The world of technology often seems all-encompassing, occupying all of one’s time and attention. But not this week. A bombing at a marathon. An industrial explosion that devastated a town. Poison in the mail. A city deserted. Another devastating earthquake in China. At the risk of being crass, the real world news was useful perspective […]
April 2013
Observations on the App Annie Index
App Annie posted their quarterly app report this week, and there were three big-picture trends that jumped out at me. 1. Google Play is getting over the monetization hump, and it’s likely due to in-app purchase From the report: Over the past quarter, Google Play has achieved higher growth rates than the iOS App Store […]
Amazon Reportedly Acquires Siri-Like Evi App
Techcrunch: When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S it seemed like a magic piece of software. The future had arrived. But it wasn’t alone. True Knowledge, a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs, had been working out what to do next. Siri was the ‘boom’ moment. They licensed Nuance’s […]
Apple the Black Swan
Apple does everything wrong. They don’t do market research. They don’t segment the market with multiple models. They don’t have promotions. They don’t diversify. They don’t have divisions. They don’t have multiple P&Ls. They don’t pursue market share above all else. They don’t take on debt.1 They don’t pay dividends (or big enough ones, now). […]
A Common Thread
Asymco: The Windows PC market is contracting. The market data has been showing unit shipment declining for some time with the latest quarter having perhaps the steepest decline for two decades. What remains undocumented however is how the market looks when considering economic value. A more complete picture would be to show revenues, average selling […]
Facebook Thinks You Might Like Up to Three Video Ads in Your News Feed Each Day
Delightful headline-writing by The Verge. From the article: Expected to launch in the summer, Facebook’s new video ad units may prove to be a revenue success for the company, but they may also become another nuisance for users. According to AdAge, Facebook is currently in talks with various agencies to secure its first video ad […]
The Facebook First at the AT&T Store
I paid a visit to my local AT&T store1 on the occasion of the Facebook First being officially available for sell. There was more promotion than I expected, including a dedicated installation and a huge promotional banner behind the counter. That said, there wasn’t really any effort by the salespeople to push me on the […]
The Week in Review – April 6-13, 2013
It was a week of beginnings and endings. The iPhone launched on T-Mobile on Friday to lines nearly everywhere, although they quickly dissipated. There seems little reason to doubt the iPhone will soon be more that 50% of T-Mobile smartphone sales, just like the other major carriers. More pointedly, it seems increasingly clear that limited […]
Apple, Samsung, and the Parable of the Model-T
Steve Jobs was famously fond of the Henry Ford adage: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s true! New products – new categories – require vision and an unflinching focus on the job to be done (i.e. transport), not simply enhancing or extending solutions that already exist […]
The Samsung Mega
Stefan Constantinescu: The long rumored Samsung Galaxy Mega product family has just been made official. As expected, there are two devices in the Mega portfolio, the Mega 5.8 and the Mega 6.3. Starting with the larger model, it has a 6.3 inch 720p TFT display, a dual core 1.7 GHz processor, 1.5 GB of RAM, […]