With the overall Android smartphone industry generating total profits of $5.3 billion during this period, Samsung’s Android smartphone shipments generated $5.1 billion of profit. To put that into context, its closest rival LG made only $0.1 billion profit, or 3% of global profit share. Other rivals like Sony and HTC didn’t even register in this report, suggesting that the smartphone market is very much a case of Apple versus Samsung.According to Strategy Analytics’ report, “An efficient supply chain, sleek products and crisp marketing have been the main drivers of Samsung’s impressive profitability… LG delivered a small profit during the quarter, but it currently lacks the volume scale needed to match Samsung’s outsized profits.”

The figures given only include Android smartphone profits and do not include tablets, making those figures all the more impressive. What’s probably more worrying is that rival Android smartphone manufacturers will have to change their strategy since it’s clearly not working. Also, with Android having already activated 900 million devices this year, the chances that many of them will have the Samsung logo on it.

With the overall Android smartphone industry generating total profits of $5.3 billion during this period, Samsung’s Android smartphone shipments generated $5.1 billion of profit. To put that into context, its closest rival LG made only $0.1 billion profit, or 3% of global profit share. Other rivals like Sony and HTC didn’t even register in this report, suggesting that the smartphone market is very much a case of Apple versus Samsung.According to Strategy Analytics’ report, “An efficient supply chain, sleek products and crisp marketing have been the main drivers of Samsung’s impressive profitability… LG delivered a small profit during the quarter, but it currently lacks the volume scale needed to match Samsung’s outsized profits.”

The figures given only include Android smartphone profits and do not include tablets, making those figures all the more impressive. What’s probably more worrying is that rival Android smartphone manufacturers will have to change their strategy since it’s clearly not working. Also, with Android having already activated 900 million devices this year, the chances that many of them will have the Samsung logo on it.

The second features French star and world no.8 player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. This time it’s for a campaign called Tweet & Shoot and asks fans to take part in a Twitter tennis game. Created by bank BNP Paribas, the idea is that a Twitter-controlled robot will launch balls at Tsonga and help train him for the French Open.

Users can place three shots to be hit  on the court, a tweet will be sent to the robot and if the combination is selected, the robot will shoot it. It’s another nice idea and it’s a rather creative way to bring social into the real world. The event is happening on Thursday May 23rd so if you’re interested, you can tweet your shots through the Tweet & Shoot website.

The news coincides with the site’s eight birthday, and is a significant jump from the same figure six months ago. At the end of 2012, this figure was 72 hours, which is a 39% increase between then and now. That combined with one billion unique users every month – a figure that’s more than likely larger considering that the site hasn’t updated its statistics page yet – only further consolidates YouTube’s position as the world’s dominant video site.

This is positive news for the site, which is currently pushing a new subscription service filled with premium TV shows. With the overall goal of hosting original premium content on the site, it’s obvious that the site wants to diversify the ways it generates revenue, and not rely entirely on ads. Also, it needs to give its most prominent content creators better ways of making money as the more they earn, the better quality shows they can produce.

While cat videos (among many other things) has taken the site to where it is now, the next test is being able to ensure that the quality of original videos uploaded onto its channels is of much greater quality than what people currently expect. If it can achieve that, then who knows where it could go next. Either way, there will be more viewers and videos to count in the future.

However, the idea of Yahoo! making Tumblr uncool or how it will result in people leaving in their droves has been a little silly. Yes, buying Tumblr would be a decent move for Yahoo!, not a game changer by any means but still good, but the idea that people will be quitting in their droves because of this move is dumb. Dedicated users or those who are up to date with the tech world may care, but that’s makes up a tiny proportion of its user base. The rest are people who only care about the product, and as long as that stays the same and is improved, they’ll be happy.

If we want to take a quick example of an acquisition similar to this, just look at Facebook and Instagram. Purchased just over a year ago, talk about how people were going to quit the service followed quickly and how it was ruined by this move. At that time, it had 27 million users, now it has more than 100 million, not bad considering the doom and gloom talk that surrounded it.

Now before we  Tumblr doesn’t have those same growth figures, to be honest it’s probably dipped a little in monthly views over the last few months, but the same principal still applies. The vast majority of Instagram users are casual users who only care about the service and nothing more. If it was a case that Facebook shoehorned ads or their logo into it, then users would have a justified reason to leave. But it didn’t and apart from that mess up involving its updated terms and conditions late last year, it’s been plain sailing.

And the same philosophy applies to Flickr as well. Yahoo! bought it, it’s remained mostly the same since its members (mostly photographers) love the service so why would Tumblr be any different?

People will quit if the service they know and love is changed dramatically, not because a different company just happens to own them. Yahoo! has a CEO who is savvy enough to understand that shoehorning your company’s agenda into a site as beloved as Tumblr is a recipe for disaster. Probably the only changes made if this deal does go through would be greater integration with services like Flickr and Yahoo! News and maybe some ad formats gradually introduced. What won’t happen is people leaving in their droves because, unless Yahoo! forces some dramatic changes, the average user just doesn’t care.

What A Facebook Update In Real-Life Would Look Like

Anytime Facebook updates its news feed, a chorus of angry complaints quickly follows. However, we accept it since it’s only happens online. However, if Facebook made these change in real-life, it would be a completely different story.

Zombie Run Takes On Whole New Meaning With Parkour video

Let’s just say that if zombies like this ever existed, we’d be in serious trouble as they flip, climb and run their way around these derelict buildings.

Beautiful Dubai Timelapse Shows City In Unique Fashion

Chances are you haven’t seen a timelapse like this before of any city, but this Dubai video is simply majestic. Taking place over a 28 hour period, it shows the city in a way you would never have seen it before.

Bear Tries To Eat Camera

Ever wonder what it’d be like if a bear tried to eat you? The answer is that it’d be a little slobbery.

Cmdr Hadfield’s Cover’s Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ On Last Day In Space

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has become a celebrity during his five-month stay in the International Space Station. From his tweets and videos, he’s gained almost 800,000 followers thanks to his amazing images and sense of humour. Before he heads back to Earth, he recorded one more video. A cover version of the David Bowie classic ‘Space Oddity’.

The Silliest Chiropractor Commercial You’ll See This Week

If there’s a strange commercial going viral, you can pretty much guarantee that it’s Rhett and Link behind it. They’ve worked their magic again by creating this ad for a chiropractor based in Los Angeles and it’s just as silly as you’d expect.

Kids’ First Taste In Slow Motion

Seeing toddlers tasting certain types of food for the first time shouldn’t be compelling, but it somehow is. Also, the slow motion and music adds to the fun as well. Just watch and feel happy that you won’t have to go through moments like these again.

Deer Shocks Bus Driver With Daredevil Entrance

And do you know what the worst thing was? He didn’t even pay for the fare!

Abercrombie & Fitch Gets Brand Readjustment With Homeless Clothing Drive

In light of Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO Mike Jeffries controversial statements about the larger person, one person has decided to give the brand a reality check. Taking A&C clothing that has been discarded, he’s started donating them with the aim to make it the number one clothing brand for the homeless.

The Next Step For Google Glass

With hype (and potential controversy) building around the arrival of Google Glass, we’re beginning to see apps and features developed for the software. However, the potential for the device is still in its infancy as this intriguing video shows.

More Than Just Tech

If Google I/O’s Keynote showed us anything, it’s that the company is not only a wide reaching tech company, but it’s changing the way we approach our lives. Every update had a purpose, every design change aims to improve existing service and all of them tie into the narrative that knowledge is power. The company has and still is expanding rapidly and won’t rest until its competition is done and dusted.

And Apple is one of those competitors, and because of its premium status, is the most threatening. Android focused on quantity while Apple’s strategy was quality, but Google’s approach seems to have paid off since both its hardware and OS has caught up. Apple has focused on what it does well, hardware and OS, but since it’s tried to expand its horizons, the problems it faced is not trying to match Google’s vast amounts of data, but create a product that comes even close to matching it.

The Difficulty In Data

Everyone’s familiar with the disaster that was (and still is) Apple Maps. It was so bad that even Google found room in its packed keynote to land a dig saying: “People called it [Google Maps on iOS] sleek, simple, beautiful… and let’s not forget, accurate.” Since it launched, there have been few, if any, updates to the app improving it or fixing the problems that plagued it since launch.

And Siri is another problem. When it was released on the iPhone 4S, people could see the vasts amount of potential it had. While there were some problems with the original product, people excused it since there was nothing else like it. However, updates for it could only happen when the OS was updated, meaning that improvements would only happen gradually.

Then came Google Now which gave it an extra layer of practicality by incorporating its search functions and algorithms into it. Granted Google Now could only be updated through an Android update, but the Google Search app on iOS can be updated anytime, which is bad news for Siri.

While Apple has the hardware and OS market sorted, but the problem now is that it needs data to progress. Both services mentioned earlier live and die on the amount of data put into it. The resources on display in Google Maps didn’t happen overnight, this was the result of years and years of work and constant improvements. Data takes time and unless you can acquire a company that has done the work for you, it will take years to reach this point.

Because Maps has set the standard, everything else will pale in comparison unless it’s as comprehensive or more unique. The closest maps competitor is Nokia’s Here, which put in a considerable amount of time and investment into beating Google. The fact that its easily forgotten by iOS users while they were waiting for Google Maps to return – despite being able to download it as an app – tells you how much of a hold Google has on the market.

This isn’t to say that hardware or a good OS won’t get you anywhere, but when users are demanding more from their devices, the real battle has moved from hardware and software to data, and it’s hard to see anyone matching Google’s might. Apple still has a lot going for it, but it will really have to make an effort to catch up, otherwise it come back to haunt it.

These are never breaking news stories, but rather some of the deepest thinkers and smartest minds from the world of technology and social media, offering their thoughts and views regarding the biggest stories of the week.

You won’t make it through them all in one sitting, but it’ll bring you up to speed with this week’s happenings. So just sit back, grab a coffee and enjoy.

- As Of Today, Every Major Mobile Competitor… Also Makes Apps For iOS (via iMore)
- How Facebook Used Science To Design More Emotional Emoticons (via Popsci)
- Cyber Caper: Behind The Scenes Of $45 Million Global ATM Heist (via The Verge)
- The Evolution Of The Web, In A Blink (via The New Yorker)
- Are Video Streams Overflowing, And Will You Pay For It? (via Forbes)

- Yahoo wants to buy Tumblr. Will Facebook swoop in at the last minute? (via Giga Om)
- How Google updated Android without releasing version 4.3 (via Ars Technica)
- New Apps Arrive on Google Glass (via NY Times)
- Why The New Google Server Farm Could Displace Adobe Lightroom (via Stuck in Customs)
- Google Wants to Help Apps Track You (via MIT Technology Review)

- Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting (via All Things D)
- Google CEO Larry Page speaks at I/O about competition and negativity in innovation (via The Next Web)
- Google+ Photos Can Now Automatically Create Animated GIFs, Panoramas, HDR Images And Better Group Shots (via Tech Crunch)
- German court says Google must act if autocomplete makes defamatory suggestions (via The Washington Post)

- The Epic Battle Between Apple & Google Is All But Over – Who Won? (via ReadWrite)
- Leadership Lesson: The Difference Between Google and Apple (via Forbes)
- Chinese abductee used Google Maps to find his family after 23 years (via The Verge)
- Google’s Glass fireside chat: Ugly prototypes, privacy and its potential to go mainstream (via The Next Web)
- Why The Internet Is A Bad Place To Discover Music (via Hypebot)

- Why Path May Be The Ultimate App For Google Glass (via ReadWrite)
- Smartphone Tracker Gives Doctors Remote Viewing Powers (via MIT Technology Review)
- What Are the Biggest Innovations Right Now in Digital Media? (via Digiday)
- Android is just the beginning: How Bluetooth is preparing for the internet of things (via Giga Om)
- Why Google thinks the GPU is the engine for the web of the future (via Giga Om)

Bonus Content

- What a Million Views on YouTube Really Means:The Stats.
- The Future Of Technology: What You Can Expect In The Next 50 Years.
- Rio Carnival Reduces Drunk Driving By Trading Cans For Tube Journeys.
- Online Video Is The Fastest Growing Digital Ad Format.
- How Twitter Just Played Its Trump Card.

We’ve analysed traffic, tweets, Facebook Likes and a whole lot more from 10th May (when the video was released) to the 15th May, to see what happens to a YouTube video during those crucial first few days. We combined public data as well as private data from our own site and social channels. Here’s what we found:

In the infographic above, ‘article views’ ‘article tweets’ and ‘article comments’ refer to interactions on the original article on our site, while 270+ articles refers to other sites that featured the video.

The lifetime of a video

The first few days can undoubtedly make or break a video and how the video views grow in this period is crucial to determining its success over its potential lifetime. But looking at these first few days in detail we saw that, instant though the internet is, in this case the 2nd day saw the peak in traffic to our site and also video views. You can then see a pretty stark drop in traffic for the 6th day. (We weren’t able to generate YouTube video views for this day due to a time lag in their analytics)

Mobile Traffic

We were a little surprised to see that just 15% of the video views came through mobile. Though given that the majority of traffic to the video came from other sites & tech blogs rather than growing through word of mouth sharing in Facebook (possibly given the ‘industry’ angle to this video) this figure might make more sense:

Social Reach

As well as understanding the success of a video in terms of views or embeds, there is a huge story to be told when it comes to social reach overall. We looked at the top six sites that ran a feature on our video, analysing their social reach through Facebook & Twitter, as well as how the article itself performed on their site. The table below shows the social followings for six of the largest sites that picked up our video, as well as how many tweets/FB Likes the individual article gained:

Our own traffic

As well as looking at what video views mean across social media, we also wanted to see the impact on our own traffic. We saw a huge rise in new traffic vs returning visits:

Compared to previous 6 day periods, this is an increase of around 15% on the usual new traffic percentage, showing that what happens on social media really can impact on your site as well.

Views by Location

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of video views were concentrated in the U.S. and mainland Europe:

External assets

As well as the original blog post featuring the embeddable YouTube video, we also created a Slideshare presentation to house all of the individual designs. This told a pretty impressive story in itself, generating nearly 300,000 views and over 250 individual embeds. This was boosted by higlights including featuring on the SlideShare homepage in the first couple of days after the release, being the top featured presentation in Slidehsare’s email newsletter and also receiving a tweet from their official account to over 89,000 followers:

This demonstrates the importance of thinking about the other formats you’re making your materials available in, instead of focusing exclusively on video.

You might think that lightbulbs are doing pretty good as they are. You use a switch to turn them on or off and they ususally end up doing the job they’re intended to do. But with technology progressing at a rate of knots today, everyday objects are constantly being revamped and reinvented. The latest example of this is Hue. This lightbulb from Philips can be controlled via an iPhone app so you can control your lighting more closely. For example you can ask it to wake you up by mimicing a sunrise by setting the alarm.

That sounds pretty cool already, but yesterday Hue announced it is opening up to be compatible with ‘If This Then That‘ – the site that allows you to create customised ‘recipes’ between connected devices and platforms. So for example you can ask to receive an email when it’s forecast to snow, and about a billion other things. But the latest releases from IFTTT will bring these recipes into the real world, so you can start influencing your physical surroundings, virtually.

So for example, you can ask your Hue light to turn on whenever you come home, by using a motion sensor. Or you could ask the lighting to turn blue when it starts to rain, powered by automated weather forecasts so you don’t actually need to do anything :

Other additions from IFTTT include UP by Jawbone- the wristband that tracks all your activity beyond just physical exercise, to look at your sleeping and eating patterns as well.  Objects like this are all about learning more about the user through collecting data and presenting that data back to improve an aspect of your live to help you live better. The integration with IFTTT will now allow you to feed UP with even more data, such as adding Foursquare checkins to the restaurant or gym into UP :

The addition of real world objects into IFTTT might seem a bit gimmicky but it’s an important foundation for the internet of things. As the concept of connected objects takes off, IFTTT is functioning as an open source for this, allowing users to control how those objects and apps can talk to each other, instead of just sticking with what the manufacturers provide you with.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can buy Hue in the UK from £49.95 and $59.95 in the U.S.

Specifically they discussed the need to track location more accurately through Android without draining battery on the phone, and making it easier for developers to use. To demonstrate the issue, they showed a demonstration of tracking a user just through GPS. Tracked against actual location data captured by a Googler (the green path), they showed it to be ineffective as soon as you entered a building (the yellow path)  :

The reverse happened when you relied on wifi to track your movement. Whilst it will work perfectly inside a building, as soon as you leave, your position is lost. In response to this, Google announced the introduction of Fuse location, which combines GPS, wifi, cell and sensors to track your location whether you’re inside or outside a building.

In addition, they also announced a new geofencing API, which will allow developers to draw ‘fences’ around locations. The opportunities for this could be significant, particularly for advertisers that want to offer real-time offers based on location.

Perhaps most exciting was the third of their announcements : Activity Tracking. Through machine learning, Android is now able to learn what activity the user is actually engaging in :

This is put into action with the Move App, which will allow users to see a history of their activity. A live demo showed the app recording activity changing from ’tilting’ to ‘walking’ to ‘biking’, picking up the correct activity instantly.

Reassuringly, they have also launched a new activity recognition permission which will function in apps using this feature. Developers will be able to start building using this API right now.

Having preceded the announcement with advice to developers that an app shouldn’t interfere with the user’s experience of their everyday life, it’s difficult to see how streaming video wouldn’t be intrusive. But it’s still pretty cool. And with this came the news that we’ve perhaps all been waiting for : Facebook are now creating an app for Google Glass, showing all the big players getting involved, as this follows news earlier this week that Yahoo are also developing for Glass. Below is a preview of the process for adding photos to Facebook on Glass

The announcement of streaming also came with news that Google has been building the Glass Development Kit and that they’re working on bringing the Glass experience offline. Though it’s difficult to imagine we won’t be continually connected by the time we’re wearing Google Glass, they have assured an offline experience will be offered for apps, such as the New York Times. No specific launch date was announced, but the native API will be ‘coming soon’.

The feature will be launching in the U.S. across desk and mobile ‘soon’, no dates are confirmed for either the U.S. or wider markets.

It’s not surprising to see this kind of partnership coming from Yahoo. Not only have they been innovating an awful lot lately, with a steady flow of app launches and product updates, but their intentions in news delivery were made pretty clear when they acquired Summly. It looks like this will also improve Yahoo’s ability to offer customised content, as the tweets delivered will be personalised depending on your previous browsing behaviour and interests.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Twitter & Yahoo collaborate to bring the two platforms closer together. Back in 2010 a number of features were added to Yahoo to integrate Twitter more cleanly, including the ability to update Twitter from Yahoo messenger.

It’s the second huge news story to circulate on Twitter in just a week, where we saw news of Alex Ferguson’s retirement reach 1.4 million mentions in the first hour. Also, an hour and a half into the announcement of the world tour, they’re occupying five of the top ten trending topics worldwide.

According to Twitter Music, they occupied seven of the top ten trends at the story’s height.