Today, HTC unveiled two new smartphones as it competes with rivals Apple and Samsung: the Desire 200, an inexpensive Android-powered device, and the Butterfly S, a top-tier handset on par with the company’s flagship HTC One.

Details regarding the two devices had been widely speculated, and were officially disclosed today at a press conference curiously held in Yilan, a beach town about one hour from Taipei.

As reported by Engadget, the Butterfly S device features a 5-inch 1080p display, HTC’s Sense 5 UI, front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers – making this device, along with the HTC One, top quality when it comes to audio.

The smartphone runs Android Jelly Bean on a quad-core 1.9GHZ Snapdragon 600, a startlingly long-lasting 3,200mAh battery, quad-band HSPA/WCDMA radio, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It also has an UltraPixel Camera, Zoe software features, as well as a 2.1-megapixel wide-angle camera on the device’s front-facing side.

Photos of the phone leaked last week. The BoomSound speakers are quite visible and recall those on the HTC One.

The company also unveiled the new low-end Desire 200, the details of which were revealed yesterday.

Launched in collaboration with Taiwan carrier Chunghua Telecom, HTC apparently took deliberate measures to keep the launch of the devices as quiet as possible. Access was given almost exclusively to local media outlets, who were bused to the event from the capital.

Engadget reports that the Butterfly S phone will retail for NT $22,900 (roughly $766), while the Desire 200 will sell for NT $4990 (roughly $165). There’s no word yet on subsequent launches in Asia or internationally.

Despite earning $970 million in revenue in May, its best monthly sales figure in about one year, HTC has lately been struggling financially. In Q4 of 2014 the firm brought in a mere $34 million in net profits, its lowest since 2004, and Q1 of 2013 didn’t fare much better. Sales of HTC one, the company’s flagship smartphone, reached 5 million one month after its launch, while rival Samsung’s  Galaxy S4 reached double that amount within the same time period.

IDC issued a report this week stating that China’s smartphone shipments for Q1 2013 leaped 117 percent compared to Q1 2012, with total shipments reaching 78 million.

As for vendor market share, IDC states that Samsung sits at first place with a market share of 19 percent, while its global rival Apple clocks in at number 5 with a share of 9 percent. Samsung’s dominance in China is well-established, IDC attributes Samsung’s success in the country to its local emphasis on pushing mid-tier devices, noting that its products priced under $200 experienced growth of 47 percent compared to the previous quarter.

Antonio Wang, Associate Director of Computing Systems Research Group of IDC China, states:

In China’s smartphone market, Samsung has switched its marketing focus from competing with Apple for high-end market to maintaining its high-end market share, and is starting to strive for market for products under USD 200, which has so far been dominated by domestic brands.

Though it’s yet to outrank Samsung in overall market share, Apple is seeing sales of its iPhone 4 soar in China, with the device growing a whopping 211 percent compared to the previous quarter. This indicates that its strategy of selling older phones at a discounted price in emerging markets is succeeding. This should bode well for Apple if speculation of a forthcoming cheaper iPhone proves to be true.

IDC notes that with the exception of Huawei, domestic manufacturers experienced no notable growth in Q1 2013, though no exact figures were given.

The report also includes several predictions for the future of China’s mobile phone market.

In particular, IDC expects that smartphones with screens sized upwards of 5-inches will occupy 20 percent of the smartphone market by the end of the year. This trend is attributed to the popularity of Samsung’s Galaxy S and Note devices. In addition, the research firm anticipates that shipments of 4G phones will exceed shipments of 3G phones by 2017.

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Design-focused e-commerce service Fab.com is now valued at more than $1 billion after it announced a $150 million Series D round of investment led by Chinese Internet giant Tencent.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Fab.com — which has 14 million registered members and is two-years-old — has taken funding from a number of other investors, although neither it nor Tencent will confirm how much the Chinese firm contributed.

The deal is significant because Fab.com is still to reach profitability, although sales are tipped to more than double this year. Last year, the Manhattan-based start up booked $120 million in revenue, and it estimates that the figure will increase to $250 million in 2013 — though that will not make it profitable.

CEO Jason Goldberg told the Journal that the firm could take on as much as $100 million in further investment “over the next few months”. This newly confirmed round will be used to build out Fab.com’s digital stores, develop exclusive products and further its international footprint.

Given that Tencent is now a shareholder, China would be a logical future step and Fab.com says it will look for ways to work with the company. That’s similar to its intention to focus on India after taking funding from Times Internet back in December 2012.

Tencent is conducting final in-house tests before it introduces payments to its WeChat mobile messaging service — which has clocked more than 300 million downloads and has 195 monthly active users — while it its QQ instant messaging service boasts some 800 million users. Both of these services could provide an interesting avenue through which Fab.com could explore the Chinese market.

As for Tencent itself, the investment isn’t just about bringing Fab.com to China, the move will help the Beijing-headquartered firm learn more about global e-commerce models. WeChat has developed into its primary service, and, in a show of its prominence, it is even stealing market share from China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo service, another massive Internet service in the country. Yet, despite its popularity, Tencent has not begun drawing revenue from the chat app.

Japan’s Line and Korea’s Kakao Talk are both seeing success in the early stages of monetizing their mobile messaging services thanks to virtual content like stickers (rich emoticons sold in packs for $1/2) and gaming platforms. Tencent’s alliance with Fab.com hints that the company — which is an investor in Kakao — might be aiming to do more than that by facilitating sales direct to users.

Already mobile messaging services are being used in Asia to conduct ‘social commerce’ sales — unofficially at this point — which suggests that Tencent may just be on to something with a potential model for WeChat.

Thanks to its vast income and capital at its disposal — Tencent posted revenue of $2.16 billion ($645 million in profit) for Q1 2013 — the company is the comfortable position of being able to scrutinize and evaluate business models before introducing them. Tencent has stepped up its rivalry to China’s established e-commerce leader Alibaba in recent times, and partners like Fab.com may help it eke out market share.

Fab.com has raised more than $150 million from investors. Its recent series C round saw Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, Japan’s Docomo Capital, Atomico and others put in $105 million. Much of that was spent on internationalizing the service, which is available in more than 25 countries, with Asia a region that it is keen to expand into.

The Series D round also includes investor from Japanese retail conglomerate Itochu, suggesting that — like China and India — Japan will be a focus for Fab.com in Asia in the near future.

Also read: Smash-hit Chinese chat app WeChat’s long march to profitability

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Kivra, the Swedish company that really wants you to get rid of your old fashioned postal mailbox, has just acquired its local competitor Brevo.

While Kivra wants to be the go-to digital mailbox service in Sweden (and beyond) it wasn’t the first – Brevo beat it to the punch by launching in March 2011. However, Kivra’s service followed in its footsteps in January this year, leading to the plucky Swedish startup acquiring its rival.

“The merger of Kivra and Brevo gives us over half a million users and more senders will be added to our service. This will clearly have a positive impact on the market,” said Stefan Krook CEO of Kivra. “This agreement is a milestone in the continuous development of a digital postal mail market in Sweden.”

Indeed, once the merger is complete there will be a userbase of more than half a million people all receiving digital mail in their mailboxes instead of traditional paper ‘snail mail’. This digitization of “window envelopes” equates to an annual saving of around 350,000 trees in Sweden alone, Kivra said.

For now, however, the two services will remain separate with integration of Brevo’s list of senders to begin “in the fall”. Brevo’s users aren’t expected to be transferred across to the Kivra platform until the first half of next year, Kivra said.

While financial details of the deal are unknown, Kivra secured $2 million in funding at the end of last year which must have gone some way to growing the service rapidly enough to acquire its key competitor in the market.

Unlike email, Kivra is intended to be a secure place to store important documents that would normally be sent out on paper. To use the service, users simply create an account and receive a secure code for access which they then use online or on the iOS app.

While the digital mailbox service currently only operates in Sweden, it has expressed intentions for expansion in the future.

A number of other digital secure mailbox services already operate in other parts of the world, such as Zumbox and Doxo in the US and e-boks in Denmark, which could well make Kivra’s expansion ambitions all the harder.

Image Credit - AFP/Getty Images

➤ Kivra

Evernote is showing no signs of slowing down as it continues to update its services. After recently launching custom reminders for iOS, OSX and the Web, followed by Android two weeks after, the note-taking service has updated its Web clipper function for Google Chrome to include Gmail.

Open any email on the Web Clipper, and the email, along with any attached files, will be saved to Evernote. The full email conversation becomes a formatted note (with the subject line as the note’s title) and what’s useful then is that you can choose a notebook to place the email into, assign any relevant tags and add a note to it.

If you’re a Premium user, Evernote also allows you to search any attached documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs.

This feature is likely to be very useful for small businesses that use Gmail within the office, and Evernote also acknowledges that it uses Gmail within the company – which is probably why it came up with this in the first place .

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Netflix, the massive film and television streaming service, has announced that it will launch in the Netherlands later this year.

The move will bring the service’s catalogue of entertainment from Hollywood to users in the country, where it will be be available on phones, tablets, TVs, consoles, and computers — as standard.

The expansion into Netherlands marks Netflix’s continued progress in launching in more European countries. Last October, it jumped into Sweden, promising that launches in other countries nearby would follow.

Netflix has already opened a new website for the service in the Netherlands, www.netflix.nl. Users can go there and sign up to receive emails updating them on the upcoming launch.

For now, there are no details on the price of the service in the Netherlands nor do we have an exact launch date — but that’s all par for the course when Netflix announces new country expansions.

Netflix currently has over 36 million subscribers in 40 countries. The platform is outgrowing its original reputation as a merely content distributor as it releases its own shows, such as “House of Cards.”

Headline image via jcestnik/Flickr

It is already a well-established fact that a mobile revolution is taking place across the world, as people access the Internet via their smartphones and tablets first, abandoning the desktop experience in the process.

This preference for mobile is extending to online videos, according to a report from online video firm Ooyala. Smaller screens aren’t deterring people from watching more videos on their tablets and mobile phones, and they are even spending more than half of their total online viewing time watching long-form videos on these platforms.

According to Ooyala’s report, tablet and mobile video viewing broke records in the first quarter of 2013. The share of tablet and mobile video grew 19 percent in Q1 2013, and made up more than 10 percent of all online video plays during the period. The growth rate for Q1 2013 was similar to the pace seen in 2012, Ooyala says, when the share of mobile and tablet viewing doubled between January 1 and December 31.

“TV is no longer a single screen in the living room. Video publishers who fail to deliver and monetize mobile content on tablets and smartphones are leaving digital dollars on the table,” Ooyala says.

In a further indication that screen size is not the key concern for viewers, Ooyala’s report showed that both mobile and tablet video viewers spent more than half of their total video viewing time watching long-form videos (referring to those more than 10 minutes long) last quarter. Out of this, a quarter of total tablet viewing time is spent with content more than 60 minutes long.

In particular, viewers in Asia are avid long-form video watchers. Viewing of such longer-duration videos accounted for nearly half (45 percent) of the total time spent watching video online in Malaysia last quarter. Viewers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand spent more than one-third of their total online viewing time watching videos longer than ten minutes across all device types.

Ooyala’s findings also show that live video continues to dominate on-demand video content – desktop viewers watched live video an average of 40 mins, 13 times longer than VOD last quarter.

“Breaking news, live sports, and special events have an inherent immediacy that hooks connected viewers and leads to longer viewing times across all devices,” Ooyala says.

In particular, the Asia-Pacific region is seeing an upptick in live video viewing. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea all watch live video at least 20 times longer than VOD content, with Singapore leading the region in time per live play, chalking up an average live viewing session of 52 minutes.

Ooyala measures the anonymized viewing habits of nearly 200 million unique viewers in 130 countries every month.

Video is not the only trend that is being mobilized now. According to a recent Nielsen ‘State of Social Media Report’, half of the world’s social network users visit sites via their phones, with 59 percent of social media users in APAC interacting with Twitter, Facebook and other services directly from a mobile device.

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If you’re unable to access Facebook, it’s not only you. The site is currently down for some users (including several of The Next Web’s team). Heading to the site shows an error message.

Update: Facebook is back up and running as normal; the company says:

Earlier today, an internal issue in our web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to 100%. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Down For Everyone Or Just Me also says the site is down on its end. According to Downwhere, Facebook is suffering severe downtime in Brazil, Canada and the US, while it is running fine in other countries.

We have already contacted Facebook for clarification on the situation and will update with any response provided.

Earlier this year in February, Facebook also suffered an outage lasting about an hour, but a cause for the downtime wasn’t provided.

A similar situation in October last year was put down to “a change to DNS as part of a traffic optimization test.”

Image Credit: Lionel Bonaventure via AFP/Getty Images

When pressed by the House Intelligence Committee today, National Security Agency head General Keith Alexander revealed that surveillance programs that have recently come to light helped stop over 10 domestic terrorist plots and more than 50 worldwide since 9/11.

The Guardian’s liveblog of the hearing (via Ars Technica) noted the comments, which can also be watched on CSPAN’s website.

Opinions will be divided about whether stopping 10 domestic threats was worth the tradeoff in privacy. At less than one a year, that’s a lot of monitoring to find each plot. There’s also no information on the size of these plots. Still, the information gathered presumably helped to save lives by providing early warning of planned terrorist actions, so that’s a tough equation to compute.

A Deputy Director at the FBI recently claimed that NSA monitoring helped the agency to thwart a bomb plot on the New York Stock Exchange and New York City subway.

During Tuesday’s hearing, NSA Deputy Director Jon Chris Inglis also revealed that about 22 people (20 analysts and two supervisors) are able to sign off on targeting US-based phone conversations.

As for how many government contractors there are in positions similar to whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alexander admitted they are “on the order of a thousand.”

Earlier today, Google filed a petition to be more transparent with disclosing national security and FISA requests it receives, citing its first amendment freedom of speech rights.

See also: NSA update: Here’s the latest on the raucous surveillance scandal

Image credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images

If you ask Bing about the coming Xbox One console, it has a pretty simple take. Google’s is a bit more complex. What’s interesting, or fun, is that they are diametrically opposed.

Fresh screenshots that I took myself between 4:55 and 5:03 PST today:

And Google:

Well then.

Intrigue? Horror? Naw. Check this out:

And:

Bing simply processes the query “the Xbox One is” very differently than “Xbox One is,” and Google doesn’t appear to. It makes for a funny Facebook-shareable. And Reddit will probably have a field day, but there isn’t much more here than a cheap laugh.

Which we are not above. To make it more fair, Bing doesn’t appear to think much of me either:

Top Image Credit: BTO

DISH Network has published a statement indicating that it has elected not to submit a revised offer for a merger deal with Sprint and will instead focus its efforts on its bid for a stake in Clearwire.

The full statement is as follows:

“While DISH continues to see strategic value in a merger with Sprint, the decisions made by Sprint to prematurely terminate our due diligence process and accept extreme deal protections in its revised agreement with SoftBank, among other things, have made it impracticable for DISH to submit a revised offer by the June 18th deadline imposed by Sprint. We will consider our options with respect to Sprint, and focus our efforts and resources on completing the Clearwire tender offer.”

Japanese telecom Softbank made an offer to buy Sprint last year, but DISH submitted its own $25.5 billion bid that was higher than Softbank’s $20.1 billion deal. Last week, Softbank upped its offer to $21.6 billion and the board accepted, while giving DISH until today (June 18) to submit a “best and final proposal.” Softbank and Sprint managed to get federal clearance for the deal in part by acquiescing to national security concerns over Chinese networking technology.

After Sprint sued DISH earlier this week in hopes of blocking the Clearwire deal, DISH called the move a “transparent attempt to divert attention from its failure to deal fairly with Clearwire’s shareholders.”

Shortly after Sprint entered into a definitive agreement last December to increase its stake in Clearwire to 100 percent stake for $2.2 billion, DISH swooped in with a $2.4 billion offer. As recently as last month, Clearwire was working to convince its minority shareholders to go with the Sprint deal.

The end is in sight when it comes to Sprint, but DISH could be looking to cause some issues when it comes to Clearwire, potentially disrupting things for SoftBank/Sprint.

Image credit: iStockphoto