News from the HIMSS healthcare technology conference: New joint mobile solutions for healthcare from Verizon and Motorola, HP announces healthcare alliance program, Avaya showcases health collaboration innovations.

Canonical’s Ubuntu TV, unveiled earlier this year, was the first in a series of announcements about “Ubuntu on devices”. The next device in Canonical’s multi-screen strategy for world domination is being unveiled next week at Mobile World Congress 2012, and it’s an Android-powered smartphone. It’s not entirely what you might think, though.

This is not an Ubuntu app running atop Android. Nor is it an all-Ubuntu device running an Android emulator. Rather, Ubuntu for Android it the full Ubuntu desktop running side-by-side with Android on a shared kernel that provides context appropriate access to all your content. When out and about, the phone operates as any other Android-powered phone; but when you slip the device into a dock connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse you get the familiar Ubuntu desktop experience.

I admit that I think this is pretty novel. It’s not an Asus Transformer trying to play both sides of the smartphone / laptop experience with a single OS. Instead, it’s something completely new that’s trying to leverage the right interface and experience for the right context. It’s a phone in most senses, but only activates the Ubuntu desktop when connected to peripherals that benefit from them.

What’s this good for? I asked Jane Silber, Canonical’s CEO, that question. The most immediate use case is enterprise users: people who carry a smartphone and a laptop. Ubuntu for Android would allow many mobile professionals to reduce to a single device. Average users would benefit from this convergence, too. According to Silber this allows “the right experience on the right form factor.”

What are the benefits of this Android/Ubuntu hybrid? Data consolidation, for one. You don’t need to duplicate your address book, or even synchronize it: whether you’re looking for a number to call from the Android phone app, or looking for an email from the Ubuntu email app, both programs are interrogating the same single address book. The same holds true for documents, media, and any other content stored on the device.

Another neat trick: if you connect your Ubuntu for Android device to a television via HDMI you don’t get the Ubuntu desktop: you get the Ubuntu TV interface. You can browse media on your phone or access online content as you would with any Ubuntu TV appliance.

Ultimately, says Silber, this hybrid approach reduces the mental “context shifts” required by using multiple independent devices. When your Ubuntu for Android device is docked and you’re composing emails, you can still send and receive texts and phone calls — and, indeed, access and launch all the Android apps on your phone — meaning that you don’t need to move away from your laptop to pick up and use your phone. You simply mouse over to the incoming call indicator and select the action you desire: take the call, hang up, whatever. Efficiency, for the win!

When I asked Silber how long it would be until they kick Android to the curb and release an all-Ubuntu phone, she simply said “We’re not going to be announcing that at MWC 2012.”

As with the Ubuntu TV, Canonical won’t be unveiling a completed product ready for purchase next week. They’re showcasing the technology they’ve developed and are looking for hardware partners.

In the latest monthly report from app analytics firm Distimo, the company delved into the revenue generating possibilites for apps sold through both Google’s Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. Looking at the top 110 apps available in both marketplaces, Distimo found some surprising data: 42 of those top apps made more money on Amazon’s store than in the more widely available Android Market.

That the Android Market has its challenges when it comes to paid applications, is widely known. In fact, just the other day a friend was telling me how when she went to buy her first new smartphone, the Verizon rep was pushing Android devices because they “have more free apps” than the iPhone. Great story, right developers? Now the Android Market’s inability to make you money is a selling point for Android phones. Excellent news.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that Amazon’s Appstore is beginning to prove itself as a better revenue generating platform for some mobile application developers than the official Android Market. After all, Amazon’s store is a “curated” collection of apps. The apps are tested, reviewed and made sure to be malware-free and stable before being listed on Amazon’s store. (Hmm. Does that process sound familiar?)

Still, the Amazon Appstore is only a small piece of the overall revenue pie for now, delivering just 28% of the top 110 apps’ revenue. But then again, Amazon’s Appstore is barely a year old, and is rapidly gaining strength. For example, the total number of downloads generated by the top 100 apps in the Amazon Appstore increased 14-fold in December 2011, compared with just 2 months earlier, Distimo found.

Today, Amazon hosts 28,826 mobile applications, compared with about fourteen times more apps on the Google Android Market. (It’s now pushing 400K+). Half of all Amazon’s apps are also available on the Google Android Market. But the Amazon market is catching up in terms of size. In December and January, the number of new apps in the Android Market was only 5x the number new apps in the Amazon Appstore, as compared with 22x in September 2011.

The Amazon Appstore is also more likely to favor paid applications than the Android Market, as 65% of all its apps are paid apps, a figure that has remained stable for the past 7 months. Meanwhile, Google’s Android Market sees 32% of all apps as paid apps, and that figure has dropped from 38% during the same time frame.

In addition, the average price for the top 100 paid applications is 40% lower on the Amazon Appstore ($2.89) than on the Android Market ($3.47) for the top 100 paid apps. That’s because Amazon, not developers, controls the apps’ prices. That means some of the discounted top apps could be bringing down the average, of course.

This pricing strategy appears, at least in some cases, to be working in developers’ favor. Users think they can find cheap apps on Android’s store, and aren’t disappointed. But while there, they download other apps, too.

Download volumes on Amazon’s store during November (when the Kindle Fire launched) quadrupled from the previous month. In December, downloads increased even further to more than 14 times October’s volume, then stabilized once again in January. During this time, 42 of the top 110 revenue-generating apps made more money on Amazon’s store than on the Android Market. It’s not a majority, obviously, and information about what types of apps, or what these apps may have shared in common, are details that are unfortunately lacking in Distimo’s analysis.

But this is the real gem in Distimo’s data: for some developers, Amazon’s Appstore is working. It’s too soon to call the success a fluke or a trend, especially with the Kindle Fire’s new(ish) arrival on the scene. But if Amazon is helping some developers make more money, it’s probably not due to a single, easily pinpointed reason. It’s more likely to be a combination of all factors: app curation, discounts, catalog size, promotions, user interface, brand recognition, price setting, and more.

By most accounts there aren’t very many people out there in the world using PlayBooks, but for those that are, or are considering the purchase of one, comes some good news: RIM has finally updated the OS to include two services that have been long discussed and much anticipated: integrated email support and Android app availability.

The OS could serve to give the device a boost in the market, after many people slammed RIM for shipping the tablet too early when it debuted last year without these and other features.

PlayBook OS 2.0 will be available as a free download for existing users and will automatically update on new devices. Some details:

The new email client — at long last integrated with the tablet and no longer requiring the user to own a BlackBerry to use email on the tablet — was perhaps the most obvious feature that RIM needed to fix in this update.

But what RIM has done is effectively bring the PlayBook up to speed with what other device makers have already been doing on other platforms like Android. Now users can access both personal and work email via the device, and the unified inbox can also be used for incoming messages from social networks Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Not clear if others, like Google+, can be added as well at the moment. Similarly, social features are also being integrated with RIM’s calendar and contact apps.

The other big area that has become crucial for tablet and smartphone makers is apps and content in general. The PlayBook has not been a standout in this area up to now, but RIM again is hoping to make up for that by not only beefing up its own catalog of apps but also giving access to a select number of Android apps:

During RIM’s developer conference earlier this month, the company said it had 60,000 apps on App World. Today, RIM tells us that it is adding “thousands” of PlayBook apps, with the addition of “a range” (again, no specific numbers) of Android apps also to be used on the tablet.

It is also finally adding its video store — first discussed last year — which will feature some 10,000 films and TV shows to rent to buy. RIM says will only be available initially in the U.S., with further countries to be added later.

One nice hardware development: those who do own BlackBerry smartphones will be able to link them up to the PlayBook to use their keyboards to input text on the tablet.

And in a nod to enterprise users — still very much part of RIM’s heartland, despite its many moves to bring consumers into the fold — there are also more productivity features added to the new OS, to print documents and manage files on corporate networks. With a number of third-party players getting involved in this space on other platforms, it will be interesting to see if these features drive more enterprise takeup of PlayBooks.

What’s interesting is that many had thought that RIM would wait until Mobile World Congress next week to announce the PlayBook update. Will that mean that there is other news up its sleeve for next week?

Microsoft and Apple should hate one another right now. I mean, really hate each other. After decades of domination, Microsoft has watched their rival move from death’s door to become the most valuable company in the world — over $200 billion more valuable than Microsoft itself. And it was Microsoft who helped get Apple there, remember, with a timely cash infusion in 1997.

Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone, which eventually helped kill off Windows Mobile — and it’s now bigger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined. And the company shrugged off the iPad, even as it established a category, tablets, which Microsoft itself had been trying to establish for years.

Now Apple’s iOS ecosystem threatens the very fabric of Microsoft. Given the rise of the iPhone and iPad, and the halo-effect they’re having on the Mac, products like Windows and Office don’t hold the same importance that they once did in the computing world. And their shine is ever-diminishing. People are realizing that they just don’t need them anymore. Apple’s rise is slowly killing the Microsoft we’ve all known for years.

And yet, Microsoft rarely bashes Apple publicly anymore. In fact, they often take their side on arguments or come to their defense on issues. Again, these were once bitter rivals. And these times should be the battleground for their bloodiest battles yet. Instead, it’s all holding hands, s’mores, and Kumbaya.

Why? Because Microsoft has an enemy they hate much worse than Apple. And Apple has the same enemy. Google.

This is nothing new, but the animosity continues to build between the parties. Look at the news today, for example. Following last week’s headlines that Google was bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s mobile Safari browser, Microsoft today says that Google is doing the same thing to their own IE browser. Meanwhile, Google says that Microsoft is full of shit, while Apple is probably off in the corner smiling.

It wasn’t long ago that Apple and Google were aligned against Microsoft. Remember, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board and the two sides worked closely on projects like the original iPhone. Then Android came along and destroyed that relationship. While Google probably didn’t consider it at the time, this set the stage for Microsoft and Apple to align on things like the Nortel patents.

Microsoft should probably be going all-in to combat the rise of iOS, but instead they seem far more concerned with spending obscene amounts of money to bolster Bing as a Google competitor. And they seem to truly enjoy undermining Android by way of licensing agreements with key OEM partners.

Meanwhile, Apple seems downright bored if you ask them about Microsoft as a competitor. But ask about Google (Android in particular) and the knives come out.

Maybe this all just means that Google is doing something right. They have all the biggest technology companies in the world pointing guns right at them. You don’t get to the top without pissing off people along the way. But the way Google has managed to unify all of these main rivals against them should at the very least give them pause. Microsoft and Apple are the two biggest examples. But Facebook and Twitter are finding common ground against Google as well thanks to the search giant’s foray into the social realm.

All of this makes for a fascinating situation in the tech world. On one side there’s Google. On the other side there’s basically everyone else, with new members seemingly joining on a daily basis. And this side is filled with rivals that under any other circumstance would hate each other. But here they’re allied. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[image: New Line Cinemas]

There have been some big numbers thrown at the medium of mobile advertising recently — eMarketer says it will make $2.6 billion in the U.S. alone this year; the IAB says that 72 percent of top brand marketers are going to increase spend in the medium in the next two years.

But some new research from app analytics firm Flurry throws a little bit of cold water on what, exactly, is happening in the world of mobile ads today.

In short, there may be more money being pumped into mobile ads, but it’s still nowhere near matching the amount of time people spend on mobile, and nowhere near what brands are investing in other mediums like TV, online and even print.

Mobile, Flurry found, had one of the biggest differentials between time spent on the platform and actual ad money invested in it:

People spend 23 percent of their time on mobile devices — second only to TV at 40 percent. And yet mobile is only getting about one percent of ad budget spend, compared to TV getting 43 percent. The only medium that exceeded mobile was print — but in the other direction: print gets 29 percent of ad spend, but accounts for only six percent of people’s leisure time.

Why the massive disparity? Flurry’s reason: that mobile has simply grown too fast for advertising to catch up with it. “Madison Avenue and brands have yet to adjust to an unprecedented adoption of apps by consumers,” the blog notes.

It also points out that a lot of the processes that have been put into place for online ads — for example, demand-side platforms and and formats for tracking — are still not as standard in mobile as they are on the web.

There are certainly a lot of changes underfoot already, with companies like Google gradually centralizing their online and mobile advertising businesses, but the fact remains that mobile advertising can be a disjointed stab in the dark for those investing in it.

Who to target? The other key area where Flurry has drawn out some numbers is in trying to figure out who, exactly, is the most valuable mobile advertising customer at the moment.

Based on data from some 60,000 iOS users from Flurry’s own AppCircle mobile ad network, it found that middle-class, college-educated women, aged 25-34, are driving the biggest click-through and conversion rates at the moment. The result is somewhat surprising, if only because mobile content isn’t something that feels inherently female — although it seems that women at least respond to the ads alongside that content better than men do.

The only age bracket where males proved to be more mobile-ad friendly was 13-17, where males just edged out females in their responsiveness — very likely a result of twitchy fingers playing mobile games.

Fujitsu once said that it didn’t have any plans to launch mobile handsets outside of Asia, but that strategy appears to be changing rapidly. Today comes a report that the Japanese handset maker — which makes both Android and Windows Phone-based devices — is planning to start selling its devices in Europe, with a debut to take place next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The news comes after Fujitsu said that it also planned to sell devices in the U.S. market either this year or 2013.

It’s not clear whether Fujitsu will lead on an Android or Windows Phone line of devices — or whether it will opt to sell both. A story in the FT that reported the European launch did not specify which devices would lead the charge. There are pro’s and con’s to both:

Android is by far and away the most popular smartphone OS at the moment — with more than 50 percent marketshare as of Q4, according to Gartner — but while that means good news in terms of apps and other services for users, it would also pose a challenge for Fujitsu to create something that stands apart from the pack.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone, meanwhile, is a lot less common, leaving more room for Fujitsu to shine — but it’s also significantly less popular with developers and the consumer public. Gartner’s Q4 figures gave it a 1.9 percent share, while the Windows Phone app storefront currently only has around 50,000 apps, compared to the hundreds of thousands of Android.

The issue of needing to be distinctive when entering new markets is not one that has gone unnoticed by Fujitsu itself: “We don’t want to be just another mobile phone,” senior EVP Hideyuki Saso told AllThingsD back in January. “We want to be special.”

Fujitsu was one of the first handset makers to sign on to Windows Phone “Mango”, and it was actually the first handset maker to ship a Mango device. It’s been a key partner for Microsoft in its bid to make more of an impact on consumers in the Asian market. Some of the more innovative “different” elements of its hardware, though, have come through on Android: waterproofing, very thin devices, and zany colors, like pink.

How do you end up with millions of new sales overnight with low development and implementation costs? In the case of Chinese electronics companies Rock Chips and Box Chips the answer has been simple – hitch a ride on Android.

China’s economy is booming thanks to low cost assembly, the country’s key advantage when competing on the global playing field. Manufacturers deliver low cost laborers who are able to follow processes and procedures to a reasonable degree of accuracy at very reasonable rates, and thus gain an edge over Western manufacturers.

In my years in China I’ve seen technologies come and go, but none have excited these manufacturers like the prospect of Android. It’s a solid, “open” operating system that lets them do a number of interesting things without many risks.

The West in turn has provided the “design” element of the process, enabling the overall product to be reliable and aesthetically pleasing. Chinese companies aren’t yet geared to competing in this arena. In order to undertake the gamble of developing an OS that gave them an exclusively Chinese platform (a la Microsoft or Apple for the US), Chinese firms would need an extensive process of re-education.

Then there’s the problem of IP. While Western competitors have strong rules in place (and real penalties) for infringement of their IP – Chinese companies face a business environment where their development costs would be lost overnight as soon as another company could clone their product. Success, then, often led to copying.

This of course doesn’t mean that Western companies in China get an easy ride. In fact Apple, a strong defender of its IP everywhere, has been unable to prevent clones and copies from flooding the market, all guaranteed to look similar to the original, though never approaching the same quality or usability.

So it becomes clear why Android is so appealing to the Chinese marketplace: it enables companies to move into the usability “design” space that they’ve previously been unable to access. Here you have a strong, internationally accepted operating system, with an open license to be copied (at no cost) and installed and used on any device you like. In fact the OS developer positively encourages you to do so.

It’s a stable platform with the weight of Google behind it and the thousands of talented computer science graduates in the country can play with it, adapt it and improve it – without having to design a system from the ground up. The market entry costs are limited to wages, so there’s a huge incentive for Chinese firms to get involved.

This means that the traditional IC players now face stiff competition from China, with Rock Chips and Box Chips already selling millions and another local firm, Actions, about to enter the fray. These companies can focus on the Android platform and develop newer and faster processors to support the latest hardware and Android updates. As the OS gains further market traction and the Chinese companies find a growing talent pool of skilled engineers to work with it, this competition is going to get stronger.

Niche developers in China will benefit, too. They’ll have local chip sets for reasonable costs, and a versatile workforce to draw on – moving more in the long-term to a quality model, based on customization opportunities and away from a volume pricing model.

Currently there’s still a defined lag from Chinese firms in the commodity technology market, and when Android first launched this lag was a year or more over developed nation equivalents, but today this is down to 3 or 4 months. Soon Chinese companies, playing to their own strengths in the supply chain, will close this gap to make it negligible or even begin to take a leading role.

For Google this is a big win too. The Chinese consumer market is a huge one and the trade-off for using a free Google service is that the user agrees to share data with Google. Of course Google’s ability to aggregate massive amounts of personal data directly relates to the quality of their products and services, but it matters more how they can exploit the information they gain from their use.

China has only 40 million credit card users (based on slightly outdated figures released in 2010) and over 500 million computer users. This means that if the Android system were to appear on just 10% of all devices in the country, Google could conceivably, but probably won’t be able to access, more information on Chinese consumers than the country’s credit agencies! The rub is that the Android these firms are running is not “official” and as such rarely communicates with Google’s servers.

As the price of Android tablets and phones continues to decrease, the percentage of users is likely to grow exponentially.

This model of quality firmware partnered with lower-cost, mid-quality hardware, enables companies like Rock Chips and Box Chips to make millions of unit sales, and to win over not only the traditional “value” customer, but also the more discerning customers, domestically and overseas. It also encourages other IC manufacturers to come to the party and many will soon be joining them in an Android led technology revolution.

Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner is the founder of szceit.com in Shenzhen, China.

Barclays Bank has unleashed Pingit, an iOS, Android and BlackBerry app that lets you send up to �300 ($470) a day to family, friends or technically-aware muggers. UK mobile number and bank account holders can get started in minutes as long as they've got one of the Barclays-branded PINSentry tools. You'll be asked to come up with a five-digit code that will lock the app to anyone but yourself (or, you know, that mugger) and then you can start spreading your cash around, baller-style. We set up our own account through the app and if you're curious about our impressions, you can find out what we thought after the break.

Gallery: Barclays Pingit iOS App

Continue reading Barclays releases Pingit mobile payments app, we go hands-on

Barclays releases Pingit mobile payments app, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re sick of firmware lockdowns and failed reflashings on your other Android tablets, the Auraslate may be for you. It’s basically an Ice Cream Sandwich-compatible tablet built from the ground up for hax0rz and programmers alike.

There are two models – the 7-inch 726B and the 10-inch 1026 – and the 1026 can run the latest version of Android. You can upload any version you want, however, and even the hardware is open source in that you receive a hardware source disk for about $20 extra.

To be clear, you won’t be blazing through web pages on this thing or playing high-end video games. For about $130, you get a standard Android CORTEX A9 tablet from a Chinese OEM that you could get for about $95 if you really dug around. However, Auraslate is promising open source software updates for their hardware and you also get a support community and the source code. This sort of package is ideal if you’re working on an Android hardware project, for example, as you will be able to talk with a community of hackers dealing with the same hardware and software rather than picking up a fly-by-night tablet from China and hoping it works.

Auraslate just launched (thanks tipster!) so we’ll have to wait and see how popular and useful the product becomes. However, as a tool for developers it seems that the founders’ hearts are in the right place.

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