May 2013

After a couple of weeks of neglect, Global Nerdy is back in business! Let’s start with a little French wifi humour:

Translation: “He has wifi.”

{ 0 comments }

Here’s a map of my travels last week:

Click the map to see it at full size.

I started last Sunday in Tampa, flew back to Toronto, where I hung out at the airport for about four hours until I caught another flight for Calgary.

While the Tampa trip (which took place the previous week) was about seeing the Special Lady (and getting work done remotely during the day), the Calgary trip was all about business. I was there to do an assessment of the current mobile device setup for an energy company, which involved going there, doing a series of 15 or so hour-long interviews with the company’s various business units, looking at their wireless, server and application infrastructure, and doing all manner of suit-meets-geek things.

We’d start our days early with a good breakfast…

…then make our way over to the client’s building…

…where they very generously set us up in a corner office with a great view of Eau Claire and the Bow River Valley. Unfortunately, we spend the lion’s share of our time in a conference room rather than our swanky corner office, but it was still a nice place to decompress between meetings and interviews, as well as to catch up on email and other administrivia.

We also spent some time at the Calgary office of Rogers, our partners in a number of projects. As you can see in the photo, we started our days fairly early during this trip.

Our earliest day was Thursday, when we caught a 6 a.m. flight…

…to Christina Lake, where we got to see the client’s operation in action. As you can see, the “tarmac” and runway aren’t paved — that’s just flat-packed dirt:

Here’s the terminal building:

And here’s the runway:

A short bus ride down a dirt road later, we arrived at the client’s production site, where we interviewed the field people and talked about their mobile infrastructure:

With our interviews complete, we caught the last flight out of Christina Lake back to Calgary…

…where we had a precious little bit of downtime before heading back to hotel and compiling our data. A busy techie’s got to have at least a little downtime, after all!

I’m heading back to Calgary to see our client, report on our findings, give them one of those whiz-bang presentations that are my stock in trade, present them with a whole lot of recommendations and a technology roadmap, and if all goes well, earn a fair profit for my efforts. It’s a lot of work, but I rather like this job.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

{ 0 comments }

Modern Android Takes Over

Click the graph to see the source article.

To the great annoyance of many a developer, Android 2.3 (a.k.a. “Gingerbread”), which was originally released at the end of 2010, has been the most common version of Android in the wild. Even until late last year, the general word was that accounted for half of all Android operating systems in the market.

Here’s some good news: according to Engadget, who are going by Google’s cleaned-up metrics (which are supposed to better reflect the number of active users), modern versions of Android — that is, 4.0 and higher (“Ice Cream Sandwich” and “Jellybean”) — now account for more than half the active Android installations. I think it’s safe to say that this is being driven by big sellers like the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note II, and should continue with the release of the S4 and HTC One.

Who Sold How Many Tablets in 1Q13?

Click the graph to see the source article.

IDC’s report on the worldwide tablet market for the first quarter of 2013 came out yesterday, and I’ve turned their numbers into the chart above. Some numbers of note:

• Total tablet shipments for 1Q13 were 49.2 million units — that’s more than were shipped in the first half of 2012.
• The year-over-year growth in tablet shipments in 1Q13 is a healthy 142%.
• Apple’s performance — selling 19.5 tablets in 1Q13 — outperformed IDC’s projected 18.7 million.
• ASUS is now the third biggest seller of tablets, thanks to its Nexus 7 tablet.
• The combined sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets make up 900,000 units in 1Q13.

iOS Users Still Way More Active

Click the graph to see the source article.

You’ve probably seen a couple of articles on how iOS users account for more online activity than Android users even though there are more Android units out there, such as GoGo: in-flight Internet use 84 percent iOS, 16 Android and Time’s iOS vs. Android article. Here’s another data point: NetMarketShare’s latest web usage share data for various mobile operating systems, which shows iOS accounting for nearly 60% of web usage, more than double Android’s share.

{ 2 comments }