The Devium Dash is a 4-inch-by-7-inch unit that is installed the same way as an in-dash GPS unit, but it replaces your whole stereo.  It’s a pretty plain design, with a slot to pop in an iPhone or an iPod touch and scroll knob. Founder Jeff Lizer says other smartphones will fit eventually too, but he started off with the original design for the iPhone because he “had to focus on a single product to get this right.”

The product’s information page says that your iPhone will fit with or without the rubber bumper that many people use. And we shouldn’t fret if Apple changes the body style for its next iPhone, he writes: ”I know the iPhone ’5′ may be released this summer and if its dimensions are similar to the current iPhones then it will work without purchasing a new faceplate. If the new iPhone varies too much, a new faceplate will be developed and released as soon as possible.”

Other interesting specs, according to the official site for Devium Dash:

Right now, Devium Dash is a Kickstarter project and is a little under halfway to its $45,000 funding goal. The company seems confident they’ll meet the goal and start producing units by July — the price will be $300 at retail. Those who cough up $250 now will get a unit when they start shipping, according to an announcement made Monday.

Speaking from experience, it’s amazing how out-of-date even a pretty nice two-year-old car’s stereo can be. It has a CD player and a digital interface, but all I really want to do is listen to my iTunes playlists anyway. My car did come with a 30-pin connector inside the middle console that lets you plug in an iPhone or iPod and control the device through the car’s dashboard. But the car’s frustrating interface uses buttons you click and a wheel you scroll, which is a pain when you’re used to touchscreen tapping or scrolling when selecting your music.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

The proliferation of these products shows that augmented reality, a technology which has a conference of its own, is going mainstream as more people carry smartphones, are always connected and want the latest and greatest experience.

San Francisco-based Nukotoys will be on hand to show off NUKO trading cards, which pop with animated monsters when viewed through an iPad, iPhone or iPod. The Monsterology cards, now in beta, will let kids collect, trade, train and play with 3D unicorns, cyclopses and sea serpents, the company said.

Digital Tech Frontier will show off its new Popar book line. The books are encoded so that a user with a webcam and a PC, will see 3-D, moving images — rocket ships blasting off, planets spinning, etc. — as they read.  (See video here.)

Other AR-adopting toy makers include WowWee, which is using the technology in its new Appgear line shown at the London Toy Fair last month. And perennial fan favorite Lego is using AR in its Life of George game and in some of its product packaging.

There are many potential uses for AR. Hewlett-Packard was on the road at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other venues showing off Autonomy’s Aurasma for retail and other applications. Bodymetrics demonstrated an AR fitting room at CES; some realtors are using AR to make house listings more compelling.

With more than 184 million iPhones on the planet, plus all the other iPads and smartphones out there, the addressable audience for AR goodies will only grow as will applications beyond fun and games.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user antjeverena

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

The company’s apps have been downloaded millions of times, grabbing attention by combining different elements of play into small, self-contained games that are simple, colorful and fun to mess around with.

Now the Stockholm company, a subsidiary of Swedish media group Bonnier, is targeting bigger things — and planning to open an office in San Francisco next month.

“After the past year we started thinking about what we were lacking — and what we could improve,” says Björn Jeffery, Toca Boca’s CEO.

“Generally speaking we don’t think there’s anything wrong with the product. We think it’s about visibility,” he adds. “The product will still be developed in Stockholm, but opening a San Francisco office will give us proximity to Apple, the iOS marketing system and the U.S. market.”

So far getting traction in America has been slower than elsewhere, but breaking in could be a big deal. Toca Boca has already developed a significant following in a range of international territories, from its home base in Sweden (where it has had eight of the top 10 paid apps in iTunes) to unlikelier climes such as Kuwait, where it boasts that it has 40 percent of the top 10 paid apps. While the reasons for some of those successes remain elusive, the team thinks it can ramp up success by concentrating on expanding in particular areas.

“We don’t quite know why Kuwait loves us so much,” chuckles Emil Ovemar, the lead producer. “But it’s testament to our growing fan base: each product does better than the last one, and Toca Kitchen has had 90,000 sales — none of them are free downloads — since we launched it on December 15.”

With its 14 staff working on short, self-contained cycles, Toca Boca has released 10 apps in the past year. But describing its products manages to be both incredibly easy and yet strangely complex. The company doesn’t like to call the things it makes “games,” but prefers to label them “toys”: environments that children can explore either on their own, or as part of a wider playtime. They’re more like building bricks or playsets than rules-based games.

“Mag+ went into the production phase, which is whole different machinery, and we were wondering what to do,” says Jeffery. “So we started thinking about what happens when a tablet like device enters the home. Before the iPad it wasn’t necessarily an outside bet that tablets would appear, but nobody knew what people would do with it.”

“I got my kids, who are aged four and six, an iPod Touch each to see what they’d do with it,” says Ovemar. “They did things like play timed hide and seek, or take photos and make movies. They used the screens to play, not just to sit and stare at… I realized they were toys — albeit expensive toys — that allowed for free imaginations and free play. Most developers make apps for adults: they don’t encourage pretending and free play.”

Accordingly, Toca Boca’s approach to games and play is one that comes from lots of different directions: members of the team have worked in children’s public service broadcasting and iOS, although they have avoided hiring traditional video games producers. The result is a sort of 21st century Fisher Price meets Sesame Street.

Being part of Bonnier — which owns newspapers, TV channels and magazines around the world, including significant U.S. publications such as Parenting and Baby Talk magazines — has so far been a hands-off experience. But Toca Boca does not see its future as a series of tie-ins with other Bonnier properties.

“We really created a company within the corporation; a startup within a big company,” says Jeffery. “There are good things and bad things about it, but Bonnier is a very decentralized company … they funded the business and then let us grow it. The risk otherwise would have been that we’d become an in-house app developer for Bonnier children’s books — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not what we wanted.”

Jeffery will head the new American office, which will initially be based at Bonnier’s base in San Francisco’s Financial District — but says Toca Boca plans to move out into its own space soon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

The key new part of the update is the addition of a new effect called “Depth” that brings what’s known as tilt-shift capabilities to Path’s photo taking feature. Tilt-shift photography lets you adjust the depth of field to take photos in which certain items are in focus and others are out of focus. The proliferation of affordable, high quality digital cameras has made tilt-shift photography increasingly accessible and popular with mainstream shutterbugs, so it’s a nice addition to the Path app, which has had a big photo-sharing component since its inception.

An example of tilt shift photography effects.

It bears mention that there are a number of dedicated tilt-shift apps for iOS devices already on the market, and Instagram also added the capability to the 2.0 version of its app that launched back in September. More than anything, Path’s latest update shows that its team is working hard to keep its service fresh and relevant in an ever-growing world of apps that compete for users’ time and attention. Adding useful new features in an incremental way is a good way to do that.

Also in the iPhone app update, Path added the capability to tap, pinch, rotate, and zoom photos and videos while viewing them at full screen. Path’s Android app has not been updated in a similar way, which may be because there is so much discrepancy between the camera capabilities on devices that run the Android operating system.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elycia Taylor.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Normally a web-based company that decides to make an app wants to translate the look and feel of its site to that app. But Kayak has been there, done that. And from the design team to the executive team, those within Kayak say it now makes more sense to do the opposite. “I got to the point where I actually liked iPhone app better than our website, I thought it was aesthetically more beautiful,” Kayak co-founder and CTO Paul English told me in an interview last week.

Here’s what the site will look like going forward:

If you’re a regular user of the site, you’ll notice some of the subtle changes right off the bat in addition to the shaded background and more consistent gradients and buttons. Chiefly, there are fewer filter choices and fewer flights displayed if they are duplicates or too similar (for example, if two flights are the same price, but one has a longer layover, Kayak will now hide the lengthier travel option unless requested to show it). The layout is also much wider, and how Kayak’s developers used that space is strongly influenced by the Kayak iPad app, which, when in landscape mode, is also a wide-screen device.

At its design lab up on Concord, Mass. Kayak does eye-tracking studies to see what users are or are not using. “Our design goal – if something is on the screen and people aren’t clicking on, we remove it,” said English. The overall goal in making the site look more like a mobile app is to shed unnecessary details and simplify.

Mobile first is a strategy we write about often here at GigaOM. Usually it refers to companies getting more traffic from their mobile apps than their web sites, but it also can mean that mobile is influencing the design of even almost decade-old products like Kayak.com.

If you really want to get a sense (and a good chuckle) of how far Kayak has come in the design department, check out this screenshot of what the site looked like when it first launched in 2004.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

When I was reading The Number by Alex Berenson, it became pretty obvious that the curse of quarterly results is leading to short-term thinking and will be the undoing of the pursuit of big ideas by large companies. That book explains a lot of the problems encountered by the incumbents in today’s fast-changing world.

The second book that I often go back to is The New Normal by Roger McNamee, a longtime technology investor in both public and private markets. McNamee might have become a punch line in Silicon Valley (thanks to his ill-timed bet on Palm), but when it comes to big-picture thinking there aren’t that many who allow themselves to think freely. In his book McNamee argues that we are in a new era and as a result shouldn’t be thinking about the past. Rather, we should face up to what he calls the “new normal.”

McNamee’s argument aligns with my own belief that if you walk looking backward, you are going to run into a pole. Instead, look back, only to see how far you have come. As a chronicler of technology, one of the biggest lessons I have learned is that innovation is almost always unpredictable — in size, timing, scope and impact. In other words, the business of technology is constantly defining what is the new normal. In case you were wondering why I am bringing this up, I will point to some stories I read this week.

An Apple a day . . .

Earlier this month, Apple announced what are essentially mind-boggling financial results for the holiday quarter ending Dec. 31, 2011. The iPhone maker surpassed even its own very generous targets and in the process has confounded its critics and champions, especially in the professional investor community, with a financial performance bettered only by a handful of oil and energy monopolies’.

No one was expecting it. Forget that: No one was daring to imagine it. Why were these professionals unable to make even a prediction of Apple’s success? Because they were always looking back, looking at Apple’s history and listening to the rhetoric of Apple’s rivals and thus making a prediction. I mean, how can Apple, which blew its lead in the PC business and fell by the wayside, do things differently? It couldn’t have learned from those mistakes, right?

No one wants to think about the fact that Apple, like Gucci and BMW, has achieved what I call “aspirational escape velocity.” If the Chinese are ready to line up for a product (the iPhone 4S) and pay a premium for it, even though it is likely that a cousin was involved in assembling it, something must be going right. So why is it then that buying an Apple product like an iPhone or an iPad is the new normal?

Reimagine

Why are we surprised that Apple and Samsung are seeing such huge demand? How hard is it for us to imagine that the cell phone — even an expensive smartphone — is more necessary than, say, a computer was twenty years ago?

Why is it hard to imagine that the world is one giant mesh, and marketing messages from one end of the Earth do indeed have an impact across the planet? If you take that into account then Apple selling more than 40 million iPhones in three months is not as crazy as it seems.

Earlier this month, web measurement and analytics company comScore reported that Pinterest, a tiny company based in Silicon Valley, is now the tenth-largest social platform, with billions of page views.

It propelled itself into a group that included Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Amazing isn’t it, considering that the service is still at an invite-only stage?

But it shouldn’t be surprising. Remember, with every passing year, the metabolism of the technology industry has increased. It took Yahoo more than a decade to blow past 500 million users. Facebook will hit the billion mark in six years.

What seems incredulous incredible today is par for the course tomorrow. I remember the novelty of email. And now I deal with the nightmare of email. I remember the initial thrill of the instant message, and now I live with its constant interruption. Technology is, and will always be, redefining our future.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Screenshot of ShoeBox uploads in Timeline (click to enlarge)

Within the next few weeks, every Facebook profile will be converted to the new Timeline user interface, which shows each user’s life over an expandable Timeline that dates all the way back to his or her birth. That’s exciting and all, but it also means that a lot of profiles out there will suddenly have big, vacant gaps with no content between the time a user was born and when they joined Facebook. Don’t panic, people: A San Francisco startup called 1000memories is here to help.

ShoeBox, an iPhone app made by 1000memories that helps you quickly scan and share your old printed photos, has debuted a new integration with Facebook Timeline. The updated app now lets you scan physical photos directly into your Facebook Timeline. Also, now all photos that have already been added to 1000memories by existing app users can now push selected photos to their Facebook Timelines.

Photo scanning made easy

Now of course, people have been scanning old photos and adding them to Facebook for a while now. But the ShoeBox app makes the process super easy. The app automatically detects where a photo’s edges are and crops it accordingly; users then add details such as dates, names and locations onto the photo, and automatically tag Facebook friends before sharing it to Timeline. The whole thing makes so much sense that Mark Zuckerberg himself reached out to the 1000memories team when the ShoeBox app debuted in October, 1000memories co-founder Rudy Adler told me in an interview this week:

“On the day we launched ShoeBox, we got an email from Mark Zuckerberg saying that he really liked it and wanted people to use it to fill their back stories on Timeline. The whole thing was serendipitous. We were probably halfway through building the app when Facebook first announced Timeline at the f8 conference, and we automatically thought it’d be a great integration then. Anyone who activates Timeline has this big gap between their birthdate and when they joined Facebook.”

ShoeBox uploads in Facebook Timeline (click to enlarge)

1000memories launched out of the summer 2010 class of Y Combinator with a primary focus on being a website where people could remember friends and family members who had died. But in 2011, after landing $2.5 million in funding from Greylock Ventures, the company expanded its focus to helping everyone organize and archive their photographs and memories online.

Keeping a standalone service

Even with the new Timeline integration, 1000memories still expects to grow as a standalone service apart from Facebook, since not every old photo is appropriate for social sharing. “Everyone has these really cherished photos sitting in their closets. They’re things you would save in a fire, but we want to breathe new life into them,” Adler said. “A lot of our current users use 1000memories as a place to put all those photos, and you don’t really want to share everything on Facebook.”

1000memories is a free service at the moment; down the line, the company could start charging for premium features and services, Adler said. In the meantime, 1000memories is working to improve its existing offerings, and a ShoeBox for Android app should make its debut in the next couple of months. To make people feel more safe about using 1000memories as a place to back up their treasured photos, all public content on the site is preserved through a partnership 1000memories has with the Internet Archive.

In all, I think the new version of ShoeBox seems like a very complementary fit with Facebook’s current push of Timeline to all users. It’ll be fun to see how people take to the app in the weeks and months ahead.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

With the advent of smartphone and Facebook ubiquity and pervasive GPS services, Highlight CEO Paul Davison says that we now have more information about the people around us than ever before. However, there are few services that bring that data together and combine all the social and location data available to show us when our friends and friends of friends are nearby.

There is Facebook, which lets us connect with friends and share information about our occupations, interests and loved ones. And there is Foursquare, of course, which allows its users to self-select when they share locations with those whom they have marked as their friends. But there are few tools with the ability to seamlessly provide real-time updates whenever a social connection — or a possible social connection — is nearby.

Highlight hopes to create synchronicity in meeting people, to reduce the friction of introductions and getting to know one another if its users already know they have things in common. “I started with the idea that if you can just take two people and connect them, you can make the world a better place,” Davison told me last week.

After downloading and installing the app, users connect their accounts with Facebook, add a few minor personal details . . . and then they sit around and wait. Or move around and wait. Either way, eventually users will be pinged when they get within a reasonable distance of someone they might know or someone their friends know on Facebook.

That might seem creepy, especially when the app pings you to say someone you have never met before is nearby. But Davison maintains that there are some interesting use cases. Imagine, for instance, that you met someone at a party or through a mutual friend and see them a few days later in a completely unrelated situation. If you were both Highlight users, the app would not only notify you that this potential contact was nearby but would also give you important information to help you strike up a conversation — the person’s name, for instance, which can be especially useful if, like me, you tend to forget names but remember faces. It would also let you know what that person’s occupation is and which friends you might have in common.

The app seems perfectly suited for the San Francisco tech scene, where everyone seemingly knows everyone else, or should. And that is where it is focusing its beta efforts, trying to refine the proximity of how and when people receive notifications before expanding to other parts of the country. Davison notes that in San Francisco, letting you know that one of your friends is a couple of miles away probably isn’t very useful, but in smaller cities in the Midwest, where everyone drives everywhere, that kind of data could be useful (especially if you are both in town from other places).

Of course, for Highlight to really become useful, it will need users to actually download the app and opt in, creating a sort of critical mass of connections. I was part of a closed alpha trial and received pings when a handful of people nearby. None of them were close enough to actually say hello, but a few had strong enough personal connections for me to have introduced myself if I were.

It also needs a little tweaking when it comes to recognizing in which situations it should ping users. I found most Highlight activity occurred while I was on a bus or on my bike rather than when I was quietly seated at a cafe, where I might have had a chance to say hello to someone. As the app collects more data, it should be able to refine the experience.

Finally, the persistent location tracking can be a battery drain, which was both my experience as well as that of colleagues that I had test it out with me. Constantly pinging location services in the background made my iPhone’s battery run down much more quickly than usual, causing me to need to recharge by the end of the day. Davison says that is something else that Highlight is hoping to optimize, for instance by recognizing when users have changed location and when they are sitting tight.

If Highlight can tweak those things as it moves beyond its current hundred or so users to potentially thousands and tens of thousands, it could become a useful app for creating seamless real-life connections among people. Given how open users have become about the information they share, it seems like only a matter of time before Highlight — or something like it — manages to become the connective tissue between the social-local-mobile worlds.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

Polar Mobile already covers a wide range of mobile devices. Its SMART platform provides turnkey solutions for launching native apps on iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry OS, PlayBook, Windows Phone and Nokia devices. It’s definitely a leader in terms of white-label native-app solution providers, but the new funding, led by Toronto-based Georgian Partners, will help it extend its reach further still.

Polar Mobile CEO Kunal Gupta told me the planned HTML5 integration of MediaEverywhere will help Polar Mobile’s clients access not only mobile platforms like those listed above, but also the new wave of connected devices, including gaming consoles, cars, TVs and household appliances, as well as social networks like Facebook. At the same time, it will also offer media companies more opportunities to “leverage audience intelligence (data and analytics) to enable higher engagement and monetization,” Gupta said. He thinks this will help companies improve delivery of personalized recommendations, leading to more profitable business models.

The beauty of MediaEverywhere is that it doesn’t force content providers to choose between apps and web-based offerings; it can work with both app- and browser-based media delivery, depending on what solutions Polar’s media company customers choose to target. When it comes to the debate about whether native apps trump cross-platform mobile websites or vice versa, Gupta isn’t taking sides. He says while “apps include richer advertising experiences, distribution channels and homescreen icon presence,” browser-based distribution offers “discovery and referrals from social networks and search engines, which for many media companies now accounts for over half of their incoming web traffic.”

Polar Mobile’s success is based on the recognition that users want their media accessible anywhere, on any device they happen to be using. The launch of MediaEverywhere will help the company extend the reach of its clients’ products further still, in a connected future where people will seek out the things they love on whatever happens to be in reach, via both the web and native apps.

In addition to launching MediaEverywhere, Polar Mobile also plans to use some of the funding to fuel its international expansion. The company expects to double in size from 40 to 80 people in 2012, and open new offices in New York City and London.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Among all smartphone users, Android still reigns supreme, with 46.3 percent of the market, compared to 30 percent for iOS.  Among recent acquirers over the last three months, Android commands an even bigger share with 51.7 percent of the market, compared to 37 percent for iOS. But iOS took a big leap in the final quarter of 2011, with its share moving from 25.1 percent in October to 44.5 percent by December, eating into Android’s, which fell from 61.6 percent to 46.9 percent over the same period.

As any iOS fan will tell, Apple is more concerned with profits over marketshare. But the new data shows that Apple’s mobile operating system has made up some serious ground on Android in the smartphone market, particularly in December. Spurred on by the big release of the iPhone 4S on the three biggest carriers in the U.S., Apple showed it’s capable of competing even more closely with Android when it has wider distribution.

Android will likely regain some momentum in the U.S. as the iPhone line-up ages and more Android 4.0 devices hit the market. Demand for Android device might have slowed in anticipation of the next generation Ice Cream Sandwich devices, the first of which, the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon, didn’t appear until mid-December. We’ll have to see if this is just a temporary surge.

But this again confirms that for now, the smartphone race is still very much a two-horse competition. Research in Motion continues to give up more ground and only has 14.9 percent of the entire smartphone market, with just 6 percent of purchases within the last three months. That has to be concerning for RIM, which put out a new line-up of BlackBerry 7 devices in the fall. It has to hope those phones can keep sales moving until new BlackBerry 10 devices arrive in the second half of this year.

Overall, smartphone penetration hit 46 percent in the fourth quarter with 60 percent of recent acquirers buying smartphones. It won’t be long before more than half of all phones in the U.S. are smartphones.

Going back to the iOS vs. Android data, it’s still pretty amazing that Apple is competing so well with a limited line-up of devices against an army of Android devices. Now that Apple is cranking on Verizon and has Sprint in the fold, it’s available to the vast majority of consumers. Getting a T-Mobile iPhone, which is actually harder than it sounds, could level the playing field even more, though the effect would be more modest.

Apple is obviously selling a lot of iPhone 4Ses, but Nielsen said that those devices consisted of 57 percent of purchases by new iPhone users. So 43 percent of sales are going to older devices, which is still really impressive. People are willing to buy a phone a year or two old at a discount rather than a new device from a competitor. As NPD pointed out, the iPhone 4S, 4 and 3GS were the top-selling devices in October and November, beating out the Galaxy S II and other Android devices. This is another good sign for Apple as it prepares to report quarterly earnings next week. This battle is far from over, but as the numbers show, Apple may not just have to chase profits. It can take a bigger share of the smartphone market when it puts all the pieces together.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

In a research note to his clients, Um, who follows Apple, wrote:

Multi-Fineline Electronix (MFLX) reported better than expected preliminary 1Q revenues of $239mn v. Street of $215 and it expects less of a seasonal decline than normal for next qtr. MFLX is one of the flexible printed circuit board suppliers for some of Apple’s products including iPhone & iPad. The company expects to exceed the high end of its guidance this qtr as supply chain shortages from Thailand improved throughout the quarter, and as it saw an increase in shipments from its largest key customer (which we believe to be Apple).MFLX saw weakness last qtr partly from a later iPhone 4S launch, so strong results & a better than seasonal outlook for next qtr may indicate underlying demand strength for iPhone/iPad (MFLX likely w/ more iPhone exposure). These results follow better than expected iPhone shipments from Verizon last week, iPhone strength from AT&T last month, Cirrus Logic (analog chips for iPad & iPod) w/ better results this wk, & strong Dec results from Dialog Semi, Catcher (Mac metal casing), TPK (iPad 2 touch panel orders), & Hon Hai- stronger iPhone/iPad orders. [UBS Research]

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Happtique wants to change all that. The company spun out of the Greater New York Hospital Association Ventures to build an app store for hospitals and doctors. Its initial pilot involved 11 hospitals including Mount Sinai Hospital, the NYU School of Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center — all in New York. But outside of creating app stores for individual hospitals to offer to patients, Happtique is now focusing on a bigger goal — creating a trusted standard for all medical apps.

Corey Ackerman,  president of Happtique, explained that the hope is Happtique’s team of four experts can create a set of criteria by which to judge health applications and build a standards program around those criteria in the next six months. That standard will in turn help consumers and doctors know what apps to trust and help them filter the myriad options out there. Once those standards are set, Ackerman envisions developers paying to get their apps certified from Happtique, but would welcome a different model, provided it helped compensate the many doctors he believes will have to spend the time to review apps.

“Patients can go and can see a value in a set of standards for apps judged by actual doctors who treat that issue,” Ackerman said. “For example, oncologists won’t review diabetes apps.”

Developers who submit their apps would get feedback on how to make their app pass muster if it didn’t in the first place. It’s a model that would be similar to how device makers pay the Wi-Fi Alliance to get their gadgets certified. Happtique has convinced the following people to join its panel of experts to create the standards criteria:

• Howard J. Luks, an associate professor of Orthopedic Surgery at New York Medical College and the Chief Of Sports Medicine And Arthroscopy at University Orthopedics, PC and Westchester Medical Center.
• Franklin A. Shaffer, the Chief Executive Officer of CGFNS International, the certification organization for graduates of foreign nursing schools and largest global credentialing organization for nursing and allied healthcare personnel authorized by the Federal government.
• Shuvo Roy, the director of the Biomedical Microdevices Laboratory and Associate Professor, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco.
• Dave deBronkart, a cancer patient and blogger who has become a noted activist for healthcare transformation through participatory medicine and personal health data rights.

But as necessary as some kind of standard for medical apps might be, it’s unclear if Happtique has the clout and knowledge to build one from scratch. While many of the hospitals it works with are “name brands” in the health space, it’s a big leap to get from a name brand for doctors to helping an app stand out in a crowded app store and a crowded field. Happtique has found that there are 23,000 medical apps for iOS and Android devices alone.

Happtique will have to attract consumers and doctors to the standard while also convincing developers to pay for that seal of approval. Presumably it will seed some apps to the app store to give consumers a taste of what the seal means and help them trust it. That consumer demand might convince developers the certification is worth paying for. While Happtique is trying to do a useful thing, marketing isn’t just about offering utility, a fact that has doomed equally noble efforts. But as a confused customer who would rather get a doctor’s recommendation than some random tech blogger’s when it comes to medical apps, I hope this, or a similar effort wins out.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Internet of things: creating tomorrow’s health care
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

Last week my colleague Erica Ogg wrote that Samsung sold an estimated 87.6 million to 94.6 million smartphones in 2011 (though it made a lot less money than Apple, which sold about 58 million iPhones during the first nine months of 2011).

Of course, people didn’t believe me when I pointed out that HTC was about to hit the skids  — it eventually did — and that Motorola is going to become an albatross around Google’s neck. It will — and the missing profit targets are only a start.

“A Googorola vertically-integrated smartphone line could counterbalance Samsung’s influence,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple employee and more recently an investor in technology companies. I don’t buy his argument. How is it that the company that was perpetually in trouble starts doing well because someone else bought it?

It may not seem obvious today, but in a few years, as the rest of the world moves away from feature phones to touch-enabled, Internet-connected phones, we will see Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese companies, go head-to-head with Samsung. And they are so dominant in Africa and parts of Asia that we are going to see them become major players in the low-to-medium end of the market.

With the emergence of Huawei (which launched a really thin and cool Android phone on Tuesday) and ZTE, which have their roots in the telecom equipment business, one should expect HTC and Motorola (and the rest of the wannabes like Sony and LG) to get squeezed out of the market. Samsung will become the high-end Android leader while the two Chinese companies will become low-end giants before they start their eventual march up the smartphone food chain.

Antonio Rodriguez, an entrepreneur turned VC (with Matrix Partners), writes on his blog:

What all of the talk of Android momentum and inevitability obscures though is that the dream of a common Android that developers can write/deploy apps to and users can become familiar with is burning. More specifically, three events in 2011 burned it and we’re now holding on to a charred corpse that is quite different: an Android so splintered that it will make the glass on your Galaxy Nexus S2 Prime Pie dropped on concrete look like an ice skating rink.

The three events: 1. Google buying Motorola and alienating all of the tier one handset makers (none of which to this day have the spine to state it publicly but all of which have now come up with their “plan B”), 2. Microsoft extracting licensing fees from these same handset makers in the form of IP indemnification and 3. Amazon shipping a wildly successful, yet unidentifiable, version of an old Android build over the holiday . . . and making it a wild success. Of the the [sic] three, #1 was completely avoidable but the other two may just have been the name of the game when there is so much at stake in the fight of who paints the interface for the next generation of computing.

These changes mean challenges for the developers who now need to make some tough choices. Over the holidays a developer friend asked me which Android his startup should focus its energies on. Since his company is making apps focused primarily on the U.S. and European market, it makes no sense for him to start obsessing about Huawei or ZTE, at least in the near term. Motorola and HTC are slip-sliding away.

My answer to him was to go for Amazon’s Kindle Fire for tablets and Samsung for the phones. Samsung and Amazon are both spending an incredible amount of advertising dollars to promote their platforms, and it makes perfect sense for small startups (depending on their regional focus) to tie their lot with them. Between those two platforms, he would be backing winners that would bring the highest return on investment for his little company.

That is, and will be, the reality of the Android ecosystem.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• A Global Mobile Handset Platform Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

A big reason for that is editing — or, really, a lack thereof. Video can be a great way to convey things, but even the most exciting event can be boring if the video has not been edited properly. Even though devices that shoot high-definition video are cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever, amateur videos themselves have not gotten any better to watch.

That’s where a new iPhone app called Magisto comes in. Magisto, which debuted its web app in September 2011 and just launched its first iPhone app this week, turns any plain video into a fully edited movie in a matter of minutes. Essentially, it does for movies what Instagram does for photos: It makes even the most mundane media appear more compelling.

Screenshot of Magisto for iPhone

The greatest thing about Magisto is how dead simple it is to use. You log in with either your Facebook credentials or email address, upload one or several short videos from your iPhone (Magisto prefers to start with videos that are at least 45 seconds long,) select some music (you can upload your own song or choose from Magisto’s library, which is sorted into categories such as “Hip Hop,” “Birthday,” “Travel” and “Christmas”) and then that’s it — you wait for the app to do its magic.

The final product is edited to contain your videos’ most “interesting” bits, with music and a few visual effects thrown in to keep viewers entertained. I’ve submitted several videos that are a minute or so long, and Magisto typically took about 10 minutes to turn each one around. You can also use Magisto on your regular computer through its website.

Now, Magisto is not for everyone or everything. Since users have very little control over the final product — how long the edited video will be, and what parts it will definitely contain, are completely up to the app — Magisto is only realistic for casual videos of things like vacations and birthday parties. And people who already know their way around iMovie or Final Cut Pro may find Magisto to be frustratingly short on features. But for most consumers who just want to make fun, short videos their friends might want to actually watch, it’s perfect. And the fact that it’s available now on the iPhone is pretty major, since people are increasingly doing everything from their mobile devices.

Magisto is run by an Israel-based startup called SightEra, which raised $5.5 million in Series B funding round this past fall led by Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro

The results affirm again that Android and iOS are in a two-horse race that has gotten tighter with the release of the iPhone 4S. It’s unclear how many phones Apple sold in the final quarter of 2011, but some estimates are coming in as high as 35 million units. NPD said that Apple held the top three spots in device sales, with the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS leading the way, ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S II 4G, the Samsung Galaxy S and the HTC Inspire 4G.

Research In Motion continued its downward trend, with the BlackBerry OS’ falling from 8 percent in the third quarter to 6 percent in October and November. No other operating system emerged to challenge the big two at the end of last year.

NPD also said that two out of every three phones sold in October and November were smartphones, up from 59 percent in the third quarter. The market for basic phones has dwindled to just 15 percent, while messaging phones represented 18 percent of sales. The results show that the cell phone market is fast becoming a smartphone market and the appetite for “dumb phones” is evaporating. The push toward smartphones is helping Google, Apple and Samsung, which are benefiting from the desire of consumers to carry mobile computers in their pockets.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Banamine

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future