A report out earlier today from NPD highlighted how tablets are taking over from notebooks as the mobile PC of choice. By coincidence, a survey has been published by Gartner today that sheds some light on the “how” behind that shift: more people are using tablets for the functions that used to be the preserve of PCs, such as checking email, social networking and checking the weather.

The survey also found that tablets are becoming a mainstay for people who read newspapers, magazines and books. More than 50 percent of respondents said they preferred to read on tablets instead of on paper. It’s not clear if ‘tablets’ in this case includes devices like the Kindle as well, but what’s clear so far is that a portable touchscreen is not replacing the physical versions of those completely, yet: it’s about “less paper” rather than “paperless”, Gartner says.

Gartner’s findings are from the end of 2011 and covering just over 500 consumers in the UK, U.S. and Australia, was run as a diary where people recorded what they did on their three most-used devices: those, it seems, were predetermined as tablets, mobile devices and PCs. The research does not look at the actual devices, to see whether the iPad, for example, is seeing more usage than an Android tablet.

Gartner found that just as it is with PCs, email was the most popular activity with respondents: 81 percent said they checked email on tablets. After that, newsreading was the second-most popular activity at 69 percent; checking weather was the third-most popular at 63 percent; social networking was at 62 percent; and gaming in third at 60 percent.

And what’s interesting is that while we’ve heard a lot from magazine, newspaper and book publishers about how the rise of tablets has changed their business models around, the Gartner survey gives us the other side of the deal: it shows that consumers are really using their tablets as a replacement for all three, with a majority of respondents, 51 percent, saying they preferred to get their periodical hit from their tablets more than the paper versions.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, notes that tablets scored much higher as a printed matter replacement than phones or PCs.

“The rapid adoption of media tablets is substantively changing how consumers access, create and share content," she writes. “On average, one in three respondents used their media tablets to read a book, compared with 13 percent for mobile PCs, and 7 percent for mobile phones.”

In fact, at home tablets seem to stand in a class of their own for consumers, in that they are used alongside whatever else a consumer is using; meanwhile, that “whatever else” is often shifting, from TV to PC to mobile device depending on what users are doing. Tablets, Gartner notes, are used most in the living room (87 percent), the bedroom (65 percent) and kitchen (47 percent), and less on the weekends than on weekdays, when we tend to be out of the house more.

And just as the NPD analysts pointed out that notebook PCs are being more tablet-like, here we get some confirmation from the consumer side that we clearly have a taste for the tablet form factor at the moment: they are small and light-weight, and that’s convenient. And while PCs are often shared commodities in a household, perhaps because of their size or price, or for the fact that they are not exactly designed to be shared, tablets occupy a personalized position more akin to the mobile handset: some 45 percent of respondents said they “do not share their tablet at all.”

Gartner also provided some survey feedback on how other devices are used. It noted that if tablets are dominant at home, mobile phones are the most dominant when considering day-long use. They are used eight times per day on average, the survey found. As a point of comparison, tablets are only used twice per day on average, and mobile PCs are used three times per day (although the hours spent in those times will, of course, vary). In terms of what they’re used for, it’s a spread similar to tablets, except that music is added in as a top-five activity (weather drops out).

Like tablets, mobiles are used most of all in the living room (78 percent). Gartner’s conclusion: TVs are fighting for users’ attention, which is also being captured by these portable devices. Mobile TV remains a very niche activity: only five percent of users said they watched mobile TV on their phones. On-demand content scored somewhat higher at 15 percent.

A bit on gender differences, too: while both use Internet at home than outside the home, men say they use their devices for gathering information, while women say they use them for entertainment like gaming and socialising on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Survey Analysis: Early Tablet Adopters and Their Daily Use of Connected Devices.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at.

* Note to Editors
In November 2011, Gartner interviewed 510 consumers via an online survey in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Respondents had to own a media tablet and at least two other connected devices.

Mobile payments platform Dwolla has the potential to disrupt how money moves in the new, digital economy. It’s an idea of how a payments network should look, if one had been built today, as opposed to tacking on digital payments to the legacy system that is the current credit card network. But there has been one big problem for end users of Dwolla – no one had any clue where they could actually try the darned thing. That’s going to change starting today with the launch of  Dwolla “Places.”

Believe it or not, until now, the company had not maintained a directory of its merchant partners, which includes both brick-and-mortar stores and online sellers. But there are 15,000 businesses in the U.S. where you can pay with Dwolla, and today’s launch aims to better highlight those merchants.

“For the first time, you can actually search for where you can use Dwolla,” says CEO Ben Milne. But he admits, “There are 25 million businesses [in the U.S.], and Dwolla isn’t everywhere you want to use it yet.” That’s why the new “Places” product allows customers to also request Dwolla support by clicking a “Want” button next to the merchant where they’re hoping to see the service implemented. Dwolla will then begin using these votes to better target which merchants it starts talking to next.

“That way, when a merchant comes online, they already have customers ready to go,” says Milne of how the change will impact Dwolla’s merchant outreach. “And then we have a mechanism for telling those customers that the merchant you want to use Dwolla with is now online,” he adds. He says customers will be alerted to their requests via email notification.

The new feature also comes with social sharing options, allowing Dwolla’s more rabid fan base to campaign for votes via Twitter and Facebook. You can also connect to Foursquare to see if your favorite check-in spots already support Dwolla. And merchants who discover they’re starting to get votes can “claim” their profile page following a short verification process.

Meanwhile, for existing Dwolla merchants – which Milne says are largely brick-and-mortar retailers – the “Places” feature means improved discovery through public profile pages. But users won’t have to just know the merchant by name – you can also search for generic terms like “coffee” or “auto body,” for example, if you want to support Dwolla-friendly businesses.

The feature is currently in beta, so it may be buggy, the company warns. It’s also currently available online online, but mobile app integration is in the works. However, Milne says that Dwolla is working on a larger update to its mobile apps which will include a redesign to support “Places,” among other things. “It’s likely that you’ll see some similar structure extended into the mobile apps,” he says. But that update may not come immediately. Internally, Milne says the thought process around mobile, where apps haven’t been updated in half a year or more, is: “let’s not do a marginal update, let’s do something meaningful here.” Stay tuned.

Here’s more evidence that Netflix is slowly chipping away at traditional TV viewing. According to a public Facebook post by CEO Reed Hastings, Netflix subscribers watched a total of 1 billion hours of video for the first time in June. Do a little back-of-the-envelope math, and that comes out to more than an hour of video per subscriber each day.

The post was meant as a pat on the back for Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, who’s spent the last several years licensing content for the company’s streaming service. Hastings wrote:

Congrats to Ted Sarandos, and his amazing content licensing team. Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June. When House of Cards and Arrested Development debut, we’ll blow these records away. Keep going, Ted, we need even more!

The milestone comes as Netflix is trying to right the ship after a few missteps last year. After announcing plans to split apart and rebrand its DVD-by-mail service — and then rescinding those plans — the company lost subscribers in the last year’s third quarter. Since then, it’s been working to repair its brand image, and apparently succeeding.

Netflix ended the first quarter with more than 26 million subscribers worldwide, which was a new high for the company and more than 1.5 million above the number it had in the fourth quarter of last year. More importantly, its subscribers are engaged and watching a ton of video on the service.

It’s not clear how many subscribers it ended the second quarter with, as Q2 earnings are likely later this month. But if we use the 26 million number as a baseline, 1 billion hours of video viewed during the month roughly translates to about an hour, hour-fifteen per subscriber per day.

Considering the average viewer in the U.S. watches about five hours of TV a day, that’s a huge number worth watching. After all, there are only so many hours in a day, and if a Netflix subscriber is tuning in to an hour of video on the service, that likely means one less hour of actual live TV he or she is watching.

When it comes to learning, BenchPrep believes that the most effective educational content doesn’t come in the form of books — or even eBooks. Instead, it’s interactive and cross platform. That’s why the Chicago-based startup is on a mission to build an adaptive learning hub for interactive courses, where students can study content from any publisher, on the Web or on any mobile device. The startup has already released 100 courses, which are being consumed by 250K students, but the team has bigger ambitions — they want to reach 500 courses and one million students within the year.

To help it meet this scale, BenchPrep is today announcing that it has closed $6 million in venture funding, led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Revolution Ventures. This is BenchPrep’s second round of funding, following the $2.2 million it raised from Lightbank last year, bringing its total to $8.2 million. BenchPrep was one of Lightbank’s first investments and Eric Lefkosky and Brad Keywell continue to sit on the startup’s board of directors. As a result of the round, NEA partner Peter Barris also joins the board.

While reaching 500 courses and one million students by the end of the year may seem an ambitious goal, BenchPrep has come a long way in a short period of time. The startup launched its platform in July 2011 and grew its course library to 100 within 10 months. But the real key to its growth is that BenchPrep now partners with more than 20 of the industry’s top publishers, including McGraw Hill, Princeton Review, Wiley, Cengage Learning and O’Reilly.

Rather than developing its own educational content in-house, BenchPrep licenses material from these textbook publishers, mixing and matching the best content for each particular discipline. Of course, textbook publishers have traditionally been reluctant to partner with newcomers, especially when it comes to licensing agreements, but BenchPrep CEO Ashish Rangnekar tells us that they were able to convince publishers that they were not, in fact, competing for the same dollar.

Instead, Rangnekar asked publishers to think of BenchPrep as distributors — and distributors not of books or eBooks, but of interactive study guides. And as extra incentive, the CEO says that BenchPrep ensures that the royalties for their publishing partners are greater than what they find selling their content through Amazon or traditional bookstores.

What’s more, the fact of the matter is that technology really isn’t in the DNA of these publishing companies, and cross-platform distribution, especially mobile, isn’t something they do well. That’s why BenchPrep has become a sort of a middle man that takes licensed educational content from publishers, turns that material into interactive, gamified courses and study guides, and distributes it across the Web and mobile devices.

That turnaround process can happen in seven days, allowing the startup to convert Algebra and Chemistry textbooks that might sell for $40 or $50 into interactive courses that run anywhere from $50 to $150. For students, this is far cheaper than having to pay the typical $1,000 or $1,500 for an online course and, in turn, gives publishers a nice little source of incremental revenue, thanks to royalties.

Updating

To my knowledge TechCrunch has never had an official meetup in Madrid, so it’s time to rectify that. We’re joining forces with the WebSummit people as part of their European Tech Crawl this Thursday night, 6-8pm.

Details and the sign up page is here.

It will be good to meet some tech startup people and fill the sadly gaping hole in my knowledge of Spain-based startups. So bring along your iPad demos etc and please come and say hi!

Like the U.S., Japan has a ticketing problem. Big incumbents keep independent event producers from managing ticket sales and growing their events. In the same way that Eventbrite helped to provide more efficient options for event organizers to get the word out and sell tickets in the U.S., PeaTiX is offering up a similar platform for managing event promotion online in Japan. And it’s raised a bit of cash to do so.

PeaTiX just closed $1 million in seed funding from a number of investors, including 500 Startups, DG Incubation, Itochu Technology Ventures, and SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg.

PeaTiX founders Taku Harada and Emi Takemura knew each other from Amazon. But their collaboration mostly began as a way to bring popular U.S. applications to the Japanese market. They got exclusive licenses for Bit.ly and SurveyMonkey and made them available in Japan, handling operations for those apps there. With PeaTiX, they’re rolling out their own service to the market, hoping to disrupt the local ticketing business with an easy-to-use platform for event management.

The PeaTiX platform is designed to give organizers the tools to create, promote, and manage all their events, while also providing a way for attendees to socialize. Since going live in May 2011, more than 2,500 events have been managed on the platform, including sporting events, concerts, and seminars.

Harada told me that the new funding will be used mostly to increase its mobile presence. According to him, about 30 percent of all tickets sold happen on mobile devices, and he expects that to increase even further. The company is also looking to expand its product to other Asian countries.

PeaTiX has 20 employees based in Tokyo. The company had previously raised $615,000 in January from 500 Startups, DFJ JAIC, Sunbridge Startups, and ZenShin Capital, with its founders kicking in a little money as well.

Android development doesn’t always have to look like this. Smaller developers without their own in-house QA departments often outsource their testing to services like Testdroid, for example, which tests their Android apps on physical devices. But today, Testdroid and the like will have some new competition from a company called AppThwack, which plans to not only match Testdroid’s capabilities, but will go even further in terms of the number of automation frameworks it supports.

Currently, Testdroid supports more devices than AppThwack, which only has 60 to Testdroid’s 100+. But, points out AppThwack co-founder Trent Peterson, they’ve managed to go from zero to sixty in just three months. And, he adds, you don’t need to have every device in order to cover the majority of the market. That said, AppThwack is still adding more devices to the service at a rate of about five per week.

Peterson and his co-founder Pawel Wojnarowicz formerly worked at Intel, where, for nine years, they focused on automating distributed systems for Wi-Fi, WiMax and Bluetooth. In March 2012, they decided to quit and begin building AppThwack. Originally, the idea was to build a distributed automation platform and market that as the company’s flagship product.

“But it quickly became apparent that two guys with an unproven automated platform that’s fairly generic is nearly impossible to market to enterprise,” says Peterson. So they shifted into Android testing instead, using the automation platform as the base and building AppThwack on top of it. “The goal is to allow developers to see how their apps are performing on devices before they ever hit an actual end user,” he says of the new product.

To be clear, AppThwack is not a beta testing suite, where apps are distributed to people who then run the apps on their devices and give individualized feedback (such as Applover, e.g.). “From our background in automation and general QA, I don’t think [beta testing is] really a solution in and of itself,” says Peterson. “First of all, these people have no ties to your app and don’t know what it should look like and how it should behave, plus, you’re sending out your IP to random people. I don’t really compare us to that entire market.”

Instead, AppThwack’s closest competitors will be the services that automate the testing process on actual hardware. Peterson identified his closest competitor as the above-mentioned Testdroid, but notes that Testdroid is focused on Robotium, the Selenium-like testing service designed for Android. With AppThwack, Robotium will be supported, but it will also support Exerciser Monkey and it will randomly test the UI by taking screenshots in both portrait and landscape modes.

“We didn’t design around Robotium or design around Exerciser Monkey, everything is very modular,” says Peterson. “And as we get new requests there are a couple of other automation frameworks for testing Android devices, and we’re adding these in as we go.” He mentions monkeyrunner, MonkeyTalk, and Calabash as those under consideration. Implementation will be based on demand. In addition, the company is adding support for web testing, too. Right now, it loads URLs and takes screenshots in a variety of browsers, but it will become a more robust service in time.

After tests are run, developers will be provided with easy-to-read reports, like these examples here: Android, web.

During its private beta, the bootstrapped company had 200 developers who ran over 200,000 tests on the service. The former director of QA at Swype, Michael Tu, and a co-founder of OpenSignalMaps, Sina Khanifer, are current users of the service.

AppThwack will be a freemium service, but until pricing is worked out, it’s free. There’s also an option for bigger shops to install the framework in-house, if they choose. Sign-up is here.

Yesterday, Beats Electronics confirmed that it was buying the music streaming service MOG. Today, HTC, which invested $309 million in Beats last year, revealed to its shareholders just how much was paid: $14 million — a song compared to the $4 billion valuation swirling around its competitor Spotify.

The note, first spotted by the blog Unwired View, is embedded on HTC’s investor relations site. It also confirms that the sale was only for certain assets belonging to MOG and have been made as a “strategic investment” through Beats subsidiary Daisy. As we reported yesterday, Beats has bought only the streaming portion of MOG’s business; the advertising and online network will continue as its own standalone entity.

The purchase is increasingly looking like a double-strategic move: on one hand for HTC to compete against Apple, Samsung and the rest with a killer music service of its own; and another for Beats/MOG to renew efforts versus Spotify.

HTC. As we noted yesterday, one big question around the acquisition is around how this might fit into HTC’s business: the company is already a shareholder in Beats and has been using it as part of its strategy to improve its service/content portfolio. (That strategy also includes a stake in OnLive, the cloud gaming platform that some believe may be in play, now that Gaikai has been bought by Sony.)

Yesterday, Beats explained that MOG would become incorporated into new, end-to-end services developed by Beats. That may see a full music service coming to HTC.

“[Beats] was never about just headphones,” Beats’ president and COO Luke Wood said yesterday in a statement confirming the deal. “We've… expanded the Beats mission to every other link in the music experience chain – speakers, mobile phones, personal computers and automobile sound systems. With MOG, we are adding the best music service to the Beats portfolio for the first truly end-to-end music experience.”

As I noted at the time of the original investment that HTC made into Beats on August 11, the idea specifically for Beats was to improve music quality and give HTC a stronger position against Apple with its iTunes stronghold. That position for Apple has now been bolstered even further by the fact that there is a strong catalog of iOS apps, like Spotify’s, that also offer compelling music experiences for the consumer.

For Beats, the bigger competitive threat is against Spotify. The U.S./Swedish company not only has a lot of cash — over $180 million in backing; on track to make nearly $900 million in revenues this year — but a lot of current and potential users, too. On its own steam, Spotify now has 10 million users, but a deal announced last week with Yahoo — in which Spotify will become the main streamed music provider to the Internet portal — could see that number ramp up significantly.

It’s got a long way to go, though. MOG has 16 million tracks but with its service only live in the U.S. and Australia (versus some 13 markets for Spotify), it is likely to be significantly smaller, judging by the price tag HTC has revealed.

The guys at iFixit are at it again and just posted their Nexus 7 teardown guide. Overall, iFixit found that the device is rather serviceable and seemingly well designed. Unlike the iPad 2 and new iPad, the Nexus 7 employs clips to hold the whole assembly together. This results in an extra 1mm of thickness, but they allow owners to open the case with just a little prying.

Once inside, the battery can be replaced with ease; it doesn’t even require the removal of any screws. Asus used standard Philips #00 throughout the Nexus 7 which also lends to its serviceability. However, unlike the Kindle Fire, iFixit found that the LCD screen is affixed to the front display assembly. This means that the entire front panel will need to be replaced if something happens to either the bezel or screen.

From my perspective as just an occasional tinkerer, the Nexus 7 seems put together rather nicely. It’s even more impressive given the fact that Google gave just four months to deliver the tablet, although as Sean Hollister previously pointed out, the Nexus 7 is likely a retooled Asus ME370T.

In a way the Nexus 7, arguably the most important Android tablet to date, speaks to the ever-constant Android vs Google debate. The new iPad, and the iPad 2 before, are virtually impossible to service. I previously argued this move was to the benefit of innovation and progress, allowing Apple to churn out newer models quicker rather than dedicating a large support staff to service old ones. That said, it’s a bit telling that the $199 Nexus 7 can be completely serviced while the $499+ iPad cannot.

Of all the disappointing details heard during RIM's most recent earnings call, the company's decision to push back the launch of its first BlackBerry 10 devices was among the most devastating to the company's loyal legion of fans.

Bummer though it may be, we may now have a clearer view of RIM's hardware plans for the next year thanks to a newly-leaked roadmap obtained by BlackBerryOS. You know the drill folks — have those grains of salt at the ready.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins confirmed earlier this year that the first BlackBerry 10 device to launch would be a full touch device (the BlackBerry London/L-series), which would be followed shortly by a QWERTY handset (the Nevada/N-series). What Heins never disclosed was how quickly that second smartphone would launch after the first, but the slide confirms that both of them will be available at some point during Q1 2013.

Perhaps more interesting is the inclusion of a new tablet into the mix that's apparently being prepared for release in the third quarter of next year. The slide is awfully light on details but the so-called Blackforest may sport 128GB of internal storage and appears significantly larger than the revamped 7-inch PlayBook 4G that's slated to launch by the end of this year. It's possible that the Blackforest could be the long-rumored 10-inch PlayBook, and if so, it seems as though the rumors of its demise have been exaggerated.

The slide is also peppered with a few other, less-detailed launches — something called the Nashville is expected to launch between Q2 and Q3, while RIM aims for a Q3/Q4 launch date for the Naples. Those names have popped up in the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha build so it's pretty clear that they're devices in the works, but there's still no detail on what they'll bring to the table.

If RIM’s plans for 2013 look a little sparse, it’s likely because RIM is looking to put more wood behind fewer arrows — as Heins stated during the earnings call, the company will have “fewer devices in a market at any given time.” It’s an approach that plenty of other smartphone players are running with these days, though only time will tell if they can survive this nasty transition period.

Six months after its teaser trailer showed up online, Robert X. Cringely’s “lost” interview with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has now available for rent in iTunes for $3.99. In 1995, Cringely interviewed Jobs, who was then running NeXT, and two years out from what would later be his triumphant return to Apple, for a PBS documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds”. However, much of their discussion ended up on the cutting room floor – 70 minutes worth, in fact.

In the un-aired portions, Jobs talked about his approach to product design, team building and product evolution, among other things. At the time, those insights may not have had the impact they do now, as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad had yet to be invented.

The footage was presumed lost until shortly after Steve Jobs’ passing, when it was discovered by the documentary’s director, Paul Sen, who found it in his garage.

Interestingly enough, Cringely says that Apple has deemed the film “too controversial” and won’t promote it in iTunes because of its “sensitive” nature. But if you search for it, it’s there. (Perhaps Apple didn’t want to promote it because of Jobs’ cocky responses -such as when he riffs on Microsoft, saying they have bad vision and poor taste? Oh, this is going to be good.)

In iTunes, the description reads:

Candid, controversial and funny… the original and unedited interview with Steve Jobs, conducted by tech journalist and former Apple Inc. employee Robert X. Cringely, from 1995 when Steve Jobs was still CEO of NeXT Computer and Pixar.

The rental is only available in the U.S. at present.

Grab your salt shakers, friends. The always vocal trade publication, DigiTimes, is reporting that Apple is preparing for an October release of a Retina-equipped iMac following a spec bump this July. This conflicts with previous reports citing Apple executives saying redesigned iMacs would hit next year.

It’s entirely possible that Apple will stuff a Retina display within the current iMac, and then in turn, launch a redesigned model next year like previous reports suggest. As demonstrated by the MacBook Pro with Retina Display’s price, the ultra high-resolution display is a costly component. Apple is likely holding out until LCD makers can increase their production yield, therefore dropping the price of the units. A Retina-equipped iMac is all but guaranteed; Apple just needs to make sure the model is priced right.

A Retina iMac would have staggering display resolutions. A 21.5-inch model would likely have a resolution around 3840×2160, double that of the current 1920×1080 screen. The 27-inch already has a 2560×1440 display; a Retina-level screen might have a resolution around a staggering 5120×2880.

Apple is seemingly trying to use the retina display to stand apart from other PC makers. It started with the iPhone and eventually hit the iPad. Now, with the latest MacBook Pro, Apple is charging forward with the Retina display. All that’s missing is an iMac and Apple Display with a Retina display.

Tablets, and specifically the iPad from Apple, have been one of the big drivers for growth in mobile in the last couple of years, but figures out today from NPD indicate that their popularity is going to get even bigger: the market for tablets, its researchers predict, is set to boom from 121 million shipped tablets today to 416 million devices by 2017, when they will overtake notebooks to become the most popular mobile PC device, driven by a drop in costs and a rise in features. Overall mobile PC shipments will reach 809 million units by 2017, from 347 million today.

But over that time, the rise of tablets will remain largely a story about developed/mature markets. Regions like North America and Western Europe, along with single countries like Japan, currently account for 66 percent of all tablet shipments (and most likely sales), and that proportion, NPD predicts, will remain in the 60 percent range for the next five years. That works out to 254 million units by 2017, versus 80 million today.

NPD seems to say that this is partly due to a lack of infrastructure and available services in developing markets, but also that it is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: vendors continue to focus on the mature markets with their new products, so that’s where they get bought: ”New entrants are tending to launch their initial products in mature markets,” Richard Shim, senior analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, notes in a statement.

The rise of tablets is also a story about the decline of notebooks. The market for these will continue to expand, but at a rate lower than the 28 percent that tablets will see: NPD says that by 2017 there will be 393 million notebooks shipped compared to 208 million today.

One takeaway from this: although Apple with its iPad line of tablets has dominated the tablet world in market and mindshare up to now, the space is far from penetrated, and that means that companies like Microsoft, Google and others still have a lot to play for.

Another is that we may continue to see a pressure on price, but that won’t necessarily mean a shortcut on features. Amazon has, by some estimates, ushered in the “death of the spec” with its Kindle Fire tablet, which pares down expensive features like cameras in favor of delivering a sub-$200 device, but NPD notes that it will be the features on those tablets — instant-on capability, battery life, portability, as well as multi-core processors, hi-res displays — that will make them a “compelling alternative” to notebooks for the mobile consumer.

Part of the reason we will see a lot of features continue to be incorporated into tablets is because of the emphasis of content on the devices. App stores are increasingly catering to tablet users. And figures from NPD itself indicate how they are becoming a major platform for traditional TV consumption. This kind of usage screams for better screens, faster processors and just generally awesome hardware.

But by the way, this is not to say notebooks are dying. Far from it — they will still account for 49 percent of the mobile PC market, NPD says, shipping 393 million units in 2017 compared to 208 million in 2012. It adds that notebook makers are also taking heed and looking to put more tablet-like features into their products — for example, becoming thinner and incorporating touch functionality.

LiveRail provides an ad serving platform used by a number of premium video publishers to insert ads into their content. The LiveRail for Publishers platform is designed to provide targeting and yield optimization capabilities, as well as campaign management and real-time analytics.

That’s all pretty standard fare for publishers, and so LiveRail is trying to sweeten the deal, with a new offering that will give them more control over inventory they sell through private exchanges or real-time bidding platforms. The product, called Checkpoint, will let publishers choose which ads are delivered — or not — and allow them to block unwanted ads before being served to viewers.

That could mean blocking ads from categories like alcohol or tobacco, which aren’t appropriate for a publisher’s audience, for instance, or ads which have adult themes. It could also be used to prevent advertisers that a publisher has a direct sales relationship with from serving lower-CPM ads through an exchange. Or it could be used to do away with competitive ads that could pose a conflict — like if Ford is a sponsor and Toyota tries to place an ad on that site.

LiveRail is already integrated with a number of major real-time bidding platforms, and the Checkpoint product will work across all of them, ensuring compatibility across its publisher platform. The feature is being offered free of charge, in the hopes that premium publishers use LiveRail for more of their ad serving needs.

LiveRail has about 200 customers, with clients including Major League Baseball, PBS, and Sony Pictures, and claims to serve between 2 billion and 3 billion impressions a month. The San Francisco-based startup has raised a total of $8 million since being founded in 2008.

Google has released its latest Android developer stats, which show that Gingerbread, version 2.3, at 63.6 percent, remains the single most-popular Android version, based on how many devices have accesed the Google Play app store in the last two weeks. But some number crunching, courtesy of Ben Evans, shows that the newer Ice Cream Sandwich may be picking up some speed.

Google says that in the last two weeks, ICS accounted for 10.7 percent of all Google play visits. But Evans’ calculations indicate that in that time there were actually more ICS than Gingerbread devices added to the overall base — for the first time. In fact, it looks like ICS devices are actually growing in their overall percentage of all active Android devices, while all other versions are seeing declines.

Evans, who is an analyst with Enders Analysis, points out that Gingerbread activations have actually gone down over the last few Android developer reports. On June 1, Gingerbread represented 64.6 percent of activations; June 15 that became 64.2 percent; and the figures ending July 2 put the number at the current 63.6 percent.

ICS, meanwhile, has seen a big jump in the last two weeks to reach its current 10.7 percent. Mapping that out presents a striking turnaround picture, with ICS accounting for nearly 10 million activations in the last two weeks, and Gingerbread just under 7 million:

The bigger view comparing ICS with other Android versions shows how ICS is the only one of them that has grown its penetration percentage in the last period, and that Gingerbread may have started its S-curve decline, echoing the one that Froyo in green below has already been through:

Evans says he arrives at his figures by using the “sporadic” data that Google gives on Android activations (latest one from Andy Rubin here, noting 900,000 Android device activations each day). He subtracts a proportion for older out-of-use handsets to get to an active base. “I then multiply this by the version penetration data that Google gives,” he says.

He cautions that this is not definitive, because Google’s version data is based on devices connecting to Google Play, “and we do not know how representative that is of the overall base.” People using forked devices, or those simply not using Google Play, mean that even Google is unlikely to have a definitive answer on version penetration.

“Asking Google for exact numbers on Android is like asking Linus Torvalds about Linux usage. Neither actually knows,” Evans says.

What Evans’ numbers, if accurate, show is that the Gingerbread population is “stale” (Evans word; possible pun intended).

Evans also noted to me, though, that despite this apparent pick-up, ICS is still growing at a rate slower than Gingerbread did in the same period after its launch, especially in the last couple of months:

The takeaway here? Well, despite declines, those other OSs are still being sold and used. ICS in total, he believes, now represents about 42 million devices in use, compared to 260 million running 2.3, and 70m still on 2.2, aka Froyo.

Google’s figures for overall handset access shows that, stale or not, Gingerbread is still bar far the most popular Android version, accounting for nearly twice the amount of Google play connections as all other Android versions put together.

Turning back to sales today, Evans suspects that lower-end devices may still be shipping with the older versions, while ICS has yet to make its way to all handsets and all manufacturers. Some analysts have noted a slowdown in handset shipments — last week Strategy Analytics put the number at a four percent decline worldwide — and in general we are reaching a higher penetration in smartphones: these could also be reasons for why ICS is slowing down in its growth trajectory a bit.

For developers, this looks like a message to continue developing for earlier versions of Android rather than focus on APIs that offer special features that will work only on the later versions: Google notes that all its iterations of Android are forward-compatible.

Anything that helps hotels improve their customer service levels is welcome in my book. Tools to help them upsell, not quite so much.

To that end, LoungeUp, a startup that provides a platform to enable hotels to jump on the mobile app bandwagon, has announced that it’s raised a seed round of “several hundred thousand euros” from Pôle Capital and several Angels, including Nicolas Baudy (previously VoyagesSNCF and Weekendesk), Francesco Maio (NowFashion, Attractive World), and Didier Herrmann (ex President of Unilog).

LoungeUp’s mobile app which runs on tablets, smartphones and laptops (via native and browser-based versions) is designed to help hotels keep their guests happy through a better interface for hotel services as well local partnerships — and the ability to up sell in new ways.

Specifically, the app offers things like access to practical information about the hotel and its surroundings (reserve a table in a local restaurant etc.), access to entertainment content, help desk, and social networking. The latter is perhaps most disruptive, and competes with a host of ambient social networking apps and seems pretty cutting edge for the hotels that take up the option.

As for competitors to LoungeUp’s offering, these appear to fall into two camps. First up are old incumbents who provide some of the same functionality via the interactive television systems found in lonely hotel rooms. And then there’s newer, mobile players, such as Mobil eMedia’s UStay or Stay Interactive — although LoungeUp says that it’s unique in respect of offering a single app rather than expecting guests to download something specific for each hotel they stay in. Instead, guests are given a pass code upon check-in or when booking that unlocks said hotel’s ‘portal’ within the app.

The funds will be used by LoungeUp to accelerate its commercialisation and to expand its partners list both in the startup’s native France and elsewhere in Europe, says LoungeUp CEO Mathieu Pollet.

The company, which is a graduate of the Paris incubator “Le Camping” was founded in 2011 by Pollet and Lionel Tressens (Ex-CTO of Overblog).

So much for that experiment in freedom of speech. Last week, the New York Times launched an online Chinese edition of its newspaper — and with it a social media presence in the country. As of today, the NYT Chinese site is still working, but the social media presence is not: a visit to the New York Times’ Sina Weibo page — confirmed to us last week by the New York Times as officially theirs — brings up a “user does not exist” page. Ditto qq, Sohu, and 163 — other popular social networking platforms with New York Times accounts (although we never confirmed their authenticity with the paper).

The disappearance of the sites was first spotted by the Chinese internet monitors Great Fire, which notes that at least as of June 29, NYT’s Chinese site is not being blocked in the country, either.

We’re contacting the New York Times to ask about what has happened here. But it’s worth pointing out that when the New York Times wrote its own article on its new Chinese edition, and when it sent us an official release on the news, it didn’t mention the social media moves it was making. We only got answers on that when we contacted them directly. So it may have been that these forays were always considered a bit precarious and more vulnerable to censorship.

The closure raises questions over how China continues to interface with media and online organisations over their activities in the country. Did the New York Times’ social media sites publish something untoward? The stance adopted by the paper has been firm on keeping to its own journalistic principles, so that may have been the case here:

“We're not tailoring it to the demands of the Chinese government, so we're not operating like a Chinese media company," Joseph Kahn, the foreign editor the New York Times, said in his paper’s story on the launch.

It’s also telling that the social media sites have gone down while the actual news site remains — some may see that as a sign social media has more immediate currency with the masses than more traditional mediums like newspapers, even when they’re online newspapers.

There’s always a chance that the blocking may extend to the Chinese New York Times at some point, too, depending on what gets published. Great Fire notes that currently Bloomberg is getting blocked at a rate of 75 percent — meaning 75% of Chinese web surfers cannot access it — which it seems to tie to a story the newswire published a story about assets owned by Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and widely expected to become president. ($376 million is also being blocked as a phrase, it notes, because that’s apparently the value of those assets.)

When we checked on the New York Times’ Sina Weibo site last week, it had picked up around 12,000 users.

Sina Weibo is commonly known as China’s answer to Twitter, which does not work freely in the country. In contrast to the regular New York Times’ site, the Chinese edition for now is not behind a paywall.

Screen shots of the Sina Weibo account then and now:

It used to be that you could go to the Google Apps front page and easily sign up for a free account. But now it is a bit different.

The Google Apps choice is not available anymore on the Google Apps home page.  You can still get a free Google Apps account. But the only way to do that is by signing up for  a 30-day free trial to its premium Goole Apps for Business service. What happens after 3o days? We’ve asked Google for comment.

Google Apps is the free service Google offers for companies with ten people or less. Google Apps for Business is for the larger enterprise accounts. The base price is $5 per user per month. It is estimated that about 5 million businesses and 40 million people use Google Apps.

Doing a search for Google Apps is about the only way you can find the form for getting a Google Apps account with no strings attached.

Even the Web address apps.google.con directs to a Google Apps for Business Web page.

Is this a shift in strategy for Google Apps? A move to de-emphasize free accounts? It appears that way. We’ll update when we hear back from Google.

VMware announced the acquisition today of DynamicOps, a purchase that puts it in position to differentiate itself from the traditional infrastructure providers.

It’s not a sexy acquisition, but it’s practical. VMware gets a tighter story for how it plans to add value, in face of deeper competition from the likes of Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack, the open-source environment for building your own cloud.

VMware is the leader in the virtualization space but it needs a deeper play that goes beyond licensing virtual machines. DynamicOps has established itself by helping its customers turn their existing IT infrasrtuture into more elastic environments that essentially mimic the public clouds of the world.

Why this matters? It’s a battle that pits the Web-style, commodity infrastructure players versus the more IT oriented solutions giants. VMware is trying to do both by acquiring companies like DynamicOps and offering new ways for customers to manage multiple cloud environments with an IT focus.

That’s what it gets from DynamicOps, which supports multiple hypervisors. It can manage apps no matter if they run on VMware, Xen or a KVM virtualized infrastructure.

It also fits with VMware’s push to move higher up the stack, as Krishnan Subramanian, principal at Rishidot Research, tells us.

“They see that the infrastructure market getting fragmented and moving towards a more federated ecosystem,” he said. “They also understand that competing in the commodity infrastructure market is not going to help them in the bottom line like how virtualization helped. They understand that the action is on the layers above the infrastructure (i.e. multi-cloud management, platform as a service (PaaS), application lifecycle management, SaaS, etc.”

It’s a big deal for VMware. It shows they are willing to look beyond their own environment to support apps that may run on any number of different architectures. That’s critical if they are going to remain relevant in increasingly heterogeneous world.

Enstratus CEO George Reese said the Big Four of IT (IBM, HP, Dell, BMC)  have had difficulty int providing cloud management solutions. The deal puts VMware in position to reach into that market.

“This is definitely a meat and potatoes acquisition,” Reese said.

DynamicOps was founded in 2008. It spun out of Credit Suisse. The company had $16.3 million in funding. Last September it raised $5.3 million from Intel Capital.

Today’s data centers may have hundreds of software stacks independent of each other. DynamicOps provides an orchestration layer so those apps can run in a private data center, AWS or any other infrastructure. This type of hybrid cloud is increasingly popular. With DynamicOps, VMware will have greater ability to manage these virtual, physical and cloud resources and support the hybrid data center model.

CEO Erica Brescia of app marketplace BitNami said the deal “shows that VMware is serious about its plans to move up the stack. Supporting heterogeneous environments (other hypervisors as well as AWS) is a bold move for them, but the right one if they want to remain competitive.”

Nielsen announced today that it’s acquiring ad tech company Vizu.

This isn’t the kind of deal where you have to wait months for something to happen. Executive Vice President for Ad Effectiveness Scott McKinley says it’s a “plug and play acquisition,” and in fact, Vizu’s Ad Catalyst will be available immediately as part of Nielsen’s online ad measurement tools.

Until now, Nielsen measured an online advertising’s reach but not its effectiveness (something that it does measure on television). When the company decided to change that situation, McKinley says Vizu was the obvious choice, since it’s the leader in the field. Vizu’s technology shows brief polls to people who have seen an ad, and otherw ho haven’t — so advertisers can use the polls to determine whether campaigns seem to improve people’s perception of their company. McKinley says one of Vizu’s big draws is the fact that it provides advertisers with real-time data, so that they can tweak campaigns based on the results.

Eventually, Nielsen will do more to integrate Vizu’s features with its measurement of online ad reach, and with its cross-platform products. The goal, McKinley says, is “bringing data out of Vizu systems and connecting up with how we measure television, so we can offer advertisers a complete picture of reach and effectiveness across television and online.”

Vizu raised more than $10 million in funding from investors including Ron Conway, Esther Dyson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, iNovia Capital, and Greycroft Partners. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but McKinley says the Vizu team will be joining Nielsen, and that it will continue working out of its San Francisco offices.