Sunday, April 25, 2010

At #140Conf NY My Devices Were My Vices


A year ago in March Jeff Pulver envisioned an unusual conference to focus on the impact of Twitter on Media, Information, Communications and Entertainment.  Since Twitter is built upon short messages of 140 characters or less, Jeff's idea was to bring that concept to life with many short presentations by a wide range of interesting "characters" rather than few longer presentations from a small group of established speakers. Thus was born the 140 Characters Conference (affectionately called "140conf").  It quickly became clear that Jeff's new conference idea was bigger than just a "Twitter Conference" and at its heart, it was really focused on exploring how Twitter, Social Media and the real-time web are impacting all aspects of our busy lives.  Hence, the real theme of 140Conf is the now familiar tag-line, "Exploring The State of Now!" 

If You Can Make It There, You Can Make It Anywhere!

After it's New York premiere last June, 140Conf events have now been held all over the world, including Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, Austin and Barcelona.  Last week was the second New York based 140Conf, and it was bigger and better than ever.  One thousand "characters" were in attendance over two days at the famed 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with about 170 of those characters participating on stage as presenters and panelists.  Speakers ranged from Miss America, to Ivanka Trump, to impassioned educators, to MC Hammer, to, well, me!  The entire conference was streamed live on U-Stream, and is now available for on demand viewing.  Jeff and his team put on a great event, brimming with information, insights and inspiration.

Devices And Vices

Since I work in the Mobile Industry, I wanted to use my ten minutes on stage at 140Conf to take a look at the impact of "real-time" on Mobile Devices, and similarly, the impact of Mobile Devices on "real-time" and how both have affected our behavior.  And, I wanted to have a little fun while doing so.  You can see "Our Devices Are Our Vices: How Mobile Is A Real-Time Blessing & Curse" in the embedded video below. I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. 



Thursday, April 08, 2010

Women, Curves and Pearls: Myxer's Latest BoomBox Report Picks Blackberries



Women, curves and pearls?  Despite the teasing headline, this post is not about female shapes and jewelry preferences.  It is, however, about female smartphone preferences when it comes to the Blackberry phones they use.  The latest BoomBox Report issued by my employer, Myxer, takes note that despite the hype and attention surrounding the Android and iPhone platform, Blackberry handsets are still the dominant smartphones among Myxer's users. According to the report:

RIM continues to far outpace Windows, Palm, webOS, Android, iPhone and Symbian based on mobile visits, growing from a 58% market share in March2009 to a 63% share in March 2010. Of the other operating systems, Android comes in second, more than doubling over the same time period from 7% to 17%, while iPhone makes a modest jump to 4%, up from 2% from the previous year. Symbian and webOS occupy the smallest percentage of market share with less than 2% combined, while Windows Mobile was the biggest loser moving from 21% in 2009 down to 10% in 2010.Interestingly, the same holds true when comparing total downloads for the month of March 2010, where BlackBerry accounted for a whopping 72% of the 22 million smartphone content downloads, followed by Android at 14% and Windows Mobile at 7%. The others did not fare as well, with iPhone only grabbing a 2% share, Symbian a 3% share and webOS and Palm only representing 1% of smartphone downloads.

Women Like Their Curves and Pearls

While it is clear that RIM dominates the smartphone visitors and downloads at Myxer, it is also interesting to note that the majority of our Blackberry users are women.  While they are Bold enough to Storm the Tour, as the chart above shows, they much prefer the Curve and Pearl.  According to BoomBox:

As broken down by gender, women were surprisingly dominant across all BlackBerry devices, with the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 having the largest concentration of female users at 70%, and the BlackBerry Storm 9530 having the highest concentration of male users at 46%.

What do you think?  Do any of these findings surprise you?  You can download the PDF of the full Myxer BoomBox Report here.

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