WebRTC has long failed to live up to a tremendous amount of hype. But while major challenges remain, the technology is clearly gaining momentum and is positioned to make big strides over the 12 to 24 months.
The market for point-of-sale mobile payments continues to spin its wheels in North America, but restaurants might provide the opening payments providers have long been looking for.
Amazon is widely expected unveil its first smartphone at a press event this week. The company has done an impressive job of building an app ecosystem for its line of Android tablets, but faces even bigger challenges as it enters a brutal handset market.
Amazon will reportedly is preparing to introduce a smartphone that presumably will run a forked version of Android, just as its tablets do. But the online retailer would face a huge challenge in replacing Google’s proprietary cloud services in Android.
Yahoo is taking a page from Facebook’s playbook by placing click-to-download ads from app publishers looking to ramp up distribution of their offerings. It’s a wise move from a company that has yet to make much of a dent in the promising world of mobile advertising.
The freemium model is fueling revenues not just for mobile games but also for other kinds of apps. Freemium’s importance will only grow over the next few years, but developers will increasingly find other ways of monetizing their wares.
As its acquisition by Microsoft near closing, Nokia is reportedly preparing to introduce its first handset running Android at GSM World Congress. Microsoft is wise to extend its software and services to the world’s dominant mobile operating system, but it can’t abandon Windows Phone.
A new worldwide survey finds that HTML5 is gaining ground among developers in emerging markets, and is actually more popular than iOS in some regions. That’s good news for Firefox OS and other new platforms based on the web-based language.
The mobile app market is often compared to a gold rush, with developers playing the role of miners looking to strike it rich. But like any gold rush, there are huge opportunities for those who can provide tools to those seeking a massive one-time strike.
Samsung is partnering with Fingerprint to launch a network of educational Android apps targeted at three- to seven-year-olds. The move is part of Samsung’s larger strategy to co-opt Google’s mobile operating system.
