News Roundup - Android Rises, IE Falls, Charlotte gets 3D Love

The big winner this month: Android. Android passed the iPhone in sales in the first quarter of 2010, becoming the #2 smart phone with 28% of the market. Blackberry is still #1 with a whopping 36%, with a big thank you corporate America.

The big looser this month is Internet Explorer, which saw its market share drop below 60%. IE6 and IE7 usage continues to decline in favor of IE8, but IE usage in general is still on a long march down. My faith in humanity rises with every drop. Chrome is the fastest riser at the moment, and for good reason. I’m using Google Chrome (or Chromium on Ubuntu) as my default browser. The way extensions are handled it doesn’t have the power of Firefox, but it’s just so….darn….fast….

Good old Charlotte has received some Google 3D love. Street View generated facades have been applied to the buildings, and it looks gorgeous.

This would be a head scratcher if it didn’t involve government: Louisiana has a bill that would increase prison sentences if you used a virtual (Internet) map in your crime. Paper map usage appears to be OK. To paraphrase John Stewart, Democracy: because none of us is as dumb as all of us.

Via the All Points Blog, their’s now an Oil Reporter application for Andriods and iPhones developed by CrisisCommons. The data collected will be housed by San Diego State University’s Visualization Center and will be open for anyone to access and use. VGI/UGC/crowdsourced data at its finest.

Google Latitude as added a location history, so you can track where you’ve been and show those locations in Google Maps or Google Earth. You can also enable latitude alerts to let you know when your friends are nearby. Donning tin foil hat in 3…2…1…

And finally, there’s a new Blender movie project coming out, and it looks incredible. It makes me wonder what I could do if I had, you know…talent. If you view it on Youtube you can see it in HD (via WebM if you’re on the HTML5 beta with a supporting browser).