Ben Evans on Facebook and their 300m app users: "70% of mobile users and 30% of all users used apps to access Facebook". Completely in line with the figures we heard from Simon at Comscore in a Mobile Monday talk in July: UK web traffic to Facebook was growing slowly and app traffic to Facebook much faster. Projecting forward at the time it looked like apps would overtake web in September 2011;
Retail has problems this year, can't say I think that coupons, virtual currencies, and shopper heat maps alone will be enough to save the high street. I found this concept from PayPal beautiful though: use shop windows even when the shops are shut. Helen has a nice thread going about this over at her blog. I think we'll see some really interesting work done here over the next few years as retail is caught between technology advances and economic troubles and has to adapt;
I hope Project Spartan launches this year. It was due to launch "in the next few weeks" back in July, then in September, and it'd be nice to have the (mostly baseless) speculation of how it's going to change everything laid to rest;
There's lots of talk of how lack of OS updates is a flaw in the Android ecosystem, I prefer the explanation that it's down to economic incentives: once they've sold you a handset, networks or device manufacturers have no ongoing revenue from you, so find it hard to justify ongoing effort on your device. Apple aside, device manufacturers don't tend to do a great job of services which provide this kind of ongoing revenue - Ovi is the most successful I can think of - so I like the idea of end-users paying for upgrades: a few pounds for a significant update to your phone doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
A beautiful set of criticisms of Android 4.0 UI, in ICS paper cuts. Much more constructive than the "Google don't get design!" drivel;
The web may not prevail, a post from Nick Brisbourne building on What the web is and is not from Joe Hewitt: "even though the open web is better, it won’t necessarily prevail". I wonder how long it will take for the traditional net.infrastructure to be sidelined - not long if you believe this post: "The Classic Web is beginning to look like a kludge. Mostly because it was"
Nice to see a couple of deeply constrained social networks pop up to handle social networks of two: Between and Cupple are both for intimate 2-person sharing. Lovely use case (though I've yet to see Between actually work), and I wonder if buddy-systems might be useful in other situations: could we usefully deploy 2-person social networks for folks trying to give up smoking, lose weight, or otherwise improve their behaviour not in public, but with the support of a friend?