AllThingsD » May

Viral Video: Pirates of the Sequelmania

Kara Swisher — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:27:57 +0000

Is it just me or is this the 103rd sequel to the original “Pirates of the Caribbean”?

In any case, here comes more special effects in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which is opening this May.

Remember when it was only a Disney ride?

Enjoy:

Hitwise: Google Gained Search Market Share in May

John Paczkowski — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:30:47 +0000

In the search market, Google is either losing share or gaining it, and the direction it’s going depends on whose data you believe. According to comScore’s (SCOR) May search market report, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo gained share, ostensibly at Google’s expense.

Not according to Experian Hitwise, though, which reports that Google (GOOG) gained share in May, and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing and Yahoo (YHOO) lost it. In a report issued today (see table above; click to enlarge), Hitwise said Google increased its share of the U.S. Internet search market to 72.2 percent in May from 71.4 percent in April, while Yahoo’s share declined to 14.4 percent from 15 percent and Bing’s to 9.2 percent from 9.4 percent.

May Search Metrics: Google Losing Share or Gaining It? All Depends on How You Look at the Data

John Paczkowski — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:30:39 +0000

Getting an accurate read on the tides of search market share these days is no easy feat given the interface changes being rolled out by the major players.

Consider comScore’s May search market report (see tables above; click to enlarge), which shows Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo gaining share, ostensibly at Google’s expense. For the month, Yahoo gained 60 basis points for a share of 18.3 percent, and Bing 30 points for a share of 12.1 percent. Meanwhile, Google’s (GOOG) share declined 70 basis points to 63.7 percent.

While those numbers seem straightforward enough, they really aren’t, given some of the navigational ploys Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) have been using to boost their numbers. Slideshows and contextual search links have helped raise the share of both companies, but they need to be backed out of the data to get an accurate view of the sector, as J.P. Morgan (JPM) analyst Imran Khan explains.

“User interface changes continue to cloud the picture,” Khan said in a note to clients. “Google, Yahoo! and [Bing] all made notable changes in April and May, according to comScore. As such, numbers may not be directly comparable to past months. On a reported basis, Google lost ~70 bps of search share in May vs. April, while Yahoo! was the biggest gainer, up ~50 bps. Excluding the impact of all adjustments, Google gained ~30 bps of share, Yahoo! was down ~25 bps and Microsoft was flat.”

In other words, the numbers here do lie and will continue to do so until measurement outfits like comScore (SCOR) account for context-driven searches and slideshows. ComScore plans to do just that.

“[The] continued evolution of search and emerging innovations in how it is used to enhance user experience, calls for a thoughtful review of how we classify various types of searches, count them and report them,” Cameron Meierhoefer, comScore’s executive VP of analytics, wrote in a blog post released along with the company’s latest search stats.

“We want to ensure that we provide comprehensive and flexible measurement that meets the needs of the various constituencies in the digital marketplace,” Meierhoefer added. “As our thinking evolves, we will include relevant stakeholders in the discussion and clearly communicate our thinking and rationale to the marketplace.”

The timeline? “While we will maintain the current method through the end of the second quarter to avoid reporting disruptions, we will aim to implement proposed revisions in the third quarter, ideally starting with the release of July data in the first half of August.”

Nearly Two Billion Tweets a Month; Giddy Foursquare Mayors Suspected

John Paczkowski — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:37:37 +0000

Here’s a promising metric for Twitter and its newly launched advertising system: The microblogging service hosted nearly two billion tweets in May. This according to Twitter itself and analytics house Pingdom, which says tweet volume is about double what it was last December (see chart below; click to enlarge).

These days, Twitter is carrying some 64 million tweets per day, 2.7 million tweets per hour, 44,481 tweets per minute, and 741 tweets per second. Which is impressive.

“Maybe Twitter won’t quite be able to reach the almost six billion tweets per month we’ve predicted for the end of the year, but it’s clear that the Twitter platform is still growing at a healthy pace,” Pingdom analysts note. “Close to doubling the volume of monthly tweets in the last six months is no small feat.”

Indeed. And that growth has got to be encouraging for a company hoping to justify its rich valuation by selling its audience to advertisers. Now if it could only figure out how to manage it a bit better. Ironically, the service has been suffering latency and availability issues today.

[Image Credits: Pingdom, Scarletbits]

Apple iPad 3G Arrives in U.S. on April 30

John Paczkowski — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:50:49 +0000

When Apple (AAPL) said the 3G-enabled version of its new iPad slate would ship by “late April,” it wasn’t kidding. In a press release issued moments ago, the company said the device will arrive at market and in the hands of U.S. customers who pre-ordered it on Friday, April 30.

The official announcement below.

iPad Wi-Fi + 3G Models Available in US on April 30

CUPERTINO, California—April 20, 2010—Apple® today announced that the Wi-Fi + 3G models of its magical iPad™ will be delivered to US customers who’ve pre-ordered on Friday, April 30, and will be available in Apple retail stores the same day starting at 5:00 p.m.

iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad Wi-Fi + 3G models are just 0.5 inches thick and weigh just 1.6 pounds—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and deliver up to 10 hours of battery life for surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching videos or listening to music, and up to nine hours of surfing the web using a 3G data network.*

Apple retail stores will offer a free Personal Setup service to every customer who buys an iPad at the store, helping them customize their new iPad by setting up their email, loading their favorite apps from the App Store, and more. US Apple retail stores are also hosting special iPad workshops to help customers learn more about this magical new product.

Pricing & Availability
iPad is available in Wi-Fi models in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB and $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available on April 30 in the US for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad is sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores, most Best Buy stores, select Apple Authorized Resellers and campus bookstores. AT&T is offering breakthrough 3G pre-paid data plans for iPad with easy, on-device activation and management.

iPad will be available at the end of May in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Apple will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders for iPad on May 10.

Before the Tablet: Apple's Steve Jobs in 2004 Talks About Not Doing Another Newton (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:01:28 +0000

Before Steve Jobs unveils his latest and perhaps greatest creation–which is expected to be a tablet computer–today at a massively hyped event in San Francisco, you might want to peruse this video clip, unearthed from our archives by the crack All Things Digital team, in which the legendary Apple CEO said he was glad he did not do another single-screen PDA-like device after the Newton debacle.

In an interview with Walt Mossberg at the second D: All Things Digital conference in May 2004, Jobs said definitively: “I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as the ones we have done.”

He specifically referenced calls to create a new version of the Newton, an innovative personal digital assistant hardware/software platform that Apple (AAPL) tried to make a success of throughout the 1990s and ultimately shuttered.

While it is not exactly the kind of tablet Apple is likely to unveil later this morning, the Newton MessagePad is is widely considered influential to the development of the iPhone. Wikipedia, in fact, notes, “Some refer to the Newton as the iPhone’s grandfather.”

Since the iPhone is kind of the son of the iPod, that would make it the father of the upcoming tablet. Thus, the new device is the Newton’s great-grandson.

We’ll see if it is a Silicon Valley chip off the old block or not very soon.

Here’s the video from D2:

[ See post to watch video ]

China Delays Filtering Initiative

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:00:52 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Palm Sold 300,000 Pres in June

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:10:16 +0000

During its post-earnings conference call last Thursday, Palm refused to say how many Pre handsets have been sold to date. Or how many it believes it will sell in the first quarter of production. The company would say only, in the words of CEO Jon Rubinstein, that “sales have been strong and growing.” So until Palm (PALM) provides specific Pre sales figures, we have only the estimates of analysts with which to gauge the device’s impact on Palm’s moribund smartphone franchise.

And the latest estimates, from Edward Snyder at Charter Equity Research, suggest that the impact is great. Sources in the manufacturing and retail channels tell Snyder that Palm may have sold as many as 300,000 Pres in June and 70,000 in May.

Those are impressive figures if they prove true. After all, Palm shipped just 351,000 phones in the entire quarter prior to the Pre’s debut. If Palm ships one million Pres to Sprint (S) in the device’s first full quarter of production, as Snyder believes, that will be an achievement indeed.

As I’ve said before, turnaround story of the year.

Search Market: Same as It Ever Was

John Paczkowski — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:34:51 +0000

More sad data points in Microsoft’s Sisyphean battle for the search market.

J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan offered an early look at market researcher comScore’s May 2009 core search volume and market share metrics for the U.S. this afternoon (to be publicly released tomorrow) and they show what search metrics always seem to show these days: Google’s share of the domestic market growing at the expense of its rivals (click on tables below to enlarge).

According to comScore (SCOR), Google’s (GOOG) share of the domestic search market rose to 65 percent in May, up from 64.2 percent in April. Its core search volume grew 42.5 percent, far exceeding the 40.6 growth in posted in the month prior. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s (YHOO) domestic core search market share slipped a bit, falling to 20.1 percent in May from 20.4 percent in April. Its core search volume for the month grew by 29.5 percent, down from 39.3 percent.

And what of Microsoft (MSFT)? It, too, suffered a decline. Its share of the domestic core search market fell to eight percent in May from 8.2 percent in April. Core search growth was also down at 24.9 percent from 25.7 percent in April. Clearly, Microsoft is still struggling to gain purchase in the search market. But, while these data don’t yet show it, Microsoft may have found some traction. As I noted last week, Bing has been generating a fair bit of interest, and that bodes well for some improvement in its position in the search market.

OS X Market Share: 8.23 Percent Down, 82.06 Percent to Go …

John Paczkowski — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:50:50 +0000

Historically, Apple’s September back-to-school promotion has been a great driver of sales and this year was no exception. According to research outfit Net Applications, Apple’s share of the operating system market rose nearly four-tenths of a percentage point in September, its biggest one-month gain since May (click on the chart below for a larger version).

Today, Mac OS X runs on 8.23 percent of the machines accessing the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications. Two years ago it was running on a little over 5 percent. That’s a 58 percent gain. Quite an achievement, though at 8.23 percent, Apple’s (AAPL) share of the OS market is still dwarfed by the 90.29 percent held by Microsoft and its Windows OS. That said Windows’s market share does appear to be slipping. It dropped 0.4 percent from August to September.