And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Sources said the talks were serious, but any kind of deal — of course — could come to naught.

But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp.

But sources said that interest has gotten stronger more recently, coming at the same time as Tumblr has been stepping up its efforts to raise a large funding round that could value the New York company at $1 billion. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far, at a reported valuation of $800 million.

In the latest round, one source close to the situation said Tumblr was considering “strategic” investments, which would presumably be of the kind that Yahoo had tried and failed to do recently with France’s Dailymotion video service. Since then, Mayer and her team have looked at the ongoing deal to purchase Hulu that has many possible other bidders.

Tumblr is different from Dailymotion or Hulu, of course, in that it focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site.

But this puts it directly in Yahoo’s main wheelhouse, especially recent efforts to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

“If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” said another source.

That said, Yahoo has been sticking to smaller acquisitions under Mayer’s regime, spending very little on a clutch of small mobile startups to up its game in the important sector. And at the same investment conference, Goldman also said additional M&A would continue to be smaller for Yahoo.

Still, any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that audience is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocket ship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn and/or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards.” That’s the equivalent of running ads in a Facebook user’s News Feed or a Twitter user’s main feed.

Initial signs are promising. Tumblr told Forbes that it generated $13 million in revenue last year, and suggested it could do as much as $100 million this year; people close to the company say its momentum has continued this year.

In addition to figuring out its top-line business, Tumblr and its backers have also been spending a long time trying to figure out a managment structure. Even Karp’s strongest backers say that the 26-year-old needs help running the company, and for months they have been looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg”-style COO candidate.

“David is very charming, and clearly very very bright, and understands the product,” said an executive who talked to Tumblr about the role. But, “he’s incredibly confrontation averse, and there’s almost a ‘Game of Thrones’ palace feeling to the management team.”

Possibility of death by wildfire aside, sources said that the search has yielded two or three candidates that Tumblr is considering. It is a key hire since the company needs to build out an extensive infrastructure quickly, given its sharp consumer growth, including fielding a more robust advertising team. Tumblr hired an experienced exec, Lee Brown, from Groupon last fall, who has been busy hiring more sales execs. Interesting aside: Brown was a longtime Yahoo ad exec.

But building out the needed structure at the company is a long slog, and Tumblr might be seeking more help one way or another.

Yahoo declined comment and Tumblr has not gotten back to us as yet.

Indeed, during a developer conference session on Thursday, Google showed a variety of ways to gain deeper access to Glass. Some, such as running basic Android apps and even connecting a Bluetooth keyboard, can be done.

Google showed other hacks, such as running a version of Ubuntu Linux. Those actions, though, require deeper “root” access to the device. Google showed how developers can get such access, but cautions that doing so voids the warranty and could be irreversible.

That said, Google plans to make its factory image available so in most cases rooted Glass devices should be able to be returned to their original settings.

The session ended with a video showing a pair of the pricey specs being blended to a powdery mess, to heartfelt groans from the packed audience, many of whom forked over $1,500 to be among the first to buy the developer edition of Glass.

Showing a different level of interest in Glass, several members of Congress sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page on Thursday asking questions about privacy issues raised by the high-tech specs.

Update: At a follow-up Fireside Chat session with developers, Google reiterated that a software development kit for Glass is coming, but Google’s Charles Mendis said not to expect it soon.

Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer for Glass, showed off one of the bulky early prototype designs for Glass as well as a current prototype that combines Glass with prescription glasses.

Prescription Google Glass prototype

Olsson, who quips that she has been working on Glass since it was a phone attached to a scuba mask, said that the development of Glass was “so ambitious and very messy.”

Getting the device light enough has been a key, Olsson said.

“If it is not light you are not going to want to wear it for more than 10 minutes,” Olsson said. “We care about every gram.”

Asked what kind of apps the Glass team would like to see, Olsson said she wanted a karaoke app, while Mendis said he would like to see some fitness apps.

Google Glass product director Steve Lee said Glass is designed around brief glances or “micro-interactions,” rather than watching a movie or reading an entire book.

“That would be painful,” Lee said. “We don’t want to create zombies staring into the screen for long periods of time.

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The letter, addressed to CEO Larry Page and signed by eight members of the bipartisan Privacy Caucus, asks Google whether it plans to use facial recognition technology in conjunction with Glass, what proactive steps Google is taking to protect non-Glass-wearing bystanders and what privacy policy changes Google might make for Glass, among other topics.

The group, led by U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, seeks answers by June 14.

Glass, at this point, has a fairly limited range of abilities such as taking pictures, getting directions and performing a search. Developers can build simple apps using a programming interface called Mirror. However, Google announced on Thursday that it is readying a broader Glass Development Kit giving developers deeper access to the Glass hardware.

A Google representative was not immediately available for comment.

Update: At a fireside chat with developers, Google Glass product director Steve Lee said that the Glass team takes privacy seriously.

“From the beginning, the social implications … of Glass, of people wearing Glass, has been at the top of our mind,” Lee said, adding that the team extended its concern not just to those wearing Glass but those around them.

He noted that to take a picture requires pressing a button or issuing a voice command. Also, the Glass screen lights up when the device is active.

Lee said that Glass is operating by Google’s existing privacy policy in terms of what data it collects.

“We’re not really deviating from that,” Lee said.

As for face recognition, Lee said that “we’ve definitely experimented with it but it is not in the product today,” Lee said. “I can imagine that existing.”

Letter to Google From Congress re: Glass Privacy

In a tense two-hour hearing, parliament’s Public Affairs Committee grilled Matt Brittin, Google’s head of sales and operations in northern and central Europe, about whether the firm completes sales of its products and services in the U.K., making it liable to pay more tax in Britain.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Image copyright Vlue

And, after confining the audience to their seats for three hours of a hodgepodge of announcements, the CEO of the company came out and bemoaned the industry horse-race mentality (which could be read as hypocritical for many reasons).

Still, the company’s stock spiked up and beyond an all-time high, and everybody raved about how great it all was.

It doesn’t make any sense, of course, unless perhaps you were talking about one of the patented reality distortion field performances of the late Steve Jobs of Apple.

But somehow that’s how it worked for Google this past week at its 2013 I/O developers conference, where nothing big or particularly ambitious was unveiled. Unlike previous editions of the conference that had major reveals, every announcement on Wednesday — dozens and dozens of them — got roughly equal billing and were presented in much the same manner. An exec set up the larger initiative, a product manager did a demo, followed by a feel-good video that showed its potential.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

While there were better tools for app developers, a neat-looking new design for Google Maps, features to automatically sort and edit photos, a way to search by voice from your computer the same way you already can from your phone, a personalized music service, a program to distribute educational tablet apps to students, a different set of software for an existing Samsung smartphone and four more languages for Google’s Knowledge Graph, it was still largely incremental.

Why there was no new rev of Android, just when Apple’s Jonny Ive is busy with a radical overhaul of iOS? Where were the new Nexus devices as the smartphone market gets more competitive than ever? What happened to the promise of Android @home and Google TV? If Apple had done this kind of incremental WWDC, they’d be slammed.

Instead, Google I/O got away without launching any significant revisions — not even a .1 release! — or devices for either its Android or Chrome platforms. It didn’t even spend keynote time on its hot topic “moonshot” projects.

Come to think of it, Google CEO Larry Page’s closing speech about the amazing potential of technology to change people’s lives might have been more fitting at the end of three hours about Google Glass and the self-driving cars. Like last year, when his co-founder Sergey Brin organized his Glass skydiving stunt from an overhead blimp down to the stage, streamed via Google Hangout.

But Wednesday wasn’t about the dream-big stuff of tomorrow, it was about today being a better version of yesterday.

In many ways, Google was filling in a structure it had already built. The company brought many products from one device or platform to another. It applied its artificial intelligence smarts for everything from beautifying photos of faces to anticipating potential searches in context. It added analytics to do useful things like help Android app developers see how effective their Google advertising spending is on driving installs. It personalized, personalized and then personalized.

That’s not to say the many products Google introduced at I/O were not impressive when taken as a whole. Rather, the incremental improvements taken together are building out its massive vision. Maybe we’re getting cynical because today’s reality is too close to science fiction to remember when it seemed crazy. Or maybe Google just hypnotized us all.

Even some Googlers conceded this. In a conversation with Johanna Wright, an eight-year veteran of Google who is now VP of search and assist for Android, she made a similar observation about the keynote.

“Having been at Google so long, I feel like there might be no single leap, no single announcement, but the way it’s coming together feels like a huge leap,” Wright said. “There’s a deep understanding underlying it.”

That Google could pull this off so successfully is interesting, especially when you think about one of its main competitors like Apple, where the news cycle is all about secrets and supplier signals and hope and fickle investors and disappointment and scrutiny.

That’s perhaps because Google is not as caught up in that launch-dependent hardware wowing, but rather has picked a line of products that it commits to and continually improves upon and is then held to a different standard.

That’s one explanation, at least.

Whatever the reason, it worked. In after-hours trading, Google stock was at $918.70 after the big show. In its entire history, it had never crossed $900 before that morning.

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Facebook is building an app that allows photos taken on the glasses to be shared directly to the social network. Twitter is doing the same, as well as allowing access to send and receive tweets.

“In addition to sharing photos, you can also keep up with the people you follow on Twitter through notifications — for mentions, DMs and Tweets from users for whom you’ve turned on notifications,” Twitter said in a blog post. “As always, you can reply to, retweet or favorite these Tweets.”

Other partners include Evernote, CNN and Tumblr.

Google also said on Thursday that it is preparing a broader set of tools for developers to write software for Glass.

So far, Google has released a relatively limited programming interface, known as the Mirror API. During a technical session on Thursday, though, Google said it is working on a broader Glass Development Kit.

“We’re actively building it,” said developer advocate Timothy Jordan, speaking to a crowd of developers that filled the main room and an overflow room, and even spilled into beanbag chairs in an impromptu viewing area in the Moscone West lobby.

The developer kit is essentially similar to developing for Android, Jordan said, with some specifics tailored to the Glass hardware.

As for whether there is going to be an app store for Glass, Jordan noted that things are still in the early developer preview phase, but said, “We’re definitely going to have something.”

Google also announced Thursday that it will start supporting video streaming to Glass. Previously, Google had only talked about support for short video clips to be shown on the eyewear.

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Thanks to app tweaks and software updates, it’s easier than ever for you to hand your photographic history over to the company of your choice.

Consider this: Take a photo using your iPhone, and Apple can instantly upload your snapshot to your iCloud account, where it’s accessible via any of your connected Apple devices. Google can do that, too, with Android phones and your Google+ account. There’s Microsoft and SkyDrive integration, Facebook and album image uploading. Not to mention others like Amazon Cloud Drive and Dropbox.

Google doesn’t want to be left behind, as evidenced by the company’s latest robust photo offering. The Google+ team dropped a massive update to its photo-editing capabilities at its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, bringing a series of professional-grade photo-editing tools to anyone who uses Google+.

The advantage here, Google would say, is that while everyone may offer free online photo storage in some capacity, Google is the one with the consumer editing suite. But you don’t have to be an expert-level Photoshop user to work with Google’s new tools. Auto-enhance, auto-highlight and even “auto-awesome” leverage the power of Google’s algorithms to choose the best pictures out of the many you’ve uploaded, and automatically make them look better than they did before.

The point is simple: The more you’ve invested yourself in a service — be it by filling out and continuously updating your profile, or through uploading photo after photo to its cloud-based storage — the less likely you are to fall away from using it. If all of your memories are stuck inside of, say, Facebook, you’ve got an online repository, an album to point others to in the future or to re-download as you see necessary. And, perhaps because of the emotional nature of the material, you’re less likely to even want to move it in the first place.

It’s also the type of media where platforms see some of their highest engagement from users. Facebook, I’ve been told, sees far and away more activity and engagement from users focused on photos in the stream than they do from text-based status updates. Google+, too, sees high engagement from in-stream pictures.

Users aside, big data companies like Google and Facebook gain reams of information from the photos you’ve sent in. Each file is another piece of location metadata to be registered, another image to identify and tag using facial-recognition tech, another way of recognizing the people and places you interact with most in your daily life.

So now, when all companies are offering similar uploading options and essentially unlimited free online storage, it’s up to competitors to differentiate to try and stand out.

That’s easier said than done. Facebook obviously has its billion-strong network (not to mention the rapidly growing Instagram), where many of your friends already likely have a presence. Apple touts accessibility and safety via only a certain set of devices. And Google+, while its usage and engagement stats are constantly a point of contention, will at least offer a simple, powerful photo tool set that gives any amateur photographer the ability to make their vacation pictures look a whole lot better.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what winds up luring you to one service over another. What matters is how they keep you coming back to upload more of your photos, more of your memories. Perhaps Google’s new editing-feature suite will give it the edge it needs to stay in the game.

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According to new research from IDC, Microsoft’s mobile operating system accounted for 3.2 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter. That’s a significant gain from the OS’s performance in the first quarter of 2012, which saw it capture a market share of 2 percent. And it was enough for Windows Phone to unseat BlackBerry from its third-place spot and claim the rank for its own.

Admittedly, ousting BlackBerry wasn’t exactly a difficult task. In the first quarter, the struggling handset maker saw its share of global smartphone shipments halved year over year. In Q1 of 2012, it claimed a 6.4 percent share. This year, BlackBerry managed to snag only 2.9 percent.

An unfortunate loss of momentum for BlackBerry, though one that’s not entirely attributable to the ascension of other platforms and a lack of interest in its own. BlackBerry is in the midst of a transition to an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 10. Right now, the company has just two smartphones that use it. The bulk of its handset portfolio continues to run on its older OS. And according to IDC analyst Kevin Restivo, that’s almost certainly having an effect on sales.

“Windows Phone is clearly gaining momentum,” Restivo told AllThingsD. “But BlackBerry’s decline this quarter really has more to do with the lag between sales of its old handsets and its new ones than anything else. Sure, Windows Phone is ahead now, but there’s no guarantee that it will maintain its third-place ranking in upcoming quarters.”

And, as I’ve noted before, third place in the current smartphone OS rankings doesn’t mean much. According to IDC, Google and Apple captured 92.3 percent of all smartphone shipments with their Android/iOS duopoly (Android: 59.1 percent; iOS: 23 percent). In other words, Windows Phone and BlackBerry are so far behind the two leading mobile platforms that their ranking is really just a moot point, anyway.

An unusual supercooled machine built by D-Wave Systems Inc., of Vancouver, British Columbia, will be installed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center, near Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. It will be operated by the nonprofit Universities Space Research Association.

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The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

• The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
• Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
• The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

But a few announcements missed the cut.

One of the more interesting was a commitment by Google to support advanced Bluetooth natively in its Android operating system. Google had supported basic Bluetooth for specific things like keyboards and headphones, but had yet to build in support for the latest version of the wireless technology.

The new move opens up opportunities for a range of new accessories, including very low-power devices.

“I think that opportunity is actually going to be huge,” said Steve Hegenderfer, director of developer relations for the group that oversees the Bluetooth specification. Hegenderfer said that Bluetooth devices have gotten so small that the batteries are sometimes the largest component.

But with support for low energy, Hegenderfer said he expects a wave of devices to hit the market in the next year that are powered by kinetic energy — basically, the energy created by a body in motion.

Google’s move will allow those developing such devices for iOS to offer the same products more easily on Android.

Apple already supports the latest version of Bluetooth, as does BlackBerry with BlackBerry 10 and Microsoft with Windows 8 (though not, as yet, with Windows Phone 8).

The lack of Android support has been a sore spot for developers because it makes an already fragmented hardware landscape even more challenging. Nearly all the devices shipping today have chips that support the latest version of Bluetooth, but until Google’s move, developers didn’t have a unified way to call on the Bluetooth functions.

Instead, developers had to tweak their code not only for particular versions of Android but also based on which Bluetooth chip was in use.

While Google announced its plans on Wednesday, support for the new Bluetooth won’t come immediately. It is due to arrive in a month or two, with the next update to the Android programming interfaces.

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Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, and Google’s successes are admirable. But there’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other companies. They want everything; their ambition is boundless.

– John Gruber, in Larry Page’s remarks onstage at Google I/O about competition — that talk about Google “versus some other company” is stupid or not interesting

You gotta hand it to Microsoft: Yesterday they got Google to help promote their message for them.

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Google finished a marathon presentation at its I/O developer conference, reports surfaced that Google’s YouTube had sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Redmond shut down a YouTube app it had built for its Windows Phone.

The issue, in a nutshell, is that the Microsoft app, built on YouTube’s public data feed, violates the video site’s terms of service, primarily because it strips out YouTube’s ads. Windows Phone users can still watch YouTube videos via their Web browser, but the experience isn’t as slick as a dedicated app.

So: Bad for Windows Phone users! But while it’s tempting to turn this into a he said/he said, there’s little to hash out, fact-wise.

There’s no dispute that Microsoft’s Windows app violates Google’s terms. And Microsoft, which has been complaining about access to YouTube for years, had to know exactly what it was doing. It also knows how to play nicely with YouTube, as it did with an Xbox app the two companies built together and launched last year.

The only question is why Microsoft went ahead and built the app anyway. Here we have to do some guessing, as both YouTube and Microsoft executives declined to comment.

So, okay, I’ll guess: Microsoft launched the YouTube app last week precisely because it hoped YouTube would make a fuss.

I’m also guessing that Microsoft is very happy that The Verge and Wired were able to “obtain” copies of the C&D letter.

I’ll keep guessing: I think Microsoft is ecstatic about the fact that Google sent the letter yesterday, on the same day it wanted all eyes on its new products and services.

And the fact that Larry Page closed the Google event by insisting that he’s got nothing but love for everyone, everywhere — even if they’re building rival technologies?

My guess is they have to be over the moon about that.