Instagram Can Take Video Too

Instagram, the wildly popular photo-sharing app that was bought by Facebook last year for a cool billion dollars, just announced that it now supports videos.

They're pretty cleanly integrated into your feed; they won't autoplay as you scroll, instead showing just as a thumbnail with a small icon of an old-timey movin' picture camera in the top-right corner to indicate that these are videos rather than stills. Tap the image to start playing. Easy!

Videos can be up to 15 seconds long (or as short as 3 seconds), and you can stop and resume recordings while shooting, so you don't have to take a single continuous shot like you do with Snapchat. All the usual Instagram filters can be applied, and the videos include audio as well. It's available right now as an update for the iOS app, with Android soon to come.

So, the obvious question: isn't this just, um, a carbon copy of Vine, the video app launched by Twitter earlier this year? Ha ha ha welllllll yes, it is pretty much exactly the same, except Instagram is an app used by 130 million people a month, and Vine has maybe a tenth that many. And Vine has had trouble; apparently a stream of videos isn't the easiest thing to grapple with, and Vine is often buggy or slow to load. Instagram videos could be almost three times as long as Vine videos--how is Instagram going to deal with that? "We have to figure this out," Instagram's CEO told.

PaperTab

There’s a lot of consumer electronics news flooding out of CES in Las Vegas this week, but one of the more interesting technology stories we’re seeing is trickling out of Ontario, Canada, where Queen’s University researchers working with partners in the UK as well as at Intel Labs and Plastic Logic have developed a tablet computer that is both paper-thin and flexible.

And while we’ve seen concept prototypes for flexible e-ink screens and the like previously, what’s most intriguing about the so-called PaperTab is the user interface.

The idea behind PaperTab isn’t to make your iPad flexible, but to rethink the way we use tablet computers--and to make them more like the actual pieces of paper we shuffle around our desks. Designed to work in clusters of up to ten tablets, the user can control various screens at once, with one or more PaperTabs for each app in use.

So you can have several documents or apps running at once and work across several PaperTabs to execute tasks while moving things around between them. You can use several together to make a larger PaperTab display, or shuffle them around like you would actual paper documents. Touch two PaperTabs together and you can swap data between them (this is all far better explained in the video below).

Rather than relying on buttons or swipe gestures, PaperTabs respond to the flexing of the actual screen in certain ways--bend the right side of the display to page forward and the left side to page backward, for instance. And while it feels like this might be easier to master in theory than in practice, the folks in the video demo make it look pretty simple.

But the point is, PaperTabs create a really interesting workflow--something like taking the various windows on your PC desktop and breaking them out on your physical desktop while retaining the ability to quickly move data and programs around from page to page. Figure out how to untether these things from those unsightly cords (they’ll need a paper-thin, flexible battery) and this Queen’s U. team might be onto something here--if not a consumer product just yet, at least a very cool interface idea.



@ Global Info Center

iOS versus Android: The Battle Begins

In the aftermath of the release of the Samsung Galaxy S4 last week, and Apple’s marketing backlash, the iOS vs Android arms race has hit a milestone. Android is growing faster than ever, in terms of both their market share and the revenue they pay out to app marketers. Apple’s marketing has taken on a decidedly ‘attacking’ tone. ‘There’s iPhone. And then there’s everything else’ is clearly mirroring the phrase, ‘Here’s the best, forget the rest’. It’s about time, for an infographic on the iOS vs Android feud as it stands now. Which is the best platform for app marketers? Let’s consider some factors, or scroll down to view the infographic right away.

Smartphone and tablet market share

Some contests seem to have been won by Android categorically. Last month, the worldwide smartphone market share figures stood at 69.2% (Android) and 22.1% (iOS). These current figures are actually more in Apple’s favor than the October figures (75% and 15%), due to the release of the iPhone 5. But now the S4 is here, it’s likely we’re going to see the gap widen again.

On other counts though, iOS is the reigning champion. While Android also takes the lead in terms of tablet market share and smartphone app downloads, albeit with smaller margins, iOS is far, far ahead in terms of tablet app downloads; which must be due to the fact that there are over 275,000 optimized for the full-size iPad and iPad mini.

iOS vs Android app revenue and monetization

It is also a widely known and inescapable fact that, on the whole, iOS apps monetize much better than Android apps. The type of user that iOS attracts (and nurtures) are high earning and very engaged users. But that’s not to say the situation isn’t changing for Android.

While iOS pays out four times as much revenue to app marketers than Android, app revenue growth is growing five times more rapidly on Android. But will it stay this way so that Android can catch up and even overtake iOS? This remains to be seen, as we watch the battle of the platforms progress.

The life of the app marketer

In terms of the day-to-day of marketing apps on the respective platforms, iOS is a less fragmented platform with higher app marketing costs but greater profits for advertisers. It is also much easier and more predictable to carry out iOS App Store ranking boost campaigns due to the ranking algorithm being more heavily weighted on download volumes than an intransparent selection of factors. On Android, we see a more complex and fragmented reality for app marketers.

The following infographic to compare iOS and Android in terms of market share, user demographic and app marketing.

There’s a myriad of points on which you can compare the two platforms, and on reflection I think the conclusion must be this: both are winners in their own ways. Highly democratic I know, but that is how it is. Final words: Compare everything and identify and support the platform that’s right for your app.

What are your thoughts on current status quo of the arms race between iOS and Android?

Will Windows 8 Be The End Of Microsoft

With mobile technology often seen as the future of computing, investors and consumers everywhere have waited anxiously for news on Microsoft's recently launched Windows 8 platform.

Although numbers have been hard to track down, some of the data points that have emerged about Microsoft's big bet on mobile haven't been as encouraging as some had hoped. In the following video, our tech analyst, Andrew Tonner, sits down with Brendan Byrnes to break down how investors should look at these numbers amid a struggling PC market.

It's been a frustrating path for Microsoft investors, who've watched the company fail to capitalize on the incredible growth in mobile over the past decade. However, with the release of its own tablet, along with the widely anticipated Windows 8 operating system, the company is looking to make a splash in this booming market.

Will Windows 8 be the end of Microsoft?