Of all the problems to have when launching a new flagship smartphone, trouble keeping up with demand is hardly the worst. Of course, things change a bit when a company has to pump units into channels as quickly as possible before the top-selling smartphone vendor in the world launches the Galaxy S4. HTC undoubtedly lost some sales thanks to its production woes with the One, but a new report suggests its manufacturing issues are behind it. According to Focus Taiwan, HTC North Asia president Jack Tong said that production capacity for the HTC One will double in May and increase further in June. ”Our capacity is expected to rise significantly starting from mid-May,” Tong reportedly said Friday at a press conference. “We are optimistic about our high-end sales during April and June.”
It’s pretty fascinating that Facebook and Google debuted new messaging paradigms within six weeks of each other. Facebook Home’s one key feature is the prominent placement of its “chat heads” messaging alerts on the home screen. Google is launching a new messaging app particularly focused on group messaging. The debuts of these two initiatives fit within the same timeline: a sudden realization in 2012 that smartphone messaging had started evolving, followed by the feverish development of a new product that would finally launch in the spring of 2013. Facebook and Google are very much on the defense here. So what happened in 2012 that suddenly awakened these slumbering giants? More →
Google CEO Larry Page spoke about peace in the industry during the Google I/O 2013 keynote, but that doesn’t mean Google has plans to slow its various attacks on rivals’ turf. Forbes contributor Peter Cohan laid out the five areas where Google is launching its “assault” on chief competitor Apple, and he discussed exactly how Google is hurting the world’s most valuable company in each area. Among Cohan’s five fronts are smartphones, where Google’s Android platform has overtaken the iPhone as the most popular handset operating system in the world; tablets, where strength in numbers will soon help Google top Apple’s market share once again; and innovation, the “most important front where Google is trouncing Apple.” Because the company is assaulting Apple on these five fronts and seemingly winning, Cohan says it looks like “Google is winning the war for the future.” Of course, whether or not this win will help Google top Apple’s record profits remains to be seen.
On the global stage, BlackBerry is still hurting — for the first time ever, Microsoft’s Windows Phone market share topped BlackBerry in the first quarter this year to take the No.3 spot in the smartphone platform war. We’re still very early on in BlackBerry’s comeback attempt though, and progress is being made in some key markets. Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt points to BlackBerry’s home turf in Canada as one of the markets where the vendor has seen good early response to its new BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones, and BlackBerry’s progress thus far has been impressive according to his figures. More →
Google is always on the hunt for new ways to boost revenue from search ads, the company’s primary money-maker, and it may have just begun to scratch the surface of a huge opportunity. Amid the numerous announcements made during Google I/O 2013, Google said that developers can now create geofenced ads that automatically display in Google Maps when a user is approaches a certain location. So, for example, a Starbucks ad with a coupon might pop up on the screen as a user walks or drives past a Starbucks coffee shop. According to industry watchers, this could end up being a huge deal. More →
The Galaxy S4 is Samsung’s fastest-selling smartphone ever with shipments topping 6 million units in two weeks. Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun revealed on Friday that sales of the Galaxy S4 into channels will likely pass 10 million units next week, The Korea Times reported. The executive noted that it is selling much faster than the Galaxy S III, which took 50 days to reach the 10 million mark. The Galaxy S4 will hit the same milestone in less than a month. More →
We may now have a clue about how Time Warner Cable plans to implement its own Aereo-like service. Unnamed sources have told Bloomberg that Time Warner Cable is considering buying an equity stake in Hulu and “could offer Hulu to its customers as a bundled service inside and outside of the home with its current products,” meaning customers could access their favorite shows on Hulu without paying a monthly subscription fee for Hulu Plus. Under the plan being discussed, Time Warner Cable would take a 33% stake in Hulu with the rest held by co-owners Disney, Comcast and News Corp. Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt recently said that the cable industry’s “structure needs more flexibility” and that he wants to offer customers “smaller, more affordable packages” that don’t cost them upward of $100 a month.
Samsung’s marketing Death Star isn’t just hovering over the United States — it has designs on conquering the entire world. Per Barron’s, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry thinks that Apple may have a tougher time in India than other markets because BlackBerry and especially Samsung have already blanketed the country with ads touting their smartphones as elite products that consumers simply see as less expensive versions of the iPhone. Because of this, he says that the companies have created ”an environment where they tend to mentally enslave the consumer to buy their products.” Chowdhry says this is particularly true of Samsung, which he says airs TV ads once every 15 minutes in India.
Millenial Media, a leading mobile advertising platform, is out with another Mobile Mix report. It shows Amazon’s tablets gaining share in the mobile content market at a fairly dizzying clip. The Mobile Mix report is based on billions of monthly ad impressions and it offers an interesting glimpse of emerging trends in mobile content consumption. Perhaps the biggest bombshell is that Amazon is now hogging 28% of ad impressions served to Android tablets; just marginally behind Samsung’s tablets that get a 35% share. No other Android vendor has achieved double digits. The cheapo Kindle tablet strategy has helped Amazon to already vault to the top tier of the U.S. tablet market when it comes to content consumption. More →
College graduates would love to land a job at Google, Apple or one of the many startups in Silicon Valley. But according to a survey from Universum Global, there are quite a few students who would prefer the rainy days in Washington over working in the golden state. The American Student Survey asked students from five different fields of study — business, engineering, IT, natural sciences and liberal arts — about their ideal company to work for. Companies such as Google and Apple unsurprisingly topped the charts in almost all categories, however there were some surprising results: Microsoft consistently outranked both Facebook and Amazon. The company ranked higher than Amazon in all fields of study and even higher than Apple in IT. Students found Microsoft more appealing than Facebook in almost all categories as well, with the exception of liberal arts.
Google’s shares continued to rise on Wednesday in the wake of the Google I/O conference, closing at over $900 for the first time and giving the company a market cap of over $300 billion for the first time in its history. The company’s stock value has been increasing at a rapid pace all year, growing from the low $700 range at the start of 2013 to the low $900 range by the end of trading on Wednesday. The continued rise in shares Wednesday was somewhat curious given that Google didn’t unveil a new Nexus tablet or a new version of Android at I/O this year as many had been expecting. Some analysts have slapped the company with a $1,000 price target in recent months and it appears that it has a legitimate shot of hitting that target now that its shares have surged past the $900 mark.
Google CEO isn’t very happy that Microsoft decided to integrate its Google Talk messaging service into its Outlook webmail platform without extending a similar offer to Google for the Gmail platform. Page, speaking during the Google I/O developers conference Wednesday, said that Google always pushes to have open-source platforms that other companies can use but lamented the fact that much of the tech industry doesn’t extend the same courtesies for many of its own innovations. Page went onto say that he was “sad” that companies such as Microsoft were “milking off” Google’s innovations by not being as open with their own software.
