Jelly Bean now runs a third of Android devices: Google

Summary: With a 33 percent use, Jelly Bean finally have gingerbread in their sights and are ready to overtake the aging Android release to take up space.

Google's statistics for devices to access its Play Store indicates that the latest incarnation of Android versions 4.1.x, 4.2.x, code named Jelly Bean — now power 33% of units in the store.

(Source: Google)

In the past month, Jelly Beans use stock — is called the distribution of Google – has increased by 4.6 per cent compared with the previous month. Jelly beans gains is at the expense of other Android versions, especially the Ice Cream Sandwich, which has seen its distribution to fall by 1.8 percentage points and gingerbread, which has seen its distribution fall by 2.1 percentage points.

See also: Android market share is really a "joke"?

Jelly Bean is now a couple of percentage points of overtaking the gingerbread as the most popular version of Android. In the current rate, this would happen this month.

Android landscape is now a three-way split between aging and gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwich editions, and the current Jelly Bean Edition.

The Data also shows clearly how Jelly Bean alone is now the only version of Android that are experiencing growth, which is good news for developers, because the average ecosystem will be less fragmented.

Beginning in April 2013, Google started to deliver data collected from each device when users visited Google play Store. Previously gathered data when the device is simply checked in to the Google servers. Google believes the new data "more accurately reflects the users who are most engaged in Android and Google Play ecosystem".

For now remains the most popular version of the Android Android 2.3.3 to 2.3.7 gingerbread, a version that was released back in February 2011.

Launch of Verizon HTC a confirmed for later this summer

Summary: there has been a lot of speculation about a Verizon version of HTC One, and today Verizon confirmed it will and can be branded as an HTC one.

(Image: HTC)

I have written a number of articles on the fantastic HTC One and it gets better in a week with Google and HTC update. Good news today for the folks at Verizon Verizon Wireless confirmed on Twitter that HTC will be available later this summer. In a good move for HTC, it sounds like it might even start as an HTC one, rather than something like a HTC Droid Incredible a 4 g LTE.

We don't have any more specific info on this model of HTC one comes to Verizon, and whether we will see it in 32 GB and 64 GB variants. Given the late summer release, I hope it launches with 4.2.2 update that includes other tweaks and fixes also.

You will not be able to buy a Verizon HTC one without feeling because the feeling-less versions are only sold on Google play Store as an unlocked GSM model. Like I said before, is the HTC One a better device with sense yet so I do not consider this a problem, and you shouldn't either.

Matthew Miller began using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has written news, reviews and opinion pieces since then.

Moto X confirmed: Made in the USA and coming by October

Summary: Motorola's CEO confirmed the rumors that the Moto X is indeed real and will launch by October. It's being made in a Texas plant previously used by Nokia.

Motorola, now owned by Google, has been rolling out solid Droid RAZR products for Verizon over the last year, but there have been rumors of an "X" phone for several months. As reported by The Verge, Motorola's CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed that the Moto X is indeed a real project and he actually had one in his pocket on the stage at the D11 event in California.

Mr. Woodside didn't reveal any details of the Moto X except to say it will have an OLED display, be made in the USA, and have some advanced intelligence to help you manage your life more efficiently. They are planning to build the Moto X in a large facility in Texas previously used by Nokia to make smarphones. Some components will come from Asian facilities, but the intent is to have a made-in-the-USA phone.

As a veteran of the US Coast Guard, the fact that it is going to be made in the US is important to me and as long as the quality is there, I will seriously consider the Moto X. They are working with multiple carriers so I am sure at least one of the three I have plans with will get the device. I haven't used a Motorola smartphone for a couple of years, primarily because most of them are on Verizon, so I look forward to trying out a new model.

Woodside also mentioned a "handful" of other devices and as an avid MOTOACTV user I sure hope that an updated model of that device is in the lineup.

Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since.

Sex Tech: Ruthless revenge porn site posts young girl

Pinterest is about to allow art nudes, revenge porn site won't remove pics of underage girls, and Snapchats Leaked quits.

Oh — and did you know this column/ist won an award? The San Francisco Weekly named Sex Tech: Violet Blue in its Best of 2013 issue. Thank you for reading, and coming back for more Sex Tech.

XBIZ reports that adult entertainment attorney Marc Randazza filed two civil cases against revenge porn site UGotPosted.com on counts of distributing child pornography and failing to comply with 18 U.S.C. § 2257 (federal age record requirements for porn sites).

According to the Los Angeles case court document, the site posted “lewd and lascivious, sexually explicit images” of a 14-year-old girl’s genital or pubic area.

XBIZ adds,

Despite the ongoing case, and intervention by an FBI agent warning the defendants to remove what they deemed child pornography, the defendants have yet to comply and remove the photos in question.

I find it interesting that veteran adult industry lawyer Randazza seems to be stepping away from Big Porn's "circle the wagons" party line and is now taking on many revenge porn cases pro bono.

The mainstream porn industry's loudest mouthpieces typically attack critics of even its most consent-blurring violent filmmakers and racist production companies, while recently "girlfriend revenge porn" has been embraced as a genre for some mainstream porn producers.

I hope this heralds a signal change for Big Porn's old attitudes.

Let's also hope those images are removed ASAP, that UGotPosted.com gets its [redacted] caught in a combine, and media outlets that cover this story do not include the girl's name in their coverage.

Once a Utah security firm revealed that popular app Snapchat wasn't deleting user photos as it claimed (Snapchat was still storing the photos but not mapping them), a website called Snapchats Leaked hit the news, scaring Snapchat users (and its investors, no doubt) by publishing submitted Snapchat photos.

However, the site's photos were not obtained via the app's security flaw even though media headlines claimed hacking and nonconsent; the pics were user-submitted.

The site was up (shakily) for around 24 hours — and then the site creator backpedaled in the media, eventually removing all the material, and as of today the website now states that it's over and done.

Find out why we snapchatsleaked.com have closed our website...

— SnapChats Leaked (@snapchatleak) June 1, 2013

On the site's page, its creator reminds visitors that the Snapchat security issue still exists, and now there are numerous "Snapchats Leaked" copycats with intentions unknown.

Changing course on their initial 'zero tolerance' stance on human nature, and in light of the fact that people are posting adult imagery there anyway and that some of their branded clients use nudity in their pins, Pinterest says it will now officially permit nudity on its site "in order to placate artists and photographers who have complained about the current restrictions."

A Pinterest Terms of Service change appears to be in the works.

Pinterest's PR team told Business Insider, "pinners have asked us for a policy on nudity that makes a distinction between works of art and things like pornography. A change like that poses a lot of questions. We're working our way through those questions but we don't have any additional details to offer just yet."

The Pentagon announced Thursday the opening of The Safe HelpRoom (sapr.mil/), an online chat space where survivors of military sexual assault can find support amongst each other, while chat room moderators will provide referrals and enforce chat room safety for its users.

The U.S. military is currently in the middle of "what its most senior leaders refer to as a crisis in sexual assault and harassment in its ranks."

Google must show "moral leadership" and block pornography websites that act as a "gateway" to images of child abuse, a Government child protection adviser has said.

With the usual fallacious argument style (that a sip of beer turns you into a violent alcoholic), John Carr, a member of the Internet Task Force on Child Protection, said porn sites are accessible from search engines (!) and called on Google for a "default" block on porn searches — a block where people would have to "register" in order to opt-out of safe search settings.

Anyone else find the idea of being put on a secret list for looking at any kind of website scary?

A few months ago, porn "tube" website search engine Porn MD collated search data by topic and user location to make an interesting inforgraphic (even though it's only a slice of the world's porn search data).

Using the top highlights of Porn MD's results, Buzzfeed put together the entertaining video above — although with an SEO-friendly, somewhat misleading title.

The video is only slightly NSFW for text of sex terms and one image of condoms.

Adult Android app store MiKandi are making porn with Google Glass and are hard at work to have an app launch by the end of next week.

MiKandi told me, "We’ll make an announcement on our blog and MiKandi's Twitter when the [Google Glass porn] video is ready, and we are currently developing an app (or two) for Google Glass..."

Is Android's market share really a 'joke'?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

There's little doubt that when it comes to the battle of the mobile operating systems, Android commands a massive lead over the other players. But is market share all that matters?

On the face of it, having a strong market share might seem good. After all, increased market share means more people using the product, which in turn means more buzz and a healthier ecosystem. After all, seeing 1.5 million new Android devices being activated daily can't be a bad thing, right?

Problem is, market share numbers ignore one vital factor: profit margins. And, as investor John Kirk reminds us in a piece over on Techpinions, there's no point losing money on every sale and then trying to make it up in volume. All you're doing is digging a deeper hole.

He reminds us of the old joke where two farmers buy a truckload of watermelons for five dollars a piece which they later sell for four dollars each. Counting their money at the end of the day, they realize that they've ended up with less money than they’d started with.

"See!" said one farmer to the other. "I told you we should have got a bigger truck."

According to Kirk, there are a number of better ways to work out who's winning and who's losing in a particular market, and market share isn't a factor in any of them. The only factor that counts in his eyes is profit.

And, as Kirk quite rightly points out in another piece over on VentureBeat, many of the big names in the Android ecosystem are losing money or, at best, barely breaking even.

Apple, on the other hand, is doing very well indeed from iOS.

So, while Android might be crushing iOS and the competition in terms of market share, Kirk believes it is doing so by sacrificing the lifeblood of all businesses: money.

"But," Kirk points out, "market share isn’t necessarily a leading indicator. Profit comes from a combination of market share times margins, and people are completely ignoring margins."

Parallels are also drawn between the Android/iOS war and another similar war that has been raging for years, which is the war between the PC and the Mac. PC OEMs increasingly cut margins in order to capture market share from one another, until prices were driven to the point where it became hard for anyone to make a profit from PCs. Compare this to Apple, which kept prices at a healthy level, and worked on its margins rather than obsessing over market share.

"Market share is like advertising," says Kirk. "A huge audience is fine, but it’s much better to have a very focused, targeted audience."

While what Kirk says makes a lot of sense, there are some points which I think he ignores.

Does Kirk expect the Android players to simply pack up shop and walk away from the smartphone and tablet markets in the face of Apple's might? Competition is what makes the economy work, and there are always winners and losers. Kirk seems to be advocating that we jump straight into calling Android a loser and move on.

Some players, specifically Samsung, are making money from Android. Here, playing the market share game seems to have paid off.

Then there's the whole issue of the smartphone market being oddly skewed because of subsidies. As analyst Sameer Singh points out, this could lead to a "profit trap" for the dominant players.

"Profit share in the smartphone industry is currently skewed, because of the economics involved," Singh writes. "Smartphones sold in markets with higher purchasing power are mostly subsidized, which ensures that today's major brands dominate. Smartphones sold in markets with lower purchasing power are mostly unsubsidized, which ensures the dominance of low-end phones, and a number of low-end vendors (with far lower profits)."

The problem comes when the lead that the big players have is eroded as the competitors' products become "good enough."

"However, as products become good enough, pricing pressure and supplier bargaining power limits profits. This 'profit share trap' becomes more problematic as investors & analysts continue to expect the same, unsustainable level of growth and profitability. The only way to escape this trap is by diversifying (IBM is an example), becoming a services/software/component supplier to the increasingly competitive OEM space (Samsung has the advantage here) or by the riskiest approach: attempting another disruption (Apple's rumored iWatch seems to be such an attempt)."

It's far too soon to write off Android.

Ubuntu declares bug #1 -- 'Microsoft has a majority market share' -- closed

Summary: Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announces that Ubuntu Linux bug #1 -- "Microsoft has a majority market share" -- is closed. Rather than simply boasting of Linux's victory, Shuttleworth offers an olive branch.

Give major Linux company Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth credit for chutzpah. In the Ubuntu bug-tracking system, LaunchPad, he just announced that bug number one "is now closed." The bug, which dates from Ubuntu's first days in 2004, was: "Microsoft has a majority market share."

Bugged no more! Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth declared that Microsoft's operating system days of dominance are over.

While Ubuntu has been part of the various factors that have cut Windows down to size, Shuttleworth largely credits the growth of smartphones and tablets for Windows' comeuppance. "Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition, with iOS and Android representing a meaningful share."

He's not the only one who's noticed that Windows and Intel (Wintel) are no longer calling the shots in computing. Mary Meeker, former superstar Wall Street analys, and now a well-respected venture capitalist, shows in her latest Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' 2013 Internet Trends report that Apple iOS and Android now has the lion's share of computing devices with 65 percent running one of these operating systems over Windows' 35 percent.

True, Shuttleworth continued, "Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry." Considering that Canonical is positioning Ubuntu to be an Android rival in smartphones and tablets, it's an interesting comment.

Perhaps even more interesting is that Shuttleworth lets go so easily of the old Linux vs. Windows fan-boy fight. Sure, bug number one, which set Windows as Ubuntu's top enemy, "served for many as a sort of declaration of intent. But it's better for us to focus our intent on excellence in our own right, rather than our impact on someone else's product."

Indeed, after noting Ubuntu's cloud efforts, Shuttleworth wrote, "the Microsoft IAAS [Infrastructure as a Service] team are both technically excellent and very focused on having ALL OS's including Linux guests like Ubuntu run extremely well on Azure, making them a pleasure to work with. Perhaps the market shift has played a role in that. Circumstances have changed, institutions have adapted, so should we."

Yes, you read that right. Shuttleworth, a top business Linux leader, praised Microsoft for its support of Linux. Things have changed!

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Best Android tablets (June 2013 edition)

Samsung Galaxy Tab 6.3 3 is due out in June.

All that is know about the new tab 3 are all rumors, not a fact. There seems to be enough evidence to support the rumors. When (or if) the tab 3 hits shelves in June, when we will have the real numbers.

Samsung has apparently benchmarking their unreleased tablet. These benchmarks are unconfirmed and maybe not the release version.

What makes this interesting is that Samsung uses an Intel Atom instead of their own ARM Based processor in Exynos Galaxy Tab 6.3 3.

AnTuTu total overall benchmark score sticks in
Tab 3 10 at 24,616
Nexus 10 at 13,750
(points came from AnTuTu website)

This gives Intel Clover Trail tablet almost 80% boost over the best performing Nexus 10.

The new tab 3 use a PowerVR SGX GPU 544MP

GFXBench 2.7
Galaxy 3 654 frames @ 10.5 Fps (7652)
Nexus 10 478 frames @ 8.5 Fps (4063)
The numbers in parentheses are frames x Fps
While this may not be a valid way to compare shows the Galaxy out performs the Nexus-10. The figures in brackets are valid beats tab Nexus 10 by almost 90%.

Tab 3 will have 1280 x 800 display, and a Plus version with the same resolution as the Nexus 10 on 2560 x 1, 600

This tab 3 uses Intel's Clover Trail Atomic Z2560. This Atom chip is at least in the same ballpark as Cortex A15 based processors in performance and battery life.

What do these benchmarks as more interesting is the Atomic Z2560 is a chip with an obsolete architecture obsolete 32nm lithography transistors.

Later this year Intel will release new atom processors with the recently announced, built from the ground up, all the new mobile architecture with many new performance and battery life features. New atoms will use Intel's new year old FinFET 22nm lithography.

It is expected that an Atom is running at maximum clock speed will exceed Z2560 by about 500%.

An Atom that runs at a lower clock rate, makes a performance level equal to Z2560, will use 300% less power.

Tablets with new Intel Atom should be on the shelves in time for Christmas.

Things in the Tablet market should get very interesting.

Intel shows great promise to have the ability to dominate the Tablet market over the ARM.

Motorola uses the Z2580 Atom in their Razr. When they start with the all new Atom, we can then have a better idea how Intel is well positioned on the mobile market. The mobile market is much different than the tablet on circuits for cellular radio and sensors (GPS, accelerometer, etc.).