¿Por qué son tan caros los productos de Apple?

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Impresionante mercado de smartphones en China

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Nintendo entra al mercado smartphone

Si Nintendo hace juegos para móviles, ¿qué puede aprender de Sony y Microsoft?
-"No es tan simple permitir que Mario pueda jugarse en un teléfono inteligente", dice el presidente Satoru Iwata. Entonces, ¿qué han hecho los rivales?


¿Cómo podría también traer Nintendo Mario y otros personajes populares a las tabletas y teléfonos inteligentes?
Empiece por lo obvio : Nintendo ya hace que los juegos móviles. Nadie mantiene Sus 3DS atados a un televisor, después de ave, pero no tiene los juegos móviles para teléfonos inteligentes y tabletas.

Ese cambio junio. La compañía ha noqueado Tradicionalmente vuelta preguntas acerca de tomar su establo de marcas de juego para los dispositivos de otros fabricantes, pero como Nintendo ha anunciado sus últimos resultados financieros de esta semana, se produjo un marcado cambio de tono en los comentarios del presidente Satoru Iwata.

" Estamos pensando en una nueva estructura de negocio. Dada la expansión de los dispositivos inteligentes, estamos naturalmente estudiando cómo los dispositivos inteligentes se pueden usar para hacer crecer el juego para un jugador negocio. No es tan simple como permitir Mario para moverse en un teléfono inteligente ", que dijo en una conferencia de prensa en Osaka, Acuer do a Bloomberg.

"No podemos continuar con un negocio sin ganar. Debemos adoptar un enfoque escéptico Si podemos silencio simplemente hacer los jugadores del juego, para ofrecerlas en la misma forma que en el pasado por ¥ 20.000 o 30.000 yenes, y venta de títulos por un par de miles de yenes cada uno. "

Lo que una estrategia ganadora también podría ser similar para Nintendo? Una forma de comenzar es mediante el examen de lo que sus dos principales rivales en el mercado de las consolas, Sony y Microsoft han estado haciendo en los teléfonos inteligentes y las tabletas, con lecciones que aprender sobre varias estrategias posibles.

Haga su propio hardware (¿y software?)

El más obvio primero. Sony hace que los teléfonos inteligentes - que volvió a comprar la otra mitad de Sony Ericsson en 2011 y ha publicado ya varios teléfonos Android, Aunque recientemente la compañía dijo que estaba " explorando " una alianza con Microsoft para hacer un Windows Phone. Por lo tanto, Sony hace tabletas basadas en Android, con su marca PlayStation una parte clave de los dispositivos como el Sony Tablet S.

Microsoft? Bueno, Windows Phone, que tiene un pequeño pero creciente cuota de mercado de teléfonos inteligentes, y Windows 8 para tabletas representan su juego en el software móvil, y por lo tanto la empresa vende sus propias tabletas Surface. Es tan a punto de comprar Nokia, para traer un fabricante de teléfonos inteligentes en el local.

Programas de rendimiento de ambas empresas hicieron es increíblemente difícil de competir a nivel mundial con Apple y Samsung en el frente del hardware, pero no imposible para labrarse su propio pedazo del mercado. A Nintendo teléfono tiene los ingredientes de un nicho ( Aunque la idea ha sido considerado CLARAMENTE ), pero una tableta Nintendo junio tienen un atractivo más amplio. No menos importante, porque la empresa tiene dos (relacionados) posibles ángulos : los jugadores, y los niños.

Una tableta de Nintendo para los niños, con juegos exclusivos y algunas ofertas inteligentes para otros tipos de aplicaciones y el contenido (vídeo y aplicaciones educativas en particular) ¿Podría ser un producto muy fuerte. Rumores alimentados con Twitter cargan noviembre qué la empresa de trabajo sobre qué es exactamente este tipo de producto tenía el anillo de un engaño, pero es una estrategia plausible.

Software- sabio, Nintendo podría ir a la ruta Amazon y Android " tenedor " para crear su propio sistema operativo, o seguir la estrategia de Sony de centrarse en sus propios servicios y los juegos que se ejecutan en el software estándar de Android. Próxima tableta para niños DreamTab DreamWorks es digno de estudio por la forma en que se integra personajes - desde películas en su caso - en el sistema operativo.


Juegos fueron un punto de venta para el Sony Tablet S.

Lleve sus juegos a dispositivos de otras compañías

Si Nintendo opta contra de entrar en el smartphone y / o mercado de las tabletas con su propio hardware, podría liberar (o licencia) de algunos de sus juegos para dispositivos de otras compañías.

Ha lanzado Microsoft Kinectimals para iOS y Android, por ejemplo, así como juego de puzzle Wordament y la Sra. Splosion Man a partir de su estudio Twisted Pixel. Tentáculos de juegos de Windows Phone : Introduzca el Dolphin se ha lanzado por lo tanto para iOS y Android. Por ahora, Halo spin-off de Halo: Asalto Spartan sigue siendo exclusivo al dispositivo con Windows.

Sony ha lanzado un puñado de juegos para iOS, incluyendo libre-a- juego de Ratchet & Clank : Antes de que el Nexus, y Quest Knack - El Últimos atar en PlayStation 4 lanzamiento del título Knack. La compañía ha lanzado por lo tanto, una aplicación paraguas llamado PlayStation All-Stars Islandia - una asociación con Coca -Cola hizo incluye mini-juegos basados ​​en marcas como Uncharted, Gravity Rush y LittleBigPlanet.

Esa es una estrategia posible para Nintendo : los teléfonos inteligentes y las tabletas como un lugar para que los spin- offs de sus famosas marcas, para promover los juegos de consola que permanecen exclusiva a sus propios recursos. Se cuenta con los fondos para rodar unos cuantos estudios móviles con talento y darles su cabeza con algunos de sus personajes.

Sony con Android tan junio Nintendo ofrece un modelo para estudiar. No acaba de lanzar sus propios juegos para otras empresas y ' smartphones Android y tabletas. Se puso en marcha un par de Initiativen llamado PlayStation Mobile y PlayStation Certified.

La primera es la esencia propia tienda de aplicaciones de Sony para dispositivos Android, mientras que el segundo es un esquema para certificar los dispositivos Android de otras compañías como compatible con ella. La mayoría de los dispositivos de la lista certificada son hechas por Sony, sostenido, HTC, Fujitsu, Alcatel y Wikipad pero tan característica. Una tienda de juegos móviles de gestión de Nintendo en los dispositivos certificados por Nintendo es una posibilidad.


Kinectimals de Microsoft ha merodeado hacia iOS y Android.

Piense en una segunda pantalla...

Una vez más, la respuesta obvia para el título es lo hizo Nintendo ya está pensando en segundos las pantallas y los juegos de azar : su consola Wii U, que construye alrededor de la idea, aunque no parece que aún no han completado al enorme punto de venta. Pero eso está basado en el controlador hizo naves con la consola. ¿Cómo sobre el uso de los dispositivos que ya están en millones de bolsillos gamers, o en su sofá?

Tanto Sony PlayStation 4 y Xbox Uno de Microsoft tenían aplicaciones segundos de pantalla disponible para iOS y Android whenthey Lanzada (y los dispositivos de Windows para Xbox Uno también, por supuesto). PlayStation App permite a los propietarios PS4 para comprobar la actividad de sus amigos, chatear, usar su dispositivo como un teclado, y navegar por la PlayStation Store y comprar juegos para "empujar " a la consola.

Xbox Uno de Smart Glass - una nueva versión de una aplicación existente para Xbox 360 - ofrece características similares, así como actuar como un control remoto con pantalla táctil para la Xbox Uno Mismo, incluyendo navegar por la web. Ambas aplicaciones se basan en la suposición sensibles hizo a. ) Los jugadores tendrán un smartphone y / o tableta cerrará mientras juega en su consola, y lo hizo b. ) ¿Se dispositivo probablemente será hecha por alguien más.

La diversión en aplicaciones de segunda pantalla es en parte creativa. ¿Qué tipo de partido -play juego podría hacer para Nintendo Wii U no tiene todo el mundo en la sala de estar jugando en sus teléfonos inteligentes, por ejemplo? Pero la segunda selección no tiene que estar en la misma habitación al mismo tiempo que la consola se está jugando : ¿qué podría también ser capaz de hacer en su teléfono cae en momentos de ocio en el día hizo tiene que afectar, en el juego que jugar en tu Wii U en la noche?

Tradicionalmente, se espera que Nintendo para perseguir este tipo de cosas a través de su familia de dispositivos portátiles DS, por lo que la estrategia de junio no apeló. Pero ni siquiera pensar en la red de la empresa Miiverse social, sus avatares Mii y su servicio de Share, el atractivo de un smartphone y la aplicación de la tableta parece clara.


Aplicación Xbox Uno Vidrio inteligente de Microsoft para Android.

O suba con algunas ideas más...

Comentarios de Satoru Iwata esta semana dejan claro qué Nintendo está considerando si su estrategia existente es adecuado para el propósito en un mundo de teléfonos inteligentes y tabletas. No debería haber ninguna escasez de ideas sobre lo que debe hacer a continuación, aunque algunos son extravagantes.

Tal vez a la huelga acuerdo exclusivo con Apple y lanzar un controlador iPhone MFi adecuada con un paquete de juegos clásicos? Tal equipo con Súper Celular y Animal Crossing se convierten en un juego móvil free-to-play hizo las arregla para hacer ollas de dinero de las compras in-app sin enfurecer a sus fans (nota: duro).

Swerve juego por ahora y hacer montones de dinero en efectivo de Mario pegatinas en aplicaciones de mensajería populares - que no busca un gran salto incursionando en anteriores nombres de Nintendo en ringtones. ¿O algo más?

¿Cuál es el lugar donde me dirijo esto a usted: si Nintendo hiciera más en torno a los teléfonos inteligentes y las tabletas, lo que debería hacer, y / o lo que usted como jugador gustaría ver lo que hace? ¿O debiera apoyar la prensa de la compañía con su estrategia a la familia Wii U y DS?

La sección de comentarios está abierto para usted sugiera una "nueva estructura de negocio " para Iwata y sus colegas...

The Guardian

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Silicon Valley, ayer y hoy

Silicon Valley Lost, And Found

Kim-Mai Cuttler - TechCrunch

Silicon Valley is a place that is just as much about people reinventing themselves as it is about people reinventing industries.

As a new year turns, it’s time to go through that silly (but actually necessary) exercise of pausing to reflect. In a world of endless e-mail and distractions, it’s hard to remember where we came from, or where we are collectively going. For better and worse, Silicon Valley suffers from a perpetual loss of memory.

I have three simple stories about reinvention, that hopefully present a historical arc of this place. They belong to my family. For three generations, we have come here — before the orchards were cut down for silicon chip factories, before the chip makers left for Asia, before the dot-com era transformed warehouses into startup offices and before drones and Bitcoin.

1930s-1960s: Hard Sciences

Even though the “Silicon Valley” moniker only came into existence in the 1970s, this place’s history as a technology hub is about a century old. The establishment of Stanford and the University of California system along with generous federal research funding formed an initial pool of talent in the 1930s through 50s.

After escaping Russian pogroms as persecuted Jews during the turn of the 20th century, my great-grandparents managed to make it to Ellis Island. To make ends meet during the Great Depression, they ran a grocery and Jewish deli in Los Angeles. My grandfather used to tell me stories of 5-cent hamburgers and being cast as a Liszt-piano playing extra in the Frank Sinatra film “Anchors Aweigh” when he was a teenager.

They never had much, so my grandfather ran out of money after four quarters of college and had to drop out of Stanford. He left to join a small electronics company back in Los Angeles to work on frequency meters and to help the family out with money.

It took him about nine years to come back and finish. It was a setback, but along the way he met my grandmother. He didn’t get his bachelor’s degree until he was 30 — an age that some people might be written off in this forever youth-obsessed industry.

But he went onto become one of a few elite physicists that designed the world’s most accurate timepieces. In the 1970s, his atomic clocks were flown around the world to prove parts of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — the idea that time does slow down when you move closer to a strong source of gravity.

In 1966, when Dave Packard enlisted my grandfather to be part of the founding team for HP Labs, Packard said something to the effect of, “We have drunk from the Well of Knowledge for many years. It’s now time to return something to that well.” While it’s easy to look at photo-sharing apps or social, mobile, local concepts and say that Silicon Valley is just pushing around eyeballs for ad dollars, this ambition lingers. It’s the same kind of thinking that fuels Google X’s moonshots and SpaceX rockets past the earth’s stratosphere.

In classic Valley fashion, my grandfather never really accumulated too many possessions beyond some antique clocks because of his fascination with ultra-precise time-keeping. Ever the engineer, he would do quality assurance on Thanksgiving dinners by testing a prototype turkey ahead of time. Then after a BART crash in Fremont in the 1970s, he was asked to design a better system that would prevent train blockages. So in a way, he contributed to both the immaterial and very physical fabric that binds Silicon Valley together.

The point of bringing his story up is that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. The consumer Internet era owes itself to the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, which then owe themselves back to basic research efforts and funding that formed the foundation of Silicon Valley back in the 1930s and 40s.

Around the time of my grandfather’s death, his clocks were providing as much as 80 percent of the data used to support International Atomic Time. IAT is the basis of Coordinated Universal Time or UTC, the standard upon which Internet communications are synchronized. Back in the 1990s, even Netscape kept a couple of atomic clocks in their offices. Great technical contributions can happen later in life, even though it often seems like VCs are always hunting for the next naively determined Harvard or Stanford dropout.

Even until my grandfather died of a heart attack while hiking in Big Basin at the age of 78, he was working. He never retired because he loved what he did.

1965-1995: The PC era and a new wave of immigrants

Silicon Valley was mostly orchards in the 1950s.

In 1965, a law was signed that would change the face of Silicon Valley forever. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 reversed decades of discriminatory quotas against immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Because of war, political instability, repression or weak economic growth, Silicon Valley became a magnet for technically-skilled immigrants from East Asia, India and the former Soviet Union. This place prospered because corrupt and authoritarian regimes cost these countries their best resource — their people. At that time, India and China’s governments were barely two decades old and had yet to make the economic reforms necessary to create the kind of sustained growth that now makes them attractive markets to start companies in.

So given the choice, the U.S. was often a no brainer at that time. My mother was part of this wave, although she came as a war refugee instead of a technically-skilled migrant favored by the 1965 law.

She and her seven siblings (two of whom died in childhood) grew up in the bustle of 1960s Saigon. They grew up with pigs and chickens and episodes of the original Star Trek with Kirk and Spock, even as firefights and bombs often erupted on the outskirts of the city.

By 1974, it became clear that the American-backed government in South Vietnam was not going to last, so my mother left for Australia on her own at 18 and enrolled in the University of New South Wales. The hardest part of being there was not about being one of the very few women studying computer science in the 1970s (though imagine that!) The hardest part was that she lost contact with her family. For several months, she was alone. As Viet Cong forces rolled into Saigon, she had no idea if her sisters and parents were alive. Many of the other students in her program became depressed or suicidal.

Fortunately, my immediate family was lucky enough to make it out one day in 1975. They carried as much gold as they could in the linings of their clothing and discreetly snuck down bullethole-ridden streets. They sought out one of the last remaining aircraft carriers docked in the city. There was little time. While being ferried to the carrier, my aunts saw other refugees fall off the packed boats and drown. Still other high school classmates of my mother’s left on smaller boats only to be attacked by Thai pirates, who robbed and raped those on-board.

Even after crossing part of the Pacific to a Guam refugee camp, it still hadn’t hit them that they were never going back. It’s been almost 40 years now.

When my mother finished up in Australia and decided to reunite with the rest of the family in the U.S., they looked for a place to put down roots.

One morning in 1979, my mom opened the Sydney Morning Herald and there was this article in the business section about a place called “Silicon Valley.” It described a place full of industrial parks, burgeoning companies and most importantly, opportunity.

On a visit the following year, she and my grandfather, who barely spoke a word of English, bought Greyhound tickets all the way to California from Michigan. When she got here, she went up and down the peninsula, visiting Advanced Micro Devices and Stanford.

Somehow she knew in her bones that this was the place. My mom and her family crammed themselves into a one-bedroom apartment in Alameda until they could scrape together enough money to move closer to the heart of the Valley.

Even then, they couldn’t afford a car, so my aunts took the county bus system around the peninsula. They used the public buses like tourists, soaking in everything about their new country. One afternoon while riding a bus, my aunt saw that she was coming up on Hewlett-Packard’s corporate headquarters in Palo Alto. She stopped the bus, marched straight to the reception desk and asked if there was an HR person around. Then she demanded an interview on the spot. A week later she had a job.

Between the six sisters, they eventually saved up enough money to buy a house in San Jose, when real estate prices were still reasonable in the 1980s. Eventually, when they each started families, they moved into the same Cupertino neighborhood. This wasn’t a fact that I fully understood or appreciated until I lived in Vietnam in my early 20s — that many extended Vietnamese families all live in the same village.

Even though they lost their homeland, my mom and her sisters recreated their own village on the other side of the world.

With great loss came the chance for reinvention.

But it transformed into suburbs and industrial parks over the next generation.

1990s-onward: Web 1.0 and 2.0

I am not a child of the Great Depression nor am I a war refugee. I’m incredibly humbled by what my parents and grandparents have been able to do.

When I was younger, I took this place for granted. My dad spent his weekends with soldering irons and my high school friends literally lugged their desktop computers around the neighborhood to have LAN parties.

As a child, something seemed dead to me about the tech industry in the 1980s and early 1990s. Before the first Internet bubble, the Valley’s leading companies had tens of thousands of employees. It was more Dilbert and Office Space than phone phreaks and hackers. Take Your Children To Work Day meant seeing a sea of bland cubicles submerged beneath seven to ten layers of corporate management. You couldn’t be two people and impact 10 million users then. Across the city where I grew up, Apple was shuttering its old offices left and right because it was the early 1990s. Microsoft was winning.

Around that time, there was the ugly proxy battle over the fate of Hewlett-Packard, one of the foundational companies of Silicon Valley and the one to which my family gave more than 100 years of collective service. The Hewlett family lost, the HP-Compaq merger went through, and the soul of a once great company died. While it’s easy to make fun of older companies in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to remember that they were once hungry and foolish too. Still, even though HP was lost, many other great companies like Google and Apple prospered in its place. Silicon Valley moved on.

I did too. Being a simultaneously naive and jaded teenager, I didn’t pursue what should have been a more technically inclined path and instead decided to be a journalist.

After university, editing my college newspaper and a string of decent internships, I left the Bay Area to go and live on three other continents. I went and lived in Vietnam, where I met my grandmother’s estranged sister. They last saw each other in 1954, when my grandmother decided to side with the U.S.-backed Southern Vietnamese government while her sister became a loyal Communist in the North. They exchanged some 50 years of letters filled with everything from mundane life updates to arguments about the relative merits of Communism and capitalism, which sometimes angered my grandmother to no end.

Then I ended up working in financial journalism in London, thinking that a foreign posting was a great escape from the bland industrial parks, highways and strip malls of California. But during the time I was away, my grandfather and maternal grandmother, who survived several decades of war and played a huge role in raising me, passed away. I missed them.

Working with bankers and traders also wasn’t the same as dealing with founders, engineers and hackers day in and day out. People were sharp, but they didn’t love their work — not the way my grandfather or dad did. Jobs in banking were a means to accumulate year-end bonuses and holidays. They didn’t spend their spare time messing with a half-dozen oscilloscopes or building makeshift telescopes.

There is a line in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that says, “The end of all our exploring shall be to arrive where we started and know the place as if for the first time.” So after the 2008 financial crash and several years away, I came home and became a tech journalist.

Ceaseless Changing

Some things are different from a generation or two ago. The more power and wealth the technology industry generates and the more it becomes embedded in everyday life, the more it attracts people who desire the trappings of wealth and power over the act of building and creating itself.

Through glamorizing acquisitions and playing up industry personalities, TechCrunch has played no small part in this. It’s a double-edged sword: by celebrating entrepreneurship, more people are emboldened to try it than ever before. On the whole, it’s probably a good thing for many more experiments to happen and for more people to take agency in their own lives. But it also means that we will have more prospective founders doing it for the ends, rather than the means or the journey.

The first contract Hewlett-Packard ever closed as a startup was one to build audio oscillators for the Disney movie Fantasia. Their products were several layers removed from the end consumer experience, so you really had to be a geek if you were going to work here. There was not much glamour or fame to be had. No Fortune or Forbes covers. No eight- or nine-figure exits. No hordes of Twitter or Instagram followers.

Today, technology companies like Facebook are replacing TV and movies. They are our new cultural mediums.

So in the same way that the medium influences the message, the medium also influences the kinds of people who choose to work in this industry. That’s why the Valley sometimes feels increasingly like the entertainment industry, with users shuttling from app to app like the hot restaurant or club opening of the week.

Secondly, the Valley is now a global mindset, not a single geographic destination. While it is still hard to find an ecosystem in the world that is nearly as supportive or as dense as Silicon Valley, the gap between here and communities elsewhere is narrowing.

The no-brainer decision that my mother made to come to the U.S. a generation ago is not so clear anymore. Beijing is an equally fascinating and active hub to start a company in. Many of the startups I meet now are distributed from the beginning, with offices here and in Bangalore, Slovenia, Pakistan, Finland and elsewhere. Silicon Valley is one very strong node among many.

Thirdly, I live in San Francisco and not the Peninsula, mirroring the Valley’s general move north into the city and this generation’s desire to live in urban cities over suburban areas. This urban shift has created painful consequences for San Francisco, while creating opportunities for diversification in other tech hubs like New York and Berlin. If software is eating the world, then the technology industry is eating more of the Bay Area.

This last year has been the most difficult and we need to find a more constructive way for San Francisco to accommodate people that want to be here and for the city to retain its quirkiness and diversity. With my own rent more than doubling over the last few years, I probably won’t be able to stay here long-term, either. Unless the city boosts the housing stock dramatically, San Francisco will increasingly become a city solely for the very young and the very rich.

However, in other ways, what drew my mother and my grandfather here is very much alive. A desire for non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration still exists in certain entrepreneurs here. The 150-year-old Gold Rush mentality lingers on in the engineers who show up every year from all over the world to try their luck at starting new companies. The Valley’s unique cultural language around materialism and status persists. While it does get flashier every year, there is still a certain discretion about being well-dressed or having a nice car here, at least compared to New York or Los Angeles.

That’s because this place is still such a lottery. Beneath the hard work is a hell of a lot of luck. Some years, you are up. Other years, you are down. One month, you are running the Valley’s most celebrated company. And the next, you are everyone’s favorite punching bag. Sometimes you raise a motherlode of a Series B, and a year later the entire landscape has changed around you and you’re screwed.

Everyone engaged in the act of changing the world is self-delusional on some level. Some small percentage of the time, the delusional succeed. That is part of the hits-driven nature of the venture business. This is the entrepreneur-as-hero myth that has become necessary to perpetuate the ecosystem here.

Few companies end up being wildly successful. Some fail outright. But most end up in some stomach-churning netherworld in-between. Invariably, all these startups are having problems hiring good engineers. The pool of job candidates is so tight many founders I know are having to scour universities around the rest of the country or hire abroad.

So like my mother and grandfather, who showed up here in their twenties, the young arrive all over again, even though they can barely afford the security deposits on apartments.

Once and young, they come, hungry to walk that tenuous line between self-awareness and self-delusion necessary for the act of creation.

As they reinvent themselves, they reinvent this place just the way my parents and grandparents did. We are lost and then found once more.

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Las tablets crecieron a costa de las PC

Tablets To Grow 53.4% This Year, Says Gartner, As The Traditional PC declines 11.2% [Updated]

by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)

The tablet category is continuing to eat the PC’s lunch, albeit it’s a large lunch so the feast is taking a while. Analyst Gartner expects worldwide tablet shipments to grow 42.7% 53.4% [Gartner has issued a correction to its earlier figures] this year, with shipments reaching 184 million units. And while traditional PCs are still shipping a lot more units (303,100 forecast for this year), those shipments are continuing to decline — predicted to be down 11.2% on 2012 shipments.

That’s lower even than Gartner’s prior forecast, back in April, when it said it expected PCs to decline 7.3% this year.

Growth in the so-called ultramobile category — aka lightweight laptops and portables running a full desktop OS such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet – is offsetting the traditional PC decline somewhat. But even adding in that category, overall PCs plus ultramobiles are forecast to decline 8.4% this year. Gartner previously said it expects tablets to be outshipping desktop computers and ultramobiles combined by 2017.

By 2014, it now expects the gap between traditional PCs and tablet shipments to have narrowed to just over 18,000 more PCs than tablets shipped, although it expects ultramobiles to have grown to close to 40,000 units shipped by then (up from around 18,600 this year).

Growth in the ultramobile category will be down to serving users that need to “balance work and play” considerations in a single device, said Gartner — thereby allowing hybrid ultramobiles to step in and offer the functionality of a PC in the form factor of a tablet.

Turning to tablets proper, smaller and cheaper is the order of the day — with consumers’ preference for the 7-inch form factor causing continued price decline in premium tablets. The raft of cheaper priced tablet hardware — from the likes of Amazon with its Kindle Fire line and Google with its Nexus-branded slates — is clearly helping to underpin overall tablet growth, taking share away from Apple’s more expensive iPad line.

Smaller tablets are also going to put a dent in the smartphone’s holiday appeal, according to Gartner. ”Continuing on the trend we saw last year, we expect this holiday season to be all about smaller tablets as even the long-term holiday favourite — the smartphone — loses its appeal,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

More generally, while the mobile phone market is expected to continue to experience steady growth, Gartner is calling time on the “opportunity for high average selling price (ASP) smartphones”. It expects growth in the mobile segment to be powered by mid-tier smartphones in mature markets, and low-end Android smartphones in emerging markets. So again, cheap devices are winning out. The wider point there is that many developed markets are saturated — pushing smartphone growth to emerging countries where lower ASP devices are required.

Gartner’s forecast for worldwide device shipments by operating system this year and next (rounded up percentage marketshares below) shows Android continuing to build out its empire — helped by growth in cheaper tablets and smartphones. Android will be approaching a half-market share across all the device types by 2014, while Windows/Windows Phone and iOS/Mac OS manage only marginal growth:

2013

• Android 38%
• Windows 14%
• iOS/Mac OS 12%
• RIM 1 %
• Others 35%

2014

• Android 45%
• Windows 15%
• iOS/Mac OS 14%
• RIM 0.8%
• Others 26%

On the wearables front, Gartner expects the market opportunity to remain primarily about companion devices that are used in conjunction with mobile phones, rather than replacing them. Gartner predicts that less than 1% of consumers will replace their mobile phones with a combination of a wearable device and a tablet by 2017.

“In the short term, we expect consumers to look at wearables as nice to have rather than a ‘must have’, leaving smartphones to play the role of our faithful companion throughout the day,” added Milanesi. ”For wearables to be successful, they need to add to the user experience by complementing and enhancing what other devices already offer. They also need to be stylish yet practical, and most of all hit the right price.”

TechCrunch

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Como salvar a Blackberry

A Way To Save BlackBerry

Editor’s note: Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, a hacker who was convicted of hacking AT&T’s iPad customer information service and sentenced to 41 months in prison. Since June, he has sent TechCrunch two other essays from prison, “The Tiger And The Cicada” and “State Machinery For State Machines.”

The first smartphone I owned was a Nokia Communicator, which I chose because the C++ dev kit gave me the most freedom. When the iPhone appeared I did not switch, because mandatory App Store signing to execute code seemed like a major step in the war on general computation. Eventually I rid myself of Nokia and got an Android acting upon a moral imperative.

Many hackers adhere to the ideology of Richard Stallman. We believe that the use of free software (that is software whose source can be viewed, altered and distributed by all of its users) is morally advantageous. We subject ourselves to “inferior” platforms in exchange for more liberty. Android is not free software, but has many free software components, so it is the most free for the time being.

BlackBerry is a flickering candle about to be snuffed, but hope yet lies in the baptismal flame of liberty.

Stallman himself refuses to carry a cellphone because none of them are free software and they have government back doors. His ascetic devotion to our cause is noble, but not realistic for those of us who find mobile devices irreplaceable tools for improving our incomes and sex lives. We less devout followers of the Church of Emacs settle for the most free platform in lieu of true freedom.

I hate Android’s UI/UX cesspool and Google’s growing surveillance state. There are vast numbers of us sharing that sentiment, and all of us could be happy BlackBerry users. BlackBerry would merely have to perform a single revolutionary act: the liberation of mobile users and developers. Release every line of source under the GPLv3. Open up the specs for every hardware component and let the community build their own devices without NSA or corporate backdoors. Our gratitude and fealty will show themselves in BlackBerry’s quarterly earnings reports.

BlackBerry is a flickering candle about to be snuffed, but hope yet lies in the baptismal flame of liberty. With nothing left to lose, perhaps BlackBerry will have the courage to disrupt its competitors and world governments.

[Image: Flickr / Brian Gautreau]

TechCrunch

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La revolución de las tablets indias

India’s tablet revolution will change the world sooner than you think
By Vivek Wadhwa
Vivek Wadhwa is the vice president of innovation and research at Singularity University, and fellow at Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University.

Just a swipe away from a revolution. Reuters/Parivartan Sharma

This originally appeared on LinkedIn. You can follow Vivek Wadhwa here. 

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I wrote this article for Times of India. It is India-focused, but the same lessons apply everywhere. Cheap tablets, connectivity, and social media have already fomented revolutions in Middle East. They are causing China to have a harder time controlling its restive population and allowing the world’s children to rise above the fears and biases of their parents. They will open up new technology possibilities and shake up industries—even in the developed world. Wait and see how innovation from the East soon reaches the West.

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Watching the news from India, one could easily conclude that the country has become more corrupt and its men have become more violent. Sadly, corruption and abuse of women aren’t new to India. Corruption is a legacy of the British Raj. Women all over the world are abused. What has changed is the ability of India’s normally docile middle-class and its youth to speak up and demand change. That is what technology has made possible.

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The technologies that allowed people to shame the government were cell phones, TV and social media. There is much more to come.

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As the poor gain access to the internet through smartphones and tablets and the middle-class gets better connectivity, the country will witness nothing less than a revolution in commerce, education and social values.

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Imagine villagers recording videos of bribe takers and uploading these to sites such as Ipaidabribe.com and documenting the abuses they suffer at the hands of the police. Or students recording the attendance of teachers—who don’t show up for work—on public websites. Or direct payments of subsidies and social benefits to the poor via PayPal-style banking accounts, thereby cutting out corrupt government officials.

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All of this is going to become possible within the next two to three years as the cost of tablet computers drops to the Rs 1,500 ($25) level and internet access becomes cheaper and more widely available. (In India, cell and mobile data plans cost less than 1/10 as in the US—they are affordable by the masses.)

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The Indian government inadvertently triggered this tablet computing revolution by sanctioning the Aakash tablet. It only ordered 100,000 units and spent less than it would have on a junket of ministers going abroad. But this project got so much attention that it ended up lowering the expected base price of tablet technologies from the $400-$500 that is common in the West to $35-$50. This would not have happened on its own. Note the price of the Apple iPhone 5S. The cheapest models cost over $500 without a contract.

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The Aakash tablet has been mired in Indian politics but is achieving big success in its new incarnations. The manufacturer, Datawind, has become a leading tablet supplier in India and abroad. These have also been tested in American schools by disadvantaged communities and were proved to be viable. Americans can’t wait for these tablets to become available to them.

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The uses of tablet technology will go far beyond giving the poor a voice. As India gets connected by fiber optic cable and mobile carriers expand data coverage, cheap tablets will find thousands of new uses.

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To start with, these will trigger an e-commerce revolution that will make the US dotcom boom look lame. Companies such as GoVasool.com will become India’s Amazon.com and there will be many of them. Apps such as LocalCircles.com will connect neighborhoods and communities all over India, providing them with a way of solving common problems.

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There will be a revolution in education as courseware from all over the world becomes available to the poorest of the poor, new apps are developed that teach specific skills, and children all over India start connecting—and learning—from each other. Technology will make it possible for any poor child to gain the same knowledge as the privileged anywhere in India and across the world.

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There will also be rapid changes in the media and entertainment industries as tablet devices become ubiquitous. Note how the media industry has changed in the US—from print to online. The same will likely happen in India.

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Cheap tablets connected to cheap sensors also open up opportunities to revolutionize health care and farming. And there will be apps for practically every task that requires the management of information. Imagine the neighborhood fruit-seller emailing his customers photographs of his produce and accepting orders over the internet. Or booking rickshaws via apps like the US-based Uber which does taxi rides. I won’t be surprised if the poor figure out better uses of the technology than the rich do.

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All of this seems like wishful thinking, but note how mobile phone usage grew exponentially in India— going from zero to 900 million devices within a decade. Tablets and internet usage will grow even faster and will have an even greater impact.

Quartz

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Blackberry empieza a tambalear

BlackBerry announces a $1 billion loss and a doomed plan to dig itself out

By Christopher Mims - QZ

Blackberry still has its fans, but they're not enough to save the company. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

BlackBerry isn’t supposed to announce its quarterly results until next week, but already the company has admitted that they will include a $1 billion loss and will result in layoffs of 40% of the company’s workers. As just about everyone has predicted, the company will soon be forced to do something drastic, which might including selling itself.

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The full release on BlackBerry’s disastrous results includes a plan for recovery: to double down on the company’s enterprise products and customers. But that almost certainly won’t work. (More on that below.)

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Company to refocus on enterprise and prosumer market, offering end-to-end solutions, including hardware, software and services.

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Future smartphone portfolio will transition from 6 devices to 4; focusing on enterprise and prosumer-centric devices, including 2 high-end devices and 2 entry-level devices

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Why it’s too late for BlackBerry to return to its enterprise roots

Enterprise has always been BlackBerry’s strength, but there are some major drawbacks to falling back on business and government customers. BlackBerry’s phones lagged in features and the company’s dwindling market share failed to attract the app developers who are the core strength of both the iPhone and Android phones. Meanwhile, both Apple and makers of Android handsets like Samsung have been busy capturing the enterprise market by making their phones evermore business-friendly.

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Samsung’s SAFE (Samsung for Enterprise) has been available on new Galaxy smartphones since June of 2012, and the company recently followed up with a very BlackBerry-like security technology called Knox—as in the fort where the US keeps a large supply of gold. Apple has added all sorts of enterprise-friendly features to its iOS 7, making the two platforms more or less competitive with each other, not to mention with BlackBerry, for even the most demanding enterprises.

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These programs, and the allure for employees already accustomed to using Android and iPhones as personal devices, have worked against BlackBerry. In October 2012, the US Department of Defense dropped BlackBerry’s exclusive contract for smartphone services, as did US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, whichmoved to iPhones. There are rumors that Samsung is about to score huge contracts with the FBI and Navy. Apple has been winning big contracts all over the world.

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So while while BlackBerry was busy trying to compete with Apple, Google and Microsoft for everyday consumers, it missed opportunities to expand on its base of enterprise customers. Investors had floated the plan to double down on the enterprise market a while ago but failed to raise the billions needed to execute it. By now, it’s probably too late. Get ready for the dismantling of BlackBerry.

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