Global Nerdy

Fortinet, a vendor of network security appliances and online threat management services, recently had the market research company Vision Critical survey 3,200 university graduate-level people aged 21 to 32 who owned their own smartphone, tablet, or laptop. If you’re unable to access the funny pictures at AcidCow.com at the office, chances are it some piece of Fortinet software that’s stopping you. Chances are also that “Generation Y”, a.k.a. “The Millennials” — those born between 1980 and 2000, and who are the target of the survey — are going to try to find some way around that restriction.

Generation Y grew up never knowing a world without DOS or its descendants, and those born in the latter half of that generation likely never knew a time when it was unusual to have a computer in the house, never mind a networked one. Most of this generation are either entering the workforce or well into the start of their post-schooling working lives, and they’re the next generation of leaders, decision-makers, and department heads. It is these people that Fortinet wanted Vision Critical to interview about their attitudes and opinions on corporate policies, rules and regulations on mobile devices and their use in the workplace.

The key findings in Fortinet’s 19-page report on Gen Y are:

• They believe that BYOD empowers workers. 45% of participants in the survey said that being able to bring their own devices to work lets them get their work done.
• They’re ready to use wearable technology. 50% of participants agreed that when wearable technology becomes available and affordable, and came with the right apps, they’d use it at work.
• They’ll break company mobile policies that get in their way. “Up to 51% of the sample” said that they would break rules and regulations that restricted the use of their own devices, cloud storage and services and wearable technologies for work. This represents an increase in defiance from a similar 2012 survey, where 42% said they’d go against such policies.
• Their devices have been compromised. “High instances of sample respondents” say they’ve been cyberattacked.
• Some of them were well-versed in security, other could stand to learn more. While a “hardcore” segment of the people surveyed — about 20 to 25% of the participants — knew about such things as APTs and DDoSs, a “worrying minority” — about 11% of them — claimed never to have heard of terms like “cybercrime”.

The report on Fortinet’s survey, Internet Security Census 2013, spans 19 pages, covers the findings above in greater detail, and is available for free in exchange for some contact information. To get a free PDF copy of the report, go to Fortinet’s Internet Security Census 2013 page.

There’s some big news from Shopify today: they’ve closed their third round of funding led by OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners, securing $100 million in funding, The funding will be used to continue their trajectory towards becoming the way that retail sales are done, whether online, offline, or a mix of the two.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

People familiar with the deal said the company’s Series C valuation was “near $1 billion.” The company declined to comment on revenue but a representative said it had 80,000 active merchants using its software today.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Reaching the $1-billion level is extremely rare. Website TechCrunch recently determined that only 39 tech firms born since 2003 in the U.S., including Facebook and Twitter, have reached the $1-billion level, as valued by public or private markets, making them members of the so-called “Unicorn Club.”

Here are more reports about the deal:

• The New York Times: Shopify Raises $100 Million in Third Round of Financing
• USA Today: E-commerce start-up Shopify raises $100 million
• TechCrunch: Shopify Raises $100M To Drop The ‘E’ And Become The Commerce Company That Spans On- And Offline
• Mashable: Shopify Raises $100 Million to Tackle Offline Commerce
• GigaOm: Shopify raises $100 million Series C to expand offline into general commerce

Congratulations to Tobi, Daniel, Cody, Harley, et. al. on a job well done!

Screenshot of Instapaper on the iPad.

Instapaper, the granddaddy of “save this web article for later” readers, is free for a limited time. I’ll let Wade “World Wide Wade” Roush explain it, as he did in his Xconomy summary of reading apps, 10 Apps & Sites That Bring Back the Joy of Reading:

Instapaper works like this: Once you’ve signed up for the service, you go to the Instapaper website and grab the “Read Later” bookmarklet, a little button that you can drag and drop into the bookmarks bar of your browser. Then when you come across a Web page that you want to read later, you just click on this button, which activates a script that extracts the article text and saves it on Instapaper’s cloud servers (or, optionally, sends it straight to your Kindle reading device).

…

I love the iPhone version of the app and I use it a lot when I’m standing in line at the grocery store or killing time in between other activities. I use the iPad version for longer, more intense reading sessions at home. My favorite feature: tilt-scrolling, which uses the accelerometer in the iPhone/iPad to scroll the text up or down, depending on which way you tilt the device.

If you’d like to see a review of the latest version of Instapaper, check out this one at MacStories: Instapaper 5.0: Sorting and Filtering Options, Tweaked Interface for iOS 7 and this Lifehacker “read later” app comparison.

There you have it: Instapaper, free for a limited time. Go get it!

Let’s see if we can make the future better than this, shall we?

(In case you don’t get the reference, here’s the relevant scene from WALL-E…)

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

Internet analytics firm comScore recently released their data from their MobiLens and Mobile Metrix services, creating a snapshot of smartphone usage in the United States for October 2013. There’s nothing particularly surprising in this snapshot: the current numbers reflect the same general trends over the past year.

62% of the U.S. population has a smartphone

Click the picture to see the source data.

As of October 2013, there were 149 million smartphone users age 13 and older in the U.S., which accounts for 62.5% of the country’s population. This represents an increase of 4.1% over the previous snapshot, taken in July 2013. It’s very likely we’ll see smartphone users accounting for two-thirds of the population in early 2014.

Apple is the leading smartphone OEM; Samsung has the fastest-growing share

Click the graph to see the source data.

In October 2013, Apple was the leading smartphone OEM, having captured 40.6% of U.S. smartphone subscribers age 13 and up, an increase of 0.2% since the July 2013 snapshot. Samsung is in second place, with 25.4% of the market (an increase of 1.3% since July 2013), followed by Motorola, HTC, and LG, each with about 7%.

The OEMs with the biggest changes in market share were Samsung, who showed a gain of 1.3% since July 2013, and HTC, who showed an equal percentage loss in the same time period.

Top smartphone OEMs

3-month average ending October 2013 vs. 3-month average ending July 2013
Source: comScore MobiLens

Vendor	Jul 2013	Oct 2013	Change
Apple	40.4%	40.6%	0.2%
Samsung	24.1%	25.4%	1.3%
Motorola	6.9%	7.0%	0.1%
HTC	8.0%	6.7%	-1.3%
LG	6.8%	6.6%	-0.2%

Android and iOS combined maintain over 90% of the mobile platform market

Click the graph to see the source data.

Android was the leading platform in October 2013, with 52.2% of the market (an increase of 0.4% over the July 2013 snapshot), followed by iOS at 40.6% (an increase of 0.2%). BlackBerry and Windows Phone are still fighting for distant third place at 3.6% and 3.2% respectively, with BlackBerry’s share having fallen 0.7% and Windows Phone’s having risen 0.2%. The Symbian market share continues its decline to zero, having dropped from 0.3% to 0.2% from July to October 2013.

With all the bad news about BlackBerry, including the oral history published in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek and the recommendations from analysts like Gartner to abandon the BlackBerry platform, we should expect Windows Phone to take the lead in the race for distant third place when the next comScore snapshot comes out.

Top smartphone platforms

3-month average ending October 2013 vs. 3-month average ending July 2013
Source: comScore MobiLens

Platform	Jul 2013	Oct 2013	Change
Android	51.8%	52.2%	0.4%
iOS	40.4%	40.6%	0.2%
BlackBerry	4.3%	3.6%	-0.7%
Windows Phone	3.0%	3.2%	0.2%
Symbian	0.3%	0.2%	-0.1%

The big players have the top sites for mobile visitors

Click the graph to see the source data.

These figures shouldn’t be surprising: the sites that act as portals to a vast field of information, whether search, news, shopping, or social contacts were the top sites visited using smartphones in October 2013. Nearly 9 out of 10 smartphone users access Google’s and Facebook’s sites, nearly 8 out of 10 visited a Yahoo! sites, nearly two-thirds visited Amazon, and about half visited Apple.

In case you were wondering:

• Turner Digital includes CNN.com, NBA.com, Yahoo! Sports NBA and Yahoo! Sports NASCAR, CartoonNetwork.com as well as Funny or Die and The Smoking Gun.
• CBS Interactive includes the various CBS news and sports sites, as well as the foodie site CHOW.com, a number of tech news sites (CNET, TechRepublic, ZDNet), ComicVine, a number of gamer sites (Gamespot, Giant Bomb, and the French Gamekult), a number of music sites (last.fm, MP3.com. Radio.com), and sites aimed at the Chinese market (the automobile site xcar.com.cn and the electronic gadget site zol.com.cn).
• Glam Media includes Glam, Ning and all the community sites under its umbrella, Foodie, the family lifestyle site Tend and the men’s lifestyle site Brash.

The big players also have the top apps

Click the graph to see the source data.

In the world of apps, there’s a strong presence of mobile platform vendors Google and Apple, and one would-be (and may-yet-be) mobile platform vendor: Facebook. Not only does Facebook have the top app with a commanding 20% lead over the second-place Google Play, they also own two other apps in the top 15: Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Google also has a strong showing with 5 apps in the upper portion of the top 15: Google Play, Google Search, YouTube, GMail, and Google Maps. Apple’s app suite and Maps app occupy two slots in the top 15, and Yahoo! have two apps there: their Stocks and Weather Widget apps.

It’s Apple’s, Samsung’s, and Google’s world, we just live in it

With Apple as the #1 OEM and delivering the #2 mobile platform, Samsung being the #2 OEM and effectively being the Android standard bearer, and Apple and Google have strong showings in both mobile websites and apps, these three companies define the shape of the mobile universe, and the trends seem to indicate that they will continue to do so through 2014. Whether you build apps, accessories, or enterprises on mobile tech, you need to take this into account.

Making longer-term predictions is a riskier game in an industry that was redefined less than a decade ago. Fortunes change in a matter of months, not years, and while the Apple/Samsung/Google troika seem invincible now, think back to the 1990s when Microsoft was the 800-pound gorilla of tech and most startup business plans ended with a statement like “and then we’ll get bought out by Redmond”.

As a final reminder of how quickly and completely this industry can change, here’s Michael DeGusta’s tweet from September, made just after Nokia’s acquisition by Microsoft:

The top 4 smartphone brands of 2006: 1. Nokia: died today. 2. RIM: dead soon. 3. Motorola: dead sooner than you think. 4. Palm: long dead.

— Michael DeGusta (@degusta) September 3, 2013

Strangely enough, I haven’t had much need to crank out invoices and do other accounting, billing, and similar tasks until now. I’ve either worked with a company who had someone do that for me, or I’ve worked with a partner who’s handled the paper-pushing. Now that I’m doing the lone wolf consulting thing — and let me tell you, the boss is an effing genius — I’m in the process of evaluating make-your-life-easier business admin tools.

I’ve decided to try out FreshBooks first. I know the people — a good number of them personally — I know many of their satisfied customers, and hey, they’re just down the street from me. I notice that they’ve changed mottos from “painless billing” to “cloud accounting”. Right now, I need a simple invoicing system, but as things progress, I’ll dip my toe into their accounting features.

So far, my experience has been pleasant — the sign-up process threw as few obstacles as possible in my path, the short, sweet, and useful “How to make your first invoice” video was everything it should be and nothing more, and I’ve sent my first couple of invoices without a hitch. I logged in, got my stuff done, got out, and went back to what it is I’m paid to do without a hassle. That’s exactly what I want from this sort of service, and FreshBooks has delivered. Well done, folks.

Looking for a new typewriter typeface, but tired of all those variants of Courier or Letter Gothic? Take a look at Royal Vogue, which is made from scans from the output of a 1920s Royal portable typewriter. It’s still obviously a typewriter ‘face, but it’s also very clearly art deco. It’s free-as-in-beer, and you can download it from the Royal Vogue page on The Classic Typewriter Page.