LITTLE ROCK — Yahoo retools Flickr for smart phones
Yahoo Inc. is revamping its Flickr photo application for smart phones as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer vies with Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. for mobile users.
An upgraded version of Flickr introduced last week for Apple Inc.’s iPhone lets users share images with groups as well as edit, crop and apply color filters to photos, said Brett Wayn, a vice president and general manager at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo.
As a growing number of consumers use smart-phone cameras to document their daily lives and share events with friends, Mayer is upgrading Flickr to compete with Twitter, which added photo-sharing tools to its mobile app last week, and Facebook, which bought the picture app Instagram earlier this year.
Upgrades may help Flickr, with more than 80 million monthly users worldwide, attract more smart-phone users in a handset market that research firm IDC projects will surge 45 percent to 717.5 million units this year.
Flickr is “a brand and product that’s absolutely associated with people who love creating and sharing and discovering photographs,” Wayn said.
Flickr’s new image editing tools were created in partnership with Aviary Inc., a New York-based photo-app developer that also helped create similar features for Twitter’s mobile app.
- Bloomberg News
Microsoft increases tablet output
Microsoft Corp. said it has boosted the production of its Surface RT tablet computer and will make the device available at more retail stores.
Customers will be able to buy the Surface running Windows RT software, an update to the company’s flagship operating system, at an expanded list of retail stores in the U.S. and Australia “as early as mid-December,” Microsoft said last week in a statement. The Redmond, Wash.-based company also said it’s extending its Microsoft holiday stores, including turning some of the temporary outlets into permanent ones.
Staples Inc. said last week that it is now selling Surface units.
Microsoft has been selling the devices since Oct. 26 only at its more than 60 retail locations in the U.S. and Canada, and online in seven countries. The company has declined to provide sales numbers, leading some analysts to express concern demand might be falling short.
Additional retailers will be added in “a number of countries in the coming months,” Microsoft said in the statement. The company didn’t elaborate or say how much it expanded production.
Microsoft said last month that it will introduce a new model of the device, the Surface Pro, in January.
- Bloomberg News
E-reader sales sink as tablets ascend
NEW YORK - Sales of dedicated e-reading devices like the black-and-white Kindles are in an “alarmingly precipitous decline” this year after five years of rapid growth, research firm IHS iSuppli said last week.
Full-blown tablets with color screens are behind the decline, the firm says. Amazon.com Inc. now sells tablets under the Kindle brand, and Barnes & Noble Inc. has added tablets to its Nook e-reader line.
IHS expects shipments of e-readers to fall from 23.2 million last year to 14.1 million this year.
The rapid rise and now rapid decline of e-readers is unusual even for the volatile consumer electronics industry, said IHS analyst Jordan Selburn, but it’s indicative of the broader trend of single-purpose devices like e-readers and cameras losing out to general-purpose ones like tablets and smart phones.
- The Associated Press
China overtakes U.S. in patent filings
GENEVA - The United Nations says the Chinese filed the most patent applications in the world last year, overtaking the U.S. for the first time.
The U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization said China’s patent office received 526,412 applications in 2011, ahead of the United States with 503,582 filings.
The agency’s Director General Francis Gurry told reporters last week in Geneva that the 2.14 million patent applications were filed worldwide last year, up 7.8 percent from 2010.
Gurry said that indicates a healthy emphasis on innovation despite weak economic conditions.
The European patent office had 142,793 applications in 2011, down 5.4 percent from 2010, but still up from 2009, when it received 134,580 applications.
China overtook Japan in 2010. Japan received 342,610 patent applications in 2011.
- The Associated Press
Business, Pages 22 on 12/17/2012