Apps Rocket Toward $25 Billion in Sales; Players in Quickly Growing Business Scramble to Figure Out Best Ways to Attract Users and Turn a Profit

Updated March 3, 2013, 8:37 p.m. ET

Apps Rocket Toward $25 Billion in Sales

Players in Quickly Growing Business Scramble to Figure Out Best Ways to Attract Users and Turn a Profit

By JESSICA E. LESSIN and SPENCER E. ANTE

How big of a money maker are apps? What country’s GDP is the size of the global app economy? How does app use compare to TV in terms of time spent per day? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has answers.

Nearly five years after Apple Inc. AAPL -2.48% kicked off the mobile-apps craze, the industry is booming.

App stores run by Apple and Google Inc. GOOG +0.62% now offer more than 700,000 apps each. With so many apps to choose from, consumers are estimated to spend on average about two hours a day with apps. Global revenue from app stores is expected to rise 62% this year to $25 billion, according to Gartner Inc. IT +0.14%

The apps industry has matured in some respects. Some of the Wild West tactics of five years ago—like scams to accrue more downloads—have given way to more order as Apple and others tighten their rules. App developers are more methodical about marketing their apps and focusing on the few apps that work best. Read more of this post

In Sweden, TV Tax Comes to Smartphones

March 1, 2013, 3:12 p.m. ET

In Sweden, TV Tax Comes to Smartphones

By GUSTAV SANDSTROM

Sweden’s public broadcaster, feeling pressure as streaming heavyweights like NetflixNFLX +0.69% and HBO gain ground with their newly-founded Nordic services, is taking the nation’s television license fees to a new level by asking smartphone and tablet users to pay up.

License fees have been in place for years as state-backed broadcasters look to fund commercial-free programming, including the BBC. In Sweden’s case, anyone owning a television is forced to pay a SEK173 ($27) tab per month for Sveriges Television, Sveriges Radio and educational broadcasting known as Utbildningsradion. That fee hardly looks like a bargain compared with the SEK79 ($12) monthly fee that Netflix Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s TWX +0.85% HBO each charge subscribers in Sweden. Read more of this post

Dear Apple, Amazon, Google: Here’s Why Chinese Consumers Hate Your Ecosystems; Be formless, shapeless, like water. (And be flexible towards your ecosystem users)

Dear Apple, Amazon, Google: Here’s Why Chinese Consumers Hate Your Ecosystems

Mar 1, 2013 at 14:10 PM by Steven Millward, in Asia, Mobile, Opinion

Chinese consumers love your gadgets – that’s great news. But the bad news for Apple, Amazon, Google, and many more companies is that Chinese netizens hate your ecosystems. They really don’t want to be trapped in your walled garden. In an age of platforms and extended web services, that’s a huge monetization problem for tech companies entering the world’s biggest market.

Android, without the Google bits

This aversion to tech ecosystems in China is seen most starkly with Google’s mobile OS, Android. An estimated 189 million smartphones were sold in China in 2012, and as many as 86 percent of those were Android devices. But that huge user-base hasn’t translated into popularity for Google’s other apps and services. Read more of this post

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers

Robocolleague

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers

Mar 2nd 2013 |From the print edition

WATSON, an IBM supercomputer, spectacularly beat its human rivals in a 2011 edition of “Jeopardy!”, an American quiz show. It has got smarter since then. Its components have shrunk from room-size to briefcase-size; its processing speed has more than tripled. The sleeker, faster Watson is now being put to commercial use: its first application is suggesting treatments in cancer clinics. Many people fear that Watson exemplifies a trend toward the displacement of human workers by machines.

In a 2011 e-book called “Race against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worried that human workers would fail to adapt to the quickening pace of technological change. “The Lights in the Tunnel”, a 2009 book by Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur, painted a bleaker picture still. Mr Ford noted that about 40% of Americans work in old-fashioned occupations—as nurses, book-keepers and the like. He argued that innovation will soon allow firms to eliminate millions of jobs, like the 3m-plus cashiers whose positions are threatened by automated cash registers, but will create few new opportunities for displaced workers.

But plenty of research suggests that innovation need not translate into a shrinking role for human labour. Read more of this post

YouTube’s Search for the Next ‘Gangnam Style’

YouTube’s Search for the Next ‘Gangnam Style’

By Bruce Einhorn on February 28, 2013

One of the ritziest addresses in Tokyo is Roppongi Hills, a vast commercial, retail, and residential complex with two art galleries, the Grand Hyatt Tokyo, and tenants including Goldman Sachs (GS) and Barclays (BCS). There are also bald vampires clad in tighty-whities and body paint filming in Google’s (GOOG) new video studio.

The Roppongi Hills studio is central to YouTube’s first significant effort at audience-building in Asia. The online video giant’s other two studios, in Los Angeles and London, help popular creators develop original programming for its online video channels. In Japan, YouTube’s biggest regional success story in Asia, the company is recruiting online video stars to bolster its local-language channels with more targeted original programming and higher production values. YouTube only launched dedicated local-language channels for Southeast Asia last year, and censorship still keeps Google’s video service out of China. Compared with the U.S., “Asia has come a little bit later” for YouTube, says David Macdonald, head of the video service’s Asia-Pacific content operations.

Local programming is important for advertisers who want to reach Asian audiences, says Trevor Healy, Singapore-based chief executive officer of mobile advertising agency Amobee. “You can get more creative in who you target,” he says. Videos like the Korean rapper Psy’s smash hit Gangnam Style (with more than 1.3 billion YouTube views) or smaller successes like the 600-odd “Eat Your Kimchi” clips by Simon and Martina Stawski, a Canadian couple who live in Seoul and have close to 500,000 YouTube subscribers, could be the breakthroughs YouTube needs. Psy’s overnight global fame demonstrated the potential of Asian-made content, says Healy: “When something goes viral in Asia, it really goes viral.” Read more of this post

Computer Interfaces: Tech’s Next Great Frontier

Computer Interfaces: Tech’s Next Great Frontier

By Drake Bennett on February 28, 2013

Consider the tongue. It’s sensitive yet muscular, packed with taste buds and nerves, and without its acrobatic ability humans wouldn’t be able to eat or talk. It’s also our most versatile sense organ, and some computer engineers say it’s underused. Wicab, a Middleton (Wis.)-based company, has designed a small, square array of electrodes for the blind. When placed on the tongue like a lollipop, it turns the feed from a video camera into a pointillist pattern of tactile stimulation. The sensation is like sparkling water, or Pop Rocks candy, but after time and practice, blind users report the paradoxical sensation of seeing with their tongues.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student Gershon Dublon is trying to broaden Wicab’s idea. He’s made a cheap ($10 to $40, he estimates), bare-bones version of the device that can be connected to any set of sensors. He encourages fellow engineers to hook their tongues up to other inputs—microphones, pressure sensors, even a magnetometer, which would give a person a migratory bird’s unerring sense of direction. The device, which Dublon calls the Tongueduino, wouldn’t be just for the blind, or the deaf, but for anyone looking to augment his senses. “It would be useful,” he says, “for anyone who wants a better sense of direction.” Read more of this post

Coca-Cola’s Chok! Chok! Chok! ad shakes up mobile marketing

Chok! Chok! Chok! ad shakes up mobile marketing

2:45pm EST

By Kate Holton and Leila Abboud

BARCELONA (Reuters) – A strange phenomenon hit Hong Kong in late 2011.

As the clock hit 10 pm each night a Coca Cola ad aired on television, prompting thousands of viewers to grab their phones and start shaking them frantically to virtually “catch” the falling bottle caps on the screen and win instant prizes.

Dubbed Chok! Chok! Chok! – meaning rapid motion in local slang – the interactive campaign by McCann Worldgroup became a hit, and sent viewers at home, in cinemas and in front of giant outdoor screens into a frenzy. (link.reuters.com/wux36t)

Nine million people saw the ad – 380,000 downloaded the Chok! Chok! Chok! app in the first month – and its success indicates that marketers may be finally figuring out how to direct ads at consumers via mobile phones. Read more of this post

Google’s Brin Touting Glasses Says Smartphone Emasculate

Google’s Brin Touting Glasses Says Smartphone Emasculate

Sergey Brin has an unconventional view of the handheld devices that help generate billions of dollars in ad revenue for the company he co-founded.

Hunching over a smartphone while walking about is “emasculating,” Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Brin said yesterday at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Long Beach, California, according to a blog post on the event’s website.

Brin was touting the benefits of Google Glass, his company’s wearable mobile-computing devices that resemble spectacles. His point: standing upright and summoning information to one’s eyes is a better use of the body than “rubbing a featureless piece of glass.”

“Is this the way you’re meant to interact with other people?” he said at the conference. “It’s kind of emasculating.” Read more of this post

Smartphone app tests urine for medical conditions

Smartphone app tests urine for medical conditions

NEW YORK — A smartphone app that analyses urine samples for a range of medical conditions has been demonstrated at a science fair in the United States.

BY –

1 MIN 23 SEC AGO

NEW YORK — A smartphone app that analyses urine samples for a range of medical conditions has been demonstrated at a science fair in the United States.

The app can be used as an indicator of 25 different health issues including diabetes, urinary tract infections, cancers and liver problems.

Users who pay £13 (S$24.30) to download Uchek from Apple’s App Store from the end of this month will also be sent a mat and five dipsticks. Read more of this post

LinkedIn: The Ugly Duckling of Social Media

February 27, 2013, 7:58 p.m. ET

LinkedIn: The Ugly Duckling of Social Media

By EVELYN M. RUSLI

Shares of Facebook Inc., FB -1.90% Zynga Inc. ZNGA +4.76% and Groupon Inc.GRPN +7.78% tanked after their rocky stock-market debuts. But LinkedIn Corp.’sLNKD +6.83% stock is still soaring, closing at an all-time high of $168.55 on Wednesday.

That may be because of people such as Chris Hoyt, who helps manage recruiting forPepsiCo Inc. PEP +0.53% Mr. Hoyt said the beverage maker has ramped up its spending on LinkedIn over the past three years by paying for job ads, career pages and a recruiter talent finder. The professional-networking site has become one of PepsiCo’s main sources of job candidates. Read more of this post

Why language is the key to winning India’s mobile market

Why language is the key to winning India’s mobile market

By Leo Mirani — February 26, 2013

“I’ve only just returned from work.”Reverie Language Technologies

“I’ll be late coming home today”Panini Keypad

MUMBAI—India has the world’s largest mobile phone market after China. Yet the amount of money mobile networks make per user is among the lowest in the world: around $2 per month. Chinese carriers such as China Mobile make five times as much. AT&T rakes in $65 per user per month in the US.

The most obvious reason is that Indian carriers operate on razor-thin margins, charging customers $0.01 per minute. Smartphone users spend more butpenetration remains low. Half of Indian smartphone owners don’t have a data plan anyway, according to Prashant Singh of Nielsen. But there are other things that make India unique.

Unlike many markets, Indian carriers derive most of their revenues the old-fashioned way: from people making calls. Non-voice revenue is just 11% of the total. That’s about half as much as in Britain and just under a third of American and Chinese operators’ non-voice revenues (pdf). Only one in two Indians send text messages, much lower than the 62% in its class of what the World Bank defines aslower-middle-income countries. Considering the zeal with which Indians have taken to mobile phones, what explains their reluctance to embrace their use for other things?

A big obstacle is language (bhasha or vasha in Hindi). Most phones sold in India come with English-language operating system software. Despite India’s reputation as an Anglophone nation, only a tenth of its 1.2 billion people count English as their first, second or third language. In any case, one out of four Indians cannot read or write. But unlike linguistically homogeneous Russia or China, India’s 22 official languages (and several hundred unofficial ones) in 11 different scripts make it a difficult market to crack. Read more of this post

S Korea grappling with smartphone addiction; smartphone penetration rate in South Korea was 64 per cent in 2012, a 60-fold-leap compared with 2009, when smartphone users accounted for less than one per cent of all mobile phone users

S Korea grappling with smartphone addiction
By Lim Yun Suk | Posted: 26 February 2013 1613 hrs

SEOUL: South Korea has more than 30 million mobile phone users. The devices have become a vital part of everyday life in the country.

But owning mobile phones also come with disadvantages. Children and adults cannot seem to get their hands off these devices.

Korean doctors are calling it an addiction.

“After church sometimes I want to play with my friends outside but all they want to do is play games on their mobiles. It’s no fun anymore,” said Han Ji Min, an elementary school student.

College student Chung Seung Yeon said: “I have many friends who use their handphones even while eating. And they do it like there’s nothing wrong with it. Because it has become so common, nobody thinks it’s serious to be using their handphones while eating.” Read more of this post

Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Snapping Up Existing Web Firms to Try to Catch Up to eBay, Amazon; Home Depot is buying a startup that uses algorithms to set Web prices

February 25, 2013, 7:56 p.m. ET

Targeting Tech-Savvy Startups

Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Snapping Up Existing Web Firms to Try to Catch Up to eBay, Amazon

By SHELLY BANJO

Three months ago, Rodrigo Carvalho and Lukas Bouvrie were working 20-hour days to raise money and attract clients for Black Locus Inc., a 20-person Austin, Texas, startup that uses algorithms to help retailers sell their wares on the Web.

Now, the recent graduates of Carnegie Mellon University’s business school work for the world’s largest home-improvement retailer, Home Depot Inc. HD -2.53%

The company, which is expected to publicly address the acquisition of Black Locus Tuesday, is the latest traditional brick-and-mortar retailer to buy a startup and launch a “technology lab” to try to catch up to online retailers like Amazon.com Inc.AMZN -2.09% and eBay Inc. EBAY -2.56%

Home Depot says the startup, renamed the Home Depot Innovation Lab, will help it compete in an online environment where prices change by the second and are determined by algorithms rather than merchants. The company declined to disclose terms of the purchase. Read more of this post

Mobile Revolution Buffets Taiwan PC Rivals; Two computer-making neighbors in the technologically inclined economy of Taiwan seem headed in opposite directions.

February 24, 2013

Mobile Revolution Buffets Taiwan PC Rivals

By LIN YANG

TAIPEI — Two computer-making neighbors in the technologically inclined economy of Taiwan seem headed in opposite directions.

Personal computer sales have slumped worldwide as smartphones and tablets have proliferated and gained in popularity. One Taiwan heavyweight, Acer, has shared in the suffering: It is expected to report a second straight annual loss in 2012 after losing 6.6 billion Taiwan dollars, or $223 million at the current exchange rate, in 2011.

But another Taiwan-based PC company, Asustek, which sells computers under the Asus name, grew 43 percent in the quarter that ended in September, to 6.7 billion dollars in net income. The company’s PC sales rose 6.4 percent even as industrywide PC shipments declined 4.9 percent in the last three months of 2012, according to the research firm Gartner.

The companies’ divergent fortunes expose both the mistakes and the opportunities for PC makers in an epic shift in the way consumers use technology. Read more of this post

Barnes & Noble Weighs Its E-Reader Investment; The company’s underperforming Nook Media division might signal that its substantial investment in its digital future has essentially run its course

February 24, 2013

Barnes & Noble Weighs Its E-Reader Investment

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Even for a company with a lot of bad news lately, the bulletin from Barnes & Noble this month had an ominous feel.

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, warned that when it reports fiscal 2013 third-quarter results on Thursday, losses in its Nook Media division — which includes sales of e-books and devices — will be greater than the year before and that the unit’s revenue for all of fiscal 2013 would be far below projections it gave of $3 billion.

The problem was not so much the extent of the losses, but what the losses might signal: that the digital approach that Barnes & Nobles has been heavily investing in as its future for the last several years has essentially run its course.

A person familiar with Barnes & Nobles’s strategy acknowledged that this quarter, which includes holiday sales, has caused executives to realize the company must move away from its program to engineer and build its own devices and focus more on licensing its content to other device makers. Read more of this post

Business network giants face China ‘guanxi’ battle

Business network giants face China ‘guanxi’ battle
Posted: 24 February 2013 2055 hrs

BEIJING: Professional social networking websites such as LinkedIn trying to tap into China’s vast business world are finding a formidable domestic foe — the ingrained system of personal connections known as “guanxi”.

Two leading sites, California-based LinkedIn and the French company Viadeo, are targeting networkers in the world’s most populous country, but acknowledge the challenges they face.

China has the world’s biggest online population at 564 million web users, but the history of Western Internet giants looking to establish themselves in it is littered with failures and disappointed retreats. Read more of this post