For those who lack the foresight to prepare in advance, or professionals such as doctors who have a tablet or handset and a need for variety of information on the devices, CoreMobile, a startup out of Santa Clara, Calif. wants to help. The company, which was founded two years ago and is a member of the Citrix Startup Accelerator, makes software running online that uses a phone’s location, a caller or even a calendar event to derive context and then deliver a multi-app view of relevant information on one screen.

CoreMobile wants to cram all these apps into one screen

I have no idea if this is the way we’ll access information in the near future — although Chandra Shekhar Tekwani the company’s CEO is excited that almost 300 paying enterprise customers are already using the beta product — but it’s certainly worth thinking about how to cram a large amount of information from different sources onto a small screen.

This is both a UI issue (how people access and interact with a lot of information in a small screen without being overwhelmed), but also a technical one. For example, how does one prioritize or manage API calls to ensure that a paying customers gets access to a feed of data that might be one or two hops away from the original app? As we enter a mobile first world, CoreMobile and other companies trying to deliver business-level applications on mobile devices that could offer us a glimpse of a connected future, one unconnected to the PC, but constrained by its own unique shortcomings.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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The app, which is free, is available now in the iOS App Store and via the web for Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. WillCall helps people who want to make last-minute plans, specifically what kind of concert or performance they want to go to.

At first, there will only be a few events listed per week, mostly for smaller venues and independent artists. As an example, the first list of acts available in the app will be: Shabazz Palaces at Yoshi’s, VHS or Beta at Rickshaw Stop or theater piece Jesus In India at the Magic Theatre.

The coolest part of WillCall — besides enabling poor planners and procrastinators of the world — is its attempt to capture the inherently social nature of concert-going. Users of the app will get a push notification and an invitation when a friend buys a ticket to an event.

“We recognize that folks are generally going to attend shows in groups, and this is our first attempt to making that as easy as possible,” said co-founder Donnie Dinch.

WillCall, for now, is going to be most useful for those around the San Francisco area. However, Los Angeles and New York City are on tap for launch just after the SXSW conference next month, according to Dinch.

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Spending on the two types of semiconductors was essentially a tie in 2010, when wireless chips totaled $51.2 billion and spending on PC chips was $51.8 billion, according to IHS iSuppli’s calculations. But the growth in 2011 was all wireless, as you can see in the chart below.

The rise of mobile devices, which sold in record numbers last year, is responsible. “Wireless will continue to generate the most growth during the next two years,” said IHS iSuppli semiconductor analyst Wenlie Ye. “A substantial portion of the segment’s increase will be due to rising tablet sales, although mobile handsets like smartphones will continue to account for the lion’s share of semiconductor segment in the wireless area.”

And who’s spending the most on semiconductors for tablets? You won’t be too surprised to find out it’s Apple, the world’s biggest seller of touchscreen tablets. Last year, Apple spent $4.6 billion on chips for tablets, more than any other OEM. The next closest — though “close” is a relative term here — was Apple frenemy-in-chief, Samsung, which spent $603.2 million on tablet chips. HTC was in third with $199.2 million.

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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.

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Walmart Labs is trying to evolve with the changing face of commerce as shoppers look to mobile and social channels to help augment the way they buy. The Labs, created out of the acquisition of Kosmix, has been on a buying spree of sorts, buying up Grabble in November and OneRiot in September.

Paul Cousineau, VP of mobile products for Walmart, said the company bought Small Society for its laser focus on products and its commitment to consumers. Small Society impressed Cousineau with its Zipcar app and has also worked on apps for Starbucks and the Democratic National Convention. And now they will take their creations to Walmart’s big audience.

Cousineau said Walmart Labs sees mobile as a big part of the way people will be shopping, both in-store and online. He said Walmart wants to continue to pick up small teams to add to its mobile team at Walmart Labs.

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I first started seeing increased Instagram activity on my own account about two weeks ago. I saw a sharp jump in the number of folks following my photo feed and more importantly, more interactions (likes, comments) on those photos. I also started seeing a lot of links being shared by folks on Twitter. Intrigued, I emailed Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Instagram. This is what he wrote back:

Coupled with being iPhone App of the Year – new activations of iPhones on Christmas definitely gave Instagram a bump, though we’re not releasing publicly how much of a bump. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but things are going well!

The last officially reported user base of Instagram is about 15 million, a number that Systrom revealed in early December at the Le Web  conference in Paris. At our Mobilize 2011 (held in late September) conference, Systrom said that the company was adding a new user every second and had about 10 million people using the iOS-only photo-sharing service.

As we reported earlier, this has been a really good Christmas for Apple. For the first three weeks of December, between 1.3 and 1.8 million devices powered by iOS or Android were activated each day, according to Flurry Analytics. Fiksu, a Boston-based mobile app user acquisition company announced Wednesday that the “swell of new iPhone 4S users, combined with iOS 5 app updates, generated escalated app discovery activity and peak download volumes for the top 200 apps.”

Here are some of my previous posts about Instagram:

• Why Instagram can become the mobile social hub.
• Why Instagram works

Fjord is headquartered in London (it’s the team behind BBC iPlayer’s mobile app and Flickr’s Windows Phone 7 app, to name a few). Each year they brainstorm and research the future of digital services, interfaces and design. This time last year, Fjord predicted that some of the big accomplishments of 2011 would be better ways to search/manage app overload (see improvements to iTunes/Siri), the reimagining of iPad magazines (Zite launched and was acquired by CNN) the gamification of everything, and the rise in mobile payment options (Square, Google Wallet). It’s also great to see that much of the areas we’ve been writing about here at GigaOM and GigaOM Pro for many months are either predicted to finally explode next year or they’re going to see a much-needed shakeout.

We’ve cherry-picked the list a bit to bring you a quick rundown of a few of next year’s next big things to watch out for, courtesy of Fjord, and what they mean for startups and entrepreneurs:

Consumer apps capitalize on the corporate market

Many companies have been dealing for years now with employees wanting to bring their own smartphones and tablets to work. It’s great for workers of course, because they use the devices they’re comfortable with and that makes them more efficient, but it’s also creating new expectations of consumer-type experiences when it comes to the software and services we use at work too. Workers want to use Dropbox, Evernote and Skype the same way they do at home.

What this means: As this continues to be more commonplace — companies of all sizes are starting to figure out how to do BYOD — doing security and compliance right are valuable services. Fjord predicts there will be a skyrocketing demand for these kinds of “corporate specific services, they just need to be built for the users and not the IT department.”

The wearable tech gold rush

The digital guys at Fjord believe there’s going to be a big change when it comes to wearable tech next year. “Prepare for a gold rush to stake out the territory of smart watches, digital jewelry and ‘wearables’,” they say. This means iPods as watches — which Kevin Tofel has written about extensively — as well as personal fitness devices like the Jawbone Up and the FitBit, but also stuff we haven’t seen yet. Perhaps an iPod watch with Siri that you talk to?

What this means: When technology is affixed to our clothing, on our wrist, or in our running shoes on a near-constant basis, it will trigger “a whole new category of service innovation,” says Fjord. That means new startups will be the gold prospectors on the hunt for fresh, thoughtful interface design, functionality and new ways to have wearables interact with our mobile phones, since that’s the most likely network to connect wearables.

Living room revolution

There’s a lot of change coming to the living room. Almost no one watches TV in the traditional way anymore, thanks to TiVo, Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Roku and a bunch of game consoles that act as media centers. With content companies embracing new platforms in fits and starts, the companies that will totally disrupt the pay TV model first are still being sorted out (Ryan Lawler recently discussed what he thinks is going to eventually have to happen). We still have confusing, terrible remote controls, and too many of them too — “for every new box and additional remote control in the room, end users are left more bewildered and frustrated,” notes Fjord. And when it comes to interfaces, that’s still up in the air.

What this means: While that traditional TV model is still sorting itself out, Fjord believes the hottest area of innovation next year will be with the “companion” device to the TV, a third device perhaps, where users interact with friends via chat, see what others are watching in real time (which we see in services like GetGlue and IntoNow), an important area for service providers to make money.

Banking 2.0

Some aspects of traditional banking have already been disrupted, like with peer-to-peer payments from PayPal, but coming next is mobile credit card payments (Square, Intuit) and near-field communications (NFC) payments, according to Fjord. Google is aiming to be a big player with its Wallet technology. But who else will emerge? Once the idea of a digital wallet takes hold, according to Fjord, it “will begin to shift the overall financial power balance from banks and credit card companies to companies that provide the smartest and best digital wallets. Banks will continue to move too slowly to take the lead.”

What this means: To survive, Fjord says, the most progressive banks will figure out how not to be just the “dump pipe” of transactions, but “put true user-centricity and customer value” front and center. That means prioritizing digital services and embracing mobile technology with an eye toward security.

Hands-free and eyes-free UI

We’ve already mentioned Siri twice in this post, so it’s no surprise that Fjord is betting multimodal interfaces that use voice and gestures instead of just touch are going to be huge next year. Siri’s not the only example though — Microsoft has its own version of voice control tech with TellMe, there’s Nuance and Vlingo. But Siri is the implementation of voice control that has finally brought the technology to the masses. Which means we’re going to see a whole lot more of this in the coming year. When it comes to gesture-based controls, Microsoft has already made it an established interface thanks to the success of Kinect for Xbox, which allows gamers to control and interact with their video games via voice and gestures. But next we’ll have to see how or if gestures make it big outside of gaming.

Another input is facial expressions — we already have some interfaces that recognize those. “A logical next step [is] to allow users to tag things as ‘liked’ by simply showing a thumbs up, or perhaps this gets as commoditized with an action as natural as the blink,” says Fjord.

What this means: While many of these new input methods are just arriving in the mainstream via a couple of brands of smartphones and video game consoles, there are going to be new business models emerging around them, Fjord predicts. The really forward-thinking companies will start to embrace new interfaces in the coming year for their products and services and figure out how to make it work for everyone, not just tech-savvy.

We’ll of course continue to cover these trends here at GigaOM over the next year to see how they develop and show you where they will take us in terms of gadgets we use and how we do business. What are your thoughts? Feel free to weigh in on how you think these themes will shakeout in the next year.

Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Eustaquio Santimano

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Need more storage? It's coming.

Are you ready for 128 GB memory cards and solid state drives at more reasonable prices? Intel and Micron have teamed up to deliver a 128 GB multicell NAND flash memory chip that will make incredibly dense memory a reality for tablets, cell phones and yes, servers too.

Of course, even as we get more memory we’re shunting more bits to the cloud, making fat solid-state drives less of necessity on the client device and perhaps boosting demand for them in the cloud.

The Intel and Micron news is good for electronics lovers, but it’s also worth noting because of how these companies built their memory — using what they call a “planar cell structure,” to help with problems of leakage as the channels etched into the chips shrink. Kevin Kilbuck, director of marketing for Micron’s NAND Solutions Group, says the technology should continue to work as chips get smaller and smaller.

It’s also worth noting that —  in the arcane world of memory chips — Intel and Micron have created a memory chip that delivers 128 gigabits (which translates to 16 GB) that can be stacked 8-chips high in a package. That’s what gets us to the 128 GB number. Right now the latest 64 GB-capable flash devices are manufactured at 20 nanometers and the stacked 128 GB-version will available in January — with mass production due by the middle of next year.

That means that 128-GB devices might be in your holiday stocking next December.

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The promise of the Internet age is one of unparalleled access to information of all kinds, but it has also seen the rise of some powerful gatekeepers that control our access to that information: gatekeepers like Google, Facebook, Apple and even Twitter. These new information overlords have been in the news recently because of their control (or perceived control) over certain information, and the reaction from users has reinforced the tension between the freedom these companies provide and the hoops through which we have to go in order to achieve it. How does that alter the way we see the world around us?

Google, for example, has been accused of censorship for removing certain terms from its “auto-complete” and Google Instant search features, including terms that relate to potential copyright-infringing services such as file-sharing network The Pirate Bay, or torrent search engines like Isohunt — both of which have been the subject of lawsuits and other actions because they refer people to infringing files. Google has said in the past that it does this because it’s trying to help media companies combat piracy and so excludes terms it believes are “closely associated” with piracy.

Is it really censorship when a search engine removes a reference to such sites from its auto-complete feature? After all, users can still search for those terms and find them in Google’s index quite easily. It’s not as though links to The Pirate Bay have been removed from Google’s index altogether (although the prospect exists that this could happen, if Congress passes laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act – which allows private companies to force search engines to remove sites from the domain-name system — or legal judgements like the one handed down in Texas this week hold up).

Is it censorship to exclude certain terms?

I raised this question on Twitter after a report in TorrentFreak about Google’s actions, and several people — including sociologist Zeynep Tufekci — said it’s a form of censorship, or at the very least, a kind of “algorithmic gate-keeping.” While many people may not use auto-complete, others do, and the argument is that their experience will be reduced, even by a small amount, due to this filtering. Tufekci said these small kinds of changes can affect the way that people process information, in subtle but important ways.

@mathewi It is important to discuss the emerging power of algorithms as new gatekeepers. Not as bad as old media, sure, but still powerful.—
Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 24, 2011

Google is an old hand at this kind of thing, since it has dominated the search market for the past half a decade at least, to the point where it’s being investigated by the federal government for antitrust activities. Critics claim it deliberately removes terms from its search results, or highlights others that promote its own products, and argue the company should be forced to abide by some kind of legislated “search neutrality,” similar to the telecom-industry principle of net neutrality. But does Google really have a duty to provide unfiltered results? Is there a societal downside?

Twitter has come under fire for something similar, or at least the perception of something similar: Advocates of the “Occupy” protest movement have complained bitterly over the past few weeks about how the network is excluding terms related to the movement from its trending topics list. Some users may never look at this list, but it has come to be seen by many as a badge of honor. During the recent removal of Occupy camps in Los Angeles and New York City, there were repeated accusations of censorship against Twitter for allegedly removing those terms from its trending list.

Twitter says its algorithm is responsible

Twitter has said a number of times that it doesn’t filter trending topics to remove specific terms (although it does remove offensive words and phrases). Instead, the trending algorithm looks for short-term spikes in activity, and that tends to exclude terms that are being used a lot over a longer period of time. In an email message to me, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said:

Trending topics are based on an algorithm that looks at spikes. Trends surface the fastest rising popular topics, or the hottest hot topics. They are not curated. Bottom line — we aren’t censoring #occupy terms.

Even Apple has been criticized for gatekeeping of a sort, with accusations this week that Siri — the voice-activated search assistant that appears as a feature in Apple’s latest iPhones — is deliberately refusing to provide users with information about abortion clinics. The company has apparently said that this is a glitch in the software, not a deliberate choice to exclude certain information, but the uproar over the incident speaks to a larger concern about Apple’s control over what its users do.

If you control the platform, you control the information flow

As Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues in a recent piece for MIT’s Technology Review, the company has an almost unprecedented level of control over what users do with its devices — and potentially even over what information they can access and how — because it controls the platform from end to end. What if Apple decided, or was forced by law, to prevent users from going to certain sites in Safari? Or from asking Siri to search for certain terms, such as The Pirate Bay? That may seem far-fetched, but it isn’t. Google could be forced to do the same kinds of things in Chrome.

Of course, people don’t have to use Google, or Twitter, or Apple, or Facebook. They are free to use other search engines and information networks, and many do — but the vast majority of people do not. As research has repeatedly shown, most people use defaults because they are easier (which is why search deals like the ones Firefox signs are so valuable). And that has the potential to erect barriers to free information flow, even if most users don’t realize they exist.

What are the potential ramifications of that for society, as more and more people access the Internet through proprietary platforms and devices, or become “locked in” psychologically to certain services? How are algorithms changing the way that we perceive the world around us? We are only just beginning to find out.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and Stefan

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A small Midwestern startup is rethinking the way we use web search on our phones by tweaking the now-standard Google layout. Their solution is a mobile app called Leap2 Navigator, which is available now in the iOS App Store. It’s initially for the iPhone only, though the company plans to make the jump to Google’s own Android very soon. It’s an admirable — though still incomplete — solution to what can be a somewhat annoying aspect of smartphone use.

Make no mistake, Leap2 isn’t rethinking the search algorithm itself, just the way results are presented and contextualized. Google is the undisputed king of search, regardless of platform, owning roughly two-thirds of the total web search market. It’s in position to dominate mobile search as well, with Android on millions of phones, Google search apps for other mobile OSes, and of course Google is accessible via any mobile browser.

But the problem, according to the guys at Leap2, is that it’s the same desktop browser search experience, just shrunk down to a smaller screen.

There have been some other creative end runs around using Google to search on a mobile device lately, with things like Apple’s Siri, the voice control assistant on the iPhone 4S, which lets users speak questions you might typically Google, but instead Siri does the search and answers instantaneously.

Leap2 isn’t that drastic. It’s built on Microsoft’s Bing’s API, but the top results (in my experience) have never been from Bing. Its aim is to make a search app that works best on a smartphone screen because it was made for a smartphone screen.

“Google’s results [page] is 9,000 results and in descending order,” Leap 2 co-founder and CEO Michael Farmer pointed out in an interview. They have the data there, but it’s not as useful if you don’t happen to be scrolling with a mouse and or scroll buttons on a browser window.

Instead, Leap2 works with a simple but creative layout: the top half of the screen uses two slot-machine-like scrolling reels, the bottom half displays your results. The large one on the left is your search field you type into, and above and below your search you can scroll to suggested related search terms that pop up based on the keywords you provided. On the right, a smaller scrolling reel has icons you can choose to better target your search to a specific category, like news, social sites, images, general phonebook info (like business names, numbers and addresses), location/maps and shopping.

When you type in your search, instead of a results list of links a la typical desktop search, you get three tabs of websites that open up on the bottom half of the screen. The middle tab is what Leap2 thinks you’re looking for, the No. 1 result. The left tab is the No. 2 result, and the right tab the No. 3 result.

This layout is meant to be the quickest and easiest way to interact with your results, and it’s tailored to those who might navigate or search with with just a thumb or a few fingers.

“The biggest thing driving our navigation, it creates a sideways T,” explained Farmer. “If you hold your phone with your right hand, you can navigate easy across the center and with your right hand you navigate up and down [...] Leap 2 focuses on a six -square-inch display, and where your thumb is. That six-inch square is always in your field of view.”

The reason your No. 1 result is in that center tab is because the middle of the phone is easiest to reach with your thumb. And the idea of displaying the web page instead of just a link is so you can see if it’s a site you trust or not immediately.

Taking the leap

I really like the idea of Leap2, and while the app works, it’s a bit rough around the edges. Here’s what I found:

• It anticipates what you want correctly much of the time. I searched for Hotel Monteleon in New Orleans and the first three windows it opened, in order, were the hotel’s website, the TripAdvisor page for it, and its Wikipedia page. In this case, Leap2 guessed correctly. I wanted to see the hotel’s site.
• It surfaces the content in smart, accessible ways. By spinning the righthand dial down to the icon that looks like a phone book it gave me the Bing, Yelp and Foursquare listing pages for the hotel. The Bing page gives me exactly what I wanted: the address and phone number.
• Sliding down to the thought bubble/chat icon button, I could see the “buzz” on the hotel: if anyone’s talking about it on Twitter, or checking in on Foursquare or Brightkite. Sliding up to the picture icon, I got image search results from Bing, Flickr and Picasa (probably not quite the right order for me, but close).
• Scrolling all the way to the bottom of the right dial to the “+” acronym brings up the option to share your search results via email, Twitter or Facebook. The process goes smoothest if you’ve authorized Leap2 to access your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

As I mentioned, the app is not perfect. It can be amazingly on target for some things, while inconsistent on others.

• A search for “bars near Lafayette Square New Orleans” brought back some odd results. The first page suggested was Hotels.com, then HotelPlanner.com, then NileGuide, which was actually results for Jackson Square, not Lafayette. In this case, I clearly was looking for Yelp or TripAdvisor recommendations, which Leap2 didn’t connect.
• When you click on one of the website results, it automatically fills your whole screen. To go back to the default view, you use a simple downward swiping motion. Unfortunately, where you swipe is very close to the new pull-down shade notifications menu in iOS 5. So occasionally I would mistakenly bring up that menu instead of returning to the default search view of the app.
• Google Maps renders slowly. In fact, several features would be much better if they were sped up.

Overall, this app needs its speed turbocharged, and the design could use some polish — it’s a little rough compared to really well-designed apps. But I like where they’re going with it and I think there’s a great idea here.

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Will this year be the one when turkey day beats out Cyber Monday? We will have to wait a few more hours to find out. But the loss of Cyber Monday, which got its name when most people had to go into their offices to shop online, shows how far broadband, and now mobile, have come.

Wikipedia notes that Shop.org was the first to use the term Cyber Monday back in 2005, but the phenomenon of increased web traffic had been noted by retailers a year or two prior. In 2003, only 20 percent of U.S. homes had broadband connections, a figure that stands at 68 percent today. But in the past few years, as Cyber Monday traffic has bled back into Black Friday and even the two days of the weekend, the smartphone has changed the holiday landscape even more.

So while PayPal is reporting that it’s seeing six times the traffic on Monday than it did last year, it’s the Akamai data around traffic generated on Thanksgiving that catches my eye. Much like last year, it seems consumers aren’t waiting for any industry-mandated shopping day to submit their credit cards online. Thanksgiving itself experienced 70 percent growth traffic, according to Akamai, which saw a peak traffic of about 2 million page views per minute on Thanksgiving evening, the peak so far for this shopping season.

Is it mobile or marketing?

Akamai reports that on Black Friday, it counted 1.6 page views per minute during its peak at 12 a.m. EST, and overall, Black Friday traffic was up by 43 percent. But note that when Akamai saw the peak, it was still 9 p.m. on the West Coast, which means shoppers were hopping online on Thanksgiving Day itself. Perhaps this was because they were on the couch after their meals or maybe because the promotions were too good to pass up?

Akamai saw a peak of 1.6 million page views per minute as of about 2 p.m. EST and wrote on its blog that Cyber Monday would surpass Black Friday as the peak traffic shopping day so far this season and should do so sometime Monday night. Once again, the office isn’t the place to shop online anymore. Akamai is waiting to see if Cyber Monday will beat the Thanksgiving peak.

More people, fewer problems, faster sites

No matter when people hopped online, there were more of them and the sites ran faster. Web tracking by SmartBear on Black Friday shows that retailers’ sites were about 30 percent faster as of Nov. 25 than they were throughout all the previous holiday seasons. According to data from SmartBear, which provides metrics on site performance, sites that took 20.83 seconds to load during the holiday last year took only 14.67 seconds on Black Friday itself. Target, The Gap and Toys “R” Us experienced some issues but more so on Thanksgiving as opposed to the day after.

Akamai said last year’s global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at noon EST on Black Friday, which makes this year’s peak 20 percent higher. On Cyber Monday 2010, global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at 1 p.m. EST, while this year, we’re still waiting.

This is good news for retailers who feel the pinch of lost revenue when customers can’t shop online, but it’s also good for consumers who are impatient to buy their merchandise and get on with their lives — even for those who are increasingly using mobile devices to shop while possibly doing other things. As Ryan Kim says in his article on Monday morning:

JP Morgan noted a Shop.org survey over the weekend that found almost 15 percent of respondents will shop on a smartphone or tablet on Cyber Monday, compared to 6.9 percent who did so last year. IBM Coremetrics said sales on mobile devices for Black Friday increased to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year.

So more of us are online, using mobile device as well as our PCs, while the web keeps getting faster. Looks like holiday shopping mirrors the broadband experience as a whole.

For those who care how their favorite retailer fared the onslaught, below is SmartBear’s chart on how various online merchants performed on Friday. “RT” is response time.

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I took a look at this idea in a recent article for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Dorsey, for example, said that the power of an information network like Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the technology behind it. It doesn’t matter, for example, that the service is now processing more than 250 million tweets a day. Dorsey said that for him, the most powerful aspect of the service is how it can help connect us to others in far-flung parts of the world, as it did earlier this year during the demonstrations in Iran.

The Twitter co-founder said that he has also tried to make the technology in his other company — mobile payments–processing startup Square — as invisible as possible, so that retailers and other entrepreneurs can use it easily to expand their businesses and make them more efficient. Said Dorsey:

Both [Twitter and Square] are great at encouraging more face-to-face human interactions . . . I believe strongly that this information and these tools help us be better, but we need to be sure, as builders of tools, that it’s not overwhelming, that it’s meaningful, and that it’s not distracting. That it’s not something that puts technology first; it puts humans first.

Meanwhile, Mark Rolston of frog design (which famously helped design the original Macintosh) talked about how computers and other advanced technology are already beginning to disappear into our surroundings and devices, and that he expects this to accelerate in the future. Rolston said that it doesn’t take much to think about combining voice technology, like the kind Apple has in Siri, with the kind of processing power we have now to create a computer that uses any available surface (a wall, a mirror, etc.) as a screen.

Rolston imagines an extension of the kind of physical interface that Microsoft’s Kinect uses, where gestures and even facial recognition could be used to control all kinds of processes or devices and where computing power behind the scenes would allow us to interact with our homes in different ways. Computers would become “externalized resources in a room.” In that kind of environment, Rolston said, “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them.”

This concept of hiding the computer can be seen emerging in other areas, too, including health-related devices like the UP from Jawbone. Many of them appear to be just fancy jewelry — in the UP’s case, a somewhat geeky-looking bracelet — but they contain as much computing power as a desktop computer probably did a decade ago. The UP tracks your activity and records your steps, just like some other devices do, but it can also be programmed to alert you when you have been inactive for a while, and it watches your sleep patterns so it can wake you at the right point in your sleep cycle. So it has a tremendous amount of sophisticated software inside it, but it looks extremely simple — all the complex parts are hidden.

As this phenomenon accelerates, companies of all kinds are going to have to adapt to this ubiquitous computing environment, both by making their products as noncomputer-like as possible (something Apple has always excelled at) and by taking advantage of the intelligence and connectivity being built into even the smallest objects around us. For more details on what is required in order to do that, please read the full article at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Angry Julie Monday

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Last month I reviewed HipGeo, an iPhone app that passively tracks your location and can easily turn your trips into travel diaries. On Thursday, the company plans to release its first public API and location widgets so that any application or website can mimic some of HipGeo’s geo-location features.

What HipGeo does really well is link all of your activities together: where you where, when you were there, and what photos you took. The API lets developers easily add this ability to their site without having to build any of that functionality themselves.

In a press release, CEO Scott Daniel said, ”We give developers the ability to add a ‘where’ to their ‘when’ without having to build the technology on their own. Our API lets developers know where a person was at a given time, and our WHERE widget is as simple to add to a page as a Twitter button.”

HipGeo is focusing on sites and apps with users who are high-end camera owners. The HipGeo API should let photo sites, for example, add location automatically to user photos based on the image’s timestamp, allowing pictures to be displayed on a map, like in HipGeo’s own application.

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The original Cray supercomputer

In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power.

Prior to this century many supercomputers really were a different animal entirely, sporting specialty chips and software. But the industry turned to commodity chips in the early 2000s. Now, to meet the demands of exascale computing at low power, chip makers are taking inspiration from the cloud computing and mobile industries.

ARM tries supercomputing on for size

As the Supercomputing 2011 show gets under way in Seattle, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, ARM and others are announcing new silicon to power the machines we rely on for science, climate prediction and high-end simulations in industries that range from oil production to car design.

Nvidia is a fairly recent newcomer to the supercomputing market, but it has made huge strides since 2008, when it first starting pushing its graphics processors (GPUs) as a way to boost speed while keeping energy usage in check. It said it would use its high-end GPUs and its new GPU-plus-ARM chip to build a new supercomputer in Spain. This is the first time an ARM-based processor has made its way into a supercomputer. ARM thus far has been the chip of choice inside cell phones and tablets.

Accelerator chips advance in supercomputers

Japan's K supercomputer is the fastest in the world.

Nvidia is doing well with its GPUs, given that in the top 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, 39 systems use GPUs as accelerators and 35 of these use Nvidia chips. The graphics processors are used in supercomputers because they can handle massively parallel tasks that high-end computing requires while using less energy than the typical CPUs made by Intel and AMD. Nvidia and its GPUs made their first appearance on the list in 2008, and the last time the top 500 list was published, six months ago, Nvidia chips were in 17 machines. To go to 35 today is a pretty big uptake.

Perhaps inspired by Nvidia’s success in getting its GPUs onto supercomputers, Texas Instruments is bringing its digital signal processors to the mix for high-performance computing. DSP chips are really good at math, and they are used in telecommunications chips and in routers. TI has been thinking about this for a while, but Monday was its first launch into the market formally.

New chips for the cloud

The same power-efficiency issues that plague those trying to advance supercomputing are hitting those who run webscale applications, from Facebook to Amazon Web Services. And while the cloud and web-scale data center operators aren’t looking for specialty gear, like Infiniband for networking, they are running one or a few applications on their hardware, similar in some ways to a supercomputer, where all workloads are optimized for speed.

This is why certain chip and hardware companies, such as Tilera, Calxeda and Applied Micro, see an opportunity to redesign the silicon and gear inside the cloud. Meanwhile, companies such as Adapteva, which makes a massively multicore chip for cell phones and HPC, see an opportunity in pushing into supercomputers and mobile handsets, where the need for more-powerful processors and lower power consumption are always at war. And with ARM piggybacking on this trend thanks to Nvidia, it’s clear that supercomputers want to be super without the influence of PCs.

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On Wednesday, analytics company Flurry Mobile released statistics that show that games on the top two smartphone platforms combined, iOS and Android, are bringing in more U.S. revenue than traditional portable gaming leaders Sony and Nintendo for the first time ever. Games on Apple and Android mobile platforms will bring in $1.9 billion in U.S. sales this year, while Sony and Nintendo’s games will account for $1.4 billion.

It’s a drastic change that’s happened pretty rapidly in the space of just two years, as the chart below shows:

In 2009, portable gaming revenue in the U.S. was worth $2.7 billion. Sony and Nintendo, whose portable devices play games that can cost between $5 and $40, accounted for over 80 percent of mobile game revenue. Android and iOS games are usually free, 99 cents or, occasionally, a few dollars more. They made  pretty big dent in 2010 by grabbing 34 percent of the revenue of $2.5 billion, but the major damage was done this year. By the end of 2011, Flurry says mobile game revenue in the U.S. will equal $3.3 billion, and iOS and Android will account for 58 percent of that, compared to Sony’s 6 percent, and Nintendo’s 36 percent.

Sony and Nintendo’s sources of revenue are not limited to portable games since they still have console gaming. However they should probably be a little nervous: Apple and Google both have entered the living room space, with Apple TV and Google TV. And it’s probably not too long before each device gets a gaming strategy of some kind.

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