One in five kids have their own cell phone by the time they are 8 years
old, according to Nielsen's latest survey, "A Pocket Guide to Social
Media and Kids." And guess what? The kids love using their phones to
socialize.
Among the 10-year-olds surveyed, 50% have their own cell phone, and that jumps to over three-quarters by the time they are 12. The average age that kids get their own cell phone has also pushed downwards--it was 9.7 years in 2009, and 10.1 years in the second quarter of 2008, but there's obviously a yearning to own them much before this age as the average age of borrowing one is now 8 years old--but I think Nielsen should re-check those numbers, because my toddler wants to borrow my iPhone all the time.
To a generation of parents who were raised on brick phones, these figures may seem surprising. They really shouldn't be though--the mobile phone is such a fantastically useful tool that it is bound to be used by everyone, no matter what their age. In fact, you can argue it's changing how our society works.
But what on earth are kids using these devices for? The answers to that are actually slightly more predictable. The average 13 to 17 year old, for example, sends over 2,000 SMS messages per month, and for anyone who's either got a child or has watched how they interact with cell phones and friends, this is absolutely no surprise at all. The same goes for how they use the mobile Internet:
While you're busy checking the weather and your tanking stock portfolio, your kids are looking for the latest movies and music releases, playing games, and using social networks. The cell phone, in other words, is way more of a communications and entertainment hub for younger people than older people. Which makes sense--kids spend more time socializing, even when all they have is a rotary dial phone with a curly cord.
Parents are wary of the new technology, of course, and particularly afraid of how much their kids cell phone habits may end up costing them. Nearly 60% of parents of cell phone-owing kids have forbidden downloads of games, ringtones videos and so on--the extra items that often incur a charge. And parents, it's only going to get worse. The children in this survey are most likely owners of dumphones, the cheapest handsets on the market. But the trend in cell phone design is clearly toward smartphones, which will inevitably mean that kids end up using them too. And the greater capability of these phones means that they'll be even more central to kid's lives than phones already are. But don't panic about the inevitable, just accept it.
Best Buy and Roxio CinemaNow announced a partnership today that will result in a whole new movie downloading service. It'll apparently be integrated into pretty much every Web-enabled device Best Buy sells too, which is a good way of ensuring success.
The way Best Buy sees it, digital distribution is the way of the future--by 2012 the company's predicting it will be a "double digit percentage" of the money generated by home movie-watching. And while that figure covers anywhere from 10% to 99%--which is, shall we say, quite a width--it at least allows Best Buy to be confident in its predictions.
The service has not been named yet, but Best Buy is planning on installing compatible software on the devices it sells. Samsung and Sony have been mentioned as hardware providers. Pursuing a multiple-platform route to making the service work seems like an immediately sensible idea, since it frees Best Buy from having ties to just one provider. But one very big name is missing from the list of providers, and it might be a significant one: Apple. With rumors that Apple's interested in getting TV networks on board for a subscription model for TV shows through iTunes, iTunes' existing movie sales, and the relatively closed-platform status of the iPhone, it's hard to see Apple as anything other than a competitor to Best Buy's plans.
Best Buy does have one big advantage though: All those bricks and mortar stores. With big advertising in front of millions of consumers every week, it'll be able to launch the download service with a massive fanfare, getting it into the public consciousness very effectively. Sonic Solutions is also a sensible partner to work with, since it already runs Blockbuster's movie download system--which is obviously a competitor to Best Buy's plans.
And maybe, with declining DVD sales beginning to become ominous, this is the right time to start the enterprise off--or perhaps even a few years too late. Let's hope that Best Buy has more success in downloadable movies than Wal-Mart and Hewlett-Packard did with their online movie service, now dead for nearly two years.
Apple rumors swirl practically every week, but there's rarely one that's as potentially game-changing as this one: According to insiders, the company's aiming to cut out the cable TV middle man, and serve up network TV to as many as 65 million users via iTunes.
The news has surfaced over at AllThingsD. According to the site's sources, Apple's been courting the TV networks directly, mentioning a $30 iTunes TV subscription service. As if that weren't intriguing enough, Apple's aiming to have the service live next year some time, which is seriously soon.
This does tally with long-standing rumors we've heard about Apple's subscription plans for iTunes--though these are usually connected to music tracks--as well as numerous rumors about Apple's televisual intentions. It also parallels the current trend towards television over the Internet, via services like Hulu (or ISPs, like Portugal's Meo and Zon suppliers). In fact, it's the logical extension of moves Apple's been making with the Apple TV hardware and iTunes.
But there's going to be one big roadblock in Apple's way: The cable companies. They're fiercely defending their current role as the channel for delivering TV to your home, because there're billions of dollars of revenue involved. Looking at the vile way Time Warner Cable is maneuvering to squeeze out a local ISP in North Carolina to protect its income, factoring in the complications of advertising revenues, and rumors that Apple's not signed up any particular network yet, this might look like an impossible task.
Or is it? Apple's turned the music business inside out and upside down and currently enjoys the position of number one music retailer in the U.S.--an odd situation for a computer company, if you think about it. And Apple's choice to use iTunes as the vehicle for the TV content is likely to be very important--it means the videos aren't tied to a particular product, and could be delivered by any Mac, by Apple TV and possibly even through the iPhone. If Apple's tablet surfaces next year, then it might actually turn into the ultimate device for TV-watching around the home--and maybe even while roaming over a wireless network. There're also some cold, hard statistics that tend to support Apple: It has 65 million iTunes users. Whereas Hulu, arguably the most successful existing Internet TV system, has 40 million, and Netflix has about 11 million. Comcast has 24 million users.
All of these facts will be a significant draw for the networks, and if just one of them signed up with Apple, the rest could follow suit. As noted at AllThingsD, that first one could well be Disney--it's got close ties with Apple, it's bought in to Apple's iPhone plans, and it has sold programs via iTunes already.
L-3 Communications (one of our Fast Company 50 this year) has just announced it's partnering with Textron to bid for a big future military vehicle contract. By big, we mean biiig: a 73-ton hovercraft that'll ferry troops and hardware from ship to shore.
Yup--you read that right: a hovercraft that weighs 73 tons. It's the U.S. Navy's Ship-to-Shore Connector (SSC) program, worth $4 billion, and it's due to be in service around 2019--it will replace the existing Landing Craft Air Cushion hovercraft that currently does the job. Think of a monster like this floating on nothing more than air, moving at high speed over sea and shore, laden with guns and people to shoot them (or bags foodstuffs when deployed in humanitarian roles). Here's a picture of a similar but larger prototype design from Textron to help boggle your imagination.
But actually, it's not all that big when you compare it to other military hardware, which gives us an excuse to talk about some of this stuff.
Challenger II Main Battle Tank
To give you some sense of perspective, 73 tons is pretty close to the basic weight of Britain's primary piece of battlefield armor--the Challenger II tank. This fearsome beast is actually advertised by its makers as the world's most reliable main battle tank--it costs about $8 million per unit, carries a crew of four, can fire its high-explosive rounds over five miles, and manages speeds of 25mph off-road. It weighs nearly 70 tons empty--so watch this video and then try and imagine something this big zipping over the sea towards you.
Of course, the SSC is actually designed to carry tanks like this to beachhead positions from ships, but you get the picture.
C-5 Galaxy
The Challenger ii weighs nearly as much as the SSC but it doesn't actually take to the air--unless it's making a jump. So here's something heavy and flying for comparison: the C-5 Galaxy. In service with the U.S.A.F. as a heavy lift vehicle, it's actually one of the largest aircraft in the World. Introduced in 1970, each C-5 is worth around $170 million; it can carry 73 passengers and has 28 wheels and a loading bay that measures 120 feet long and 19 feet high. It's huge. It flies. And it weighs over 250 tons--three SSCs all at once.
Caspian Sea Monster
Okay, we have the Challenger ii tank that weighs as much as the SSC but which doesn't fly or float, and the C-5 Galaxy that weighs three times as much but which is actually a genuine plane that you wouldn't want anywhere near the sea. What about something that combines the two? That's where you get the Ekranoplan. It's actually a ground-effect vehicle much like the SSC, but it generates its cushion of air because it's shaped like an airplane and actually flies very, very close to the water's surface.
The Soviet Union experimented with many different Ekranoplan designs, but the biggest was so astonishing it was dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster by foreign intelligence agencies. They were designed to move fast--very fast (up to several hundred miles an hour), and to be able to act as attack vehicles as well as cargo freighters. The Caspian Sea Monster weighed over 500 tons.
That vehicle weighs nearly seven times as much as the SSC will, but the Monster never really made it past the prototype phase, whereas the SSC will be roaring over the oceans soon.
Pro-copyright activists celebrated while file-sharers cried at rulings on the Pirate Bay's illegality, and the subsequent attempts to sink the site. But some new data suggests piracy sites tripled in the aftermath, which really doesn't sound good.
McAfee, which makes security software for PCs, has done some analysis into the number of file-sharing sites that help P2P file-sharers find the pirated music, videos, and software links they're looking for, and has found that in the third quarter of this year, the number of pirating sites has actually tripled. August was a particularly bad month with nearly 1,400 sites McAfee labeled as pirate file hosting sites joining the ranks of existing ones--that's compared to way less than 200 news ones in January.
What this demonstrates is that those in positions of authority in the music biz and the legal system don't understand even basic politics, let alone the mechanisms that drive the Internet. On the Web, sites can come and go as quick as a thought, hosted anywhere in the world that ISPs exist--if you force one site to close, then another can pop up almost instantly. (BlueBeat's Beatles downloads, anyone?) And, more than that, this is a classic case of a power vacuum: When one supreme dominant force (in this case the Pirate Bay, which was unquestionably the most powerful site for pirated torrents) disappears all of a sudden, there's a frantic struggle by all-comers to fill the void with their own offerings. McAfee's concern is that the genuinely nasty people on the Net--the phishers and the malicious hackers--used the power vacuum to launch malware attacks on users who had to now scout around to find their pirated content, and were more likely to use a service they didn't trust as there was no Pirate Bay to anchor in. McAfee measured a similar rise in malware during this period, to the point it's now at record levels.
You can imagine how the authorities are going to try to deal with this when they finally hear about it. Lots of blaming the naughty denizens of the Internet (which probably amounts to everyone on the Net) and lots of decisions to try to beat piracy down with an even bigger stick.
Which, if you apply just a jot of lateral thinking, is dumb. We reported not too long ago on some research that suggested music pirates were actually the biggest buyers of legitimate MP3 downloads. Guess what's just happened? More research in the U.K. by Ipsos Mori (the second largest survey research organization in the country) has just reconfirmed the fact that those people who pirate music tend to be heavily into technology and the Internet, and actually buy many more legally-sold MP3s and CDs (£77 per year) than the members of the public who don't pirate files (£44).
If you tie these two pieces of news together, and blend in the three-strikes piracy ISP disconnection plans that some European governments want to implement (and that surely the RIAA and MPAA approve of) then what you have is this: Pirates actually spend nearly twice as much on music than non-pirates, and closing their main pirated file wellspring hasn't changed their downloading habits. In fact it's increased the risk to all Internet users malware. And actually it's made piracy more of a public issue and multiplied the number of piracy Web sites that exist. Which could result in greater piracy. In other words, authoritarian stances on piracy actually achieve the opposite, and punish the very people who spend the most to keep the music biz in, as you might say, biz.
With the iPhone still the hottest smartphone, there's much speculation about how its future will pan out. For some the money's on gaming, but new research from Flurry is surprisingly different: eBook apps are overtaking games in the App Store.
Flurry's analysis involved tracking the number of applications submitted to the iTunes App Store per month since its inception. A simple comparison between the percentage of apps falling into the games category versus those under the books category reveals that between launch and August of this year, games outnumbered book apps and dedicated books in the catalog, comprising some 16-17% of all apps in July and August of 2009. But in late August of this year, book apps, which had been growing all along, overtook games, and by October games were just 13% of apps while books were 20% of the total.
That may be a surprise to many, possibly even including Apple--whose current iPod Touch advertising is extremely games-centric. The iPhone (and Touch) is often seen as the biggest threat to Sony and Nintendo in the handheld gaming market, since it's a converged device and people would prefer to not haul around extra gadgets.
And the iPhone as an e-reader seems like a clumsy solution, compared to the way the industry itself is trending. Its screen is small, not too good in sunlight and it uses LCD technology, which isn't the most relaxing on the eyeballs as well as being comparatively power-thirsty. Compared to large-screen e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook. which have long battery lifespans and easy-on-the-eye e-ink screens, reading a book on the iPhone would seem to be a much less satisfying experience. It's why there's such a push towards e-readers at the moment, and why there's much excitement about the format from forward-thinking newspaper and magazine publishers.
But Flurry's data suggests that actually consumers do like using the iPhone to access e-book texts (or at least app makers think that way, and the growing trend in the books app data shows they must be in tune with the public). Perhaps e-reader's aren't the future that Amazon and Sony and even some publishing houses would like them to be--a point being debated over at Reuters recently. With the iPhone still a hot-ticket news item, and fresh data that expanding iPhone usage is likely to soon see Apple beating RIM's BlackBerrys in smartphone marketshare, there could be massive implications for the nascent e-publishing game. That's because there are tens of millions of the devices in use, and though Amazon calls the Kindle best-selling (and won't reveal the sales figures) it surely hasn't sold tens of millions of units--how many people do you know who have one, compared to iPhone-owning friends? It might also go a long way to explaining why Amazon has its own Kindle iPhone app. Maybe the future of e-books really does lie in Apple's hands, not Amazon's or Barnes and Nobles.
Even as we busily plug our personal information into Facebook, the powerhouse social network is about to get a whole lot more personal. It's getting ready to link geo-location information to your actions on the social site.
The news comes via a recent adjustment to Facebook's terms and conditions (historically an act fraught with controversy) that, while it adjusts the text to satisfy Canada's Privacy Commissioner, also includes the following words:
Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate."
In no uncertain terms, this indicates that Facebook is chasing Twitter's move to geotag Tweets, possibly thanks to GPS systems built into pretty much every new smartphone. It looks like Facebook's system will also be opt-in, for privacy reasons, and that it will work with things like status updates, comments on other people's posts, photos, and so on.
It's certain to open up all sorts of new ways to use Facebook--it's easy to imagine geotag-based Facebook games, for one thing, and it'll make Facebook's photo archive facility much more powerful--but what's in it for Facebook? As usual, it comes down to data and money. Facebook will certainly be able to spin all that geotagged information towards location-sensitive advertisers, much as it does currently by examining your IP so that you get localized ads in the sidebar. The geotag archive is also a useful dataset all by itself--it could be useful for cell phone companies trying to work out where and how people use mobile data the most, or for academic research--and Facebook may well be able to make money here too.
There will be privacy issues of course, and there's bound to be at least one stalking case that hits the news involving Facebook, but it's actually an exciting change. That's because most of the uses this system will be put to haven't been dreamed up yet.
Comixology's iPhone app just got an exciting boost: 71 titles from Marvel. Reading comics on such a small screen is okay, but it sure would be nicer if they were on a bigger screen. Enter iTablet. Is this their future?
The Marvel titles are available for $2 apiece, thanks to the new in-app purchase system. Those titles include some humdingers, such as Astonishing X-Men and Captain America. While there are plenty of issues available from other publishers, Marvel's the big sell. Due to copyright issues it's a U.S.-only deal for now, but Comixology's app has other implications. While swiping between comic panels on-screen is likely to work better than reading tiny e-book fonts on the iPhone's 3.5-inch LCD, it's still not an ideal way to appreciate the art--or a complex story. In comics, it's the interaction between the cells that matter; seeing cells separately diminishes the experience of reading a comic book.
That's why a bigger screen would be a more natural fit for downloadable comics. Which is where the iTablet might just enter the story. In a piece over at Gizmodo, Joel Johnson explores this idea and argues that Apple's tablet may well be the device that will inject a bit of the 21st century into the entire genre. Johnson also spoke to Neal Adams, who's developing an Astonishing X-Men comic for iTunes, and according to Adams the entire comic industry is excited about the prospect.
Johnson's sources have made him believe that Apple's not directly courting publishers, but is content to let comics and e-books be sold just like Comixology is--through in-app purchases. And that's where this story gets even more interesting. A piece on Fortune highlights a different slant for the tablet: According to analyst Mike Abramsky from RBC Capital, the real deal Apple has in mind is video--naturally more suited be watched on the tablet's screen. Abramsky notes "video content is expected to be the next 'exploding' opportunity" and Apple "was less enthusiastic about the online book/newspaper market, given unattractive industry structure."
So, this conflicts with the comics theory, with some previous rumors, and with plenty of wild speculation on the Intertubes about exactly what kind of content will drive Apple's mythical device.
It all points to one thing: The tablet is going to be good for all of the above, and Apple's not going to take the same kind of hands-on approach that device developers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble are. Why would the folks at Cupertino expose themselves to all that risk, when they could just as easily be a mere device provider and channel for the content--leaving app developers like Comixology to do all the legwork?
Today it looks like Google's expanding Wave to external servers. If your company has an internal communication problem. If no one else can help. Maybe you can try ... the Wave team.
The news has popped up over at TheNextWeb, speculating that Google's literally on the verge of launching Wave's federation server connects today--but the rumor carries more than a little weight, because RWW has spoken to Lars Resmussen, who's one of the system's inventors. Plus Wave has been designed with this sort of implementation in mind right from the start. A sandbox version (with added protection while its still in development) will be the first thing to launch, and Google's already released some code, and the Federation Protocol and Conversation Model for developers and company techies to get to grips with how it'll all work.
The roll-out will mean one significant thing: You can construct and run your own Wave servers on your own hardware, and have them link up to the greater Web should your Wave conversations need to include people from the outside world. And that means companies can use private Waves as a tool for intra-office conversation and, more in keeping with how Wave is being promoted by Google, as a collaboration tool. In particularly high-tech outfits, you could even imagine that company developers could put together specialist Wave Apps to help with specific tasks or to tailor Wave to the local modus operandi. As a system for facilitating discussion, group working and file sharing Wave just seems to have a better mental fit into this environment than it does as a public system, since one increasingly voiced criticism is that it's all very clever but seems to have not much utility. With a large team, physically distributed across the company and time-critical collaborative task on the table, it's just possible Wave would work out to be very handy indeed.
As with many Google products designed for external-server use, companies are going to have to get past the fact its open source software--with all the attendant misunderstandings about security--but if the White House and the DoD are happy to embrace this tech, then there's no reason commercial entities can't too.
Ericsson has just pulled the covers off a concept PC that takes the all-in-oneconcept and design minimalism to a whole new level. The spartan machine doesn't have a screen or a keyboard, and instead opts to use projections for both.
It's dubbed the Spider, and it's Ericsson's guess at the PC we'll be using in 2020--it's on the left in the image. For this demo incarnation, Ericsson used currently available picoprojector and laser-projected keyboard technology to mock together how the machine would perform--and presumably there's no motherboard and Intel CPU chugging away inside that cylindrical case. But the idea is that electronics and optical tech will have evolved enough over the next ten years so the final Spider will be self-contained in an even skinnier cylinder with tripod legs (pictured on the right.)
The resulting machine is part laptop, part desktop PC--there's essentially no reason to classify it as one or the other, considering its meager mass and easy portability. It's presumably part home theatre PC too, given that projector technology should easily be able to beam out a 60-inch display by 2020. With another 10 years behind projected keyboard tech, there's no reason it shouldn't be more usable than the slightly clumsy versions that exist now, either.
There's certainly some logic in this thinking, and it represents one destination for the current trend in PC design simplification. Who would employ this sort of design, though? Sony? HP? Perhaps we should look at the Mac. Apple aficionados have pretty much a single person to thank for the sleek, clean, and almost Zen-like lines that nearly every Apple product now sports: Designer Jonathan Ive (on our Most Creative People list this year). He's responsible for the styling changes that have reduced the iMac from a sweet but chubby multicolored beast to its current screen-with-a-computer-behind slenderness. But dear Jon must be jealous of Ericsson's effort, which does away with the screen and even the wireless keyboard of the newly refreshed aluminum iMacs. Or maybe he'll be inspired by the idea, and get wiggling on adapting Spider's concept into a unibody brushed aluminum shape--and working it into the next-but-several iMac refresh.
That's why a bigger screen would be a more natural fit for downloadable comics. Which is where the iTablet might just enter the story. In a piece over at 
The news has popped up over at 
