Technology

As you get older, you start to see the great cycles of life emerge. Hope and disillusionment and hope again; pride crushed by defeat and then rising again; and of course, the rising wave of speculation in advance of every Apple product launch.

No surprise, then, that Morgan Stanley analysts are getting plenty of news coverage this week for predictions of a March iPad 3 release and a June iPhone 5. They join plenty of other pundits, and the predictions are more or less coalescing around quad-core chips, a higher resolution screen for the iPad and a slimmer profile for the iPhone.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to write that people who obsess over those product rumors (unless they’re investing in Apple or it’s competitors) are shallow fools destined to spend the next Apple keynote gnashing their teeth in fury that the latest new iDevice doesn’t come with the tachyon emitters that MacRumourLicious.com swore were coming.

Except that I get it. I understand the appeal. For a lot of us, speculating about the next iPhone’s processor or whether the iPad’s touch-screen will be pressure-sensitive (yes, fine, I’m the only one speculating about that) or what the next version of Android will offer is about more than just speed ratings or raw performance. It’s about what we can do with the new features or increased power of the device: what we’ll be able to create, how we’ll be able to collaborate, and how we can foster richer and more satisfying connections with each other.

OK, it’s also about whether the next version of Angry Birds will be able to have 3D-rendered shadows and photo-realistic explosions. But it’s also about that humanity-lofty stuff, too.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function.

The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele’s popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current “swear jar sweepstakes” promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit somewhat limited at this point.

A sister site called Likes Matter offers a real-time view of Facebook Page growth rates. There I discovered that Eminem’s Facebook Page is currently attracting about 35-40 new likes every minute.

The main site, the awkwardly named SocialMedia-live, updates Facebook Page data on 90,000 “big players” every 10 minutes – including Eminem, Coca Cola, YouTube and other very popular brands. A further 1.8 million “medium-sized pages” are updated every 12 hours. The other 36 million or so “little pages” are refreshed every 5 days.

There’s a special page for “Hip Fanpages,” those Facebook Pages “that have distinguished themselves in terms of layout, navigational ease, interactive fanpage features, etc.” Current members include Adidas Originals, Snooki, Livestrong, Star Wars and a German comedian named Linda P. That last pick is a clue that SocialMedia-live hails from Germany.

There are some useful comparison tools, too. Below is a chart comparing the growth of Adele, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry over the past 90 days. We can see that the popularity of Adele’s Facebook Page spiked in January of this year. She has about 12.6 million fans at time of writing. Meanwhile Lopez is growing faster than Perry. Although note that Perry has more fans than Adele and Lopez combined. She has 37.6 million fans, while Lopez has 8 million. A likely explanation is that Perry is much nearer to peak popularity on Facebook than either Adele or Lopez. Growth rate could also be affected by when the fan pages were started. So, as always, take these statistics with a grain of the proverbial salt.

The big thing missing from SocialMedia-live is search. I could find no way to get statistics about our own ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page, for example. There also seems to be no easy access to the 36 million or so “little pages.” Both of those issues severely limits the usefulness of the site for marketers, who would be a prime audience for this data.

But this is a beta site, so we hope it will expand over time. For now, if you’re interested in finding out how fast certain brands are growing their Facebook Page fan bases, then SocialMedia-live offers an interesting set of statistics.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Workers at Foxconn threaten to commit suicide in protest of poor working conditions. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Foxconn Workers Threaten Mass Suicide

Over 300 employees at the Foxconn factory in China climbed atop the building and threatened to commit suicide en masse. The Taiwan-based Foxconn, most known for manufacturing the XBox360, the iPhone and iPad, the Playstation 3, the Wii and the Kindle, has long been under fire for difficult working conditions and the irony that the workers who earn so little are making the most popular recreational luxury items on the planet.

From the comments:

KathrynTerry — “Making toys for by comparison, rich capitalists,while being an underfeed,overworked human beings.

Free labor is just wrong especially when making non-essential toys, that carry hefty price tags. Shame on Xbox,Kindle,I Phone. Profits must be outlandish. Why not have decent working conditions for all??? People take their own lives in despair.”

More Must Read Stories:

The Nokia Lumia 900 Gives Windows Phones A Chance In the United States

A year ago Nokia was talking about hurling itself off a burning platform into a cold and dark ocean. The world wondered if the largest cellphone maker on Earth was committing suicide by phasing out Symbian smartphones and ditching the MeeGo operating system. Nokia, the company that brought many consumers their first cellphones, was crumbling in front of our very eyes. (more)

Will Data Collection on User Behavior Be Forced to End Soon?

Harvard Business Review ran three interesting short pieces in this month’s magazine, under the misleadingly timeless title “Tackling Business Problems.” The three essays are actually guest submissions from business radicals, the final of the three being from social media luminary Doc Searls. (more)

With Kinect For Windows, Microsoft Ushers in the Era of Motion-Controlled Personal Computing

We all knew it was coming the minute we laid eyes on the Kinect. The wireless, motion-based controller for the XBox 360 was designed for gaming but its potential uses for other human-machine interactions were immediately obvious. We saw it in the way the device let users flow through film selections in the Netflix UI using only their hands. The Kinect’s potential also wasn’t lost on hackers and tinkerers, who wasted no time making the device do all kinds of things outside of the scope of the XBox. (more)

Visa Certifies 6 Smartphones for Its NFC Mobile Payments App

Visa is beginning to make its move in the mobile payments space. While MasterCard has heavily featured its near field communications capabilities and exclusive partnership with the Google Wallet, Visa has been working behind the scenes to set up mobile payments strategy. Visa announced today that its payWave NFC mobile wallet application has been certified for a variety of smartphones giving the payments giant its first real steps into unleashing NFC wallets. (more)

Google Web Fonts Get Smaller and Faster

Speed counts, and nobody knows that better than Google. The latest tweak to provide better performance comes in the form of adopting a new compression type that promises to yield files about 15% smaller than using Gzip to compress fonts. If you’re already using Google’s Web Fonts, what do you need to do to get the improvements? Nothing! (more)

CES 2012: Now You Can Check Facebook From Your Benz

In an age of smartphone addiction, you’ll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?

Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have “liked” on Facebook. (more)

CES 2012: Find All The Gadgets With Google Maps for Android

If you’re attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you’ll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport. (more)

Firefox to IT Managers: We Know We’re Annoying, But Here Comes a Solution

As beloved as Firefox is by its users, the open source browser has had a harder time finding hardcore fans among IT managers at large companies and other organizations. That’s because its rapid release cycle has always been notoriously tricky for them to keep up with. On top of that, Mozilla would sometimes end support on a particular older version of its browser before enterprise clients were ready. (more)

CES 2012: Mystery of the Missing Office 15

The last Steve Ballmer keynote has come and gone, and even after the company’s overt effort to reduce expectations about product announcements, if you listen carefully, you may still be able to hear the faint sound of a gospel choir chanting about one of the few remaining expectations that was left unmet last night: There was no word on a possible Metro-style preview of Office 15.(more)

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Lots of fun stuff coming down the pike from the jQuery Mobile folks. According to a post today by Todd Parker, the 1.0.1 maintenance release for jQuery Mobile will be coming out in “the next two weeks.” After that, Parker provides a look at some of the new features that we’ll see in 1.1 and 1.2.

Parker says that the jQuery Mobile project is moving to regular releases every three months (or so). The first of the timed releases is 1.1, which is expected in February.

What’s in 1.1

On the presentation side, 1.1 will add support for “true” fixed toolbars and smoother AJAX page transitions. According to Parker, the old method of using fixed toolbars did not work as well as hoped. With the 1.1 release, users will have true fixed toolbars if they’re using Android 2.2 or higher, iOS5, BlackBerry 7, the Kindle Fire and others. You can read all about the problems with fixed mobile positioning on Brad Frost’s blog.

As a result of the fixed toolbar support that’s going into 1.1, the touchOverflow feature is going to be deprecated in 1.1 and removed in 1.2. Says Parker, “Now with the significant changes to fixed headers and transition planned for 1.1, these will improve the experience in an almost identical way as touchOverflow, except it will work on a lot more platforms and with less complexity so we’ve decided to retire this feature.”

Parker says that the jQuery Mobile team tried to make transitions smooth in 1.0 “but there were two significant constraints that we couldn’t avoid: the need to scroll the viewport between transitions and Android’s poor animation performance.” With 1.1, Parker says that they’ve fixed the problems with a lot of work. On most mobile browsers. Older Android devices are going to be excluded from complex transitions and see the fade transition instead.

Figure: jQuery Mobile Flip Demo

If you want, you can check out a demo of the page transitions that’s in progress. I tried it out on iOS5 and it worked quite well.

Less visible to users, but more fun for developers, jQuery Mobile 1.1 will also add support for JavaScript’s Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD). Parker credits James Burke for “jumping in and helping us polish our AMD implementation.”

Springtime for jQuery Mobile

In the spring, look for the jQuery Mobile 1.2 release. It’s too early to say exactly what will be in that release, but Parker says that one likely feature is the popup component. This would give users popup menus, photos, dialogs, etc. on mobile browsers – while developers only need to add a few lines of HTML and a link.

As Parker points out, the feature is a bit buggy right now if you check out the demo. I tried it on iOS5 and most of the demo buttons popped up and disappeared before a user would have any time to react. The menu is relatively stable, but the tooltip, form, dialog and other demos are still pretty rough.

Now that jQuery Mobile has passed the 1.0 milestone, things seem to be humming along nicely. What else do you think that jQuery Mobile needs? If you’re interested in trying it or pitching in, jQuery Mobile is on GitHub and released under the MIT and GPLv2 licenses.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

There’s a special appeal that Myers-Briggs personality types holds for folks in the online space. Maybe it’s because of the appeal of a simple yet exhaustive taxonomy that can capture the whole spectrum of human variation. Maybe it’s because you can quantify it, plot it on a graph and measure it against other people’s – kind of like Klout for your soul.

Or maybe because people can drop it into a Twitter bio, and reveal their inner selves in just four characters, which helpfully leaves room for the words “passionate about B2B marketing for rotor arm assemblies” along with that that quote that Gandhi apparently never said.

Whatever the reason, it at least suggests that in a world so often dominated by metrics and conversions, we’re still up for a little introspection. Especially if it leads to an embeddable web badge. I take comfort from that.

Happy new year, all.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

2011 was a great year for apps. Both the Android Market and the Apple App Store grew exponentially and users now have so many choices that it is hard to sort all of them out. December was an especially big months for apps as publishers revved up for consumers to unwrap new devices during the holiday season. Christmas is the biggest app-downloading day of the year for many publishers. From empirical observations, publishers started ramping up a few days before the holiday with Dec. 22 one of the biggest days of the year fo the App Store, with literally thousands of apps published. What was new and exciting in the last month of 2011? Check out our selections below.

After several months of putting app updates in the column, we have noticed a trend: about a third of your apps will be issued updates on any given month. See the popular updates section at the end of the column.

The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.

Cross-Platform Apps

QuickOffice Pro ($14.99 — iOS, Android)

QuickOffice Pro is a mobile office solution for the businessperson on the go. Everybody that needs QuickOffice probably already has the free version but the pro version adds much more capability to the app such as the new SmartTouch capability for easy editing and an all new PowerPoint editor for when you need to change your presentation at the last minute. The price is a bit hefty but imagine if you were to put this on your PC? $15 seems like a steal. The app was updated with new functionality in December for both iOS and Android.

Google Currents — (Free – iOS, Android)

Watchout Flipboard, Zite, News360, Pulse … really, any of your favorite news reader apps. Google has gotten into the game and is feeding Google News into this new mobile user interface that gives the reader a whole new dynamic when checking out the latest Google News headlines. Unlike other Google apps made for iOS, the iPhone and iPad versions function well and give the user a dynamic interface for surfacing the best stories of the day in a variety of topics.

Beaver’s Revenge — ($0.99 — iOS, Android)

Twisted Games brings us this beaver … and he is pissed off. The lumberjacks have invaded his home and now he is out for revenge. This Angry Birds clone gives a new meaning to launching furious wildlife.

Skyscanner: All Flights — (Free – iOS, Android)

A new entry into the world finding cheap flights fast. Skyscanner allows users to search for flights across 600 budget and scheduled airlines with over 700,000 routes. Available in 28 languages and completely independent from any carrier or search engine. If you find Kayak or Hipmunk not to your liking, check out Skyscanner.

iOS

Flipboard For iPhone — (Free, iPhone)

Six months after telling us it was working on an iPhone app, Flipboard finally delivered in December. It is everything you have come to expect from the iPhone version, just slimmed down for your iPhone. If you have not done so yet, grab the one of the best and most innovative readers out there for your iPhone.

Wolfram Words Reference App — ($0.99, iPhone/iPad)

You thought that Wolfram Alpha was just for math geeks running algorithms through search engines? Think again. The Wolfram Words app is not just a dictionary, it is a thesaurus, teaches pronunciation, finds the score for the word in word games, historical crossword puzzle clues, translates it to Morse code and Braille and more. Wolfram is taking language to the next level.

Final Fantasy III — ($16.99, iPad)

One of the greatest things about the new mobile revolution is the release of favorite old video games to the new mobile platforms. Final Fantasy III for the iPad is a great example of that. It is expensive for an iPad game but those that love Final Fantasy will find it well worth it to be able to bring the game everywhere they go. It works best on an iPad 2 upgraded to iOS version 5.0.1.

Michael Jackson: The Experience HD — ($4.99, iPad)

Dance along with MJ in this iPad game that brings the King of Pop to Apple’s tablet. Trace shapes to get Jackson and his entourage to dance to some of the most iconic music to ever be released. The game comes with four tracks to start and puts Apple’s in-app purchasing to the test with the ability to buy more song when you have mastered the originals. Great HD graphics set with historic pop music and Michael Jackson. Kind of like Rock Band meets Tap Tap Revenge and with some furious moves.

AppStart for iPad: 2012 Edition — (Free, iPad)

There are multiple great ways to find new apps for your iPad. First, you can read the monthly Apps Of The Month column at ReadWriteWeb. Or, you can download and app that will help you get the most out of the “magical” device. AppStart is one of the best apps out there to learn how to use your iPad and do just about anything with it. It is a tutorial inside of a guide inside of an … iPad! Even iOS veterans like myself or the staff at RWW can find value in AppStart. Perhaps you can even recommend it to your family members that have new iPads after the holidays. Great user interface and simple dynamic to learn about Apple’s tablet.

Grammar Express: Active & Passive Voice — ($1.99, iPhone/iPad)

This one is for my editor. Grammar Express is a popular series of of apps that teach people how to use the English language … properly. Active & Passive voices is just one new app that was released in December but the company also launched several new Grammar Express apps such as Articles, Parts Of Speech and Prepositions. Great for kids learning how to write or for writers that might need some brushing up on their grammar skills from time to time.

Android

Mickey Puzzle — (Free)

Who does not love Mickey Mouse? He now has his own puzzle game on Android. It is a drag and drop tile game with 18 levels of jigsaw goodness. Once you have completed a puzzle you can turn it into a wallpaper and enjoy your accomplishment whenever you take your smartphone out of your pocket.

DroidEdit — (Free)

DroidEdit is a free source code editor for Android. It has Syntax Highlighting for the most popular coding languages and can open files from Dropbox or other file managers. Need to edit some code while away from your computer? DroidEdit is the app for you.

Steam For Android — (Free)

Steam For Android puts the entire Steam community in your pocket. It allows you to check and updates your public Steam profile in a variety of ways with several tabs including Friends, Groups, Games and Favorites. No ads in this app and should work seamlessly on any Android device, from Cupcake to Ice Cream Sandwich.

Kaspersky Mobile Security — ($9.95)

There is no denying it, security on Android is an issue. Yet, if you are conscientious about what you download, where you click and avoid obvious phishing and spam bait, you should be fine. A good strategy is to make sure you have a security app on your Android at all times. Kaspersky is the latest entry in the Android Security Wars following Norton (Symantec), Lookout, Bitdefender (my personal favorite) and others. Kaspersky has all the things you would expect from an Android security app from theft-protection, anti-virus treatment, call and SMS filtering and privacy protection. Works from Android 1.6 to Android 2.3. Expect and update for Android 3+ sometime in 2012.

Waze: Community GPS Navigation — (Free)

Social … driving?! Wait, isn’t that exactly what we don’t want? You know, less people playing with their phones behind the wheel sending messages to people to the detriment of public safety? Anyway, outside of that unfortunate phrase, Waze is actually a very cool app. It is a social traffic and navigation app that updates traffic around you based on other commuters updates and gives you turn-by-turn directions. By driving with the app open you passively update the traffic surrounding you. Or you can update the directory with road reports, accidents, police traps and other information. Drivers working together for the common good. Just do not get into an accident because you cannot take your eyes off it.

Alfred — (Free)

Alfred is a recommendation engine for places around you. Kind of like Yelp except forcibly shorter. Which, if you spend any amount of time on Yelp, you will deeply appreciate that Alfred only allows users three sentences and a picture. Alfred has been available on iOS for some time but has now, finally, made its way to Android.

Notable Updates For December

It is always important to remember to go into your device and update apps on a regular basis. Updates provide new functionality, performance and security upgrades and make sure that the bugs from the last version have been taken care of.

Notable iOS Updates:

• Nook for iPad, HeyWire Free Texting, Foursquare, Facebook (Timeline update), Google Search, Google Currents, Quora, Order & Chaos Online, Fishing Joy HD, Cut the Rope HD, StumbleUpon, XFinity TV, IMDb Movies & TV, Powder Monkeys, Facebook Messenger, Fruit Ninja Lite, Zite, Dolphin Browser HD, Instagram, Pulse for iPad, Adult Swim, Flixster, Flipboard, CNN App for iPad, Evernote, NBC App, Kindle, Hulu Plus, Pandora Radio, Rdio, RunKeeper, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Twitter Official iPad App, HeyStaks Social Search, Infinity Blade II, Slacker Radio, Google Earth, Zaarly.

Notable Android Updates:

• Adobe Flash Player 11, Angry Birds, Conan O’Brien Presents, Dolphin Browser HD, E-Trade Mobile Pro, Evernote, Facebook for Android, Foursquare, FxCamera, Google Books, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Music, Google+, Google Translate, Great Little War Game, IMDb Movies & TV, LinkedIn, Lookout Security, Flixster, Netflix, News360, OpenTable, Rdio, Skype, SwiftKey X Keyboard, SwipePad, WordPress, Words With Friends Free.

Credits:  ReadWriteWeb

The segment of the media delivery industry that may yet take off for consumers consists of programming and services that are delivered to newer HDTVs “over-the-top” (OTT) – meaning, outside of the cable or satellite provider’s pipeline. Naturally, the Internet is the delivery medium here. In prior years, analysts have wondered how (or whether) traditional programming from multi-service operators (MSOs) like Comcast would compete.

The answer we may get from CES 2012 is that it won’t have to. Semiconductor maker Broadcom is set to demonstrate a new class of system-on-a-chip (SoC) components that could be integrated into set-top boxes (STBs). This new class, numbered BCM72xx, would deliver OTT services alongside cable channels, in a format that would enable MSOs to utilize Android as the operating system, and Sling Media as the streaming provider for wireless devices. It could be the formula behind the phrase, “Goodbye, TiVo.”

Sponsor

The multitude of partnerships this new class of products entails is so hot that neither Broadcom nor its new partners could hold off until next week. Essentially, what we should expect to see demonstrated in Las Vegas by Broadcom is a type of STB that delivers all of the following:

1. DVR functionality from EchoStar that incorporates wireless “place-shifting” from Sling Media. Meaning, anything you record to your EchoStar DVR can be streamed wirelessly to your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. EchoStar had purchased Sling back in 2007, but its ability to exploit that technology had been tied up in a patent battle with TiVo that only ended last May, in a $500 million settlement in TiVo’s favor.

2. An Android-based apps ecosystem enabled through a partnership with Myriad Group, the maker of the Alien Vue environment that Dan Rowinski introduced you to last month. Existing OTT program services such as Google TV and Roku are already being integrated into Alien Vue; and to that end, Roku today announced its own partnership with premium channel Showtime for a kind of “previewing app” for premium content.

3. A 3D environment for graphical, on-screen program guides using OpenGL ES 2.0 as the graphics standard.

4. Optional built-in videoconferencing, which could be a major plus for cable operators that still want to deliver “triple-play” or “quadruple-play” customer options, but find themselves uncompetitive with wireless providers like Verizon.

5. Interactive supplemental content similar to the BD-Live content on Blu-ray movie discs, by way of Adobe AIR for the Digital Home.

6. Expanded bandwidth for on-demand streaming of as many as six simultaneous channels, by way of support for the Multimedia over Coax Alliance MoCA 2.0 standard.

7. Accelerated channel changing and scanning ability by means of a Broadcom standard called FastRTV.

As RWW’s Dan Rowinski told me today, one of the sticking points to seeing Android implemented on STBs already concerns something called the device recognition setting, which enables software to determine the size of its own display. Newer versions of Android, including “Ice Cream Sandwich” version 4.0, enable a variety of standard sizes; but at least for now, Rowinski says, “extra large” refers to tablets with 10.1-inch diagonal screens. Any demos we see of Alien Vue on Android-based widescreens, therefore, would probably have to be manual hacks, at least for now.