Amazon’s potential plans for your TV; Twitter sales trump Facebook’s.
Eric Schmidt: “There are now 1.3 million Android device activations per day” [TECHCRUNCH]
Android is growing at a rapid pace. Last December there were 700k devices activated each day. Then, earlier this summer, that number was at 900k. One month later in late July it hit 1M. Now, in early September, there are 1.3M devices activated every single day.
Schmidt later added that there are close to 500 million Android devices worldwide right now. As comScore noted the other day, that’a factor of at least two or three times greater than the competitor.
Does Amazon have its own TV plan? [ALLTHINGSD]
So here’s another theory: Maybe Jeff Bezos will show off a video box for the living room. I’ve heard this one floated a couple times today, but not from anyone who claims to have firsthand knowledge of Amazon’s plans. But people who do know what they’re talking about tell me that Amazon made an offer to buy Roku, the Web TV box maker that competes with Apple TV, earlier this year. Roku ended up raising a big $45 million round led by News Corp. and BSkyB instead (News Corp. also owns this Web site).
Twitter tops Facebook in mobile ad sales [CNNMONEY]
According to the eMarketer report, Twitter will rake in $129.7 million in mobile advertising in 2012, while Facebook will sell $72.7 million worth of mobile ads. But Facebook may be due for a big mobile surge in the next few years. The social network’s U.S. mobile revenues are expected to surpass Twitter next year and leave it in the dust by 2014, when eMarketer forecasts Facebook’s mobile ads will top $629 million, compared to Twitter’s $441 million.
Wikikpedia founder Jimmy Wales attacks government’s ‘snooper’s charter’ [THE GUARDIAN]
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has sharply criticised the government’s “snooper’s charter”, designed to track internet, text and email use of all British citizens, as “technologically incompetent”.
He said Wikipedia would move to encrypt all its connections with Britain if UK internet companies, such as Vodafone and Virgin Media, were mandated by the government to keep track of every single page accessed by UK citizens.
According to Spotify’s public accounts for 2011, it had about $236 million in revenue, 83 percent of which was from subscriptions, and the company paid $229 million in “costs of sales,” including royalties, distribution costs and other unspecified expenses. After salaries and other costs, its net loss for the year was $57 million.
The blame, according to analysts, falls on TV makers. “The user experience is not good because the interfaces are not easy to navigate on the sets,” says Riddah Patel, NPD DisplaySearch research director of Consumer Insights. This is made worse because each TV manufacturer has its own user interface conventions. Imagine if each computer you used had an entirely different operating system, one of eight or 10 types, rather than simply Mac or Windows.
