STRENGTH AT THE TOP:
Looking at sales of the iPhone, the premium iPhone 5S accounted for almost 60% of
Whatever the case, there seems to be a few factors working in the U.S. in favor of Samsung and Apple. U.S. consumers have now shown a willingness to spend big for
APP STORE OPTIMIZATION RACE: With app stores getting increasingly more crowded, developer demand for app store optimization (ASO) services, such as improving app discoverability within stores, is through the roof. One ASO company, MobileDevHQ, is looking to gain a foothold in this market and will make its basic ASO tool set free for app marketers. (TechCrunch)
CHINA MOBILE GEARS UP: The iPhone is set to launch on China Mobile, the world's largest wireless carrier, this coming Friday. To prepare for what analysts think will be overwhelming demand for the 5S among China Mobile subscribers, Foxconn has shipped approximately 1.4 million units to the carrier. (Wall Street Journal Digits)
BIGGER THAN ANDROID? Christopher Mims at Quartz thinks the Nest acquisition will go down as a more important part of Google's legacy than its own Android operating system. While Google let Apple get ahead of it in defining the era of smartphones, Nest represents Google's first step toward defining the Internet Of Things. (Quartz)
NET NEUTRALITY IS DEAD: A federal appeals court has denied multiple parts of the Federal Communication Commission's Open Internet rules, effectively ending a rule that Internet service providers (ISP) must treat all broadband Internet traffic equally. Consumers may bear the brunt of this; ISPs now have the right to slow down certain traffic, or charge more for bandwith-heavy Internet traffic, like video streaming. For mobile, this may lead to more smartphone and tablet owners utilizing neutral 4G and LTE networks on their devices for certain activities that may be slowed down on broadband. (Wall Street Journal)
NETFLIX, BUT FOR BOOKS: Oyster, a startup looking to mimic a similar subscription content strategy as Netflix but for e-books, recently raised $14 million to help it expand its growing library of literary content. While Netflix wasn't designed for mobile initially, it has flourished on tablets and smartphones. Oyster, interestingly, was created as a mobile app, indicating once again the huge opportunity for content distribution on mobile. (GigaOm)
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