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Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate

Gartner just released its annual numbers for worldwide mobile phone sales to end users in the year known as two thousand nine. Looking at smartphone OS market share alone, Gartner shows the iPhone OS, Android, and RIM making the biggest gains (up 6.2%, 3.4%, and 3.3% from 2008, respectively) at the expense of Windows Mobile (down 3.1%) and Symbian (down 5.5%). Although Gartner says that Symbian “has become uncompetitive in recent years,” (ouch) it concedes that market share is still strong especially for Nokia; something backed up by Nokia’s Q4 financials and reported quarterly smartphone growth of 5%. Regarding total handsets of all classifications sold, Nokia continues to dominate with 36.4% of all sales to end users (a 2.2% loss from 2008) while Samsung and LG continue to climb at the expense of Motorola (dropping from 7.6% to 4.5% of worldwide sales in 2009) and Sony Ericsson. See that table after the break or hit up the source for the full report.

Continue reading Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate

Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weekend Reading: Blogging to Drive Business, by Butow and Bollwitt

In last week’s installment of Weekend Reading we discussed the engaging social media marketing and brand development A-to-Z guide Crush It! from Gary Vaynerchuk. From that we learned that blogging is just one of many ways to reach your customers, but the subject is so important itself that it deserves its own book; that’s exactly what we’ve got this week. From Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt, this week’s selection is Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections, an overview of the tips and techniques needed to excel at business blogging.

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Earlier this week we provided our own 6 Approaches to Your Company Blog and mentioned that “corporate blogging” is moving up the “slope of enlightenment” to the “plateau of productivity” on the 2009 Gartner Hype Cycle. Basically what this means is if you have a business that isn’t blogging, you’re about to miss the boat, so you’d better hop on before it leaves dock.

The book is co-authored by Rebecca Bollwitt, a Vancouver-based blogger and podcaster at Miss604.com, and Eric Butow, CEO of a Web design and e-marketing firm and author of twelve books like User Interface Design for Mere Mortals and How to Succed in Business Using LinkedIn. This 162 page book is broken into nine easily digestible chapters; the longest chapter at 26 pages is appropriately devoted to “Creating a Blogging Stategy,” which includes descriptions of popular blogging platforms, the various media used in blogging, and integrating your blog with the top social networks. The book also includes an index, which is handy for finding specific topics and issues.

Besides covering the common subjects around corporate blogging, such as why its important and how to market it correctly, Butow and Bollwitt provide lesser heard tips, like how to use internal corporate blogging and how to decide who will actually be authoring the blog. Another intriguing issue the book chronicles is how to deal with blog commenters, especially the negative ones.

“Negative comments might not necessarily need to be deleted unless they are defamatory, libelous, or anything similarly malicious,” the book says. “However, if comments contain negative but productive feedback, you should respond in a courteous manner.”

It’s tempting to begin moderating negative comments and banning users, but this should really only be done in the most extreme of situations. It’s important that your readers (who are most likely also your customers) be able to trust your public voice on the blog. If non-malicious but negative comments are continuously deleted, readers will lose this trust. The best thing a business can do with negative comments is to respond to them promptly and politely.

The best bloggers are avid blog readers, so make sure whoever is writing your business’ blog is following what other businesses are writing about. This will also help someone new to blogging develop a writing style that is native to the Web and not full or jargon and business-speak. They can also take the next step and leave a comment on the other blogs, which not only helps spread the word about your brand, but increases your reputation as an active participant in the community – just be careful how you do it.

“Only leave a comment when you genuinely have an interest in the post and can contribute something productive,” the book says. “Simply leaving a link to your site and saying you also wrote about a certain topic can easily get your comment flagged as spam.”

All the important bases are covered in the remainder of the book, including how to create a blog with an appealing design, finding topics to write about, monitoring the Web for when people talk about your brand or blog, and how to optimize your blog for search engines and blog lists. The cover price is $21.99 but discounters like Amazon have the book listed at under $16 for the paperback, and $9.99 for the Kindle version. The paperback version also includes a free e-book accessible online for 45 days after purchase.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education, Inc.

Photo by Flickr user racheocity.

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Cloudkick: Helping Customers Get the Most Out of the Cloud

The optimism for cloud computing is ebullient. But a problem is brewing in the fevered boil.

Customers need better ways to monitor performance. Deploying to the cloud is one matter. Monitoring in a way that optimizes deployment is a whole other issue. Every cloud service provider has a different dashboard. Deploying to multiple cloud service providers means monitoring multiple dashboards.

Cloudkick is a Y Combinator startup that has developed a Web application to help monitor performance so a customer may receive a unified view of its deployment.

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Today the company announced that its service is now commercially available, supported by cloud computing services that include: Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting and VPS.NET.

Large IT organizations may have the manpower and expertise to manage cloud services but small and mid-size companies do not have the same capabilities. This is critically important as companies shift to outsourcing IT assets.

This trend is rapidly taking shape. Gartner predicts that by 2012, one in five companies will outsource its IT assets. Companies like Cloudkick faciliate this move by providing a level of service on top of what is provided by companies like Amazon and Rackspace.

Cloudkick provides a unified API that allows a view into the performance of the provider. For example, a customer can see all their servers in the cloud, turn them on and off at will and receive notifications through email or voice mail.

Competitors could include companies like RightScale and potentially the service providers. But Cloudkick appears to be the only company that focuses solely on monitoring performance.

Interestingly, Cloudkick has also recently emerged as a tool for scrutinizing the performance of cloud computing service providers.

Earlier this month, Cloudkick looked at network issues on Amazon servers. Cloudkick discovered problems that had started before Christmas. For the record, Cloudkick hosts its application on the SliceHost service owned by Rackspace.

For its part, Amazon said it does not have issues with over capacity.

Nonetheless, the story points to the important role that service providers can play in this emerging market. With more scrutiny it only follows that there should be better service by the providers.

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Apple’s App Store said to have 99.4 percent of all mobile app sales, more like 97.5

The latest research from Gartner indicates that, for the year 2009, only 16 million app sales were executed on mobile devices not bearing the infamous bitten apple logo. In reporting this data, Ars Technica inadvertently conflates Apple’s latest announcement of three billion apps downloaded with the notion of three billion apps sold and pegs the App Store’s market share at a whopping 99.4 percent — but more realistic calculations still show it to be somewhere in the vicinity of 97.5 percent. Going off estimates (obtained by GigaOM) that a quarter of App Store downloads are paid-for apps, and taking a rough figure of 2.5 billion downloads in 2009, leaves us with around 625 million app sales performed by Apple, which comfortably dwarfs all its competition. Considering the fact 18 months ago there wasn’t even an App Store to speak of — whereas today Cupertino is gobbling up the best part of $4.2 billion in annual mobile apps revenue — maybe you can now understand why we’re covering every tiny drip of info about that mythical tablet.

Apple’s App Store said to have 99.4 percent of all mobile app sales, more like 97.5 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Component shortages lead analysts to forecast rise in prices of personal electronics
As you might well know, we’re not the biggest fans of analyst blather, but this piece of research by Gartner is backed by some substantial numbers. The FT reports that DRAM prices have recently risen by 23 percent, followed closely by LCD prices with a 20 percent jump, both in response to the financial crisis the whole globe seems to be suffering from. Because the effects of recently renewed investment in capacity building won’t be felt for a while, we’re told to prepare for higher prices throughout this year — a significant combo breaker from the previous decade’s average of around 7.8 percent drops. Oh well, let’s just cling to the encouraging signs for the future and ignore this bump on the road to gadget nirvana.

[Thanks, Ben W]

Component shortages lead analysts to forecast rise in prices of personal electronics originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PC prices may rise, reversing six-year trend

Your next PC may cost you a bit more than expected if you buy later this year. Market research masters Gartner say that the price of building PCs will climb this year, reversing a six-year trend, due to component scarcity. That’s going to pose a bit of challenge to manufacturers who have focused on pumping out cheap netbooks during the economic downturn.

The biggest driver of the likely price increase is memory. The DRAM industry is in the midst of moving from DDR2 to DDR3, which means less of each type of RAM is being produced. DDR3 spot prices are up 23 percent over the last month; with memory comprising about a tenth of a PC’s overall cost, that’s a significant cost for OEMs to absorb.

It’s not just RAM: LCD panels and hard drive prices are on the rise, with the cost of the former expected to jump by as much as 20 percent. Optical drives are also suffering from supply constraints.

As a result of the recession, component manufacturers reduced capacity and delayed building additional plants. While investment is on the way back up, it takes time for new facilities to come online. In the meantime, OEMs face a dilemma: how much of the additional costs can they pass on to consumers and businesses without scaring them away from new hardware?

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Aria: Providing Cheaper PCI Compliance for Payment Processors
Achieving Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance for online transactions is an expensive and timely endeavor; routinely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and spanning several quarters in tim. According to Gartner, PCI compliance will cost up to an average of $2.7 million among Level 1 merchants and $267,000 among Level 2 merchants. Further, Visa and Mastercard will be imposing new PCI requirements upon online merchants, which will include more frequent on and off site security reviews, beginning in 2010; thus forcing more companies to upgrade their systems to meet compliance standards.

Demand billing and recurring subscription management company, Aria, offers a solution built to manage PCI compliance for companies.

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Unified Communications: Saved by the Cloud?

Unified communications was a notable absent In Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. For years, the idea of a common platform for seemingly all communications seemed bewildering. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that even CIO’s were unsure what unified communications really meant.

But now here it is raising its flag once again with predictions from ABI Research that the unified communications market will jump from $302 million in 2008 to $4.3 billion by 2014. Seems like a big jump? Not really if you compare it to what at least one other analyst group is predicting.

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Interestingly, the reason for the growth may be in part due to cloud computing, which not surprising is the number one technology on Gartner’s list for 2010.

For years, unified communications has held promise as a product or suite of products that had a unifying user interface that, according to Wikipedia, would integrate real-time communication services “such as as instant messaging (chat); presence information; IP telephony; video conferencing; call control and speech recognition with non real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).”

Over the years, camps divided as people grappled with the idea of how all these technologies come together. Cisco recently dumped the term “unified communications,” in favor of “Cisco Collaboration.” They are smart over at Cisco. Collaboration is definitely the new black. There’s not a lot new behind the curtain but collaboration has an edge to it that is getting the attention of the enterprise.

But now comes along cloud computing and the vendors seem to be learning that perhaps unified communications should be treated as a service.

Vendors like Cisco are teaming up with SaaS services like Salesforce.com and VOIP providers such as Skype. The potential proves to In-Stat that the market for unified communications will jump to $39 billion by 2013.

It may be easy to poke fun a the hype around cloud computing these days. But there is actual proof that whatever you want to call it, cloud computing is playing a significant part in the growth of unified communications. Services that interconnect across devices and provide the capability for collaboration are emerging in a variety of flavors.

More proof of what is to come? Aire-Spring represents a new breed of telecommunications companies. They are also one of the fastest growing operators. The comany has built an IP network from scratch. The company is processing 4 billion calls annually.

Those are big numbers fitting for a market that is just about to burst.

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