Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 1.211 billion units in 2009, a 0.9 per cent decline from 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008.

Three of the top five mobile phone vendors experienced a decline in sales in 2009 (Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson). The top five vendors continued to lose market share to Apple and other vendors, with their combined share dropping from 79.7 in 2008 to 75.3 per cent in 2009.

On the OS side, the two best performers in 2009 were Android and Apple. Android increased its market share by 3.5 percentage points in 2009, while Apple's share grew by 6.2 percentage points from 2008, which helped it move to the No. 3 position and displace Microsoft Windows Mobile.

Much more information in the press release.

Smooth Streaming in Vancouver

NBC plans to offer more than 400 hours of live competition and more than 1,000 hours of full-event replay through its NBC Olympics website, dedicated to the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010. All the shows will be in HD 720p video quality, thanks to the Smooth Streaming capabilities of Microsoft's Silverlight 3.0.

Cnet news reports that Microsoft is also helping NBC by allowing the broadcaster to easily insert ads into the middle of video streams when there is a break in the action, something that proved to be technologically challenging for Beijing, where only so-called "pre-roll" ads were used.

Internet video to remain free

MPEG LA recently announced that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as Internet Broadcast AVC Video) during the next License term from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2015. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing, and royalties to apply during the next term will be announced before the end of 2010.

Full news release here.

Silver-Moon

Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. Sponsored by Novell, Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework.

Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight, primarily for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems.

Moonlight 2, released on December 2009, runs the Silverlight 2.0 MS-PL controls and 2.0 based applications. The final release of Moonlight 3 is scheduled for Q3'10 and will offer HD Smooth Streaming and native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio. An integrated H.264/AVC decoder is not yet available, though...