In 3.5 Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones

Worldwide, according to Gartner, smartphone sales exceeded feature phone sales in 2013, for the first time — but Africa remains a different story. Informa UK’s terrific Africa Telecoms Outlook (PDF) projects 334 million African smartphone connections in 2017, maybe 30% of the continent’s population. IDC is more pessimistic yet; it figures smartphones are currently 18% of the African mobile phone market, but they expect their number to “merely” double in volume by 2017. The available data seems to indicate that the penetration rate feature phones shot from 6% to 40% of the African market over a five-year period, and I still see no reason to believe that smartphones will do worse, and many to believe that they will move faster.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Hyper-Local Search

As the world grows increasingly mobile in its computing — and advertisers grow increasingly demanding about how they target prospects — the giants of the net are intent on tailing people around town. Google captures location through its Android phones and various mobile apps, while Facebook includes a Foursquare-like service within its ubiquitous social network. With this deal, Microsoft gets extensive access to Foursquare’s brand new tracking system.

Read more at Wired

The Movie-making Billionaires Club

Lionsgate has achieved a level of success no one predicted. American box-office figures for 2013 are now in, and they show that the second “Hunger Games” film helped Lionsgate to overtake Paramount and Fox. Other than the surviving six “majors”, all dating from the age of Gloria Swanson and Rudy Valentino, the young challenger, founded only 17 years ago in Canada, is the only studio to have grossed more than $1 billion in a year, as it did in 2012 and 2013.

Read more in the Economist

Testing, testing

A whole industry of services to help startups tweak their offerings has sprung up, too. Optimizely, itself a startup, automates something that has become a big part of what developers do today: A/B testing. In its simplest form, this means that some visitors to a webpage will see a basic “A” version, others a slightly tweaked “B” version. If a new red “Buy now” button produces more clicks than the old blue one, the site’s code can be changed there and then. Google is said to run so many such tests at the same time that few of its users see an “A” version.

To see how people actually use their products, startups can sign up with services such as usertesting.com. This pays people to try out new websites or smartphone apps and takes videos while they do so. Firms can tell the service exactly which user profile they want (specifying gender, age, income and so on), and get results within the hour.

Read more at the Economist

California says no to Stephen Glass

The California Supreme Court has ruled that disgraced journalist Stephen Glass is not welcome as a lawyer in the state.

The New York Times reports:
The 33-page ruling was stinging in its portrayal of Mr. Glass’s character, raising questions about his motives and sincerity despite the appearance of character witnesses who testified in his favor. The court said Mr. Glass had not been forthright in a previous application to the New York bar and had not acknowledged his shortcomings in that effort (he was informally notified in advance that his New York application would be rejected). Many of his efforts at rehabilitating himself, the court wrote, “seem to have been directed primarily at advancing his own well-being rather than returning something to the community.”

Read more at the New York Times

You’ll never believe how recommended stories are generated on otherwise serious news sites

Links, which appear on hundreds of news sites, including CNN and The Washington Post, (often at the bottom of news stories) are the work of a “news discovery” company called Taboola. The company acts as a middleman between a Web site, such as Politico, and other sites that want to attract Politico’s readers.

At regular intervals, Taboola’s computers feed new headlines and photos into the “Around the Web” sections from an inventory of articles, photo galleries and videos supplied by these third-party sites. Taboola’s main competitor, another Israeli start-up called Outbrain (both companies are now based in New York). Outbrain and Taboola say publishers can customize their offerings to screen out material they deem inappropriate.

The engines’ recommendations are based on algorithms shaped by a user’s Internet behavior and that of similar groups of people. Thanks to tracking software known as cookies, the companies’ computers can learn whether you like to read about sports or entertainment or prefer to watch videos instead of reading articles. They also do some educated guesswork based on broad categories. People in Washington, D.C., for example, might see more links to political stories than people in Washington state.

Read more at the Washington Post.

Pinterest Is More Popular Than Email for Sharing

According to a new study, Pinterest now one of the primary ways that people share stuff online. It even tops email. The company found that in the fourth quarter of 2013, Pinterest raced past email to become the third-most popular way to share online. It was topped only by Facebook and Twitter.

Read more at Wired

Instagram Fastest-Growing App Among Top 10 In 2013

Facebook was the No. 1 app overall in 2013, but its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram was the fastest-growing app among the top 10...the growth in social media -- especially among teens -- is shifting to single-purpose or messaging apps, including Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Whisper and others.

Read more at Media Post

Many Americans don’t recognize top news anchor

In an online survey about Americans’ knowledge about the news conducted last summer, just 27% of the public could correctly identify Brian Williams, anchor of the top-rated NBC Nightly News.

Three decades ago, when far more Americans watched the nightly network news programs, nearly half (47%) could identify Dan Rather, who at the time anchored the top-rated CBS evening News.

Read more at the Pew Research Center

New rules and start-up firms will let people sell their personal data

In 2014 new regulations and start-ups will overturn the traditional approach to privacy. Individuals will be encouraged to place an economic value on their personal data—in effect creating a market for them.

A report by the World Economic Forum called personal data “a new asset class”. A study by the Boston Consulting Group said the market in Europe could be worth €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) a year by 2020. But the gains to individuals may seem trifling. Most data points—such as age, sex or address—are worth less than a penny a piece per person.

Read more at The Economist

Fears that teenagers are deserting Facebook are overblown

There is no mass defection (from Facebook by teenagers) under way. Instead, teenagers are using different social networks for different things, says Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life project. They post less intimate stuff to Facebook and more risqué material to networks not yet gatecrashed by their parents. Mr Miller’s research has also highlighted this habit. The danger for Facebook is that one of these newer places starts to attract parents.

Read more at The Economist

Should Tech Designers Go With Their Guts — Or the Data?

For many tech companies, design is no longer subjective. Instead, it’s all about the data. Analytics click and hum behind the scenes, measuring the effectiveness of even the tiniest design decisions. This constant data-stream plays an increasing role in determining what new products we will use and what forms they might take.

When it comes to the future of design and technology, the uncomfortable question we bump into is: do human design instincts even matter anymore?

In the design world, there’s always been a dichotomy between data and instinct. Design departments — think Mad Men – were once driven by the belief that some people are gifted with an innate design sense. They glorified gut “instinct” because it was extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of designs in progress; designers had to wait until a product shipped to learn if their ideas were any good. But today’s digital products — think Facebook and Google — glorify “data” instead; it’s now possible to measure each design element among hundreds of variations until the perfect outcome is selected.

From my perspective working with over 80 product teams, data is important … but there’s no replacement for design instincts built on a foundation of experiences that include failures. As engineering and design become ever closer collaborators, the biggest challenge is to make decisions through a careful balance between data and instinct.

Read more at Wired

FB still #1

Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. These are among the key findings on social networking site usage and adoption from a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

Read more at the Pew Research Center

The Limits of Videogame Storytelling Reveal Themselves in The Novelist

In the PC/Mac game The Novelist, you play a very nosy ghost living in a house the Kaplan family rented for the summer.

Videogames might one day be a great way of telling a story like The Novelist, but before that can happen interactive storytelling in videogames must be more interesting... The truth is videogames are not yet as good as novels or films when it comes to telling stories. The Novelist crashes headlong into that reality by throwing the full weight of a story upon the best storytelling tools games currently have to offer. It doesn’t work, but it reveals something about the medium, and for that reason The Novelist is important.

Read more at Wired

The internet is changing television habits

In 2014 online video will become a more influential cultural force, changing conversations, communities and what people watch. Several factors will speed up television’s move to the internet. Faster broadband will make it easier to watch videos delivered online without having to wait ages for them to load. People will buy more internet-enabled “smart” television sets, bringing websites once accessible mainly from laptops and tablets to bigger screens. In 2014 firms such as Sony and Intel will launch “over the top” services, which deliver television programmes over the internet. Apple’s long-awaited television offering may come to fruition. In 2014 some of the world’s biggest creators of programmes, including Disney, will start to make exclusive programmes for new platforms.

Read more at The Economist

Better times for the music industry

Streaming is still a small part of the music business globally, but will bolster it in the years ahead. Like a popular rocker who burns out, only to try to stage a comeback a decade later, the sickly music industry will probably never regain its previous vigour. But even modest growth is welcome news for the industry... It will become more common for bands and managers to use data about where fans are listening to them in order to decide where to tour.

Read more at The Economist

Here's Why Instagram's Demographics Are So Attractive To Brands

Before buying Instagram ads, advertisers need to understand who is on the social network. Over 90% of the 150 million people on Instagram are under the age of 35.. Though it's owned by Facebook, Instagram is a mobile app with distinct demographics.

Instagram is largely made up of urban, youthful demographics, with a significant skew towards women.

Instagram also leans toward urban users; 17% of U.S. adult residents who live in urban areas use Instagram, compared to only 11% in suburban and rural areas.

Instagram is about quality not quantity. Instagram accounts for 7% of daily photo uploads among the top four photo-sharing platforms (544 million daily uploads total). So it's not as much of a heavyweight, in volume terms, as some might believe.

Read more at Business Insider

A New Map Reveals the Geography of American TV News

Georgetown scholar Kalev Leetaru tracked all the locations mentioned on U.S. television news between June 2009 and October 2013, then plotted them on a world map.

Read more in the Atlantic

Ubiquitous cameras

It is getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This opens fascinating possibilities—and alarming ones.

Thanks to digital technology the world is replete with cheap and highly capable cameras. ABI, a research firm, reckons there were a billion built into the mobile phones and tablets shipped in 2012 (many boast more than one). Adding a run-of-the-mill digital camera to a phone, or pretty much anything else, costs about $10. Narrative, a Swedish company that has raised $500,000 through Kickstarter, is marketing a clip-on life-logger the size of a coin.

Read more at The Economist

The Chinese Stream

Around the world online video is becoming a bigger and more sophisticated business, but nowhere is that truer than in China. The country has the largest number of online-video viewers: around 450m, or nearly 80% of the internet-connected population. Their numbers will rise to around 700m by 2016, according to iResearch, which tracks the industry. In America and Europe, online video has yet to supplant broadcast- and pay-TV, but in China it seems rapidly to have done so.

Read more at The Economist