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Good sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet led to significant gains for Google’s Android operating system in tablet market share during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to new data from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry, which purports to measure application sessions on more than 90 percent of all Android devices, found that Android tablets gained 10 percent share from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011 and now represent 39 percent of the overall tablet market.

The Kindle Fire, which only just debuted this past November, has managed to best Samsung’s Galaxy Tab in terms of application session usage (a session represents an application launch and exit that is longer than 10 seconds). The Kindle Fire already represents 35.7 percent of total Android tablet application sessions, while the Galaxy Tab has been reduced to just 35.6 percent (down from 63 percent in November), according to Flurry data that accounts for most of January 2012.

From the data, one could easily infer that Amazon has not only helped Android carve out a larger slice of the tablet pie, but has done so at the expense of Samsung, and in just a matter of months. The deduction makes sense: the Kindle Fire is the most successful product Amazon has ever launched, and it was the e-retailer’s most popular gift and its top best-seller for the holiday season.

“In January, after the holiday boom in devices and in apps, we see that strong adoption of Kindle Fire, combined with significant downloads driven from the Amazon App Store, resulted in a massive surge in session usage that just edges out the Galaxy Tab,” Flurry vice president of marketing Peter Farago said.

Farago partially attributed Amazon’s success to an Apple-style Fire launch, its decision to offer a more consumer-friendly version of the Android OS, and an improved application purchase and download experience. Farago pointed to Flurry’s January analysis of five top paid Android apps as proof. The Kindle fire, he said, drove upwards of 2.5 times more paid downloads then the Samsung Galaxy Tab, even though the Tab is estimated to have double the install base of the Fire.

Amazon may be helping Android snatch up tablet market share at an accelerated rate, but don’t fret about Apple. The undisputed leader in the tablet category did not see sales of its widely successful iPad slip, as previously suggested. In fact, Apple is fresh off record earnings and sold 15.4 million iPads in its first quarter for fiscal year 2012.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who spearheaded engineering for the iPod, and then proceeded to revitalize Palm, has officially left Hewlett-Packard, the company confirmed today.

The news isn’t entirely unexpected. Rubinstein was reportedly a no-show at HP since former CEO Leo Apotheker killed off the company’s WebOS devices. Even before that his role at HP was reduced with a change to a vague “SVP of innovation” title.

An HP spokesperson told All Things Digital, which first reported the news about Rubinstein’s departure, that “Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well.” Rubinstein confirmed that he only agreed to stick around HP for 12 to 24 months after it acquired Palm, in an interview with The Verge.

Speaking to the Verge’s Joshua Topolsky, Rubinstein deftly avoided chatting about where Palm went wrong or complaining about Apotheker’s treatment of webOS:

We built an amazing OS in webOS. It’s very advanced, it’s where things are going. But we ran out of runway, and we ended up at HP and HP wasn’t in good enough shape on its own to be able to support the effort. I had four CEOs! Mark acquired us, Les Jackson took over as the interim CEO, then Leo, and now Meg.

Now Rubinstein, seemingly going full circle, is taking a much-deserved break in Mexico, where the Palm folks initially tapped him to help save the company in 2007. He admitted that he’s still carrying a tiny webOS-powered Veer, and that he hopes to get back into the mobile world in some fashion.

“I think the future is mobile,” Rubinstein told the Verge. “Obviously there’s going to be stuff that comes post mobile, there’ll be a next wave. It could very well be home integration, but mobile’s going to continue to be really important. But I have no idea what I’m going to do next. I haven’t spent a minute thinking about it.”

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

We’ve seen an explosion in game startups in the past few years. Zynga and Nexon have gone public, an indication that we could be nearing the end of a cycle. Their IPOs raise the question: When will there be enough game companies?

Game Dojos, a brand new San Francisco-based accelerator for game startups, thinks we’re not there yet. The game market will be saturated, not when there are lots of game startups, but when many successful game startups come to dominate their particular parts of the market, as Zynga has done. Once dominant players are established, platforms can stagnate, momentum shifts, and the indie game makers move on.

Accordingly, Game Dojos has created a three-month program where it mentors game-startup entrepreneurs, helping them with everything from connections to monetization to a small amount of funding. In doing so, it is following YetiZen, which set up its own game startup accelerator last year with multiple graduating classes. Joystick Labs has also been accelerating game startups in North Carolina.

Cassandra Phillips (pictured far right), producer at Game Dojos and veteran of the startup-conference scene, says there’s no reason there can’t be multiple game accelerators since there are a variety of other non-game startup accelerators in Silicon Valley, all of them churning out Web, social, or mobile-focused companies. It says something about the sheer volume of game startups that there are now multiple entities focused on providing services to them.

“Gaming doesn’t have a lot of the same opportunities to benefit from networks yet,” Phillips said. “There is a disconnect, particularly on distributing games, between the indie game companies and the major networks. Indies are great at making fun and creative games, but they hit the wall on distribution. The No. 1 goal is in building the network to get the games played and monetized faster.”

Ann Burkett, (pictured in red in the middle), the chief executive of Game Dojos, is a veteran of game development. She is the chair of the Silicon Valley chapter of the International Game Developers Association (SV IGDA) along with board member Simon Amarasingham (pictured in white). They have been active in creating game jams, demo nights, and conferences such as the recent HTML5 Developers conference in September that drew 1,000 people.

Burkett said she had been mulling over the idea for a couple of years, as her small game development company was involved with the YouWeb game incubator headed by Peter Relan, and her co-founding partner is an architect working there.

“We want to offer the best mentorship out there,” Burkett said. “We are thrilled with the quality of companies we see out there.”

For sure, the accelerator is late to the startup wave, which really got going about five years ago on social with the creation of companies such as Zynga. With Zynga raising $1 billion in its IPO, however, a new stage is beginning. Zynga may use that money to acquire smaller companies, or to muscle them out of the market with massive marketing campaigns. Some of that has already happened, as the cost of acquiring a new user on Facebook has risen sharply and the funding amount that companies can raise is hitting a ceiling.

But Burkett said the game industry is in a constant stage of change, with some waves ending while new ones begin. Mobile gaming, for instance, is taking off and producing a Cambrian explosion of new startups that want to create the next Angry Birds, the hit game created by Rovio. Game companies can now create one game that can be a hit on the web, Facebook, iOS, and Android, as well as other emerging platforms.

“I say we are at the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one,” Burkett said. “Once the smaller studios are cornered and the distribution channel succeeds in shutting them out, they will find and popularize a new channel. It’s very hard to contain creativity. The console industry shut itself off from small game studios. That led to the casual web, social games, and now mobile games. This is an industry that does not die and keeps cycling.”

Indeed, the game industry doesn’t seem to have hit its upper limit. Tapjoy alone has used its $5 million Tapjoy Android Fund to give money to 130 game developers in the past seven months. Apple has said it has paid out $4 billion to app developers since the creation of the App Store. Matthäus Krzykowski, managing director at Xyologic, a mobile analysis firm, says that last month, 7,142 new app publishers successfully submitted apps to the Apple App Store, which now has apps from more than 130,000 app publishers. Many of those are games.

Burkett said the company will welcome applicants who simply want to build great studios that make great games. In the past, startups have had to create game monetization, distribution, or development platforms to raise money. From the view of venture capitalists, the latter group have offered more opportunities to disrupt markets, and therefore they can command a bigger value than firms that focus only on making games.

In return for helping its startups, Game Dojos could take a small percentage ownership in the startups. Or it could negotiate to take a revenue split or a fee, depending on the preference of the founders. Because it is a for-profit company, Game Dojos has to remain separate from the nonprofit SV IGDA.

But the leadership is essentially the same. Using connections from the SV IGDA, Burkett and her crew are tapping their networks to provide speakers to advise and drill the first class of teams being accepted for the inaugural program. Current applications are due Feb. 15. The program will likely start in March and accept 10 to 15 teams in the class, with most of the focus on companies with three to five employees. It will offer lessons on game design, distribution, best practices for startups, moving quickly, learning what works and doesn’t, and monetization.

The funding amounts will likely be small at first, Burkett, but could grow over time. More likely, the accelerator will create the connections for the startups to raise subsequent rounds of money from angels or venture capitalists.

Among those serving as mentors are Jessica Kahn, an executive at Disney Mobile; Dennis Ryan, head of publishing at EA’s PopCap Games; Josh Elman, principal at Greylock Partners; Nicolas Beraudo, vice president of business development at Glu Mobile; Rick Thompson, co-founder of Funzio and Wild Needle; Cynthia Woll, game designer; Drew Curby, sales and marketing director at IGN; and a host of others.

For now, Game Dojos has space in The Hatchery in the IGN building, but it is looking for more space.

[pictured from left to right: Andrew Severns, staff; Simon Amarasingham, COO; Ann Burkett, CEO; Melody Schaeffer , producer; and Cassie Phillipps, producer; not pictured is Jim Boyle, CFO]

Filed under: games, mobile, social

In what will likely be a constant back and forth between Apple and Samsung, the iPhone maker has apparently reclaimed the title of the world’s largest smartphone vendor for the fourth quarter of 2011.

That’s according to research firm Strategy Analytics, which points out that Apple shipped 37 million iPhones during the quarter versus Samsung’s 36.5 million. Samsung still remains king for all of 2011 though, with 97.4 million smartphones shipped compared to Apple’s 93 million.

In October, the firm reported that Samsung had toppled Apple in smartphone sales for the first time ever. Now it appears that both companies will be seesawing for the top spot.

Overall, global smartphone shipments grew 54 percent in the quarter to reach 155 million units, according to Strategy Analytics.

But while Samsung and Apple duke it out, third-place Nokia is falling like a rock, dropping from 33 percent in smartphone market share last year to just 16 percent in the fourth quarter. Nokia is only now beginning to see the results of its Windows Phone experiment, but given the relative immaturity of that platform, the company likely won’t be able to hold on to the No. 3 position for much longer.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

It’s good to be the Android king: Samsung today announced its record fourth quarter earnings, in which it saw operating profits of 5.3 trillion won (around $4.7 billion) on revenues of 47.3 trillion won (around $42 billion).

That’s a decent jump over last year, when it reported earnings of 3 trillion won (about $2.6 billion) on 41.8 trillion won (about $36.5 billion) in revenue.

Samsung performance was in line with its guidance from earlier in the month, and the company attributed much of its success to the popularity of its Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note Android devices. Revenue from its telecommunications business was 17.82 trillion won (about $15.8 billion), up a whopping 52 percent from this time last year.

Given that it’s the top Android device maker, it’s not surprising to see Samsung’s huge numbers. Meanwhile, both Motorola and HTC announced losses in their latest earnings.

Shipments of Samsung’s smartphones jumped 30 percent compared to the previous quarter (not surprising since this was a holiday quarter). Looking forward, Samsung expects the demand for entry-level smartphones and LTE will grow the smartphone market by more than 30 percent over the year, and the company expects tablet demand to grow as well.

The company reported strong sales in its TV business and a 19 percent growth in display panels sales. Computers fared less well, thanks to slow sales and an oversupply of DRAM.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Without any wildly successful Android devices this quarter, Motorola took a beating during the fourth quarter.

Motorola reported a loss of $80 million on revenue of $3.4 billion, compared to earnings of $80 million last year. The company’s mobile device shipments were down as well at 10.5 million, a slight dip from 11.3 million a year ago.

Motorola’s earnings show how difficult it is for Android phone makers to remain profitable in the face of massive competition from other Android manufacturers. HTC, formerly a smartphone titan, reported its first quarterly loss in two years last month (while Samsung, now the top Android device maker, is sitting pretty).

It’s funny how quickly things can change in the mobile market these days. Two years ago, Motorola saw its first profit in three years thanks to the wildly successful Droid. But then Samsung’s Galaxy lineup toppled Motorola from the Android throne, and now Moto is waiting for Google to finish snapping it up. Most recently, Motorola relaunched its Razr brand with the Droid Razr.

Motorola shipped 5.3 million smartphones during the quarter, and despite the drop in units, its mobile device revenue was up 5 percent from last year at $2.5 billion. The company shipped a shockingly low 200,000 tablets for the quarter (which goes to show that the Xyboard name was so terrible, consumers actively avoided it).

For the full year 2011, Motorola reported $13.1 billion in revenue (up 14 percent from the prior year) and it shipped 42.4 million mobile devices (including 18.7 million smartphones). The company now has $3.6 billion in cash on hand, as of the end of the quarter.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

In a week when Apple reported its highest quarterly earnings ever, the company is still plagued with reports of labor abuses among its suppliers.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Apple — which is now sitting pretty with $97.7 billion in cash after record-breaking earnings of $46.33 billion in the first quarter — has become addicted to the rapid-fire manufacturing capabilities made possible by low-wage Chinese workers, no matter the human cost.

The New York Times has begun documenting the current state of global manufacturing in its “iEconomy” series, which, not surprisingly, focuses on Apple as the latest manufacturing prodigy. Complaints about working conditions in Apple’s supplier factories aren’t new — Foxconn has been under the spotlight for years after a spat of worker suicides — but with Apple’s revenues on a seemingly non-stop tear, the fact that issues are still being reported is becoming increasingly troubling.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” an anonymous Apple executive told the New York Times. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

The company has made gestures that it would keep tabs on its suppliers. A few weeks ago, Apple for the first time ever released a list of its suppliers, as well as the results of an internal audit report on conditions at supplier factories, which revealed ugly facts like child labor and slave labor conditions.

“I would like to totally eliminate every case of underage employment,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the time. “As we go deeper into the supply chain, we found that age verification system isn’t sophisticated enough. This is something we feel very strongly about and we want to eliminate totally.”

Cook announced that Apple is joining the Fair Labor Association, a non-profit dedicated to improving working condition worldwide, and it would add transparency and independent oversight of Apple’s suppliers. Notably, Apple is the first technology company to be approved for membership in the FLA.

Joining the FLA is definitely a significant step for Apple, though it is just one in many gestures the company has made regarding labor abuses over the past few years. As one anonymous executive told the New York Times (emphasis ours):

If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it… Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.

As Apple continues to reap the rewards of its Chinese manufacturing workforce, that last point echoes loudly. Thus far, Apple has been a company concerned with churning out as many iPhones and iPads as humanly possible. That’s not too different from every other company manufacturing products, though Apple certainly has worked its suppliers to the bone with its lean manufacturing processes and need for perfection.

The New York Times mentions one fitting example, recounted by a former Apple executive.

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive told the NYT. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

While Apple is seeing the brunt of manufacturing complaints right now, that’s likely only because the company’s processes are so advanced. Eventually, all electronics companies will have to take a closer look at how their products are built, especially as devices like smartphones and tablets get cheaper.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Is there such a thing as being too organized? A new to-do app called Clear aims to cut down on the amount of time you spend managing to-do lists so that you can actually, well, do things. The app is being demoed for the first time Thursday at the Macworld/iWorld expo in San Francisco.

There is no shortage of feature-filled to-do apps in the App Store. Apple even launched its own in October called Reminders, which lets you add location-based alerts to items. Many of the current apps are based on or inspired by Getting Things Done (GTD), a 10-year-old organizational book-turned-movement that lays-out a specific way of tracking and managing tasks.

“It has become the Bible for productivity nerds, and the dominant religion in the world of to-do apps,” Clear-creator Phill Ryu said of GTD. “We just think it’s all bullshit. The system is so elaborate and feature-filled that it demands you start investing a lot of work just to make sense of it all.

“GTD has turned into some perverse form of procrastination.”

Ryu’s solution is a back-to-basics graphic and fun (yep, fun) to-do list app. Clear is a color-coded list inspired by that old standby, paper and pencil. Items are organized by urgency for a look reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security’s old threat level advisory system. Pinch and expand to add a new task, pinch in to bounce back to the master list of lists. Swipe right to mark something as done. Swipe left to delete. That’s it in a nutshell. Make a list and move on.

The app is the first project from Impending, a new design studio started by veteran app developers Ryu and David Lanham. Ryu and Lanham first met online Ryu was 16 and Lanham worked at Iconfactory. Most recently, they worked together at another app studio, Tap Tap Tap, which is responsible for big hits such as Camera+ and The Heist for iPhone, and has sold more than 10 million apps.

But Ryu and Lanham wanted to start their own shop where they could pursue their unique design philosophy.

“I think the important thing is to never take anything for granted and question everything — all the known interface design conventions, the clichés and rules of the genre.” said Ryu. “These are formulas, and to us formulas are just a fancy way of describing the rut you’re stuck in.”

The product of this approach is Clear, a collaboration with Realmac Software and Milen Dzhumerov, but other “top secret” projects are already in the pipeline. The Clear app won’t be available in the App Store until mid-February, but the duo has a video of the app in action (watch it below). Impending plans to make Clear free to download and try, but you can pay to add pro features.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Hoping to dispel its reputation for terrible reliability, AT&T today revealed the dramatic extent of its network improvements in 2011 as part of its fourth quarter earnings announcement.

The carrier said it made over 150,000 improvements throughout last year, including the addition of more than 700,000 square miles of 3G coverage. AT&T also said that 3G call retainability across the nation is up 25 percent from last year.

The latter is something I’ve definitely noticed while using my iPhone in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It used to be that I would drop about 30 percent of my calls when traversing the city; now a dropped call is a rarity. AT&T boasts that its 3G call retainability has been above 99 percent since the middle of September.

AT&T said that 80 percent of its mobile traffic now goes over its enhanced backhaul, which refers to its HSPA+ network that powers non-LTE 4G devices. For most customers, that means slightly faster speeds than 3G, but nowhere near the improvement that LTE would bring. Technically, the iPhone 4S is a 4G device on AT&T’s network, since it supports 16 megabits per second HSPA+.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Echoing the sentiments of its competitors, AT&T today discussed the growing need for more wireless spectrum in the US and criticized the FCC’s inability to open up more spectrum, in its fourth quarter earnings call.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the wireless industry is in the midst of tremendous growth, but “this growth cannot continue without more spectrum being cleared and brought to market.” He pointed out that the last big spectrum auction by the FCC was five years ago and that it seems like the agency is delaying its efforts to free up more spectrum.

“It appears the FCC is intent on picking winners and losers rather than letting the market work,” Stephenson said.

Strong words against the FCC aren’t unusual for mobile carriers, but I also got the sense that AT&T is particularly ticked off this time around given the agency’s hand in killing the T-Mobile merger, which cost the company $4 billion during the last quarter.

To deal with the massive increase in mobile data growth, Stephenson said, AT&T will “manage usage-based data plans, increased pricing and managing the speeds of the highest volume users.” The company should still be able to continue its LTE rollout with its current spectrum, and Stephenson noted that the technology is 30-40 percent more efficient than 3G. But he added, “LTE is important, but it is not the silver bullet in terms of capacity planning. What that means is that to meet customer demand we need to continue our spectrum push.”

“We have an industry clearly stuck in creating capacity,” Stephenson said. “Clearly it’s time for Congress and the FCC to step up.”

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat