Posts by: Levi Shapiro
his week, 70,000 attendees will descend on Barcelona for the annual mobile techie Fiesta known as the Mobile World Congress . Among the 1500 exhibitors, more than 10% are from Israel, the third largest contingent of any country at the show.
Nielsen has made it official- Multi-tasking across screens, particularly while watching TV, is now the norm. With US Smartphone penetration on pace to reach 80% next year (Asymco) and 2012 tablet sales of 136 million units, the era of Social TV has arrived.
Groucho Marx could have been talking about the Israeli hi-tech sector when he said “I made a killing on Wall Street a few years ago…I shot my broker”. In 2012, as Israeli exits topped $5.5 billion, there was reason to celebrate but plenty of cause for concern.
This week marks the annual orgy of PR excess known as the Consumer Electronics Show. More than 150,000 (mostly male) visitors, many sporting T-shirts with mysterious acronyms like “4K in HD3D”, will alternate between 2 million square feet of exhibition space and the craps tables. Unfortunately for the 3,200 exhibitors, their marketing dollars will be squandered. Although I will predict a few likely trends, when it comes to CES, what happens in Vegas really does STAY in Vegas.
Traditional media companies had an amazing year on Wall Street. While the Dow Jones Index increased a respectable 6.7%, the US Broadcasting and Entertainment Index surged 40%. In fact, other than Sony (dragged down by its hardware business), 6 of the top 7 media conglomerates substantially outperformed the NASDAQ 500.
Nearly 100,000 new developers created applications this year for the App Store, which rakes in 4x more revenue than Google Play. With the number of App Store applications now topping 1 million, application discovery platform Appsfire has released a fascinating end of year infographic about the App Store.
There is no doubt that mobile devices are transforming healthcare.
