Thursday, June 30, 2011

MySpace yourSpace NoSpace

MySpace was once the Internet’s equivalent of the hottest nightclub in town. In its heyday, the world’s dominant social network attracted some 3 million bands, 8,000 comedians and countless filmmakers and wannabes who came to see and be seen.

But even before this, myspace was the leading social network. All my friends inclusion me have been first at my space before joining Facebook. But we all stopped using myspace because it was too busy and after a while just ugly. It felt like social spam portal. But maybe it is no wonder, hence the founders (Chris deWolfe, Tom Anderson) got their start at Intermix (formerly eUniverse) where they worked on a series of profitable internet ventures. eUniverse made money running spyware and spam operations, as well as selling subscription skin medication, made famous by its "Better than Botox?" ads. eUniverse was a Los Angeles-based Internet marketing company. It was opened in 1998. In April 2005 New York State attorney-general Eliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit that alleged that the company is the source of secretly installed spyware that has illegally sent pop-up advertisements and other intrusions to millions of computer users.

In 2005 myspace was number one SNS

MySpace.com
Nov. 2004: 4.9 million
Nov. 2005: 26.7 million

Facebook.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 11.1 million

Friendster.com
Nov. 2004: 966,000
Nov. 2005: 1.5 million

And still leading in 2008

1 Myspace.com 59,352 1%
2 Facebook 39,003 116%
3 Classmates Online 17,075 28%
4 LinkedIn 11,924 193%

Source: The Nielsen Company, Custom Analysis (September 2008).

But already in 2008 the falling trend started with myspace, which only grew 1% to the year before.
NewsCorp bought in 2009 myspace for around $580 million and reduced the workforce by 50%. Myspace got an overhaul but all this did not help.

Now, MySpace is seemingly no place — a digital castoff that corporate parent News Corp. [NWS] sold for $35 million in cash and equity to an Orange Country, Calif., digital media firm specializing in online advertising. That’s a fraction of the $580 million that the media giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch paid to acquire the site a scant six years ago, and well shy of its one-time $65 billion valuation.

But maybe Justin Timberlake (who has a now a stake in MySpace) can bring the portal alive again.

MySpace has 35 million users and got sold to Specific Media basically for $1 per member. This is pretty low. Which would put the value of Facebook to just $800 million.

But to be serious, in less than 3 years myspace went from a potential $30 billion company down to $35 million and lost users and traffic as much as almost no other company in such short time.





As much hype Facebook has today, as fast Facebook can decline and lose value like myspace if they are not careful.

Below are some screenshots from myspace over the years. The last one is from today.

2003




2006




2008




2011



All pictures from the Internet archive archive.org.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Holy iPad

This week our Pope opened his twitter account and did his first tweet in front of a camera. He needed some help to understand how twitter works. Besides that the Vatican goes aggressive to social and online, there was another interesting part. The pope did use an iPad to tweet. What better advertisement could Apple get.

I was searching for his account but it seems he used @news_va_en which is a Vatican account and not an account for the pope.




There are 1.166 billion Roman Catholic members if only 10% are now going to buy the iPad (because it might be holy) then Apple would sell another 100 million iPads.

Maybe Apple will sell an iPad which has the bible already downloaded in the iBooks store.

If not then you can download the Gutenberg version free at the iBooks store.



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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Black day for Oracle

Today might have been one of the worst day in the Oracle history.
Multiple websites once operated by Sun Microsystems have been down for hours. Websites like openoffice.org and all projects under java.net have been not reachable.

Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009.

Normally it is not the biggest issue when a website is down. But in case of Oracle it is a different situation. Oracle is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products — particularly database management systems. Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, United States and employing 105,000 people worldwide as of 1 July 2010 it has enlarged its share of the software market through organic growth and through a number of high-profile acquisitions. By 2007 Oracle had the third-largest software revenue, after Microsoft and IBM.

Being half a day down can cost Oracle millions because the reputation gets hurt.
A company like Oracle should have redundant systems in case main servers are going down.

I work at a much smaller company, but even we have all our servers not only in clusters but as well mirrored and constant backup. If main cluster falls out our redundant system will jump in within minutes and if they are going down, then we can boot up our backup system within 30 minutes. To ensure we will never have a down time, all three systems are in different physical locations.

What ever happened at Oracle, it did not seems that their Sun Microsystems platforms did follow such security measure.

It is interesting that only the Sun free products were down, which could tell us something much more. Maybe Oracle does not care so much anymore about free products like java or openoffice.org, but if so let people know.

In 2009 we had in average 30.000 java developers here in the states and the numbers this year will be still far over 20.000.




i am pretty sure companies like SAP (their systems are using java) and Google (Developers write primarily their Android apps in the Java language) are not happy about this outage.

Oracle is one of the four biggest CRM providers and offers like Salesforce.com SaaS model. Imagine you have a company with 2,000 sales people and your CRM is down for hours or even days and maybe some data got lost only because your SaaS provider went down?

Obviously this will not happen with Oracle CRM or other Oracle paid services. I was looking for comments from Oracle during and after the outage of oppenoffice.org but did not find anything.

Apache does own openoffice.org since three weeks (1 June 2011: In an announcement made today, Oracle has donated the OpenOffice.org project to the Apache Software Foundation. The proposal calls for OpenOffice.org to be established as an incubator project.), maybe Oracle did try to move the servers to Apache and this went into an outage, but then I am not sure why java.net was down.

The only info I saw from java.net was on top of the page a red banner with apology that netbeans, openoffice and kenai.com are down.




Netbeans.org down is pretty bad. I called Oracle, and actually I was in a 25 minutes waiting line to land at the end to a message saying that at the moment my call can't go through.




The second time I came through but got as an answer that the service will be shortly running again, with not comment on what happened. I explained that I am a paying oracle customer and that I am worried, but I guess, i am such a small customer that they don't care.


Oracle tag line might not be a good fit at the moment.




Asterix:
Engineered to work together as long it is not free.

Sorry java developers, you might need to face the future and move to .net or objective C.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

I am so social irrelevant

A few years ago we went almost every day to a search website and searched for our name. The more results we got the more we did feel important.

As a hiring manager we searched the Internet for the person's name before we conducted an interview.

The last few years we tried to find the person on linkedin to see what connections this person has and where the person worked to get a better picture of candidate.

We found now new ways, since "social" got big. Depending on the job offer we want to see how much social influence these people have. And of course there are two apps for this (BTW I will in future refer websites with a lot of personalization and interaction as apps instead of website).

I tested http://www.peerindex.net and klout.com.

Klout.com:
Klout does compare your twitter and Facebook interaction with others and will generate a klout score. My score is 18, average user score is 12 and highest is 100 (like Justin Bieber)

Last week my score at klout was 10. This week it was already 18.




I did gain within one week 8 points, hurra.


The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engaged audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.

Klout does only use twitter and Facebook. PeerIndex is using more factors like linked and blogs.




PeerIndex Score (from their website)
Your overall PeerIndex score is a relative measure of your online authority. This score reflects the impact of your online activities, and the extent to which you have built up social and reputational capital on the web.

At its heart PeerIndex addresses the fact that merely being popular (or having gamed the system) doesn't indicate authority. Instead we build up your authority finger print on a category-by-category level using eight benchmark topics.

Someone, however, cannot be authority without a receptive audience. We don't simply mean a large audience but one that listens and is receptive. To capture this aspect PeerIndex Rank includes the audience score we calculate for each profile.

Finally, we include the activity score so account for someone who is active has a greater share of attention of people interested in the topics they are interested in.

The average score at peerindex is 8, mine is N/A. I have peerIndex Since a few days but still no score which let me believe that they have a manual validation going on. A lot of people are complaining that their peerIndex is much lower than the klout index.

For both systems I seem not be relevant at all. I might not get hired, if I would want to apply for a social marketing job because of these two apps.

Klout has around 60 million profiles and peerIndex 45 million. Klout got so far $18 million in funding, but I did not find how much PeerIndex got.

But before you subscribe to these services you have to know that you need to allow them to connect with you through Facebook and twitter, which means go give them a lot of information about you.



They might offer us a good tool to see if we are social influencer but the real kick is that they collect data from multiple sources from you, they might be at the end better able to have targeted ads than Facebook.

peerindex does not work well with the iPad. They use some modal windows which are working horrible on the iPad. They are all over the place but not where you expect them. It took me a minute to find the drop down of matches when I tried to search for a twitter account. For some reason it was on top left instead under the search box. My screen got crazy, When I tried to tweet about it.

Both apps have no iPhone or iPad app, however there is a 3rd party app for klout.




Overall I am not sure how helpful either of both app is for me, I surely need to see the next weeks if I can change the score by doing different things in social. Maybe I need to follow Justin Bieber.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Monday, June 27, 2011

What is edge rank?

I know this might not be really news but as a marketer I had to figure out how Facebook news feeds are working. I was the first rime confronted with edge rank last year and it is now an important part of FB marketing for us.
And then I saw the news that FB will allow comments on ads an I was wondering what benefit FB could have. Edge Rank came again in my mind.
Usually we pay for ads either for click or per view. Now if FB is going to apply edge rank to ads the whole advertising model will be rewritten. Edge rank would not be based on just branding or just clicks it would make your ad more expensive when people interact with the ad, because we will know if the banner or ad is successful. Click rates are down and paying per views don't give us really an indicator how successful the display ad is, but FB new method which allows comments to ads will give much better metrics. With edge rank your ad might be displayed more often because the consumer did interact.

So what is edge rank? Edge rank is the part of a formula that Facebook has released which lets us know how to get onto people’s newsfeed.
Facebook considers an item in your newsfeed as an Object. Whenever someone interacts with this object they are creating an ‘edge’ e.g. comment on the object, like the object etc. Facebook is trying to figure out what pieces of content is most interesting to me. If people are interacting with content then it’s probably more interesting so it will take that into account.
If this piece of content is from a friend that you interact a lot with on Facebook then that’s probably going to be more interesting.
Finally when this content is old it’s not as interesting as new content.

This means the key for getting a higher edge rank and therefore more on top of news is to have news with interactions as much as possible.

Getting people to comment on the news or to like the news is the key. Good examples are Lady Gaga and Walmart.

As brands come to understand Facebook more, they learn how to optimize posts to make them more “likeable”, or worthy of clicking like. There are many ways to do this, but the method that is by far the most mysterious to brands is the often misunderstood News Feed.

Currently on Facebook, when you log in as a user, you are brought to a home page that has your Top News Feed. The Top News Feed is a stream of information from your social connections (Facebook Friends, Groups you’ve joined, and Pages that you’ve “liked”) that Facebook thinks is most important to you. It’s not every piece of information being posted by every one of your friends. You have access to that, of course, through the “Recent News” feed—but the default for users who log into Facebook is the “Top News” in their News Feed.

If you’re a smart marketer, the first thing you’ll want to know is how to get into your target users Top News Feed. Here’s a graphic from the presentation given by Facebook.




Basically as a marketer you need not only to know how to do SEO for search engines but as well ERO (edge rank optimization).

TechCrunch has a good article about Edge Rank.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

iCloud - no music streaming - so what?

When Steve Jobs presented the new iOS 5 and talked about the iCloud and how cool it will be, he mentioned that we can listen to our music through the cloud on any iOS device. In a side note he said that the song will start to download a few seconds before we can listen to and we are even able to listen to the last 30 or so songs when we are in the airplane and no wifi or 3G is available.



So how does this work?
Pretty simple, instead that Apple streams the music, the songs will be downloaded to your device. The iPhone will keep the last 30 songs in full on your device and the last 200 songs (or favorite songs) only 30 seconds. This saves memory and allows to start a song before it is downloaded. Therefore you will not be able to listen to your music through a web browser only through iTunes.

It is no streaming but is it bad? Actually not, this allows you to listen to music when your Internet connection is bad or the Internet connection is shortly interrupted.
I assume iOS 5 will reserve some of your free memory to do so, otherwise we are getting in trouble when our memory is full with games and other apps.

The sync through iCloud still works, even if the music is partly downloaded to your device. Apple will apply to music the same methodology like for all other apps and documents in the icloud.

But why is Apple not streaming the music?
There could be multiple reasons. First of all, because Apple does not stream the music, it does not need to pay such high fees to the record labels. Streaming would fall under other rules. Apple would be similar like a radio station. As an example the biggest problem for Rhapsody are the high fees to the record labels because of their streaming, surely Apple want to avoid this.

Second, Apple is taking something from ATT and Verizon away when iMessage starts. But gives something back with their music download.
I am assuming Apple had to make a deal with the phone service providers. The network is already today extremely heavy used since the iPhone went on the market. We all can remember how people were not able to use 3G in big cities like NY or LA because too many users were on 3G. There are right now around 100 million Apple 3G users, if everybody would stream music the network would break down. For streaming, the connection must be always good and fast otherwise the music does not play well. Doing it over downloading the speed is not so important, the provider can slow the download when the network is too much stressed. If they slow down steaming then listing would not make fun. And most of the people might listen only to 100 songs if most of them already to your phone downloaded and you listen to them multiple times then it does not use any streaming bandwidth.
Even only having the first 30 seconds of a song stored would save a lot of streaming, if you listen to the same 100 songs 10 times a month. This is 1000 x 30 seconds with 256kb quality is already 937.5 MB. This is half your data plan for a month.

Third, this allows Apple to give a better user experience. By not streaming Apple does not need to work on complex caching which would slow the iPhone down. Neither would listen to music slow browsing or other apps down. When I listen sometimes to rhapsody, I can tell that either my phone slows down or the music does not play well.
We should not forget we are not always on Wifi.
I have met people who are listing at least 3 hours to rhapsody over 3G through their iPhone on a daily basis and their data plan bill is always at least $50 more a month because of this.

Streaming is great, but if Apple's methodology is working out, then not streaming is better. It will need to be tested how much delay we will have till a song starts if not streamed but downloaded (when loading the first time)


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Want to know when the best time is to buy?

Before we had Internet we went to a small store and did let us explain from the sales person why and which product we should buy. Many times we took their advice, but we drove to the next super store outside of town to buy exactly the item we want some few $$ cheaper than in the small local store.

Then came the Internet. We still went to the local store to get as much as possible info, and then we went online to buy our new stereo. We might have used Amazon or pricegrabber to find the best price.










These websites do a good job to compare prices but they have two problems. First they use feeds they get from the retailers which means many times the prices are not really valid anymore and they don't help us to predict when the best time is to buy.

This changed now with decide.com










Decide.com is not relying on 3rd party feeds. Their system is crawling all the rimes certain retailers to ensure to get the latest price.

Few of the founders were former owner or employees of farecast.com which got bought from Microsoft in 2008. Farecast was a travel side which did predict changes in flight costs. Farecast claims according to a third-party audit of their predictive technology, they are about 75% accurate and on average, customers will save over $50 on a typical round-trip transaction.

The same prediction software is used with decide.com. Decide works right now only with TV, computers and cameras.
Decide tells you if the price will fall (with a confidence level), if a new model is coming out and when a new model is expected.

The main product page shows the lowest price and will link to the company which had the lowest price. If multiple companies have the same price then it takes the first one in alphabetic order.

Clicking on "Prices" will bring the browser to the lower part of the website where you can see 5 compares at the same time. Really nice is, that the grid shows taxes and shipping costs as separate columns.









Decide is a great tool. But you can't buy products at decide.com. You will be redirected to the reseller of your choice. In one case the item I was looking for was out of stock and decide.com was not aware of it.

The website is nicely done for iPad, I would like to see an iPad app but do not really miss it, because the website is ok. However I don't like all these popups when navigating to vendors product page. With iPad it gets annoying because you don't have tabs (not yet). It has a complete Facebook and twitter integration which can only help.

Overall it is a great concept but it needs more categories. Phones and tablets would be perfect for decide.com











These people seem to be big Apple fans, when I searched for blackberry or galaxy tab, I got info back that neither phone or tablet category exist and guess, the I,ages shown wad the iPhone and iPad. However in their search seems not macmall.com included which many times cheaper than anybody.

Another kickback is the low amount of products.
There are only 85 notebooks, 268 televisions and 68 cameras in the system, but on the other hand why more per category?

Decide.com has a great future, if they can offer more categories where products are changing price all the time. However it is a little different than booking flights. I electronic the price goes usually down and seldom up. Flights are more tailored round seasons and depend on the gas price a lot.

But still it is good to see when we should not buy a product because a newer model comes out. Because then we can either buy the new model or pay less for old model.

Cars would be a good example as well, I am so tired to talk to car sales people that I would love to find the best price online and then just go to the dealer to finalize the deal.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Saturday, June 25, 2011

What is next?

A good friend on mine and I discussed today what is already old what will be the new trend, to define what is old was easy but what will come was not.

The last few years social did dominate the Internet. Thousands of social platforms and apps came on the market. The famous ones are Facebook, twitter, linkedin, groupon and foursquare. All these social networks have in common that you suddenly connect with people you can't remember anymore or you don't know it is all about to be connected. As a result we have so many connections that the social gets too blur.

But social is now so common that it is not new anymore. Trying to do something new in social is still possible, but difficult to have a new break through. On the other hand, it is fascinating that many investors still invest in social start ups. Localization is almost old too but at least still open for more to come.

However there is a trend of new social networks which reduces the connections just to a few people who are truly your friends. I see this the next level in terms of social. Companies who are building networks, where we easily can have small groups of people and with no big effort allow to communicate and prioritize them combined with location recognition will get the next hype.

Shazam is to watch.
Shazam is a commercial mobile phone based music identification service, with its headquarters in London, England. The company was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton (now at Google), Philip Inghelbrecht, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Avery Wang.
Shazam uses a mobile phone's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user. Relevant links to services such as iTunes, YouTube, or Zune are incorporated into some implementations of Shazam.

Shazam has a perfect recognition software, is is really pretty fast and accurate. But the really cool part is, that shazam can bring TV ads and e-commerce together. If Shazam would be able to be build in the major smart phones then it could get big verry big.

During a show you see an ad you really like, you can now either try to read in the ad the internet address (if you see it) or try to scan from 15 feet with your phone the QR code (if they show one) - good luck with this, or try to make a picture of the ad and use google goggles to get more info about the product shown on TV. Nothing of this works really well. But Shazam can listen to the ad and then display on your phone the relevant online ad with a buy now button. Shazam did already some experience with same SciFi shows. I tried it and it worked well.

Gadgets
In the gadget department are smart phones already old. Tablets are still on the growing market but nothing really innovative. All manufactures are trying to copy the iPad. Android and iOS are so look a like that even there is not much innovation.

NFC (near frequency communication) is surely the next big thing for electronic devices. It is not a new technology but still not build into many devices. In a few years we might see NFC not only in smart phones but in many other things like toaster or running shoes. NFC will get cheaper and wider communication radius.

Augmented reality is still on my top list. We are still not at the top of the cycle. A big breakthrough will come when the processors of the smart phones and tablets will double in speed and performance.

Another big favorite of mine is gesture as input device. The Microsoft kinect is a great beginning. I can see many great innovations in this area. I believe that we are able to buy 65inch TVs in a few years under $1000 with build in kinect similar
technology. We will then replace in our master bathroom the vanity mirrors with flat screens. They work like mirrors (because of build in cameras) or as windows with scenics coming from the cloud. If we then walk in front of the screen ,the scenic will move like if we move in front of window and look outside.

In 2013, most of the consumers will buy tablets instead of notebooks. Netbooks will be dead till then. But the really fascinating part is that we, the consumers, will have always multiple intelligent devices, even if each device can do everything we need.

I remember that my friend I and discussed that in 2010 we might have only one device to make a call, shoot picture, tape a video or to surf the internet. We have been partly right. Our iPhone can already do this, but we have been wrong at the same time. We believed everybody does want to have only one device. The reality is different. The reality is that most of the electronic devices will be able to do almost everything, but we still want to have multiple devices. The reason is the form factor. I even believe (as my friend), that there is still space a device in size between a smart phone an a table. Something around 6inches screen size.

The biggest trend will be the total integration of all of them. Apple started some of this by allowing to watch a movie which is streamed to the iPhone or to play a game on the iPad which was purchased on the iPhone. And now they are going further with their iCloud for music and documents.

However the inter connection is yet not even started. The next really big trend for us is the seamlessly switching between devices without any effort and data lost.

Imagine you take a FaceTime call on your iPhone, you then go in your office to your desktop with NFC the iMac could recognize that FaceTime is running on your iPhone and ask you if you want to switch to the iMac. You could then at the same time surf again on the iPhone or even take another call.

Or you are on the phone having an important conference call, at the same time you need to take your car to pick up your son from VPK.
In the future you would be able to have your conference call on your office phone, as soon you wave your iPhone over the office phone, the call will be directed to your iPhone. When you are in your car, the call gets directed to the build in phone in your car and the sound will be played over the build in stereo.

After you picked ip your son, you need to print a presentation. You drive to Fedex Kinko's. There you hold your phone to the printer and your selected document will print.

Computers are much easier to use than 15 years ago, but then we had one device. Today we have at least 2 if not even more. I am regularly using any given day 5 different "computers" (iPad, iPhone, AppleTV, iMac, Windows 7 notebook).

Apple, Google, dropbox and Amazon are helping us to move our data (music and documents) into the cloud which helps to get better our devices synced, but to be honest not yet did I find a system which worked very well and is at the same time easy to set up.

the cloud is a buzz today but nothing really new, however faster Internet connections, the cloud and wifi everywhere will bring us to the next level. I truly believe, that in a few years most of our smart devices don't have large memory for storing data. The apps will be thin clients that a smart phone only need to have a few gigs to run OS and the Thin clients. Surely memory gets cheaper and smaller, that I doubt the memory will be reduced on the devices, but I believe most of our data will be stored somewhere but not the device.

I am not the biggest fan of Google but Google will lead this. They have already a notebook which uses chrome as OS and everything you do is in the internet using their service. The notebook sucks, it sucks pretty bad but only because we don't have all the time internet and without Internet the notebook is useless. It is like having a 3 series BMW but no gas to run it.

Even if the notebook sucks, the philosophy behind is the future. As developers we need to think more in applications which are storing the data not local and to allow seamless integration to any other device if needed. If Google would extend the notebook to allow to work on a doc offline and as soon internet is available the data would go into the cloud would be great. And as I heard they are working on this. Apple's iCloud seems to promise this for some data types.

Another trend will be projectors. They are around since ever, but with augmented reality and better technology, they will get new places not just for presentations or as TV replacement.

When I talk about projectors then I actually mean screen less displaying. The windshield in cars will be your screen. Windows will be screens and every wall can be a screen. Maybe you choose your room color by clicking a button on your iPhone and your room is suddenly red. If you don't like it anymore then you can change your room color without painting the walls.

The future is closer as we think and when my son is 18, he will lough about my blog entry from today.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Monday, June 20, 2011

Want to have a free iPad? Buy a Hyundai

Yesterday during watching golf I saw an ad from Hyundai. Instead of talking about the car they showed an iPad app. At the end of the commercial the voice over said that this is mot just an app it is the driver manual.

Equus is a new kind of luxury car, so Hyundai created a new kind of service we like to call ‘At Your Service.’ Your owner’s manual comes on an Apple iPad®. Maintenance is free, and when it comes time for tune ups and oil changes, we’ll come retrieve the car from you. In fact, we may just have to get rid of our service waiting rooms altogether.



Hyundai Equus Owner Experience App
Equus is the first luxury car to have an iPad app to help you understand and maintain your vehicle. Using Apple’s simple interface, the Owner’s Manual includes interactive demo videos, 360 degree images and a quick reference guide to help you learn everything from the Vehicle Stability Management System to how to use the supervision cluster. You can also use the Dealer Locator to find the nearest Authorized Equus Dealer and schedule all you routine maintenance.



Apple's success of their products is not only because they might look better or might be functional better but it is because brands are offering these idevices with their product. When first the iPhone clams out, many auto manufactures started to offer iPhone connections or even iPhones build into the dashboard.



But not only brands are promoting Apple. Even tons of TV shows and movies are using Apple products for product placement. I watched 2 hours shows and in all three the iPad, MacBook Air or iPhone were somehow placed into the TV show. Sanctuary as an example, a fictive SciFi show had all three items in just one episode. You can even see the iPad in Stargate Universe. The iPhone is featured in white collar as well the MacBook Air.

There is almost no movie or no show which has not an iPhone somehow featured. The iPad is only one year old but seems to be the darling of the film industry. It is on one hand a device which can play in any SciFi movie as well in films which are showing some high tech things.

We saw in the last 10 years in many films and shows the iMac, but since the iPhone and iPad we see more and more Apple products.

I understand that cars are really good for product placements and thought that maybe Ford is number one of all. But it is Apple.

According to Brandcameo, 30 percent of last year's (2010) top movies featured some kind of Apple product, whether it was a MacBook, iPod or an iPhone.

Second place was tied among Nike, Chevrolet and Ford for placement in 24 percent of movies in 2010.

Product placement is nothing new for Apple since its products have made cameos in 112 of the top 334 most popular movies in America since 2001.

Apple understood really early that the best way for product placement is to give the items for free or even before they are available. It helps of course that their products are perfect in style, almost look like jewelry.

Apple spends a lot of money for marketing but get as well more free marketing than anybody. All this free marketing let us almost believe that there are only Apple products and no other phones or pads.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Now! Apple's latest iPad 2 ad

It is just amazing. All the competition are either showing their pad in an action unrealistic spot with a lot of uber composed images or are talking about screen size, processor speed and how they can play flash. All these commercials are produced like they pitch a computer just annoying.

But then there is Apple. There ads are emotional and show what the consumer wants to see. The latest commercial is named Now!. The messages are great and simple. Now we can read the newspaper, now we can watch a magazine, now we can have a complete library in our hands.

The message is simple and true. Just switch the iPad on and it works.

Regardless if we like Apple or not, I think we all agree their ads are simple and perfectly done.



Microsoft does not seem to be any problem for Apple anymore. Do you remember the Apple VS PC ads?
The Apple vs. PC ads began running in 2005. The ad agency responsible for the campaign is TBWA Worldwide. TBWA is a subsidiary of Omnicom Group, the world's largest advertising conglomerate.

Actors
The Apple vs. PC ads use only two actors. The actor playing the Apple spokesperson is Justin Long. The actor playing the PC is John Hodgman. The Apple character is tall, laid back and cool, intending to evoke the characteristics of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. By contrast, the PC character seems older, nerdier and less cool, intending for viewers to think of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Versions of the ad that appear in England and Japan use local actors, while the original American ads are dubbed into the local language in most other foreign countries.

Content
Thus far, a number of different commercials have aired that point out the differences between Mac computers and PCs. Although the particulars vary, the overriding point of the commercials is to underline Apple's message that a Mac is a better choice than a PC for dealing with multimedia, staving off viruses, playing games and conducting business.

Last aired
The last Apple vs PC ad was aired sometimes in Summer 2009.




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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

I got hacked

You might have noticed that I did not blog a few days and that even my blog was 2 days offline.

The reason was easy. My gmail account got hacked and I am happy that I have in my gmail account just a few contacts. If my apple .me account would have been hacked, then over 3,000 email addresses would have been compromised.
I even did not know that my account was hacked till somebody emailed and asking me if my blog is deleted. I went to the blog and it was gone. When I tried to log into my google account I got an error message.
Shortly after google did send me to my alternative email address an email saying that my account got compromised. I had to go to google website input my cell phone number to get a code and then reset my password but my blog did not show up. I got totally nervous. One year blogging gone and no backup. I am now thinking to move my blog to my own server and have a good backup. Anyway I went to blogger.com to find any clues how I can get my blog back, but as usual Google has no good service and no way for me to find the answer I was looking for and no phone number I can call. Lucky wise two hours after I changed my password my blog was back to life.
All contacts I have in gmail got send an email from the system which compromised my gmail account.




I don't know if this was a normal google attack and I was one of the victims or if it was a direct attack against me, since I wrote two weeks ago about the paypal email phishing from Russia/China.

Now everything is back to normal but I had to change all my passwords to be on the save side.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

iCade the cool stand for your iPad

Since I have the iPad, I have been on the search for the right stand for my iPad. my wife saw last year at thinkgeek.com an arcade case for the iPad and did try to order it but unfortunately it was just an aprils fool.



However so many people tried to order it that thinkgeek.com finally decided to build the arcade. They call it iCade. I had to order one ($99) and it is great. It came in a big box unassembled. The build is very easy and it comes with all tools, even two AAA batteries. The batteries are needed because the controls are communicating with the iPad via Bluetooth, which is great because you can connect the iPad to the power cord when sitting in the iCade for charging.

The iCade switches on when you hit one of the 8 buttons and switches off when you don't use any of the controls for 5 minutes. The quarter screen in the front lights up when the iCade is on.

The top of the iCade is easily to open to slide the iPad in or out. This thing is right now a attraction in my office. Even people who don't like Apple said they would buy the iPad because of the iCade.

Not only does it look good there are even Atari games for the iPad which you can buy.
I bought Atari's greatest hits (99 games for $14.99).




Playing the games is like going back in time. Unfortunately the control is not easy and takes some time to get used. And pac man is not included in the bundle.





The iPad screen is too long for the games therefore half of the screen is black. When you play the games without the iCade then the black part it replaced with controls.

I am pretty sure there will be soon other arcade versions which are taking advantage of the iPad screen format.

Overall the iCade is awesome even if you only use it with the iPad as a charger. We have now in the office every Friday at 5pm a game session since I have the iCade.
Unfortunate the iCade is already sold out at thinkgeek.com

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Lion without Java and Flash

Two weeks ago Apple presented the new Lion OS on the WWDC. If you watched the keynote you might have noticed thar on some webpages shown, when the presenter flipped through the presentation, had small blue Lego blocks on it. The reason is that Lion comes out of the box without Flash. You still can download flash for Safari but will not be included with Safari and OS. Apple will as well not deliver the OS with Java, but can be downloaded from the web if needed.

The OS will be only available as download, you can't buy it on a DVD, this means you don't have an optical disc to boot from in case the OS is failing when booting. However Lion does install a clean 600MB boot version which can be accesses when booting the computer.
This 600MB 'Restore HD'partition is accessed when you depress the option key while booting your machine. It then shows up beside your other partitions, select it and you'll be straight into recovery mode, which lets you restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup, reinstall Mac OS X, run Disk Utility or use Safari. If this new system works, it looks like Mac repair could be made a little easier.
Some more of the functions for the upcoming Lion OS.

Macs run Safari, no log-in required

Lion lets guest users launch Safari even when they are not logged into the system, reports claim. In the most recent beta, OS X's login screen began offering the option to "Restart to Safari" rather than logging in.

This means anyone should be able to use any Mac to access browser-based services, such as Web apps, online services -- iWork.com -- or email.

We keep hearing that iCloud won't offer Web-based access to previously available services such as Bookmarks, Contacts or Mail. This seems strange, as offering access to some iCloud services via a browser on a Mac would (theoretically) mean any users could use any Mac to get to their online lives.

This also trounces Google's Chrome, by making any Mac an Internet-connected device, which, given the move to make things such as Pages documents available in their most recent form to multiple products via iCloud makes for a more compelling connected computing experience.

Instant wipe

Some very interesting data within Apple's online description of FileVault 2. For a start, FileVault 2 now supports encryption of external USB and FireWire drives; beyond this, Apple's notes state:

"With FileVault 2, instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac instantaneously, making the data completely inaccessible. Then your Mac performs an entire wipe of the data from the disk."

In conjunction with the Find My Mac feature I'm expecting, the Mac will become one of the world's more data secure platforms -- straight out of the box!

Screen sharing

Screen sharing in Lion is much more useful than before. You can now log into a remote Mac user account even while someone on that remote machine is logged into a different user account. You can also log in with your Apple ID, the person on the other end can authorize you for access, and you'll be able to connect to that remote machine just as if using a local user account. Then there's an observation mode. This will be highly useful in many ways. Particularly if you get to use this feature from a mobile device (iPhone, iPad).

Apple melts Rosetta

No big surprise really, but Rosetta support will not feature within Lion. Already an optional install in Snow Leopard, Rosetta lets Mac users access PowerPC apps on their Intel machines. The Intel transition was five years ago so a move to abandon PowerPC completely seems appropriate enough. Built-in Java and Flash support also disappear in Lion, though you'll be able to install the most up-to-date Mac versions from their respective developers, if you need them.

A reader noted that Quicken requires Rosetta, a MacObserver report tells us that while this may be a problem at first, an unusual solution is planned.

Looking ahead, July's Apple news focuses on the Mac: MacBook Air, Mac Pro and Mac mini upgrades are all being discussed (some say new Mac launches are delayed until Lion ships), Final Cut Pro X is also expected to hit the Mac App Store as soon as next week.

One thing is to mention that upgrading to Lion works the best with the MacBook Air because it has a SSD drive. Normal hard drives might be sometimes too slow to take advantage of the new cool features from Apple like instant opening apps in last used state.

We tested Lion on my wife's old MacBook Pro. It is 4 years old and Lion seems sometimes a little bit slow but it might be because it is the developer version. We will see when the final version is out.

So far I have to admit that Lion is a big improvement of Snow Leopard. The low price of the OS should be a no brainer for people to update their computer but older systems might not take full advantage of the new OS.

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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Google Music Beta finally arrived

Finally I can start to test Google Music. It took only 6 weeks after my request to join google music beta.

Tomorrow I am going to get me an android device, because beta does not work on iPhone or iPad :( but maybe I find a way like I did with amazon.





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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

The Apple iCloud is already here - partly

I don't know if anybody did notice, but all your iOS devices have a new function. When you go to settings and then click on store Icon you have three options.




The interesting part is that this function addition seems to be done over air not with an update of the iOS through iTunes. At least I did never saw it before June 3rd.

When you switch music, apps and books on then a nice thing happens, your device will get new app installed even if you bought it on another device.

I recently bought Atari games for my iPad. And when I came home the app was already installed on my iPhone.

Steve Jobs talked about this feature being a part of iOS 5. This means you don't need to buy an app anymore for multiple devices. The Atari app has in app buying function and even this worked. I bought with the iPad games within the app and when I started the iPhone app it asked me if I want to restore these games for no extra charge.





You can see all purchased apps which are not yet on your device, when you go into your app store on your iOS device.




My iPad has 64GB and my iPhone only 16GB, therefore I have to be careful which app I want to have on the iPhone. For this I switched automatic download for apps on the iPhone off. Instead I go to my app store and choose the app I want to have on the iPhone.

Interesting is the feature for apps like NYTimes. They charge you for each device extra (in app purchase). Unfortunately with NYTimes you have still to pay extra, but maybe not for long anymore because this is against Apple's agreement.

Unfortunately the automatic download does not work yet with the app store on MacOsX, these apps are still separated from the iOS apps.

It might be that this function is a long time available, but all friends I asked did bot know about it.

I don't know if Apple is just testing this function or if they introduce us to iCloud step by step like the recent update for iTunes. Either way I like it. This will save us money. Why to pay for an app three times only because I have two iPhones and an iPad.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

iTunes upgraded to 10.3

Apple released yesterday itunes 10.3.
The first step to iCloud is on the way. You can now download all your purchased iTunes song to all of your Apple devices.

What's new in iTunes 10.3

Introducing iTunes in the Cloud beta. The music you purchase in iTunes appears automatically on all your devices. You can also download your past iTunes purchases. Where you want, when you want.

• Automatic Downloads. Purchase music from any device or computer and automatically download a copy to your Mac and iOS devices.

• Download Previous Purchases. Download your past music purchases again at no additional cost. Your purchases are available in the iTunes Store on your Mac or in the iTunes app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer on the iTunes Store.

iTunes 10.3 also adds Books to the iTunes Store, where you can discover and buy your favorite books on your computer and automatically download them to iBooks on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This version also allows you to use Automatic Downloads with apps and books or download previously purchased apps and books from your computer or iOS device.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit:support.apple.com/kb/HT1222


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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Apple is selling unlocked iPhone 4 in the US but why?

Starting Tuesday, Apple is selling on their website the iPhone unlocked. The price starts with $649 for the 16GB model. The 32 GB model is $749.














The price is pretty high but as expected as unlocked phones are not sponsored by the carrier because there is no 2 year contract. However there are not many options besides ATT or t-mobile. The latter one would not yet work with 3G but might come when T-Mobile is acquired by ATT. Interesting is that T-Mobile edge is pretty fast and sometimes comes close to ATT 3G.

However if you are from another country the this would be a good option to get an iPhone without contract. As an example in Germany the iPhone without contract is €629 (including Tax) which is just over $900.



Germans making vacation in the states could save €180 or $124. If they then buy as well an iPad and a MacBook air the total saving could be $800 (if we upgrade memory etc). This is a round trip from Frankfurt to NY. And as we know tourism from Europe to America did grow the last few years because of weak Dollar. This alone could be a reason to sell unlocked iPhones.

And then don't forget almost 15% of iPhones are jail broken to get it unlocked. No need anymore for this if the consumer wants to stay with his carrier and want to have an iPhone. This could get some sprint and T-mobile users to iPhones.

Here are some more reasons why Apple is selling in the US unlocked iPhones:
Source Pcmag.com

Keeping the iPhone 4 alive: There is nothing to lose by apple selling them unlocked 3 months before a new iphone." Apple traditionally releases iPhones in June, and there's no new iPhone this summer. That could create a trough in sales and mindshare. So Apple found a way to bump up an aging product. Even though the unlocked iPhone doesn't provide any advantages to most Americans, this gets the hardware into the news.

Sell an iPhone 4 now, iPhone 5 later: Zach Epstein theorizes this lets people buy an iPhone 4 now without re-upping their AT&T contracts, so they can buy September's new iPhone at a subsidized price. It's a kludge, though: consumers are either essentially paying more than $200 a month to use a phone for three months, when they'll then have to cope with reselling their phones on eBay this fall. Still, it's an idea.

Currying favor with the FCC: AT&T is trying to merge with T-Mobile right now, so the company wants to do things to make it not look like a rapacious, wannabe monopoly. As Jon Fingas suggests, what would be better than to wave around a bunch of unlocked iPhones? No monopoly here, Senator. Anyone can have a GSM iPhone! See, we're all consumer-friendly-like. In this theory, Apple takes a neutral stance, and it's been AT&T stopping the sales all along.

International travelers are a real market: Jan Dawson, an analyst with Ovum, Tweeted that AT&T and Verizon consider international travelers to be a real, if not a huge market. One of the big advantages of having an unlocked phone is that you can avoid your home carrier's high roaming fees by buying a local SIM card. The problem with this is, unless you're familiar with the language and culture of your destination, this can be very difficult. (I've tried.)

The export market: Because of exchange rates and taxes, Apple products are less expensive in the U.S. than in some other countries. An unlocked, 16GB iPhone 4 is £512 in the U.K.—that's $839 in U.S. dollars. Compared to that, $649 is a bargain. Apple could be welcoming massive gray-market exports of these phones to more costly countries. When the iPad 2 came out, Apple limited the number people could buy to prevent them from being snapped up by resellers. But if Apple has a surplus of iPhone 4s it wants to get rid of before the iPhone 5 comes out, the company may be willing to open the floodgates.

Apple has nothing to lose: I'm uncomfortable with this theory because Apple doesn't just sell hardware. It sells end-to-end experiences, and there's something very incomplete about the end-to-end experience of an "unlocked" iPhone in the U.S. I can see average consumers thinking an "unlocked" phone works on Sprint, Verizon, or T-Mobile 3G—after all, that would make sense, in a sane world—and Apple's entire customer strategy is designed to prevent confusion and frustration like that. But Apple may just feel that U.S. consumers are smart enough to understand that their unlocked iPhones aren't truly free at all. In that case, the company could feel it has nothing to lose by putting those phones out there.



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Monday, June 13, 2011

The future of Apple

Fall 1990, I had my first day at university. I have been an early adapter with computers. I had my first computer 1984 but i never had a windows computer. However at the university we did need a word program and a CAD program. Sure I could have used my Atari for this but neither our professors nor my colleagues had Atari but most of them (if they had a computer) had Windows with Word for Windows and AutoCAD 10.
I switched again away from Windows when a friend and I started an advertisement agency. We used Macs and Ataris even if most of our clients had windows. In 1994 I was sure no real design company could work on Windows computer. We with Apple had Photoshop, Quark Express and Freehand. Windows had CorelDRAW, which we called a housewife drawing program.

But when I joined in 1999 a bigger company (NEC), i had to use Windows again. I finally joined the corporate world. At this time and later most of my friends did buy Windows computers because they were used to them through work or bought them because it was important to have Windows and Office experience to get an office job or even a better office job.

From the beginning Microsoft understood that the first time people will be confronted with computers will be at work. The mission from the beginning was to build a mass OS for companies, they saw that in the 80es the mainframe server-terminal configuration will die. Apple on the other hand had always the consumer in mind, they did want build an easy to use computer. The problem was that computers have been expensive and there was no Internet. Not everybody could afford a computer or did know what to do with a computer at home after a long day at the office.
I believe, that Microsoft became the number one operating system for consumers was only an unexpected side effect. But it worked out. Because we used Windows and office at work, we decided to buy the same for home, we knew how it works and we could bring our documents to work to print or we knew we could share it with everybody.
Computer usage got a necessity at work, did not matter what our profession was, in some way we most likely had to use a computer.
Microsoft went further and did build and buy more and more enterprise applications. In the mid and late 90es the home computer got more and more introduced to younger people. The first generation had kids which have been now teens. And game companies started to build more and more games for Windows computers to attract the teens. At this time, game consoles were expensive and could not keep up with the speed. The first playstation from Sony got introduced 1994. But already a year later the graphics on the PC were so much better that it made sense to buy a computer instead of a game console to keep up with the rapid changes in speed and graphic. And then there was the Internet and AOL. In 94/95 we were able to use our home computer to read news, to talk to other people around the world. More and more people saw more sense in having a computer at home. The prices of the computer did not much go down but there were suddenly unlimited software for the consumer available.

In 1998 Apple started a strategy which changed everything.
I am pretty sure Steve Jobs was sitting 1997 on his back-porch and thought that it would be nice if computers could attract kids, the future working and decision making people. He needed to do something that children will influence their parents for the better of Apple. He knew the first contact with a computer is not anymore the enterprise world. It is in every house household.

When Apple released the first iMac in 1998, they changed the way we look at computers. Not only was the iMac not as boring as Windows PCs but was as well priced closer to PCs than ever before. The iMac was priced $1,299 same price as an average PC with monitor.




But there was an issue. Windows office was expensive on the iMac and there was not much common with the Windows UI.

2001 was the biggest most important step. Apple opened their first Apple store, totally designed to that whole families have fun. Parents can bring their kids to the store and can play at a round table on iMacs kids learning games.
In the same year Apple started to sell the iPod and iTunes. A great music player targeted to young audience with an easy to use music library. The iPod was an instant success but computers are still not growing as good as they could.

But Apple needed to understand a few years that beautiful computers don't sell if the user does not know how to use them. Apple introduced intel based imacs and bootcamp in 2006. Which allowed the user to install Windows on a Mac computer. This brought Apple closer to PCs. Consumers were now able to buy computers with beautiful design and still to run Windows on them. But at the same time the consumer is able to boot the Apple in MacOs.
I don't know how many people did really buy an Apple and run it only in Windows, but the marketing was good enough that Apple finally found a bigger user base for their computers. In Fiscal Year 2007 (October 1, 2006 - September 30, 2007), Apple sold approximately 4,887,000 Macintosh computers. In this year Apple market share almost doubled. And from there on Apple grow each year faster than PCs.




Of course it is easier to grow if you are an underdog.

Apple started something in 1998 which got perfected in the last 4 years. A way to introduce a new system to the consumer of the future for a price same or lower than the competition. In 2007 Apple released the iPhone and iPod touch. The iPod touch is basically a mini computer with music player. A device we parents do not mind to buy our kids if they are asking for a music player, it would not hurt our pockets. In 2010 Apple extended the mini computers (iPhone and iPod touch) with the iPad. A tablet computer. For all three devices are now over 400k of applications available (smart move to have one place where we can find all apps). And because there are some many apps, Apple was able to sell over 200 million of their devices. Many of them are used by kids. Apple took it a step further. If every kid knows how an iPod touch, iPad or iPhone works, would it not cool if they could switch to a computer and it would work the same way?
Therefore Apple introduced Lion and iOS 5.0. Two systems which got just closer. In only 2 years, there will be in the base functions no difference. Microsoft missed the step and was too much concentrated on the thing they are good. Game console and business. Unfortunate the xbox has not much in common with computers and what drove people to buy a PC will change in the opposite. There will come the time where businesses will choose what people are used to work with from childhood on. The biggest problem for Microsoft was and is the Internet. The Internet made it possible to run applications on browsers which are mostly OS independent. The cloud will even support web browser based applications. With the cloud it is not anymore necessary to have Office only to work as a desktop application. It will enable us to use it through browsers, like Google is already showing.

I believe Microsoft will be more and more an important role in enterprise applications and DB but will lose extensive market share in PC or user OS. We will see a lot of Apple products in offices in 5 years.

The question is were will google play a role in this? I can't really tell, Google has a potential to be a bigger player than Apple. But I doubt it will be in the office world. Google is too open. As an example, Linux might have been the better OS than Windows and even did run on PC and the best part, it was free. However support is difficult and there are not much applications on the market. Linux made it into the web server world because there you don't need tons of apps. Google has a similar problem, they have no experience with support and this will be their problem why they won't get fast into the office world.
Apple on the other side has a lot of experience in support and offers hardware with software which allows them to have a more stable system, because they can build it against their specifications, they don't need to consider many difference form factors or hardware part to support.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Thursday, June 9, 2011

We are almost there -Cellphone is a game changer

In 2002 I got my first cell phone with camera. It was an external camera.






Since then I had always discussions with my friends if we want to have only device, or if we need multiple devices like camera, cell phone, organizer, computer.
The first there are now one device. iPhone uploads to flickr are now more than any pocket most SLR camera only the Nikon D90 has more uploads.



There almost no music players on to buy on the market. Most people use their smart phone for music. Organizers like HP or Palm ore even not anymore produced.
We are only two years away to use our smart phone as a computer. Already today there is the Motorola Atrix 4G which can dock into a screen and keyboard.




But it goes further. Google just released their latest phone with NFC and digital wallet. Which will eventually replace the credit cards. In Europe and Japan are consumers already used to pay the train or tickets with their cell phone.
The smart phone will eventually replace even cash. You can already download the Starbucks app on your phone to pay electronically your coffee in any Starbucks.





Electronic payments via phone are very common in poor countries with bad Internet connections like certain countries in Africa.
An article in July 2009 wrote:
..... From the pitiful national tele-density status of just about 0.7 per cent in 2000, Ghanaians’ access to telephones rapidly soared to 5.5 per cent by the end of 2003; at the close of 2008 Ghana’s tele-density had sky rocketed to the region of 50 per cent.

National Communications Authority (NCA) figures point to an exponential growth in the number of mobile phone subscribers from 7,604,053 at the beginning of 2008 to 11,302,647 subscribers by December 2008.

This literally means that at least a whopping 11 million people, out of Ghana?s population of 22 million, now carry and use cellular or mobile phones.

The availability, accessibility, simplicity and the sheer convenience of this revolutionary medium of direct inter-personal communication has removed not only geographical barriers but also the prohibitive barriers of poverty and illiteracy from the communication chain.

That alone should explain why today one can find the business executive, the fishmonger, the student, the lawyer, the herdsman, the farmer and the street hawker all using mobile phones.

The “txtNpay” (pronounced text-n-pay) Platform

One incredibly innovative application of the mobile phone technology is its use for the provision of financial services – a potential which Afric Xpress, has exploited and incorporated into its high-tech electronic payment system and which the company says is about to turn every mobile phone user’s handset into an -electronic wallet”.

The same website http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/?p=3598 estimates in 2015 709 million mobile money subscribers in emerging markets.

According to a new research report by Berg Insight, the number of mobile money subscribers in emerging markets is forecasted to grow from 133 million users in 2010 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent to reach 709 million users in 2015.


What does all this mean?

I believe in less than ten years we will not have anymore paper or coin money as common used currency. We will still collect coins but many stores will not anymore accept cash. We will not anymore use our plastic credit cards. We might have them as backups in case our phone lost power.

This sounds all great but the impact is big. As an example because cell phones can tape videos, flip camera which was the hit 3 years ago does not exist anymore. Minolta camera devision got sold to Sony.

There are over 350,000 ATM's across the USA. Bank of America has over 16,000 by itself. All these ATMs will go away in less than 10 years. This will wipe out a whole industry.

Around 640 million credit cards are in circulation in the United States with about $750 Billion and $800 Billion in credit card balances based upon Federal Reserve figures (source cardratings.com).

Multiple thousand people who are involved in producing credit cards will lose their job.

Most of the leading PC makers are not leading smart phone makers.
Top ten smart phone manufactures:




Top 5 PC manufactures 2009:




Only Apple is in the both lists, and NEC is the other Compnay which plays in both groups a role.

Acer and Toshiba might not exist anymore in the year 2020.

The smart phone changes a lot, not only that we carry less things with us, but other things will go away which are small things but can have big impact. Cars will not have anymore locks. Doors to apartments and houses will use the smart phone instead of a key and lock. Many in this industry will go away.

ATT, Verizon, Orange etc will not sell anymore minutes only data plans, they might even not offer even data plans because wifi is everywhere. They might be now wifi providers and nit anymore cell phone carriers.

No newspaper will have printed coupons. All coupons will be digital and personalized to our needs. In 2009 were almost 360 billion coupons in circulation. A whole paper and printer industry will go away.
In the last two years Americans bought 20% printers than in the years before. With the smart phone on hand there is no need to print something out. Most of the smart phones have GPS which is better than any street map printed. Eventual we will have almost no printers.

Garmin report end of 2010
The continued decline in consumers buying GPS navigational devices for their cars and trucks led Garmin Ltd. to miss Wall Street expectations for the third quarter and lower its financial expectations for the full year.
Garmin sold 19% less devices than the prior year.

Smart phones are killing GPS devices. In three years we will not have commercial GPS devices in our stores.

Smart phones are game changers for me, they kill many industries and I hope all this companies are aware of it, that they can rethink their business. I would not prefer to see hundred of thousands people unemployed because nobody did see the smart phone period come.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Star Wars in Cupertino

On June 7th, Steve Jobs did present his plans to build a new campus for Apple. Apple bought in the last 5 years 150 acre to fulfill the dream. The new building will look almost like a space shuttle as Mr. Jobs did phrase it.





Please watch the video. I am a big Apple fan, I even admire a lot of things Steve Jobs accomplished. Even the plans for the campus are awesome and surely a milestone for Apple, Cupertino, CA and America. But please who are these councils? The 20 minutes hearing was praising Steve Jobs for 15 minutes. And then these very unqualified comments like from Ms Wang about free
Wifi or free iPads. Or the mayor Mr. Wong who showed his iPad 2 and that his daughter with 11 years loves the iPad. Or that Cupertino needs and Apple store, and that the city will help if the store is not profitable (maybe all government employees must spend $10k a year at the Apple store) Does he has no dignity?
Of course I think as well that Cupertino needs an Apple store or at least the first Apple building as a museum, like Walmart in Bentonville has. But Wong could have said this in a better way more with style.









Steve Jobs slides during the presentation.

I can understand that Apple is the biggest single employer in Cupertino and that Apple is important for the city, but please it is not necessary to slime so much around Mr Jobs. You could see that he even felt uncomfortable with so much drooling.

Steve Jobs knew his audience very well. He mentioned that his first job was at HP and under the line he said that HP made him what he is today. As a thank you, he decided to buy HP land when they downsized. Orrin Mahoney worked over 35 years at HP. Mark Santoro worked a while at Apple, Gilbert Wong kids went to same high school like Steve which Steve is sponsoring. Kris Wang worked as well for HP (1991-1992) and is very active in making Cupertino more children friendly and safer place for disasters. Barry Chang used to be a public safety commissioner.

Steve had for all of them something in his presentation. It took him a few minutes to warm up, but then he was presenting as good as he would present his gadgets.

Some facts:


Here is a link to the press conference after the hearing:
http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=26&recordid=465&returnURL=%2findex.aspx


Cupertino has less than 60.000 habitants but thanks to Apple a very high income average.

From Wikipedia:
As of the census[2] of 2010, there were 58,302 people and 21,027 households in the city. The population density was 5,179.5 inhabitants per square mile (1,999.8 /km2).The racial makeup of the city was 29.3% non-Hispanic White, 0.6% non-Hispanic African American, 0.1% Native American, 63.1% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 0.2% other races, and 3.0% from two or more races. 3.6% were Hispanic American or Latino American of any race.
According to the 2005-2007 American Community Survey of the US Census Bureau, the median income for a household in the city was $118,635, and the median income for a family was $133,098. The per capita income for the city was $44,774. About 3.6% of families and 5.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.9% of those under age 18 and 8.1% of those age 65 or over.[3]
According to the 2005-2007 American Community Survey, White Americans made up 37.4% of Cupertino's population. African Americans now made up 1.5% of Cupertino's population and American Indians made up 0.4% of the city's population. In addition, Cupertino now has an Asian American majority as this group now represents 55.7% of the city's population. Pacific Islander Americans remained at 0.1% of the population. Also, 2.5% of the population are from some other race and 2.4% of the population are from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos remained at 4.0% of Cupertino's population.[4] In the 2000 Census, non-Hispanic whites made up 47.8% of Cupertino's population.[5] According to the 2005-2007 American Community Survey, non-Hispanic whites now represented 35.3% of the city's population.[6]
Cupertino was the only city with both a population over 50,000 and a median household income in excess of $100,000 in 2000 besides Naperville, Illinois.

Apple, HP and Oracle are employing 70% of Cupertino residents.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States