Roku first launched in 2008, and the device was called “the Netflix player,” basically because its only function was streaming Netflix.

Over time, Roku broke out of the “Netflix box” moniker by adding plenty of other high-profile apps – Hulu Plus in 2010, HBO GO in 2011. Spotify and Time Warner Cable support more recently. As of now, Roku boasts around 750 channels. And with 5 million players sold, it’s clear that Roku holds a firm place in a market filled with streaming options. It’s about half of what Apple TV has sold (globally), for a competitive reference.

“What are people streaming on Roku? Tons of TV shows and movies. Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Crackle, HBO GO and VUDU are all top favorites. Music is extremely popular, and consumers enjoy Pandora, VEVO and Spotify among other choices. News, sports, science and foreign languages from around the world are also big hits. Did I mention games? In 2011, we introduced casual games to the Roku platform with the debut of Angry Birds, which took the leap from mobile to TV for the first time. Angry Birds remains the most popular game on Roku today – by our count more than 3 billion bad piggies have been eliminated!” says Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood.

Roku says that these 5 million boxes have streamed over 8 billion individual items of content of video and music, and that 25% of all Roku players stream over 35 hours per week.

Roku just launched their new device, the Roku 3 box, last month – and it’s been getting some good reviews. Are you a Roku user? What do you think the furutre holds for set-top boxes that pretty much exclusively stream online content to TVs?

From the Hulu blog:

I’m pleased to announce that Hulu Plus is available on select Toshiba 2012 Blu-ray players, Sharp 2012 TVs and Best Buy’s Dynex Blu-ray players. Earlier this year, we also launched Hulu Plus on Netgear’s NeoTV 200 Media Player and branded set-top boxes from Magnavox and Funai.

Along with these new options, as far as TVs/ Blu-Ray players go, you can watch Hulu Plus on select models from Samsung , Vizio, Sony, LG, Haier and Panasonic.

Hulu has been available as an app on the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 for some time now, but just launched on the Nintendo Wii on February 16th. When they made that announcement, Hulu also said that Hulu Plus would be coming to the Nintendo 3DS “some time later in 2012.” Hulu’s devices page still list the 3DS capabilities as “coming soon.”

Hulu looks to have as good of a 2012 as they had last year. In 2011, Hulu grew 60% from 2010, raking in about $420 million in revenue. In January, Hulu announced that Hulu Plus had amassed 1.5 million subscribers, making a point to say that their climb to 1.5 million was faster than other subscription-based video services. In 2011, Hulu Plus’ content offerings grew 105%.

In 2012, Hulu will invest $500 million in new content. Couple this with expansion to more devices, they look to chip out their place in a landscape that already has a lot of streaming options – and those are only going to grow.

Kobo is backed by Indigo Books & Music, Borders, REDgroup Retail, Cheung Kong Holdings, and others. In July, Borders launched its own branded eBook store powered by Kobo. At that time, Border CEO Mike Edwards said, "The race to emerge as a retail leader within the digital category is just starting." 

Since then, Samsung has unveiled its Android-powered Galaxy Tab, and Kobo announced that it would be supplying the e-reader technology for it. Kobo has apps for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, and Palm Pre. 

Today’s announcement, however, only applies to the reader, the iPhone and iPad apps at this point. Publications include: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Scientist, The Seattle Times, Wilson Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, American Scholar, China International Business, Columbus Dispatch , Guideposts, Harvard Business Review, National Review, New York Observer, PC Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Reason, The Christian Science Monitor Daily Briefing, The Nation, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times-Colonist, and The Globe & Mail.   

The company says it will continue to expand its offerings in this area. The newspapers’ and magazines’ formats are emulated on Kobo’s offerings. Still, readers can customize text sizes.

"Kobo continues to build on our commitment of making sure that consumers have the best reading experience on any device with the largest selection of content worldwide," said Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis. "We’ve had tremendous success with eBooks and we’re very excited to expand the Kobo offering to include newspapers and magazines with a two-week free trial, allowing consumers to try first without any obligation. We continue to bring on top publishers to ensure that Kobo’s newspaper and magazine offering meets our customers’ highest expectations."

After the two-week trial, monthly subscription prices start at $13.99 for newspapers and $2.99 for magazines. Kobo also claims to have over 2.2 million eBooks available.

Additionally, in those four weeks, customers ordered more Kindles on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product. That makes Kindle the bestselling product across all products on Amazon for two straight years.

"Kindle is the best-selling product on Amazon.com for two years running and our new generation Kindles are continuing that momentum," said Steven Kessel, senior vice president, Amazon Kindle. "Readers are excited about all that the new Kindle has to offer—50 percent better contrast, 20 percent faster page turns, 15 percent lighter, up to one month of battery life—and a new price of only $139."

The new Kindle has a new electronic-ink screen and a new design with a 21% smaller body, while keeping the 6 inch screen of the old Kindle. It has built-in Wi-Fi, a graphite color option, and double the storage, holding 3,500 books.

As an added bonus for all of those people that ordered the new Kindles, Amazon also announced that they began shipping today, 2 days earlier than previously announced.

"Acer strives to continually improve on our customers’ total mobile experience, whether it is increased responsiveness or extended Internet interactivity through longer battery life," said David Lee, associate vice president of Acer’s Mobile Computing Business Unit. "We are pleased to select dual-core Intel Atom processors for Acer netbooks, helping to empower netbook users achieve even more – both at work and at leisure."

"In their short history, the netbook category has experienced impressive growth," said Erik Reid, director of marketing for mobile platforms at Intel. "Having shipped about 70 million Intel Atom chips for netbooks since our launch of the category in 2008, there is obviously a great market for these devices around the world."

Intel says the netbooks enable new levels of support for applications like games, as well as Adobe Flash technology for access to a number of Web pages including online hotel booking systems and multimedia sites such as YouTube and Hulu.

The devices will be in stores from today until the end of the year, according to the announcement.

On a related note, Intel has shipped over 70 million Atom netbook chips since its the launch in 2008.

"In the first connectivity wave, the bulk of devices connected to the Internet were PCs and laptops plus their associated modem and networking equipment," says IMS Research President Ian Weightman. "Today, over 1 billion computers worldwide are regularly connected to the Internet, and this number is growing steadily."

The second wave, as IMS refers to, would be the cellular industry, combined with other emerging sectors like tablets, netbooks, eBook readers, TVs, digital picture frames, cameras, etc. These combine with the first wave to get that 5 billion estimation.

"There will be a number of drivers behind this amazing growth," Weightman says with regards to the 2020 prediction. "Firstly, by 2020 we are forecasting that there will be over 6 billion cell phones in use around the world, the great majority of which will be Internet connected. Then consider that there are around 2.5 billion TVs in use today, and that many of these will be replaced with Internet connected sets, you have another tremendous growth area. In addition, an increasing proportion of the world’s 1.1 billion cars will be replaced by models that have Internet connectivity."

"The potential for greatest growth comes from the third wave which will include machine-to-machine (M2M) deployments. This has the potential to go way beyond industrial applications to encompass increasingly sophisticated smart grids, networked security cameras and sensors, connected home appliances and HVAC equipment, ITS infrastructure, etc."

IMS is a firm that tracks installations of Internet-capable equipment. It supplies market research for the global electronics industry.

Google appears to have somewhat given up on Wave, at least as a standalone product. The company posts to the Official Google Blog:

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Nielsen reports that the mobile Internet is more popular in China that it is in the U.S. "Widespread ownership of mobiles is only a fairly recent development in China, but consumers there have fully embraced the technology and in some ways are using it more robustly than their American and European counterparts," says Shan Phillips, Vice President, Greater China, Telecom Practice, The Nielsen Company.

Nielsen also has another interesting report looking at who is buying the iPad, and asking if they will also buy an iPhone.

WordPress has introduced its own "like" buttons. Now readers can "like" posts, although I’d say for publishers, the Facebook "like" buttons will be a lot more effective for driving traffic. Still, it’s nice to provide as many gateways for engagement as possible (without getting too cluttered, anyway).

According to the Financial Times, Motorola and Verizon have teamed up on a "TV Tablet." This is a device with a 10-inch screen that users will be able to watch television on.

Reuters reports that Sharp intends to launch a 3D smartphone this year. This would feature a 3D panel that can be viewed without special glasses and would have a 3D capable camera.

According to Unwired Review, Samsung is considering puting touchscreen functionality on the back of a tablet. This is based on a patent application for a "mobile terminal having dual touch screen and method of controlling content therein".

Meanwhile, as Engadget writes, Microsoft has been teasing an as-of-yet unannounced product via Twitter, saying, ""Don’t be so touchy…flat is where it’s at," and offering a small partial image of some object. This may or may not be a trackpad.

Meanwhile, for the first time since 2007, RIM has slid to the number 2 position, as Android took the lead.

While Android accounted for 33% of all smartphones purchased in Q2, RIM accounted for 28%. Apple came in third at 22% with the launch of the iPhone 4.

"For  the second consecutive quarter, Android handsets have shown strong but slowing sell-through market share gains among U.S. consumers," said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD. "While the Google-developed OS took market share from RIM, Apple’s iOS saw a small gain this quarter on the strength of the iPhone 4 launch."

This week, BlackBerry unleashed its new BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry 6. It remains to be seen what kind of an impact this will have on the market.

"Blackberry 6 will soon offer features that have been popular in recently launched Android handsets, such as support for capacitive touchscreens and a WebKit-based browser. However, the Blackberry Torch lacks the large screen allure that has characterized the best selling Android devices at its price point, including the Droid Incredible and EVO 4G," Rubin said.

The top 5 Android smartphones sold were:

1. Motorola Droid
2. HTC Droid Incredible
3. HTC EVO 4G
4. HTC Hero
5. HTC Droid Eris

Android still has tablets and Google TV to look forward to as far as attracting more users.

"This is one of the most significant launches in RIM’s history and we are proud to introduce the new BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry 6 together with AT&T," said RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. "With a new user interface, new browser and new handset design, the highly anticipated BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry 6 deliver integrated and uncompromising capabilities for consumers and business professionals that preserve the industry-leading strengths of the BlackBerry platform while adding exciting new dimensions."

Here’s the full feature list from the release:

• Elegant styling, measuring approx. 4.4" (5.8" open) x 2.4" x .57" and weighing 5.68 ounces
• 3.2" 360×480 capacitive touch screen display
• 35 key full QWERTY backlit slide-out keyboard, designed to feel optimally balanced when opened for typing
• Optical trackpad that makes navigation fast and smooth
• Powerful 624 Mhz processor with 512 MB Flash memory
• 4 GB built-in memory storage plus a microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports up to 32 GB cards; a 4 GB card is included giving users 8 GB of storage out-of-the-box
• 5 MP camera with flash, continuous auto focus, image stabilization, scene modes, geo-tagging and zoom, as well as video recording at up to 640×480 resolution
• Built-in GPS for location-based applications and geo-tagging
• Wi-Fi® (802.11 b/g/n); qualifying smartphone customers can enjoy seamless connectivity to over 20,000 AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots at no additional cost
• 3.5mm stereo headset jack
• Premium phone features, including voice activated dialing, speakerphone and Bluetooth® (2.1) with support for hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits (including systems that support the Bluetooth Message Access Profile standard) and other Bluetooth accessories
• New BlackBerry® Desktop Software 6 with integrated media sync for easily syncing music, photos and videos^**. It also includes Wi-Fi Music Sync, a unique feature that allows users to view their entire iTunes® or Windows Media® Player music libraries from their BlackBerry smartphone, create and edit playlists as well as select music for download. When in range of their home Wi-Fi network (or via USB), the changes are synced with iTunes or Windows Media Player and the songs are automatically downloaded to the smartphone
• Tri-band HSDPA (3G) and quad-band EDGE support for the option of voice service in more than 220 countries, data service in more than 195 countries and 3G connectivity in more than 125 countries, including Japan and South Korea
• Removable, rechargeable 1300 mAhr battery that provides approximately 5.8 hours of talk time on 3G networks or 30 hours of audio playback or 6 hours of video playback

"BlackBerry 6 is the outcome of RIM’s ongoing passion to deliver a powerful, simplified and optimized user experience for both touch screen and keyboard fans," said Lazaridis. "Following extensive research and development to address consumer needs and wants, we are delivering a communications, browsing and multimedia experience that we think users will love, and we are thrilled to debut BlackBerry 6 on the amazing new BlackBerry Torch smartphone."

A Nielen report released this week indicates that loyalty is lacking among BlackBerry users, saying that half of BlackBerry users could potentially choose an iPhone or an Android phone for their next device. These things should be taken with a grain of salt, and that was before today’s announcements, but it still has to be a little worrisome for RIM.

Original Article: Amazon’s Kindle has been making a lot of headlines lately, and now the company has introduced a new generation of Kindle devices. The new Kindle is smaller, lighter, faster, and has 50% better contrast than any other e-reader on the market, according to Amazon.

It has a new electronic-ink screen and a new design with a 21% smaller body, while keeping the 6 inch screen of the old Kindle. It’s 15% lighter at 8.7 ounces. Amazon claims it has 20% faster page turns, up to a month of battery life, built-in Wi-Fi, a graphite color option, and double the storage, holding 3,500 books. The price is $189, and still comes with free 3G wireless.

Amazon has also introduced the Kindle Wi-Fi, which doesn’t come with 3G, but is only $139.

"Kindle is the best-selling product on Amazon for two years running. We lowered the price to $189 and sales growth tripled," says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Readers are going to do a double take when they see Kindle’s bright new screen and feel how remarkably light the smaller 8.7 ounce design feels in one hand."

The new devices will ship in 140 countries and 30 territories on beginning August 27.