More mobility: 15.5% of European smartphone users also own a tablet, comScore says

According to a brief post on comScore’s Data Mine blog, roughly one out of six European smartphone owners also have a tablet.

The measurement and audience tracking company looked at data from the ‘EU5′, a group of five European nations with comparatively large economies, namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, and found that smartphone penetration is now at 53.7 percent.

15.5% of European Smartphone Owners Also Have a #Tablet cmsc.re/fzlwj #mobile #EU

— comScore Data Gems (@datagems) November 26, 2012

According to comScore, this represents nearly 130 million people who’ve used a smartphone in the three-month average ending September 2012.

Of those, 15.5 percent also own a tablet, compared to only 9.3 percent last year. Clearly, the number of people suffering from multiple mobility disorder is steadily increasing.

You can find comScore’s ‘Data Gem’ chart below.

The UK ‘leads’ with 17.7 percent of the smartphone audience also owning a tablet, with Germany ‘trailing’ at 12.8 percent.

Italy and France are on par with each other and closest to (but below) the EU5 average estimated by comScore.

Your turn, now: do you own both a smartphone and a tablet?

Image credit: David Gannon for AFP / Getty Images

Japan's Masayoshi Son Picks a Fight With U.S. Phone Giants

In Japan, Masayoshi Son is known as the eccentric Internet billionaire who upended the country’s telecom industry. In the U.S., he is about to become the cash-strapped underdog who picked a fight with two corporate giants — AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless.

“It’s like the poor kids fighting against the rich kids,” Mr. Son said recently about the coming showdown. “Sometimes, the poor kids have more guts to fight the uphill battle.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“In the Studio,” Sifteo’s David Merrill Unveils “Sifteo Cubes” To The World

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” presents the first of two special holiday segments this Thanksgiving by welcoming one of the co-founders of one of my personal favorite startup companies. Almost five years ago, Sifteo’s David Merrill and his cofounder, Jeevan Kalanathi, embarked on a long journey that would take them from MIT’s Media Lab to San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, to blazing a trail for other venture-backed hardware startups during a time when traditional venture capital was more reluctant to deploy funds in this space. The result, after years and years of hard work, persistance, and learnings, is the Sifteo Cube, a set of small siftable computerized tiles with preloaded games for kids to play with and learn about math, spacial recognition, and most importantly, tactile play with real objects.

I invited Sifteo’s President, David Merrill, into the studio to talk about his long journey, the TED talk that turned his idea into a sensation, and the ups-and-downs encountered along the way, when hardware startups weren’t “cool.” In our discussion, we discuss the world of play for kids, the venture environment toward hardware today, what other resources hardware entrepreneurs can access, the trials of building a hardware startup and platform company at the same time, and a live demo of his cubes. Sifteo is unveiling these gaming cubes to the world right now, designed for folks aged 7 to adult, and inspired to make kids and others play with real tactile objects to learn. Merrill and his colleagues also have an SDK for developers out there who want to build educational games on this new platform. (There’s another Sifteo video demo below.)

Overall, when it comes to the long struggle of entrepreneurship, of creating an idea and working on it for a really long time, of building hardware, software, and a platform at the same time, a company like Sifteo, its founders, and early investors really deserve a lot of credit for their patience and vision to bring these kind of consumer electronics to market.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City heading to iOS, Android

Back in December last year Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto III on iOS and Android. It was the game’s first appearance on mobile devices and was generally well received even if the controls were a little limiting compared to the original. It joined the previously released GTA: Chinatown Wars which saw a release early in 2010.

This year, Rockstar aims to please mobile gamers again and has announced that GTA: Vice City is also heading to iOS and Android devices soon.

Originally released in October 2002, Vice City is set in the Miami of the 80′s. The re-release for mobile is actually a 10th anniversary celebration, so Rockstar is taking the opportunity to give it a proper update. That includes giving the graphics a HD makeover, releasing a new trailer, and including a load of artwork that has never been seen before from the original development of the game.

If you have already played the game to death, Rockstar may be able to tempt you into purchasing some commemorative merchandise instead. They haven’t announced what that includes yet, but it will all appear on the Rockstar Warehouse online store once the game is available.

The fact Rockstar is promoting Vice City now means the release can’t be too far off. It would be nice to see it appear before the end of October, which means they have until next Wednesday to get it on the App Store and Google Play. As for price, I’m hoping it’s no more than the $4.99 Grand Theft Auto III debuted for last year.

More at Rockstar

Facebook, YouTube and Google dominate the mobile Web in Asia: Opera

Internet giants Facebook, YouTube and Google are dominating Asia’s mobile Internet market, according to browser maker Opera‘s most recent State of the Mobile report, which found that the services rank as the three most used by Opera Mobile users in more than half of the 25 Asian markets that the Norwegian firm tracks.

Facebook itself is the undisputed leader, as may well be expected. The Menlo Park-based social network is the top destination for Opera Mobile users in no fewer than 16 Asian countries. That’s further incentive for the company to up its game on mobile and better monetise the channel in Asia and other emerging regions.

Asia being Asia, and a hugely diverse continent at that, there are two stand-out examples to Opera’s trends: China and Japan. In the case of the former, this is hardly a surprise given that Facebook and YouTube are both blocked in the country, where newly merged Youku Tudou Inc is the largest video site (but not on Opera’s ranking list) and Google has had much publicised issues.

Furthermore, Opera’s statistics for China are diluted by the presence of a strong local competitor. Though Opera doesn’t break out raw user statistics, its Chinese presence is likely cramped by home-grown rival UCWeb and its competing browsers. However, among the users that Opera does have in China, Baidu, Sina and Tencent-own messaging service QQ hold the top three spots. Sina Weibo — China’s Twitter equivalent — sits seventh and is the highest ranked social network.

Things are somewhat different in Japan, where Google is top, ahead of popular Web portal Livedoor and Wikipedia. In a sign of the country’s 140 character obsession, Twitter ranks eighth ahead of Facebook. Despite making significant progress in Japan, after doubling its userbase in six months, Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site is not included in Opera’s top ten list, yet.

We know that smartphone sales are growing massively across Asia — with China becoming the world’s biggest market on shipment volumes and device activations — and Opera is riding that wave with its own impressive gains on smartphones.

The firm says use of its Opera Mobile and Opera Mini browsers on smartphones has grown 460 percent in the last year. The company picks out Indonesia, a country that mobile companies are increasingly targeting, as a market that embodied this growth and has seen “significant uptake.”

For comparison, use of the two browsers on all kinds of mobile devices (feature and dumb phones included) grew by an impressive 43 percent across its selected 25 countries in Asia.

The benefit of smartphones over feature devices is more than just increased activity as the company is able to better monetise smartphone users with its ad-based system. That network was boosted in February when Opera acquired two mobile ad providers for a combined $64.5 million.

When it comes to measuring mobile Internet usage there are few better than Opera. Existing metrics often come up short — as we’ve discussed before — but Opera’s mobile browser was used by 208 million phones worldwide during July (up from 200 million in June) and emerging markets are a particular stronghold for the Norwegian company.

Finally…no, before you ask, there’s no update on the rumors that Facebook is eyeing Opera and, yes, this report is another example of the reach and benefits that Opera could provide the social network in emerging markets.

Also read: Opera releases its first mobile advertising report; iOS king of the hill, Windows Phone sucking wind

Image via Flickr / Cglosli