Sun Microsystems was well-loved among developers. It created Java and gave it to the world, asking little in return. It took big bad Microsoft to court and won. Java is one of the most important software innovations of the Web era. Until it sold itself to Oracle. 

Oracle acquired Sun in January 2010 and took all of seven months to bring charges against Google for infringing its rights to Java. The database king claimed that Google not only violated a variety of patents but copied the Java language and its application programming interfaces (APIs) outright. It sought damages of $6 billion - roughly a billion shy of what it paid for Sun. The case hasn't gone smoothly. As of last week, it looked as though Oracle does not have a strong claim to Google’s profits from its use of Java in Android. 

And this is where Oracle has not only damaged its bottom line, but also its credibility. Java has been and will likely always be open source and free. Sun created it as such and developed it more as a steward than an owner. By attempting to copyright the API regardless of the impact it would have on the entire software ecosystem, Oracle has thrown the legal nature of computer languages and programming into question.  

How badly have Oracle’s legal machinations hurt its brand? How badly have its legal machinations damaged its credibility with developers and the open source community? Take the poll below.

The trial was supposed to have three phases: copyright, patents and then damages. The jury delivered a partial verdict in the copyright phase, which means the decision to award damages in the copyright phase comes down to the judge, William Alsup. There will be no phase three and the trial, for all intents and purposes, is over. 

And #Googacle The Trial is over. Judge Alsup dismissing jury. Since Oracle won virtually nothing, no damages phase at this point.

— Ginny LaRoe (@GinnyLaRoe) May 23, 2012

Google off the hook for patent infringement. For now, Oracle is walking away with infringement on 9 lines of Java code out of 15 mil. Total.

— Caleb Garling (@CalebGarling) May 23, 2012

Oracle will appeal the result. It has millions of dollars tied up in legal fees and billions of dollars tied up in Java. To walk away empty handed will sting, and Oracle has proven that it is very committed to using the judicial system to make money from its acquisition of Java creator Sun Microsystems. 

While the jury has been dismissed, the issue of final damages that Google may have to pay Oracle is not yet finished. Judge Alsup has to decide on the copyright phase of the trial that the jury left unanswered when it delivered its verdict. The jury found that Google indeed copied the “structure, sequence and organization” (SSO) of 37 Oracle APIs related to Java. The jury came to an impasse on whether or not Google’s copying of the SSO of the APIs constituted fair use. Alsup will determine on that issue of fair use in the next week and then determine any damages Oracle can claim. 

Both parties had statements prepared at the conclusion of the proceedings. 

“Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java. We plan to continue to defend and uphold Java's core write once run anywhere principle and ensure it is protected for the nine million Java developers and the community that depend on Java compatibility,” Oracle said in a statement.

Google’s response touted the verdict not just as a win for Google, but a win for Android and its vast ecosystem.

“Today's jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle's patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem,” Google stated.

Oracle had pinned its hopes on convincing the jury that Google was a no-good, dirty thief that damaged Java and its community by outright copying the language, its patents and its APIs into Android. Oracle hoped that a jury would be more likely to award bigger damages than a single judge. Ultimately, that strategy failed. Yet, the fact that the jury did not come to a concrete decision in the copyright phase does leave a distinct opening for Oracle when it eventually appeals the verdicts in the case. 

The trial has been a soap opera of epic scale with two tech giants battling about the future of tech technologies (Java and Android) that are essential aspects of the technology landscape. Oracle came away the loser while Google can sit back and know that its investment in Android is safe… for now. While Oracle is the first company to sue Google directly over copyrights and patents, it is likely not the last. Patent battles between Microsoft, Apple and Android manufacturers are being fought across the globe. Many of those battles are attacks against manufacturers like Motorola, HTC and Samsung. In certain ways, the lawsuits against Android OEMs are proxy fights against Google itself.

Google now owns its own smartphone manufacturer with this week’s final approval of its acquisition of Motorola. Expect companies like Research In Motion, Microsoft and Apple to now come directly after Google in future lawsuits. 

For now, though, Google can celebrate knowing that it has defended Android, and millions, if not billions, of dollars in damages have been averted. 

Both operating systems were created by well-established technology giants. Both are licensed to multiple original equipment manufacturers to provide a variety of devices. Both have regulations about how the OS can be used to access the platform’s application stores. But this is where Microsoft and Google diverge. While Android is a Wild West that orbits around Google, the search giant does not directly control much of the ecosystem. For Windows Phone, everything originates with Microsoft. 

Google calculates its platform distribution (between how many people are using Android 2.2 Froyo or Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, for instance) by measuring what version of the operating system accesses Google Play. In May, 63.9% of Android devices accessing Google Play were running version 2.3.3 – 2.3.7 Gingerbread. Google does not regulate a minimum version of Android to access Google Play, which is one of the reasons that 6.2% of all Android devices are still running version 2.1 Eclair or below.

While Google has tried to whip the precarious ecosystem of manufacturers and mobile carriers into shape to push out operating system version updates in a timely manner, the initiative has mostly failed. The Android Update Alliance, announced by Google at its I/O conference in May 2011, has proven largely ineffective. Updating old phones to function with new versions of Android is cumbersome and expensive for both the manufacturers and carriers. All parties involved would rather just create a new device and force consumers that want the newest flavor of Android to buy a new device. 

Google has a big stick to wield against the OEMs and carriers with Google Play, but it has not been effective in using that stick when it comes to platform updates. The carrot approach will not work either, as pushing users to new devices, over updating old devices, is all the carrot that companies in the Android ecosystem care about.

Microsoft's Control of the Platform

This is the distinct difference between how Microsoft and Google approach their mobile operating systems. Whereas Google has been laissez-faire with how its ecosystem behaves, Microsoft has learned from Android’s shortcomings and controls as much of the Windows Phone experience as possible. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that only phones running Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) would be allowed to access the Marketplace. Users that do not have version 7.5 will be prompted to update through Microsoft’s “Update Central” when trying to download an app. 

This is the benefit of centralizing the entire mobile experience. Microsoft states a minimum standard and makes users and partners rise to that standard. It then takes control of the ecosystem and makes sure that happens. For instance, look at how Microsoft initially handled the update of Windows Phone from 7.0 to 7.5 last September. All updates originated not from the OEMs and then through the carriers, but from Microsoft itself. It was a mass update, graduated over a period of a couple of weeks. By the end, almost every person with a Windows Phone had the Mango update. With this week’s announcement that 7.5 is required to access the Marketplace, the stragglers who have not made the update yet will be forced to upgrade. 

Microsoft has made some interesting choices when it comes to how it has handled Windows Phone. Think of it as the operating system that sits in between the two philosophies employed by the leaders in the smartphone market, Apple and Google. Apple controls everything, making its own hardware and shipping its own updates. Google does not push its own updates, letting whoever wants to build on top of Android do it for free and stipulating that to have access to Google Play, certain requirements must be met. Microsoft licenses Windows Phone the same way it licenses its desktop Windows platform to any manufacturer that does not mind paying that fee. While the operating system is spread out among OEMs such as Nokia, HTC and Samsung, Microsoft still places itself as the cog that makes the machine run. 

Say what you want about the interface of Windows Phone and whether it can eventually catch up in market share to Android or iOS, but Microsoft’s strategy is good for users and developers, because the experience is consistent across the board.

Microsoft sign by Wonderlane.

Google, a Hardware Company?

The first big change will be to replace Motorola's chief. CEO Sanjay Jha is out, replaced by longtime Google employee Dennis Woodside, a man instrumental in the revenue growth of Google as a business over the last several years. Now his job will be to streamline Motorola’s smartphone product line, cut out the dead weight of Motorola Mobility and deliver on the Android geek’s wet dream.

Many pundits and analysts thought that when Google acquired Motorola, it was purely a patent deal. Google had just lost out on a boatload of critical mobile patents in the Nortel patent auction and Android looked more vulnerable to being taken down in the patent wars than ever. With Motorola in its war chest, Google all of a sudden had 17,000 patents from the company that basically invented the cell phone. With patents in hand, would Google spin off Motorola Mobility or sell it piece by piece?

Selling off Motorola's hardware division doesn't appear to be in the plan. If the search company were going to do that, Google CEO Larry Page likely would not have enticed one of his most effective lieutenants, Woodside, to take over. Yet, while the smartphone division will likely remain under Google's control, other hardware aspects of Motorola Mobility, such as its set-top cable box segment, may go on the block.

“Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound - as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone. That’s why it’s a great time to be in the mobile business, and why I’m confident Dennis and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come,” Page wrote. 

Balancing the Ecosystem

To prognosticate the future of Motorola and Google, it is pertinent to look at the guidelines various government bodies put in place when approving the merger. For instance, both the European Commission (the European Union version of the Federal Trade Commission) and the U.S. Department of Justice concentrated mostly on the patents aspect of the merger. The U.S. DOJ was obviously thinking that Motorola/Google was a pure patent play when it approved Google’s acquisition, the sale of Nortel’s patents to “RockStar Bidco” (a consortium of Apple, Research In Motion and Microsoft) and Apple’s acquisition of Novell’s patents in the same ruling. 

“The division's investigations focused on whether the acquiring firms could use these patents to raise rivals' costs or foreclose competition,” the DOJ stated in its release. “The division concluded that the specific transactions at issue are not likely to significantly change existing market dynamics.”

While the E.U. and the U.S. focused on the patents aspect of the deals, China had different motivations when it approved the deal earlier this week. China stipulated that Google had to keep Android free and open source for at least the next five years. China is clearly looking out for its smartphone manufacturers in this deal, with Huawei, Meizu, Lenovo and ZTE pumping out versions of Android smartphones on a regular basis. 

An acquisition of this size, with so many global entities sticking their fingers in the pie, is a fascinating study on the global impact of Android. While Google does not directly profit from Android hardware (for now), there are billions of dollars wrapped up in the Android ecosystem. And this is where Google needs to tread carefully. It needs to balance its desire to streamline the Android process while also not alienating its OEM and carrier partners in the process.

One way to appease the Android ecosystem would be to spread the love when it comes to flagship Android Nexus devices. According to reports, Google will be giving early access of its next Android operating system, likely called Jelly Bean, to five different manufacturing partners that could then sell the device directly to consumers. One motivation for this would be to wrest control of Android from mobile carriers, such as Verizon and AT&T (in the same way that Google originally had planned when it unveiled the first Nexus device and tried to sell it without the carriers). Another reason, and probably more important from Google’s perspective, would be that it could let Motorola create a quintessential Android Nexus device and avoid claims of favoritism.

Benefits of Motorola/Google Android Devices

The potential benefits of Google taking top-level control of the Android ecosystem are intriguing. Google benefits, consumers benefit, developers benefit. It remains to be seen if the carriers and other manufacturers will benefit, especially if Motorola and Google create an Android device that becomes a true “iPhone killer” and starts cannibalizing sales from other Android handsets. 

For consumers, the benefits are obvious: an extremely high-end smartphone and likely an equally impressive tablet that are streamlined to Android software and hardware specifications. The device would receive timely Android firmware upgrades and customer support from Google and Motorola. The very best of Android delivered at palatable price points.

Google benefits from these devices as well. It is hard to say that Page and the rest of the Google executives see the revenue that Apple is making from its iOS line of devices and don't want a bigger slice of that pie. For instance, Apple made more in profit from its hardware last quarter than Google made in total revenue. 

This is not going to be easy for Google and Motorola. Google is moving into an entirely new product category and that comes with its own problems outside of the balancing act that has to be performed with the rest of the Android ecosystem. There are a lot of balls to juggle, not only in incorporating Motorola into Google, but creating a vibrant division that operates and iterates with a high degree of quality. 

What can be said is this: In many, many ways, the best thing to ever happen to Android will be Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Google can now defend its mobile operating system with Motorola’s patents and create dynamic devices with Motorola’s hardware. At the same time, the E.U. and U.S. have put in measures concerning litigation around essential patents and China has ensured that Android will remain open and free. There will be losers in the Android ecosystem, among them several mobile manufacturers and maybe mobile carriers, depending on how much control Google can exercise over the sale of the devices. 

When the Motorola deal was announced last August and Page said that Google wanted to “supercharge” Android, he was not being facetious. Google has a tremendous opportunity in front of it. The path is paved with daggers but the benefit to the entire ecosystem at this point outweighs the risks. 

Development studio Spaceport.io used its PerfMarks II testing platform to determine which browsers and devices run HTML5 best. PerfMarks II tests “attempt to translate, scale, or rotate as many objects as possible on various devices while maintaining 30 frames per second or better,” according to the studio's report. 

30 frames per second is considered the benchmark for whether an application runs smoothly. For some apps, like high-quality games, 60 frames per second is ideal. At this point, no mobile device or mobile browser performs anywhere near the level of desktop/laptop computers. On average, mobile browsers perform 889 times slower than desktop browsers. The top mobile devices, both Apple and Android, are between six and 10 times slower. 

As we noted last week, Google’s Chrome Beta for Android is one of the most HTML5-capable browsers in the mobile ecosystem when tested by Rng.io. The difference between Rng.io and Spaceport.io’s PerfMarks II is that Rng.io only tests for browser capabilities while PerfMarks II tests actual performance across a variety of techniques. 

PerfMarks II uses three main categories to test HTML5 rendering: canvas, WebGL and CSS. For the sake of clarity, here is a screenshot of exactly what PerfMarks II is testing:

Spaceport.io only tested the top browsers and devices. That makes sense. While there is something to be said for testing Microsoft’s mobile version of Internet Explorer and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, as long as the operating systems they run on represent less than 10% of combined mobile market share, the results are not really relevant. 

Spaceport.io tested mobile Safari and Google Chrome Beta on the Samsung Galaxy S II, Galaxy Nexus (running variations of Android 4.0.x), iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S (running iOS 5.1.x). For desktop browsers, it tested Google Chrome and Safari (running WebKit r116996, akin to Safari 5.1.5) on a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.7.3. 

The desktop results served as benchmarks. It should be noted that WebGL is not currently supported on iOS or Chrome Beta for Android, so those results can be tossed immediately. The best results for iOS were with canvasDrawImageFullClear, only slowing 6.24 times on an iPhone 4S in comparison with a laptop (an iPhone 4 was 45.95 times slower). Two CSS techniques worked best with Chrome Beta: css3dImg and css3Dbackground; both were more than 11 times slower than a desktop test. The Chrome Beta results suggest that canvas should pretty much be avoided, even though it works great on the desktop versions of both Chrome and Safari.

“It’s easy to see an HTML5 demo on a laptop and get excited about how HTML5 will revolutionize mobile application development, but with the slowdown factors ranging from 6 to thousands, it’s very important to take such demos with a grain of salt,” the report stated. “The problem is that on desktop and laptop computers, the Flash Player plugin is effectively universal and provides a high-performance, cross-platform experience. Thus, HTML5 is not so desperately needed on the desktop web. It’s the mobile platforms, where Flash is not available, that so desperately need HTML5 and sadly, it is exactly these platforms where performance is still lacking.”

So, once again, it all comes down to Flash… or the lack thereof. The results highlight how big an opportunity Adobe had in creating Flash on mobile devices, an opportunity it bungled and eventually scrapped. Adobe has stopped making new versions of Flash for mobile devices, and the last iteration will be Flash 11 for Android 4.0. Adobe could have had a proprietary system that controlled nearly all the media on iOS and Android. The company is now making HTML5 tools, an area with a lot of competition coming from the likes of appMobi, Sencha, Brightcove, Netbiscuits and others. 

"They ignored it until it was too late," said Carlos Icaza, former Flash manager at Adobe and cofounder of Ansca Mobile, to ReadWriteWeb in 2011. "They were not looking out for the best interest of developers."

So now the open source community takes on HTML5 and attempts to drive better performance. Sencha and appMobi are leaders in this area and do significant testing and release product suites designed to increase performance. While those systems are on the cutting edge of mobile HTML5, right now the cutting edge is just not sharp enough. 

"Android is open for disruption.” That's what Stewart Putney, CEO of the mobile gaming company Moblyng, said last August. He was talking about the potential for HTML5 Web apps to disrupt the Android Market (now Google Play), but he may have been oddly prophetic. Android has not been riding high in 2012. More than one competitor is lining up to strike a decisive blow.

To truly disrupt Android, other OS makers face an uphill battle. It is no longer 2009, when Android stepped into a mobile market hungry for options beyond the iPhone (then only on AT&T) and the aging BlackBerry and Windows Mobile ecosystems. The market is now well established and the only two players that currently mean anything are iOS and Android.

For the sake of clarity, let’s look at the other contenders (in order of importance):

• Windows Phone: On its way to becoming a solid Number 3 behind iOS and Android.
• BlackBerry 10: Research In Motion’s next BlackBerry operating system and perhaps its last gasp to save the franchise.
• Mozilla B2G: Open, browser-based OS currently in development from Mozilla and the open source community. 
• Tizen: Formerly MeeGo. Has the backing of the Linux Foundation and Intel, and it has caught the eyes of several manufacturers looking for an alternative.
• Linux/Ubuntu: Pure, open Linux-based OS has been kicked about by the open source community, but generally unavailable in devices until 2013 at the earliest.
• webOS: Open-sourced by Hewlett-Packard, may have a legitimate future if developers embrace browser-based mobile interaction.

Microsoft and Nokia would love nothing more than to see Windows Phone eat Android’s market share. In the short term, that is not going to happen. The best Windows Phone, the Lumia 900, available through AT&T, does not measure up well with the best Android phones, either in specifications or user interface. What Windows Phone does have going for it is increasing traction with both carriers and manufacturers tired of dealing with the array of Android devices and the never-ending need to support them. Windows Phone is a known quantity and will continue to rise in market share. It will not reach the levels of Android, but it can shave 5% to 10% of its market share within a couple of years, especially if carriers continue to market and subsidize Windows Phone devices.

The problems for Windows Phone in disrupting Android are the macro-problems that face any OS aiming to usurp the crown. First, the Windows Phone Marketplace is a wasteland of copied and boring apps (with a few exceptional entries). Developer support is critical to the success of a smartphone OS, as developers create the content that drives adoption. The better a developer can fare on a platform, the harder it will work to build a productive ecosystem around it. Windows Phone and BlackBerry do not, at this point, have developer interest equivalent to Android and iOS. With almost 500,000 apps in Google Play (against 70,000 for Windows Phone and BlackBerry), conquering Android is bound to be an uphill battle. 

Manufacturers and carriers may be starting to look at throwing more weight behind Windows Phone. There are a variety of reasons for this. The most important is that Microsoft is willing to pay for visibility, and manufacturers and carriers are happy to take money whether or not Windows Phone actually sells well. 

While Windows Phone appears to be on the rise, Blackberry is still in wait-and-see mode. What will BlackBerry 10 ultimately look like? Will it be sexy enough to not only compete with the current crop of Android phones but remain viable for two or three years? To take market share back from Android, RIM needs to focus as much on what it releases this year as what that platform will look like in 2014. 

Tizen occupies an interesting space in this ecosystem. It has indirect backing from Samsung and could easily add HTC to the list of supporters if manufacturer relations turn sour with Google over its Motorola acquisition. Tizen will continue to be pushed by Intel - but the fact is that there may be little hope for it. It does not have the industry clout to disrupt Android in the short or long term. A wild card: Tizen has been seen running Android apps, a development that could give it traction.

What applies for Tizen also applies for webOS. These open source projects will likely produce nominal results and devices, at best. 

That leaves the two most intriguing candidates – Ubuntu and Mozilla. These are also open source projects, but they have significant developer communities behind them. Canonical has proposed an Ubuntu mobile operating system that has potential to step right into Android's position. One can imagine that an Ubuntu mobile OS would be very similar to Android (both with a Linux kernel) but not tied to Google. That would please Google’s manufacturer and service partners that would love to be free of Google’s regulations about how a device must behave to be allowed access to Google Play. 

Mozilla's Boot2Gecko Mockups

Mozilla is in a different category. It is an operating system that is of the browser, by the browser. In that way, it's similar to Google’s Chrome operating system, though B2G would be specialized toward mobile devices rather than notebooks. This is where HTML5 could truly disrupt Android, as it would run through the mobile Web and not be restricted by… anything. The trick for Mozilla is to create a browser-based operating system that has all of the device capabilities that Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone have with native APIs and hardware acceleration. That is not something the HTML5 environment does currently (at least, not well) and will be the biggest challenge for Mozilla as it develops the OS. Right now, Mozilla’s problems are technical in nature. Get the OS right first and then we can start talking about how it deals with manufacturers, carriers, developers, marketers, advertisers and the rest of the mobile ecosystem. Of all the methods and technologies used by would-be Android competitors, HTML5 has the highest ceiling. The company that pulls together a browser-based mobile operating system could fare very well, especially with developers. 

Taken individually, each would-be Android killer has strengths and flaws that will help and hinder it in trying to unseat Google. The near-term players (Windows Phone and BlackBerry) will have to battle OEMs and manufacturers and curry favor with developers. Everybody else still has to work out development and technical issues before they can gain the kind of traction that Android has created. 

Consequently, for the next two years or so, the mobile world will likely be a race between Apple and Google. 2012 will not be the Year Of Something Other Than Android. 2015 and beyond? Perhaps. 

What do you think has the greatest potential to disrupt Android? Let’s hear your picks in the comments. 

Oracle Seeks to Cover the Cost of Acquiring Sun

It's Up to Judge Alsup

The beauty of mobile devices from a marketing perspective is that you can reach consumers at a more personal level – right in their pockets. The Holy Grail of marketers used to be a home telephone number and address. Direct mail and telemarketing, despite being some of the most hated forms of advertising, are historically effective. Now mobile takes marketers closer to consumers than direct mail ever will.

But mobile isn't just one marketing channel. It's several. Think about how you use your smartphone. You use apps, you search the Net, you visit websites. You text friends and family. 

“The challenge for global brands in mobile is finding relevancy to the various activities a consumer may be performing at any given time.  The misconception is that mobile is a new marketing channel, when in reality it is several new channels, all with vastly different implications for brand marketers,” said Jeff Peden, CEO of Boston-based local advertising startup Crave Labs.

The trend toward mobile marketing and commerce is significant, and it's only going to grow. According to research firm Deloitte, 19% of merchants said they plan to invest $100,000 or more on mobile platforms. The money will go toward building apps, delivering through the various marketing channels that mobile affords and providing services for other businesses. About 22.5% of businesses are seeing the most traction in business-to-business mobile solutions while 33.7% are gaining mobile momentum in the business-to-consumer sector. Overall, 37% of enterprise companies have seen significant impact on their top and bottom line revenue through mobile.

Reaching consumers is a big part of the game, but it is only a start. The goal is to generate transactions. This is where relevance comes in. How do marketers achieve relevance through mobile?

“Tying into the context of the consumer (location, time of day, et cetera) improves relevancy in these cases," Peden said. "In the case of search, brands should be directing consumers to the closest place of action, turning that immediate local intent into a physical transaction. In other modes, such as gaming or video, the content of an ad has to be just as rich and compelling as the app in which it's running."

These observations aren't just theoretical. Nearly 29% of consumers who research a product in a retail location through a smartphone end up purchasing that product online. Mobile commerce is expected to be a $163 billion market by 2015. Companies that focus on mobile solutions for consumers will reap the greatest reward. Procter & Gamble could sell more toothbrushes if it used a location-aware price comparison app for shopping lists. Amazon has been a leader in price-comparison shopping and its strength in m-commerce should only grow as the ecosystem expands and smartphone users come to rely on their devices' in-store utility.

The infographic below, courtesy of Deloitte, serves as a rough map to the biggest m-commerce opportunities for developers, brands and retailers. 

Click here for a larger version of the infographic.

To understand where Facebook is with its mobile products, one must understand the problems that big companies deal with in rolling out new revenue-generating products. There are four phases, which author Geoffrey Moore calls “horizons,” for revenue-generating products at any given company:

• Horizon 1: Established products that are generating revenue.
• Horizon 2: Go-to-market products that are out of the research and development phase and are making the painful birth into a new revenue category for the company.
• Horizon 3: Products that are in R&D and may or may not constitute the future of the company.
• Horizon 4: End-of-life products that have long been revenue generators for the company but may have outlived their usefulness. 

Right now, the challenge for Facebook is to take its mobile monetization strategies and any resulting new products out of Horizon 3, see them through Horizon 2, and firmly establish them as Horizon 1 products. Many large companies struggle with Horizon 2 because of the need to allocate resources to a project that may not see actual revenue any time soon. It is a critical stage for a company as it looks to expand its categorical product portfolio.

In its initial S-1 filing for its IPO, Facebook identified making money from mobile as perhaps its biggest risk. We analyzed the avenues that Facebook could take to make money from mobile and found that there are several distinct directions the company could go, from direct and indirect ad placement, to creating an application store, to payments (Facebook Credits). Most of Facebook’s mobile monetization will come from advertising in one form or another.

Slide from Facebook mobile presentation at f8 in San Francisco in Sept. 2011

“Mobile should be a huge priority for the Facebook team, especially given the IPO. Traffic to social media sites on the Jumptap network from January 2011 – January 2012 grew 107% and had a 28% uplift in CTR for ads on the channel when combined with outside data sources. The social networking channel remains one of the most popular for our top verticals, including auto, retail and CPG," said Paran Johar, CMO at Jumptap. "There is an incredible opportunity for Facebook to monetize their massive mobile presence. Thirty-three percent of their traffic comes from mobile devices, and 85% of their $3.7 billion in revenue comes from advertising; monetizing mobile is a billion-dollar opportunity."

Where Facebook Can Take Mobile

There are several different types of advertising that Facebook could implement in mobile. The easiest would likely be interstitial and banner ads within Facebook’s native apps and mobile Web presence. That should not be a problem for the company on larger mobile screens, like the iPad, but creating effective ads for screens smaller than five inches has proved problematic not just for Facebook, but almost every other mobile ad network as well. 

Facebook can also capitalize on the “interest graph” it has created through its social graph platform and its newer OpenGraph applications, such as The Washington Post Social Reader or SocialCam. This is essentially what Facebook is doing on its desktop platform - targeting ads to people based on their interests. How to achieve that on mobile while still optimizing screen real estate and not alienating users (or infringing on privacy) will be the hardest part for Facebook. 

The most alluring prospect for Facebook may have to do with location-aware push notifications. Facebook has recently started adding location to users’ posts on both desktop and mobile platforms. This feature can be turned off, but the way Facebook pushed it out recently to users shows that it is deeply interested in associating location with user updates. A recent Facebook acquisition, ambient social location startup Glancee, could prove very useful in this area. Glancee knows where you are, runs in the background of your phone and tells you when a friend of yours is nearby. When integrated within Facebook, that could be a powerful tool. Thinking a step further though, Facebook could also use Glancee’s technology to connect not just people to people, but also people to stores, merchants and restaurants. All Glancee needs to do is treat physical locations like it does people and add some type of incentive for the user to go to that business, with which Facebook has presumably cut a deal. That could be a location-aware push notification based on your interest graph. For instance, I like sports, I am passing a sports bar that is offering happy-hour specials, I get a push notification. Facebook makes money, the location makes money, I get beer. Everyone is happy. 

App Happiness

Then there are the apps. A good portion of Facebook’s revenue is tied to apps in one form or another. The most lucrative of those are games, as Zynga has shown by riding its partnership with Facebook to its own IPO. Facebook’s original intent with its apps ecosystem was to let users spread apps through viral channels in much the same way that Farmville and MafiaWars became popular. That worked for a while and still has potential to be a good source of app enlistment for the company, but Facebook apps needed a boost beyond viral community growth. Hence, the social platform unveiled its App Center last week to act as a central repository for apps tied to the Facebook platform.

The App Center will prove pivotal in the way Facebook approaches mobile monetization. The center can sell mobile Web apps and bolster Facebook's Credits program, but it also can extend Facebook's presence in both the Apple App Store and Android Google Play. There is an interesting advertising opportunity here, as well. What if Facebook were to tie all of the apps that use its platform to its own advertising service? Then, if I am playing Draw Something and seeing ads, those are Facebook ads, not just ads served from some random ad network to which the developer tied its app. 

The ability to unleash interest graph-based mobile ads outside of Facebook’s actual owned and operated properties could have great potential both for social app developers and the social platform. Think of it as Google’s AdMob program, but tied to mobile social apps. 

The challenge for Facebook now will be to take these varying initiatives (like Glancee, App Center and even Instagram) out of Horizon 3 and push them through Horizon 2. Moore cautions companies that going to market with new categorical revenue generators is extremely difficult and should be done one at a time, so that each can be done right and done quickly. Going to market with new products one at a time has never exactly been Facebook’s strong suit. It likes to, “build fast, break things and fix them" as quickly as possible.

Facebook does not need to institute every idea it has for mobile monetization right away. It just needs to take its best idea, make sure it is as strong as possible and unleash it on the public. 

If Facebook can ever figure out how to really make money off of the hundreds of millions of people that use its mobile platform, then there is definitely sunshine on the horizon. 

This is Part One of a two-part series on Disassembling Android. 

Android conquered the world in 2011. Hundreds of thousands of users activate Google’s mobile operating system every day, a growth rate unprecedented in any era of computing. This extraordinary strength has carried into 2012, but Android is not the brazen warrior it was a year ago, and its vulnerabilities are starting to show. Is the world’s leading smartphone platform ripe for disruption?

Dethroning Android will take more than a rival releasing a new operating system and seeding devices to manufacturers and carriers. Just because Mozilla is developing a browser-based HTML5 operating system (Boot2Gecko) and the Linux community is (finally) trying to make a splash with Tizen (formerly MeeGo), it does not mean that either will push the smiling robot off its perch. Android is too well established to dethrone so simply, and unseating it involves too many moving parts. But Android does show signs of weakness, and it will need a boost in the next couple of years to maintain its lead.

Android, at this moment, is still going strong. According to comScore, it gained 3.7 percentage points of the U.S. market share in the first quarter of 2012, from 47.3% to 51%. That was led by Samsung, which controls 26% of the U.S. smartphone market and gained 0.7 percentage points in the quarter. Apple's market share has been growing faster, as is seen by sales from the top three U.S. mobile carriers, gaining 1.6 percentage points of the market in Q1. Yet the other top Android manufacturers lost share, with LG (-0.7%), Motorola (-0.5%) and HTC (-0.2%) decreasing by a total of 1.4 percentage points.

Many observers thought that Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) would provide the boost that Android needs. The update was designed to quell many of the problems that manufacturers, carriers and developers had with the operating system. Its promise is still attractive – streamlined app design, easier to code for multiple screen sizes – but the update has not put an end to fragmentation (still Android’s biggest challenge), nor has it seen widespread adoption.

As of the beginning of May, Android 4.0 is being used by 4.9% of users accessing Google Play. Gingerbread (Android 2.3x) is still the predominant flavor of the OS at 64.4% and stubborn Froyo (Android 2.2x) still controls more than one out of every five devices (20.9%). Why hasn't Ice Cream Sandwich seen mass adoption six months after its unveiling? Foremost, carriers and manufacturers are not updating older phones from Gingerbread through over-the-air updates in a timely manner. Second, the manufacturers have been slow to put out devices that take advantage of the update's new capabilities.

Only a handful of desirable Ice Cream Sandwich devices are available right now. The newly released HTC One series is probably the best, but that may not last long with a new Samsung flagship (Galaxy S III) in the pipeline. AT&T did not have an Ice Cream Sandwich device on its shelves in any form until the Samsung Galaxy Note was released. Verizon was not much better, with the Android flagship Galaxy Nexus as the only decent Ice Cream Sandwich phone on the market (from any carrier) for a good portion of 2012. Simply put, for most of the year, there have not been a lot of exciting high-end Android phones. It's hard to see how the latest version of Android can achieve mass adoption while it's so hard to obtain. 

Android still does robust sales at lower price points both in the U.S. and abroad. Going forward, that will continue to be a strength, as manufacturers release cheaper devices. Lower-end Android phones will battle for supremacy in emerging markets as Asian manufacturers such as ZTE, Huawei and Samsung pump out more and more inexpensive devices. 

So what might actually pierce that Android armor? Look out for Part Two of our miniseries.

Normally, the latest version of a mobile app wouldn't merit coverate on ReadWriteWeb, but this is a game changer, especially for experienced speakers who are used to running their PowerPoint presentations with "presenter" mode. This is the ability to see your speaker notes and adjoining slides on the computer monitor at the podium, while the audience sees only a separate screen with the slide content. It is how I usually like to give my own speeches.

iPad Presentation Problems

There are several issues with giving a speech using an iPad. First is the actual connection to a digital projector. There are two methods you can use: either a wired connection with a special VGA or DVI dongle that fits to the bottom of the iPad, or with a wireless AirPlay connection to an Apple TV device. If you go wired, you better make sure your iPad is fully charged iPad, because you can't connect it to a power source while you have the dongle in place. Using an Apple TV means you have to cart around yet another device and get it set up properly. Neither is very satisfying.

A second issue is that Microsoft doesn't yet make an iPad version of PowerPoint, although Apple has an iOS version of Keynote. If you're a PowerPoint power user, there are a number of products that can display iPad presentations. VMware's Sliderocket is another free iPad presentation app. Or you could use the offline iPad app from Prezi.

Of course, you could junk the whole Powerpoint-style presentation ethos and move into a new era: this is what Alfresco is trying to do with its occupymeeting.com ebook manifesto here, along with a collection of tools for those that are interested. But many business people have years of deep experience with PowerPoint presentations and may not be quite ready to give up their slide decks. Many companies still prefer them, as well. 

The Power of Presenter Mode

Most of these iPad presentation apps don't support presenter mode, and just show everyone whatever you have on your iPad screen. That can be limiting for speakers used to seeing their notes and their current position in the entire presentation. That's where SlideShark shines. iPad 2 and 3 users can plug into a projector or TV to simultaneously view slide notes, view separate timers for time spent on individual slides and the overall presentation on their mobile device - while the audience sees only the slides. There is also an animation counter. Of course, speakers can also choose a full-screen mode for both the presenter and the audience. In either mode, animations display on both screens. You can see a sample screenshot below.

Brainshark's newest SlideShark isn't going push the world of presentions in some brand new direction. Instead, it finally makes it possible to comfortably give an iPad PowerPoint presentation using the tools and views experienced presenters already count on. SlideShark version 1.6 is available today for a free download here from the iTunes App Store.

By 2015, IDC predicts that 80% of all mobile apps will be based wholly or in part on HTML5. It makes sense: As HTML5 evolves, it gains access to many features that were once the sole domain of native code. Audio and video playback have been problems that are now beginning to improve, and several companies including Sencha, appMobi and Mozilla are working on ways to give HTML5 better device access to objects such as a device’s camera and accelerometer. 

It takes a village to raise a child - or, in this case, HTML5. During February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a group of companies banded together to create the Core Mobile Web Platform Community (Coremob), a forum for “the global mobile developer and IT community to focus and accelerate the evolution of the mobile Web as a compelling platform for mobile applications.” Coremob includes several giants in the development and mobile worlds, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, AT&T, Red Hat and Qualcomm’s Innovation Center (among many more; see infographic below). Like the browser wars and the Web before it, the mobile Web is not going to be completely developed by one company. For HTML5 to truly become a viable set of standards, the technology community at large will need to work together to share resources to make that possible. 

But the mobile universe is not quite ready for a full-fledged HTML5 ecosystem yet. This comes down to the status of mobile browsers. Applications that run in browsers do not have the capabilities that native apps have. You thought Android was fragmented? Ever since Microsoft trounced Netscape with Internet Explorer, browsers have been, almost by definition, the most fragmented aspect of Web technology during the past 15 years. That is no different for mobile browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Google’s stock Android browser or its mobile Chrome Beta, Firefox Fennec, Opera Mini, Dolphin, Skyfire, Internet Explorer for Windows Phone or BlackBerry. HTML5 is supposed to be able to cut through the differences of all these browsers, but they are not all created equal. 

This is where Ringmark comes in. Designed as an open source tool by Facebook for the Coremob community, Ringmark is a browser-testing suite that determines how well different browsers implement app functionalities. Ringmark determines what “ring” a browser is in and what type of capabilities an app can perform in that browser. For example, browsers that pass “Ring 0” can run “Level 0” apps, Ring 1 can run Level 1 apps, and so on. The infographic from IDC below shows an example of the capabilities in each ring, and which apps can run on which levels.

We did a couple of Ringmark tests by visiting Rng.io on mobile browsers to see how well they stack up. Ring 0 has 97 different capabilities, which most of the browsers we tested passed. There are between 137-160 capabilities in Ring 1, which none of the browsers we tested passed. If a browser does not pass all the capabilities of a Ring, then it does not test the next Ring. (As browser versions advance and begin to pass Ring 1, Ringmark's developers will build out more rings to allow for further advances in expected browser capabilities.)

Rng.io test of Chrome Beta for Android Here are the results:

Opera Mini/Mobile

• Android (Opera Mobile) -- R.0: 7 failed, 90 passed
• iOS (Opera Mini) -- R.0: 32 failed, 52 passed

Dolphin HD

• Android -- R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 44 failed, 93 passes
• iOS R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 33 failed, 106 passed

iOS Safari

• R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 34 failed, 106 passed

Stock Android Browser

• R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 44 failed, 93 passed

Android Chrome Beta

• R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 17 failed, 143 passed

Windows Phone Internet Explorer

• R.0: 11 failed, 86 passed

Amazon Kindle Fire Silk

• R.0: 4 failed, 93 passed

BlackBerry 6

• R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 58 failed, 80 passed

It appears that the browser with the most HTML5 capabilities at this point is Chrome Beta on Android. We noted when Chrome Beta was announced that it would be a good browser for HTML5 development. Yet, Chrome Beta’s performance does not help the bulk of the Android ecosystem. First, it is only available on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich devices, which make up only 4.9% of all Android devices as of May 1. Second, when a mobile Web app runs an application through Android, it will choose the default browser of the device, which will be the stock Android browser, not Chrome Beta. 

Take a look at the infographic below and let us know what you think about the future of browser development for HTML5 functionality in the comments.

Note: Thank you to Evan Davis of Isobar in Boston for testing Windows Phone and BlackBerry 6 for us. 

Click here for a larger version of the infographic

The Supreme Court thought it settled the issue in January, but the debate over warrantless GPS searches won't go away.  Now, one U.S. senator is concerned that the Department of Justice hasn't fully scaled back its searches and may be subpoenaing ISPs for the GPS data it can no longer get directly. 

Last September - an eon ago for attorneys involved with this issue - a U.S. appeals court ruled that the Justice Department must turn over information about how much data it obtains about suspects under surveillance by way of GPS devices. It was the first drop in what became a watershed for privacy advocates, including the ACLU, which has long argued that obtaining civilians’ locations through GPS constitutes a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Then in January, the Supreme Court affirmed the ACLU’s argument almost in its entirety (PDF available here), overturning a drug trafficking conviction of a D.C. nightclub owner whose whereabouts had been tracked through warranted use of GPS data for a car registered to his wife. Since the warrant applied to information for someone other than the suspect, an appeals court ruled, and the Supreme Court upheld, that the search leading to his arrest and later conviction was unconstitutional. Immediately afterward, the DOJ ordered a scaling back on the use of GPS in surveillance.

But recent news reports (like this one) compelled Sen. Al Franken (D - Minn.) to send a letter sent yesterday to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, a copy of which was sent to ReadWriteWeb. The letter includes a questionnaire asking the government to disclose the number of requests for information it filed with wireless carriers between last January and April. Sen. Franken apparently is looking for a pattern: Since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in U.S. v. Jones on January 23, a sudden spike in information requests could be a signal that law enforcement officials are bypassing the high court.

“Americans’ right to privacy shouldn’t depend on what technology is being used to track them,” Franken says in his statement sent to RWW.  “The protections people are guaranteed by the Constitution and by the Supreme Court shouldn't be limited to the use of physical GPS monitoring devices; they should extend to any device law enforcement officials use to track an individual’s movements - including location information obtained from wireless carriers.”

The government’s position on the Jones case had been that a GPS database was like a public place, a virtual community. And in that respect, it’s like a public park, where people might not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In the specific case of Mr. Jones, who was suspected of involvement in a cocaine ring, the government had argued that any privacy right the suspect may claim would be outweighed by the rights of all the other citizens who share this common place (albeit in cyberspace), and who expect it to be free of drug trafficking.

A lower district court, whose ruling had been overturned by the appeals court, had offered something similar to this metaphor: If you’re in a public park and you notice that you're being watched by a passer-by, that's not a privacy violation. If that person keeps looking at you for a long period of time, however, maybe he really is spying on you. By that same standard, perhaps it’s unreasonable to suspect the motives of an agency that acquires a person’s location once or twice. When that person's being monitored for four weeks or so, however, maybe that’s bad.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, completely disagreed. In his classic law-professor style, the justice wrote that the long-term spying metaphor, “introduces yet another novelty into our jurisprudence. There is no precedent for the proposition that whether a search has occurred depends on the nature of the crime being investigated. And even accepting that novelty, it remains unexplained why a 4-week investigation is ‘surely’ too long and why a drug-trafficking conspiracy involving substantial amounts of cash and narcotics is not an ‘extraordinary offens[e]’ which may permit longer observation. ... What of a 2-day monitoring of a suspected purveyor of stolen electronics? Or of a 6-month monitoring of a suspected terrorist? We may have to grapple with these ‘vexing problems’ in some future case ... but there is no reason for rushing forward to resolve them here.”

It’s this question of long-term interest (“Is he staring at me or just in my general direction?”) that may have motivated Sen. Franken to ask Attorney General Holder this question - the second part of Question 2 of his questionnaire:  “How many individuals’ location information did the department receive as a result of these requests?”  Holder was asked to have his staff respond to the questionnaire by June 11.

Stock image by Shutterstock.

But a conversation with senior Wells Fargo execs reveals a bank trying to use the Internet, social media and mobile technology to worm its way deeper and deeper into their customers' lives.

At a wine-lubricated dinner this week in downtown San Francisco, Wells Fargo execs shared their insights into how they are trying to change banking.

Kimarie Matthews, VP Social Web, explained that Wells Fargo has little choice but to engage in social media. “We’re there because our customers are there,” she said, noting that account holders use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to discuss the bank and such issues as financial planning. “Being there is very important” to help improve customer satisfaction, whether it’s saying “thank you” when someone tweets a nice comment, or stepping in to “save a customer” when someone is unhappy with their experience.

Kimarie noted that Wells Fargo has just launched its first online community, where college-bound children and their families can share tips on saving for college.

But Facebook and Twitter are only the beginning. Brian Pearce, senior VP in charge of Wells Fargo’s retail mobile channel, said the bank sees mobile as “a way to be with our customers all day long.”

Wells Fargo's aim to go wherever its customers go involves more than getting them to use mobile apps, mobile websites and text banking. Pearce wants to move beyond purely mobile interactions into so-called "simultaneous uses." After all, Pearce pointed out, people always have their phones with them, so they can use them at the same time as they’re engaged with ATMs, tellers or wellsfargo.com.

Customers could use their phone instead of a card to log into the ATM or ID themselves to a teller, for example. Or the bank could use geofencing to identify and alert a customer's personal banker every time they walk into a branch.

Pearce declined to go into more detail on how those simultaneous interactions might work, but possibilities include

• Mobile promotions: The phone displays special interest rates, point-of-purchase discounts, or other benefits based on customer behavior
• Mobile advertising: The phone presents ads sold by the bank based on one's banking history
• Mobile charitable contribution: The phone gives the option of sending a microdonation to a favorite charity with every transaction
• Mobile payments: The phone acts like a debit card at point of purchase

Feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

<em>Chase photo courtesy of <a href="http://photostock.com">Photostock>/a>.</em>

To understand where Facebook is coming from with App Center, it helps to know the company’s modus operandi to this point in its history. Facebook is built around two central principles: the browser and sharing. The browser is what Facebook is built upon, even for its native (hybrid) apps. Sharing is the core philosophy of Facebook, as everything it does has to be social in one way or another. The concept of the “social graph” on the Web existed before Facebook, but the company has taken the idea to a whole new level.

In many ways, the App Center was destined to be built one way or another since 2007. When we look back 20 or 40 years from now, we will note that 2007 was the year in which two very big things happened: Facebook opened its platform to be built upon, and Apple released the iPhone. 

Our current era of Web technology and innovation is built upon three principles: the cloud, social sharing and smart mobile devices. While we cannot point to one distinct event that signifies the rise of the cloud (an old concept that has taken on new meaning in the last several years), the iPhone and the Facebook platform are seminal moments that point to the kind of software that is being built today. 

What App Center does is aggregate the mobile and social applications that are the result of those trends that were started in 2007. For Facebook, it hinges on the ability to tie mobile applications and websites to its platform. That is a key concept for Facebook. App Center is not just some application repository for any app that can be found on iOS, Android, Facebook or the mobile Web. Facebook is aggregating its own ecosystem into a destination that is (in theory) easy to use and easy to find.

That is why we see some strict guidelines in what will be found in the App Center. Any iOS, Android or Web app that is listed in Facebook’s repository must use Facebook as its login credential and have a Facebook Page specifically designed for App Center. Facebook will review any app submitted to App Center for quality - but also to measure how social the app is. This is not like Apple’s review process for apps submitted to its App Store. Apple is looking to make sure apps have appropriate content, do not contain malware and meet the company’s (sometime absurd) policies. Facebook is looking to showcase apps that highlight Facebook. 

Facebook has permeated itself as one of the backbones of the Web. The social graph and its new Open Graph are embedded into hundreds of millions of websites for users to like, recommend and share. By doing this, Facebook has successfully infiltrated the plumbing that supports the Web that people see everyday. It is the same with mobile; Facebook apps are not contained just to the Facebook platform. Social apps are tied to the platform but also reside within every app store that serves mobile devices, from Apple’s App Store, Android’s Google Play, the Windows Phone Marketplace, BlackBerry App World, Getjar or the Amazon Appstore. As a result, Facebook is ever-present, both on the Web and on mobile.

And that is why App Center will work. Facebook does not need to create an app store where it sells only mobile Web apps that work on its platform. App Center is more of a display showcase than a store. It redirects users to whatever app store or mobile Web application they may want. Some might think it is counterintuitive for Facebook to send traffic away from its own website, but the fact of the matter is that nobody ever leaves Facebook. It goes with the user wherever they are. By sending traffic to the App Store and Google Play, Facebook is guaranteeing that users will still, in one form or another, be tied to Facebook. 

We will see how this works when App Center is rolled out to Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users. Down the road, Facebook could eventually decide that App Center is better suited not sending users to the App Store and Google Play and creating a marketplace that is only for HTML5-based Web apps tied to Facebook’s platform. While that would help centralize and define Facebook’s mobile presence, that would be counter to Facebook’s longtime approach of being everywhere, all the time. 

The departure from Facebook’s previous company line comes as the social platform ramps up its mobile offerings to make money from its hundreds of millions of mobile users. This is not your father's app store, though.

Let's start with the requirements. Facebook has announced a strict set of style and quality guidelines to get apps placed in App Center. Apps that are considered high-quality, as decided by Facebook’s Insights analytics platform, will get prominent placement. Quality is determined by user ratings and app engagement. Apps that receive poor ratings or do not meet Facebook’s quality guidelines won't be listed. 

Whether or not an app is a potential Facebook App Center candidate hinges on several factors. It must

• have a canvas page (a page that sets the app's permissions on Facebook’s platform)

• be built for iOS, Android or the mobile Web

• use a Facebook Login or be a website that uses a Facebook Login. 

Facebook is in a tricky spot with App Center. It will house not only apps that are specifically run through its platform but also iOS and Android apps. Thus it needs to achieve a balance between competition and cooperation with some of the most powerful forces in the tech universe. If an app in App Center requires a download, the download link on the app’s detail page will bring the user to the appropriate app repository, either Apple's App Store or Android’s Google Play. 

One of the more interesting parts of App Center is that Facebook will allow paid apps. This is a huge move for Facebook as it provides a boost to its Credits payment service. One of the benefits of having a store is that whoever controls the store also controls transactions arising from the items in it, whether payments per download or in-app purchases. This will go a long way towards Facebook’s goal of monetizing its mobile presence without relying on advertising. 

Facebook App Center Icon Guidelines

Developers interested in publishing apps to Facebook’s App Center should take a look at both the guidelines and the tutorial that outlines how to upload the appropriate icons, how to request permissions, how to use Single Sign On (SSO, a requirement for App Center) and the app detail page. 

This is a good move for Facebook. It will give the company several avenues to start making money off of mobile but also strengthen its position as one of the backbones of the Web. For instance, App Center is both separate from iOS and Android but also a part of it. Through App Center, Facebook can direct traffic to its apps, monitor who and how users are downloading applications and keep itself at the center of the user experience. 

Developers: Are you jumping to deploy an app to App Center? Or is this too little, too late for Facebook? Let us know in the comments. 

China has the largest mobile-phone installed base (by volume) in the world, and just as it is in the U.S., the Chinese market is an Android vs. iPhone war. So how do people in China use their smartphones, and how does that compare to those in the United States?

As it is in the U.S., the top app categories in China are games and social networking, according to Chinese mobile ad firm Guohe. Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) is among one of the most popular apps in the country, while other localized social-networking apps (Weixin, Mi Tech, Miliao, etc.) are driving a large share of app usage. Social apps are becoming more prevalent for younger Chinese users, with 36% of 18- to 22-year-olds saying they use apps more than calling or text messaging. 

Also just like in the U.S., content is apparently king in China. It is almost a worldwide maxim at this point: Content is the front-facing data that drives much of the worldwide Internet. In China, popular content apps include Spotify, Pinterest, Turntable.fm and Flipboard. Those should sound mighty familiar to U.S. users. 

Android leads in Chinese smartphone usage, with 54% of the market share on Guohe’s network. Users were predominantly male (55%) and earned less than $50,000 a year. 

Chinese users love to use their apps, too, which makes the demographic really no different from the rest of the world. U.S. users average about 77 minutes of app usage per day. But the Chinese are in the same ballpark: According to Guohe, 48% of iPhone users and 36% of Android users spend two hours or more with apps. 

Interestingly, Android users in China do not pay for apps, while many iPhone users do. Only 23% of Chinese Android users have ever purchased an app, and 90% have spent less than $10. In contrast, 68% of iPhone users in China have spent less than $10, but 31% have spent more than that. 

While it is hard to draw definitive conclusions about the overall habits of Chinese smartphones users based on the data of one ad network (in contrast, there are several sources of similar data in the U.S. from the likes of Flurry, Fiksu and Millennial Media), it is nonetheless interesting to note the differences between iPhone and Android users, as well as many of the similarities to U.S. users. Games and social networking drive mobile growth in China, just like the U.S. Many of the same apps (or, at least the same types of apps) are popular in both China and the U.S. Check out the infographic below. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

Flipboard originally was an iPad-only app. In fact, it was one of the first and best iPad-only apps. Last June, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Conference that the company would first work on an iPhone app (which it delivered six months later) before working on Android. Almost a year later, we finally have Flipboard for Android.

"We have to be careful not to get ahead of ourselves," McCue said at 2Way. "Do one platform, do it incredibly. You will see us stay on the iPad and iPhone for quite some time.”

McCue was not kidding. A year is an eternity in app development cycles. But Flipboard stuck to its guns and created a dynamic iPhone app first before tackling Android. In this way, it is not unlike Instagram, which created a user base of 30 million people on the iPhone before porting to Android. 

There is distinct value in developing for one platform and doing it well. If the product is sound (as Flipboard and Instagram certainly are), then you create a faithful user base that raves to its friends about how good the app is. That creates an organic growth campaign that the company can build upon. You know how these things go. I tell a friend, and she tells two friends, who tell two friends, and so on and so on. 

The other half of the smartphone landscape then becomes jealous that it does not have access to this great app. When Instagram released its app for Android, it had 5 million downloads in a matter of days. Since that time (and being acquired by Facebook), Instagram has added nearly 20 million users. 

Flipboard will not take off like Instagram. Not yet, at least. It is not officially available for Android yet. But, it is not hard to get.

XDA Forum developer Valcho found the Android Package file (.apk) and posted it to XDA. All a user needs to do is get that .apk on their Android device one way or another, and Flipboard will download.

Steps:

From mobile:

• Go to Valcho’s post at XDA Forums through your Android’s browser.
• Click on the .apk file on the bottom of the post. 
• The Flipboard file will download. Open it and download the app.
• Note: Make sure your Android device accepts .apk files from outside sources. Go into Settings – Security and check Unknown Sources to allow installation of non-Google Play applications. 

From your computer:

• Go to Valcho’s post at XDA Forums.
• Click on the QR Code link next to the .apk file. 
• Scan the QR code. The file will download. Open the file and download the app.

OR

Download the .apk to your computer. Transfer it to your Android device through email, Dropbox (or another personal cloud provider), or through the micro-USB. Follow the above steps when you download the file. 

It is extremely simple, and from what we can tell from reactions on the Web this morning, it is working for new (HTC One X), middle-aged (HTC Thunderbolt) and older (Droid X) Androids. 

Are you going to download Flipboard or wait until an official build hits Android’s Google Play market? Let us know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

That’s the key finding of a new Forrester Research report that predicts the end of the laptop’s 15-year reign. The trend is already well under way among people born between 1980 and 2000, known to demographers as the millennial generation. In the U.S., 30% of tablet owners in this age group have purchased a tablet in place of a PC, compared to 20% of baby boomers. 

"For this growing body of [millennial] users, PCs will seem like clunky trucks rather than sleek cars, dampening their long-term propensity to buy conventional PCs," says the 19-page report authored by Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.

But the tablet won’t replace the laptop all by itself, Forrester says. File-sharing services such as Box, DropBox, SugarSync and Apple’s iCloud will be critical enabling technologies, as well as a new type of stationary display the analyst calls a frame, due to become commonplace by 2015. 

Sales projections back up Forrester’s forecast. Tablets are expected to outsell laptops in 2016 as tablet shipments quintuple from 81.6 million in 2011 to 424.9 million by 2017, according to research firm DisplaySearch. Tablet sales will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 46% during the same period, Forrester predicts, reaching 375 million in 2016. A third of those sales will be directly to businesses, as tablets become standard tools for executives, sales staff and other information workers.

China and other emerging markets will drive the fastest tablet growth because they aren’t already saturated with laptops and smartphones, according to Forrester. Emerging markets will account for 40% of tablets sold by 2016.

For users, the rise of the tablet will bring one outstanding benefit: Convenience. At 1.75 pounds or lighter, tablets are half the weight of the sleekest laptops. They turn on instantly, are easier to use and have a long battery life. In time, they’ll acquire more processing muscle and move beyond today’s most common uses: reading email and documents, browsing the Web and watching video. Eventually they’ll come to rival laptops as workhorses. Apple is already pushing in that direction by making iWork available on the iPad. Microsoft is expected to make the Office suite available for tablets next year.

One stumbling block in the tablet’s path to dominance is screen size. At 7 to 14 inches diagonal, tablet screens are too small to handle the gamut of computing chores comfortably. That's where frames come in, according to Forrester.

Frames will be large, stationary displays that a person can use to wirelessly show video, documents and any other tablet-based content. They’ll be laden with sensors, so people can interact with them through touch, voice and gestures (via motion sensors similar to those in Microsoft's Kinect). Forrester envisions frames as fixtures in homes, offices, hotel rooms, coffee shops and conferences. Forrester analysts expect them to reach the mass market in 2015, when they will spark an acceleration in the displacement of laptops. 

The presumed ubiquity of frames might be the report’s most iffy prediction. But the technology’s forebears are already on the market, Forrester points out, including the Apple Thunderbolt, Samsung Central Station and Sony Power Media Dock. Apple AirPlay wireless technology enables the iPad and iPhone to send video and audio to TVs or external speakers via Apple TV, and Intel Wireless Display technology moves content from PC to TV.

More than the iPad

Note that tablet dominance doesn’t mean iPad dominance. Apple's market share will shrink from its current 68%, dropping below 50% by 2017, according to the NPD Group. Nevertheless, Forrester predicts that Apple will continue to lead in the enterprise and among premium buyers worldwide. Tablets based on Google's Android platform will capture the low end. Microsoft Windows 8 tablets, expected to reach stores by the end of the year, will become a strong competitor in 2014.

While laptops will no longer be the center of the personal computing universe, they won't disappear for a long time. The transition to tablets will take years, and meanwhile laptops will be used for graphic- and processing-intensive tasks such as graphic design, engineering and complex calculation. But as tablets become better-suited to a wide range of tasks, and the support technologies become more widespread, most people will find them simpler and more convenient. Then, Forrester says, even die-hard laptop lovers will ditch their notebooks and jump on the tablet juggernaut.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

MasterCard released the “MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index" (MPRI) to gauge the readiness of 34 countries across the globe for mobile payments. MasterCard defines mobile payments in three different categories: peer-to-peer, mobile commerce (mCommerce) and at the point of sale (POS).

Six different factors were weighted on a 0-100 scale:

• Consumer Readiness – MasterCard surveyed 1,000 consumers in each of the 34 markets to gauge their familiarity with mobile payment, willingness to use mobile payment and current usage of the three payment types. 
• Environment – Economic, technological and demographic elements, such as Internet access and per-capita income. 
• Financial Services – Depth of the financial services sector, including accessibility and affordability, and penetration of digital (plastic card-based) payments. 
• Infrastructure – Mobile phone penetration, network coverage and breadth of NFC terminals. 
• Mobile Commerce Clusters – Partnerships among financial services, telecommunications companies, governments and technology providers. 
• Regulation – Structure and efficiency of each market's legal and governmental bodies.  

These six categories show MasterCard is doing its homework. The MPRI is the result of that homework. The results are mixed, but no country has hit what MasterCard identifies as the inflection point for mass mobile payments adoption, at 65 of 100 on the company’s scale. See the results below.

According to MasterCard’s white paper on the survey results, Singapore’s top ranking is based on its infrastructure. The country has 100% mobile coverage, 70% Internet penetration and 68% mobile phone penetration. It also leads in the regulation category with “well-developed laws in relation to information and communication technology.”

In North America, the U.S. and Canada are both above average on the index. The U.S. skews toward a younger demographic, with young, affluent males making up most of the mobile payments sector, especially in the POS sector. The U.S. rates above average on willingness to use mobile payments for POS and mCommerce.

MasterCard’s conclusion on mobile payments in the U.S.:

“While scoring quite well compared to other markets in terms of integration, there remains much work to be done in the United States. That’s one of the reasons mCommerce is so far ahead of other varieties of mobile payments: The infrastructure, especially as regards the roles and responsibilities of the players – is already in place. The existence of Isis and Google Wallet do much to boost the United States’ score; but until both these projects begin to achieve air speed by engaging all players, it’s still in the early days.”

The needs of mobile payments vary in scope between developed and emerging worlds. For instance, Kenya is No. 4 on MasterCard’s index despite having little infrastructure or mobile commerce clusters. Yet, it is precisely this lack of infrastructure that has led Kenya to be one of the most ready countries in the world for mobile payments because it is building a new transactional model almost from scratch. That kind of flexibility makes developing mobile payment systems easier. For instance, take a look at M-Pesa, a peer-to-peer mobile payments system that works without banks or financial services organizations (such as MasterCard). M-Pesa is administered through IBM for Vodafone, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. It is an example of how technology is used to fulfill a need (in this case, easy transactions) as opposed to artificially disrupting an entrenched market that will be slow to change.

That is where MasterCard and much of the financial ecosystem may be seeing mobile payments through rose-colored glasses. For instance, why do mobile payments skew heavily toward young males in developed countries? The answer, more or less, is because it is cool. The actual need for mobile payments (NFC or otherwise) is not as clear in the U.S. as it is in other countries, like Kenya and Singapore. Mobile commerce does well in the U.S. because the existing infrastructure is in place for it to succeed. It has robust carrier billing options, PayPal and other online payment processors, as well as retail destinations like Amazon, eBay and others. The need for a peer-to-peer payment system in the U.S. is a novelty, because money can be switched easily via bank transfers, checks or other means. As for POS integration, it remains to be seen how robust that market segment becomes as retailers and consumers decide whether NFC, beam technologies and/or QR codes really add more value to the transaction process.

MasterCard has identified what it will take to create a true mobile payments ecosystem in many countries across the world. What it fails to recognize is that none of this is a foregone conclusion. Reading MasterCard’s MPRI, you get the feeling that the payment processor wants mobile payments to become a worldwide reality. It identifies an MRPI score of 60 or more as the inflection point at which a country becomes ready for mass adoption of mobile payments. The question then becomes: Even if a country does hit that inflection point, will it actually develop a robust mobile payments system?

MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index Inflection Point

MasterCard presupposes that there is a distinct need for mobile payments. As we have seen, that already is a reality in places like Kenya. But in developed countries, mobile payments are not based on need, but rather on creating extra value for the consumer. Whether mobile payments will deliver an easy, seamless ecosystem that creates that kind of value (such as deals, offers and data) remains to be seen.