I keep reading articles that talk about the looming Android threat to iPhone's supremacy as *the* smartphone to rule the mobile web space.

Canada has long had quite a love affair with Apple with a third of smartphones sold. Sure, it's #2 to Blackberries but since they're increasingly irrelevant, especially in the mobile web space, I'll ignore it for the purposes of this post. But all the news is buzzing these days about how Android has doubled its market share and is now used by a quarter of Canadian smarthone users (all references from Financial Post article).

So by that count you'd expect to see Android web usage to be near that of iPhones. Trouble is that's not what I'm seeing from our mobile web traffic. iOS has grown steadily and now has a nearly 9:1 advantage over every other OS combined. And while Android traffic is dropping to below 4% iPad traffic has spiked, up 3X in unique users in the last year.

This leaves me with a simple conclusion: Android devices may be making inroads in terms of owners but those owners are just not using the mobile web as actively as iOS users are. So why develop for Android devices? I'd rather focus on iOS and wait until the Androids really do take over...

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Love this!

Doubleday is taking advantage of social media + playful nature of people + timely reference to create a social media smash hit: #Literary Turducken

Take 3 literary works and mash 'em together to create a Turduckeny-style literary masterpiece.

This is a hashtag that I want to follow to see what kind creative genius people will come up with. Like these gems:

A People's Brief History of Time to Kill

The Lion, The Witch, and the War & Peace Like a River

A Great and Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gatsby

Happy Thanksgving, my American friends :)

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Congrats to Vancity on their recent brand relaunch. They're now the home of "Good Money" which speaks directly to their core value as a socially conscious financial institution with deep roots in the Vancouver community.

Vancity has always had a reputation as the socially conscious bank but to me it was never really clear what they truly stood for. Recycling, helping the homeless, bicycles... there's so many popular causes these days it must be tough to pick one. 

What I like about the new direction is that it builds on the years of community involvement and tremendous goodwill but, more importantly, it simply reflects what Vancity is about. Making money, but not the kind of money that most people are after, "easy money", but money that is community based and gives back. And as a consumer that is a simple value proposition to identify with (or ignore, as the case may be).

It reminds me of the success that we've had at Coast with "Simple, Financial Help". It's more than a saying, it embodies everything we do. We're not just about making you money, we're about helping you understand, in clear, plain English, what every other financial institution seems to overly complicate. Again, something that as a consumer I can easily value, or not.

So good on ya, Vancity! I like the new direction. And congrats to my good friend, William Azaroff, Vancity's Director of Digital & Community Engagement, for his star turn as the voice over in two of their new commercials. As someone who I've worked closely with over this past year, I've seen Vancity's values embodied in real life and it's great to see the brand represent what I see in William each day.

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