Just one week after Google launched the Nexus One , its entry into the smartphone field, the numbers are in and it doesn’t look to be keeping up with the competition. We reviewed the iPhone-competitor the other day and see it as a formidable challenger, but its first week sales numbers fall drastically short of those same numbers for other smartphones during their first week, according to statistics from mobile analytics firm Flurry . Sponsor While Flurry’s own analysis of the numbers makes sure to point out that the statistics may not provide an “apples to apples” comparison, the Nexus One’s first week sales were a fraction of its top three competitors. Flurry details the methods used to arrive at these numbers in its blog post and is certain to call the data an estimate, but if they are even close to correct, the Droid outsold Nexus One by more than 12 times, myTouch 3G by 3 times and iPhone 3GS by 80 times. Whether it was Google’s lack of marketing, the fact that the phone was only available for purchase online, or its $500-plus sticker price without a service contract, Flurry identifies a number of reasons for the slow start. The company also points to the post-holiday release date and the fact that Google did little compared to Verizon’s $100 million marketing of the Droid. We see a few other points that could have contributed to the slow start. For those using AT&T, the Nexus One works in slower EDGE mode, not 3G. And for the contract weary, news about Google charging additional early termination fees certainly holds some scare factor. We’ll have to keep an eye on these numbers as time goes on, but we’re curious – what, if anything, has kept you from taking the leap? Discuss

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Nexus One, Week 1: Outsold by iPhone 3Gs 80-to-1

Just one week after Google launched the Nexus One , its entry into the smartphone field, the numbers are in and it doesn’t look to be keeping up with the competition. We reviewed the iPhone-competitor the other day and see it as a formidable challenger, but its first week sales numbers fall drastically short of those same numbers for other smartphones during their first week, according to statistics from mobile analytics firm Flurry . Sponsor While Flurry’s own analysis of the numbers makes sure to point out that the statistics may not provide an “apples to apples” comparison, the Nexus One’s first week sales were a fraction of its top three competitors. Flurry details the methods used to arrive at these numbers in its blog post and is certain to call the data an estimate, but if they are even close to correct, the Droid outsold Nexus One by more than 12 times, myTouch 3G by 3 times and iPhone 3GS by 80 times. Whether it was Google’s lack of marketing, the fact that the phone was only available for purchase online, or its $500-plus sticker price without a service contract, Flurry identifies a number of reasons for the slow start. The company also points to the post-holiday release date and the fact that Google did little compared to Verizon’s $100 million marketing of the Droid. We see a few other points that could have contributed to the slow start. For those using AT&T, the Nexus One works in slower EDGE mode, not 3G. And for the contract weary, news about Google charging additional early termination fees certainly holds some scare factor. We’ll have to keep an eye on these numbers as time goes on, but we’re curious – what, if anything, has kept you from taking the leap? Discuss

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Nexus One, Week 1: Outsold by iPhone 3Gs 80-to-1

We began our Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things series yesterday with a look at barcode scanning . We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes – in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. These applications, such as RedLaser on iPhone and ShopSavvy on Android, allow you to scan a barcode on a product or object and get more information about it. We noted however that RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year. Sponsor RWW’s Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things Series: According to a number of believable blog reports , RFID is set to be a part of the as yet unannounced iPhone 4G. Apple holds a patent for a touch screen RFID tag reader and is said to be testing an RFID-enabled iPhone currently. So RFID could be a feature of the iPhone 4G as soon as Spring 2010 . As MacRumors succinctly explained in November, mobile phone usage of RFID technology will come in the form of Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is a new standard based on RFID and it has three use cases: the phone as an RFID tag; the phone as RFID Reader; and peer to peer communication (P2P) between two NFC-enabled phones. The first two use cases are most interesting. Using the iPhone as an RFID tag means it can be a deployed as a payment device (similar to a credit card), identity card, security device, and more. This type of functionality is already happening in Japan, where the RFID Suica chip is installed in some mobile phones. Using the phone as an RFID Reader allows the iPhone to interact with RFID-enabled objects in the real world. Check out this prototype from a Norwegian research organization called Touch, using the iPhone as a Media Player: Timo Arnall from Touch noted in a follow-up post in November that RFID and NFC peripherals are beginning to be released for the iPhone. 2010 could be a great year for RFID in the consumer market, if it is to be a feature of the next iPhone. Expect to see it in Android devices too. Will mobile phones provide the tipping point for adoption of the Internet of Things? We’ve seen now that mobile phones are a big driver of consumer adoption of both barcodes and RFID tags, so we wouldn’t be surprised. Discuss

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iPhone as RFID Tag & Reader: Coming Soon

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on a new “superphone” launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs). Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report , about the Real-Time Web. Sponsor Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper , we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print . For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it . Don’t forget about our Community Management Report . It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it! Web Trends How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records. Web Apps Meet Consumer Electronics at CES The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics , from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars , courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford’s announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung’s latest Internet-connected TV . SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise , devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL Web Products Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One , which it described as “Where Web Meets Phone.” Google calls this a new category of phones – the “super phones.” The Nexus One apparently “pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.” Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details. Droid’s December Boom: Metrics Show Device Use Doubled in One Month The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests. Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You Starting this spring, you won’t need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won’t even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen – the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs. SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Nexus One, CES Coverage, Online Finance, And More…

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Sponsor Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Mint: Leading the Charge Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit’s Quicken Online . Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you. Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta . Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week. Mint’s success didn’t go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn’t plan to compete in the market anymore . Correction : In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi. Beyond Mint While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it’s by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint. ClearCheckbook.com , for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online. A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe , for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint. Since acquiring Exepnsr , Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo – which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting. Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax , for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K. Going Mobile Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe , for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone – either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert. Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America , Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example. When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due. What’s Next? Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software. This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Discuss

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How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

New rules from the Federal Trade Commission, requiring bloggers to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review , came into effect on December 1st and the first major announcement of 2010 just occurred today. The Google Nexus One mobile phone was unveiled this afternoon and all the members of the press who were on-site for the announcements received free phones from Google. This is the most-anticipated phone to hit the market in years. It’s like a unicorn sparkling with magic, perhaps. Almost no one at all has disclosed getting a free unit in writing their reviews. Sponsor The idea is that receiving free goods from a vendor makes a writer more likely to write positively about a product than they would otherwise. Readers deserve to know if a writer has a financial interest in the company or has received free stuff, so that the readers can take product reviews with gifts associated with a grain of salt. Some people believe that this is essential to safeguard the trustworthiness of media in a “new media” era, others believe it is unfair to small-time bloggers who deserve a chance to profit from their writing just like the pros do. In this case, though, it’s the pros we’re talking about. Blogger Robert Scoble tells us that all the attendees were given a choice: receive the phone as a gift or sign an agreement to borrow a Nexus One on loan for 30 days. Scoble signed up for the loaner. VC blogger Fred Wilson wrote in his post “I received a gift from Google. It was a Nexus One.” Michael Arrington has said that TechCrunch will give away the phone he received at the press event. Scanning over Techmeme’s survey of coverage , we’re unable to find anyone else who makes mention of the freebie. It may be the case that big-name tech review bloggers like Walt Mossberg or Engadget are just expected to always send back the review copies of things they get and so there’s no reason to disclose on every post. (I don’t know.) It may be that all the press who got a Google Phone today is planning on giving the phones back in 30 days. How should disclosures be handled though if you’re writing an article and you haven’t decided whether you are going to send something back as a loaner or keep it? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we try hard to always make casual but clear mention when we have a financial interest in a company we are writing about. We try hard to mention the same if we are writing about a competitor to a company we have a financial interest in. And we always do our best to disclose it if we ever get free stuff from vendors we write about. That doesn’t happen very much. Sometimes the lines aren’t clear, either. The community manager at Postrank.com sent me a sock monkey she made last year and I write about that company often. (I use it daily for essential work.) I’ve never mentioned that sock monkey before, though. This is a phone made of pure sunlight and hype, though. Is it a poor reflection on the FTC’s new disclosure requirements that so few have disclosed their free Google Phones, or is it a poor reflection on our group of tech bloggers? Discuss

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1 Month Into New FTC Rules: Who’s Disclosing Their Free Google Phones?

In December, I visited Parrot ’s development labs in Paris to check out the company’s newest project. While Parrot is mostly known for its Bluetooth headsets and speaker systems, the company’s newest project combines augmented reality with a remote controlled helicopter. This helicopter – the AR.Drone – features four rotors to keep it stable and a front-mounted camera that is linked to an iPhone or iPod touch. The rig is controlled via an iPhone or iPod touch and the device’s screen can show an augmented view of what the helicopter’s camera sees. Sponsor AR Meets the Real World What’s most exciting about this product is how it combines a real helicopter with this augmented reality view. Instead of just looking at an augmented view of the world through the phone’s camera, you get to see the world through the drone’s camera. The iPhone takes the view of the camera (via Wi-Fi) and replaces markers with anything from walls to dinosaurs. During our discussion with Parrot in December, we couldn’t get any information about the price of the AR.Drone out of the company’s representatives. Given how sophisticated the hardware is, however, chances are that it won’t be very cheap. The drone, for example, features two camera. Besides the camera that feeds the video to the iPhone, the drone also features a second came that is mounted underneath he structure and augments the drone’s autopilot. Hands-On With the AR.Drone We got a chance to play with a prototype of the AR.Drone in Parrot’s labs and while it took a while to get used to the controls (the app uses a combination of the phone’s tilt sensors and on-screen controls to manipulate the drone). The video on the iPhone was surprisingly clear and didn’t show any noticeable lag. Sadly, we didn’t get a chance to try out the AR features of the app, though. Parrot will launch the AR.Drone later this year. The company plans demo the helicopter at CES this week but the exact date of the public launch remains unclear. A Drone for Developers In its current iteration, the hardware and software is clearly laid out for gaming, but Parrot also released an SDK that will allow developers to use the hardware for other purposes as well. It will definitely be interesting to see what games and other tools the developer community will come up with one the AR.Drone is launched. Parrot told us that it hopes that developers will look at the hardware as a platform and the company hopes to create an active developer ecosystem around the AR.Drone. More Videos Click here for more videos of the AR.Drone in action. Disclosure : Frederic met with Parrot during a trip that was partly sponsored by Parrot . An Early Demo Discuss

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Parrot’s Remote Controlled Helicopter Takes Augmented Reality to the Next Dimension