Robot Dancing Wondergirl's Nobody

Robot Dancing ' Nobody - The most amazing home videos are here

The Smart Phone Market at a Glance

Nokia leads the world in the smartphone sector, but no one can sit still in this fast moving space. The latest Gartner data for the 4th quarter of 2009 shows that Symbian leads with 46.9% market share with RIM in second at 19.9%. Unfortunately, Symbian saw a drop of 5.5% from the same quarter a year ago. RIM, iPhone, and Android platforms all saw large increases in market share and are definitely the ones to keep an eye on moving forward.

1.2 billion handsets sold in 2009, Nokia & Symbian still remain at the top. Nokia is still the runaway market leader with a whopping 441 million devices sold, garnering a respectable 36.4%. But that’s down 2 percentage points over 2008. Samsung came next with 236 million devices sold, followed by LG (122m), Motorola (58m), Sony (55m) and then the rest (299m).

FREE Netsize's Guide

It's packed with stats, and it's free from the Netsize website. Published by a French billing specialist, this exhaustive industry bible. It is full of analysis and interviews, but the real sauce is a reference section that delivers subscriber info, ARPUs, tariff info and more.

The 9th Edition includes interviews with 28 execs from firms such as Havas, Marks & Spencer, Mobile Marketing Association, Nokia, Paypal and Sony. In the stats section, there's info on 41 countries and 194 mobile operators.

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Income of Top World Leaders

Who you reckon gets more salary? Obama? In fact the highest paying leader comes from a tiny country with population less than 5 million, he is Lee Hsien Loong, the PM of Singapore who takes home $2.05 million, 5 times more than Obama.

Windows Phone 7 Series introduced at Mobile World Congress.

Microsoft is really serious about reinvigorating their mobile arm. Shame we have to wish away an entire year before it hits the shops!

Symbian S^3 Officially Demoed

A great video showing off the new Nokia interface for Symbian S^3. There are multitouch gestures to spare, including pinch to zoom, swiping, and scrolling. Certainly designed and driven like iPhone.

Nokia Beta Labs launches Nokia Feel

When you open the application you can select how you feel – are you feeling Energetic, Lucky, Lonely, Happy, Hungry, Bored, Lost, Caring or Creative? And when you have told it how you feel, the application suggests a few things you could do.

'We are the World 25' for Haiti Debuts at Olympics Opening Ceremonies

Snickers - Voted the funniest TV ad at the Super Bowl

Banned Microsoft Office Commercial – “Password Protected”

100 million Mobile Facebookers

Facebook has just hit the 100 million mark on mobile. Facebook’s mobile user base has almost doubled in less than six months, as it had around 65 million mobile users in Sep, 2009. Facebook has been adding mobile users much faster than it is adding web users. Facebook had around 300 million users in Sep, 2009 – which has increased to 400 million users – an increase of 25%. However, the mobile user base has increased by almost 53% in the same time period.

And this pace is just going to pick up as there are more than 4 billion mobile users out there.

Google Buzz launches

Google Buzz is a new way to share and discover inside of Gmail. It is akin to a whole new environment inside of Gmail. Buzz has a feature called auto-following, to let you find a new social graph without all of the work behind actually looking for those people. Buzz will follow all of the people that you already email with, building on your current Gmail contact list

With the auto-follow capability, you will automatically be set up with a feed coming in from your contacts, inside of you Gmail inbox, right away. This will bring Buzz millions of users on day one, creating overnight a heavyweight in social sharing.

A set of new features adds functionality like status updates, inline images and links, and location, where posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context based on the poster’s location.

The service integrates tightly with Google’s other services - Gmail, Picasa, Google Reader, and YouTube – and also hooks into the likes of Flickr and Twitter.

On mobile, Buzz adds a new layer to Google Maps, which allows you to see Buzz comments and updates near you or anywhere on the map, so in addition to checking out updates from people you’re following, you can also see info from the people around you.

Buzz for mobile is already available for the iPhone and Android but the kicker is that the app is only working on Android 2.0 at present, while the layer for Google Maps is only backwards compatible as far as Android 1.6.

Twitter-Powered Popcorn Maker

Two men (Dave Britt and Justin Goeres) have built a popcorn-making robot that serves up a popcorns whenever someone mentions #popcorn on Twitter.

Source : Engadget

Megan Fox introduces Motorola DEVOUR at the Super Bowl

Check out what happens when Megan Fox uses her DEVOUR to send out a hot, wet image via a social network?

Google lights up TVC at Super Bowl Ad

The rumors were correct! Google took the bold step of running a Super Bowl ad in the 3rd quarter of the game today, marking its first major push into TV advertising for the company that has triumphed only on online ads.

Top 3 Fastest Internet countries are located in Asia

Recent report on the Internet by Akamai shows South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong dominating the top 3 positions of the world 's fastest internet. Hong Kong has the second highest levels of extremely high speed connectivity among the top 10 countries, with more than 2.5% of connections to Akamai at speeds between 20-25 Mbps, and more than 5% at speeds in excess of 25 Mbps. The speed race isnt going to stop here as we are going to see more and more record breaking speed.

Source : Thomas Crampton

Go Daddy Super Bowl 2010 TV Commercial

5 Trillion of text messages sent in 2010 at the value of $150 Billion

5 Trillion ! That's how many text messages sent in 2010 creating a $150 billion market according to Portio Research. The research firm expects the number of texts will double by 2014 and the market to grow to be worth $233 billion.

Multimedia messaging (MMS) market was worth $27 billion in 2009, making it almost as big as SMS five years ago. MMS is growing fast in all major regions around the world as affordable camera-equipped handsets flood the market and increasingly become the norm.

Portio expects rapid growth in the IM market, with almost 1 billion regular IMs and $18 billion in sales by 2014. Spending on mobile email will also triple over the next five years.

Apple the Champ of smartphone wars

Apple was the clear winner in last year’s smartphone market, gaining more market share than any other handset vendor. The company shipped 25.1 million smartphones in 2009 compared with just 4.4 million units in 2008, increasing market share 5.3 percentage points to 14.4%.

In contrast, rival RIM’s market share took a battering, falling from 19.8% with 34.5 million smartphone shipments, to just 15.5%, according to Strategy Analytics. Dominant smartphone vendor Nokia shipped 67.8 million shipped units to fall one point to 39%.

Global smartphone shipments stood at a record high of 173.8 million units, up 15% on 2008, according to the research firm.

Nokia continues to be in the commanding lead and Motorola drops further

Global handset shipments reached 324 million units worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2009, rising 10 percent from 294 million units a year earlier, according to new figures from Strategy Analytics. The research firm said the numbers represented the handset market’s first quarter of positive growth since Q3 2008, signaling an end to the industry’s year-long recession.

Both Samsung and LG again shipped record volumes, while Motorola and Sony Ericsson edged their way back toward profitability. Full-year (2009) handset volumes reached 1.13 billion units in 2009, slipping 4 percent from 1.18 billion in 2008.

Nokia delivered the biggest surprise, registering better-than-expected sales as demand soared for its high-end smartphones. Nokia shipped a huge 126.9 million handsets worldwide in Q4 2009, jumping 12 percent from 113.1 million units a year ago. Nokia may have outperformed in smartphones, but longer-term challenges still remain, including below-average share of the high-growth touchscreen market and a tiny presence in the US market.

On the other end, Motorola forecasted a surprise first-quarter loss, signaling new handsets failed to boost sales. Motorola is trying to reverse three years of slumping sales and recapture the success it had with its 2004 Razr phone by rebuilding its handset business around Google’s Android software. Droid, released in November has proven popular but Droid alone isnt going to save Motorola. It needs more devices challenge the other device manufacturers.

Mobile-phone sales declined faster than overall revenue, falling 22 percent to $1.8 billion. Motorola shipped 12 million phones, including 2 million Web and email-equipped smartphones, compared with 19.2 million a year earlier.

Orange Shots UK ramps up Blyk-based mobile advertising service

Full launch of Orange Shots gives brands chance to target 100,000 opted in customers. It will initially target Orange’s Pay As You Go Monkey customer base. This offers free music and texts to users when they top up their mobile.

However, the operator plans to make Orange Shots available to its entire (opted in) mobile customer base over time. The project marks an evolution of Orange's relationship with Blyk Media, the original pioneer of the ad-funded mobile model, which switched from an MVNO approach to one of white-labelling for operators last year. Blyk closed the doors on its MVNO operation at the end of August 2009, having notched up some 200,000 end users. The firm re-launched itself as an advertising services provider and since September Orange has been testing the platform with its own content and brands including 4Music, Ubisoft, COI and Snickers.

Orange Shots works across SMS and MMS mobile platforms, encouraging customers to message back and give views and opinions. Users receive a variety of benefits, including news and gossip, content, film and games previews, and sports information.

While Blyk will provide the technology behind the service, it will be sold through Unanimis, the digital ad agency that Orange bought last August for an undisclosed sum.

Opera - Facebook is the most-visited social networking site on the mobile web

Unique mobile visitors to Facebook increased 619 percent worldwide in 2009 according to browser developer Opera Software's newest State of the Mobile Web report. Facebook is now the most-visited social networking site on the mobile web, although microblogging service Twitter experienced the biggest year-over-year leap, with unique mobile visitors increasing 2,859 percent in 2009. All major social networking sites enjoyed mobile user growth last year with the exception of Friendster, which slipped 29 percent.

Despite Facebook's continued growth, the site remains the second most-visited mobile website in the U.S., trailing search giant Google. Yahoo, Wikipedia and MySpace round out the top five. Opera page-view growth in the U.S. grew 228.1 percent over December 2008, with unique user growth up 128.5 percent, users now view an average of 276 mobile web pages per month.

For more on Opera's December 2009 State of the Mobile Web report: read this release