Smartphone market has been a churning revolution for a while and so, it’s not surprising to see a steep 42 percent in its growth in just a year’s time. As a matter of fact, sale of Smartphones to end users reached 115 million units in the third quarter of 2011!

Android’s pace has definitely affected all its competitors who are literally gasping to keep up with this Google product’s velocity. Even iOS, Android’s major competitor who had a market share of 16.6 percent a year ago and an 18.2 percent in the second quarter, plummeted to 15 percent in the third quarter. However, they registered a sale of 17.3 million units in the third quarter. Anyway, with the release of the new 4S iPhone into the market, we should be seeing some significant movements in the figure now.

Samsung Bada has also put up a good fight and its market share went up from 1.1 percent last year to a striking 2.2 percent this year; thus pushing its way ahead of Windows Phone 7.

Symbian, the once famous OS, fell from 36th percent to 17 percent, with unit sales dropping by about 10 million devices. The OS which had a 36.3 percent market share a year ago, tumbled to an unbelievable 16.9%. As Nokia shifted to Windows phone 7, many of their existing customers ditched them and their OS. However, with new operating systems and many stylish phones in the production line, Nokia is planning to make a comeback. But for Symbian, the time has comes to say goodbye.

RIM, whose unit sales were almost flat during the past one year, also couldn’t do much. They helplessly watched as their share fell from 15.4 percent (Q3, 2010) to 11 percent in the third quarter of 2011. However, RIM, hopefully, should be minting some gold with the launch of BB 7 and BBX phones.

According to the study, corporate giant, Microsoft too, had a tough time in the market with their Windows phone 7. They ended up selling just 1.7 million devices in the third quarter compared to 2.2 million units in the same period, last year. Recently, Nokia started launching devices with Windows Phone 7 OS. That, along with new Mango updates available in the market, should hopefully boost sales for Windows Phone 7.

The war in the mobile industry is raging violent. No doubt we are going to see and hear about the many ups and downs, laughter and whimpers, hopes and despair and a mix of other emotions out there.  Who’s going to succeed and who’s not, is something we’ll have to simply wait and watch.

Recently, Microsoft released the preview of their newest operating system called Windows 8, to compete with iPad and Android based tablets. This operating system is being developed for both Desktop and Tablet PC customers. The Windows 8 tablets will have a marvellous new interface that looks rather like Windows Phone 7, called Metro. The Windows 8 Metro interface is well-suited for tablets with the UI designed and optimized for touch.

Windows 8 introduces a number of features in its tablet and PC versions.

Windows Store:- Windows 8 comes with Windows Store that is similar to Apple Store and Android Market. Application developers will be able to upload their applications to Windows Store.

Support for NFC:- Windows 8 also introduces APIs to support Near Field Communication (NFC) on Windows 8 devices, allowing functionality like launching URLs/applications and sharing of information between NFC supported devices just by touching the devices.

USB 3.0 Support:- In addition to USB 2.0 support, Windows 8 will have USB 3.0 support for higher data transfer.

Windows Live ID Integration:- Customers will be able to link their Windows Live ID with their Windows 8 operating system. This can be used to synchronise their settings and files across multiple computers running on Windows 8 operating system.

Windows To Go:- This feature allows Windows 8 to boot from a USB device. Windows To Go works both on USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 connections.

Protogon Filesystem:- News update states that Windows 8 will support a new file system called Protogon. However, the Microsoft team hasn’t released any more information about this file system or its features.

ARM Processor Support:- Windows 8 will will support ARM based processors in addition to AMD and Intel processors. There will be separate editions of Windows 8 for ARM based processors and x86 based processors such as AMD and Intel. ARM based processors consume less energy and this will be a plus for Windows 8 based tablets.

Windows 8 based tablets are expected to be released in the mid of 2012. The preview build released recently is getting the attention of the mobile and tablet application developers because of the wide array of supporting features and its fresh GUI.

QBurst, is eagerly awaiting the release of Windows 8 to see how it competes with iPhone and Android markets in the coming years. If you would like to hear more about apps development on various tablet platforms, just shoot us an email or contact us today.

With technology advancing at a fast pace, we are almost into an era where we can do just that! In the next five years, we would probably be buying just about anything by simply waving or tapping our mobile phones at the shopping counter.

This technology is called Near Field Communication (NFC) and is expected to create a revolution in coming years. NFC makes it easy to conduct transactions, connect electronic devices and exchange digital content with just a simple touch. This wireless technology allows devices to transfer data over short distances through short waves, a touch or a tap.

The Future of NFC

Market research company, ABI Research estimates that by 2016, eighty-five per cent of point-of-sale (POS) terminals will support near field communication for mobile payments. ABI Research also predicts that the shipment of contactless payment cards will increase from 170 million in 2010 to one billion by 2016.

Although only 10% of today’s POS terminals support contactless payment, it is expected to rise exponentially in the coming months. Some of the latest Android phones in the market already have NFC capabilities. Samsung, Nokia, Motorola are among the mobile companies who have launched NFC enabled smart phones. BlackBerry Bold 9900, RIM’s which hit the market very recently, is another smart phone that supports NFC technology. A list of handsets that support NFC is available at NFC World and Wikipedia.

Consumers in the tech world are now eagerly waiting to see if Apple will also include the technology in their next generation iPhone. Speculations suggest that iPhone 5 will arrive with NFC facility, thus propelling this technology rapidly into mainstream usage.

Early Players Stand to Gain

NFC technology is in its nascent stages now and available only in parts of Asia, Europe and the US. However, analysts predict that NFC will launch in 20 countries within the next 18 months. Sensing NFC’s strong potential growth, mobile network providers, credit card companies and even small companies are actively looking for opportunities to facilitate digital transactions when NFC-enabled phones become widely available.

The two big players who have joined the mobile payment race are Visa Mobile Wallet and Google Wallet. The US also plans to roll out a number of NFC-enabled services for customer-facing applications such as mobile banking, mobile payments, transportation initiatives etc. The Android app store already has a small but growing list of NFC-capable apps including those for restaurant coupons, creating and reading NFC tags, NFC widgets, and others. Very recently, the Museum of London has also introduced NFC-based interactive service provided by Nokia’s NFC Hub.

It is certain that in the coming months, more and more NFC capable devices and apps are going to hit and dominate the market. This would be is the right time for businesses to adapt to this new technology and gear up for the fast approaching change.

What if you come to know your buddy is already in there taking advantage of the offer? You could join and have a great time too – at half the price.

Wait! Get a few more of your friends to drop in to make it a group of 10 and your meal will cost only one-fourth.

That is possibly what a combination of Where app, Facebook and Groupon could do – give you a ‘happy meal’!

Way back in 2000, businesses were just starting to realize the benefits of being online. In those days, online success was synonymous with having a website with a .COM name. Soon, as the number of websites grew, it became necessary to stand out in the crowd. This realization brought forth a brand of online marketers armed with tools such as SEO, PPC ads. etc. Man being a social animal, realized before long that ‘being online’ meant ‘being on social networks’. Social media sites, Facebook and the likes, appeared and with it bloomed the era of social media advertising.

According to Wikipedia, the term social commerce was coined by Yahoo in 2005 to describe collaborative shopping tools. The term was rarely discussed until Groupon with its “cents-off coupon married to a Friday-after-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy” came into the scene. The astounding growth of this technology start-up prompted a lot of clones to come up. Not to be left out, Facebook also added ‘Groupon features’ to its offerings. Of course, the social networking giant has an advantage. While Groupon and similar sites rely on deal sharing through social networks, for Facebook sharing is the default.

So, that brings us all the way from e-commerce to social commerce to f-commerce. And now what?

Location based mobile apps seems likely to take it forward from here. Services like Gowalla, DeHood and Loopt are becoming increasingly popular. The social commerce field will continue to explode and we will see the convergence of social and mobile commerce. The recent eBay acquisitions of Milo (for real-time inventory management) and Where.com (for location based mobile ads) seem to be in line with these trends. Moreover, Google is in it too with its mobile payment app and the most recent Google+. The future definitely seems promising and it waits to be seen who will be the king of e-commerce.

Skipfish is an open source scanner written in C language used to detect vulnerabilities in web applications. Users can compile the code and execute it for installation. Skipfish crawls through the web application, detects the security probes and generates a report for security assessments.

Features

Skipfish overcomes some of the common issues associated with other web security scanners. It is designed for high performance. It can handle 7000+ requests per second against local instances, 2000+ for LAN/MAN networks and 500+ against Internet targets. Its usability extends even to websites with multi-frameworks and different filtering rules. It also chalks out tricky scenarios including stored XSS (path, parameters, headers), blind SQL and XML injection.

The main security checks performed by the scanner are categorized based on the risk levels and are listed in the Skipfish wiki. This tool is expected to support Linux, FreeBSD 7.0+, MacOS X, and Windows (Cygwin) environments.

Limitations

However, Skipfish is not found to satisfy some of the major requirements charted out in the WASC (Web Application Security Scanner Evaluation Criteria).

The Skipfish 1.29 beta version is currently available for download.

Finally Google has arrived at the ‘Micro-blogging’ platform with a real ‘buzz’. On 9th February 2010, Google introduced ‘Buzz’, the new social networking application to embark on its battle to limit the popularity of Twitter. So, now there are lot of competitions going on in the Internet space. Google Vs Microsoft (Operating System & Enterprise Application Suits), Orkut (Owned by Google) Vs Facebook (Social Networking) Google vs Apple (Smart phone market). Before acquiring YouTube, they fought against them with Google Videos. So what we understand from all these competitions is that Google is not just targeting a niche or industry, rather it want to rule the entire IT Business.

At the first look, we may feel that Google Buzz is an integration of Facebook and Twitter, but it is beyond that. First and foremost advantage is that you don’t have to go to another web page to see the ‘buzz’, it’s there right below the inbox in  the Gmail. The conversation will go like an email thread which is the fascinating aspect of Buzz. You can post in the Buzz, which can be held as private or public. Also, you can connect your profiles in Flickr, Piccasa, Google Reader and Twitter to Buzz. That means you aren’t missing any of your friends and by start ‘Buzzing’, you are increasing your friend and professional network. See this wondeful Video of Buzz, to get more insights.

Now we can perhaps clearly say that it is now ‘Google Vs. Rest of the World’. Apple and Microsoft are companies that are worth more than  $ 100 billion each, Facebook and Twitter are the champs of their respective niche, though they are not monetizing it well. There is no doubt that the internet and enterprise software market will come under the reign of Google, which is not far away.

The dominance of video has also made the web a great place for video advertisements. There are different advertising methods that are in existence. Let us explore them briefly.

Video Ad Methods

1.    In Stream Video Ads – The advertisement appears in the bottom or top of the video player when the video is streaming. Here is a sample.

In this sample, the advertisement is displayed on the top as the video streams.

2.    With Video Ads – Pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ads constitute this method. The advertisements appear before, in the middle and after the streaming of the video respectively.

The sample below shows the advertisement being played in the entire section of the video player.

3.    Around Video Ads – This advertisement comes in video oriented sites in a variety of ad formats including standard text ads and image ads.

In the above sample, the publisher website Hulu has customized the surrounding areas of the video player for the advertisement that plays within the player.

Video Ad Production

Gone are the days when companies had to invest huge amount of money and time for video advertisements. Similar to the DIY (Do It Yourself) website creation tools, today we have DIY video ad creation tools. And these packages start from as low as $500. Few web companies provide huge database of already prepared advertising videos from which the customer can choose and customize.

There are also on-location ad production companies who come to the spot, shoot the video and do the customization. These methods are however complicated when compared with the DIY methods which specialize mostly in creating montages.

Video ads are short. The very lengthy ones could span to 60 seconds and they are very rarely made. Most of the ads are 15 to 30 seconds long.

Video Ad Distribution

When we think about video, the first picture that comes to our mind is television. So can we bring our web made advertisement into TV? If you have that question, the answer is yes. There are companies that function exclusively for this. The platform which they provide enables a customer to create a video ad, bid for TV spots and schedule airing time. Spotrunner was the company to pioneer this service. Soon to compete with them was Google. Now we have many companies which offer a similar platform and they distribute the video ad not only in TV but also in online TVs like Hulu, Veoh and various ad networks like YuMe, ScanScout and Right Media.

Video ads are also distributed in online advertising campaigns, business directory listings, Internet yellow pages, local search directories, online newspapers, video sharing sites, social networks, eCommerce sites, etc.

Are you a business owner finding difficulty in locating customers for your service? Maybe it’s time to invest in video ads.

Google has made some pretty major improvements to the camera application in Android 2.0. This includes more control over white balance, focal length, flash settings, and effects. To complement this Motorola has smartly outfitted the DROID with a 5 megapixel camera coupled with an LED flash. However many initial users claim that the camera is painfully slow to focus and take a snap.

The system comes with a 1400 mAh removable battery which is not bad at all but we expect that it won’t deliver the rated 270 hours standby time or 6 hrs 25 min talktime, especially comparing it to the previous CLIQ. However Motorola has managed to provide a decent talktime of around 5 hrs 30 min, thanks to the somewhat ironic under-clocked CPU!

What is a platform?

Platform in software realms can be understood as an entity on which software can be made to function. A platform provider will provide APIs (Application Programming Interface) for software to be developed in his platform. Let’s take a few examples: Java, the product of Sun Microsystems serves as a platform and it comes with APIs like AWT, JDBC, JMF and so on. These APIs are also provided by Sun Microsystems. Apple Inc, owner of iphone had APIs confidential until October 2008 when the company open sourced and made it license free to develop software applications to be run on iphone. Lately, there is facebook API which is both powerful and popular.

What about Google API?

Google has promised to come up with a public API which can be used by any developer to create applications that run on the wave platform. There are 2 ways by which a developer can make his presence felt in Google waves. The first method is by building robots or creating gadgets. The other method is by embedding waves on third party websites. Let’s try to get some insight on these new terminologies.

Robots, Gadgets and Embed API

Robots are automated participants in a wave. Remember the robot in ‘Lost in Space’. It is a similar kind of simulation except that these robots will function inside the computer. A robot created inside a wave will be able to read, modify and delete blips and wavelets. A wavelet is a smaller wave that is resident inside a wave and a blip resides inside a wavelet. The diagram below will give you better picture.

The developer can create robots and perform interactive operations within a wave. What are the interactive operations? Well, that is left to the creativity of the developer. Learn more about robots here. Wave Gadgets are similar to the ordinary gadgets in its mechanism to get embedded as third party development applications. But there is more offered. A wave gadget can function within a live wave. An example Google gives to explain this is one which lets participants of a wave to vote on where to go for lunch. Learn more about gadgets here.

The second method using Embed API enables to bring waves into third party websites. There will be simultaneous updates in websites as and when an update is made inside a wave. Google has already come up with a few embeds. ‘You tube playlist discuss’ is one among them and is sure to gain so much popularity.  Learn more about embed APIs here.

As Facebook is dominating now with so much integration, it is certain that we can expect even more from Google waves. So if you are a developer, be informed about what is going on in Google waves and get ready to play with the tools as soon as you get them.

Links for further study:

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/

Thus despite new players coming up, Google still remains the leader in information search on the web. That is exactly why it makes sense to understand and develop efficient googling techniques. Mentioned below are few tips which, when practiced while searching the web using Google, will save time and improve search results.

• Asterisks: Clearly one of the most commonly used symbols in search queries; even a novice would need no explanation on its use. Ideally translated to mean “anything”, wild card queries can bring forth an assortment of results.
• Quotation marks: This is another commonly used sign in search. Enclosing a combination of words in quotes results in Google displaying only those sites/pages with the words in the exact order.  Try searching the same group words with and without quotes to see the difference.
• Minus sign: By using “-“ sign we can avoid unrelated search results. For example: Typing Barack Hussein -Obama lists many Barack Husseins other than Barack Hussein Obama. Now do the search with Barack Hussein (hyphen) Obama and you will see my point.
• Plus sign: This gives a result which is exactly opposite to the minus operator. To include a specific word in your search result, add it with “+” in the query. Let’s say you want to know more about the level of scientific knowledge in medieval India. Your query string would be scientific knowledge + medieval India. However, with numbers this will work like the normal arithmetic plus operator.
• Intitle and intext search: Using “intitle:” before a search keyword returns only those web pages which have that keyword in its title tag. Similarly, “intext:” returns pages with the keyword in the content of the web page. To see the difference in results, try out both these functions – “intext:” “HTML Tags” and “intitle:” “HTML Tags”.
• Allinanchor: In this age of SEO, keywords are all important. Use ‘allinanchor:’ syntax to get google to search for the terms you want to find in anchor text. You are sure to get a more content-focused list.
• Filters to choose sources: You can restrict the sources of results by adding special syntax to your query after the search term. Some filters are site:edu, site:gov, inurl:blog, inurl:forum. Type the following into the google search box and check the results – “SEO” inurl:blog.
• Filetype filter: This filter tells google what kind of file to look for while searching. Type your search word followed by filetype:file extension(xls,pdf,doc).

Mix and match the above mentioned operators intelligently and you can further narrow down your search results. Try various options to refine searches and optimize time. If you know of something else worth mentioning, feel free to add to this list. As you know, the list goes on.