cross pond high tech

Global tablet shipments are rising, but a new report from Strategy Analytics says Apple's tablet market share continues to slip, despite its utter dominance just a few years ago. Based on Strategy Analytics data charted for us by BI Intelligence, the iPad's global market share dropped 20%, from a 32.6% share in 2013 to 26.1% in 2014.

Strategy Analytics says the leading tablet makers can no longer "rely on inertia alone" as other smaller players are beginning to offer cheaper tablets with competitive features. But Apple CEO Tim Cook is still confident in the iPad, especially in businesses: Last month, he said the company's partnership with IBM could help "move the dial" with sales, and the rumored 12-inch iPad could certainly improve Apple's tablet market share, especially if it offers businesspeople more features for advanced productivity.

Based on where things stand now, more than 90% of 222 smartphone patent infringement assertions by major players against other large organizations have gone nowhere, with 109 assertions (49%) having failed (so far) and 93 assertions (42%) having been dropped outside the context of a comprehensive settlement or having suffered a comparably negative fate

Out of the 9% of cases (20 of the 222 assertions) in which liability was established (and not reversed so far, or not before a settlement), only 10 -- 4.5% -- resulted in lasting injunctive relief. And that number would most likely be closer to 3% if, for example, the patents underlying Nokia's German injunctions against HTC had come to judgment in the Federal Patent Court. What's more important than alternative scenarios is that none of the injunctions against the Android operating system itself (including its key apps) had enough impact to force someone into a settlement.

Thanks to strong growth of its online payments business, eBay reported better-than-expected second quarter results yesterday. Net income increased to $676 million from $640 million in the same quarter a year ago. Overall revenue climbed 13% to $4.37 billion, as eBay's payments business once again outgrew the company's core business, the marketplace, by a wide margin.

The PayPal unit now accounts for 45% of eBay's net revenue and is on track to become the company's main revenue source in the near future. eBay's marketplace business was hurt by a severe security breach in the past quarter, as a cyberattack left the company no choice but to ask its 145 million users to change their passwords.

According to a new report from Sandvine, YouTube and Facebook account for roughly one third of mobile traffic in North America during peak periods. HTTP, the protocol used for simple web browsing, is ranked third, accounting for 12.6% of mobile traffic. 

The Top 10 are comprised of many popular apps/services and account for a combined total of 77%. The remaining 23% percent are accounted for the huge long tail of mobile apps available.

If there's one negative thing you've heard about the iPhone in past few years, it's that it's getting walloped in market share battle with Android. 

Around the world, that's certainly true, but in the U.S., the iPhone is doing pretty well. As you can see in this chart from Statista based on data from comScore, Android is actually falling while the iPhone continues to take share.

Apple's iTunes business exceeded $4 billion revenue last quarter. Horace Dediu broke down where all the sales are coming from on his site, Asymco. As you can see, it's mostly a mix of content and app sales.

Based on IDC data charted for us by BI Intelligence, Samsung’s market share is getting eaten not only by Apple, representing the high-end smartphone market, but most notably from low-end phone makers in China including Lenovo, Huawei, and Xiaomi, which has come out of nowhere to become the biggest smartphone maker in China and the third-biggest in the world.

In case you hadn’t heard, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba just had the world's biggest IPO in history. 

But if you thought Alibaba's revenue was explosive, get this: Based on estimates from The Economist charted for us by Business Insider Intelligence, Alibaba shoppers spend an average of $9,368 each second. This is an incredible feat, especially when you consider Amazon shoppers spend less than half of that value ($3,691) each second. Users on eBay, which once tried to compete with Alibaba in China, only spend about $2,775 each second. In other words, Alibaba sells a ton of stuff, and consumers feel very comfortable buying all of it.

As you can see, the price of a PC has fallen, significantly through the years. And yet, the price of a gaming console has risen. Why is this? Thompson speculates, "Incumbents are driven by their best customers to add more and more features that drive up the price, causing the incumbents’ product to move further and further away from the average customer’s needs."

As the price goes up, it becomes less appealing. One of the great things about Nintendo in the 80s was that it was an affordable computing device. These things are no longer relatively affordable.

This chart from Bessemer Venture Partners shows how far a basket of "cloud" stocks has fallen from their peak. The cloud index tracks 37 publicly traded companies. 

The cloud companies are still outperforming the broader market since 2012, but the trend doesn't look great.

Monthly active users were 241 million. The company added only 9 million more users since the last quarter — that is very weak progress. Only 1 million users were added in the U.S.
Worse, timeline views (a measure of how engaged users are with Twitter) actually declined sequentially.

Here's a pretty neat chart from comScore, via...

This OpenSignal  chart on the state of Android is based on the last 682,000 downloads of its app.

It says there are 11,868 distinct Android devices, up from 3,997 Android devices last year.

For years, people have been predicting the death of Microsoft's Windows dominance. And in the last two years, it's finally happened. The rise of iOS and Android have made Microsoft's operating system significantly less important. 

Luckily for Microsoft, this hasn't meant the death of its business overall. Thanks to the strength of its Office franchise and its Servers and Tools business, Microsoft is still very healthy. 

But, there's no escaping that Windows is what drives the whole company. CEOSteve Ballmer calls Windows, "the heart and soul of Microsoft from WindowsPCs to Windows Servers to Windows Phones and Windows Azure." And that heart is beating a little bit more weakly today than it was in say, 2005. 

This chart from Asymco earlier this year illustrates the decline of Microsoft's Windows monopoly as Apple has risen. There are other illustrations of the same thing here and here.