Samsung made itself the brand to beat in the crowded smartphone space by backing Google’s Android software –- 96 percent of the South Korean company’s shipments ran on the platform. Now, it’s planning a high-end smartphone powered by Intel-backed open-source platform Tizen.

The new phone, out as soon as August, is good news for those geeks and independent-minded consumers of the tech zone who are crying out for open-source gadgets. Maybe less so for Apple and Google, who face another challenger in the battle to dominate the platform for global mobile communications.

But Samsung had best beware. Growing competition from Samsung as a maker of high-end smartphones has already turned Apple from its most-valuable customer to an increasingly bitter rival. Does Google’s move into handsets after last year’s acquisition of Motorola put the writing on the wall for that relationship too?

Samsung’s efforts to lessen its reliance on Android by designing its own software Bada – “the sea” in Korean – haven’t yet produced a credible alternative. Nor have phones powered by Microsoft’s OS. Enter Tizen.

“This is just sort of a safety net,” said Doh Hyun Woo, an analyst for Seoul-based Mirae Asset Securities. “But if Google dominates the market just like Microsoft did in the PC market with more than 90 percent share, it may prove the total opposite,” with Google possibly holding this over Samsung’s head.

The big question for Samsung and Google – and Apple, too – is whether consumers learn to live with multiple operating systems, or whether one comes to dominate and the rest are left to wither (who remembers Betamax?).

Watch this space for developing open-source news.

Original post is Samsung Braces for Next Battleground With Google by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, with the Firefox logo during a news conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

While many European technology companies have pared back their presence at this week’s Mobile World Congress, Silicon Valley’s Mozilla is leaving a noticeably bigger footprint.

The maker of the popular Firefox web browser sent about a hundred employees — which is a sixth of its staff and a 50 percent increase from last year — and prepared a much larger stand to help it showcase its new open mobile operating system.

The hope? That by letting loose its fox in the smartphone world, it can steal some of the spotlight from Google’s Android, which dominates the market.

“We have made a more significant investment this year because we have more to say and show,” Peter Scanlon, senior director of global branding at Mozilla, said Sunday in an interview in Barcelona.

Mozilla’s new marketing message, “blaze your own path,” shows the fox from its logo unleashed and following people as they move around to explain how they can access the Internet regardless of where they are.

The question remains whether that campaign, which included a lavish presentation in front of hundreds at the luxurious Hotel Arts Barcelona, was convincing. Mozilla’s mobile software, first discussed a year ago, has been a long time coming. Phone buyers looking for a bargain may be tempted to see whether a new generation of feature phones — such as Nokia’s 105 — may do the trick and be available faster.

Mozilla does have some big names in its corner. As I wrote about yesterday, more than a dozen wireless carriers including billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil are supporting Mozilla’s open mobile operating system to make a range of cheaper smartphones. Firefox-based devices may arrive as early as the second quarter, Mozilla said.

We’ll see how fast and far this fox can run.

–With assistance from Cornelius Rahn.

Original post is Mozilla’s Fox Tries to Steal Spotlight and Outrun Google’s Android by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

A Toshiba Excite Android tablet is shown at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Google’s Android software for mobile devices has opened up a wide lead in market share, but it hasn’t made the same inroads with a lucrative niche: businesspeople.

While Android is expected to grab 68 percent of the smartphone market this year, according to researcher IDC, only 22 percent of information workers say they want a smartphone based on Google’s software on the job, according to a survey of 9,766 people by Forrester Research. Here’s what the survey said:

• Apple — 26%
• Windows 8 — 20%
• I don’t plan to use a tablet for work — 17%
• Windows 7 or other Windows — 12%
• No preference/Don’t know — 11%
• Android — 11%
• Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook — 1%
• Blackberry Playbook — 1%
• Other — 1%

Why the disparity? Android has done very well with consumers, particularly more price-sensitive ones, Gillett said. Businesspeople can pay Apple’s prices for a premium product, and millions of them already own iPhones and other Apple products and aren’t likely to walk away from their investment, he said.

Those polled may have written off Android because their companies don’t support it beyond e-mail access. That’s because many chief information officers don’t like the fact that almost every model of Android phone uses a slightly different version of the software, which means more testing, security updates and support costs, according to Frank Gillett, a Forrester analyst.

“CIOs are worried that their employees will end up with malware that they’re not likely to get with iOS,” Gillett said. “Google is taking the approach of reacting to problems, while Microsoft and Apple are being more proactive.”

In tablets, Android has an even smaller share among the business crowd, despite its 42.7 percent share of the overall tablet market:

• Apple — 33%
• Android — 22%
• No plans to use  smartphone on corporate network —  16%
• No preference/Don’t know — 11%
• Windows — 10%
• Blackberry — 7%
• Other — 1%

Android’s poor showing is not for lack of trying. Dozens of Android tablets have come to market since the iPad was introduced in 2010. Even more notable is how poorly Android scored relative to Microsoft, which has been a no-show in the tablet market and hadn’t even begun selling its Surface tablet until October.

Original post is Android Is Red Hot, Except With the Business Crowd by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Some of the most aggressive Android apps are programs purporting to be affiliated with popular franchises, Bit9 found.

That Angry Birds wallpaper app you’ve downloaded is doing more than decorating your smartphone screen — in the background, it’s also accessing your device’s GPS data, which tracks your location.

As unseemly as that sounds, it’s not uncommon. Security firm Bit9 found that more than 100,000 Android applications in Google’s online marketplace were “suspicious”  or “questionable” because of what they do in the background, such as location tracking, accessing contact lists and harvesting the contents of e-mail messages. Those functions go far beyond the programs’ stated purpose.

Android phones do warn users when they download applications about what information the programs will access. Whether most people actually read those warnings is another matter. Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Some of the most aggressive apps are programs purporting to be affiliated with popular brands such as Facebook and Zynga, Bit9 Chief Technology Officer Harry Sverdlove wrote in an e-mail. The extra functions don’t necessarily make the programs malicious, but they do raise questions about the developers’ intentions, he added.

“Including a common app or publisher in the title is not a guaranteed sign of suspicious behavior, but it is certainly a technique that malicious authors use to trick users into installing their apps,” Sverdlove wrote.

The findings illustrate a reality of the application economy: having a vast amount of third-party applications is both good and bad for consumers. With so many unknown developers writing software for smartphones, users must be vigilant about monitoring what permissions they’re granting when they download new programs. Just 8,200 or so of the more than 400,000 applications that Bit9 studied came from what it described as highly trusted developers.

Mobile app privacy is even becoming an issue for law enforcement.

In California, the only state to require privacy policies for mobile applications as well as websites, Attorney General Kamala Harris has warned companies such as United Continental Holdings Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc. and OpenTable Inc. that they are in violation of state law for failing to conspicuously post privacy policies for their mobile applications, Bloomberg News reported.

The companies have 30 days to make the policies readily accessible or face fines of as much as $2,500 for each download of applications that violate the law, which is known as the California Online Privacy Protection Act.

Original post is 100,000 Android Apps Collect Too Much Data, Security Firm Finds by Tech Blog.

That’s the idea behind Banjo, a startup founded in late 2010 to help smartphone users view all the posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites that are tagged to one geographic location. With its flagship app now counting more than 2 million users, the company is launching a new program.

Pin a Post, a free application that goes live in Apple and Google app stores today, lets users save social media posts emanating from a specific spot that they want to refer back to later.

“It’s Pinterest for location,” said Damien Patton, founder and chief executive of Redwood City, California-based Banjo. Like the popular site for saving collections of photos from around the Web, Pin a Post serves as a bookmarking service for consumers of social media.

The app, which was built in just three days by Banjo’s team of 18, is an experiment aimed at exploring new uses for the company’s underlying engine for mapping tweets and location check-ins in real time.

“Everybody in the company showed up on a Wednesday morning,” Patton said. “I said, ‘By Friday we are going to ship a finished and complete application on Apple and Android that allows you to go anywhere in the world and save content and be able to go back and recall that later.’”

More mashups of Banjo’s service are expected. Patton said the company plans to open its social-location engine to other developers through a public API, or application programming interface, by the end of this year. The startup is also gearing up for a move into a larger office, where it will share 25 percent of the space with outside developers building new apps based on Banjo’s service.

“If we can build Pin a Post from scratch in three days, imagine what scrappy young kids from all over the world can come in and build on this platform,” Patton said.

Original post is Banjo Creates ‘Pinterest for Location’ With New Mobile App by Tech Blog.

Courtesy BMW

BMW's DriveNow car-sharing service lets members take the ActiveE electric car for a spin.

As young city dwellers choose car-sharing services such as Zipcar over owning their vehicle, BMW is getting into the act with its first U.S. rental program starting in San Francisco.

At a rate of $12 for the first half hour and 32 cents for each additional minute,  BMW’s DriveNow service lets members take the automaker’s ActiveE electric car for a spin. The cost for a full day is $90, and there’s a $39 signup fee. By comparison, Zipcar customers in San Francisco can rent a BMW 328xi (not a fancy electric model) for $15.25 per hour or $109 per day.

The service, which lets users book a car using an app for Apple’s iPhone and iPad and Google’s Android devices, has been available for more than a year in Germany and has 40,000 members, said Ian Robertson, a BMW board member. Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz and other car brands, has a similar program called Car2Go.

“The current model of the car industry needs to change,” Robertson said at an event outside San Francisco City Hall that was attended by Mayor Ed Lee. “Mobility service will be a highly significant part of the luxury car industry.”

Alongside the car-sharing app, BMW plans to introduce a new service called ParkNow in San Francisco next month. With the app, drivers in the city can locate available spaces at parking garages and book them. The software then displays a QR code that is like a key to access the garage. About 10 garages will be listed at first, and at least 100 more are coming in the next few months, Robertson said.

While ParkNow is a BMW service, the garages won’t discriminate against your ’95 Geo. It seemed like a smart buy at the time, we know.

Original post is BMW Gears Up to Offer Car Sharing and Parking Locator Apps by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Stephen Wilkes/Gallery Stock

In the first quarter of this year, China became the world’s first country to have 1 billion mobile subscribers.

China, a country where 40 percent of households can afford a smartphone, is expected to double that number in five years as disposable incomes continue to grow, a new study said.

By 2017, 80 percent of China’s households will be able to afford a smartphone, according to research firm Research2guidance. Smartphones in China cost between 1,000 yuan ($157) and 2,000 yuan ($314).

Disposable incomes in the world’s largest smartphone market have risen significantly in recent years, with more households joining China’s middle class. That segment of the population earns an annual income of $8,500 to $60,000, and spends a third of its income on discretionary purchases, the study said.

In the first quarter of this year, China became the world’s first country to have 1 billion mobile subscribers.

Original post is China’s Potential Smartphone Base Could Double By 2017, Study Says by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Walgreens has teamed up with Aisle411 to help shoppers locate whatever they’re looking for at each of the drugstore chain's stores.

If trying to find Tylenol or other products at a Walgreens store gives you a headache, the pharmacy said it has the remedy.

The largest U.S. drugstore chain has teamed up with Aisle411, a St. Louis-based mobile software developer, to help shoppers locate whatever they’re looking for at each of Walgreens’s 7,900-plus sites. With Aisle411′s latest app, a user can pull up a store’s floor plan and search for a product. A pin will drop onto the map to show which aisle it’s in.

“We’re very focused on making sure that products inside of our store become easier to find,” said Abhi Dhar, the chief technology officer for e-commerce at Walgreens, which is based in Deerfield, Illinois. The new maps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android smartphones will be available tomorrow.

Retailers are trying to improve the experience of shopping in their stores to fend off lower-cost rivals on the Web. If shoppers at Walgreens use the Aisle411 app instead of, say, Amazon.com’s bar code scanner, which lets users do price comparisons, the pharmacy could prevent its stores from becoming showrooms for items that are cheaper online.

For Aisle411, which has 18 employees and raised $5.9 million from private investors, Walgreens is by far the biggest retailer to offer its stores’ layouts and product data for use in the app, said Nathan Pettyjohn, the startup’s chief executive officer. Smaller partners include Ace Hardware and regional grocery stores Price Cutter and SuperValu’s Shop ‘n Save.

Aisle411 also provides maps in about a dozen cities for larger retailers, such as Home Depot and Lowe’s. However, those maps are compiled from public information and are less accurate, Pettyjohn said.

Last week, Pettyjohn and I tested the new version of the Aisle411 app at a Walgreens in Palo Alto, California. On our shopping list: Advil and diapers (a natural combination). When cellular reception was available, rarely a guarantee in the Bay Area, the app was fairly snappy.

When Pettyjohn tapped the app’s checkbox to denote that we’d picked up the diapers, a banner ad at the bottom of the screen suggested we might want to also pick up baby wipes. Coca-Cola and General Mills have already signed on as advertisers, Pettyjohn said.

Dhar declined to discuss the financial arrangement Walgreens made with Aisle411 for sharing mapping information. Aisle411 would not say how many times its apps have been downloaded.

Walgreens’s own mobile apps, which let customers refill prescriptions and order photo prints, have been downloaded millions of times, said Tim McCauley, the retailer’s senior director for mobile commerce. He declined to give specific numbers.

“We’re doing very well with our own mobile apps, but we wanted to make sure that we were expanding on our reach,” McCauley said. “What we’re looking to do on this is drive additional trips to our store.”

Original post is Looking for Pain Relief? App Tells You Which Aisle in Walgreens by Tech Blog.

Google pulled off what may well be the most thrilling and gutsiest product demo in history.

To show off prototypes of its augmented reality goggles, being developed by an internal initiative called Project Glass, Google hired a team of skydivers to jump from a zeppelin a mile or so above San Francisco.

Wearing the goggles to video the trip in real-time, they took off in wingsuits, parachuted onto the roof of the Moscone West conference center and made a triumphant entrance into the room where Google founder Sergey Brin and thousands of attendees of the annual Google I/O developers conference cheered (a team of extreme bicyclists wearing the glasses did tricks up on the roof, and two people rappelled down the side of the building–but so what).

I’ve been to lots of Apple events over the years, but with all due respect to Steve Jobs, I’ve never felt electricity in a room like this. Sure, it was mostly due to the fear factor. But the excitement was also because the sky-diving was so totally unexpected. It came late in a long keynote that was just about to go on too long. We’d seen the latest flavor of Android, a new 7-inch tablet and were even treated to a surprising “one-more-thing” — the Nexus Q home server. And then, just when it felt like a great time to say “thanks for coming, have a great show,” Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra came out to talk about Google Plus.

“I was getting bored,” said Surith Thukkian, an attendee. “I was playing games on my phone.”

That’s when a somewhat scruffy Sergey Brin came charging out on stage, interrupting Gundotra. With little intro and evidently some heart-felt hesitation, he said they were going to put on a never-before-seen demo.

“This can go wrong in 500 different ways, so tell me: Who wants to see a demo of Glass?” Brin said.

The applause turned to a somewhat surreal disbelief as he described what would be happening, especially when the video went live inside the blimp and one of the jumpers opened a door and peered out. Suddenly, they were off. Only when a relieved-sounding Brin said “chutes are open” was I absolutely certain we weren’t going to all witness the skydiver’s gruesome death, from their own perspective no less.  (Ironically, Brin’s most nervous moment came when one of the rappellers went zooming down the building far faster than he expected.) Of course, the risks were actually quite low, as any skydiver would tell you. But I’m not a skydiver, and neither were most of the people in the room.

Although it felt as if the idea had come to Brin that morning, there had been plenty of planning. He had proposed the idea to Google’s communications team eight weeks ago, though most thought he was joking when the idea of wingsuits came up. The team had to work with various government officials to get some regulations changed, including one that forbids opening the door of a zeppelin while in flight .

Technical glitches had been worked out.  Someone came up with a filter for the digi-shades, so the sun wouldn’t overwhelm the video stream. I can’t say I understand how this worked, but a Google spokesperson told me that establishing a stong Wi-Fi connection involved taping the skydivers’ smart phones to woks. Yes, woks.

Even as it was occurring, I was thinking how different this keynote was for Google, and how Apple would never do something like this. The Google presentations I’ve attended were perfectly professional and informative, but never imparted any real sense of the company. Even if it was a bit of a gimmick — what role did the goggles have that many a video camera couldn’t do? — this demo celebrated Google’s sense of itself, including its passion for risk-taking and experimentation and willingness to fail (what if the glasses had gone dark in mid-flight?). At Apple keynotes, there’s no doubt the passion is all for the end product, not the process.

All this to show off a prototype of a product that won’t hit the market for some time, and may never be a big seller.

Only trouble now is what do they do for an encore?

“Tomorrow, it’ll be motorcycles jumping over shark tanks,” said Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg.

Original post is Google’s Demo With Skydivers One-Ups ‘One More Thing’ by Tech Blog.

Photograph by John Lund/Corbis

Microsoft's partners haven't said much in response to the software giant's unveiling of its own Windows-powered tablet.

Considering that one of their closest partners had just announced an invasion into their territory, Microsoft’s cohorts in the personal computer world were awfully brief with their comments this week.

They’re either declining to comment on Microsoft’s plan to release two models of tablet computers running the company’s upcoming Windows 8 (see Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Samsung) or offering a Stepford Wives-esque reaffirmation of how much they value their relationship with Microsoft.

Toshiba said it “plans to keep a good cooperative relationship with Microsoft.” No mention of the fact that Microsoft’s new Surface tablet, demonstrated at a press event Monday in Los Angeles, competes directly with the prototype Windows 8 tablet that Toshiba unveiled earlier this month at the Computex show in Taipei.

Dell said it views Microsoft as “an important partner to Dell and we look forward to delivering a full slate of Windows 8 tablets later this Fall.”

Microsoft also continues to be one of Lenovo’s “most valued partners.” Lenovo, which says it’s the No. 2 tablet seller in China, said it welcomes the competition.

PC makers don’t seem willing to discuss it, but Microsoft’s moves aren’t going to engender much goodwill, said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Ballmer’s comments at the event and the company’s decision to create its own tablet imply that Microsoft no longer felt it could rely on its hardware partners to translate its vision for Windows into compelling devices, he said.

“Microsoft is not taking any chances whatsoever that anything is going to impede their vision on how mobile computing will look in the future,” he said. “They are doing it at the expense of the hardware companies that are their licensees.”

It’s an approach Microsoft executives mocked Google Inc. for taking with its Android phones, saying the search giant’s decision to make its own phone and acquire Motorola Mobility would alienate partners, he noted.

That acquisition was also met with a series of comments from hardware makers — highlighted on Google’s website — about how much Google’s step was welcomed by the partners it would now compete with and how close the new rivals remained with Google.

And there’s the rub. PC makers may not be Steve Ballmer’s biggest fans this week. But they have few alternatives. They rely on Windows to sell desktop and notebook computers — a far larger business than tablets for most of them. Apple doesn’t license its operating system and Google is likely to make a tablet of its own through Motorola, said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.

Perhaps some will shift resources away from Windows. Maybe we’ll see a variety of slates using a Linux OS (other than one made by Google).

What we’ll likely see is these companies remaining at Microsoft’s side, sort of like those wives of politicians who were caught cheating on them. We’ve seen those press conferences, where they stand there awkwardly to show their support. But where they stand once the cameras are off may be an entirely different place.

To be fair, some of the PC makers have also embarked on relationships with Google’s Android, as both Microsoft and its partners scramble to better compete in an increasingly mobile world.

Original post is PC Makers Stand by Their Microsoft Amid Company’s Move Into Tablets by Tech Blog.