Hasta La Gadget!

It was almost a year ago that we first heard about Kno‘s smart textbook metrics system “Kno Me.” Now the software is set to actually launch, and find its way into students’ (and parents’) hands. As a refresher, the system provides analytics on your (or your children’s) study patterns, letting you see how long you have studied for, amount of time interacting with the subject matter, percentage of pages that have been annotated and more. Kno Me is available for all of the firm’s interactive textbooks and launches tomorrow on the iPad, Windows 8 and browser platforms, with Android and Windows 7 coming by the end of the month. Kno Me is free, and will be pushed out via the existing app.

Continue reading Kno launches ‘Kno Me’ interactive textbook metrics, lets you study your studying

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It’s really not a surprise when you’re told that people spend a lot of time on social media. We all know that Facebook has over a billion users, and that all these statistics that get thrown around of how many photos users share on social networking sites are just a fancy way of saying, “people are using social media.” However, it turns out that Americans are collectively spending over two billion hours on social media, every month.

In its annual Social Media Report, Nielsen says that Americans spent a collective 121 billion minutes on social media websites in July alone, which is up from 88 billion the year before. 121 billion minutes equates to just over 230,000 years, which means if we split that time equally amongst every American, that would be about 13 minutes per person per day.

Of course, not everyone in America uses social media — Facebook alone has around 150 million active users in the US according to the report, and there are a total of around 212 million Americans using social media as we speak, compared to the current total US population of 312 million. It’s also very possible that a lot of social media accounts are probably duplicates or multiple accounts for one person. So, more realistically, people are probably spending a lot more than just 13 minutes surfing Facebook and Twitter every day. Specifically, if we took those 121 billion minutes and split them equally amongst the 212 million social media users in the US, that would be approximately 19 minutes per person per day, on average.

These are just rough estimates obviously, and not every single social media user only spends 19 minutes per day browsing the sites, but the total 121 billion minutes makes sense no doubt. Furthermore, Nielsen reported that, on average, users spend roughly 20% of their time online on a computer browsing social media, while on mobile devices, users spend around 30% of their time surfing the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ on their tiny screens.

Americans spend over 2 billion hours on social media per month is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The holiday season is right around the corner, and it’ll kick in to full swing after this weekend when all of the Thanksgiving festivities wrap up. So then, what are the good little boys and girls putting on their Christmas lists this year for Santa? It seems Apple products are the go-to gadget for most kids.

According to research firm Nielsen, American kids aged 6-12 are more excited about the latest iOS devices than any other electronic devices. Almost half the kids surveyed wanted a full-sized iPad, and 36% wanted an iPad Mini. The iPod Touch and iPhone are were also on the list, with 36% and 33%, respectively.

In second place was the Nintendo Wii U, which garnered 39% of kids. It turns out that four out of the top five most wanted items by kids are Apple products. Coming in at number six is a computer with 31% interest from kids. Honestly, we’re not too surprised by the vast interest in Apple’s products, especially with kids. Apple names their products in order for people to easily remember them and they’re really simple names, so we’re not surprised that kids know what all the latest iDevices are all about.

Gaming was also a huge hit, according to the survey. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 made the list, as well as the PlayStation 3, and an assortment of Nintendo DS products. However, while Apple products dominated the top of the charts, the one item that kids were least excited about was the Apple TV. Frankly, we’re not too surprised by that, since kids probably aren’t big into televisions and all the cool video apps that you can get on the Apple TV. So for now, it seems that gaming, and playing around with tablets is the thing to do.

Study shows kids want Apple products the most for Christmas is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We obviously do a lot of different things on the Internet each and every, but when the peak hours between 9PM and 12AM arrive, it’s all about Netflix baby. A new report from Sandvine shows that in North America, Netflix is responsible for 33% of the downstream traffic on fixed networks between those hours. That’s good enough, but Sandvine’s report also says that 65% of all downstream traffic during those hours is coming from video and audio streaming sites, meaning Netflix is responsible for half of that.

In Europe, it’s a bit of a different story there, as YouTube accounts for 20% of all downstream traffic during peak hours on both fixed and mobile networks. It probably won’t come as much of a surprise that video streaming sites take up most of the downstream traffic during peak hours, but what’s interesting is that Netflix takes so much share for itself. Amazon, Hulu, and HBO Go were all mentioned in Sandvine’s report, but they only respectively account for 1.8%, 1.4%, and 0.5% of downstream traffic on North American fixed networks during peak hours.

Hearing that, it’s immediately clear just how strong Netflix is in North America. All in all, Sandvine says that mean monthly data usage on North American fixed networks has risen quite a bit, jumping from 23GB to 51GB in just one year. That’s an increase of 120%, and we can probably expect that to climb even higher as more people begin turning to the Internet for their video content.

Sandvine, which calls itself a “leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators,” collected this data from a selection of its 200 customers around the world. It’s an interesting study to say the least, and we’ll be even more interested to see where these numbers are a year from now. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Sandvine is predicting that the 2014 World Cup will be the most-streamed event in Internet history.

Sandvine report shows Netflix dominating during North American peak hours is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

Are you reading this? Seriously, are you? Sure, we know you think you are, but what if you’re just a sub-feature of a complex computer program. A sprite, nothing more than the creation of software. The problem with this question is, how would you ever know? You wouldn’t, right? Well, not so fast there. Turns out, maybe there is a way to unravel the matrix (if there is one). It’ll come as no surprise, that this is one of the topics in this week’s collection of alternative stories. Think that’s all we got? Not even close. We’ll explore the truth behind cloning dinosaurs, as well a rare performance by singing mice — all before dinner. Or is it really dinner? This is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 10.13.12: is the Universe a simulation, cloning dinosaurs and singing mice

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Alt-week 10.13.12: is the Universe a simulation, cloning dinosaurs and singing mice originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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