IDC: Android, Windows Phone to rule mobile

Android and Windows Phone will reign supreme in the smartphone market in the not-too-distant future, a new IDC report claims.

According to the market researcher, more than 450 million smartphones will ship in 2011, up from the 303.4 million units last year. IDC predicts that Android will account for 39.5 percent of all smartphone shipments this year, easily besting Symbian's 20.9 percent market share. Apple's iOS platform is expected to be running on 15.7 percent of the smartphones shipped in 2011. RIM's BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile will round out the top five with 14.9 percent and 5.5 percent market share in 2015, respectively.

IDC's 2011 expectations likely won't surprise many folks. But its 2015 estimates will.

(Credit: IDC)

The research firm contends that Android will have 45.4 percent market share in 2015. It will be followed by Microsoft's Windows Phone platform with 20.9 percent market share. The compound annual growth of Microsoft's platform over the next four years is expected to be 67.1 percent, IDC said. Apple's iOS and Research In Motion's BlackBerry platform will own 15.3 percent and 13.7 percent of the smartphone market, respectively.

Microsoft's expected gains in the smartphone market aren't by chance. The company's market share boost will be due mainly to its recent partnership with Nokia, which will be using Windows Phone 7 as the "principal" operating system in its smartphones likely starting in 2012.

"Up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share while other operating systems have brought forth new and appealing experiences," Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst on IDC's Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team, said today in a statement. "The new alliance brings together Nokia's hardware capabilities and Windows Phone's differentiated platform...By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be the No. 2 operating system worldwide behind Android."

On World Water Day, a look at water-energy tech

competition held by nonprofit ImagineH2O highlights the close connection between water and energy.

ImagineH2O, a not-for-profit company formed to foster innovation around water, last week announced that the three winners to its Water-Energy Nexus Prize, a competition for the best business ideas to reduce the energy needed to move and treat fresh water and wastewater. Winners out of the more than 50 participants were awarded $100,000 in cash and in-kind services.

Hydrovolts CEO Burt Hammer shows off the company's turbine designed specifically for manmade canals. The company plans to build these turbines in three sizes, with the largest able to fit into a shipping container.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The top prize went to Hydrovolts, a Seattle-based company that makes a hydrokinetic turbine designed specifically for manmade canals. Flowing water turns adjustable wings to generate electricity.

The company's plan is to sell the turbine to landowners and facility operators that have a steady-flowing canal. One advantage of this approach is that there shouldn't be a need for environmental reviews because it's an artificial environment, according to the company.

The runners-up were Philadelphia-based Blackgold Biofuels, which has a process for converting fat, oil, and grease from wastewater treatment facilities into biodiesel fuel; and Oakland, Calif.-based Fogbuster, which is also separating fat, oil, and grease (FOG) from wastewater without using chemical plants.

Other companies in the competition focused on different areas, such as membranes that improve the efficiency of desalination plants or drawing usable energy from water distribution systems.

ImagineH2O, which was started by people from Harvard Business School, organized the competition to bring attention to energy in water distribution and treatment. California, which has to pump much of its water long distances, uses 19 percent of the state's energy on water.

Different forms of power generation have wildly different water requirements as well. Nuclear power uses 720 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of energy produced, compared to 140 gallons for natural gas, 30 for solar photovoltaics, and 1,060 for concentrating solar power plants, according to Dow Water and Process Solutions.

Supplying fresh water to people around the world, the focus of today's World Water Day, is obviously vital. But water technologies tend not to attract entrepreneurs and investment in part because in industrialized countries water is relatively inexpensive as a resource and facilities are run by cash-strapped municipalities.

'Artificial leaf' makes hydrogen from solar cell

Drawing from nature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Daniel Nocera thinks he can draw cheap and clean energy from water.

At the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Nocera yesterday presented results from research on making an "artificial leaf" to split water to get hydrogen fuel and oxygen. The goal is to use the solar cell to make hydrogen, which would be stored and then used in a fuel cell to make electricity.

"The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station," Nocera said in a statement.

In 2009, Nocera and others created Sun Catalytix to commercialize his work on relatively cheap catalysts made from nickel and cobalt for a device called an electrolyzer that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The company in the fall raised more money from Indian industrial giant Tata.

Using a $4 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), researchers at Sun Catalytix began work on their second-generation product. Rather than use an electrolyzer to make hydrogen, this product would make hydrogen directly from a solar cell. That would mean a renewable source for the hydrogen fuel and electricity.

Until now, research yielded very low efficiencies in converting sunlight to hydrogen using a solar cell. Nocera yesterday said that researchers are optimistic they can boost the efficiency rate and the durability of the material. In the lab, he said that an artificial leaf prototype operated for 45 hours without a degradation in performance.

At the ARPA-E Summit earlier this month where Sun Catalytix showed a prototype of its second-generation product, company executives said the research will take a few years to complete and about three to five years to create a commercial product.

EBay buys GSI for $1.96 billion to take on Amazon

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online auction site eBay Inc moved to bolster its ability to take on No. 1 Web retailer Amazon.com Inc with a $1.96 billion takeover bid for e-commerce service providerGSI Commerce.

EBay would gain expertise in helping major retailers fill online orders and build relationships with big toy, electronics and book sellers which have helped Amazon grow.

EBay said on Monday it had offered GSI shareholders $29.25 per share in cash, a premium of 50.9 percent from the stock's closing price on Friday.

The deal would be eBay's largest acquisition since it bought Internet phone company Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, and comes as growth in its main auctions business is slowing.

"It's one of the few fulfillment operations that could rival Amazon," BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said. "Amazon is fulfilling its third-party sellers more and more. eBay is all third-party sellers."

On Nasdaq, GSI soared 50.7 percent to close at $29.20, while eBay fell 4.3 percent to $30.34 on concerns it may be paying too much and might eventually need to invest more money on GSI's technology. Both stocks held steady in extended trading.

Amazon shares edged down 1 percent to end at $169.35.

Among GSI's clients are Aeropostale Inc, Toys R Us, and TJX Cos Inc's Marshalls chain.

GSI, which owns Web businesses such as Rue La La and ShopRunner, also provides retailers with technology, payment processing and customer care services for their e-commerce operations.

Online shopping accounts for about 8 percent of total U.S. retail spending, rising 11 percent during the most recent holiday season, according to data firm comScore, almost twice the pace of bricks-and-mortar sales.

EBay estimated in February that its online marketplaces unit is set to grow into a $7-8 billion business by 2013, from $5.7 billion in 2010. In contrast, Amazon pulls in annual sales of more than $30 billion.

While PayPal has been a growth driver for eBay, the company has struggled with other deals, such as its purchase of 28.4 percent of classifieds site Craigslist, which led to a court fight after eBay launched its own classifieds business.

Still, Fred Moran, an analyst with Benchmark Capital, called the price "reasonable," saying it comes out to 13 times this year's expected earnings before certain expenses, which he said "is right in line with the e-commerce peer group."

UNLOADING MOST OF RUE LA LA

As part of the deal, eBay would sell off GSI's licensed sports merchandise business, as well as 70 percent of Rue La La, which offers one-day-only Web deals to its members, and ShopRunner, a members-only online shopping service that offers free shipping.

EBay said those business were not important to its long-term growth strategy.

Those holdings would become part of a new company run by GSI founder and Chief Executive Michael Rubin. EBay said it would lend Rubin's new company $467 million, bringing the deal's value to $2.4 billion.

EBay said the acquisition, expected to close in the third quarter, would have little effect on its fiscal 2011 adjusted earnings forecast, and boost 2012 earnings. The deal would hurt 2011 net income by 30 cents to 34 cents per share, the company said.

GSI has until May 6 to solicit bids from other parties during the so-called "go shop" period.

While PayPal has been driving eBay's growth for years, the company is also trying to lift its more familiar marketplaces unit -- a high-margin but mature business that connects online buyers and sellers -- especially as Amazon has enjoyed double-digit revenue growth.

The GSI deal follows a number of other e-commerce deals in recent months. Amazon expects to close its purchase of Quidsi, operator of diapers.com, around April 1. In November, Oracle Corp said it would buy e-commerce software company Art Technology Group Inc for $1 billion.

Goldman Sachs & Co, and Peter J. Solomon Company are acting as financial advisers to eBay, while Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP is its legal adviser. Morgan Stanley is advising GSI and Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP is advising a special committee of GSI's board. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP is acting as GSI's legal advisor.

Everything you need to know about Firefox 4

To get you started with the Editors' Choice-winning Firefox 4, here's CNET's First Look at the browser. (Download Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac, and Linux):

One of the best features in the browser is Firefox Sync, which will not only synchronize Firefox across multiple computers, but it will also sync to your Android version of Firefox 4.

Firefox has a deep backbench of add-ons to provide features not found in the standard version of the browser, and you can also customize the interface in ways that you can't with other browsers. Here's how to make your Firefox 4 look like Firefox 3, in case you really miss the old design. It's also a good hands-on tutorial for add-on use, in case you're new to Firefox add-ons.

In the following How To video, we show you how to make Firefox load tabs a bit faster than it does out of the box. This is a great tweak for users who have 20 or 30 tabs open.

App Tabs are a new feature in Firefox to keep your most-used tabs in the same position every time you load the browser. Here's how they work.

Another useful new feature in Firefox 4 is Tab Groups, also known as Panorama. This allows you to keep your tabs accessible but out of sight until you want them. It's excellent for organizing tabs between different interests, and you can label the groups as well.

Serena Williams' sexy video game ad 'unauthorized'

So you work for a video game company. Say it's called 2K Sports. You are about to launch a game called "Top Spin 4."

Now, tennis isn't quite the most popular sport in the world. And you need to persuade, oh, young, happily hormonal men to buy your game.

You hold a brainstorm that takes at least some minutes. You decide you need to make your game sexy. "Serena Williams is sexy," someone says. "Yeah, yeah," someone else replies.

Your minds then hotfoot it to an ad concept in which Williams looks sexy. You're then left with a couple of options: Once you've made this ad, you can spend many millions running it on TV and on the Web. Or you can leak it onto the Web, which will cost you rather less.

Remember, you've decided to make this ad as sexy as you can get away with. There are lovely shots of the more alluring parts of Williams and of an actress called Rileah Vanderbilt.

So, if you happen to go the cheaper, leakier route, how are you going to leak it? It's a deep dilemma.

Now, I have no idea how it truly happened that this ad saw the light of day and the darkness of grandmother's opprobrium, but it was certainly first leaked by Vanderbilt on her Twitter feed. How odd that she would have a copy and would think nothing of leaking it.

How odd, too, that since leaking it, she doesn't seem to have left a tweet of apology or taken the link to it down.

Once it was leaked--and, given the very high production values, passed along from human to human--2K Sports released this statement: "As part of the process for creating marketing campaigns to support our titles, we pursue a variety of creative avenues. This video is not part of the title's final marketing campaign and its distribution was unauthorized."

Now that the video has enjoyed more than 1,000,000 YouTube views (it has been posted by various enthusiasts), I am sure that you, too, will be wondering what the title's final marketing campaign will involve.

What, indeed, can 2K Sports afford? The company must have offered Williams a considerable sum of money to polish her loins for this ad. And it's rare that a company would spend that kind of money and not use the ad. You can always re-edit to make it less alluring. A snip here, a snip there, and suddenly it's PG.

Williams herself, tweeted that she found the ad "awesomely sexy."

I have a sneaky feeling that 2K Sports, the company that commissioned the ad, finds it "awesomely sexy" too.

And perhaps its CFO also finds it awesomely sexy that, thanks to no media spend, the company might save a lot of money and still sell quite a few video games. Tennis video games, at that.

Java founder James Gosling joins Google

James Gosling, the notable programmer who founded Java at Sun Microsystems, has joined Google, a company locked in a lawsuit over how the technology is used in Android.

Gosling announced his new Google employment today on his blog. "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon," he said.

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, Gosling decided not to join.

Oracle's ways evidently didn't agree with Gosling. He called Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison "Larry, Prince of Darkness." And, he said, "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle."

Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement concerning how Android uses software called Dalvik that's very similar to Java. A prime benefit to using Java is that it shields programs from the differences of underlying hardware, such as different processors, letting a single program run on a variety of computing devices.

Google has some of the bubbling, research-intensive ethos that characterized Sun, but it's vastly more commercially successful. And unlike Sun, it's managed to become a household name.

Gosling was on his own for about a year. "One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities," he said on his blog.

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