2011 was a year of unbelievable growth in the apps market. Strategy Analytics research group (http://www.strategyanalytics.com) estimates that more than 30 billion apps were downloaded across various connected devices.

This explosive growth will lead to increased competition for the coming year, along with validation that the app economy is real and here to stay, with more players entering the app space, according to the research group. Three predictions from the report, "2012 App Predictions: Phones, Tablets, TV’s, and Cars -- Oh My!" include:

° Apple will roll out carrier billing in emerging markets;

° Amazon and Nook app stores will account for more than 25% of Android downloads in the US; and

° A car manufacturer will partner with Android for a dedicated automotive app market.

Manufacturers, developers, and content owners recognize apps opportunities in...

American consumers continue to expand the number of devices and platforms they use to view TV shows and movies, yet report no significant change in the total time they spend watching on the traditional TV set. Which is good news for Apple if, as myriad rumors suggest, it's planning its own HDTV set in 2012 or 2013.

An annual study of consumer video consumption habits conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates (http://www.magid.com) reveals that while more than 50% of online consumers watch TV shows and movies online at least occasionally, there is still growth in their use of On Demand, DVR, and DVD options. Surprisingly, the more alternative platforms that consumers use, the more they tend to spend on traditional TV subscription services.

Notably, satisfaction with HD service is at an all-time high among customers of pay television providers, including cable, satellite, and telco TV. TV purchase intentions...

I don't understand most analysts. The consensus opinion among pro pundits seems to be that iPhone sales for the holidays will disappoint while Mac sales will thrill.

Overall iPhone shipments in the holiday quarter could come in around 30 million units or below Wall Street expectations. I'm not sure what the Street was expecting, but 30 million units sounds like a lot of iPhones sold. (Academic studies have shown that insiders traditionally make higher investment returns than ordinary investors.)

Meanwhile, Barclays said that it continues to believe Apple can see further gains as it extracts more profits out of the traditional computer and mobile phone industries. According to its checks, sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday were quite solid for Apple, largely in line with their own expectations. Barclays believes Macs have momentum overseas in the Apple's December quarter, as it expects unit growth of 22% year-over-year.

-- Dennis Sellers

An Apple patent (number 20110293094) for a "digital handshake" between devices shows that Apple is looking at new ways sharing data between handheld devices -- and perhaps Macs.

The patent is is directed to a digital handshake for establishing a secure communications path between two electronic devices. Each device can capture an image of the other device using a camera (e.g., a front facing camera or a back facing camera) and extract, from the captured image, a key or seed associated with the other device.

For example, each device can display a seed to be identified from an image taken by the other device. Using the extracted keys or seeds, each device can generate, using a same process, an identical digital handshake key. The digital handshake key can then be used to define a secure communications path between the two devices and share information securely.

In some embodiments, a digital handshake key can be shared among several devices to create a multi-...

By Rick Sutcliffe

The Spy recently acquired a few surplus G5s, and in the process of setting them up to be useful file servers and replacements for even older G4s at his home and church, (re)-discovered some interesting things about memory, disk drives, and both hardware and software compatibilities.

First is that all disk drives are not manufactured equal, quite apart from the Thailand flooding that means many aren't being manufactured at all. Two 250G Maxtor drives in an old G5 Quad, when inserted into a new (well, one year old) MacPro, could not be recognized. Evidently this is a known problem with this brand--they play well with some machines and not with others. 'Course, the Maxtor name is gone now, absorbed by Seagate, but perhaps this finicky behaviour is one reason why.

So, the Spy went out to his local NCIX store and picked up a new Western Digital Caviar blue 500G drive for the Quad. No problem getting that recognized, partitioned,...

Economist Martin Sullivan says Apple is no better than other multinationals that have been "painted as corporate tax dodgers by major media outlets." This would seem to contradict a Nov. 3 report in which Citizens for Tax Justice estimated that Apple paid an average effective U.S. tax rate of 31% between 2008 and 2010.

That's close to the ostensible corporate income tax rate of 35%, notes the "San Francisco Chronicle" (http://macte.ch/coRY2). Out of 280 companies in the study, only 49 had a higher effective tax rate than Apple.

However, Sullivan says "despite outward appearances, Apple enjoys enormous foreign tax benefits, just as GE and Google do. By taking advantage of lax U.S. and foreign tax laws, Apple has been able to book a large share of its foreign profits in low-tax jurisdictions and greatly reduce its tax liability in the United States and other major countries where it conducts most of its...

Posted by Greg Mills

The RIM PlayBook is being sold off at $99 as paperweights. Best Buy sold their existing PlayBook inventory that they had tried to return to RIM, unsuccessfully it seems. When they sold out at $99, it appears Best Buy has washed its hands of the worst dud since the Kin Phone Microsoft pulled from the market after about 6 weeks of humiliation and abuse in the press.

RIM has taken the "gang that can't shoot straight" title away from Microsoft as every BlackBerry and the PlayBook have failed to gain market share for the once big gun in the enterprise arena. The outages that mysteriously took down the RIM network and repeated dud smartphone models have really hurt the reputation of RIM. With a bill of materials for PlayBook of about $205, retailing them for $99 amounts to dumping them to clear shelf space.

It is hard to imagine PlayBook coming back at this stage of the game. The promised software that RIM failed to launch...

Apple has been granted two patents by the US Patent & Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Patent number 8068125 involves luminescence shock avoidance in display devices. Per the patent, a luminescence shock avoidance algorithm selectively limits the brightness level of a display device when the display device is activated in a dark environment to prevent the temporary vision impairment that can occur when a display device is activated in a dark environment. The algorithm receives the state of the display (e.g. on or in standby mode), and can optionally receive an ambient lighting value from an ambient light sensor and a user-selectable manual brightness adjustment setting to determine whether luminescence shock avoidance should even be triggered, and if it is triggered, how much should the brightness level of the display be limited. Kai Achim Pantfoerder is the inventor.

Patent number 8067701 is for an apparatus...

Shoppers expect to spend approximately US$748 this season compared to plans of spending $730 at this time last year, according to the Discover 2011 Annual Holiday Shopping Survey, which examines holiday spending intentions and trends for the upcoming holiday season.

Twenty-three percent of respondents indicated they intend to spend more in 2011, up from 13% that planned to spend more in 2010. Fifty percent of consumers intend to spend the same or more as they did last year; up from 43%.

One of the most important insights the survey revealed for consumer shopping intentions is Americans’ propensity to look to sites such as Groupon or Living Social for gift purchases. When asked if they would buy a gift through a group-buying site, more than half, 55%, of consumers gave a jolly nod to the idea, up from 22% who said the same last year. In 2010, just 6% of those surveyed said they had purchased a gift through a group-buying site, which more than tripled in 2011 to 20...

Apple has been granted three patents by the US Patent & Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Patent number 8065143 involves providing text input using speech data and non-speech data. Systems, methods, and computer readable media providing a speech input interface. The interface can receive speech input and non-speech input from a user through a user interface. The speech input can be converted to text data and the text data can be combined with the non-speech input for presentation to a user. Kazuhisa Yanagihara is the inventor.

Patent number 8065392 is for methods and systems for managing web feed content with an email client application. Per the patent, a web feed manager formats web feed contents from a web feed to allow a user on the email client application to read web feed contents as email messages with all the controls typically provided by the email client application for an email message, such as displays...

In an always-on, connected world with a surplus of new devices fit for every function, location and context it’s no surprise that mobile phones are helping people multi-task and even duck out of awkward situations. A recent Yahoo! Mobile/Razorfish study (mobile.yahoo.com) reveals some intriguing gender differences in usage and ranks the smartphone as the highest rated device in the home with 75% of votes.

The more than 2,000 U.S. respondents that participated in the study -- which revealed that the iPhone 4S is the top searched mobile phone -- were asked questions on their multi-tasking habits and device preferences, bringing to light some interesting trends and valuable insights. The study found 52% of consumers use their mobile device to escape awkward situations. Women are more likely to use their phone as an excuse than men.

Overall men (59%) are using their web-enabled mobile devices most frequently for navigational purposes. And, not surprisingly, men were...

By Greg Mills

Bit by bit more inside information is leaking out as to the various visions Steve Jobs had for Apple technology. The massive authorized book about Steve had a lot of insight into the grandiose directions he saw ahead for Apple. I read it on iPad, a fitting tribute to Steve Jobs. His life cut too short by cancer, it is hard to imagine the full spectrum of things he might have done if he lived to a ripe old age.

One news story that has recently hit the internet is that Jobs was thinking at one time of competing with the existing cellular networks using unlicensed spectrum. He would launch iPhone exclusively to work outside of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint using Wi-Fi and other public free frequencies to connect iPhones to the internet and thus the telephone network.

As I mentioned in a previous blog Tony Fadel filed a patent that Apple recently received for reselling unused bandwidth Apple hoped to buy wholesale from...