of the country’s population. This represents an increase of 4.1% over the previous snapshot, taken in July 2013. It’s very likely we’ll see smartphone users accounting for two-thirds of the population in early 2014.

Apple is the leading smartphone OEM; Samsung has the fastest-growing share

Click the graph to see the source data.

In October 2013, Apple was the leading smartphone OEM, having captured 40.6% of U.S. smartphone subscribers age 13 and up, an increase of 0.2% since the July 2013 snapshot. Samsung is in second place, with 25.4% of the market (an increase of 1.3% since July 2013), followed by Motorola, HTC, and LG, each with about 7%.

The OEMs with the biggest changes in market share were Samsung, who showed a gain of 1.3% since July 2013, and HTC, who showed an equal percentage loss in the same time period.

Top smartphone OEMs

3-month average ending October 2013 vs. 3-month average ending July 2013
Source: comScore MobiLens

Vendor	Jul 2013	Oct 2013	Change
Apple	40.4%	40.6%	0.2%
Samsung	24.1%	25.4%	1.3%
Motorola	6.9%	7.0%	0.1%
HTC	8.0%	6.7%	-1.3%
LG	6.8%	6.6%	-0.2%

Android and iOS combined maintain over 90% of the mobile platform market

Click the graph to see the source data.

Android was the leading platform in October 2013, with 52.2% of the market (an increase of 0.4% over the July 2013 snapshot), followed by iOS at 40.6% (an increase of 0.2%). BlackBerry and Windows Phone are still fighting for distant third place at 3.6% and 3.2% respectively, with BlackBerry’s share having fallen 0.7% and Windows Phone’s having risen 0.2%. The Symbian market share continues its decline to zero, having dropped from 0.3% to 0.2% from July to October 2013.

With all the bad news about BlackBerry, including the oral history published in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek and the recommendations from analysts like Gartner to abandon the BlackBerry platform, we should expect Windows Phone to take the lead in the race for distant third place when the next comScore snapshot comes out.

Top smartphone platforms

3-month average ending October 2013 vs. 3-month average ending July 2013
Source: comScore MobiLens

Platform	Jul 2013	Oct 2013	Change
Android	51.8%	52.2%	0.4%
iOS	40.4%	40.6%	0.2%
BlackBerry	4.3%	3.6%	-0.7%
Windows Phone	3.0%	3.2%	0.2%
Symbian	0.3%	0.2%	-0.1%

The big players have the top sites for mobile visitors

Click the graph to see the source data.

These figures shouldn’t be surprising: the sites that act as portals to a vast field of information, whether search, news, shopping, or social contacts were the top sites visited using smartphones in October 2013. Nearly 9 out of 10 smartphone users access Google’s and Facebook’s sites, nearly 8 out of 10 visited a Yahoo! sites, nearly two-thirds visited Amazon, and about half visited Apple.

In case you were wondering:

• Turner Digital includes CNN.com, NBA.com, Yahoo! Sports NBA and Yahoo! Sports NASCAR, CartoonNetwork.com as well as Funny or Die and The Smoking Gun.
• CBS Interactive includes the various CBS news and sports sites, as well as the foodie site CHOW.com, a number of tech news sites (CNET, TechRepublic, ZDNet), ComicVine, a number of gamer sites (Gamespot, Giant Bomb, and the French Gamekult), a number of music sites (last.fm, MP3.com. Radio.com), and sites aimed at the Chinese market (the automobile site xcar.com.cn and the electronic gadget site zol.com.cn).
• Glam Media includes Glam, Ning and all the community sites under its umbrella, Foodie, the family lifestyle site Tend and the men’s lifestyle site Brash.

The big players also have the top apps

Click the graph to see the source data.

In the world of apps, there’s a strong presence of mobile platform vendors Google and Apple, and one would-be (and may-yet-be) mobile platform vendor: Facebook. Not only does Facebook have the top app with a commanding 20% lead over the second-place Google Play, they also own two other apps in the top 15: Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Google also has a strong showing with 5 apps in the upper portion of the top 15: Google Play, Google Search, YouTube, GMail, and Google Maps. Apple’s app suite and Maps app occupy two slots in the top 15, and Yahoo! have two apps there: their Stocks and Weather Widget apps.

It’s Apple’s, Samsung’s, and Google’s world, we just live in it

With Apple as the #1 OEM and delivering the #2 mobile platform, Samsung being the #2 OEM and effectively being the Android standard bearer, and Apple and Google have strong showings in both mobile websites and apps, these three companies define the shape of the mobile universe, and the trends seem to indicate that they will continue to do so through 2014. Whether you build apps, accessories, or enterprises on mobile tech, you need to take this into account.

Making longer-term predictions is a riskier game in an industry that was redefined less than a decade ago. Fortunes change in a matter of months, not years, and while the Apple/Samsung/Google troika seem invincible now, think back to the 1990s when Microsoft was the 800-pound gorilla of tech and most startup business plans ended with a statement like “and then we’ll get bought out by Redmond”.

As a final reminder of how quickly and completely this industry can change, here’s Michael DeGusta’s tweet from September, made just after Nokia’s acquisition by Microsoft:

The top 4 smartphone brands of 2006: 1. Nokia: died today. 2. RIM: dead soon. 3. Motorola: dead sooner than you think. 4. Palm: long dead.

— Michael DeGusta (@degusta) September 3, 2013

Strangely enough, I haven’t had much need to crank out invoices and do other accounting, billing, and similar tasks until now. I’ve either worked with a company who had someone do that for me, or I’ve worked with a partner who’s handled the paper-pushing. Now that I’m doing the lone wolf consulting thing — and let me tell you, the boss is an effing genius — I’m in the process of evaluating make-your-life-easier business admin tools.

I’ve decided to try out FreshBooks first. I know the people — a good number of them personally — I know many of their satisfied customers, and hey, they’re just down the street from me. I notice that they’ve changed mottos from “painless billing” to “cloud accounting”. Right now, I need a simple invoicing system, but as things progress, I’ll dip my toe into their accounting features.

So far, my experience has been pleasant — the sign-up process threw as few obstacles as possible in my path, the short, sweet, and useful “How to make your first invoice” video was everything it should be and nothing more, and I’ve sent my first couple of invoices without a hitch. I logged in, got my stuff done, got out, and went back to what it is I’m paid to do without a hassle. That’s exactly what I want from this sort of service, and FreshBooks has delivered. Well done, folks.

Looking for a new typewriter typeface, but tired of all those variants of Courier or Letter Gothic? Take a look at Royal Vogue, which is made from scans from the output of a 1920s Royal portable typewriter. It’s still obviously a typewriter ‘face, but it’s also very clearly art deco. It’s free-as-in-beer, and you can download it from the Royal Vogue page on The Classic Typewriter Page.

Randy Liedtke came up with a prank that’s equal parts eeeevil and clever: baking cookies that look like iPhones. He goes driving, holds them as if they’re the real thing, and if a cop pulls him over, he takes a bite and asks if cookies are against the law.

The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History is the cover story of this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. The dead-tree edition of the magazine should be on stands by now, and the article itself has been online since Saturday. If you follow it with the Globe and Mail’s investigative report titled Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt (co-written by my friend and former Crazy Go Nuts University schoolmate Sean Silcoff, and published in late September), you’ll have a pretty complete picture of what happened to the company that once made mobile devices that were considered must-haves.

In the video below, Bloomberg’s Felix Gilette talks about the making of the article, as well as one of the most telling quotes, which came from Vincent Washington, who was RIM’s, and later, BlackBerry’s senior business development manager from 2001 to 2011:

One thing we missed out on was that Justin Bieber wanted to rep BlackBerry. He said, “Give me $200,000 and 20 devices, and I’m your brand ambassador,” basically. And we pitched that to marketing: Here’s a Canadian kid, he grew up here, all the teeny-boppers will love that. They basically threw us out of the room. They said, “This kid is a fad. He’s not going to last.” I said at the meeting: “This kid might outlive RIM.” Everyone laughed.

The perspectives in Bloomberg Businessweek’s article come from reasonably high-up BlackBerry/RIM employees, but not any of the CEOs: not the original duo of Lazaridis and Balsillie, nor replacement CEO Thorsten Heins, nor current interim CEO John Chen.