mobile

Now that Google’s selling Motorola, how much did it overpay in 2011?

Just how much did Google (GOOG) overpay for Motorola Mobility when it agreed to buy the phone maker for $12.5 billion in 2011 Shareholders will have to figure that out after Google announced on Wednesday that it is unloading the money-losing subsidiary on Chinese electronics maker Lenovo Group (0992.HK) for $2.9 billion.

Sure, Motorola had $3 billion of cash on its balance sheet when it was acquired and Google later sold a set-top box division for $2.4 billion. But that still leaves Google CEO Larry Page left to explain why he’s only getting $3 billion for the remaining net investment of $7 billion. “Patents,” he’d likely reply.

Analysts speculated all along that Google made the hasty deal only to get control of Motorola’s vast trove of about 17,000 patents. At the time, Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) appeared to be waging an intellectual property war to beat back the Android challenge. Many of those battles continue and intellectual property attorneys are split over whether the Motorola patents have helped Google much, if at all.

Still, Google said it would retain “the vast majority” of patents from Motorola in the sale to Lenovo.

WordPress 3.8 is available for immediate download

The bright new and shiny version – WordPress 3.8 – is available for download. As I mentioned previously, the biggest change is the reworked administration area that now scales well to smaller screens, like those of smartphones and tablets. It’s far from perfect, but at least it works now. I’m sure there will be more changes and improvements in the upcoming versions.

But that’s of course not the only change. The administration area has changed a lot – more contrast, different icons, improved typography, and now even with color schemes. Also, theme preview and management got changed quite a bit. With the new theme management interface, the screenshots are larger, which, unfortunately, makes them blur out a bit until theme developers will update with higher resolution versions.

Until now, it was particularly difficult to obtain…

Until now, it was particularly difficult to obtain reliable figures on the results of the Android operating system in China. Indeed, there is no “centralized app store” and most smartphones sold in the country do not use Google services, including activation. In fact, it is very difficult to know the actual results. The search engine Baidu has corrected this by publishing a report on trends in the mobile internet for the 3rd quarter 2013. It appears that there would be now 270 million active users of the Google platform in the country (more than 20% of the total population). Growth would, however, decrease with a small 13% against 55% for the same period last year but up 10% compared to Q2 2013.

270 million Android users in China

10 (not so) surprising social media statistics

Fast Company shares the 10 surprising social media statistics that will make you rethink your social strategy. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that all of them are really all that surprising, but they are mostly interesting. Here they are in a nutshell:

The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 year age bracket.
189 million of Facebook’s users are “mobile only”.
YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable network.
Every second two new members join LinkedIn.
Social media has overtaken port as #1 activity on the web.
LinkedIn has a lower percentage of active users than Pinterest, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.
93% of marketers use social media for business.
25% of smartphone owners ages 18-44 say they can’t recall the last time their smartphone wasn’t next to them.
Even though 62% of marketers blog or plan to blog in 2013, only 9% of US marketing companies employ a full-time blogger.
25% of Facebook users don’t bother with privacy settings.

Read the whole thing for more details, links, stats, visualization, and ideas on how to utilize this information.

I’m seriously considering Google Nexus 10 tablet a…

I’m seriously considering Google Nexus 10 tablet as a Christmas/New Year present for myself. Anybody tried it yet and say anything good or bad about it?