Day: August 26, 2011

The organization “Chitika Insights” is the research arm of online advertising network “Chitika.” They use their data to monitor and report on Internet trends – search engines, clickthrough rates, the mobile war, and more. So, when they show Firefox 6 usage IS up… I guess some folks were suitably impressed!

Firefox 6 Takes Off, up to Over 8% of Traffic

“August 16th saw the release of the newest version of Firefox; Firefox 6, and already the browser is taking off with rave reviews. The second version released under Mozilla’s new rapid-release process, Firefox 6 has seen a huge bump in our network since release day.

To quantify the spike of traffic, Chitika took a look at all USA and Canadian traffic from August 16th to August 22nd, and took a look at the hourly growth of Firefox 6 as a function of both overall traffic, and just Firefox traffic.

Clearly, Firefox 6 is growing, already consisting of just over 8% of our total traffic by the end of the day on August 22nd. Also of note, though, is the periodic growth of Firefox 6: peaks tend to occur at the beginning of each day, and valleys occur at the early morning hours when Internet Explorer is primarily in use.”

Maybe. It will be cheaper… cheaper is always good!

Amazon Tablet to undercut iPad price by hundreds

“The long rumored iPad-killer that could be Amazon’s upcoming tablet is expected to launch sometime in September or October. But with the recent $99 fire sales of the discontinued HP TouchPad doing amazingly well, there are new reports that Amazon may introduce their tablets at a similarly low price point to excite the masses.

According to the New York Post, an insider source has revealed that the Amazon tablet will sell for ‘hundreds less’ than the entry-level iPad, which retails for $499. Although that doesn’t mean the tablet will go for $99, it does mean it could be sold at most around $299. This sounds about right if Amazon is going the budget tablet route, as recent contenders in that space, such as the Vizio 8-inch Tablet, have had to drop down to that price point.

Amazon is also known to take loss leaders with extreme discounts made up for by increased volume and distribution of other content and services from the Amazon ecosystem.

The two rumored Amazon tablets include an entry-level 7-inch model codenamed ‘Coyote’ and a higher-end 10-inch model codenamed ‘Hollywood’ that’s also expected to sport a quad-core NVIDIA Kal-El processor. Previous rumors had pegged the retail price for these tablets at $349 and $449, respectively. But with the way the market has been developing with the recent webOS casualty and the iPad still predicted to control the tablet market through 2013, Amazon may just get much more aggressive.”

You didn’t really want to deal with hew-mons anyway, did you?

Google+ Adds Ignore Option

“Is that one Google+ friend chatting a bit too much about Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple or posting too many vacation photos? Not to worry; the search giant this week added the ability to ignore people.

‘We want to make sure you can represent your real-life relationships on Google+—whether you want to connect with someone or not,’ Google’s Olga Wichrowska said in a Thursday post. ‘So starting today, we’re rolling out a new option to Ignore people, in addition to the existing (and stronger) option to Block them.’

By ignoring someone, ‘you’ll see less of what a person is sharing,’ Wichrowska wrote. This is less severe than blocking them, which limits how they can communicate with you rather than just hides their annoying updates. In both cases, the offending party is not notified.

Specifically, ignore stops putting that person’s updates in your incoming stream, stops notifying you about their activities, and removes them from your Circles page.

If that sounds good, there are several ways to ignore a person: click ‘ignore’ next to a person’s name in the Google+ Notifications bar or stream; via the incoming stream; or from the Circles page—highlight their name and click ‘ignore.’

You can undo any ignores via “More Actions” on the Circles page.”