With rave reviews of HTC’s newest smartphone, the HTC One, continuing to populate the Web, some analysts are predicting the device will dramatically improve the company’s long-term prospects after several years of receding market share. HTC’s most prominent competitor within the North American Android marketplace, Samsung, also recently released its own new smartphone model, the Samsung Galaxy S IV. With both Samsung and HTC largely eyeing the same target market, Chitika Insights looked to explore the initial adoption rates of both devices to quantify the early market progress of each smartphone.

Last Thursday, Chitika hosted its second Big Data Open House, with the main focus of the event being on the architecture and infrastructure of Big Data.

Samsung Electronics held its earnings call on Friday, April 26th, 2013. The Korean manufacturer had already posted its earnings guidance in advance of the call, sporting a quarter-over-quarter 50% growth in operating profit, and $40 billion growth in revenues since last year – both beating analyst estimates. With the tablet market being a high growth sector for both Samsung and chief rival Apple going forward, Chitika Insights looked to compare each company’s share of the overall marketplace over the past six months.

The mobile marketplace continues to grow as tablets become increasingly popular for their functionality, convenience, and portability. As part of its monthly update on the subject, Chitika Insights examined the current distribution of Web usage among leading tablet devices at the conclusion of March 2013. For comparative purposes, tablet usage shares are all mapped against shares observed over the previous three months.

BlackBerry 10, the latest operating system from BlackBerry, formerly known as Research in Motion, is the company’s most ambitious attempt to match the functionality of Apple- and Google-powered smartphones after years of receding market share. The operating system made its Canadian debut on February 5th, 2013 in the form of the full-touch BlackBerry Z10 – one of two BlackBerry 10 smartphones unveiled as part of the operating system’s launch event on January 30th. The Z10 then made its U.S. debut on the AT&T network March 22nd, 2013, before subsequent roll outs to Verizon and T-Mobile in the following weeks. To get a view into the operating system’s initial progress, Chitika Insights conducted a study examining the BlackBerry Z10’s impact on North American BlackBerry Web usage in the days since its release.

Are you passionate about data infrastructure and the “back end” architecture of Big Data? If either of these topics are exciting to you, mark your calendar for April 25th from 6-8pm and join us at our Westborough, MA headquarters for the second installment of our Big Data Open House series.

Windows 8’s relatively tepid rate of adoption has been well documented, but with institutional contracts being a sizable portion of Microsoft’s PC business as a whole, the Chitika Insights team looked to examine how Windows 8 was faring on college campuses. Using the top 50 universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report in 2013, Chitika Insights then re-ranked the schools by the percentage of Web traffic identified as coming from desktop computers running Windows 8 through the ISP associated with that university.