I picked up a recent copy of Rolling Stone magazine which carried a double page ad for the MyHero3G ‘phone from T-Mobile [the HTC Hero in the UK]. The ad, like the TV ad [at the bottom of the page] promotes the fact it is ‘with Google’ but makes no mention of the Android brand nor does it include branding of the Android. Is this a concious decision by Google to not promote the brand?

Similary, there is a full page ad for the Droid which carries no Google branding at all. Is Android not a selling point?

As a side note, the copy of Rolling Stone also included two ads for the iPhone [one solus for Rhapsody, one for AT&T and apps]

On a total side note, try www.google.com/android – nothing there!

Mobile Apps are set to become even bigger business in 2010. With Apple already generating a reported $200m in app revenue (that’s only 30% of the pie) Google’s Market and Nokia’s Ovi Store have both opened this year to tap into this booming market. Whilst some way behind in scale, I believe these app stores represent a signifcant shift in mobile consumption and in turn the actual business model for mobile companies. No longer will mobile ‘phone promotions be purely about what the ‘phone can do but what you can do ‘on the ‘phone.’

The latest promotions from Apple and from Nokia both concentrate on the apps, rather than the handsets.

Joining the bandwagon today is Samsung, which will open an App Store for independent apps next year. To quote the FT,

Samsung’s first smartphones using its bada platform will be released in the first half of next year, together with an “app store” that is meant to include at least 1,000 applications.

The latest research from emarketer also points to next year and beyond as ‘big’ for app revenue. I quote,

Mobile applications are a major channel for content delivery to mobile devices. In September 2009, the Yankee Group estimated that US paid smartphone application revenues would reach $4.2 billion in 2013—an order of magnitude above the 2009 estimate of $343 million.

In time it will be the mobile ‘phone companies without mobile app capability [and associated stores] that will be the laggards.

Google’s mobile aspirations continue apace. A Firmware update is planned for Android (2.0, known as Eclair) which will bring even more enhancements to the Android ‘phone and it looks [from this walkthrough] that the UI will become a lot smoother. News also reaches us that Google are building their own ‘phone to be sold directly and not through the Telco’s. To quote Thestreet.com,

In what is likely to be seen as disruptive to the wireless status quo, Google is working with a smartphone manufacturer to have a Google-branded phone available this year through retailers and not through telcos, according to Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar, who has talked to Google’s design partners about the plan.

This news comes on the heels of a Garter report predicting the Android operating system to be the second largest mobile operating system by 2012. To quote Computerworld who ran the story,

Gartner forecasts Android will actually rank second globally, behind the Symbian OS, which is used in Nokia devices that are highly popular in Europe and many countries outside the U.S. Symbian now runs on about half of all smartphones, but will fall to 39% in 2012, Gartner says.

[I'm still trying to find the actual report quoted, I'll link it here if I do.]

And today we see Google Analytics add a rash of new improvements to help us understand traffic from mobile platforms including identification of which mobile platforms. Quoting econsultancy,

As part of an upgrade to Google Analytics announced today, Google is introducing a numer of useful enhancements,  including the ability to track traffic to both mobile sites and applications, and explanations of what device is being used. Meaning that marketers will be able to track digital campaigns across web and mobile platforms.

Whilst this is not a directly related point to Android it is also another important sign that Google is visibly growing the attention is it giving to mobile platforms.

–

Eclair image courtesy of QuintanaRoo

These are my bookmarks for July 2nd from 09:51 to 09:54:

• famfamfam.com: Home – Welcome to famfamfam.com, personal site and web playground of Birmingham (UK) based developer Mark James.
• Mobile Device Icons by ~pierocksmysocks on deviantART – A great collection of mobile device icons
• famfamfam.com: Hopping with Shortstat – Shaun Inman's ShortStat software is nothing but addictive, especially with the addition of the PathStats extension. But never one to be satiated, and always one to be aroused by interactive visualisation of just this kind of data, I have quickly knocked together the TravelStats extension, which displays a directed graph of the pages on the site, with the thickness of the lines displaying the relative amount of people who 'hopped' between pages.
• 40 Professional Icon Sets For Free Download | Graphics | Smashing Magazine – The motherload of beautiful icons

These are my bookmarks for July 1st from 14:13 to 15:21:

• Buy Sky Lanterns & Chinese, Flying, Glo, Wedding, Festival & Paper Lanterns! – Night Sky Lanterns – Our lanterns are manufactured to the highest standard and should not be confused with cheap imitations. Each lantern is supplied with a non drip fuel cell, which is easy to light, and fully illustrated instructions on how to launch your lantern. In addition our lanterns are flame retardant and biodegradable.
• Your Social Compass | Loopt –

These are my bookmarks for June 30th from 13:55 to 15:26:

• HTC – Products – HTC Hero – Overview – HTC Hero is our first phone to embody HTC Sense™ – an intuitive, seamless experience built upon three fundamental principles – make it mine, stay close, and discover the unexpected.
• The National Association For Holistic Aromatherapy – The National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy NAHA is an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing public awareness of the benefits of true aromatherapy.
• WordPress › Ephemeris « WordPress Plugins – Adds a sidebar widget that display from the astrologycal sky the sun sign, the moon sign and the moon phase. The plugin also display degrees for the sun sign, degrees for the moon sign and how old the moon is. It has options to display the signs and moon pictures large and small.
• WordPress › Widget Locationizer « WordPress Plugins – Widget Locationizer permits you to define where you want your widgets to appear. You may specify the tags, categories, and page/post IDs for which a widget will be displayed. It also provides an option to exclude the widget from being displayed on selected tags, categories, and post/page IDs. Furthermore, you can assign a nofollow or dofollow status for a widget's contents too.

These are my bookmarks for June 29th from 12:56 to 14:15:

• Tether Free for iPhone 02 – Tether Free is an application written to let you use the Internet on your iPhone for free. It uses the same access point for tethered access as your iPhone uses for normal data so as far as I can tell no additional charges *should* be incurred.
• Google move paves way for Firefox on Android | Webware – CNET – Google's move to let software run natively on Android devices opens the door for a version of Firefox that can run on the operating system.

These are my bookmarks for June 24th from 16:54 to 17:12:

• Read It Later Launches New iPhone App (But if You Don’t Like It, You Can Build Your Own!) – Read It Later, a cross-platform browser extension for saving online articles for later reading, has just debuted their newly updated iPhone application. This latest version introduces a number of useful features for voracious mobile readers including support for articles spanning multiple pages, support for sites requiring logins (like WSJ or NYT), new sharing features, and a lot more.
• Mafia makes money from Twitter (but you didn’t hear it from us) | Digital | Revolution – LONDON – Social media gaming start-up Lolplaying is turning to the Mob to generate revenue from Twitter, with the launch of a game that allows users to turn their followers into La Cosa Nostra.
• Once Touted As A Google Killer, Cuil May Deal With Search King – Yahoo! News – Cuil , the upstart search site launched by former Google engineers to a wave of publicity last year, isn't too cool to do business with its supposed rivals, Google or Yahoo.
• Google wants to make friends with your agency | Search | Revolution – Google is testing the new AgencyLand platform in the US with agences including Aegis' Carat Interpublic's Initiative and WPP's Ogilvy and plans to roll it out to all major search spenders.

These are my bookmarks for June 14th from 17:46 to 17:49:

• iPhone Stencil Kit | Design Commission – Sketch out your iphone design ideas with this iPhone Stencil Kit
• blog.jedchristiansen.com » Blog Archive » Thursday, June 18th – Announcing Cambridge Tech DEMO Night – Cambridge, UK is known for top science and engineering talent and research. More exciting is that many of these innovations and ideas are leaving the lab and are being commercialized by startups created in Cambridge.
• 30 Fresh and High Quality Twitter Icon Sets | Icons – Placing a Twitter “follow me” button on your website or blog is certainly one of the easiest way to convert visitors into Twitter followers. Designing a beautiful Twitter icon or badge can be challenging for those who know less about design, but the good news is – there are plenty of nice and high quality Twitter icons and badges available for free.

These are my links for June 1st through June 2nd:

• 37 Data-ish Blogs You Should Know About | FlowingData – You might not know it, but there are actually a ton of data and visualization blogs out there. I'm a bit of a feed addict subscribing to just about anything with a chart or a mention of statistics on it (and naturally have to do some feed-cleaning every now and then). In a follow up to my short list last year, here are the data-ish blogs, some old and some new, that continue to post interesting stuff.
• Wesabe > Your Money. Your Community. – We want to help you get rid of credit card debt and start saving for college for your kids. We are tired of getting stung by stupid fees from banks and credit cards. We believe pooling information on where we all spend can help you make better financial decisions and ultimately take control of your money to reach financial goals.
• Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard – Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.
• Show Pages – Backstory – CNN.com – We show you the story behind the story, revealing a side of news that is rarely seen. To accomplish this, we capture the passion and emotion of witness accounts. We hear how correspondents deal with the challenges and human emotions they confront. And we showcase the worldwide reach and resources of CNN
• Mobile Internet makes its way into cars – Auto Tech- msnbc.com – Just as radios evolved from hulking home consoles into expected accessories in virtually all cars, so may Wi-Fi Internet access break free to become a commonplace automotive feature. That’s the hope of Autonet Mobile, a company that supplies in-car Wi-Fi routers that let passengers use laptops and other mobile devices in their vehicles.
• Build Unlimited Affiliate Datafeed eCommerce Stores | datafeedr.com – In just minutes from now, you're going to learn about Datafeedr, a powerful push-button store creation system that makes it fast and easy for affiliate marketers just like you to set up, manage and update a complete affiliate store WITHOUT touching any clunky datafeed files, learning a programming language or hiring a programmer.
• Warmer, Fuzzier – The Refreshed Logo – NYTimes.com – A great article on the new refined logos which are represented a warmer, 'fuzzier' feeling for their brand.
• 60+ Amazing Poster and Advertisment Tutorials | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine – In this article, we have collected a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials related to posters and advertisements. You will find some are intermediate and some are very advanced, but they’ll all give you a lot of direction with photo composition, illustration, coloring processing, typography techniques, pen tool tricks, shapes processing and much more.
• A Collection Of Resources For Motion Graphics Addicts | Spyre Studios – I have always loved motion graphics and animation and I’m sure many of you web and graphic designers do too (if not, don’t worry, it’ll grow on you!) So, I thought I’d make a list of resources, sites and blogs on the topic since it’s something I really enjoy, I hope you find it useful!