Survey finds internet listening is on the up thanks to mobile devices

Radio audience measurement body Rajar says new figures show that 20% of smart phone users have a radio app installed on their device.

Its most recent survey also shows that 31% of listeners listen to the radio online and 16% have downloaded a podcast. It appears that radio habits are adapting well the arrival of not just streaming internet but catchup services.

13% of the adults questioned have listened to radio by a mobile phone, with the majority using a specific FM preset on the app, with a only small proportion running a station-centric app.

Out of those 20% with a radio app, more than half use their apps at least once a week. On the internet radio front, 25% use time-shifted services to catch up on programmes they have missed. The vast majority said that the “listen again” services had no impact on the amount of live radio they listen to, with the average listener just the services twice a week.

The awareness of personalised online radio services has increased to 14%, with frequent users up to 11%. Personalised radio services (such as Last.fm) create a streaming radio station based on your listening habits and artists you enjoy.

Podcast listening figures are also on the up, with 15% of the adult population listen to a podcast once a week but only 25% of the users listen to the entire recording. The typical listener subscribes to less than five podcasts, mostly in the comedy and music genres. Those surveyed listen to podcasts home and on the way to work, with 36% claiming that podcasts have introduced them to new radio shows.

Have you listened on a mobile device or do you fancy the internet over the air? Check out TuneIn Radio for the iPhone, Android Online Radio or iheartradio for BlackBerry to tune into your favourite station.

Be aware that unless you are on Wi-Fi, radio stream over the air will zap up your data usage faster than you can say Radio 2.

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(Source The Guardian)

The details about the Google Nexus phone keep coming out. But should we shed a tear for Microsoft?

“Please keep quiet about this phone until January 5th”, Google asked venture capitalist Fred Wilson when it sent him one of its new Nexus mobile phones.

True to his word, Wilson did. But – ah – it’s January 5th, even if Google’s official launch for the Nexus isn’t happening until rather later today, and so Wilson has blogged his experiences.

Meanwhile, Guy Kewney at Newswireless notes that the real loser from the Nexus deal is Microsoft – because HTC used to be its BFF in mobile phones and now, clearly, isn’t.

First though to Wilson, who writes:

“I’m at the gym on elliptical trainer typing this into the Android browser. I connected to the gym’s wifi without hassle, something my security obsessed blackberry fails at regularly. Then I checked in with the awesome android Foursquare app. Then I put on last.fm “my library radio”. Then I launched the killer android browser and went to typepad and started writing this.

“I could have done all of that on the iPhone except the part about running multiple apps the same time. Which is a big deal by the way.

“The Google phone isn’t much different than the iPhone. Its basically an Android clone of the iPhone. I have to type on the screen on this phone and I’m struggling mightily to do that fast and well. If this post has errors in it I wont be surprised.”

He also makes the point that it still doesn’t have “multitouch” – the gestural control that the iPhone does. And it’s intriguing that he overlooks the phone functionality almost entirely – only adding it in a postscript to the original piece:

“I don’t really use a phone for voice very much. I’ve made a total of a dozen calls on this phone in the two plus weeks I’ve been using it, mostly to the Gotham Gal [his wife]. But the phone seems to work great.”

Meanwhile, Kewney observes that “you can expect some very excited reviews over the next week”, and adds:

“All this will be misery upon misery to Microsoft, which sees HTCs partnership with Google as the worst sort of treachery. Micrsoft, after all, pretty much created HTC’s phone division – the company was High Tech Computers when Microsoft first approached them with an offer.

“The man who is probably laughing loudest, would be Sendo founder Hugh Brogan. Brogan had signed up with Microsoft to give Redmond its start in phones. “They didn’t know how to make a phone. Neither did HTC. We told them how to do it, and they gave all our know-how to HTC” he complained when the first Microsoft smartphone, the SPV, appeared. A lawsuit was threatened.”

The Sendo-Microsoft lawsuit-in-threatening kicked off in 2002 and finally ended in September 2004: Microsoft paidSendo an unspecified amount of cash as well as giving back the 4% stake it held in the British firm. Neither company admitted liability. When Sendo decided, in November 2002, to dump its plans for a Windows phone and go instead with a Nokia Symbian model, Jack Schofield commented “I can’t see this as anything but bad news for Microsoft Smartphone 2002. And a coup for Nokia.” Chickens come home to roost, perhaps.

Kewney notes:

“The close, chummy relationship that developed between Peter Chou, ceo of HTC, and the Microsoft mobile team, is well and truly over. They’ll probably work together when the MWC exhibition gets under way next month in Barcelona, but behind the scenes, Microsoft phone staff can barely mention HTC without spitting.”

“Equally, HTC knows that if it plans to ever rival Nokia, it has to have a more successful partner than Microsoft and Windows. And if Google carries on delivering headlines like these, HTC will feel it backed the right horse…”

This does leave Microsoft looking bereft. With Nokia, Apple, RIM and now Google all racing ahead on the smartphone front, the question really is: what has Microsoft got left in the mobile market?

Finally, Forrester analyst Ian Fogg observes that “What will matter most is how Google communicates the news and how it’s received. This will set the tone for the Android smartphone operating system for 2010 and influence how other firms involved in Android – Motorola, LG, SonyEricsson as well as the operators – react and adjust their strategy.”

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(Source The Guardian)

As the noughties come to a close, we take a look at the biggest technology stories of the decade – and how the Guardian reported them at the time

After a whirlwind 2006, you could be forgiven for thinking that 2007 would be a little quieter. Wrong: certainly in terms of technology, the year started with a bang and just kept going.

Behind the scenes at Guardian HQ, 2007 saw a few changes. We relaunched the technology website, moving from the classic Neville Brody design to one that brought the site and the newspaper closer together in feeling (and one that we’re still using, as of 2009).

We also started the Tech Weekly podcast in December – you can still listen to that first episode if you want.

Anyway, as we near the end of our look back over a decade of stories – and the way the Guardian reported them – we come across a series of major successes and dismal failures. There were plenty of stories we had to leave out, but here are five of the big ones.

2007

• Pretty much the first thing that happened was when Steve Jobs confirmed a swelter of speculation by announcing that it was planning to launch a mobile, the iPhone. The device had been hyped up in advance, with plenty of speculation that Apple was planning to do something in the phone market. But the handset itself looked like something we hadn’t seen before, and when it went on sale in the US people queued for days to get one. Not everybody thought it would be a hit, but by November, British customers could get their hands on it too – and O2 said it sold tens of thousands in a weekend.

• A few weeks after Microsoft finally made its latest operating system, Windows Vista, available worldwide. The first obstacle to overcome was the confusing array of packages, but after a series of driver problems that left people nonplussed, the impact was more damp squib than fireworks. By the summer, the rot had truly set in, and the computer industry pronounced its disappointment with the product.

• Cyberwar suddenly became a buzzword, with a number of incidents that appeared to up the ante global online warfare. After a political tussle involving a war memorial, the highly-wired state of Estonia was hit by cyberattack that left it reeling. That was followed, later in the year, by a string of strikes on western government targets that opened up a wide range of issues.

• One of the big stories of the year in British circles was the sale of music service Last.fm, which went for $280m to US media group CBS. We had a long history of following the company (literally right back to the very beginning) and had tipped in an article the previous year about whether UK entrepreneurs could produce a web success like YouTube. Maybe Last wasn’t the same scale deal, but it was a significant boost for the country’s startup stars.

• And after plenty of fits and starts, the BBC iPlayer suddenly got an injection of excitement in 2007. First off, a mildly depressing download service hit the scene in the summer – but then, after a rapid retooling, the streaming service that we’re all familiar with was pushed out in December. The rest, as they say…

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(Source The Guardian)

British-based social travel website Dopplr is being bought by mobile phone titan Nokia for around €15m (£13.5m), according to reports.

News of the deal, which was first reported by Silicon Valley blog Techcrunch, comes as the latest in a string of dotcom acquisitions by the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer.

The boutique travel company, which is based in London and Helsinki, launched in 2007 as a way for frequent travellers to keep track of their movements. After receiving around €1.5m in funding from The Accelerator Group and a number of private investors, the company expanded into travel tips and forged a series of partnerships with high-end brands such as Mr & Mrs Smith and Monocle.

The company did not return a request for comment, but the deal is believed to have been in the works for several weeks.

The acquisition does not come as a complete surprise, given the close connections between the company’s team and the Finnish mobile giant.

Co-founder and chief executive Marko Ahtisaari was a former director of design strategy for the Helsinki technology firm, where he worked alongside Dopplr’s recently-departed design chief Matt Jones.

However, while the deal marks a significant return for the company’s backers – who included LinkedIn boss Reid Hoffman, Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer and serial Esther Dyson – some remained sceptical that it will succeed in the long-term.

Om Malik, a journalist and venture capitalist who writes at the GigaOm blog, said he was concerned about the possible outcome.

“I’m happy for the founders and backers of Dopplr, after all it is a nice financial outcome for a service that hasn’t grown beyond a base of passionate users,” he wrote. “It’s only a matter of time before Nokia mucks up this acquisition, however, much like it has in the past.”

Nokia’s own track record is blotchy in this area – particularly since the company announced in 2008 that it planned to move into the internet arena as well as its handset-manufacturing business. While the buyouts of mapping provider Navteq in 2007 has gone relatively sucessfully, the outcome of other moves – such as the spin-off of software company Symbian – remains unclear.

It is also true that the purchase of British startups by foreign companies have a patchy history of success. In 2007 London-based music service Last.fm was bought by American media conglomerate CBS for £140m, a move which has yet to recoup major benefits for the US company.

More controversially, the internet telephony company Skype was purchased in 2005 by auction website eBay for an initial $2.6bn. The move was widely seen as a failure, leading to an announcement earlier this month that the Californian dotcom planned to sell off 65% of the business for $1.9bn.

Since then Skype’s co-founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, have filed lawsuits against eBay and the company’s purchasers over accusations of intellectual property theft.

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(Source The Guardian)

Twitter’s path to profitability lies in charging for mobile use, according to one of its venture capital investors who has hinted that the company is about to close a new round of funding.

“When Twitter grows, SMS [text message] usage goes up,” said Joi Ito, a Twitter investor who has previously invested in a number of successful internet companies including the photo-sharing site Flickr and the music community site Last.fm. “Sites are now able to promote across friends’ [Twitter] networks; traffic to certain kinds of sites increases. There’s a lot of things Twitter enables. And as a normal internet company would do, we’d look at who’s benefiting the most in this value chain, and where is there the least friction [for Twitter] to get paid.”

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said at a conference in Los Angeles yesterday that the site will not start using ads this year. He said Twitter was “pretty good right now” with regards to funding, and stressed that the company’s immediate focus was on building out features ranging from an improved search functions to paid-for commercial accounts.

“Any kind of approach toward advertising is going to be awhile … We’re not thinking about that just yet,” Stone said at the 140: Twitter Conference in Los Angeles.

But In an exclusive interview, Ito told Guardian Technology that Twitter has already achieved the most important step for any internet company by getting tens of millions of users. “I will say that mobile is globally one of the areas that has significant growth in revenue for a lot of [industry] players… I think mobile will be an important part of the strategy.”

Ito emphasised that he is not speaking on behalf of Twitter, which has so far kept silent about its plans to make money from its service.

But, he said, “all the companies I’ve invested in that have gone bust, or that I’ve seen go bust, have business models and great product and pretty good teams, but they have no users. Getting users, getting distribution, getting attention, becoming viral – that’s the single most difficult thing on the internet to do. And just about every product fails because they don’t have enough users.”

Entrepreneurs, he said, failed to focus on that growth aspect. “It may sound initially like an internet bubble-era way of thinking, but if you think about it statistically, that is usually the successful thing, to focus on the virality and the user growth.”

Twitter has seen a dramatic rise in use during 2009. In May it overtook both Bebo and Linkedin for traffic to its website, a measure that understates its use by a factor of four because many users connect directly to its servers using third-party programs.

That, suggests Ito, means that it now has the clout to deal with large organisations such as mobile networks. Rumours are swirling that the company is about to close another round of funding that could value it at more than $1bn.

“Yes, there is that rumour,” Ito said. “I can’t really say if it’s true. I can’t speak on behalf of Twitter. It’s possible.”

But when asked whether he was worried if Twitter might run out of cash before it can find a way to generate revenue, he said “There are very few companies that have gotten to the scale that Twitter has, with the cash that they’ll have” – a possible reference to the outcome of the funding round – “that have come to zero.”

Ito is bullish about the potential of Twitter to make money through mobile use – possibly charging either, or both, of the networks that see traffic grow from its use, and the users who get it on their phones. “Twitter has a very smart biz dev [business development] people right now thinking about various things. In Japan we’re talking to a variety of different partners. If you look at Japan, the companies that are growing are the mobile companies – selling hundreds of millions of dollars each on avatars for mobile phones, and avatars, and games.”

But it is hard to say whether it will be the networks or the user who will pay. Ito says that both benefit from Twitter’s growth: “if you have a clear value [to the user and network], you may experiment and find out that one way of collecting money is going to work better than another. If you have the users and the traffic, you can experiment and iterate and usually figure out a way to make some money.”

Listen to Joi Io in this week’s Tech Weekly podcast

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

US firm that created first mobile phone unveils handset using Google’s Android software that will be known as Dext in Europe

The struggling American technology firm Motorola, which made the world’s first mobile phone, has taken an important step in its attempt to regain its lost grandeur by unveiling its first handset that uses Google’s Android software.

The Cliq – which will be called the Dext when it is launched in the UK next month – will compete with Apple’s iPhone and the Pre, upon which rival American group Palm has pinned its own hopes of revival, in the key Christmas market.

The touchscreen Cliq has a slide-out keyboard, like the Pre; a better camera than both the Palm device and the iPhone, at 5 megapixels; and supports fast mobile broadband and wi-fi. But it is the way the phone integrates a host of social networking services – from Facebook and Twitter to the music-sharing service Last.fm – that shows how Motorola hopes to differentiate itself from the host of touchscreen phones available.

Motorola has taken Google’s Android operating system – designed to compete with Palm’s WebOS, Apple’s iPhone OS, Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian platform – and built a new system it calls MotoBlur out of it. It allows users to synchronise their contacts, posts, feeds, messages, e-mails and photos from sources as diverse as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail, corporate e-mail and even Last.fm and have them appear on the device’s screen. As a result, the phone gives users an instant snapshot of all their communication services – unlike the iPhone, which relies on users downloading and flicking between a host of applications.

The Palm Pre has similar functionality for email and Facebook to the Cliq, while the low-cost INQ1 handset, from the Hutchison Whampoa-owned INQ, also allowed easy integration with the social networking site, email, internet telephone service Skype and numerous instant messaging services. But the Cliq is more integrated than any of its rivals.

The phone’s home screen acts almost like a window on to the user’s different applications. All conversation threads, friend updates, stories, links, photos and more are automatically delivered to live widgets on the home screen. Messages are relayed through a single message hub giving an instant snapshot of emails, texts and instant messages. Even news items can be amalgamated into one feed alongside friend’s postings on Facebook.

The Cliq is the first of what will be many handsets from the American firm to include MotoBlur, which will become Motorola’s smartphone platform of choice, though it will continue to make handsets using Windows Mobile aimed primarily at business users.

“Is this phone the make-or-break phone?” Motorola’s chief executive Sanjay Jha asked the GigaOM conference in San Francisco. “No, but it is a very important starting point, it points the direction … it is the first step in a long journey.”

The Cliq is also an important step for Google’s Android platform. There are already touchscreen phones in the market using Android, produced by Taiwan’s HTC, but the Cliq is the first from a “big name” manufacturer. Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are all expected to produce Android phones in the coming months, leaving Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, as the only one of the top five handset makers not experimenting with the Google platform.

Two Drunks

Jha said coming together with the Android platform, which is run by Google’s head of mobile Andy Rubin, was like “two drunks finding each other in a bar”, which rather highlights the perilous state in which the company has found itself in recent years.

Motorola’s fall from grace has been long and hard. Having made the DynaTAC 8000x in 1983, the first commercially available mobile phone (an unwieldy beige handset), it went on to dominate the market with Ericsson but the switch to digital phones in the 1990s found Motorola unprepared and its share started to slip as Nokia came to dominate the global market.

Motorola then started this decade as the second-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world – accounting for one in four of all handsets sold – but still the market leader in the US. But it failed to follow-up the success of the ultra-slim Razr phone, initially launched six years ago, with another headline-grabbing product, preferring instead to try the same handset in a variety of different colours or with slight technical improvements.

By the time the iPhone appeared two years ago, Motorola was in freefall. In the three months to end June, Motorola sold just under 16m phones, giving it just 5.6% of the market, compared with 10% the previous year, and putting it firmly in fourth place behind Nokia, Samsung and LG.

Orange has grabbed the Cliq/Dext under an exclusive deal with Motorola for the UK. Pricing will be announced in the UK next week but the phone is expected to be free to anyone signing up to a long-term contract of between £25 and £30 a month, making it cheaper than the iPhone.

Ralf Gerbershagen, vice-president and general manager of Motorola Western Europe, told the Guardian: “This is a day we have been waiting for for quite a while.

“You have to have a great piece of hardware in the market and we believe that we have this with Dext, and you have to have a good brand and we believe Motorola is a very strong brand in the marketplace,” he said. “Motorola is a global player and it is geared up to remain a global player”.

MotoBlur is designed to cope with the bewildering array of web-based communication tools available, he added. “There are more social networking accounts around the world than email accounts and the reason is many people have a couple of them.”

The Dext, he argued, would help consumers take charge. “In the end, technology is there to make your life simpler.”

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

• Germany’s version of LastFM files for insolvency >> TechCrunch

• Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teenagers >> NYTimes.com

• Who’s Winning the Smartphone Wars? >> O’Reilly Radar

• The Social Web Isn’t Just for the Young Anymore >> GigaOm

• STUDY: Social Media Is for Narcissists>> Mashable

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Just as newspapers were looking to attract new mobile readers, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has rejected the first version of Newspaper(s), an iPhone app that let users read the content of over 50 newspapers around the world, including the New York Times (NYSE: NYT), France’s Le Monde, and the UK’s tabloid the Sun. Apple rejected the app on the grounds that The Sun, with its topless Page 3 Girls, was “obscene”.

The Register reports that The Sun is sure to take the accusation of being a porn peddler seriously – when a UK operator categorised the Page 3 girls as “adult” content, Sun publisher News International calls the topless girls “fun family, content”.

Newspaper(s) developer Makayama Media was told it could wait for the iPhone’s 3.0 upgrade, by which time the app could be properly labeled. The firm decided instead to remove access to The Sun, after which it has now been approved and is selling for £0.59.

Also in iPhone Apps news…

• Nine Inch Nails app blocked: It’s not just The Sun that’s “obscene”, it’s the rock band, Apple says. But frontman Trent Reznor has got mighty angry at his NIN:Access app’s latest version being blocked by Apple, presumably because a song in a linked podcast contains a profanity. More at mocoNews.net…

• Developer payments withheld: According to a number of posts on an iPhone developers forum, some app makers haven’t yet received their cut of sales from February. It’s obvious from Apple’s replies to developers that the company is struggling to keep the payments flowing, especially to those developers outside of the US.

From paidContent:UK:
• Microsoft laying off 5% of UK staff in global cutbacks
• @ FIPP: B2B sites shift to service platforms; put faith in paid content
• @ FIPP: Advertisers, publishers assess digital growth, print declines
• CBS formalises Last.fm, CBS radio relationship under new music unit; radio’s Goodman named president
• Industry Moves: Vivendi chief executive Lévy to chair game maker Activision Blizzard
• EC still pushing for cross-border digital content retail, licencing

From paidContent:
• Disney’s Iger on Hulu, YouTube: ‘New media isn’t going away’; planning movie subscription product
• The video evidence: Why YouTube is concerned about product placement
• Industry Moves: Chief executive Pete Sheinbaum leaving DailyCandy, Comcast
• NYT’s Heekin-Canedy: Times is ‘not a newspaper, but a news provider’
• Report: Microsoft guts in-game advertising unit in layoffs
• @ Digital Hollywood: Looking beyond the hype on Hulu
• Does the FTC really have a case against Google and Apple?

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(Source The Guardian)

This is now accessible from various nokia handsets.

Read more and download from the Last.fm website here.

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