BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Another Record Quarter For Smartphone Sales

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Smartphone Sales Topped 210 Million In The First Quarter (Gartner)
With few signs of slowing, the smartphone market eked out a rare first quarter increase in sales. Smartphone came tantalizingly close to accounting for half of mobile phone sales, but fell just short at 49%. Android accounted for nearly three out of every four smartphones sold and Samsung for almost one of every three smartphones sold in the quarter. Read >

Google Readies Its Spotify Competitor (The Verge)
Google has reportedly landed Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, the two largest record labels, for its new subscription music service, having previously inked a deal with number-three Warner Music Group. It may give consumers a first peek of the service at I/O, which begins today. Here's where you can watch the keynote live. Read >

ESPN, Twitter Expand Partnership (Wall Street Journal)
Sports highlight clips are coming to Twitter. ESPN plans on selling ads to run against the clips and its marketing partners will commit to buying a minimum value of promoted tweets. The tie-up is a further sign of Twitter's push into video ads, as we discussed in our report on social media advertising. Read >

Square Unveils An iPad Register For Small Businesses (TechCrunch)
It's basically an iPad case with a better credit card card reader and connects with necessary hardware accessories like a receipt printer or cash drawer. It costs $299 and is now available for pre-order. The move not only allows for deeper integration with merchants, but helps ward off the emergence of NFC (Near-Field Communications) as a viable alternative. Square faces competition from PayPal and Groupon, which released their own point-of-sale solutions. Square also announced that it is now processing payments at $15 billion annual run rate, excluding its partnership with Starbucks, up from $10 billion last November. Read >

Blackberry Bringing BBM To Android And iOS (The Verge)
If you can't beat them, join them. Blackberry is bringing its once wildly popular messaging service to Android and iOS this summer. It makes sense: Blackberry was always more of a messaging platform than a smartphone platform, but it feels a little late to the party with the emergence of over-the-top messaging apps in the past few years. It also released a new phone and updated its enterprise software. Read >

China's Tencent Sees Double-Digit Growth In Its Messaging App (Tech In Asia)
Tencent says it has an impressive 194.4 million monthly active users of WeChat, which represents 23% growth over the previous quarter. Read >

The HTC First, Facebook Home's Flagship Phone, May Be Discontinued (Ars Technica)
That was quick. About a month after its release, the HTC First will be discontinued by carrier partner AT&T. Only 15,000 handsets were sold, indicating there isn't much demand for a Facebook phone. Read >

Twitter's Power Users Produce The Bulk Of Tweets (First Monday)
The top 1% of Twitter users produce 20% of the tweets, the top 5% generate 48%, and the top 15% account for 85%. Twitter's usage is 70% mobile, according to comScore.

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