“We think that there is an important place for BlackBerry,” Mead told attendees of the Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference this week. “Three to four operating systems is good for the industry and good for us,” he concluded, noting that Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS is another good candidate.

No disputing that; more diversity in the smartphone market would also benefit consumers. Trouble is, consumers seem pretty happy with the current duopoly. According to recent research from Canaccord Genuity, Apple and Android juggernaut Samsung captured about 100 percent of global smartphone industry profits in the March quarter.

Not that those companies’ domination of the market is unassailable. Mead said Verizon is seeing decent customer interest in BlackBerry’s new handsets and thinks it will only improve with the launch of the QWERTY-keyboarded BlackBerry Q10. “We have a lot of BlackBerry customers on our network,” he said. “There seems to be a hunger for the QWERTY keyboard.”

But on the heels of runaway hits like Temple Run 2 and Subway Surfers, the company is off to the races, hoping to give those single-player phenomena a multiplayer-focused run for their money.

(Pardon the barrage of running puns.)

The company’s latest game is Running With Friends, a smart twist on the popular endless-runner genre. As with other games, you swipe on the touchscreen to avoid obstacles, collect powerups and move your character around the screen: Left and right to change into one of three “lanes,” up to jump and down to slide.

The twist comes in the form of some familiar multiplayer features that Zynga has built around this tried-and-true formula. This is asynchronous multiplayer, meaning you can challenge someone to a race without needing to play at the same time as your opponent to compete (as is the case in other “With Friends” titles).

Developed in partnership with Twisted Metal and God of War creators Eat Sleep Play, the game just looks good — the bright Subway Surfers-esque 3-D graphics are streets ahead of the other titles in Zynga’s existing lineup.

Factoring in a bit of luck from a pregame slot-machine spin, Running With Friends awards points to players based on how far they can run and how many bonus items they pick up along the way. And if one of your opponents has run the same obstacles as you already, the game remembers how they moved, sort of like the “ghost” mode in Mario Kart.

That means you might see your friends on the track and can shove them out of the way with a swipe — which, let’s be honest, is pretty fun.

The game is iOS-only to start (so, available on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), but Zynga’s mobile SVP Travis Boatman told AllThingsD that the company will likely do what it has done with previous games like Zynga Poker and Words With Friends: See how the game does, improve it and then roll it out to other platforms, one at a time.

A teardown analysis conducted by the market research firm IHS, due to be released tomorrow, has pegged Samsung’s cost of materials and manufacturing to produce the U.S. version of the 32 gigabyte model of the S4 at slightly above $237 per unit. Without a contract subsidy, the entry-level 16GB version of the phone costs $639 when sold by AT&T Wireless.

The cost is somewhat higher than that of Apple’s iPhone 5, the base model of which costs $205 to build for a 16GB version, according to an IHS analysis conducted last fall. It’s also well above the cost of Nokia’s Lumia 900, which costs $209 to build, IHS found at the time.

The S4 cost is not far below the cost of Samsung’s larger Galaxy Note tablet, the cost of which IHS estimated last year to be $270.

Most phone manufacturers source their components from many different suppliers. But Samsung, a large, diversified manufacturer of many different kinds of electronic components, has used its significant capabilities to supply itself with many of the key parts inside most versions of the S4 phone sold around the world.

“Samsung’s strength is this ability to in-source to itself,” IHS analyst Vincent Leung said in an interview. “They just keep adding to the list of components that they can supply to themselves.”

One key component that Samsung did not supply to itself for versions of the phone being sold in the U.S. was the main applications processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, which contributes $20 to the overall cost.

Versions of the phone sold in Korea and other markets around the world contain a Samsung-made chip called the Exynos 5 Octa that costs $28. Samsung is known to be manufacturing at least four variations of the phone for different market geographies around the world, including at least two being sold in the U.S., one going to AT&T and T-Mobile, and another going to Verizon Wireless and Sprint, said Andrew Rassweiler, another IHS analyst.

“Samsung is demonstrating its ability to suit the tastes of carriers in different regions of the world,” Rassweiler said. “It comes down to what the market is willing to spend on the features offered.”

The fact that Samsung used the Qualcomm-made chip is a testament to the U.S. chipmaker’s prowess. “Even with all the vertical integration it’s doing, it’s not like Samsung has given up on Qualcomm,” Rassweiler said.

One interesting difference between the U.S. and Korean versions resulted from the difference in the choice of processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain an image-processing chip made by Japan’s Fujitsu that added $1.50 to the total cost. Leung says that in the Korean versions, some of the image processing is handed off to Samsung’s Exynos chip.

Samsung also supplied the flash memory used to store data on the device. IHS estimates that 16GB of memory added $28 to the cost of the device.

The Korean giant also supplied itself with a display and touchscreen parts, which added $75 to the cost of components. The combined display package also includes Gorilla Glass, a strong glass material made by U.S.-based Corning.

Samsung is also thought to have supplied itself with several unlabeled components, including the camera module and some wireless baseband chips.

A few non-Samsung suppliers include Broadcom, which provided Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips; Maxim, which provided a power-management chip; and Triquint Semiconductor, which provided some wireless chips.

Scenes from my not-very-artistic Oggl feed: Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick on the office roofdeck and animal heads on display

So, what next? Rather than evolve the core Hipstamatic experience — you know, one of those overhauls that results in pissed-off users who liked your old product just fine, so please change it back — Hipstamatic is launching an entirely new app called Oggl. And, surprisingly, it has all the same functionality as regular Hipstamatic, but with a new interface and business model.

Most importantly, Oggl is also meant to be more of an artistic community than a photo-editing tool.

“We’ve never really cared where you post your photos,” said Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick on Tuesday at Hipstamatic’s fancy-dancy San Francisco office. He noted that splintered communities of people who use Hipstamatic to take pictures have naturally emerged on services like Flickr.

But creating an entirely new app for a Hipstamatic community is kind of a drastic move — and one that reflects the ongoing trade-off between change and users’ resistance to change.

Spurned after so many “pivots” by app makers that get rid of their favorite functionality in favor of spammy new features, we users now wield our #fail hashtags readily.

Companies — which need to evolve and change, even if they are succeeding, and especially when they are not — are trying to figure out how to deal. So Hipstamatic’s approach with Oggl is to relinquish its core brand and audience, built with years of work, in order to reshape what it already built into something new.

Buick noted that the changing lineup will give stability to existing users. “Hipstamatic Classic is still awesome,” he said.

(Still, the fresh paint and the swank office don’t erase earlier Hipstamatic hiccups, like staff layoffs made last year in an attempt to regain focus.)

Launching for iPhone later this week, Oggl is a free invitation-only app that will cost 99 cents per month or $9.99 per year to access the full library of Hipstamatic lenses and films. Oggl will feature a curated selection of photos, and users will be encouraged to share only their best work.

People who have been frustrated with Hipstamatic’s inflexible editing may be pleased to learn that Oggl allows users to capture first and edit later. Oggl also has a sparse navigation around various icons that looks neat but seems like it might take a while to learn.

Buick described mobile photography as a balance between making art and capturing life. So Oggl is perhaps not the place to post your daily breakfast, but if you happen to eat at one of the world’s great restaurants, go right ahead and make a pretty photo.

“This isn’t a place for duck lips, it’s not a place for your cereal. But we do want your French Laundry shots,” Buick said.

To wit, the fractious general meeting Nokia held Tuesday, which was reportedly peppered with calls for the company to reconsider its bet on Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Why, when Samsung has had such success with Google’s Android OS, does Nokia insist on sticking with Windows?

With Android, Samsung is capturing 43 percent of the handset industry’s profits — the other 57 percent going to Apple. Meanwhile, with Windows Phone, Nokia is capturing nothing. Given that vast disparity in performance, isn’t it about time Nokia and its leadership reassess the company’s commitment to Windows Phone and take a good hard look at Android?

As one shareholder bluntly put it, “The executive team is doing its best. But it’s not enough. Are you aware that results are what matter? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Please switch to another road.”

Not an entirely unreasonable suggestion, considering Nokia’s downward trajectory the past few years. But evidently it’s not one CEO Stephen Elop is willing to entertain right now — even after a 60 percent decline in the company’s share price. Really, there’s no easy answer here: Windows Phone might be slow to ramp, but there’s no guarantee that Nokia would do any better with Android, a platform that Samsung has so thoroughly dominated.

“We’ve made a clear decision to focus on Windows Phone with our Lumia product line,” Elop said. “And it is with that that we will compete with competitors like Samsung and Android.”

In other words, for Nokia, Windows Phone is Plan A — and Plan B is that Plan A must succeed.

Courtesy 2K Games

When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known.

And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol.

Although the WWI dogfighting game — scheduled to launch on May 9 — will be iOS-only, Meier acknowledged that “there’s certainly a logic into looking into other platforms and seeing what the possibilities are.” He caught up with AllThingsD on the phone recently to talk about how he sees the changing landscape of games.

CC BY-SA 2.0 Antonio Fucito

Sid Meier: The very early console games were very simple, twitchy hand-eye coordination games. And then, over time, strategy became okay to do on console. I think we’re going to go through a similar evolution with mobile, where initially the games are pretty casual and simple, but that’s not because of any restrictions in the platform or anything, it’s just that the market is gonna evolve and the audience is gonna evolve. There’s definitely a role for more strategy-oriented games on mobile.

And do you think that’ll go mainstream, or will that be a niche audience?

I think [strategy] is probably not going to be the predominant genre on mobile, but it will grow in the same way it has grown in the PC market and the console market. In a lot of ways, it’s more suitable to mobile than console because, on mobile, you could potentially be distracted, so you want a game that’s played at the player’s pace, and not at a pace that’s driven by the game itself — something you can start and stop, and put away for a while.

What about multiplayer? Depending on whom you ask, the future of multiplayer games could be asynchronous and turn-based, or all about playing live, either in the same room or on different devices anywhere in the world. Do you have a dog in the fight?

Since our game is turn-based, we chose to support two of those modes. One is the asynchronous mode, where you can have 10 games going on at the same time with 10 different people. The other mode, which we’re calling “hot-pad” mode, is where you’re playing on the same machine with the same player. Real-time multiplayer is suited to another type of game. I’m playing a lot of World of Tanks right now, and that works really well as a real-time multiplayer game. It might not work so well on mobile, where you might get a phone call, or maybe you’re traveling and you can’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to hang around until the end of the game.

What did you learn from the experience of heading up such a small team on Ace Patrol? Do you think you will do the same thing in mobile again?

I’ve enjoyed the small-team aspect — fewer meetings, and more time to actually work on the game. And I’ve learned really to kind of appreciate some of the unique features of the mobile platform: The touchscreen, the gestures, the swiping, the pinching. That tactile interaction between the player and the game really connects you more closely with what’s happening on the screen. We’re very impressed with just the raw horsepower of the platform. For a flight game, it’s fun to have a 3-D world to fly through … we actually weren’t sure whether we could do that when we started. Also, [we've learned] how many of our core strategy game elements that we’ve used on other platforms seem to work fairly well on iOS.

And that’s interesting because not all games are as mobile-friendly as others. Will Firaxis be doing more with turn-based games on mobile?

I think it works very well, yes. There are certainly some real-time games that work just fine. But the turn-based games that we’ve done, whether it’s Haunted Hollow or Ace Patrol or XCOM, later this summer, just all seem to be a natural fit for the mobile platforms. Is it part of our future? I think the answer is pretty assuredly yes. But we’re not giving up on PCs. They’re our bread and butter, and the new consoles are very interesting, but we definitely see mobile as a significant part of our future going forward.

What do you think about what Microsoft is doing with Windows? Obviously, they have the legacy title for being the home of PC gaming, and yet, in some ways, they’re making their main OS a lot more like a mobile operating system.

That’s a very interesting development. The PC market is splitting into tablet PCs and the traditional desktop PCs. These games that we’re doing cross over really nicely into tablet PCs or any kind of mobile format. That’s another reason why we’re looking really seriously at this market. I’m not sure what’s happening in the PC market, whether it’s going to go toward tablet or continue to be really strong in desktop. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

The finding comes in a new report from Gartner containing the results of a survey of CIOs around the world. So it’s not for nothing that Gartner calls these BYOD strategies “the most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing” in a decade.

When you think about it, BYOD amounts to a pretty fundamental shift in the way companies handle the knotty questions around supplying employees the tools they need to get the job done. For years, standard operating procedure at pretty much every company was to give a computer and maybe a phone or BlackBerry to every employee who needed them, and for the company to bear the cost. (Gartner, incidentally, includes PCs in its BYOD definition.)

What started with an occasional request for the IT department to support smartphones and tablets with access to work email has blown up into a huge shift in the way that corporate IT services are supplied to employees.

Right now, Gartner said, mid-sized companies of $500 million to $5 billion in sales and 2,500 to 5,000 employees are most likely to be using a BYOD approach. BYOD-friendly companies are twice as common in the U.S. as in Europe, but employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device on the job.

And if you’re looking for some figures to drive the point home, here’s one: 38 percent of companies expect to stop supplying employees with their devices entirely by 2016. But executives aren’t yet completely sold on the idea: Only 22 percent say they’ve made a good business case for adopting a BYOD move. There are, Gartner said, many benefits, not the least of which are lower costs and a happier work force.

Sources who declined to be named because they are forbidden to talk publicly about Apple’s plans tell AllThingsD that the company has been “borrowing” engineers from the OS X 10.9 team as part of an effort to double down on iOS 7. “Yes, yes — it’s essentially a repeat of the iPhone/Leopard scenario,” one source said, referring to Apple’s 2007 decision to pull engineers from OS X 10.5 to work on iPhone. “Not as much of a fire drill, though. It will ship on time.”

News of Apple’s iOS 7 scramble was first reported by Daring Fireball last month, and reiterated today by Bloomberg.

So what is it about iOS 7 that has caused Apple to rally additional engineering resources? It’s a pretty big update. With SVP of Industrial Design Jony Ive now oveerseeing interface design, sources say Apple has adopted a unified approach to software and hardware design. And evidently the spartan, elegant aesthetic that Ive has developed around Apple’s hardware is now being brought to bear on its software, as well. Last week, 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman reported that iOS 7 would feature a “flat” design that favors simplicity over flash. I’ve heard similar descriptions from sources who say iOS 7 is iOS “de-glitzed.”

“Put it this way,” said one source who has been briefed on iOS. “You know Game Center’s green felt craps table? Well, goodbye, Circus Circus.”

Not a surprise, really. With Scott Forstall — an advocate for flashy, skeuomorphic design and its stitched-leather and faux-wood-grain flourishes — now gone from Apple, and Ive in an expanded role, the current and former Apple employees I’ve spoken to say iOS 7 was destined for a new coat of paint. As one said, “Sounds like a much-needed ‘de-Forstallization.’”

Which is not to say that the design of iOS 7 is entirely about removing skeuomorphic gloss. Fact is, Apple hasn’t much changed the operating system’s look since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. If the company has good ideas for design tweaks, it’s about time it implemented them. With new mobile operating systems like BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone proving that there’s plenty of room left for innovation in the market, Apple can ill afford even the risk of the perception that iOS might be getting dusty.

Apple’s challenge, then, is to overhaul the look and feel of the OS while retaining the intuitiveness that has made it so popular. “The key question here is whether those changes deliver on the core Apple promise of improving customers’ ability to make productive use of the device and deliver a clearly superior experience,” Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told AllThingsD. “Presumably they don’t need the flashy stuff to realize that vision.”

Microsoft said on Tuesday that there is a test version of updated Facebook software for Windows Phone 8. The beta software adds support for high-res photos, post sharing and the Facebook Timeline.

However, the companies apparently mean it when they say beta.

“Don’t like it when apps crash?” Microsoft said in a blog post. “This probably isn’t the program for you.”

The app isn’t available in the Windows Phone marketplace, but is available via this direct link.

Separately, an app geared toward to making it easier for folks to switch from Android to a Windows Phone has made its way onto the Google Play and Windows Phone stores. Developed by Quixey, Switch to Windows Phone helps ease the move and allows one to see which of their apps are available for Microsoft’s operating system.

But here’s the guy to ask: Bill Carr, who heads up Amazon’s digital music and digital video groups, which now include Amazon Studios, the unit that is going to make original movies and TV shows for the e-commerce giant.

Carr doesn’t talk much, but last week I got the chance to sit down with him at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Amazon is as tight-lipped as Apple when it comes to new product discussions — or lots of other stuff you and I would like hear about — so I didn’t even bother asking him about Amazon’s new TV box. (Still: Count on it.)

But if you read between the lines, you should at least be able to get a sense of what Amazon is thinking as it contemplates beefing up its music offerings, and as it goes head to head with Netflix (and everyone else) in digital video. Here’s an edited version of our chat:

Peter Kafka: A couple years ago, Amazon and Google and Apple were all racing to develop music-locker services. But we don’t hear much about them anymore. How is Amazon’s locker working?

Bill Carr: The fundamental things about cloud music storage that works for all consumers is that it backs up everything, it’s in a safe place. I can access it from all of my devices, it’s simple. I don’t have to think about it. People don’t want to manage their music, they want to enjoy their music. Every consumer likes that.

What may have more limited appeal is how many consumers want to pay $25 a year to do that for all of their music.

Are you surprised about the take-up rates for the $25 a year option?

No. I don’t find that surprising.

The locker services seem like part of a larger trend where big platform companies like you, Apple, Google, are trying to get people to move their media into your own clouds, and end up committing to one ecosystem or another.

It may be that other companies think about it that way, because their goal is that you only use their devices. But that’s not our goal. Our goal is to free you up to use whatever device you want. Which is why we support any kind of PC, any kind of Mac, iOS devices, Android.

Our goal is to be ubiquitous on any device people might want to use. It’s a big investment for us to make all those apps avilable. But our goal is not to lock you into any one ecosystem.

Do you think you can keep doing that? It seems like we’re moving back toward a walled-garden world.

I can’t speak to other people, and what decisions they may make that may prohibit us from enabling our app. But we’ll work very hard on behalf of our customers to make sure our app is available on the devices they use.

You first started selling MP3s in 2007, and for a while it seemed like you weren’t making any headway against iTunes, which dominates the business. But now, at least according to NPD, you have 22 percent of the download market. What changed?

We don’t release any details about where we stand. But what I can say is that we have seen customer growth in our service every year. We have year-over-year growth in sales and in customers. And the way we’ve accomplished that is by building more solutions for customers.

Is your locker service helping sell more music? Are Kindle Fires helping you sell more music?

There’s no doubt that with the trend toward connected devices, mobile devices, our customers are realizing that it is super convenient to buy once and play it anywhere, and make it available on any of their devices. That’s working, and driving more sales.

Now it seems like there’s a move away from music sales and toward access — either from subscription services like Spotify, or free Internet radio like Pandora. You guys don’t offer anything like either one of those, but there are reports you are considering them. Should we expect an Amazon version?

We don’t speculate on what we might do in the future. But we’re also listening to our customers about other ways they’d like to enjoy their music. We’ll always look for the next innovation.

But you’re not philosophically opposed to subscription or ad-supported music?

Not at all. As a company, if we constrained ourselves to certain definitions, then we wouldn’t have gone nearly as far for our customers.

What about the idea of bundling music into Amazon Prime, like you do with video? Right now, there’s no connection between Amazon Prime and music.

We’re always thinking about distinctive experiences — how can we provide something for our customers that’s going to solve important problems for them? We’re always thinking about those things.

When it comes to video and Prime, it seems like your approach to your subscription service has changed. From the outside, it looked like, initially, you simply wanted to build up a catalog, and you weren’t very picky. More recently, it looks like you’re focusing on specific titles and catalogs.

The part I would disagree with is that we’ve never been thoughtful, or cared about the content. We have reams of data, based on years of being in both the transaction video business and the DVD/Blu-ray business, to know what our customers want to watch. And we’ve used that information to help bring them the right videos.

I think what has changed is — yeah, obviously, we have been increasing our investment over the last two years that we’ve been in this business. And I think it’s fair to say that increasingly you’ll see more and more content on Amazon that’s exclusive.

Why does exclusivity matter?

I think it’s very important for our customers. In some cases, it’s the only way to get some of the best shows. If we want those shows, in many cases the way that business shakes out is you can either have it exclusively, or not have it. More importantly, we are looking at what our customers like, and we want to have a set of movies and TV shows that are only on Amazon.

Why does that matter?

For the same reason that you can only see “30 Rock” on NBC, or “House of Cards” on Netflix, or “Girls” on HBO. It gives users a reason to tune in and try our service.

Are people watching many videos via Prime? Again, from the outside, it seems like there’s not a lot of use. There was a Sandvine study that showed Amazon very far behind Netflix last fall, and people I talk to who sell you programming don’t think you have a a lot of viewers.

We don’t disclose the details. But I would say we’ve seen strong triple-digit growth in terms of rate of use. We’re very pleased.

In the investor letter he published last week, Reed Hastings set up Netflix as a direct competitor with HBO. Do you also think Amazon is competing with them?

HBO’s a wonderful company, and has been a great partner to us. Our customers love HBO programming. I can’t speak to Reed’s strategy. But we’re building … I don’t think there is a another service like ours. It’s not like HBO. There’s at least three, four different ways to get movies and TV shows that you want on Amazon.

Hastings said he’s competing with HBO for customers’ time and money, but also now for content. Are you seeing that conflict coming with Amazon?

My ambition is to make sure that we create something that is its own service, that is not like HBO, Netflix or any other service, with its own unique value proposition. A lot of companies have a competitor focus. We have a customer focus.

Like Netflix, you are producing your own original programming. Earlier this month, you put up 14 TV pilots and asked people to vote on them. Why are you getting into originals, and why are you doing it that way?

The primary reason is because we’re committed to the idea of reinvention, and that we think that there’s great value for our customers if we get this right. And the reinvention is, “How do we get a lot more feedback from our customers early in the process? How do we remove gatekeepers from the process, so that great ideas can come from anywhere in the world, and get made into movies and TV shows? And how do we create a collaborative environment, where different creators can work in an open environment, to produce more exciting ideas and exciting stories that customers want to hear?”

So you think there’s video out there that could be made, and should be made, but isn’t, because of the way the existing production process works?

A simple example of that is what we’ve done in books, where we’ve created an open platform for any author to submit their books, through Kindle Direct Publishing. That removes gatekeepers from the process, and opens up all kinds of possibilities for people to become authors. So, why can’t there be great possibilities for people who have great stories to tell, whether it’s a script or screenplay?

It’s a journey for us. We’re flexible on the tactics of how we get there, but firm on the strategy.

If you look at the pilots you put out this month, it seems you’ve used a fairly traditional approach, and are working with lots of established talent. Only one of the 14 pilots — “Those Who Can’t” — came in over the transom. And even in that case, those guys were fairly established. Will that change?

Just the fact that that show came in from an online submission — I would consider that to be remarkable. That possiblity doesn’t exist in the traditional system today. And the idea that we’ve put all 14 pilots out for free, for anyone to watch, with the explicit ask for customers to give us feedback — I think both of those things are remarkable.

Are you surprised by any of the feedback you’re getting on the shows so far?

The point isn’t what I think about it. I didn’t spend a lot of time forming my opinions about it. I have shows that I prefer, but my views don’t represent the views of all of my customers. It really isn’t what I think about the shows, it’s what my customers think.

Do you think the comments you’re getting on the shows will be useful?

I think we’re getting really insightful information on all of the shows. How accurate it is is something we’ll discover over time. Because there has to be a feedback loop, and you have to see what happens in the real world.

This is a multiyear process. If you’re focused on reinvention, it requires you to experiment and collect data. And then try new experiments.

This move was expected, but it is a loud-and-clear demonstration of Google’s and Apple’s differing mobile strategies. Where Apple would never-ever-no-way bring Siri or its other signature apps to Android, Google wants to get people using its services from wherever they are.

Of course, Google Now will still be a better experience on Android, where it is built into the latest operating system and is accessed via an upswipe motion, along with live-updating home and lockscreen widgets. Not gonna happen on an iPhone.

But iOS users will be able to use 22 of the 29 currently available Google Now “Cards” at launch. That includes proactive personalized alerts about upcoming appointments and traffic, sports scores and news alerts, and information about nearby attractions and places where people often take photos.

Nine-month-old Google Now is really only useful if you actively use the Google suite of services — Gmail, Google Calendar and especially Google Search.

It is one of the best examples of an app where people don’t just get tracked and give up personal data for no reason — they do it in order to get the benefit of a service that understands their personal context. And along with voice search, it’s an example of Google’s increasing focus on “conversational search,” where machines start acting more natural.

But Google Now is still an early product, and one that’s explicitly designed to anticipate users’ needs rather than allow them to request and configure their settings. Sometimes its suggestions are irrelevant, and sometimes it doesn’t work that well.

(If you want a non-Google product that does some of the same things, other options include Tempo, EasilyDo and Sherpa.)

And, again, some of Google Now’s most advanced new features — like one that integrates searching for a movie to watch at the theater, buying a ticket on Fandango and then scanning a location-aware mobile ticket that automatically appears in the vicinity of the theater — are still only for Android. We’re told to expect upcoming new Google Now “Cards” on Android first, and then see them added to iOS later.

Or maybe you didn’t notice it. The Quartz team told me about the change in advance, and even I have a hard time seeing much difference. The biggest change is that a black bar that used to run across the top of the site and then shrink down as you scrolled down is now just preshrunk.

You can see, sort of, by comparing some “before” shots (clicking the images should enlarge them):

And an after:

The more interesting thing to note about Quartz’s overhaul is that it is one of dozens of changes Atlantic Media’s newest property has made since it launched seven months ago. Quartz editor Kevin Delaney says the site has pushed 73 code chages since Quartz first debuted, most of which have to do with the way the site’s guts function.

The reason Quartz can do that, Delaney argues, is because of its decision to rely on an HTML5 design that essentially serves up the same page to every reader, no matter what device they’re using to access the site. If you want to change the way an HTML5 site looks or behaves, you can simply change it — no need to monkey with an app that’s already downloaded to someone’s iPhone or Android.

That runs counter to a lot of current digital distribution thinking, which holds that every Web distributor — from newspapers to Facebook to Netflix — needs to be thinking app-first.

No need to beat the debate into the ground — it’s really only relevant to a few thousand people, and it can take on a religious overtone — but it is worth noting that it seems to be working for Quartz. Delaney said his site is now attracting two million users a month.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD.com this week:

1. Daily-deals site LivingSocial was hacked, compromising the names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords of 50 million users.
2. In an essay, Reed Hastings laid out his predictions for the future of streaming video, which includes not just his company, Netflix, but also HBO, ESPN and anyone else transitioning from a channel to an app.
3. Walt Mossberg reviewed the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, and concluded that “while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer.”
4. What are Google’s plans for its high-speed Internet project, Google Fiber? Theories abound, but good luck divining an answer from CEO Larry Page’s words.
5. According to multiple sources, Twitter is testing local discovery features that will help you better understand what’s happening not just around the world, but also down the block.
6. Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone may not be inexorable, after all. A new report says customer loyalty will let Apple overtake Google in smartphone market share by 2015.
7. On the 10-year anniversary of its sale to Google, Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz explained what he and his partners learned from starting up and getting acquired.
8. For the first time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer publicly commented on the controversy created after Yahoo banned its employees from working from home.
9. Speaking of Mayer, she’s officially joined the board of wireless gadget maker Jawbone, and it’s likely to be a good fit.
10. Apple needs some new hit products to drive growth, and CEO Tim Cook says they’re on the way… just not until this fall.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD.com on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

“What search is for the Web, maps are for mobile,” Bardin said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week.

The latitude and longitude of a location, he argued, are the equivalent of the URL for a Web page.

Doing maps well is quite hard, as demonstrated by Apple’s troubled iOS mapping app launch last year. People really, really don’t like it when their maps are wrong — and rightly so.

Bardin argued that crowdsourcing is the cheapest and most effective way to keep maps up to date, as well as provide real-time navigation. Waze’s 44 million users, who both actively and passively contribute to its maps, are its biggest weapon versus market leader Google and its infinite wallet.

Bardin also mapped out an interesting theory of “meta operating systems” for mobile phones. Where Apple and Samsung want to build fully integrated platforms, other players like Google, Facebook and Waze are building apps that reach across all sorts of different phones.

But then, where Google is building nearly every sort of app, and Facebook is increasingly extending its tentacles with Facebook Home, Waze is still just a mapping app.

So, what about those acquisition rumors? Is Waze preparing itself to be a strategic asset of some larger company? You’ll want to watch the video to see Bardin’s answer, where he’s unusually willing to not rule out a sale.

Also in the interview, Bardin discussed advertising on Waze, relations with Google and Apple, and recent legal threats to using phones in cars:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130426/maps-are-for-mobile-what-search-is-for-the-web-says-waze-ceo-noam-bardin/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130426/androids-leaky-bucket-loyalty-gives-apple-the-edge-over-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20130426/androids-leaky-bucket-loyalty-gives-apple-the-edge-over-time/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:01:57 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=315864 So, Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone? Not quite so inexorable anymore. Apple’s smartphone continues to gain share over devices running Google’s mobile OS in the U.S.; so much so that, according to the Yankee Group, iPhone ownership in the U.S. will exceed Android ownership by 2015. The reason: Platform loyalty.

Yankee Group surveyed 16,000 consumers over the past 12 months regarding which smartphones they own and which they intend to buy within the next six months. And, broadly, it found what you’d expect. About half of smartphone owners use an Android handset, while 30 percent use an iPhone. Of respondents who intend to buy a new smartphone within the next six months, 42 percent said they plan to buy an Android phone. Another 42 percent plan to purchase an iPhone. Again, about what you’d expect from the Google-Apple smartphone duopoly, with one exception: Buying intention versus ownership is higher for iPhone than Android.

Now, here’s another.

Of those surveyed, 91 percent of iPhone owners intend to buy another iPhone, while 6 percent plan to switch to an Android device with their next purchase. In other words, more than nine out of 10 iPhone owners are loyal to the platform. Once you buy an iPhone, chances are high you’re going to buy another.

That’s not quite as true for Android. Yankee found that 76 percent of Android owners intend to buy another Android phone. A big number, sure. But it means that 24 percent of Android phone users plan to switch to another platform. Guess where the majority of those professed switchers are going — 18 percent to iPhones.

Flip side: Just 6 percent of iPhone owners said they plan to switch to Android.

That’s a pretty significant asymmetry. And when you apply it to first-time smartphone buyers, two-thirds of whom plan to buy either an iPhone or an Android phone, it’s not hard to see iPhone ownership surpassing Android ownership in the U.S. in the next few years — by 2015. Yankee Group VP Carl Howe, who figures that Android has already peaked, has a great analogy for how this trend will play out:

“Think of the Apple and Android ecosystems as two buckets of water. New smartphone buyers — mostly upgrading feature phone owners — fall like rain into the two big buckets about equally, with a smaller number falling into Windows Phone and BlackBerry buckets. However, the Android bucket leaks badly, losing about one in five of all the owners put into it. The Apple bucket leaks only about 7 percent of its contents, so it retains more of the customers that fall into it. The Apple bucket will fill up faster and higher than the Android one, regardless of the fact that the Apple bucket may have had fewer owners in it to begin with.”

Lesson: Massive market share surges are great, but platform loyalty is powerful, powerful magic.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130426/androids-leaky-bucket-loyalty-gives-apple-the-edge-over-time/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130425/linkedin-launches-contacts-product-for-ios-and-the-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20130425/linkedin-launches-contacts-product-for-ios-and-the-web/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:00:03 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=315212 LinkedIn on Thursday launched a new Contacts feature for its website along with a standalone mobile iOS application, a product stemming from the October 2011 acquisition of startup Connected. Contacts pulls together a LinkedIn user’s network of, well, contacts, across multiple accounts, including their personal LinkedIn network, Gmail and exchange networks (though not their Facebook and Twitter accounts). As with a calendar app, users can also set reminders and take notes on specific people inside the Contacts product.

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