Join a cutting-edge new company, spend your days with an office full of hip people and your nights at rockin' rooftop parties. Sounds like the perfect life for a newly minted college graduate, right? Maybe not.
The start-up mix of an exciting lifestyle and the potential to strike it rich if the company hits it big would seem to be a big draw for young workers – especially as the overall economy continues to struggle adding new jobs. But the
opportunity has yet to register with the class of 2012. And that could make it surprisingly difficult for start-ups to attract top talent.
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Women are the hot new demographic to court in the social space (if you can call half the population a "demographic"), but the fairer sex is catching up when it comes to mobile, too, largely thanks to the iPhone. But is Apple's gender-blind wunderkind truly more popular with women – or is Android, the iPhone's defacto rival, just less popular?
With 65% of the U.S. population projected to own a smartphone or tablet by 2015, it's safe to say that the gender differences in mobile are dissolving fast. Women are among the most explosive demographic segments for smartphone ownership, seeing a 13% spike between May 2011 and February 2012. Early adopters still skew male, but these days, the smartphone isn't a bleeding-edge accessory so much as the gateway gadget for a new cohort of technophobes turned technophile.
It's no Pinterest, but according to data from now Google-owned Admob, iPhone users were split pretty evenly along gender lines in February of 2010, with women accounting for 43% of iPhone owners. As for Android, that number was at 27% – less than a third. In 2011, a survey of 15,818 Hunch users found that iOS users are more likely to be female, while Android users still trend male. But why?
View full post on ReadWriteWebGoogle unveiled the Knowledge Graph. SlideShark makes giving presentations via your iPad easy peasy. Learn more about these stories and many more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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The next iteration of Mac OS X is coming. It doesn't have a launch date yet, but it likely will by the time Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference wraps up next month.
While most of the updates focus on the slow convergence of iOS with the desktop, one unsung gem is sure to delight those of us who rely on the Internet rather than cable for television: AirPlay for Mac.
Just as we already can with our iPads, iPhones and iPods, AirPlay for OS X will allow us to wirelessly mirror the screen of our Macs onto their televisions using Apple TV.
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With an expected valuation of close to $100 billion, it's understandable that no one can stop talking about Facebook's initial public offering this week. But while Facebook basks in the social media spotlight, companies tackling tough business problems are exciting investors, if not consumers. Workday, for example, is expected to be among the largest IPOs this year in the business software market.
Founded in 2005, the Pleasanton, California-based Workday makes payroll, accounting and human resources management software available over the Internet to 280 corporations, including big names like Time Warner, Kleenex-maker Kimberly-Clark and giant electronics manufacturer Flextronics. So far, Workday has raised $250 million from venture capital firms and other investors.
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Laptops are doomed. In the next five years, tablets will displace notebook-style computers to become the dominant personal computing platform. And the transition from laptop to tablet has already begun.
That's the key finding of a new Forrester Research report that predicts the end of the laptop's 15-year reign. The trend is already well under way among people born between 1980 and 2000, known to demographers as the millennial generation. In the U.S., 30% of tablet owners in this age group have purchased a tablet in place of a PC, compared to 20% of baby boomers.
"For this growing body of [millennial] users, PCs will seem like clunky trucks rather than sleek cars, dampening their long-term propensity to buy conventional PCs," says the 19-page report authored by Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.
But the tablet won't replace the laptop all by itself, Forrester says. File-sharing services such as Box, DropBox,SugarSync and Apple's iCloud will be critical enabling technologies, as well as a new type of stationary display the analyst calls a frame, due to become commonplace by 2015.
Sales projections back up Forrester's forecast. Tablets are expected to outsell laptops in 2016 as tablet shipments quintuple from 81.6 million in 2011 to 424.9 million by 2017, according to research firm DisplaySearch.
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Sometime in August, Facebook will top 1 billion users. Every few months, Twitter floats a press release that it has added another 100 million users. In quarterly earnings calls during the past year, Google has had to sheepishly admit that it its Google+ social network isn't growing as fast as hoped. Pinterest is the hottest new social network, in large part because it reached 10 million users faster than any of its predecessors.
Building a social media empire is all about building numbers. Those numbers, however, don't always have dollar signs in front of them.
"I do think there is a ton of speculation," said Dean M. Wright, founder of the social data and research company BrandMixer LLC, noting last year's Groupon initial public offering and this year's likely Facebook IPO. "This speculation is driven largely by investors being enamored by the numerology of social media: Facebook has 850 million users! Over 50% of Tweets come from mobile and 300 million people in the U.S. have a mobile! Every minute there are 2,000 check-ins on Foursquare!"
Seiman says he believes Facebook's purchase of Instagram was impulsive, and that Facebook likely overpaid for the app maker. But, ultimately, Facebook feared it would not be able to show Wall Street investors that it had a mobile strategy based on its existing product, so that fear drove the company's wild speculation.
Seiman, as we previously reported, does not necessarily think the acquisition is a fatal flaw.
"If Facebook has one advantage that could possibly make its own 'go-fever' a little less destructive, it is unique in its ability to bring unparalleled scalability to the table of its acquisitions," Seiman said. "No one doubts that it likely overpaid for Instagram in what seems to be an impulsive move, but if anyone can use scale to elevate a potential contender into the next Facebook… perhaps it is Facebook."
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App stores are frustrating, cluttered places. Even with Apple's prescreening process of every app that passes through its iOS gates, the App Store, it is often hard to find what you may want or need. This is a problem for consumers – but an even bigger problem for developers that often rely on these apps to make a living. For every successful app that makes millions for its publisher, there are thousands of apps that will not rise above the mess.
So, you are an app developer and you have figured out your next big idea. Dollar signs and millions of downloads float through your head, like so many sugar plum fairies. If you build it, users will come… or so the thought goes. But there is really a lot more to it than that.
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