The Final Stage Of Our Post-PC Reality Is Around The Corner

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BII tablets and pcsGlobal Tablet Shipments to Outpace PCs by 2015, IDC Says (Bloomberg)
The final pillar of our post-PC reality is just on the horizon: a world in which more tablets are sold than PC computers. However, given the enormous expansion of tablet shipments and substantial declines in the PC market, that tipping point may happen even sooner than many think. In the first quarter of this year, 78 million PCs were shipped versus just under 50 million tablets. (See chart, above right.) Read >  

Tim Cook: Apple TV Sold 6.5 Million Units In 2013 Alone (The Verge)
Apple's CEO appeared at the All Things D conference yesterday, and there were a few highlights. He said Apple TV, which runs on the iOS mobile operating system, has sold 13 million in cumulative terms, with half those units sold in this year alone. He took a swing at Google Glass, saying the device won't have mass appeal, and he named Jon Ive, Apple's design chief, as being "really key" to the design of iOS 7. Read >  

Mobile Is Among The Trends Driving Social Commerce (BI Intelligence)
Demographics, device proliferation, and the visual Web: these are some of the trends that are pushing social commerce to the fore. Tablet-friendly Pinterest in particular has emerged as a digital shopping catalog and an efficient source of high pricetag sales referrals for e-commerce sites. Read > 

Samsung Sold 12.5 Million Smartphones in China During Q1 2013 (The Next Web)
The largest smartphone manufacturer in the world retained the top spot in the world's largest smartphone market, parrying domestic challenges from Huawei, Lenovo, Coolpad, and ZTE. Overall, 67.4 million smartphones were shipped in China during the first quarter, accounting for about one-third of global shipments. Read > 

Buzzfeed, CNN, And YouTube Form Online-Video Channel (Wall Street Journal)
Buzzfeed, a hot media property, introduced "CNN Buzzfeed," a YouTube channel based on CNN content. Behind the move lurks the enormous shift in consumption patterns to mobile. Buzzfeed's traffic is almost half mobile and video has been one of the few bright spots in mobile monetization, drawing significantly higher ad rates. 

At Odds Over Privacy Challenges Of Wearable Computing (New York Times)
Wearable technology promises to unleash a huge debate over privacy, which could inspire a backlash, as we touched on in a recent report. The most contentious issue will likely be the ability of someone to take your picture without your knowledge. Read > 

Girls Aged 6 To 16 Are Receptive to Mobile Ads (MarketingCharts)
However, it may not be a positive signal for the mobile ad market overall so much as a reflection that young people are more impressionable, and gung-ho about spending money. Read >  

Lenovo Aims At U.S. Smartphone Market (Wall Street Journal)
As the PC market contracts, the Chinese manufacturer is pushing aggressively into the smartphone market. Its smartphones business has gone from practically nonexistent two years ago to briefly becoming one of the world's five largest in the fourth quarter. Lenovo plans to start selling phones in the U.S. within the next year. As we discussed in our smartphone market forecast, manufacturers like Lenovo are going benefit enormously from the market's shift to developing economies. Read >

Apple and Samsung's 'Profit Share' Trap (Tech Thoughts)
A cogent analysis of the market share versus profit share debate that has popped up in the past week. Sameer Singh argues that profit share can become a trap for manufacturers as the economics of the smartphone market shift. Read >  

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