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Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.

Keep Your Gadgets Dry at the Beach With These Waterproof Pocket Shorts

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Many of us protect our gadgets from clumsy falls and nicks with protective cases. But when your precious smartphone gets wet from the elements or from an unfortunate drop down the toilet, sometimes there’s no going back.

Salt Lake City-based Stash Incorporated has designed waterproof pocket shorts that are designed to keep your phone and other pocket items dry. It could be convenient for those summertime activities: relaxing at the beach, a trip to the water park or for mindlessly running through the sprinklers.

The Stash shorts basically incorporate a built-in, waterproof pocket bag, with an opening on the shorts’ exterior that can be snapped closed via an attached cap. It’s a special pocket for your keys, money and electronic devices that could allow you to jump in the pool with your belongings. The shorts are made out of a 60/40 polyester/cotton blend and come in khaki and sage green colors. Read more…

More about Fashion, Outdoors, Clothing, Apparel, and Water


Mobile Marketing Industry May Employ 1.4 Million by 2015

Mobile Marketing Industry May Employ 1.4 Million by 2015 Mobile Marketing Industry May Employ 1.4 Million by 2015A new study commissioned by the Mobile Marketing Association is shedding some light on today’s mobile marketing ecosystem.

According to the report, which was conducted by consulting firm mLightenment, the number of mobile marketing-related jobs will climb from 524,000 in 2012 to 1.4 million in 2015.

The mobile marketing ecosystem “exhibits remarkable levels of investment for an industry so young.”

$6.7 billion was spent on mobile marketing by client side marketers and retailers across all industries in 2012, a figure likely to reach almost $20 billion by 2015, the report shows.

Particularly important to note is that mobile marketing contributes even more impressive levels of incremental output to the U.S. economy: $139 billion in 2012 and an estimated $400 billion by 2015.

“Historically, spending in all other mediums eventually flattens out and declines. We don’t see that curve in the data that we have,” says Joe Plummer, one of the study’s lead researchers. “We looked at the sales of high-end and low-end spenders in mobile, and while the correlation is not 1.0, it was in a positive direction.”

To peruse more findings and projections or to review the MMA-sponsored study in full, click here.

04e41e474457ed234785ba1f7b6e26df Mobile Marketing Industry May Employ 1.4 Million by 2015 Mobile Marketing Industry May Employ 1.4 Million by 2015

Nearly 500 Million Searches A Day Are For Things Google Has Never Heard Of (GOOG)

Google John Wiley

Supposedly, there is nothing new under the sun.

But there are nearly 500 million new things per day being asked of Google that the search engine has never seen before.

“Every single day 15 percent of the questions people ask of Google are questions we’ve never seen before,” John Wiley, lead designer for Google Search told Bloomberg TV’s Jon Erlichman.

Part of the reason is that the Internet is growing so fast, it’s hard even for Google to get its arms around it:

Google says it has found 30 trillion “unique addresses” on the Web, meaning websites, web apps and other stuff connected to the Internet. Every day, Google crawls 20 billion websites per day. Google processes 100 billion searches each month.

At 100 billion searches for month, that’s just over 3.3 billion per day, which means more than 495 million per day are for things Google has never seen before.

Kind of amazing when you think about it.

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iTunes users spend $40/year on apps, music, and digital shtuff

MobileBeat 2013 July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA Early Bird Tickets on Sale

itunes gift cardApple has built a massive and fast-growing $16 billion annual revenue stream in digital content alone, Apple analyst Horace Dediu says.

The company announced that quarterly iTunes revenues topped $4 billion — including $2.4 billion in content alone — in its latest earnings report. Based on historical numbers alone, that’s a $16 billion annual run rate, thanks to Apple’s 500 million iTunes users. But since it also has grown at a fairly steady 29 percent per quarter for the past six years, it’s also an underestimate of the annual value of the iTunes ecosystem.

And it gets better as users have more Apple devices.

“Apple users spend about $1/day for each Apple device in use,” Dediu says.

iTunes digital media revenue by product segmentSource: Horace Dediu

iTunes digital media revenue by product segment.

All of which means that Apple is still king of the mobile ecosystem, at least as far as monetization is concerned. Users have currently downloaded 49.9 billion apps, and Apple is currently running a contest which will see the downloader of the 50th billion app win $10,000 in iTunes cash. While Google Play is growing faster than Apple’s app store, Apple still leads in downloads, and it holds a 2.6-times revenue advantage.

It’s also an interesting metric for Amazon to evaluate itself by.

Amazon sells Kindle devices at or near cost in part because it hopes to make extra revenue on digital content — perhaps $3 per user per month – via its own app store and its digital media offerings, such as TV shows and movies. Its newly launched virtual currency Amazon Coins should help with that mission, and with 11 million to 12.5 million Kindles sold through Christmas 2012, and perhaps 15 million sold to date, that would translate into just over half a billion dollars in revenue.

And at Apple-like numbers of $40/user/year, it would be $600 million dollars.

All of which could help explain why Amazon is hitting digital media hard and buying technology to make all of its Kindles full-color, with responsive screens.

And why Apple, Amazon, and Google are increasingly hard-core competitors in their three-way battle to own your devices … and your wallet.

Image credit: 401(K) 2013/Flickr

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