I don’t do the Gruber-style ‘claim chowder’ thing, but if I did, I’d be filing away Pyramid Research’s Why Windows Phone Will Beat Android for future reference. The article’s market share estimates for smartphones seems a bit on the bonkers side to me.

In short:

• Android growth will slow dramatically in 2011 and pretty much plateau thereafter.
• Windows Phone will spike from fuck-all to a third of the market this year, rocketing past Android within 12 months.
• iOS and BlackBerry will be the losers, with declining market shares UNTIL THE END OF TIME (2015).

Pryamid yadders on about it blah blah 51 markets blah extrapolating data for the rest of the world blah blah projects based on demand projections, but the main arguments appear to be:

• Nokia is super-powerful and with Microsoft by its side, the pair will RULE THE WORLD, not least because Nokia will bring down the price of smartphones (you know, like Android already has).
• WP will get loads of traction for being late to the party and going LOOK AT MY NEW SHOES!
• Vendors such as Samsung, LG and Sony are “placing their bets on WP”, which “may” remove the multivendor strategic advantage of Android (rather than, say, ensuring those companies have no focus whatsoever).
• iOS is screwed, because Apple “only runs on hardware manufactured by the vendor”.

We’ll see.

iFlowReader is closing and in a candid open letter, the service blames Apple for “changing the rules in the middle of the game”.

Facebook Indie Games argues:

If you are an iOS developer then no matter how much money you’re making diversify now. If iFlowReader had put out HTML5, Flash, and Android apps while times were good they may be in a different position now. Still painful but at least sustainable.

It’d be great to have some figures to back this up across a number of app/game types. I agree that, in theory, diversification is a good thing, and—from a business standpoint—a platform-agnostic approach (even if you build specific delivery mechanisms for each platform) enables you to cast a wider net.

But all we hear about these days is that iOS device owners have been trained to buy content and so they do so, but Android owners want free, and desktop/laptop users often also moan when presented with firewalls and paid content, preferring the free route as well.

So while it’s great to argue that iFlowReader would still be in a sustainable position had it also created an Android app and an HTML5/Flash version of its offering, there’s absolutely no guarantee that’s the case, just as there’s no guarantee even the most popular iOS app and game offerings could survive if Apple saw fit to ‘force’ them off the platform.

As reported here before, Henry Blodget has argued a number of times that the iPhone is dead in the water. His main reason is that there can only be one winner in any single tech field:

Technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

Given that even the ageing iPhone 3GS is still outselling many new Android devices in the USA (All Things Digital), it’s increasingly clear (if it wasn’t before) that Blodget is talking crap.

Microsoft’s purchase of Skype has ushered in similar comments, with people calling Microsoft bonkers to splash out $8.5 billion on a service that’s clearly going to be crushed by Google at some point. But Ben Horowitz offers a different take in his article that provides background on Andreessen Horowitz’s acquisition, 18 months ago, of the service from eBay.

Many observers believed that as the world inevitably transitioned to mobile and web, Skype would be left in the dust [and we] soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple.

These attacks were Google’s free competitor to Skype, aggressively marketed to Gmail users, and Apple’s FaceTime, heavily advertised and baked into iOS devices and Macs.

Horowitz reveals the result of these two titans attacking Skype:

Skype new users and usage growth has accelerated since Google’s launch, culminating in:

500,000 new registered users per day

170 million connected users

30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently

209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010

[And] 50 million users have downloaded Skype’s iPhone product since the release of Apple’s Facetime.

But, yeah, technology platform markets tend to standardise around a single dominant platform.

Electronista reports:

Apple’s iPad 2 is as fast as a Cray 2 supercomputer from a quarter-century ago, Top 500 and Linpack co-manager Dr. Jack Dongarra said late Monday. At 1.5 to 1.65 gigaflops of computing power, Apple’s tablet would compete with the eight-processor, 1985-era system despite being just a sliver of the size.

The real disadvantage of the Cray, though, is that there’s no shipping version of Angry Birds. Still, given Rovio’s increasingly fevered attempts to milk that series until it screams, it’s probably only a matter of time.

(Before the Cray version, Rovio should release C64 Angry Birds!)

The Telegraph claims, in an article that sounds unlikely to me, that mobile phones could soon be charged by talking into the handset:

Electrical engineers have developed a new technique for turning sound into electricity, allowing a mobile to be powered up while its user holds a conversation.

The technology would also be able to harness background noise and even music to charge a phone while it is not in use.

If true, this is also good news for The Telegraph itself. Assuming we really can generate electricity by talking hot air, the newspaper’s HQ could become the Middle East of generating electricity by the power of regularly spouting garbage at volume.