There is a general thought going around the Internet that by making Android open source, Google has lost control of the platform as companies like Amazon and Facebook use to source code fork to create their own devices. It has been said that Google has lost the keys to Android and it was a mistake to let anyone outside of Google-approved original equipment manufacturers build off the platform.
Has Google really lost control of Android? By forking Android to their needs, have Amazon and Facebook really taken money out of Google's pockets? Probably not. In fact, with the Kindle Fire and rumored Facebook Phone, both Facebook and Amazon may have unwittingly become platform evangelists for the Android platform.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
A project lead by some of the most-respected leaders of the Internet has secured $240,000 in funding to build a prototype system for both expert and peer review of all the content on the web, sentence by sentence. Called Hypothes.is, the project is lead by early search engine innovator and climate change activist Dan Whaley and backed by advisors from John Perry Barlow of the EFF to Garret Camp of StumbleUpon to Kaliya Hamlin of the Internet Identity Workshop to Nate Oostendorp of Slashdot, and many more.
We wrote about the Hypothes.is fundraising effort on Kickstarter last month. That effort succeeded, including with a large matching pledge by cleantech and web venture capitalist Sunil Paul. And so Hypothes.is will be built. What do people want out of it and does it stand a chance to change the web? Opinions differ.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Research firm Gartner has come out with its third quarter global mobile sales numbersand overall, the industry grew 5.6% from the same period last year. About 440.5 million cellphones were sold, with 115 million of those being of the smart variety, a 42% growth rate from Q3 2010 but only 7% growth from Q2 2011. The feature phone market is being buoyed by emerging markets while most of the smartphone growth was in Russia and China. Many other markets have stalled in smartphone growth.
Gartner says the slowdown of smartphone growth in markets such as the United States and Western Europe was due to consumers waiting for flagship devices to be released, such as the newest iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Rezound. Nokia is still No. 1 in the world in overall sales while another study shows that the best selling single devices in the U.S. are Apple's variety of iPhones.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook is close to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that it acted in a deceptive manner in regards to its privacy settings, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal.
The settlement would require Facebook to receive user consent before making "material retroactive changes" to its privacy settings. It would also require independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Brian Massey, a conversion optimization scientist and widely published author, recently presented on how to measure and improve social media conversion rates. Massey, the owner ofconversionscientist.com, emphasized that regardless of the size of a brand's "social footprint," it is important to measure conversions. It is this data that will ensure the site is properly converting the visitors from social sites into positive ROI.
At one point during the presentation, Massey said:
"Social media is great for customer support, but I don't care. Social media lets us tune into the conversations about our brand, but I don't care. People say social media is free, but it is not. Social media can drive sales that a brand otherwise would not have seen – Now you have my attention, prove it."
