The Kindle Fire, which began shipping on November 15, 2011, represented 54.4 percent of all Android tablets sold in the U.S., according to a new report from comScore, a data and analytics firm. The entire Samsung Galaxy Tab lineup came in second place, with a 15.4 percent market share. All other Android tablets came in at less than 10 percent: Google’s Motorola Zoom stopped at seven percent; Sony’s Tablet S got 0.7 percent.

Compared to December, Amazon’s share in the Android tablet market nearly doubled, as was expected. Other Android tablets, which tried to compete with Apple’s iPad at comparable prices, were simply unable to match Amazon’s $199 price point.

Yesterday, the company announced financial results for the first quarter of 2012. While earnings were down 35 percent from the same quarter last year, revenue results beat Amazon’s own guidance and the predictions from Wall Street. The company reported first-quarter earnings of $13.8 billion, far ahead of its own target guidance of $11.9 to $13.3 billion, and The Street’s, which was $12.9 billion. As a result, the company’s stocks surged 15 percent in after-hours trading.

The success came from the Kindle family and the Kindle-driven Amazon ecosystem, including Amazon Prime. Each tablet is sold at a loss, but Amazon plans to make up for these losses as people begin using the Kindle Fires to purchases media and goods.

These trends are bad news for Google, according to comScore. The company has tried but failed to become a major player in the tablet game.

“Google now faces a situation where the most popular Android tablet goes without not just Google’s official interface but the Google Play Store and other services the company depends on to make money from Android,” according to the comScore report.

Google is reportedly coming out with a Nexus tablet, which is supposedly going to be cheaper than the Kindle Fire. Yet with such tight margins, it will be extremely difficult to create a device that’s feature-rich and elegant enough to pull off an upset.

Chart via comScore.

Consumers are influenced more by what their friends say than what ads are online, at least according to recent Nielsen research. The Global Trust in Advertising report shows that 92% percent of consumers trust what their friends or family recommends more than any other form of advertising. With consumer confidence in more traditional forms of advertising on the decline and a huge growth in the likelihood that people are going to ask each other about a business or service, it leaves a lot of us wondering how can we be sure we’re getting recommended?

The research from Neilson isn’t surprising at all as a large portion of revenue is generated simply from people recommending us to other businesses. We’ve worked for ten years to build trust with our customers and take advantage of the word of mouth recommendations. If you’re going to adopt a policy of encouraging recommendations, you have to keep a couple of things at the top of your list. When you have the trust of a customer that is willing to say Yes, call them, they will take good care of you that’s a promise between you and that customer to do a couple of things for everyone.

Ask For Recommendations
While a lot of people still shy away from asking for help them grow their business, it’s clear from this research that people are asking their friends where to get certain services. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging your customers to recommend your services to others as long as you’re not pestering people about it. There’s no harm in saying hey, if you like what we’re doing, please let your friends know.

Customer Service
When trying to catch the word of mouth referrals to your business you have to be ready to provide a level of customer service that no one else is going to do. Here, we don’t have phone trees or long hold times for our customer, which tends to be a welcome surprise. We don’t mind that reaction, since it means we’re doing something with our customers that no one else is doing.

Be Consistent
Our beliefs and principals apply across the board. When we hire a new employee, it doesn’t matter if they are hired as a writer, developer, or sales representative, they are first trained on the customer service lines before anything else. Why? Because there’s a chance anyone in our office can get a customer on the phone at any time and it’s important that anyone who has a phone on their desk can help the customer. We made a promise to not have to transfer our customers around to different departments to get a question answered and while it’s always mattered to us to keep this promise; it matters to our customers too.

Another interesting note on this information from Neilson is that the things you pay for online seem to be the least trusted. Once upon a time, buying advertisements was something that could bring you business and now it looks like the funnel is changing from advertisement to word of mouth. Companies that are get people to talk about them are doing better than companies that rely solely on advertising.

Trust matters when it comes to helping consumers make decisions. What are you going to develop those relationships with customers?

The S-1 filing, sent in December 2011, highlights the opportunity for Gogo’s in-flight WiFi, and it also gives insight into the future of this freshly pioneered market–Internet connected flights.

Gogo launched in 2008 with 30 Internet-connected commercial aircraft. By September of 2010, it had connected 1,177 planes to Gogo Connectivity, the company’s in-flight WiFi service. This represented about 85% of all internet-enabled North American commercial aircraft at the time. Since then, the company has installed Connectivity on 146 additional aircraft and signed contracts to install Gogo on about 525 more, which it hopes to get done by the end of 2012. Contracts are good for 10 years; the earliest contracts expire in 2018–which is good because airlines are locked in, yet risky because some airlines with which it has contracts, like American Airlines, are bankrupt. Will they renew in 2018, or will they still be insolvent?

With roughly 1,850 Gogo-connected airplanes in North America by the end of 2012, the majority of planes will still be without WiFi. According to the filing, only 16% of North American aircraft and 6% of global aircraft are WiFi ready. That means the market is prime for exploitation, and Gogo, being the industry incumbent, is poised to make inroads. In the S-1, the company discussed expanding its commercial aircraft footprint. To do so it will seek new partnerships and leverage full-fleet connectivity, which are deals that see Gogo installing Internet on each aircraft in an airline’s entire fleet. Apparently, Gogo is uniquely poised to do these types of installations on the cheap, which will keep it as the industry leader going forward.

But getting the planes equipped is only a small part of the battle. Based on the filing, passengers have been slow to adopt WiFi in commercial airlines. Consider the numbers: since 2008 about 350 million passengers have flown on flights with Gogo connectivity, yet the company has provided only 15 million sessions, give or take. That means fewer than 5 percent of people who fly on connected flights use the Internet.

Yet despite this slow take-up, the filing sites a study by Forrester Research which says in-flight internet usage should increase rapidly over the next five years, from about 15.6 million North American sessions in 2011 to 96.9 million by 2015.

The Takeaway

Gogo is in a good position to take this market and become profitable, yet it is not without risk. The company is increasing its profit per customer (from $0.26 in 2010 to $0.41 in 2011) and revenue (up 89% from 2010). But it still has an operating loss of more than $430 million on $282 million in sales. The key, then, will be to continue expanding into more airplanes and airlines, which are want to offer ancillary services for fees, as they themselves are struggling and vying among stiff competition. The biggest risk seems to me to be the loss of a major contract, such as American Airlines or Delta in 2018, which is not out of the picture in the rocky airline industry. And in the end, it Gogo must find a way to get more passengers connected, something which seems more and more likely as more and more people buy tablets, laptops, and smartphones.

To read more, see this article by Dan Frommer on SplatF.

Narrative Science, a Chicago-based firm, generated its first story in early 2010 by taking the stat sheets from a Northwestern Wildcats baseball game and feeding them to their computer. The computer took the data, framed it out into a narrative structure, and cranked out a grammatically correct, readable story. Wherever there is data, according to the company’s founders, the computers’ software can structure it into a story.

For the time being, computers are ideal for reporting on stories that are heavy with hard information, such as sports stories or earnings reports.

For example, Forbes currently uses Narrative Science to generate dozens of daily profiles on companies. Looking at one of today’s profiles, for instance, of a company called Amphenol, the machine used its artificial intelligence to order data into a coherent narrative, telling readers all of the following: What to Expect, Trends to Watch For, Analyst Ratings, Competitors, and Recent Price Movement.

“A decline in revenue in the fourth quarter of the last fiscal year snapped a streak of three consecutive quarters of growing revenue,” according to the machine, reporting for Forbes. “The 0.1% revenue decline in the most recent quarter can be compared with three quarters prior when it had been rising. It increased 8.9%in the third quarter of the last fiscal year, 15% in the second quarter of the last fiscal year and 22% in the first quarter of the last fiscal year.”

As the software improves, it will be able to use its stored data to make inferences about the world, which is basically what a writer does. Then it will give the inferences an angle through which it will enter the story. Using its massive trove of data, and if the machine is programmed with a set of rules–for example, to write in active voice, to vary cadences and sentence lengths–in other words, programming them with all of our knowledge about language and literary narrative–the machines could actually make refined literary pieces.

Nonetheless, in the realm of art, it is hard to imagine that a machine gathering data could create something with feeling.

According to Joe Fassler, who wrote about Narrative Science in The Atlantic, good writers can still rest at ease:

“How, then, could any machine begin to understand the ways we love and hunger and hurt? The net contributions of science and art, history and philosophy, can’t parse the full complexity of a human instant, let alone a life. For as long as this is true, we’ll still have a role in writing.”

Photo via Narrative Science.

Image Credit - Sent from a Friend

Last week, a few of those commuters watched with the rest of the nation as tornadoes moved through the neighborhoods of Lancaster and Arlington. The Arlington residents here (myself included) in the office froze in shock as an EF2 tornado ripped through highly populated districts.

I want to first say that I have never been more proud to be a resident of Arlington, Texas. The City of Arlington, the police department, fire departments, managers, local business, and citizens have been absolutely amazing in light of a disaster that could have been much worse. There were no fatalities in our city and given what some of the damage area looks like – it very easily could have been a situation where we were not just dealing with the loss of property.

I know this because I drive to my home every day through the disaster area. I know this because my mother’s home was missed by the twister by only a couple of streets. I know this because I was watching the coverage from my safe office in Fort Worth, and frantically texting my friends and family as they reported the loss of power at their locations. It took only twenty-four hours for the city to have a response center open, safeguards in place for citizens who needed repairs, and setting up special instructions for getting into damaged neighborhoods.

With the popularity of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and even YouTube, the city offices and police departments of Arlington have both been incredibly active, but in very different ways – and in light of this disaster, I think that the City of Arlington missed an opportunity to use social media to connect with residents. Again, this is not to say that they didn’t respond quickly and effectively, I just think they missed a chance to connect with individual residents.

On the city website they created a special Tornado Recovery section to keep citizens updated and to give news about the ongoing recovery effort in the city. Their Twitter account (@CityofArlington) is a running stream of messages communicated to citizens who have questions. What’s missing?

The Twitter account has a number of @ responses directed to the city and their tornado recovery blog has received some comments – some in praise of the wonderful job that the city has done, some that offer volunteer services, and even have questions about when and where citizens need to put items for pick up.

The response? Nothing. Not even a quick response to say “thanks” or direct residents with questions to the place on the website where they can find the information they are looking for. I am of the opinion that if you’re going to be on social media, it’s especially important to be “there” in the event of a disaster.

On the business side of social media, we talk all of the time about the importance of handling customer service needs quickly and that if we are on a social media network, we need to be prepared to respond to anything that comes through that channel. In contrast to the city, look at the Arlington Police Department’s twitter stream (@ArlingtonPD). They respond to questions, thank people for kind tweets, and even do “ride-alongs” via Twitter.

My hope is that if / when disaster strikes in our community again, we take full advantage of the communication channels that are available. Residents of a community often view themselves as customers – choosing to live and play in a city that welcomes them. It wasn’t that long ago that another weather crisis struck in the form of ice and snow that made Super Bowl activities very difficult – and the city of Arlington caught national flack for an act of nature that was very much out of their hands.

The biggest take away from this is to listen. Social media networks provide that open channel and if you, your business, or even your city is going to be on a social network – you have to be willing to respond. Otherwise – what is the point?

To arrive at the results, The Startup Genome project drilled down into data from more than 13,000 young companies, all of which used the project’s Startup Compass, a tool for benchmarking a company’s performance.

“As we’ve started to dig into the data we have begun to uncover valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of different startup ecosystems,” according to the blog announcement.

The point of these results, then, is to give insight to entrepreneurs deciding where to start their company, investors deciding where to allocate capital, and larger companies determining where to look for acquisitions.

With the detailed data, however, the list is more than just a typical top 25 group. The Startup Genome Project offers insight that is specific to the questions entrepreneurs might be asking.

For instance, Silicon Valley ranked number one, but the Startup Compass found that it was extremely ambitious and therefore carried greater risk. So while Silicon Valley may be the number one spot, it may not be the best place for every startup to go. Meanwhile, London, the number three city, was found to be a great spot for launching project management tools or e-commerce startups.

Based on the criteria, the top 25 cities for startup cities are as follows: (Click this link for a full list of the 22 criteria, with explanations.)

1. Silicon Valley (San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland)
2. New York City
3. London
4. Toronto
5. Tel Aviv
6. Los Angeles
7. Singapore
8. Sao Paulo
9. Bangalore
10. Moscow
11. Paris
12. Santiago
13. Seattle
14. Madrid
15. Chicago
16. Vancouver
17. Berlin
18. Boston
19. Austin
20. Mumbai
21. Sydney
22. Melbourne
23. Warsaw
24. Washington D.C.
25. Montreal

For those who don’t know, some quick background. Instagram lets you take pictures on iPhone and Android, apply a filter, and share that picture on a mobile social network. Just last week, the site announced that it had registered more than 30 million users and that 1 billion photos had been uploaded. That is to say, it’s managed to amass a massively popular social network on its own, independent of Facebook (though Instagram did integrate Facebook sharing early on).

With today’s purchase (the social network’s biggest by far), Facebook gets a tried and true product for “sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.”

But many people may be worried that their Instagram networks will just fold into Facebook. Well, Zuckerberg, in his blog post, made it clear that that would not be the case.

“We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.”

In addition, users will be happy to know that Zuck and Co. have no plans to disallow the sharing of Instagram photos on other popular social networks, like Twitter.

To learn more about the acquisition, see the Instagram announcement here.

For me, the first part of the month is always helpful in shaking off the previous month’s mistakes, celebrating victories, and making goals for the new month. I personally enjoy the beginning of a month but I know a lot of people who don’t. For some, it’s because everything must now ramp back up to full speed ahead and soon deadlines will start flowing in.

If you’ve started the month thinking that your March wasn’t nearly as effective as you’ve thought it would be, think about how your month went and ask yourself some questions to figure out what you need to do to have a more productive April.

Did Your To-Do List Get Longer & Nothing Is Checked Off?

This month, don’t get overwhelmed by the length of your to-do list. Evaluate what you have written down and divide it into two parts: what you’re doing right now and what you’re going to do. Splitting those two lists up will help you stay on top of the things you need to do now versus the ideas you have or future deadlines you need to meet. Split up your lists and focus on the things you have to do now.

For example, let’s say you’re using your email inbox as a storage place for tasks. You might get emails about products you have coming up in the future and they get lost in the shuffle of the things you’re currently working on or following up with, so you separate them. You should do the same thing when you keep your tasks on a list.

Did You Spend More than An Hour on Facebook?

In March, I promised myself that I would be better about managing my time. I’ve heard from people who are smarter and more successful than I that an egg timer is a great way to manage your time, so that there’s less of likelihood to get distracted by Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr. I never bought an egg timer and I do sometimes get distracted. So this month, my goal is better time management. (I’ll keep you posted)

Bonus Suggestion: If you want to manage your time and don’t want to buy an egg timer – I came across E.ggtimer.com and it works by just putting in the amount of time into the start box.

Who’s Doing What?

If communication was not a strong point of March, one of the easiest things you can do in April is getting yourself a project manager. Not only does it help to clean up communication, it also puts all of your to-do, tasks, and documents in one place. When you have multiple emails flying around and bouncing back and forth, it causes a lot of communication confusion. All it takes is for one email to not be sent to someone who needs to see it and the entire project can be lost valuable productivity time.

If you’re excited about the arrival of a new month and want to evaluate some of the things you were doing in March that might have affected your productivity, this is a good place to start. What kind of pledges or promises have you made that will make April the best of 2012?