But the figure is still impressive and shows just how fast the app market is growing. Last year, over the same period, Dec. 25 – 31, Flurry estimated there were 1.2 billion apps downloaded. By December 2012, the average one-week download tally had already risen to 1.07 billion. So app downloads over the holiday week grew by 65 percent over the weekly December baseline, which itself was close to eclipsing last week’s record for most downloads in a week.

Flurry also estimated there were 50 million iOS and Android devices activated over the last week of 2012. As we wrote earlier, the big growth in Christmas device activations was in tablets, which for the first time eclipsed daily smartphone activations. I suspect that the holiday week download numbers also reflected a rise in tablet app downloads as well, which is good news for developers who are targeting those devices.

Flurry, which pulls its data from 260,000 iOS and Android apps that run its analytics and advertising software, said the U.S. led the way with 604 million downloads, or 34.3 percent, followed by China, the U.K. and Germany. For 2013, Flurry expects the 1 billion weekly download mark to be the norm. And at this pace, we should also easily get to 2 billion weekly downloads at some point soon.

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The deal, which is expected to close in Spring 2013, allows Avis to get into the growing car-sharing market and gives Zipcar a big backer, which can help it grow and make it more efficient. Avis said it can achieve annual cost savings of $50 to $70 million for Zipcar by relying on its expertise in fleet procurement, operations and maintenance as well by increasing fleet utilization between the two companies.

For example, Avis can provide extra cars to Zipcar on the weekends when supply is constrained. Avis said it expects the deal will be accretive by the second year. Zipcar will also be able to offer more deals and open up new locations as part of the acquisition, said Zipcar Chairman and CEO Scott Griffith.

“By combining Zipcar’s expertise in on-demand mobility with Avis Budget Group’s expertise in global fleet operations and vast global network, we will be able to accelerate the revolution we began in personal mobility,” Griffith said in a statement.

Zipcar is the leader in the car-sharing market with more than 760,000 members in 20 major metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada and Europe. It will operate as a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, with Griffith and Mark Norman, president and chief operating officer set to continue leading the company.

Ronald L. Nelson, Avis Budget Group chairman and CEO said car-sharing represents a big growth opportunity for Avis and is complementary to traditional car rentals. He said he wants to continue the Zipcar brand but will utilize Zipcar’s technology to offer more options under the Avis and Budget brands. Avis in 2011 launched Avis on Location, a corporate car-rental service that allowed enterprise clients rent by the hour. The Zipcar deal is a big bet by Avis, which will use most of its $554 million in cash and securities to buy Zipcar, which also has $82 million in cash and securities.

Zipcar debuted in 2000 in Cambridge, Mass., and grew through acquisitions and mergers including a deal with Flexcar in 2007. More recently, it has expanded in Europe through the acquisitions of Streetcar in the U.K. and Carsharing.at in Austria. It has also taken a majority stake in Barcelona-based Avancar. The company went public in 2011 and hit a market value of $1.2 billion after its stock price zoomed to $30 a share. But the stock price has steadily declined since and has hovered at less than $10 a share since August. The company, however, was looking ahead to brighter days after its third-quarter earnings report in November, when Griffith said Zipcar was on track to have its first year of profitability in fiscal 2012. The deal comes as Zipcar faces more competition from car sharing startups such as GetAround and RelayRides.

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The company’s vision is to ultimately become the IKEA or Amazon of design. Considering IKEA has been around for 60 years and Amazon for 18, Fab clearly has a long way to go. But with 10 million members, the company believes it can be a winner by hammering on its goals, which are to have a unique personality, sell exclusive stuff and “lead on mobile and social.” And it plans on going even bigger globally in 2013.

Goldberg doesn’t go into too much detail on Fab’s upcoming game plan, though he stresses Fab’s success will come down to building out a team of superstars and creating a unique Fab culture. Fab will have to keep up the pace and execution for years to realize its dreams and there’s no guarantee it will get there. But it’s off to a good start so far.

With 104 slides in all, you might not get through them all. But here are some of the highlights:

• Fab has sold 4.3 million products, or 5.4 products a minute. This holiday season, it sold 17 products a minute.
• A third of Fab’s sales come from mobile with 56 percent on Christmas Day sales coming from mobile devices.
• Total sales grew by 600 percent from 2011 to 2012. On a daily basis, two-thirds of sales are from repeat customers. Fab had several days in 2012 with sales of more than $1 million.
• Q4 sales grew by 400 percent in 2012 with 30 percent of sales outside the U.S. Fab now sells in 26 countries.
• 50 percent of Fab’s sales are home products while 20 percent are fashion and accessories. Jewelry and art make up more than 10 percent each. Fab now has 15,000 products for sale, up from 2,000 at the end of 2011.
• Fab ships 75 percent of U.S. orders within two hours, compared to 16 hours last year. Customer response time is down to 15 minutes, from 48 hours last year.
• Employee headcount is now 600, up from 85 at the end of 2011.
• 15 percent of products sold in 2013 will be exclusive to Fab. Fab has worked with 7,500 designers.

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The result is a sleeker user experience and an upgraded platform that will mean even faster updates in the future. Here’s a look at some of the improvements in 3.0, which is coming to Android soon.

The overall look, which de-emphasizes bold colors, has been cleaned up to create a more consistent UI that is easier to read and navigate. Users can now share in-app photos to Facebook and Twitter more easily at any time during their workout. Runkeeper photos are integrated with Twitter’s card system. It’s all part of an improved sharing and end-of-workout experience on Runkeeper.

Runkeeper Elite users ($19.99 per year) can also enable live activity tracking so friends can follow a user’s progress. Signing up for Elite is also now enabled right from the app. The new Runkeeper also does a better job incorporating improvements over the last year such as the ability to track progress against set goals and compete with friends in the app.

Under the hood, Runkeeper touched up every page in the app as part of an overhaul of the codebase. By refactoring the code, Runkeeper can boost the performance of the app and push out new releases much faster.

RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs said the redesign touched almost every employee at the company, which has grown to 38 people, up from 12 a year ago. He said hitting this release on time gives the company confidence it can maintain an aggressive timeline into 2013, as it plans a lot more improvements.

The company, one of the first GPS tracking fitness apps for the iPhone, continues to grind away, thanks in part to $10 million raised a little over a year ago. It’s now up to 14 million users, with half a million new users jumping onboard each month. With the New Year upon us, the update to 3.0 should get a lot of new sign-ups from resolution-setting users.

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The technology, which won’t actually go into production until 2015, allows a user to unlock and lock their car by tapping their phone on an NFC tag on the car door. That would mimic some of the basic building access tests we’re seeing using NFC smartphones. And it also replicates some of the mobile applications that allow for remote entry via a smartphone.

But Hyundai wants to go further. Once a user gets in the car, they place their smartphone in a center console, activating their specific user profile. The car then remembers the user’s specific settings such as radio station preferences and seating positions.

Users can stream their own music and phone contacts to the car’s 7-inch touch screen display, which can also interact with a phone’s navigation, multimedia and applications. It’s not clear if the streaming is via Bluetooth. The center console can also wirelessly charge the phone, something Toyota is integrating into its 2013 Avalon Limited. 

Hyundai said it will be relying on a partnership with Broadcom to power its upcoming connected cars. This will be part of a larger package of connected services from Hyundai such as infotainment, telematics, reverse parking cameras and lane departure warnings.

I do wonder how much added security will be layered on because I wouldn’t want someone to be able to get into my car and drive off with my phone. Users will likely need to enter in a PIN, I imagine, to gain access to or start the car. But this shows again how NFC can be provide value in various settings because it makes tap-and-go interactions intelligent and can simplify the process of connecting and streaming information.

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Ouya announced that the development kits were being shipped to developers, who can also access the Ouya SDK (ODK) online under a free Apache license.

The release of the hardware and software should give developers time to prepare games for the platform, which is expected to be released to the public around March. That’s still the milestone that everyone will be watching but the signs look good for Ouya to make it there.

An early look at the Ouya UI

The company has been under a lot of scrutiny since it debuted as a Kickstarter project in July. The $99 console, built off the Android platform, raised $8.6 million from more than 63,000 backers. That has raised expectations and also concerns about whether the system is for real and can deliver as promised. We chatted with CEO and founder Julie Uhrman shortly after the launch — she assured us that it wasn’t rocket science putting Ouya together and that she was confident Ouya will hit the market by this spring.

The developer console still has plenty of bugs, Ouya has warned developers, and the triggers and D-pad on the controller are not final. Developers will also get a look at an early version of the console UI.

Following a recent CNN report that most of the biggest Kickstarter projects were shipping late, it’s nice to see that Ouya is keeping to its promise. We still don’t know what the quality and experience is like and what the game library will ultimately be. And as Kickstarter has pointed out, it’s not always important that projects ship on time if the end result suffers. But this thing looks like it’s for real.

Here’s a look at an unboxing video provided by Ouya:

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The comparison isn’t just for headline purposes. Waze’s founder and CEO Uri Levine is a Moovit board member and has helped shape the company’s people-powered approach.

The iOS and Android app, which just debuted in New York earlier this month along with Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston and Los Angeles, starts by offering static and GPS-powered data from transit systems and then applies an algorithm that tweaks it with statistical data compiled each day. That allows it to offer more accurate estimated times of arrival that adjusts predictions for the time of day. Moovit also alerts people catching multiple trains and buses about upcoming travel conditions and whether they might have just missed their next connection.

That already makes Moovit extremely valuable, said CEO Nir Erez, for both inexperienced transit riders and hardened veterans who just want accurate ETAs or a look at upcoming conditions. But Moovit works to add another layer of data provided by users. When a user catches their bus or train and leaves their app open, their movements get anonymously sent to Moovit’s database, which shares that with other users, who can then track arriving vehicles.

Moovit also pings a user with a question immediately about how crowded their bus or train is, which can be shared to riders further down the route. Users can also share information about accidents, delays, inaccurate information or provide information about the vehicle such as whether it has Wi-Fi or is wheelchair accessible. Erez said 95 percent of people respond to Moovit’s questions and offer feedback into the system.

A crowd-sourced system like Moovit’s obviously relies on a crowd to really make it valuable. Moovit, which debuted in the second quarter in Israel, is now up to 400,000 users worldwide including 40,000 in the U.S. But half of the users are in Israel. Erez said a city like New York needs only about 20,000 to 30,000 users to make its crowdsourced data useful. He said it’s quickly getting to that point, but until then, it can’t quite deliver on its full promise.

Another weakness for Moovit is the inability to go underground. When users jump on subways, they are unable to provide real time data until they arrive at a stop with connectivity. That can limit some of the data that gets sent to upcoming riders. Moovit is working on a system to better understand a user’s movement as they travel underground by measuring their acceleration and grabbing whatever signals it can get as travelers pass through stations.

As someone who travels on a subway regularly, that’s one of the barriers I see to Moovit. That and the fact that I pretty much have only one route to take to get to work. But Erez said that a lot of users actually have choices for their transit routes and everyone can benefit from better ETAs and arrival times. A Moovit analysis found that users are delayed an average of 12 percent over the time they originally expected to spend traveling on a particular trip.

Erez said user retention is growing as people find more usefulness in the app. And that just makes the app more accurate as it processes more user data.

“If you provide a comprehensive and very accurate solution, people will trust you,” Erez. “They will be willing to use your application even if they know what their route is, just to get reports on trips and see if there are problems reported.”

Moovit, which has raised $3.6 million from Gemini Israel Ventures and BRM Group, has also launched internationally in Brazil, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. It’s gotten a nice bump in attention thanks to Apple Maps, which now recommends Moovit as an alternative for transit information. But it also faces plenty of competition from Google Maps and apps like Embark, The Transit App.

Where Moovit can shine is by making good use of crowdsourced data, something that has made Waze a killer driving app. That’s a differentiator and can help Moovit deliver more accurate information, as long as it can get enough users to buy into the system and share their data.

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Device activations on Flurry’s network hit 17.4 million units, up 332 percent over the first 20 days in December, which represented a baseline of activity. That blew away last year’s mark of 6.8 million new device activations on a single day, said Flurry.

Tablets were apparently the hot gift item, grabbing 51 percent of mobile device activations. This was the first Christmas that tablets edged out smartphones for activations. During the first 20 days of December, smartphones were activated four times more often than tablets.

Flurry noted that the most popular devices were iPads, Apple iPad Minis and Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7-inch tablets, and that Amazon in particular had a good Christmas, increasing its tablet activations by several thousand percent over its baseline during the first half of December. The big increase in Christmas tablet sales may reflect the falling price points of tablets, which are becoming more affordable with smaller 7-inch models.

With all those new devices, it’s no surprise that app downloads soared on Christmas Day. Flurry said there were 328 million app downloads that day, up 112 percent over the baseline. That flew by last year’s record of 242 million app downloads. The download parade was steady all day long, hitting about 20 million downloads an hour at 11 a.m. local time and remaining steady all the way through 8 p.m.

Flurry, which said it detects 90 percent of iOS and Android devices activated each day, expects app download activity to remain high through New Year with a shot at hitting 2 billion downloads over this week for the first time ever.

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The big beneficiary of this ebook reading increase appears to be tablets, which have overtaken e-reader ownership for the first time in Pew’s surveys. While ownership of e-readers has grown to 19 percent from 10 percent a year ago, tablet ownership is now up to 25 percent, up from 10 percent a year ago. Overall, one-third (33 percent) of Americans now own an e-reading device, either e-reader or tablet, compared to 18 percent of Americans a year ago.

The Pew Survey, which polled 2,252 Americans in October and November, doesn’t break down exactly how much reading is actually taking place on tablets versus e-readers so it’s possible that e-readers are still more popular for actual reading of ebooks. But the report falls in line with other reports that suggest that the e-reader is set to decline in the face of more versatile tablets.

IHS Suppli said earlier this month that ebook readers peaked in 2011 and were expected to decline by 36 percent in 2012 to 14.9 million units, down from 23.2 million in 2011. IHS forecast that e-readers shipments will drop to 7.1 million by 2016. Meanwhile, tablets are expected to grow to 203 million shipments by 2013, up from 70 million last year.

The rise in ebook reading comes as traditional paper book reading declines. Pew found that 67 percent of Americans 16 and up read a printed book in the last year, compared to 72 percent a year ago. It’s not surprising that ebook reading is up. It’s just more convenient for many readers. And with tablets only accelerating in sales thanks to smaller units like the iPad Mini, there’s less need to rely on a dedicated reader.

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The results are down from the same period a year earlier when RIM reported revenue of $5.2 billion with adjusted income of $667 million or $1.27 per share diluted. The company shipped 6.9 million BlackBerry smartphones and 255,000 Playbook tablets in the latest quarter, also a steep drop off from the last year when RIM shipped 14.1 million smartphones and 150,000 BlackBerry Playbook tablets.

But the bright spot that RIM kept coming back to was the fact that it was able to boost its cash on hand to $2.9 billion, up from $2.3 billion for the previous quarter. That came from a mix of favorable working cash flow, better efficiencies and tax benefits in the quarter. This stockpile of cash is essential for RIM, which will need to turn it into working capital and use it for a big marketing spend for BlackBerry 10.

RIM plans to debut BlackBerry 10 at a New York event on Jan. 30. The devices will be key to RIM’s turnaround as it looks to get back into the smartphone race against Android and iOS.

While it prepares for a big battle, RIM is remaining thrifty with its money and believes it’s gotten better at managing its costs, hoping that will help power it through its comeback to profitability. A key sign of that was RIM’s restructuring plan, which was supposed to net $1 billion in savings by the end of the fiscal year. But CEO Thorsten Heins said Thursday that RIM had already achieved the savings one quarter early. He said the total cost of the restructuring will cost $250 million compared to $350 million originally announced.

Even as RIM ratchets up its spending in the coming quarters, it still expects its cash on hand to remain well above $2.1 billion, which it started the year with. It’s all part of righting the ship and instilling a new culture at RIM, said Heins.

“We believe that the company has stabilized and will turn the corner in the next year,” he said.

But challenges are mounting for RIM. It saw its first decline in its subscriber base, which slipped to 79 million, down from 80 million in the previous quarter. The biggest reason for the drop off was losses in the U.S., which doesn’t bode well for the future. RIM also said Canada and the U.K. made up a smaller percentage of sales in the latest quarter. That’s a concern because these markets are where RIM can expect to sell the most BlackBerry 10 devices.

RIM is also facing more uncertainty with its service revenue fees as it moves to offer enterprise customers different service packages. Some may actually spend less because they don’t need as many BlackBerry enterprise services. Some may elect to spend more, trusting RIM to manage not just BlackBerrys but all of their devices. That will be a key area to watch to see if RIM can be successful going forward. And a lot will depend on whether BlackBerry 10 gets traction, both with consumer and enterprise customers.

That, in the end, is the biggest question: how well RIM’s new phones will be received. If it can’t move those, even with good backing from carriers, it’s pretty much game over.

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