Publishers Clearing Hou...

Direct marketer Publishers Clearing House has acquired mobile marketing company Liquid Wireless. Publishers Clearing House CEO Andy Goldberg said the acquisition closed "before Christmas" but declined to disclose terms.

iOS Market Share Up Fro...

According to a new report from research firm NPD , iOS’s U.S. market share (by sales) jumped from 26% in the third quarter of 2011 to 43% by October and November. Android, however, came out on top, with 47% market share during those two months, down from 60% in Q3. Says NPD, over the course of 2011, the smartphone battle saw iOS and Android distancing themselves from the competition, turning it into “a two-horse race.” Overall, smartphone sales continue to grow, NPD says, and accounted for two out of every three handsets sold in October/November 2011. For comparison purposes, that’s up from 50% in Q4 2010. In addition, nine of the top ten phones sold in Oct/Nov are smartphones, with Samsung, HTC and Motorla each having at least one smartphone listed in NPD’s top ten. Apple’s phones are on the top of the list, with the iPhone 4S in the number one spot and the iPhone 4 still doing well in the #2 position. It’s clear that iOS and Android are dominating the market here, as former leader RIM’s sales tanked from over 20% in Q3 2010 to just 6% in October/November 2011. We recently got a glimpse of the extent of iOS and Android’s growing popularity, when a previous report from mobile analytics firm Flurry from December had confirmed the massive gains those platforms were making over the 2011 holiday season. The firm found that 6.8 million Android and iOS devices were activated on Christmas Day alone. That was up 353% from the 1.5 million activations a day over the first 20 days of December. It also set a new record: Christmas 2010 had only seen 2.8 activations, Flurry said. We’ve also been watching Android’s steep market share climbs based on activations – Google’s Andy Rubin  tweeted  in December that there were now more than 700,000 Android phones activated every single day, which is up from  500,000 activations per day  last June. Mobile analyst Horace Dediu at  Asymco  then estimated that the total cumulative number of Android devices activated so far is between 224 million and 253 million. To compare, last October, Apple announced a cumulative total of  250 million iOS devices  sold (including iPods and iPads). For what it’s worth, research firm Chitika was also reporting today that Android was leading in market share with a 51.6% share versus iOS’s 46.4% share. But this data was based on web impressions from the last week of November and December. That’s not enough data for anything but a quick snapshot of traffic levels during one of the busiest times of the year – holiday activations. We won’t know for sure how many iPhones Apple is selling until its next earnings report, but thanks to NPD’s new data, we know it’s going to be neck-and-neck.

Selling Apple In Octobe...

MG Siegler argues that if you sold your Apple stock last October, right after the company’s Q4 2011 earnings report, you are an idiot and/or a moron . After all, Apple’s stock price closed at $398.62 on October 19, and it closed at $422.4 last Friday (a respectable 6 percent bump). So selling your Apple stock that day was idiotic, right? Maybe, maybe not. Flamebait headlines aside, for all we know you could have been selling Apple stock you acquired back in 2000, in which case I daresay you were a true visionary. Of if you spent the money to buy your kids and spouse some nice Christmas gifts, or treated yourself to that plane ticket to Cambodia or whatever. Reality is that, yes, Apple stock was staggeringly oversold on October 19, but I’ll be damned if I’m calling anyone an idiot over doing it if I don’t know what you did with the money. In hindsight, it may have been smarter to hold on to it, but that’s the harsh reality of the volatile stock market for you. If the future could be accurately predicted, we could all make a killing. Now, a decidedly smart move would have been buying Google the very same day you shouldn’t have sold AAPL . On October 19, 2011, GOOG closed at $580.7. Last Friday, stock price reached $652.73. That’s a 12+ percent bump, or about double the gain Apple saw in the same timeframe. Now, if you sold your Apple stock in October to stock up on Research In Motion or Nokia instead …

Nobody Wins At CES

Rather than do a CES pre-round-up of exciting products I’d like to address this interesting slant on the whole “massive electronics trade show in the middle of the desert” concept that has kept the Gadgets crew here up for the past few weeks. MG said Apple won CES. He was being snide, but, in a way, honest because, in the end, nobody wins CES. The Consumer Electronics Show is, as its name implies, a show for consumer electronics. These include, but are not limited to, TVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players (if they still make those), and accessories. TV stands! TV brackets! Speakers! Remotes! In fact, there’s an entire hall dedicated to the Asian purveyors of the components that make up those consumer electronics, a sort of Fishmongers Row to the CE industry where the smell is at least far more tolerable. You’ll notice that nowhere in there did I mention PCs, laptops, cellphones, tablets, and Microsoft Windows. That’s because those are typically termed “mobile devices” or PCs or operating systems. There are trade shows for those, as well, although they are far fewer these days than they ever were. Why? Because the Internet took away all the fun of schlepping a booth to the Javitts Center in New York and paying for hotel rooms and food for a bunch of salesmen to stand around giving out tote bags. Why have a COMDEX when you can get Engadget, The Verge, and Gizmodo to cover your geegaw the moment its launched. Why pay $100,000 in booth fees at SXSW as a start-up when you can talk to TechCrunch to get approximately the same number of eyes? It doesn’t make sense. CES is really for buyers. Sure it’s a hoot to see what gadgets will launch at back-to-school in September and we, regrettably, will be there reporting on start-ups and cool gadgets we find. But it’s buyers – men and women who love to spend a week eating steak and playing backgammon at MGM grand – who really drive CES. Buyers may be considerably more plugged in these days than they were in the past, but the orders they place at CES are usually the last time they actively pursue the noephillic instinct until January of the next year. Again, with the rise of the Internet, this is swiftly changing but for now the mom-and-pop electronics shop in Scranton trying to fight off Amazon and Best Buy comes to CES to see which TVs to stock. Microsoft left CES because the news cycle it imparted on the industry didn’t suit it. You can talk backroom politics all you want, but in the end Microsoft could make its own news without CES. Every company is beholden to produce something new and great for CES and their R&D teams are geared to follow this schedule. Microsoft wanted off the treadmill, and they’re big enough to do it. Ultimately, nobody wins CES because there’s nothing to win. Most products announced don’t launch for months (if not years) and the major news articles end up being trend pieces rather than actual reviews. Sometimes companies can take the air out of the event by launching something “huge” – the Palm Pre is the last item in recent memory that really stole the show – but CES is about selling real goods to real people, not impressing some tech blogger with a 1 terabyte cellphone. It behooves us to remember that the Consumer in Consumer Electronics Show is less a term of endearment and more a target for a precision strike. We are the consumer. They want to sell to us. CES is geared to making that happen. If you’re a gearhead, I don’t want to cancel Christmas on you here. Yuck it up. We’ll be covering it in our own way over here . However, just remember that CES exists not to offer solace to the unmitigated fanboy. It exists to make money and when that money can be made elsewhere, CES will go away.

New Details Emerge For ...

Long-time readers may know that I’m a sucker for white phones, so today is something like Christmas Part Two for me. New details have surfaced about two new pearlescent phones: the white Epic 4G Touch and the white Galaxy Nexus. Sprint’s (unfortunately named) Galaxy S II Epic Touch variant is the more imminent release, as the white model will be hitting all of the company’s sales channels on January 8 with a $199 price tag. We’ve talked about the GSIIE4GT in-depth before, but in case you were wondering, it sports a 1.2 GHz Exynos processor, a 4.52 Super AMOLED Plus display and a heaping helping of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. Sprint’s a little late here – AT&T and T-Mobile have already rolled out their white GSII variants — but more chromatic choices are always welcome. Meanwhile, a white Samsung Galaxy Nexus will see the light of day in Europe before this year’s Mobile World Conference kicks off on February 27 according to Pocket-Lint ,. Online retailer Handtec has already opened pre-orders for the pearly handset, with the 16GB model going for £496.79 ($770). The international Galaxy Nexus comes with full support for AT&T and T-Mobile’s data networks, so I don’t expect it to be too long before people with too much money snag a white GalNex to flaunt around town. Fan though I may be of Samsung’s Android 4.0-powered gray monolith, I’m hoping against hope that the white model will officially make its way stateside. It’s been rumored that the GSM Galaxy Nexus will soon hit AT&T , and a white Nexus S with support for AT&T’s 3G bands surfaced not too long after the original Nexus S debuted. It’s a tenuous connection at best, but hey — a guy can hope right?