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re creating smartphone loyalty, determining which OS and device a consumer may buy. At least that’s what a recent Gartner report will have you believe. The sales report ranks Android, Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone sales in the first quarter of 2011, noting the impact of mobile apps on the market share of new sales. It seems the mobile device market is only gaining in strength, Google (GOOG) taking 36 percent market share, leading with 36.3 million unites sold. Symbian comes in second, with 27.4 percent market share at 27.6 million units, leaving Apple (AAPL) at 16.8 percent market share with 16.9 in sales. RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry comes in fourth, with 13 million and a 12.9 percent take of the market.

“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform,” notes principle research analyst Roberta Cozza. “This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google. As well as putting their devices in the context of a broader ecosystem, manufacturers must start to see their smartphones as part of a computing continuum.”

Apps have certainly created an expansive ecosystem for mobile industry, but just like the mighty dinosaur, this era may one day become extinct. The death of mobile apps has been predicted by MIT writer Christopher Mims, pegging web apps as the future. It’s their potential ubiquity across platforms that extends access to web users, instead of drawing lines in the sand around mobile browsing versus the web you access on a PC laptop. Mims calls for a browser-based utopia where offline access and standards like HTML5 harmonize our desperate web experiences, but notes that offline access is far from perfect. Things still boil down to business, where Google’s marketplace has lower operating costs than Apple’s, with a broadening reach.

Recent developments suggest that mobile payments at scale is getting close

There has been a flurry of activity in the mobile payments space lately

While these developments are helping to enable mobile payments and build awareness, it still is not clear which solutions are likely to drive the most usage

Nielsen reports a 39-percent Android platform market share across the major smartphone manufacturers, while Apple’s iPhone operating system claims a 28 percent stake.

A new app storefront forecast by Strategy Analytics says the app economy is strong and getting stronger. Paid downloads are expected to drive nearly $2 billion per quarter by the end of 2012. They predict the Android Market will overtake the Apple App Store in quarterly volume by the end of 2012. Android will be helped with additional assistance from third party distribution outlets such as the Amazon App Store, GetJar, Nook App Store and others.

Of the 65.2 million tablets predicted to be shipped in 2011, Apple will continue to dominate the tablet market with 40 million iPad shipments and hold a 61% share of the market, a new research report from Digitimes reveals. In the first six months of 2011, tablet shipments increased more than 420% from the previous year, with sales expected to increase into the second half to boost the number of shipments by 150% from a year earlier. Apple is expected to contribute more than 25.5 million iPad shipments in the second half of the year alone, up 76% compared to the first half of the year.

With all the ephemeral and seemingly disconnected data that it holds on us, the company hopes to "one day tell people things they may want to know as they are walking down the street, without having to type in any search queries", reports Scott Morrison in the Wall Street Journal. "Think of it as a serendipity engine," said Google's Eric Schmidt at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference last September."Serendipity" is the latest holy grail in the Silicon Valley software zeitgeist: an ill-defined buzzword that developers use to describe services that will connect people with online ephemera they would not normally find on their own. Yet a website's success relies on delivering successes, and something that tries to predict serendipity will fail almost every time. "If you can plan it, how is it serendipitous?" asks reader ShockJockey on the Guardian's Technology blog. Indeed.

Research group Gartner issued a special report on Thursday, noting that Apple will have a "free run" in the tablet market this holiday season as rivals continue to lag. The group sees worldwide media tablet sales as on track to reach 63.6 million units this year, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010.

Gartner predicts Apple will hold on to a dominant 73.4 percent of the market this year, though down from 83 percent in 2010. Android is expected to remain in second place, with the firm assuming that no other platforms will manage a 5 percent share of the market in 2011.

By the end of 2015, the company's tablet share is expected to slide to 46 percent.

Speaking at a press briefing here Tuesday, Bidaud pointed out such mobile strategies would also provide "contextual and social user experience", which he described as "enriched reality" in which information would be meshed with the real world. For example, location-aware apps that could inform users which bus stop they were at and the arrival times of buses that stopped there, he said.

viewpoint, the Gartner analyst said the Internet of things, also known as machine-to-machine communications, was an arena in which there were "lots happening". Defining it as having a network-connected device sending information back to the network, he predicted that beyond smart utility grids, the technology would be used by consumers to share community-specific information such as a weight-watchers group, for instance.

"Restrictions could be in requiring social networking sites and Web companies to host their data centers locally, as well as having a tighter compliance environment for shared data," Sengar suggested, noting that this could stifle the growth of social CRM uptake in Singapore.

Because NFC tags are more expensive than barcodes or RFID tags (just under $1 in volume) they will make their way into high-end retail products first: Cars, electronics, consumer appliances.  As more products start to include NFC tags, this will drive the price down even further.  As the price goes down, NFC tags will make their way into products $20 and above (clothing, wine, shoes, Costco-sized purchases). And then there are the phones. With almost 100 million NFC-equipped phones estimated to be shipped just over the next year and more than 1 billion predicted for the next four years, shopping, comparing, and purchasing via NFC-equipped smartphones will become commonplace.

The global optical networking (ON) market will reach revenues of $20 billion by 2016, as the sector pulls itself out of the economic downturn, predicts Ovum in a new forecast. However, the independent telecoms analyst warns that although the global market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6% from 2010 to 2016, not all of the regions will see strong growth. Ian Redpath, Ovum analyst and author of the forecast, said that "increasing bandwidth from residential broadband networks, mobile networks, and enterprises is the key driver of the growth. Carriers are investing in access networks and mobile long term evolution (LTE) rollouts are beginning to gain momentum. The ON market is also reaching a watershed moment in terms of technology. Networks based on 40G and 100G wavelengths are now poised for mass-market deployment.

Powering remote sensors, which are seen as the key to the future “Internet of Things”, is a problem. Given that sensors may well be embedded, long-life power sources are essential; you don’t want to be changing AA batteries every few months on the predicted 50 billion devices that will be connected to the net. Now U.S. researchers have devised a way of tapping into the energy found in the fog of electromagnetic energy that envelops us all; a fog caused by radio and TV signals, mobile phone transmissions, even domestic WiFi. The researchers have already successfully operated a temperature sensor, according to reports by PhysOrg.

Without so much as a whisper from the retailer itself, Amazon’s Android tablet is heading our way. Rumoured to launch at the end of the third quarter in time for the holiday season, Amazon is hoping it can steal a little of Apple’s thunder and steal a little of its market share.

Apple’s closest competitor in the mobile industry is Google, a company that develops and maintains the fastest growing mobile operating system on the planet. But even Google was forced to admit that its Honeycomb operating system was not up to standard, having previously condemned vendors for creating tablet devices that ran Android builds that were specifically tailored for smartphones.

Amazon is one of, if not the world’s number one Cloud storage and service provider and is seen by many to have led the march towards the Cloud, with affordable and reliable online services that even the most bootstrapped startups could afford. Asserting itself in the hosting market has helped the company make the best of its other web-based services, namely online music downloads and its new Android Appstore.

The global optical networking market is estimated to reach revenues of $20 billion in 2016, according to analyst firm Ovum. The global market is forecast to grow at 6% CAGR between 2010 and 2016, driven by investment from carriers in 40G and 100G networks. This level of growth, however, will vary according to region, with the North American market, for instance, estimated to grow by 12% this year while the Asia-Pacific market is predicted to contract by a further 3.2% in 2011. “Increasing bandwidth from residential broadband networks, mobile networks, and enterprises is the key driver of the growth. Carriers are investing in access networks and mobile long-term evolution (LTE) roll-outs are beginning to gain momentum,” said Ovum analyst Ian Redpath. “The optical networking market is also reaching a watershed moment in terms of technology. Networks based on 40G and 100G wavelengths are now poised for mass-market deployment.”

Nuance Communications (NUAN) CEO Paul Ricci must have taken copious notes in class because his company's recent purchase of Swype has catapulted it from a voice recognition company to an input organization.

I think this is a big move for the company because it expands what it, as an entity, does.

To "swype," a person traces across keyboard letters in a continuous motion to comprise a word. Swype says its input method lets people do more than 40 words a minute, and says the application is meant to work across not just phones and tablets, but also game consoles, kiosks, televisions and other screens.