CES 2014: Connected Home And Wearables To Take Center Stage

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/03/ces-2014-preview-wearable-technology-4k-tv-connected-home-smartphones-tablets#awesm=~ospn3pfubMOvk8

The Consumer Electronics Show is an annual pilgrimage to the deserts of Nevada to find an oasis of gadgets. Next week we will make that pilgrimage again, this time hoping to find the future of computing in screens we hang on our walls, wear on our wrists and everything in between.

CES has lost a bit of its luster over recent years. The most important technology companies on the planet—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc.—have no tangible presence at the show any more. CES is no longer the panacea of everything and anything tech, but rather a proxy that serves and illustrates the undercurrents of the massive worldwide gadget industry. CES has become the metadata of the technology world: it informs everything else that is going on even if it is not exactly the main story.

This year at CES, the ReadWrite team will be looking for some specific trends. We will be highly interested in fitness and wearable technology (which we expect to find in droves). We are on the lookout for interesting uses of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities to inform the connected home. We want to find the next-generation of content devices, be they innovative streaming services or gadgets as well as the future of smart 4K Ultra HD televisions. There will be robots. We will be monitoring the big news and laying the groundwork for our research on how the mobile industry will evolve in 2014. 

CES offers a great opportunity for us to monitor and study all of these trends that will be gaining traction in 2014 and beyond. While we will be sure to be up to date on the major news announcements, we also like to go off script a little bit at these types of mammoth trade shows. CES is so big that there is a certain amount of serendipity baked into the format. What’s the weirdest thing at CES this year? A Bluetooth paper airplane? Maybe that gadget that tries to translate your dog’s barking into English? Death ray goggles? We will keep our ears and eyes open to find out. 

At the same time, we like to approach a conference like CES with a certain amount of, shall we say, finesse. Instead of broadcasting every minute of CES with a video camera strapped to our backs and writing about everything and absolutely everything we lay our eyes on, we will be focusing on the spaces in between. Call it our own version of journalistic metadata. These are the conversations that people have in bars and on buses, what people are saying on the show floor and how they react to the latest news. These conversations usually never make news or headlines, but they tend to inform the world of technology better than a press release or a booth demonstration. When you read between the lines, often times you get a better sense of what is actually happening than when you sit through a litany of briefings and press conferences. 

This year CES will be defined by a burgeoning amount of wearable technology, really fancy televisions, some new smartphones and tablets that will look a lot like last year’s smartphones and tablets and an endless supply of accessories and cases. We expect to find wireless chargers and nifty stylus pens and lots and lots of robots.

Make sure you join us next week by following ReadWrite on Twitter as well aseditor-in-chief Owen Thomas, mobile editor Dan Rowinski and reporter Adriana Lee as we traverse the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center for the most interesting tidbits at CES 2014.

The Post-PC Era Begins In Earnest Next Year

http://readwrite.com/2013/12/10/smartphone-pcs-install-base-2014#awesm=~opGVaP5Pvu62cf

To date, there are still more installed PCs in the world than there are smartphones or tablets. Next year, that's likely to change.

According to projections from mobile analyst Ben Evans, the number of smartphones in use around the world will pass that of PCs for the first time next year. According to a chart from Evans, the estimate of installed PCs in the world is a little north of 1.6 billion. The global install base of smartphones is near 1.3 billion and growing at a much faster clip than PCs. If you add tablets into the equation (with a tick more than 200 million installed across the world) then mobile devices are almost on par with PCs already.

Evans predicts that the total number of installed smartphones in the world will eclipse PCs in 2014 sometime in the second quarter.

Evans notes that the numbers are appropriately approximate because firm numbers of devices "installed"—meaning purchased, activated and used—by global consumers is difficult to pinpoint with a high degree of accuracy.

The broad stroke numbers are very easy to see. IDC predicts that 314.2 million PCs (desktop and laptop/notebook) will be shipped in 2013, down from 349.4 in 2012. That is a 10.1% shortfall year-over-year, the biggest single year drop in PC history.

On the other end, smartphones are predicted to eclipse one billion shipments this year. IDC shows smartphone shipment growth of 39.3% year-over-year with little sign of slowing down.

See also: Dropping Prices Are Driving Mass Smartphone Adoption Across The World

IDC predicts that 1.7 billion smartphones will ship in 2017, versus estimated PC shipments of 305.1 million. Shipments, of course, don't equal sales of actual devices to consumers. It is also important to note that even sales do not mean an addition to the installed base, as many as older models are replaced by newer ones. In aggregate, the install base rises over time—just not at the rate of shipments or sales. 

The Power Of Ubiquitous Computing

The era of ubiquitous computing is upon us. Smartphones and tablets are devices that are always connected, always with us. The adoption curve of mobile devices has been astonishing in the last several years, fueled by Western consumers rushing to buy the latest and greatest smartphones. Now smartphone and tablet prices are dropping around the world, leading to a billion smartphone shipments this year.

Over the last several years, “mobile shopping” has become a big buzz term around the holidays. IBM has tracked the data for Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday for the last several years and notes that 25.8% of sales were made from a smartphone or tablet on the American holiday. On Black Friday, 21.8% of sales were through smartphones or tablets. Essentially, between one out of every four and five online sales on the biggest shopping day of the year were made by mobile devices. People have their tablets and smartphones close at hand and look online for deals.

At some point this ceases to be a “mobile” phenomenon. Instead of “mobile shopping,” it is just “shopping” … through whatever computer happens to be close at hand. That is the power of ubiquitous computing.

As smartphones overtake PCs globally, the notion that anything is seen as a mobile trend ceases to be important. Instead we are just all connected wherever we go by the a powerful computers in our pockets.

summary; In 2014, smartphones will most likely eclipse PCs in terms of the number of devices in use around the world.

Are Smartphones Turning Us Into Bad Samaritans?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579151850028363502?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

Busy with our tablets and smartphones in public places, we may be losing our sense of duty to others

We can't afford to be so preoccupied with our gadgets when we're in public spaces, says writer Christine Rosen in a conversation with WSJ's Gary Rosen.

In late September, on a crowded commuter train in San Francisco, a man shot and killed 20-year-old student Justin Valdez. As security footage shows, before the gunman fired, he waved around his .45 caliber pistol and at one point even pointed it across the aisle. Yet no one on the crowded train noticed because they were so focused on their smartphones and tablets. "These weren't concealed movements—the gun is very clear," District Attorney George Gascon later told the Associated Press. "These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They're just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They're completely oblivious of their surroundings."

Another recent attack, on a blind man walking down the street in broad daylight in Philadelphia, garnered attention because security footage later revealed that many passersby ignored the assault and never called 911. Commenting to a local radio station, Philadelphia's chief of police Charles Ramsay said that this lack of response was becoming "more and more common" and noted that people are more likely to use their cellphones to record assaults than to call the police.

Indeed, YouTube features hundreds of such videos—outbreaks of violence on sidewalks, in shopping malls and at restaurants. Many of these brawls, such as the one that broke out between two women during a victory parade for the New York Giants in 2012, feature crowds of people gathered around, cameras aloft and filming the spectacle.

Our use of technology has fundamentally changed not just our awareness in public spaces but our sense of duty to others. Engaged with the glowing screens in front of us rather than with the people around us, we often honestly don't notice what is going on. Adding to the problem is the ease with which we can record and send images, which encourages those of us who are paying attention to document emergencies rather than deal with them. The fascination with capturing images of violence is nothing new, as anyone who has perused Weegee's photographs of bloody crime scenes from the early 20th century can attest. But the ubiquity of camera-enabled cellphones has shifted the boundaries of acceptable behavior in these situations. We are all Weegee now.

Enlarge Image

Our screens often keep us from noticing what's going on around us. Alamy

But if everyone is filming an emergency, who is responsible for intervening in it? Consider an event from December 2012, when a man was pushed onto the subway tracks in New York City. Struggling unsuccessfully to heave himself onto the platform, he turned, in his final seconds, to see the train barreling down on him. We know this because a freelance photographer who happened to be on the platform took a picture of the awful episode and sold it to the New York Post, which ran it on the front page the next day, prompting public outrage about profiting from a man's death. The photographer noted that others on the platform closer to the man made no effort to rescue him and quickly pulled out their phones to capture images of his dead body.

The brutal nighttime stabbing of Kitty Genovese on a New York City sidewalk in 1964 became a symbol of the uninvolved bystander: Many people heard her screams, but no one went outside to assist her or to intervene in the attack. The incident spawned much hand-wringing and some intriguing social-science research about why we don't always come to each other's aid.

In a 1968 study, the sociologists John Darley and Bibb Latané tested the willingness of individuals to intervene in various emergency situations (a "lady in distress," a smoke-filled room). They found that the larger the number of people present, the more the sense of responsibility was diffused for any given individual. When alone, people were far more likely to help.

In subsequent experiments, carried out by Irving Piliavin, bystanders were much more likely to help an actor on a subway car who pretended to be ill and asked for help. Why? As psychologist Elliot Aronson wrote in his classic textbook "The Social Animal," "People riding on the same subway car do have the feeling of sharing a common fate, and they were in a face-to-face situation with the victim, from which there was no immediate escape."

The problem with many of our new gadgets, as the San Francisco shooting suggests, is that they often keep us from experiencing these face-to-face situations and the unspoken obligations that go with them. Most of these duties—to be aware of others, to practice basic civility—are not onerous. But on rare occasions, we are called upon to help others who are threatened or whose lives are in danger. At those moments, we should not be anticipating how many views we will get on YouTube if we film their distress; we should act. To do otherwise is to risk becoming a society not just of apathetic bystanders but of cruel voyeurs.

—Ms. Rosen is a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation and senior editor of the New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.

Curved Smartphone Paves Way for Flexible Devices

http://live.wsj.com/video/curved-smartphone-paves-way-for-flexible-devices/907982A2-2126-475F-B6C5-558B9E9F623B.html?mod=trending_now_video_1#!907982A2-2126-475F-B6C5-558B9E9F623B

In Search of the Next Boom, Developers Cram Their Apps into Smart Watches

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519541/in-search-of-the-next-boom-developers-cram-their-apps-into-smart-watches/

 

Clever apps might persuade people that they need a wrist-worn computer.

 The age of wearable computing is upon us. Forget the debate over how capable or fashionable the first devices are, how popular they may eventually become, or even whether we fully understand what we’re getting into with these devices (see “The Paradox of Wearable Technology”). The big question is simply: what will they do? And the answer will have much to do with the apps that emerge.

Both hardware makers and software developers hope that wearables, like the smartphone, tablet, and television, will become a new platform for application development. The two most promising platforms are the headset and the smart watch. But while the only viable headset is Google’s still-in-beta Glass, smart watches and smart watch apps have arrived. These early smart watches may also help clarify what does and doesn’t work for software development in the broader emerging category of wearable technology.

The first devices include Samsung’s Galaxy Gear ($300) (see “Is Samsung’s Galaxy Gear the First Truly Smart Watch?”), Qualcomm’s Mirasol-screened Toq ($300), and the Kickstarter-backed Pebble ($150). Apple is also widely thought to be developing its own “iWatch” (see “Apple Needs a New Category to Reinvent”).

Samsung is launching the Galaxy Gear, which runs a modified version of the Android smartphone operating system, with a small group of third-party application developers, both to work out the kinks in its software application programming interface, and to establish best practices for app development. One of Samsung’s launch partners for Galaxy Gear is Runkeeper, which has already developed a popular fitness application for smartphones and for the Pebble smart watch.

Nine months ago, Runkeeper began working with Samsung on apps for other devices. Runkeeper’s CEO, Jason Jacobs, compares this generation of smart watches to the first tablet computers. “As with any new category that emerges, it’s a question getting to know the category and figuring out what the use cases are,” he says.

For the Galaxy Gear, Runkeeper is following Samsung’s and Pebble’s approach of using the smart watch as a companion for the smartphone. This approach will affect the way apps are designed.

“It’s not a replacement for the app on the phone,” says Jacobs of the Runkeeper app for the Galaxy Gear. “It’s a remote control so you can keep your phone in your pocket, can start and stop without pulling your phone out. It’s the same data, the same application, but changes the experience to make it less intrusive.”

Jacobs believes some unexpected ways of using smart watches will emerge as apps appear. “No one really imagined that doctors would use tablets as they made their rounds,” says Jacobs. “The skeptics who say ‘no one would ever use that’ [about smart watches] are some of the same people who said they would never use a laptop without a keyboard.”

While a fitness app seems like a natural fit for a smart watch, the usefulness of other apps is less clear. Pocket, for example, which serves primarily as a way to share articles and video between devices, is also available for the Galaxy Gear.

Pocket’s founder and CEO Nate Weiner acknowledges that a smart-watch screen is limited. “This device is not for long periods in which a person is looking at their watch to consume content,” he says. “We weren’t going to just drop a Pocket list on there and assume people would want to read or watch a video on their watch for a long period of time.”

Instead, Pocket sidestepped the screen and went for audio. Users can listen to articles already saved to Pocket on the smart watch with the same text-to-speech feature already available on Pocket’s Android app. It’s not recommended in crowded spaces, and it may be awkward to hold the Galaxy Gear’s tiny speaker near your ear like a transistor radio, but Pocket was able to easily port Listen to the Galaxy Gear because Samsung built its smart watch on Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world.

Samsung’s chief product officer, Kevin Packingham, said at the Galaxy Gear launch event in New York earlier this month that simplicity will be the key with smart-watch apps. “As we innovate, sometimes we add too much complexity to devices,” he told . “Some people want as much horsepower as they can get, and you want to allow them to do that, but you also want to make it usable for the average user who wants a companion device.”

Samsung experimented with how much functionality to add to the Gear’s app for making and answering telephone calls, Packingham says. The guiding design principle was to get the device out of the way when it’s not being used. “Some [devices], and I won’t name names, are very intrusive,” he says. “They can interfere with how you live your life on a daily basis. We don’t want that to be the case for our wearables. We want them to be natural, rather than edgy.”

This may be a veiled jab at Google Glass, but it’s also part of our expectations for a wristwatch: besides being relatively hands-free, the appeal of checking time, weather, or notifications on a smart watch is that it’s quick, natural, and discreet. Ideally, third-party applications will follow the same approach.

Adam Stroud, Runkeeper’s lead Android developer, says that for fitness applications, the watch form factor offers as many advantages as disadvantages. “A smart-watch screen is great for display, bad for interaction,” Stroud says. “There’s not a lot of room for input; the minute you flash up a keyboard on that little screen, it’s over.”

It’s likely that other companies will create Android-based smart watches with different screen and hardware specifications. Stroud says that Android developers are already used to working around this problem with phones. However, the information that smart watches gather is very different from a phone. “Sensors are really interesting in a watch,” Stroud says.

On a smart watch, Runkeeper’s software will compete more directly with fitness bands like the Fitbit ($99) and with runner’s watches like Garmin’s Forerunner ($250), all of which are already jockeying for scarce real estate on the wrist. The hope is that over time, devices that do more, cost less, and look and feel better will win out.

Smart-watch makers also firmly believe that all wearable computing devices will get better. Samsung executives called the first model of the Galaxy Gear “a concept device,” and reports suggest that a new Galaxy Gear could appear as soon as next January’s Consumer Electronics Show.

“The beauty of being in the business we’re in is that we don’t really care what form factor ultimately wins,” says Runkeeper’s Jacobs. “Wherever wearables emerge that are fitness-friendly and are used by hundreds of millions of people, we want to power the software. It doesn’t matter to us whether that’s your watch, your phone, your glasses, or the phone tying into sensors in your clothes.”

MOBILE SEARCH: How Smartphones Are Disrupting The Internet's Biggest Business

http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphones-are-disrupting-mobile-search-2013-7

BI Intelligence

Search — the very cornerstone of the Web — has begun to show signs of decline on desktops and laptops. 

Meanwhile, search is surging on smartphones and tablets. Mobile searches are quickly becoming the main way in which consumers find everything they need — whether it's information, services, or physical and digital goods. 

That means there's a great opportunity, but also that search has more work to do. There are kinks to figure out in areas ranging from app discovery to tracking the effectiveness of local search ads.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we analyze the current state of mobile search, look at how different players in the mobile ecosystem can better take advantage of new mobile-driven search behaviors, detail why search quality is an important issue and why marketers need to gain visibility across multiple search-driven platforms, analyze how mobile search will create opportunities for developers, and examine how it will help determine which platforms succeed or fail in coming years.

Access the Full Report By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>>

Here's a brief overview of the current state of mobile search:  

• Google currently dominates: Google enjoys a 95% share of worldwide mobile search queries, but Google's year-over-year CPC growth has been negative for five quarters beginning in late 2011, as cheap mobile clicks create drag on ad prices. In order to combat the low CPCs, and the monetization gap, Google recently overhauled its immensely successful search-focused ad product, AdWords. The update is complex, but Google is essentially forcing advertisers to design campaigns around context rather than specific device types — and there is no guarantee this new approach will work. 
• Search fragmentation could change everything: Search's future depends on how consumers behave on mobile. Will browsers and search engines continue to funnel search behavior? Or will apps tend to mediate search experiences? Consumers are searching more on apps vertically focused on specific categories like shopping and restaurants. That includes location-aware searches, which are increasing outside of Google's ecosystem.
• Mobile search advertising has a bright future: Despite bumps in the road — such as the problems with measuring mobile conversions, and confusion over device-targeting — mobile search has a great future as a marketing tool. The key is closing the consumer loop from online search to offline purchases so marketers understand the value proposition.
• Mobile-native search approaches will proliferate: As startups grasp for a search formula geared to mobile consumers, we can expect an increase in mobile-native search innovation. One area ripe for innovation is app search. It's difficult to find apps beyond the blockbuster Top 25 list on Google Play and Apple's App Store, both cluttered with nearly a million titles.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphones-are-disrupting-mobile-search-2013-7#ixzz2b4i5OgSr

Inside The Rise Of Responsive Design And Its Pros And Cons As A Mobile Strategy

http://www.businessinsider.com/rise-of-responsive-design-pros-and-cons-2013-6

BI Intelligence

Responsive design, a technology that stretches or shrinks Web pages to fit differently sized screens, has emerged as the most-often recommended manner of optimizing content for mobile devices. This dominance was cemented in mid-2012 when Google recommended responsive design as the best strategy for smartphone-optimized websites. 

As the iPhone, Android phones, and iPad became bestselling consumer gadgets, businesses realized their Web presence needed to translate to those smaller screens. Otherwise, their websites would bear tell-tale signs of a business clueless to mobile: tiny text, tinier links, and a jumbled layout. They risked lost traffic and sales.

These days, responsive design is recommended as the gold standard. But as with most technologies in a multi-device world, it has disadvantages, and it's not right for every business, or every application.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we describe what responsive design is and compare it to other mobile optimization tools, analyze responsive designs pros and cons, examine data and statistics that track responsive design adoption and performance across mobile, and evaluate whether dedicated mobile websites have their place, and detail the ramifications for HTML5 development. 

To access the full report, sign up for a free trial of BI Intelligence today >>>

Here's an overview of the main mobile optimization tools:

• Mobile apps: Particularly at the beginning of the mobile boom, when some believed apps would channel virtually all mobile activity, businesses rushed to create apps. Apps may be dominant in some mobile markets like the U.S., but consumers use their mobile browsers too — and not just for casual browsing, searching and information look-ups. A great deal of e-commerce happens in the mobile Web browser, not in native apps. Not to mention: Apps are expensive. Apps are not the be-all, end-all for mobile.
• Dedicated mobile websites: Some usability gurus advocate for separate mobile sites that offer a stripped-down version of its content and carry their own Web address (often with the URL that looks something like this: m.website). These mobile-only sites tend to perform very well in terms of load speeds.
• Responsive design: In responsive design, the same Web code or HTML is delivered to every device, but tweaks to CSS code — which determines the layout of Web pages — allow it to determine the device size and adjust layout accordingly. The website maintains the same Web address or URL regardless of what device it's seen on. In sum: The fluid layout means that content adapts to all form factors, even smart TVs — a fast-growing source of Web traffic.
• Responsive Design With Server-Side Support. This is a variant of responsive design. The difference is that the computer server that hosts the website will deliver different batches of HTML and CSS Web code depending on what device the user is on. This method solves some of responsive design's performance issues, but requires device detection. It means a company can use responsive design and enjoy its advantages where it wants, but deploy more customized components too. It may deploy responsive elements across mobile, while keeping a more traditional fixed layout for the PC. It may even deliver customized experiences for certain device models (like a feature that only works on retina screens, etc.).

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/rise-of-responsive-design-pros-and-cons-2013-6#ixzz2XOMGinLE

What the future of mobile keyboards will look like

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/08/mobile-keyboards-future/

June 8, 2013 4:28 PM 

Parham Aarabi is a professor at the University of Toronto and CEO of ModiFace. We’ll be talking about mobile user experience and more at VentureBeat MobileBeat conference in San Francisco, Calif. July 9-10.

It’s the one thing that we do most on mobile devices that often is the most annoying: typing.  With so many different kinds of mobile keyboards, and perhaps a pending keyboard redesign from Apple debuting next week (or at least an announcement allowing third-party keyboards), it’s a good time to consider some recent (and a few not-so-recent) advances in mobile keyboard interfaces.

Intelligent Keyboards

Over the past few years, several unique keyboard interfaces have garnered significant attention and popularity. Swype, acquired by Nuance in 2011, is one such example, where users type by either touching the keys as usual or by making continuous touch gestures that cover the letters of a word. The result is surprisingly robust and user friendly (side note: this is the keyboard I personally use). There are other options, such as the Fleksy keyboard by Syntellia, or the Minuum flattened keyboard by Whirlscape, as well as SwiftKey, a very popular keyboard that is similar to Swype. The “magic” with these keyboards is that they assume user touches have a spatial error (or in the case of Swype and SwiftKey, a gestural error), and account for this when finding the most probable word. In almost all cases, these intelligent keyboards work better than their traditional counterparts. In the case of Minuum, there is an added benefit that the keyboard takes up very little space on the screen.

Dynamic Keyboards

Although not mainstream, there has been work in the area of keyboards that dynamically change based on what letters are most probable. In the simplest context, this could be visualized as a keyboard where the size of the individual keys are scaled according to the usage frequency of each letter.

A more interesting example is the Dasher keyboard (created by a research group at Cambridge University), where the user types by going through a continuous sequence of dynamically scaled letters (click here to see a quick demo). Although this may not be the fastest way of typing, it works well in situations where multi-finger typing is not possible (such as for Google Glass).

A discussion of dynamic keyboards isn’t complete without mentioning Tactus. Tactus creates physical touchscreen keyboards that can “pop-in” and out dynamically, which gives users a tactile feel for the keys. It remains to be seen whether such an interface will gain mainstream popularity, but it is certainly interesting.

Beyond Keyboards

There are methods of entering text that may do away with the keyboard altogether. One such example that we have been developing at the University of Toronto is the Extended Touch interface. Here, a user can tap a location on any surface that a mobile device is placed on, and based on the unique vibrations and sounds, we detect the exact location tapped. Although the core tap detection technology works reasonably well, there are several important challenges that will need to be overcome. However, it is possible in the future that such an interface (i.e. typing on any surface) combined with a probabilistic keyboard will make a viable method for text entry.

Parham Aarabi is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he teaches a graduate course on Advanced Mobile User Interfaces and directs the Mobile Applications Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was twice selected as a Canada Research Chair. He has been the recipient of MIT’s TR35 “Top Young Innovator” award and the IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award. He is also the founder and CEO of ModiFace Inc., the leading provider of virtual face simulation and virtual try-on technology.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/08/mobile-keyboards-future/#uSGhSTHJGGvd6spq.99