mass market

Wal-Mart’s New Apps Will Integrate Coupons and Voice Recognition

Tricia Duryee in Commerce on November 8, 2011 at 9:00 pm PT

Wal-Mart is launching its first iPad app ever and is refreshing its iPhone app, providing a glimpse of what mobile commerce will be like for the mass market.

With iPad, Apple Will Claim 12 Percent of PC Market in 2011

John Paczkowski in News on December 13, 2010 at 11:50 am PT

Some 54.7 million tablets will be sold next year and of those, 37.2 million will be iPads. That’s the forecast from Goldman Sachs’s Bill Shope, who says exploding sales of the device may well make Apple “one of the largest vendors in the global personal computing market.”

Two Little Laptops With a Lot to Offer Their Core Users

Walt Mossberg in Personal Technology on February 3, 2010 at 6:04 pm PT

Walt Mossberg reviews Dell’s M11x and Sony’s Vaio X, two diminutive laptops aimed at radically different customers.

Amazon Pushes Royalty Rates Up–And Prices Down–For Do-It-Yourself E-Book Publishers

Peter Kafka in Media on January 20, 2010 at 5:50 am PT

Amazon is doubling the royalty rate it pays small e-book authors and publishers–if they promise to keep the prices of their digital texts below the price of physical books. The goals here are obvious: Push prices down and try to keep business away from a growing list of rivals.

Analyst: Palm Is Not Toast

John Paczkowski in News on December 15, 2009 at 1:00 pm PT

Investors poised to write off Palm as a legitimate contender in the smartphone market may want to hold off in light of some recent developments that suggest 2010 may be a strong year for the company. With a Verizon relationship clearly in the works, some 500 webOS applications available and a high-end and low-end device on which to run them, the highly competitive smartphone sector appears to be developing an … appreciation for Palm.

BoomTown Decodes Google CEO Schmidt's Shut-Up-You-Whiny-News-Folk Op-Ed (So You Don't Have To)!

Kara Swisher in News on December 3, 2009 at 1:30 pm PT

Google CEO Eric Schmidt did one of his patented throat-clearers in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today and it pretty much begs for translation. Well, BoomTown shall not tarry from the task of decoding the extra-long rumination from the head of Google, who was responding to the recent spate of aggressive attacks by traditional media publishers. They have blamed the search giant for everything from their current business woes to the destruction of journalism to Tiger Woods’s dicey marital troubles. Okay, not that! But the rest for sure.

OMFG: 4.1 Billion Text Messages Sent Every Day in U.S.

John Paczkowski in News on October 8, 2009 at 11:59 am PT

Some 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009 in the U.S. This according to the CTIA’s semiannual wireless industry survey, which helpfully breaks down that astonishing figure to an even more astonishing 4.1 billion texts per day. That’s about double the number sent during the same period last year.