Facebook re-design the feed

“In a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone, Facebook is re-organizing users’ homepages. The new look homepage will allow users to “see the things they’re most interested in.” The main elements that will power the new layout are, the revamped Friend Lists, the new Subscribe button, and a real-time ticker.

One notable change is that the verbiage “post” seems to be completely removed from the Facebook vocabulary. All mentions of content-formerly-known-as-posts are now labeled as “stories.”

The rationale behind the new layout ironically takes after newspapers, the very form of media that Facebook is slowly replacing. The release states that:

“When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that. Updates slide down in chronological order so it’s tough to zero in on what matters most.

In order to achieve this, some posts will be labeled as a “Top Story” with a blue mark the left hand corner”

Images will also be much larger and easier to view from the homepage. For those avid Facebook users, new stories will show above the “Top Stories” section”

See more at Search Engine Land

Facebook ‘planning new buttons’

“The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch something big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.”

See more at TechCrunch

Twitter announce new analytics

“Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.

The product provides three key benefits:

• Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
• See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
• Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration”

See more here 

The future of Twitter ads? Some interesting thoughts from John Battelle

“As I posted earlier, last week I had a chance to sit down with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We had a pretty focused chat on Twitter's news of the week, but I also got a number of questions in about Twitter's next generation of ad products.

As usual, Dick was frank where he could be, and demurred when I pushed too hard. (I'll be talking to him at length at Web 2 Summit next month.) However, a clear-enough picture emerged such that I might do some "thinking out loud" about where Twitter's ad platform is going. That, combined with some very well-placed sources who are in a position to know about Twitter's ad plans, gives me a chance to outline what, to the best of my knowledge, will be the next generation of Twitter's ad offerings.

I have to say, if the company pulls it off, the company is sitting on a Very Big Play. But if you read my post Twitter and the Ultimate Algorithm, you already knew that.

In that post, I laid out what I thought to be Twitter's biggest problem/opportunity: surfacing the right content, in the right context, to the right person at the right time. It's one of the largest computer science and social engineering problems on the web today, a fascinating opportunity to leverage what is becoming a real time database of folks' implicit and explicitly declared interests.”

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Twitter claims 100m active users

“Twitter has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day, CEO Dick Costolo revealed Thursday.

The microblogging service has a total of 200 million registered users, but how many of those are actually regulars has been open to debate for some time. Costolo, in an informal chat with tech reporters he called his “state of the union,” revealed that exactly half of them log in monthly — a number he says is up 82% since the beginning of the year.

The CEO offered a whole raft of statistics to prove that Twitter is healthy and growing like a weed — especially on mobile platforms. Some 55 million users log on to Twitter from their phone or tablet every month. Web-based users are on the rise, too: Twitter.com now sees 400 million visitors a month, up from 250 million at the beginning of the year, Costolo says.”

See more here

Facebook tests automatically grouping friends

“Facebook has had the Friend Lists feature for a long time, but few users actually know about it, and even fewer use it. Clearly the social networking giant is figuring out a way to fix the problem.

You also have smart lists that update themselves for coworkers, classmates, and local friends. You can add or remove anyone to these lists at any time.

(Coworker icon) This will be a list of friends who work with you.

(Classmate icon) This will be a list of friends who attend school with you.

(Local icon) This will be a list of people who live within 50 miles of your current city.

These lists appear to have two major uses. The first is for sharing content with: you can choose a list you created manually or one that was created for you from the drop-down menu in the bottom right of the “What’s on your mind?” status box. The second is for the News Feed: you will be able to filter your News Feed to only display content from one (or more?) of your friend lists.

These changes are clearly an answer to Google+ Circles. Two months ago, four Facebook engineers built Circle Hack, which lets you build friend lists on Facebook exactly how you build Circles on Google+.”

See more here 

Google buys restaurant guide Zagat

"Did you know there's a place in Menlo Park near the Safeway that has a 27 food rating?” one of my friends asked me that about two years ago, and I was struck because I immediately knew what it meant. Food rating... 30 point scale... Zagat. And the place... had to be good. With no other context, I instantly recognized and trusted Zagat's review and recommendation.

So, today, I'm thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.

With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry."

See more here

Nearly 50% of UK internet users also use mobile internet

“Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Some 45% of people surveyed said they made use of the net while out and about, compared with 31% in 2010.

The most rapid growth was among younger people, where 71% of internet-connected 16 to 24-year-olds used mobiles.

Domestic internet use also rose. According to the ONS, 77% of households now have access to a net connection.

That figure was up 4% from the previous year, representing the slowest rate of growth since the ONS survey began in 2006.”

See more here

Google promote ‘Offers’ on their search page

Google Inc promoted a Groupon-like daily deals offer on its home page on Wednesday for the first time, a rare instance of the Internet giant using its prized online real estate for advertising.

The world's No.1 Web-search engine launched a daily deals business in certain cities this year -- called Google Offers -- to try and counter Groupon's increasing draw for Web surfers.

Wednesday's daily deal was the first time a Google Offers product has been promoted on its minimalist website, and may signal an escalation of competition with Groupon -- which has filed for an IPO sources say could happen as soon as next month.

The pair are vying for advertising dollars from local businesses, such as restaurants and retail stores.

A short blurb beneath Google's sparse home page -- a valued window into a plethora of services from email to maps -- offered visitors $25 tickets to New York's American Museum of Natural History for the discounted price of $5.

See more here

Facebook kills Daily Deals, but keeps Checkin Deals

After quietly announcing they were killing off their nascent Deals product this afternoon, Facebook caused some confusion. You see, with the decision to kill off Facebook Places earlier in the week, everyone wondered what it meant for the location-based deals they launched alongside it? Those would remain alive, Facebook said at the time. But does today’s execution change anything?

No, says Facebook. Daily Deals are separate from Check-in Deals. The Check-in Deals will work a bit different with the end of Places, but the company will continue to support and enhance that product. Daily Deals are dead — and my email account thanks them for that.

See more here

Google users are losing interest in Google+

Google+ got a ton of buzz when it launched in June, and got a lot of visitors thanks to its integration across Google Web sites. But people don't seem to be sticking around very long after they check it out.

Earlier today, social marketing company DreamGrow posted some stats from Alexa that show a steep drop-off in Google+ traffic as a percentage of overall Google traffic. At the beginning of August, 2.89% of all Google.com traffic coming into Alexa's tracking system was coming from Google+. Now, it's only 1.84%. That's a drop of nearly one-third in less than a month. Alexa is not the most reliable way to track Web traffic, but numerous reports from Experian Hitwise show a similar pattern: lots of people are checking Google+ out, but they seem to be dropping out pretty fast. 

Anecdotally, it seems like the site is pretty active -- we're still getting dozens of notifications about new followers every day, and there are some interesting posts and debates showing up there. It's definitely not a dead zone.

See more here

Facebook’s Like button ruled illegal in one part of Germany

Germany has a long tradition of using laws to protect its citizen’s privacy. Home owners, for example, can ask Google to pixelate their houses in Street View (maybe so that their garden gnomes can stay incognito?). Facebook’s facial recognition feature has also come under fire in recent weeks. The latest target of Germany’s privacy advocates is Facebook’s ‘like’ button („Gefällt mir,“ in German). Thilo Weichert, the head of the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, argues that Internet sites based in his state that use the ‘like’ button are illegally sending this data to Facebook, which in turn uses it to illegally create a profile of its users web habits.

Updated: German websites based in the state of Schleswig-Holstein have until the end of September to remove Facebook‘s ‘like’ button or face a fine of up to 50,000 Euro.

See more here

Four things Facebook should tell every CMO – a provocative article

Engagement on the Facebook walls of leading brands is down 22%. Brands aren't playing for the long term. Engagement is the crown jewel of a community marketer. It's always talked about and drives the relevance and power of the platform. We reviewed public engagement data for 300 of the top brands on Facebook over a one-year period starting in July 2010. The results show a clear decline in average engagement.

Many are likely to blame Facebook, but it's more likely that marketers themselves have led to this decline. Dissing audiences with bad content, coupons, polls, contests, and boring filler is the way to blow off engagement in the long run, even if it makes a few campaign results shine in the short term.

Not all 300 brands saw a decline. Some brands were rock stars and beat the Street. The winners included brands like Deutsch, Renault, Hermes, Lowe's, and Chanel. These brands didn't have the most fans, but day in and day out, they are performing magic in keeping their fan base engaged.

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Google+: 10 things it does better

Google+, Google's new social networking service, might cautiously be called a hit. With 25 million visitors at last count, Google+ may well be the fastest-growing social network to launch thus far.


See the list here

How To Post Your Google+ Feed To Facebook And Twitter

One of the questions that we see a great deal of on our Search Engine Land Facebook Page and LinkedIn Group is “How can we get our Google+ feed to post in Facebook and Twitter?” The correct answer to that question is that no official way exists to have the networks play nice. However, with the use of extensions & add-ons, this feat can be accomplished.


See more here 

Bing Webmaster Tools Integrates Yahoo Traffic Data

Bing Webmaster Tools now has fully integrated in Yahoo’s traffic numbers as well. So if you have seen a spike in your Bing Webmaster Tools traffic charts, this is the reason why. 

See more here

Google Retires The Googlebot-News Bot

Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag.


See more here

Apple’s scary sales figures

Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2011 third quarter ended June 25, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $15.70 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.7 percent compared to 39.1 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 20.34 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 142 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 9.25 million iPads during the quarter, a 183 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 3.95 million Macs during the quarter, a 14 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.54 million iPods, a 20 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

See more here

Google+ Some stats from Hitwise

For the week ending July 19, 2011, the average visit time for Google+ was five minutes and fifty seconds up from four minutes and fifty two seconds the week prior. While the average visit time has increased since launch, in comparison, users spent an average of 21 minutes and fifty seven seconds on Facebook last week.

The combination of Google and Gmail accounted for over 50% of all upstream traffic to Google+ last week, with additional referrals from other Google properties like YouTube and Google Profiles. Facebook ranked 3rd among websites visited immediately before Google+, not surprising since many social network users tend to maintain multiple accounts, especially to experiment with new social networks.

The highest share of visits to Google+ since launch is from those between the ages of 25-34 and those between 18 and 34 were more likely than the overall online population to visit. The audience to Google+ tends to be more affluent, over-indexing for those earning a household income of $60k and over, particularly $150k and up.

See more here

How brands can target on location

LocalResponse shared some results from three of its recent campaigns, showing how consumers have reacted to the outreach tool. An automobile manufacturer targeted consumers who checked in on Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and many other services at and nearby events hosted by this company. By timing the tweets to the actual events and hitting only people nearby, the manufacturer was able to get a 22-percent click-through rate and a 10-percent increase in followers over a three-day campaign, with 58 percent converting to the mobile website.

A consumer packaged-goods company looking to promote holiday dishes made with their products sent in-store coupons and recipes to people checking in at major supermarkets and people tweeting about the company. The tweets got a 15-percent click-through rate, and more than half redeemed the coupon.

A fashion retailer looking to drive traffic at a new location and build word of mouth targeted people checking in at the grand opening as well as people nearby with an offer to win a $2,000 shopping spree. The offer got a 40 percent redemption rate and impressions and click-through rates doubled, thanks to viral sharing on Twitter.

See more here

Some examples of what Ford have done with their basic profile

“While Google has specifically requested that business users hold tight before playing around in business-consumer relations on Google+, a few companies have jumped the gun. Ford Motors is one company who took great advantage of the built-in features, even going as far as inviting users to step into a Hangout (a group video chat, and one of Google+’s distinguishing features) after a press conference. A captioning contest was also held where the +1 on the comments were the voting method.

Ford stated, though, that they’d “seen comments, both pro and con, about our presence” on Google+. Clearly, the mold for Google+ will be different than either Twitter or Facebook, but no one yet knows exactly what that difference will look like.”

See more here

What Google+ it means for brands

The launch of Google+ apps sends a powerful signal – the personalized web has begun. What this means is that the way information is structured and accessed will turn on the individual, or rather their personal profile which is a composite of all the data collected on the basis of what they have searched for and shared. What this means for brands and their marketing is enormous.

As the individual becomes the filter through which all information must pass, the onus for brands to be defined and social becomes acute. Here’s why.

Till now, search was outward facing. When you wanted to find something you entered its name and in most cases, relied on Google to provide a list of ranked links to that topic. But now search, and the way information is structured and accessed is becoming increasingly inward facing with the individual as the filter. That means when you visit a website the ads will reflect brands, topics or causes that you have demonstrated a past interest in through what you searched and shared. In short, your experience of the web is being built from the individual out, in circles

See more here

15bn apps have been downloaded from iTunes

Apple today announced that over 15 billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store by the more than 200 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users worldwide. The App Store offers more than 425,000 apps and developers have created an incredible array of over 100,000 native iPad apps

In just three years, the revolutionary App Store has grown to become the most exciting and successful software marketplace the world has ever seen,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Thank you to all of our amazing developers who have filled it with over 425,000 of the coolest apps and to our over 200 million iOS users for surpassing 15 billion downloads.”

See more here

Facebook announces 750m active users

Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook had surpassed 750 million monthly active users today at a product launch in Palo Alto.He said the company had declined to announce it earlier because it’s become focused on other metrics, including how actively users are sharing information.“Hopefully, we’ll get to a billion at some point,” he said. “I think people generally think that’s going to happen at some point.”

The announcement suggest that Facebook’s growth, at least in terms of raw monthly actives, is continuing at a linear, not exponential, pace. The company has been growing at just under 50 million monthly actives every two months since late 2009. It last said it was at 500 million monthly actives a year ago.” 
Facebook’s official user count metric is determined when a user has logged in to the site for at least a month.

See more here 

One Facebook Like for a retailer leads to an average of 20 more site visits

“Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month. However, by utilising this new service, brands can more rapidly build a fan base within Facebook and therefore drive more traffic to their website. Within retail each new fan acquired will drive an additional 20 visits to a retailer’s websites, which in turn will generate extra sales both online and offline.”

See more here

Hangout could be the breakout feature

One interesting feature that could really put Google+ ahead of Facebook is its “Hangouts” feature. Google+ Hangouts are a kind of mashup of video chatting through Gmail, and the old “chat rooms” of the days when AIM was our only chat option.

First, you click on the “Start a hangout” button, and it takes you to a separate webpage and enables your webcam and mic (while it's loading it even gives you a “fix your hair and make sure your mic works!” message, so you’re not taken by surprise). Then, you invite circles of friends, or individual friends to the Hangout room for the video chat session. You can create Hangouts of up to 10 people.

Google puts the image of the person who is talking at the center of the screen. If multiple people are talking at once it moves the one who is talking loudest to the center (that’s a good lesson for you kids out there).

See more here

Google+ - Google’s new social network

Google has learned the painful lesson of Buzz and has taken enormous pains to attend to privacy in the overall design and experience of the product.

It’s very easy to add people and organize them into standard or customized groups (see list below). This is one of the things that immediately impressed me, as well as the attention to privacy and selective sharing. There’s lots of control over who sees what updates, etc. You’re also able filter all messages and updates by category to see only those from “friends” or “professional” contacts. On the Plus homepage you can click down the list and get selective views from each of your groups.

Users can create and manage groups (“Circles”) very easily once you understand how Plus is organized. This takes relatively little time.

See more here

Google +1 Counts Appearing in Search Results

In what seems to be an attempt to further push its new Google +1 button, Google is beginning to show the number of +1's sites have received in the search results, whether or not you're logged in to a Google account and regardless of which browser you use.

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Roamler – mobile app lets people get paid for small, local tasks

Now in invitation-only beta, Roamler offers iPhone users interested in earning extra cash an easy way to tap into an ongoing stream of small assignments while they go about their daily lives. Examples might include taking a photograph of a potential retail site, for instance, or verifying a product’s placement on the local retail shelves. 

Roamler’s client brands make their requests with the company, and Roamler offers the work to its users based on their location. In exchange, they earn between EUR 2 and EUR 4 for successfully completing each mission. Users also gain points and badges for each assignment they successfully complete; the higher their resulting status, the more challenging assignments they get and the more money they earn. Roamler was launched earlier this month with Heineken and the City of Amsterdam as its first partners. The video below illustrates the company’s premise in more detail.

See more here

Mobile apps are now more widely used than the web

In 2011, for the first time, smartphone and tablet shipments exceed those of desktop and notebook shipments (source: Mary Meeker, KPCB, see slide 7).  This move means a new generation of consumers expects their smartphones and tablets to come with instant broadband connectively so they, too, can connect to the Internet.

In this report, Flurry compares how daily interactive consumption has changed over the last 12 months between the web (both desktop and mobile web) and mobile native apps.  For Internet consumption, we built a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa.  For mobile application usage, we used Flurry Analytics data, now exceeding 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications.  We estimate this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which we scaled-up accordingly for this analysis.

Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption.  This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms.

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Nokia announce the N9

With the N9, Nokia has “invented” a new gesture: the swipe. The phone has no home button (although you do get volume switches and the like on the side), so returning to the home screen is done by swiping in from any side of the screen. This could be annoying or awesome, depending on implementation. The N9’s familiar icon-driven interface is divided into three sections. Events shows you the feeds from your friends’ social networks, along with notifications. A multitasking view shows an Exposé-style tiled view of all open apps, and the applications view shows all your apps as icons.

Impressive, but the outside is even better. Gone is the busy, miniature-computer styling of previous Nokia smartphones. This thing is a sleek marriage of a giant 3.9-inch 854 x 480 AMOLED Gorilla Glass screen curving gently out from a polycarbonate unibody body. It’s like a giant iPod Nano, in a very good way.

If Nokia can knock out phones this good with Microsoft’s lovely Windows Phone 7, then things might not be as bleak as they seemed. Available soon, price to be announced.

See more at Wired and the official site

Unofficial Facebook site InsideFacebook announce that Facebook is losing users in mature markets

Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data service.

Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year.

But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual.

The company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. In contrast, it grew by at least 20 million new users over the typical month in the past 12; while there have been a few months that have registered lower growth numbers, they have not been back to back.

Why the drop? Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000. If these countries — most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago — had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month.

See more here

Google Introduces Me On the Web

Google introduced a new feature available in your Google Dashboard called Me on the Web. It's officially announced purpose is to "help understand and manage what people see when they search for you on Google.Google suggests this tool will help make it easier to monitor your identity on the Web and consider this a next step in providing options to protect your identity.

Offering assistance for setting up search alerts, managing your online identity and helping you remove unwanted content, this service sounds altruistic enough. With the recommendation Google recently gave suggesting web content authors use rel=author and rel=me attributes, this announcement seems like a natural follow-up idea.  However, the new Dashboard section is merely links to how-to's help articles and different interface to Google Alerts, which are not new.

The second step to managing your identity, according to Google's help topic, is to create a Google profile. In fact, if you don't have a Google profile, you can't use "Me on the Web," because it reports information you entered on your Google profile.

From Facebook-like profiles to their +1 button, it's no secret that Google has ambitions of being more social. Getting a profile is the first step. And Google is trying every reason to get people to sign up for one.

See more here 

To Make Search Faster, Google Speeds up the Web

For Google, faster search means a better experience for consumers. But making search faster means speeding up the web as well. Today Google unveiled a host of new enhancements for search, including search by image and new tools to make mobile queries easier. But it also is attempting to make the web itself faster by pre-loading web pages in search results for those using Google's Chrome browser or other browsers with a special plug-in.


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Google Voice Search: You Can Hear Me Now

Google brought mobile innovations to the desktop Tuesday with the rollout of a variety of technologies -- the most innovative: voice search. At an event in San Francisco, Mike Cohen, Google manager for speech technology, said mobile devices have spurred the need for these features, even on the desktop. The search engine processes years of non-stop speech daily. 


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Google Voice Search & Search By Image Comes To Desktops

Mobile innovation is fueling Google’s search offerings for the desktop, as the company today announced two new search interfaces — Voice and Image — inspired by mobile Voice Search and Google Goggles, respectively.

With Voice Search for the desktop, which is a feature of the Chrome browser, users click a microphone icon in the search box, and then speak into their computer’s microphone.

Google Search by Image for the desktop, part of Google Image Search, builds upon the image-recognition technology the company previously rolled out for mobile in Google Goggles. As in Goggles, users input an image, and Google returns results it believes are related to that image, along with similar images. Users select an image by dragging and dropping, uploading, or inputting an image URL. Installing a Chrome or Firefox extension enables searching by image by right clicking on the image on the Web.


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Survey: Print Yellow Pages More Trusted Than Search Engine & Social Networks

Who still uses yellow pages? San Francisco has even banned delivery without permission, assuming no one wants them. But a yellow pages industry group is pushing back in part with a new survey saying yellow pages are more trusted, more widely used and perceived by consumers to be more accurate when it comes to local information than search engines and social networks. 


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Does Re-targeting Show a Lack of Respect for Our Customers?

An Opinion... Stalking Them on the Web May Not Be Good for Your Brand 


See the article here

Have you seen Qwiki?

Qwiki's goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.


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A survey says over half of smartphone owners say their phone is their life

As mobile technology continues to evolve, a majority of smartphone users are fully integrating their devices into every aspect of their daily lives. According to a recent smartphone survey conducted by Prosper Mobile Insights™ among smartphone users on their devices, 52.9% say they utilize all of the functions of their smartphones—it’s their life. 30.4% say they use the basic functions of their smartphones plus some applications and 16.7% only use their smartphones for calling, texting and emailing.

With all the unique features of smartphones, texting (21.6%), Internet (16.7%) and email (15.7%) are the top functions smartphone users say they cannot live without. Calling features (7.8%), GPS (6.9%) and Facebook (5.9%) are also necessities to some.

With new technology, however, comes new concerns, and the top privacy issue among smartphone users is location tracking, followed closely by unauthorized access to personal information

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Nokia is bringing the e-wallet to India

Handset maker Nokia is looking for a pan India coverage for its Nokia Money, the mobile payment services enabling consumers to pay directly from their Nokia mobile phones in India, a top official said.

"We are now planning for a pan India coverage for our Nokia Money this year," Nokia Mobile Financial Services Director, Gerhard Romen told media.

The e-wallet services of the firm is currently available in Mumbai, Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), Nasik, Pune, Chennai and Chandigarh and the company will soon commence its operations in Surat, Baroda, Rajkot, Lucknow, Kanpur, Kochi and Kozhikode, he said.

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Apple’s new Cloud and operating system

Apple® today introduced iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac® or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

The free iCloud services include:

The former MobileMe® services—Contacts, Calendar and Mail—all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.

The App Store™ and iBookstore℠ now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.

See more here