Gartner reports that among new smartphone shipments in 2010, Google’s Android penetration rate grew 888.9 percent, making it the second most common OS in new smartphones. As indicated by Gartner’s market share data (tabulated below), the top five smartphone OS vendors in 2010 were Symbian (37.6 percent), Google (22.7 percent), RIM (16 percent), Apple (15.7 percent), and Microsoft (4.2 percent).
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Robot specialist Boston Dynamics has just received a contract from the U.S. Defense Department’s DARPA agency to develop two new robots. Atlas, a humanoid bot, will “climb and maneuver in rough terrain [with] human-like agility,” while Cheetah, a felinoid bot, will “sprint faster than a human, corner like a race car, and start and stop on a dime,” says the company.
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Boxee, maker of the free Boxee multimedia-player software platform for PCs and Macs, and the smarts behind D-Link’s recently introduced Boxee Box, has just received $16.5 million more funding. The lead investors of this financing round were Pitango and Softbank, with prior investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures also participating.
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Owners of D-Link’s first-generation Boxee Box finally got what they were anxiously waiting for today: Netflix’s video streaming service actually running on their devices. Although it’s still somewhat buggy, DeviceGuru can confirm that the Boxee Box Netflix app does works well enough to browse, select, and watch videos.
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President Obama reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to rapidly growing the U.S. electric car industry in his State of the Union speech on January 25. The investment, which includes a proposal for $7,500 on-the-spot rebates for new electric car purchases during 2011, is part of a plan for the U.S. to become the first nation with 1 million “advanced technology vehicles” on its roadways.
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