With Apple’s more than 15 million iPads shipped during the quarter, the worldwide PC market grew 16 percent year over year. Not counting tablets, of which the iPad is easily the most successful, the PC market actually shrank by 0.4 percent worldwide when compared to the same period a year ago, according to the Canalys data.

Apple’s success both with the iPad and its Mac computers allowed it to take top honors for the quarter, knocking HP to second place overall. Canalys says the lack of a valid HP tablet competitor, now that the TouchPad is shelved, will mean that HP will continue to struggle against Apple’s success.

The iPad wasn’t the only tablet to do well during the quarter, however. Canalys says that the Amazon Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet also helped contribute to the success of tablets in the U.S. Amazon ranked as the second strongest tablet manufacturer worldwide, while Barnes & Noble took the fourth place spot.

All told, iPads accounted for 22 percent of all worldwide PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011, as measured by Canalys. It’ll be interesting to see what effect a new iPad launch in the coming months might have on the worldwide momentum of tablets, and the larger PC industry.

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Node.js, a server-side JavaScript framework, has ridden a wave of popularity as evidenced by new support by Windows Azure. Developers like using the framework to write server applications because they can keep using standard libraries and their JavaScript skill set to build very efficient server applications. The question here is, does a change at the top of the project spark concern about that momentum, or is it just a natural evolution?

Judging from responses to Dahl’s post, the Node.js faithful are sorry to see him step back, but understand his need to do so. Some posted some last-minute requests for the framework, just in case.

According to Dahl’s post, he’s not really going anywhere, but after three years on this project it’s time for a change:

I am still an employee at Joyent and will advise from the sidelines but I won’t be involved in the day-to-day bug fixes. Isaac has final say over what makes it into the releases. Appeals for new features, changes, and bug fixes should now be directed at him.

“Genuinely surprised at the “Ryan Dahl stepping down as Node.js leader” news. Node has only just hit the big time really. Good luck to him!”

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In a piece in the New York Times on the weekend, media writer David Carr took a look at News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s use of Twitter, and how the media mogul has used it as both a bully pulpit and a soapbox. Carr’s fellow media writer Brian Stelter, however, has a somewhat different view: at a conference on social media at Columbia University, Stelter said that “sources going direct,” as Murdoch has done with Twitter, is one of most disruptive changes that have hit journalism in the digital age, and the thing that “keeps me up at night.” Stelter is right to be concerned — it is clearly a paradigm shift. But is it good for journalism?

As Carr’s story points out, even though the News Corp. founder has only been on Twitter for a relatively short time, Murdoch’s tweets have already provided a huge amount of enjoyment (and ammunition) for media buffs, Murdoch-haters and everyone in between — including media reporters like Carr and Stelter. From his typo-laden missives about Barack Obama caving in to anti-piracy activists over SOPA and PIPA to his Google-bashing and attacks on Governor Cuomo, the combative mogul has made things a lot more interesting. He’s even apologized for the failure of MySpace:

Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.—
Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 13, 2012

First blogs, now Twitter and Google Hangouts

Murdoch’s ranting on Twitter seems harmless enough. So why does this kind of activity keep Brian Stelter up at night? Because it is just another example of the “sources going direct” — to use a phrase that blogging pioneer Dave Winer coined some time ago to describe what happens when those who are directly involved in the news have the ability to publish their own thoughts, and reach readers and viewers directly. First, that ability came through blogging, and now it has been amplified even further with Twitter and other social tools. It’s all part of what Om has called the “democratization of distribution.”

In addition to saying it keeps him up at night, Stelter said that this ability for sources to go direct is “the generational issue of our time for journalists.” He didn’t elaborate on why he thinks this, but I have a few ideas: for one thing, it removes the need for the journalist as middleman or information gatekeeper. In the past, a journalist could have made a pretty good name for themselves by simply getting access to Rupert Murdoch and quoting his thoughts on Barack Obama or Google — but now, he is providing those himself.

Murdoch is only the latest example of this phenomenon, of course. It arguably began with blogging, which allowed other prominent newsmakers like billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban to reach a broad audience directly (Cuban even published his own email interviews with journalists, so he could correct the record). It has continued with early adopters like basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who announced the news of his retirement on Twitter through a service called Tout. Celebrities have also made use of it to get their own stories out to their fans — or to simply rant, Courtney Love-style.

In the end, this should be good for serious journalism

Over the past year, we have seen this phenomenon accelerate to the point where the White House is doing live discussions on YouTube, taking questions from Twitter during a “town hall,” and now is doing Google+ “hangouts” where the president responds to citizens with concerns about the country. This has gone so far beyond the fireside radio chats that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to communicate his message that it’s almost hard to fathom how much has changed in just a few decades:

So what is the job of a media or sports or political reporter now? There’s no question that we still need them, and in fact we may need them even more — but now we need them to filter and make sense of what is out there, and to probe beneath the surface for the real meaning behind what Murdoch says on Twitter or what a basketball star says about themselves or their career. In other words, we need less of a focus on “scoops” that are three sentences long and have a half-life of five minutes, and more smart analysis. So the reality is that all of those reporting jobs have gotten a lot harder.

In the end, however, that is probably a good thing for journalism — and for consumers of journalism as well. Those who only wish to be distracted by the 140-character rantings of a billionaire now have a source for that, and those who want a little more depth will hopefully get some of that as well. For media companies whose focus is solely on those micro-scoops and quotes from celebrities, however, the future doesn’t look so bright.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and See-ming Lee

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South Korean and Japanese cities dominate the top 100 cities list. Amsterdam is the fastest city in Europe (ranked #33), and San Jose was once again the fastest city in the United States with an average connection speed of 13 Mbps. It was ranked at number 13 amongst the top 100 and was one of the 23 US cities that made the list. Other US cities in the top 100 include Plano, Texas (8.9 Mbps,) Fremont, California (8.6 Mbps,) North Bergen, NJ (8.5 Mbps,) and Jersey City, New Jersey (8.2 Mbps.)

One of the biggest trends according to the report is growing mobile broadband speeds. “Average connection speeds on known mobile providers ranged from 6.1 Mbps down to 327 kbps, while average peak connection speeds in the quarter ranged from 22.2 Mbps to 1.4 Mbps,” the report data shows.

Here are some other notable facts from the report:

• The global average connection speed continued to see extremely strong yearly growth, increasing 39 percent from the third quarter of 2010.
• The global average peak connection speed grew 45 percent from the third quarter of 2010 to 11.7 Mbps in Q3 2011. South Korea is the country with the highest average peak connection speed, at 46.8 Mbps. Hong Kong also had an average peak connection speed above 40 Mbps, while Romania, Japan, and Latvia were all above 30 Mbps.
• India finally achieved a 10 percent broadband adoption rate, which China had achieved in the second quarter.
• Despite rapid growth, China and India are only two countries with high broadband adoption of 1 percent or less — China stand at 1.0 percent adoption and India has a 0.6 percent adoption. Akamai deems connections faster than 5 Mbps as “high broadband.”
• In the third quarter of 2011, global broadband adoption (2Mbps or higher) grew 1.6 percent to reach 66 percent. United States now has 81 percent broadband adoption, the report says.
• By average speeds, Netherlands might be tops in Europe (9.5 Mbps), but when it comes to peak speeds, the Romanian city of Timisoara leave it in dust at 41.5 Mbps.

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But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, is this deal enough to turn the tide of startups away from Amazon and Rackspace? Azure has been live since Feb 2010, and despite some big customers touted by Redmond, in general Azure isn’t a name I hear often from startups. Patrick Riley, director of business development at TechStars, notes that as of 2010 (about 18 months ago) 35 percent of the incubator’s startups used Amazon’s services, 30 percent used Rackspace, 20 percent used Media Temple and 5 percent used SoftLayer. The rest fell under the “other category, which may or may not include Azure, which had launched earlier that year.

Getting startups on board is important for the future of a cloud business. While enterprise may be where the big bucks are, enterprise cloud deployments tend to be a small chunk of their IT operations and they may never commit fully to the cloud. Meanwhile, startups are risky, but where the growth is. In many cases, a startup using an outside infrastructure or platform as a service still has to design its architecture for that service, so convincing a startup to launch on your platform is a step toward gaining a customer for the life of that application (some will last longer than others). Additionally, because people tend to favor “the devil they know over the devil they don’t,” once an engineer is hooked on AWS for example, it may be much harder to get him to use Rackspace or Azure at his or her next job.

Azure has tried to broaden its base in recent months by adding new support for languages, such as Node.js, which has become a hot one for web developers, while rivals in both the infrastructure and platforms as a service space are racing to add features that will appeal to the enterprise. When asked how many startups are on Azure, Doug Free, a Microsoft spokesman, said that there are “thousands using it,” but he couldn’t give me a percentage. Microsoft added discounts to Azure as part of BizSpark program for startups when Azure launched, but this offer with TechStars is far broader and more significant in terms of how much it provides for startups.

Azure is said to be a quality platform, so perhaps all it will take for startups to hop on Microsoft’s cloud is an introduction during their formative weeks. If so, then this deal could help Microsoft make strides with tomorrow’s big cloud customers.

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That’s interesting by itself and falls in line with other reports about how much traffic is going mobile. But in talking with Mobify’s CEO Igor Faletski, one thing that stood out to me was that almost all of Mobify’s work has been to optimize sites for smartphones last year. Very few customers have thought to optimize their websites for tablets like the iPad. Instead they have relied on native apps or just a desktop version of their website. Compuware came to a similar conclusion when surveying 30 of the top retailers’ sites and finding that none were optimizing their sites for tablets.

Faletski said it’s somewhat understandable that many companies haven’t made their sites tablet friendly. Many feel they can get away with just a desktop version with perhaps a little tweaking to replace Flash elements with HTML5. It’s also not easy converting a big site for tablets. And he said that of the top 1,000 retailers, only one-third are still mobil-optimized at all. But he said retailers are starting to realize that the tablet is its own opportunity, unique from a smartphone or PC experience. And now he’s having a lot more discussions with customers about getting their sites to work well on tablets, something he believes will be big this year.

He said it makes sense because customers who optimize for mobile see greater returns. Faletski said customers who went mobile with Mobify saw their revenue double within 100 days. He said that’s new revenue that doesn’t cannibalize desktop traffic.

“On a mobile device, it’s pretty clear that a desktop site is not usable. But for tablets, a desktop site can work. But this year, a lot of people are now investing in the tablet experience to make it like a native app,” Faletski said.

Mobify uses HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to take an existing desktop site and optimize it for mobile users. He said the result is a very compelling alternative to a native app and it has the benefit of tapping into existing marketing dollars. He said a lot of traffic to sites comes from emails and social networks with people clicking on URLs. And with mobile searches growing as well, there are also more referrals to actual websites. With more and more of those actions taking place from mobile devices, it makes increasing sense to build out websites that shine on smartphones and tablets, he said.

Faletski said while native apps work well for games and entertainment, he said retailers are seeing more traffic flow toward the mobile web. And retailers with mobile-optimized sites are also seeing higher conversion rates from shoppers visiting from mobile devices.

We’ve talked about the rise of tablet shopping and what eBay calls couch commerce. The tablet is increasingly becoming the perfect shopping device. Adobe earlier this month reported that tablet users spend more than 50 percent more for each transaction at an online retailer site compared to smartphone users and 20 percent more than traditional computer users. Adobe also found that tablet users were three times more likely to buy something than smartphone users and nearly as likely to convert to a purchase as traditional computer users.

Increasingly, it looks like consumers that have access to both smartphones and tablets are using them in tandem, turning to the smartphone for quick research and price checks while the tablet is the preferred place to actually check out. Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg told me that mobile users are twice as likely to buy products than computer visitors and that the iPad has purchase amounts that are an order of magnitude higher than on iPhone, Android and the web.

And with tablet sales growing quickly thanks to the iPad and new lower-cost competitors like the Amazon Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, it makes even more sense for retailers to think about making their site tablet friendly. Faletski said that means making apps that perform more like native apps, with a UI designed for touch, with more bigger text and more space for touch accuracy. And he said look at streamlining some on-screen elements to simplify the presentation and compensate for less horsepower in many tablets.

We’re still realizing the ecommerce impact of tablets, which have really been around for less than two years. But increasingly, the world is going mobile and the data coming in shows that smartphones and tablets are providing a big boost to retailers. But it’s not the same effect between those devices, and retailers who figure out how to best leverage tablets will be in a better position to take advantage of the coming smartphone AND tablet boom.

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The news, announced in Politico, marks the first time a national campaign has deployed Square. The rollout will take place at all levels of staff and should help cut down on the time it takes to process campaign donations.

Here’s what Square had to say about the news:

Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, running for president or local assembly, Square makes it easier than ever for candidates, organizations and volunteers to fundraise for their cause.

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Japanese cloud-gaming and VOD startup G-cluster plans to enter the U.S. market with an on-demand mobile gaming service, presenting a possible challenge to OnLive. The company has secured an unnamed amount of funding from Intel and Vivendi’s French mobile carrier SFR to expand its reach beyond home casual gaming and movie streaming into high-end gaming for tablets and smartphones.

G-cluster has already established itself in France, providing a casual gaming service through SFR’s residential broadband arm that customers can access through their TVs and set-top boxes or on their Macs or PCs. In Japan, G-cluster is offering an HD movie-on-demand service to connected TVs. But according to Sevan Kessissian, G-cluster VP of Content and Strategy, the startup has bigger ambitions than just casual gaming and video in the domicile. It plans to combine the processing might of the cloud and low-latency, high-bandwidth connections of new wireless networks to create a mobile service that supports high-quality, real-time gaming to tablets and other mobile devices. And it plans to launch that service in the U.S.

“We are in discussion with major partners in order to penetrate the US market” Kessissian said via e-mail. “The game catalogue will be a blend of the best casual games and AAA games.”

Kessissian didn’t provide any details about which partners G-cluster is in discussions with or when such a U.S. service would launch, but when it finally does emerge here it may find an already established competitor in the market. In December, OnLive announced its mobile gaming service for iOS and Android devices.

My colleague Kevin Tofel reviewed OnLive’s mobile beta on the iPad, over both Wi-Fi and 3G, and was particularly impressed by its performance when hooked into his home network connection. As Kevin pointed out in earlier post, virtualization services like cloud gaming to the tablet and smartphone are proliferating, delivering one more blow to already suffering PC sales.

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But targeted advertising is also, by and large, terrible. Just take a look at Google’s recent attempt to be transparent by showing you its ad preference manager, which seems to think everybody who uses it is a middle-aged man working in the technology industry.

And then there’s Twitter.

Oh Twitter. Why are you, one of the great hopes of the social web, getting it so wrong?

You probably know about Promoted Tweets, the company’s attempt to make money from its ever-growing user base. Since September, the company has been slowly rolling the ads out in new ways, selling more units in more countries and pushing them forward so that the ads are deployed straight into user’s timelines.

That means that the service effectively elbows out a single message from somebody you follow with one that somebody else has paid for. But don’t worry: the company promised that “we will display Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they are relevant” and that, “we will expand the rollout only when we feel we’re delivering a high-quality user experience.”

But is it really living up to that claim?

Today it became apparent to me just how abysmal Twitter’s advertising machine remains, even as the company rolls around in more than a billion dollars of funding.

Earlier today, my partner looked at her Twitter stream and saw a promoted tweet that could not have been more poorly targeted. It was for a product from VKernel, a virtualization management service.

New vSphere 5.0 Performance and Capacity Resource page- check it out for a thorough overview on all latest features bit.ly/vsphere-5

— VKernel (@VKernel) January 10, 2012

To say that she has never shown the slightest bit of interest in virtualization is an understatement. In fact, she yelped in dismay when she saw it, because it was painfully out of place. “I don’t understand any of this,” she grumbled.

While it could be a one-off, in fact this seems to be the case for many people. One friend reports that the first ad she saw on Twitter was from Lexus, despite the fact that she doesn’t tweet about cars and doesn’t even have a drivers’ license.

And then there are the Promoted Tweets that look a lot like spam, such as this one from Negri Electronics promising users a shot at a free Android handset if only they’ll follow its account. Crazy, right? An ad in which the advertiser has effectively paid Twitter to help it get more followers on Twitter instead of growing organically.

Now, of course, the problem of annoying ads isn’t exactly new. Television and radio advertising has been doing this for years: interrupting the content we want with financially lucrative content that we don’t. We’re used to it. And it’s still early days for Twitter: targeting could get better as more and more advertisers arrive on the service, and Twitter is undoubtedly trying to improve its hit ratio.

But this isn’t exactly a new issue for Twitter.

It’s been almost a year since the arguments over Twitter’s “quick bar” — an imposing space for advertising that it injected onto its mobile apps and filled with irrelevant information — and little seems to have changed. In a piece I wrote at the time called “Why the fuss over Twitter’s quick bar won’t go away”, I argued that being unable to provide relevant advertising was its biggest problem:

The issue, by and large, isn’t that the Trends bar is a bad idea. It’s that the trends aren’t relevant. This seems so obvious that it causes consternation among users. So that irritation… develops into a series of gripes. Why can’t Twitter do a better job of showing me information that’s worthwhile? Isn’t that the whole point of it?

It’s a fair point. I willingly give Twitter huge amounts of information about myself and the people I am interested in. I’m essentially handing over information that other publishers and platforms would pay for — and yet the best it can offer me is a link to some crap about Sammy Hagar.

Eleven months on, the delivery method appears to have changed, but the accuracy seems just as poor. Promoted Tweets might be making Twitter money, and they might get better over time as more advertisers hit the service … but right now it’s a problem.

The great hope of targeted advertising — the ultimate reason we give up all our data to these companies — is because we want to get away from the TV model. The idea of targeting is that it works better for everybody: the advertiser gets better audience, people get the service they want — and perhaps ads that are actually useful, and the service provider gets to make a little money too.

Right now, that balance is tipped in the wrong direction: Twitter’s making money, but at the expense of users and advertisers. This isn’t the future I thought we’d be getting.

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Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: according to a report from Britain, two British tourists were detained and then denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security and other authorities — including the FBI — are monitoring social media like Twitter and Facebook isn’t that surprising. But the fact that Homeland Security is willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.

Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and questioned for five hours about messages that Van Bryan had posted on Twitter saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which the Irish traveller said that Homeland Security threatened the two, they were put in a van and taken to a holding cell overnight, along with some illegal immigrants. After being held overnight, they said they were forced to take a plane back to England.

According to a report in The Daily Mail, the Homeland Security officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission to the United States, and it reads like a bad joke itself, saying:

He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe… Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.

Van Bryan told the newspaper that he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party, and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but that the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched their luggage looking for shovels and other tools, he said.

Monitoring social media makes sense — within reason

This isn’t the first time that someone has gotten in trouble for making a joke on Twitter: a British businessman named Paul Chambers was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for more than seven hours in 2010 after making a joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport, a joke he said he made because he was frustrated about the airport being closed due to bad weather. He was tried and found guilty and fined a thousand pounds, and eventually lost his job as a result of the publicity.

The fact that Homeland Security is monitoring social networks like Twitter and Facebook for certain keywords isn’t that surprising: the department said during a security review earlier this year that it has been monitoring those networks and a list of blogs and other sources (including WikiLeaks) for information about potential security hazards and what it called “situational awareness.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation also recently revealed that it is trying to develop a service that can monitor social-media sources and automatically create alerts based on the information it finds there.

To me, it makes perfect sense for security officials to be monitoring social networks and even blogs. This is all public information that could contain useful signals about real terrorism or threats to national security of some kind, and it should obviously be part of the normal intelligence process. But doing this properly also requires some sense of proportion about what constitutes a real threat and what is clearly a joke. Did Homeland Security really think that a 26-year-old bar manager was a serious threat?

We all know that we are likely being monitored in even more ways now than we have ever been, whether it’s by security cameras or algorithms that comb through tweets and Facebook posts. But that’s not the scary part — the scary part is what can happen when that information gets misinterpreted and it escalates into a major crisis for no reason.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stefan and Rosaura Ochoa

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Earlier today I noted that Samsung’s Galaxy line-up was getting bland and bloated. But the Note is an exception because it attempts to bridge the gap between a large smartphone and a small tablet. The Galaxy Note uses a 5.3-inch Super AMOLED screen at 1280 x 800 resolution and supports inking on the capacitive display thanks to an extra digitizer under the screen.

I took a peek at the Galaxy Note at CES and shared my video thoughts here. I’m just now getting used to the 4.65-inch Galaxy Nexus in my hand and found the Note to be a tad wide. Although the hardware is excellent, I’d recommend potential buyers to use the device in a store for a bit, given the unique size and form factor.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a phone / tablet effort; Dell tried this strategy and failed with the Streak back in 2010. But there are some key differences that tell me Samsung may find an audience for the large slab. The Streak used an 800 x 480 resolution display; stretched out across 5-inches, that made for low pixel density and fuzzy display.

It also arrived long before Android had a viable tablet operating system, although the Note comes with Android 2.3, which is meant for smartphones. Still, the OS is much improved and Samsung’s TouchWiz software helps hide Android’s warts. Samsung has also promised Android 4.0 for the Galaxy Note in the first quarter of this year.

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Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft and the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — most recently Node.js support in Windows Azure  and the decision to back Hadoop at the expense of an internal Dryad project, squarely at Gates’ feet.

The story recounts a meeting in the summer of 2008 where some (unnamed) top Microsoft execs argued against opening up more to open source while Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect, and Sam Ramji, the open source strategist, argued the opposite. According to Wired:

Then Bill Gates stood up.

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.

That was it: Microsoft had to be more open to open source. The story quotes a number of former and current Microsoft employees who might be trying to curry favor with their former or current boss, but the account rings true. Here’s why.

1: Microsoft is nothing if not pragmatic

The company will fight, fight, fight for its own agenda, but if it senses futility, it will declare victory and reverse course. I have heard Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer counsel a company that was engaged in a fruitless tussle with another company to do exactly that: “Declare victory and move on.”  And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to see Word and PowerPoint on the iPad or iPhone — not too long after Ballmer mockingly stomped on an iPhone at the company sales meeting. If Microsoft believes that the X86-based PC is on the losing side of history, it will do what it can to keep its money-making Office — if not Windows — on every device on the planet. The decision to support ARM architectures in the upcoming Windows 8 is just the beginning of that journey.

And that is why a company with a CEO who once likened Linux to cancer can now with a straight face bring Node.js, Hadoop, even Linux itself into the fold. There are now reports that Microsoft is recruiting Linux experts whose mission it will be “to identify, define, scope, implement and drive to completion software projects that promote full, transparent interoperability between Windows and Linux in Microsoft virtual and cloud environments.”

2: Once it gets the memo — often late — Microsoft goes all out

Microsoft is often late to the party, but once it gets there, look out! It was late to spreadsheets (after Lotus); it was late to word processing (after WordPerfect); it was late to PC databases (after dBase, Foxpro, Paradox.) It was famously late to the Internet — but once Gates decided to turn the ship around — as Netscape Navigator posed a huge threat — that ship was turned around. Gates’ 1995 memo on the Internet tidal wave is one example of this. Anyone remember Navigator now? Or even Netscape? Years later, Gates even had the good grace in one speech to claim to have “discovered the Internet”  (wait for it) after everyone else did.

It’s tempting now, with iPhones and Android phones tearing up the market, and more businesses flocking to Apple hardware,  to write Microsoft off. Word to the wise: don’t be hasty.

3:  Microsoft works best when it’s under the gun

And the corollary is that Microsoft works worst when it’s dominant. Ask most shops why they upgrade Office (or Windows) and it’s typically because they want to stay legal — not because they’re dying for new features. It’s hard to remember in this age of Google Chrome and Firefox and Opera, that Internet Explorer was once the upstart browser. It left Netscape Navigator in the dust because Microsoft had to make it better than Navigator or no one would use it. On the other hand, many people feel that Microsoft Office, the undisputed leader in productivity software suites, remains fat and feature bloated. In short: Office could still use a good competitor. (Pre-emptive apologies to the Open Office, Google Apps fans out there.)

The Microsoft SQL Server team remains scrappy and innovative. Why? Because they have a dominant competitor (still) in Oracle. As Cade Metz, the reporter who wrote this article says: Microsoft is “a company that’s at its best when it’s freaking out.”

To be clear, Microsoft had an open source strategy before this 2008 meeting. For example,  it had already worked with Samba, an open source effort to foster interoperability between Windows clients and Linux servers — although cynics said much of that peaceful coexistence came about because of legal anti-trust action.

But the Wired account holds that it was Gates’ statement at that meeting that blew away any lingering obstructionism in the ranks and forced Microsoft to get off its duff when it comes to open source. Given the boundless regard that Microsoft employees hold for Gates, only he could get the famously fractious product groups to get on board with open source.

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In a new study of 1,000 adults conducted earlier this month, Pew found that 38 percent of mobile users called a friend while in store for buying advice while 24 percent of cell phone users used their phone to obtain product reviews on line. And 25 percent of adult cell phone users looked up prices online for products in store in attempt to find the best deal online and in other stores. Altogether, 52 percent of all adult cell owners relied on their phone for one of these purposes and 33 percent specifically turned to their phone for online information while shopping inside a store.

The numbers are consistent with a survey Deloitte did prior to the holiday season, which found that 27 percent of US smartphone users said they planned to use their smartphone while in-store for holiday shopping.

Pew said that mobile consumers 18-49 are much more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than older cell phone users. And urban and suburban users are about twice as likely to look up online reviews from their phone than rural cell phone owners. Non-white and more educated consumers were more likely to use their phone for in-store research.

Of the people who conducted online price research, Pew found that 35 percent still bought the product in the store while 19 percent purchased online. Another 8 percent went to another store to buy and 37 percent decided not to buy at all.

This last piece of data shows the challenge for retailers, who lost about 5 percent of transactions that began with online price research, even though they have the customer in-store. That’s something that retailers have been increasingly sensitive about, especially with promotions like Amazon’s holiday offer to knock off $5 from certain products if users checked prices through Amazon. But the data also show how retailers can fight back. They obviously need to be aware of prices online, and they may look at ways to lower prices or match online prices in-store to remain competitive. They can also look at advertising online and through price-shopping apps such as ShopSavvy, so users can get routed to that retailer’s online store instead of its competitors. Or they can pick off competitors’ customers who price shop through apps.

ShopSavvy and RedLaser have also started to institute scan-and-buy options, so users can scan a product from the aisle and buy them right  from online retailers, having their purchases sent home to them. That can be another challenge for a local store but also offers a way for retailers to still compete for that transaction if they price competitively. Aislebuyer and PayPal have been talking up similar kinds of options for retailers to offer buying from an aisle. Having that kind of an option may soon be a necessity for retailers.

The challenge is still considerable for retailers of all sizes. Having consumers walk in with connected computers in their pocket means many of them can find a potentially better deal online or in another store. But retailers should be thinking about how to satisfy their customers’ shifting buying patterns. Saving a couple dollars may be enough to abandon a local store, but if that retailer can provide more convenience, better in-store service or the ability to haggle on some products, a consumer may still want to buy immediately. It’s definitely going to be harder for physical retailers in this new mobile-enhanced shopping era but there’s still ways to compete as buyers get a lot smarter.

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“Program and design from the mobile standpoint first, then extrapolate what could be applied for the PC, television and print experience.” – Michael Bayle, VP and general manager of ESPN Mobile

Apparently, for ESPN, mobile is now “the company’s fourth-largest network” and “has 150,000 people plugged into its mobile offerings at any given time” with “users spending 45% more time with ESPN mobile content in 2011 than the prior year,” according to this report in Media Post.

Those numbers are stunning — but not surprising (to me, at the very least). With more than 400 million smartphones expected to be sold, it makes perfect sense for sports to get the mobile bump. I mean, don’t we want the baseball gossip, score updates or results of the F1 race when on the go?

I have been a firm believer that when it comes to design these days, mobile comes first. That thinking was behind the redesign of my blog. Of course, I saw an increase in mobile visits and decided to go the full monty with my blog makeover. It is good to see that “mobile-first” thinking is spreading: Kayak and others are following the mobile-first approach.

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The application is a bit of a combination of Dropbox and Evernote, letting users store videos, articles, images and even PDFs in the cloud. The application then automatically downloads that content to mobile and tablet devices for consuming later. But the sharing aspect, and how people have begun using it, is what is really interesting and a real opportunity, according to founder Avichal Garg.

While Facebook and other services are enabling so-called frictionless sharing of what our friends and contacts are watching and consuming at any given time, that has also resulted in a lot of noise and not a whole lot of signal. It is hard to know what’s good and what’s not. So what Spool hopes to do is to enable users to more easily share relevant content within groups.

The idea sprung out of usage that the Spool team was seeing among its users and its own staff. Garg explained that the startup’s employees were sharing links and stories within the company and found that other users were doing the same. Those shared links then show up in a users’ Spools for reading later, just as though they bookmarked them themselves. That kind of application could be helpful for sharing relevant documents and news among enterprise team members, for instance.

It has become an interesting market opportunity for Spool, as the company looks to leverage both user stickiness and network effects to bring in new users. “No one owns the market for small group sharing,” Garg told us in a meeting last week. As more users become hooked, the company is more likely to convert them into paying users.

The San Francisco–based startup has also seen a large increase in the number of users signing up after being featured on the Android Market. While Spool was featured, Garg said it was seeing ten times the number of downloads and sign-ups that it usually received. Retention rates vary, but Garg said that once someone becomes an active user, they are not likely to quit.

“If we get you using Spool, we know you’ll probably still be around in three months,” he said.

Spool recently closed a $1 million round of financing from investors like SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Start Fund and Charles River Ventures, as well as angels Vivi Nevo, Steve Chen, Elad Gil, Deep Nishar, Kevin Donahue, Joe Lonsdale, Bill Lohse, David King, Nils Johnson, Matt Ocko and Raymond Tonsing.

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Rose said that one of the interesting things about the integration of music services like Spotify has been that more often that not, lesser-known bands show up in the Top 100 of most-shared acts. “It’s not reinforcing the same songs that everyone listens to,” he said.

He also explained that enhanced sharing functionalities have brought in some additional revenue on other levels as well. One example: Ticketmaster makes an additional $5 of incremental revenue every time someone shares on Facebook that he has just bought a concert ticket, according to Rose.

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