That’s why Google has come forward to announce a new service called “Bouncer” just days after Symantec’s announcement of a major malware infection found in some Android apps.  Yeah, Android Market is the hippest night club in town and it’s not going to put up with belligerant drunks and would-be thieves. Get out, buddy. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

In a nutshell, Bouncer will scan developer accounts automatically and look for “potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience.” It also “looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags.” If it finds some bad stuff, it gives that app (and presumably the developer) the boot out of the door, thereby protecting us Android users from the bad guys.

Let’s just hope that Google’s Bouncer isn’t like its Goliath-sized non-digital counterparts where you can just slip them some green to get in the club.

[ source ]

The regular old Twitter client on your Android phone is fine for basic updates, but what if you’re using social networks for a small business and you need more features? What if you need to handle multiple accounts and manage different teams of workers? Thankfully, there are more than a few alternatives out there.

Sprout Social has been around as a web-based desktop client for some time now, they’ve also offered an iOS app. Now, they’ve updated us with an Android application to let you better “manage your social media on the go.” This is a companion app for users of Sprout Social, so you’ll need to start with an account there first.

A Sprout Social Overview

It’s clear right from the beginning that Sprout Social is catering itself to business owners, particularly those where there are multiple team members working on the same social media accounts. The core service is designed to give you more information for sales, marketing, and support, as well as that collaborative experience for everyone on your social media team.

You can manage mutliple social media accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, complete with analytics, monitoring, top performing posts, publishing options, discovery features, task assignment, CRM, and location information. That last bit is interesting, because you can keep tabs on Foursquare locations for check-in data and trends, which is great for brick and mortar businesses.

Navigating the Mobile App

But what about the new Android app?

Everything is laid out in a relatively easy to understand manner, allowing you group together different Twitter accounts into workgroups. From there, you can see the main home feed as well as access your sent updates, look at tasks, and so on. Everything that you’ve come to expect from a Twitter client is here, though I would have liked the ability to “swipe” from column to column rather than simply tapping on the icons near the top.

When composing a new message you can choose which social media accounts you’d like to use (that’s the left column). There are also options to attach images (it defaults to a low-res image to yfrog) and schedule your tweets into the future. Unfortunately, just like HootSuite, there does not appear to be a way to check your scheduled tweets from within the mobile app; you have to go to the web-based desktop client to see that.

The tasks and statistics are available to you, though, so you can see how many clicks and retweets you are getting from your sent messages, for instance. The team management function is great too, since you can assign tasks to team members for following up.

The Smart Inbox

The primary column in the Sprout Social Android app is the Smart Inbox. Again, clearly designed with businesses in mind, this allows you to monitor everything that has to do with your company and your brand from one convenient location. The criteria can be customized, but it effectively lets you see all the mentions and activity related to you across mutliple services.

For instance, I named the workgroup “Mobile Magazine” and linked up my @dotcompho Twitter account. As you can see in the screenshot, it picked up the tweets that mentioned “Mobile Magazine,” as well as the mention directed at @dotcompho. This one inbox gives you an “at a glance” survey of how the social web is responding to your brand(s).

How Much Does It Cost?

Ah, there’s the rub. While the Android app is free, using Sprout Social is not.

Each of these comes with a free 30 day trial with no credit card required, but there is no “free” plan that can be used with Sprout Social. The plans range from $9/month to $899/month, offering anywhere from 10 social profiles to unlimited profiles. The cheapest plan supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Reader, while the higher end includes Foursquare and Google Analytics, as well as local search, task assignments, Facebook tabs, branded reports, and more.

I’m not sure that Sprout Social is quite the right fit for the regular old consumer, but its robust feature set — particularly with monitoring and analytics — and could prove invaluable to businesses of all sizes.

Android is on the rise. In fact, when you look at the sales numbers for Q3 2011 and compare them to the sales numbers for the same period one year prior, you’ll see that Google’s mobile operating system has effectively doubled its market share. This means that Google Android now has an impressive 52.5 percent market share. Compare that to the 25.3 percent it had in Q3 2010.

The recent report comes by way of Gartner, revealing that a total of 60.5 million Android-based smartphones were sold in the third quarter fo this year. The next closest competitor is Nokia with its 19.5 million smartphones sold, but the Finnish company lost more than half its market share compared to 2010 (16.9% vs. 36.3%). Nokia was also the overall leader in mobile sales, but again, its market share shrank from 28.2% to 23.9%.

Apple more or less held steady at 15.0% (compared to 16.6% last year), selling 17.3 million iPhones in Q3. The assumption is that people held off for a while there, waiting to get their hands on the iPhone 4S. When looking at all mobile phones, Apple only accounts for 3.9 percent, compared to the 17.8% enjoyed by Samsung and the 4.8% earned by LG.

According to the latest financial figures of the company, over 190 million Android devices have sold around the world, with CEO Larry Page at the ship’s wheel. While 190 million is quite a large number, more importantly is the other one; 2.25 billion dollars, which sums up Android’s success and Google’s alike.

Larry Page also declared he was excited about another thing than aside from the billions of dollars their products have brought the company, and that is the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich launch.

“You won’t believe what we manage to get done in this release,” Page said excitedly… about the “Ice Cream Sandwich”.  Can Ice Cream Sandwich be a worthy counterattack against the somewhat troubled, yet advanced iOS 5 with Siri?

It might be revealed as Android 2.4 or maybe Android 4.0, but whatever the case, Ice Cream Sandwich looks like they took Honeycomb and shrunk it down to smartphone proportions. You get the same kind of launcher for seeing your most recent apps, for example, as well as a similar interface for going through the settings and thumbing through your list of apps.

While these are just still screenshots, you can tell that there are going to be some animations in place for page swipes and similar transitions. You’ll also notice that, like Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich has “soft” on-screen buttons for back, home, and recent apps, which will likely lend itself to smartphones that start abandoning the physical buttons (or touch-sensitive buttons) for those functions. This could lead ot bigger slates and thinner bezels.

I think it looks great and hopefully it’ll help with some of that Android fragmentation that’s going on.

Apple’s FaceTime video-calling service is exclusively for iPhone users, along with owners of the iPad 2 tablet and Mac computers. Google wants to join the video-calling club to compete with Apple, so Android users will be able to make free video calls using Skype. With the new Android Skype app, users can make free one-to-one video calls between Android phones, iPhones, Mac computers, Microsoft Windows PCs and televisions. That means you don’t have to own an Apple product to contact someone using an Apple product, so Google has one over Apple.

The first Android handsets to support Skype video calling are the HTC Desire 5, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and the Google Nexus S. The service will eventually extend to other devices. Skype is being bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, so video calling could also help Microsoft promote its Windows Phone smartphone platform.

Skype had an average of 145 million connected users per month in the fourth quarter of 2010. Together, they made 207 billion minutes of calls in 2010, about 42 per cent of which was video calls. In January 2011, after the release of video calling on the Skype client for iPhone, Skype reached a record 27 million simultaneous online users, which was surpassed at the end of March with 30 million online users. The video calling industry is growing, and Google wants to make sure they’ve got a competitive edge against Apple.

Graphic from Nihar’s World.

With the noted exception of Samsung, which has been able to snag a 10% market share with its Galaxy Tab family of tablets, the other guys haven’t been doing quite as well. Motorola shipped 250,000 Xoom tablets in two months, but you have to realize that Apple sold 25 million iPads in 14 months. That’s hardly a dent in Steve Jobs’ side.

The “supersized” Android smartphone is gaining in popularity and the companies think they can capitalize on this instead. After all, there is no “supersized” iDevice (yet). This would encompass all the smartphones with screens between four and five inches, like the HTC Desire HD, Motorola Droid X, and Dell Streak 5.

I’m still a fan of Android tablets and I hope that market segment continues to grow, but if heavy hitters like Motorola and LG are going to shift away, that might not help the Android tablet cause. So much for Honeycomb dominance.

It’s not the first Android phone with two screens — we’ve already seen the LG Genesis and Kyocera Echo — but this yet-unnamed handset also has a full hardware QWERTY keyboard. As you can quite plainly see from the photo, you get a regular touchscreen, plus a smaller one that fits in between the two halves of the keyboard.

This is quite the interesting form factor, I’d have to say. It’s probably a little on the fatter side of things, thanks to the two-layered slider, but it could prove to be quite functional. The “split” keyboard could be better for thumb typing too. I’d imagine the secondary display isn’t quite as useful as a full-sized screen, but it could still be good for shortcuts, macros, options, wasting battery, those types of things.

We’ll keep our ears to the ground for this, but we’re hearing that the dual-screen Android from LG is going to make its way to T-Mobile UK. No word on a US release just yet.

The Google Nexus S has a near field communications (NFC) chip in it, so you know that Google is interested in pursuing this technology for a variety of purposes. The most obvious application is mobile payments and it looks like the search engine has just made its next big move on this front, buddying up with MasterCard and Citigroup to make it happen.

The concept of using NFC for mobile payment isn’t novel, by any stretch, but it’s just on the cusp of hitting the mainstream in North America. This partnership could really be the tipping point, rendering the “barcode” style Starbucks app obsolete. Just tap the phone, pay for your latte, and be on your merry mobile way.

The interesting thing is that Google isn’t at all interested in taking a cut from the transaction revenue. Instead, it’s going back to its search business, selling (aggregate) customer information back to retailers. The stores can then offer targeted ads and discounts to their customers.

Considering all the security things with chip-and-pin technology, requiring signatures, and all that jazz, it’s almost ironic that they want to make it as easy as tapping a phone to pay for a new Xbox at a brick and mortar store. Now, if you lose your phone, you could be losing so much more. The thief can check your email, update your Facebook, and potentially load up on filet mignon at Morton’s Steakhouse!

[WSJ]

So, in the battle royale involving a little green bot, a half-bitten produce, and some Canadian fruit, who reigns supreme? Nielsen has compiled its statistics for the period covering November 2010 to January 2011 and is presenting it in the form of a couple colorful stacked bar graphs.

The first chart shows the major smartphone platforms, which are then further broken down based on the manufacturers using those platforms. Naturally, Apple owns the entirety of iOS and RIM owns the entirety of BlackBerry. They’re neck and neck at 27%. However, the combined efforts of the Android conglomerate add up to 29%, mostly led by HTC (12%) and Motorola (10%), with Samsung (5%) supplying a sizable chunk too.

What’s interesting is that HTC is also the biggest contributor to the Windows Phone 7 market share too. The platform as a whole has 10%, but HTC is providing nearly three quarters of that, once again followed by Moto and Sammy. In this way, if you combine HTC’s efforts, it accounts for 19% of total smartphone market share. That’s getting close to the exclusive RIM and Apple territory, don’t you think? HTC even has a chunk of the HP webOS pie.

If we consider that both Android and WP7 are on the rise (one more than the other), will it be long before HTC actually holds more market share than either BlackBerry or iPhone? It’s really not that far fetched and HTC has been in the smartphone game for a very long time.

On a side note, the second chart isn’t quite as noteworthy. By and large, smartphone market share remains relatively consistent (in terms of proportion) across age groups, though RIM is preferred just a touch more by the older crowd (corporate types) while Android leans toward the younger set.

[Nielsen]