We didn't produce a local business story Thursday. But Tom Sowa wrote an A-1 tech story about Mike Russell, the Hillyard geek who plays a pivotal part in making available the Spokane County emergency scanner channel to web users and smartphones. It was used heavily during Tuesday's wild and harrowing hunt for Charles Wallace, who wounded two Spokane sheriff's deputies.

That scanner story was one of those “huh, that's how that works” explainers.

We tracked down Russell after looking at the iPhone app Radio 5-0, which hooks into Radio Reference, a system that offers free scanner feeds from thousands of North American locations.

Russell sent a message today indicating that he's truncated the EMS feed now into three separate channels, to help people hear and read the scanner traffic. (The text summaries of emergency calls that show up on RadioReference.com  come from a different service: Incident Page Network.)

The three feeds from Russell are for fire, one just for police, and a third channel for all county EMS traffic.

We also noticed, along the way, that there are a few different apps for smartphones. The ones we highlighted were just the two best known ones. Search the Android and iOS iTunes markeplaces to see if any other scanner app suits you.

Net traffic tracker comScore today released new numbers on the smartphone market in the United States.

The numbers show both Android and Apple are making strong gains in one of the strongest sectors of the country's tech industry.

The graphic here gives the counts and shows a contrast between the most recent, Jan. 2012 and Oct. 2011 numbers.

Source: comScore Mobilens.

Trying as hard as we can to offer the occasional useful chart or graphic. Today's offering:  a recently published graphic on what matters to people when buying a smartphone.

Definition first: A smartphone is: a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. Smartphones and feature phones may be thought of as handheld computers that use applications similar to those you would use on a computer. (Definition from Wikipedia).

The graphic comes by way of Businessinsider.com.  The big determining factor, the survey shows, was “platform.” which means: Is this running on Apple software, Microsoft or Google Android software?

The second leading factor in smartphone selection appears to be features (the kind of buttons, the presence of a video recorder, etc.)  The third main factor are apps.