Thursday, January 23, 2014

Article: Lyst, A Fashion E-Commerce Aggregator, Raises $14M More, Plans Beacon Rollout With PayPal

Lyst, a platform that aggregates different fashion commerce sites in a single place with a "universal shopping cart", is today announcing a $14 million round of funding — money that it will use to ramp up its marketing and to hire more data scientists and other engineers to keep building out its ...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/lyst-a-fashion-e-commerce-aggregator-raises-14m-more-plans-beacon-rollout-with-paypal/

Sent via Flipboard

Read More...

drag2share: Google wants you to know what you're clicking on

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/22/google-search-website-sourcing-information/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

Google knows a lot, both about its users and about the internet in general. Today, the team in Mountain View has found a new way to share more of its vast knowledge of the web with us by providing background info on sites that show up in search results. You see, site information is gleaned from Google's Knowledge Graph, and for every site we've checked thus far, that means the data's coming from Wikipedia -- so don't go thinking that this new cursory background check is 100-percent accurate. Google's not providing the extra info about all sites, either, just those that are "widely recognized as notable online" according to the company's blog post announcing the new capability. Still, it's a nifty addition that should give netizens some peace of mind before clicking search-provided links, and Google's promising that as the Knowledge Graph grows, so too will the amount of information this new feature can provide.

Read More...

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Sharp's AQUOS Serie mini phone has a Full HD IGZO display, bright colors, limited stateside availability

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/22/sharps-aquos-serie-mini-phone/

With phone specifications often reaching a terminal velocity before the next new technology or trend, giving your hardware a differentiator can be hard. Sharp's new AQUOS Serie mini SHL24, however, is having a stab at a couple. Firstly, the TV-maker is leveraging its IGZO screen tech, and spicing it up by cramming a full (1080p) HD display into the 4.5-inch panel -- that's almost 490 PPI. Secondly, in what it's calling an "EDGEST" design, the AQUOS Serie mini SHL24 seems to have some of the thinnest bezels we've seen for some time (bar the bottom one where the buttons are) making that screen really take pride of place. Thirdly? Colors of course! As for the rest of the specification, well it's not too shabby either. First up it's running Android Jellybean (4.2), sports a 13-megapixel camera, 16GB of storage (with an SD card slot) and a Snapdragon (MSM8974) quad-core processor -- clocked at around 2.2 GHz. Oh, and it's even waterproofed to IPX57 standards. That's quite a few boxes ticked. But, sadly there's one biggie that currently remains empty -- as far as we can see right now, this is a Japan-only device. Sorry.

Filed under: ,

Comments

Via: Phone Arena

Source: KDDI, Sharp

Read More...

Phablet Shipments Are Exploding, But They Won't Have A Huge Impact On The Overall Smartphone Market

Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome

Massive screens and large form factors are finally resonating with consumers in the smartphone market, according to a new report from Juniper Research

  • Juniper forecasts that worldwide annual phablet shipments will hit 120 million in 2018. 
  • That's up from just 20 million last year, which equates to roughly 43% compound annual growth between 2013 and 2018. 
  • Lining those numbers up against our recent smartphone market forecast figures, though, shows that, despite rapid growth, phablets are unlikely to have a truly defining impact on the smartphone market. By 2018, they will only make up about 5% of smartphone shipments, according to our estimates. 

Samsung is already at the forefront of the phablet movement and having an enormous impact on the market as a whole. In fact, the 5.7-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 3 may have accounted for over half the 2013 phablet sales reported by Juniper; Samsung sold a reported 10 million units in just two months on the market

But Juniper defines a phablet device narrowly, as a smartphone whose screen is 5.6 inches or above. IDC, on the other hand, defines phablets as a smartphone with a screen size of between 5 inches to 6.9 inches. By this definition, demand for phablets in Asia-Pacific alone is accounting for a much bigger slice of the smartphone market. In the second quarter of 2013, IDC reported that phablet shipments in the region reached 25 million.

We consider Juniper's definition a fair benchmark for the phablet category, but it's still important to keep in mind that the overall trend in the smartphone market is to larger-sized phones, even if these bigger devices aren't quite phablets. 

Consumers are embracing larger 5-inch screens and gravitating away from smaller 3.5 or 4-inch screens. For example, Samsung's Galaxy line of smartphones have taken developed markets by storm. In North America, the Galaxy S3 and S4, at 4.8 and 5 inches, respectively, make up over 55% of smartphone Web traffic, according to Chitika

Click here to download the chart and data in Excel

< em>Click here to see a larger version of this chart

PhabletForecast

Join the conversation about this story »


    






Read More...

drag2share: South Korea Is Building A $1.5 Billion 5G Service That Can Download Movies In A Second

source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/lPE7OF3wC3U/south-korea-is-building-a-15-billion-5g-service-2014-1

Seoul south korea

South Korea, already one of the most wired countries on earth, Wednesday announced a 1.6 trillion won ($1.5 billion) plan to roll out a next-generation 5G wireless service quick enough to download full-length films in a second.

The science ministry said it aims to implement the technology -- about 1,000 times faster than the 4G services currently available -- within six years.

"We helped fuel national growth with 2G services in the 1990s, 3G in the 2000s and 4G around 2010. Now it is time to take preemptive action to develop 5G," the ministry said in a statement.

"Countries in Europe, China and the US are making aggressive efforts to develop 5G technology ... and we believe there will be fierce competition in this market in a few years," it said.

Under the roadmap, a trial 5G service will be rolled out in 2017 and a fully commercial service in December 2020.

Priority will be given to developing key features for the new network, including Ultra-HD and hologram transmission as well as cutting-edge social networking services.

Related industries will be able to rack up sales of 5G-related devices and infrastructure equipment worth 331 trillion won from 2020 to 2026, the ministry estimated.

Read More...