Linked List: July 3, 2012

Tuesday, 3 July 2012

10 Percent of 9to5Mac’s iOS Readers Are on iOS 6 

Visitors to sites like 9to5Mac certainly are not representative of the iOS user base as a whole, but it’s an interesting statistic nonetheless. Here at DF, 7.75 percent of iOS visitors yesterday were on iOS 6. (83 percent were on 5.1.1, 5 percent on 5.1, 1.6 percent on 5.0.1, and all other versions of iOS were well under half a percent.)

More interesting to me is that iOS now accounts for just under one-third of DF web traffic. These are numbers the past month:

Macintosh 51%
iOS 32%
Windows 14%
Linux 1.4%
Android 0.8%

The iOS split is 19/13 for the iPhone and iPad, respectively.

Amazon Buys 3D Mapping Startup UpNext 

Ki Mae Heussner:

It looks like Amazon is building up its presence in the mapping business. The tech giant today closed a deal to acquire 3D mapping startup UpNext, GigaOM has learned.

The maps war is in full swing. Got to give credit to Google for committing itself to maps so long ago.

Designing Bond’s World 

Nice video:

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 007 film franchise, The Barbican sits down with set designer Sir Ken Adam, Aston Martin’s Head of Design, and the designers and the makers of the legendary Golden Gun to talk about the creation of the iconic world inhabited by Bond.

See also: Designing Bond’s Look. (Via Joe Caiati.)

Preview of Vanity Fair Feature on Microsoft’s Downfall 

Vanity Fair:

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking” — a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor — effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

The Scene at BlackBerry’s Only U.S. Retail Store 

You can hear the crickets chirping from here.

‘Tablets’ 

Ryan Kim, reporting for GigaOm:

Monetate, which analyzes more than 100 million online shopping experiences, said that in the first quarter of 2012, tablet traffic to commerce sites hit 6.52 percent, overtaking smartphones (5.35 percent) for the first time. In the last year, tablets’ traffic increased 348 percent while smartphones visits grew by 117 percent over the same period.

Which tablets, though?

Almost all of the traffic (95 percent) was from the iPad, said Monetate.

So why is the headline about “tablets”?