Let's talk iPhone - October 4th

Apple did send this week invitations for the upcoming event on October 4th out. Like many other invitations, it is cryptic and does not tell us a lot. Or does it? The invitation is very clear "let's talk iPhone"




We know it will be about the new iPhone and we do not know much more. However with Apple it seems never anything randomly.

At the past they had always something "new" at the event. Like the first smart phone without a keyboard, the first phone with a retina display or the first computer which is not a phone nor a notebook.

"let's talk iPhone" why this headline? I think Apple will introduce their way for voice recognition.

Voice recognition on phone is not new. Google has already some voice recognition on Androids and the google app allows you to browse using your voice.
But now Apple's taking up the torch, and if rumors prove true it's not just adding speech tech to the iPhone... it's transforming the device into something new again, starting a whole new paradigm. If it works for Apple, expect others to follow.

We all wondered for a while about how Apple was going to mix Nuance speech recognition tech with its iOS devices, and how the technology it acquired when it bought Siri (the firm behind an artificially inteligent assistant) would emerge.

9to5Mac claims that Apple's "Assistant" is going to combine all of this technology into one powerful system, that runs throughout the upcoming iOS5 and the new iPhone.

I tested dragon, google voice and a few others but it never appealed to me to use voice instead of my fingers. However, I am missing forever the ability to listen to music and when I get a call to listen who the caller is. I still need to take the phone out of the pocket to see who is calling. Maybe with the new iPhone it will change.

Maybe the iPhone can talk to us and we can talk back. After-all it would make sense to go to the next level. The phone was originally invented to hear and talk, why not taking the hands out of the play once again.

We use our fingers for many things we do with the phone, not because we want, but because it is easier. Voice dial is horrible, works almost never (for people like me with strong accent).

Siri was actually a good app. You could ask for a dinner on Friday and you got a list of restaurants back, but only in text and images and not as voice.

It is only a few days left till Apple hosts the event, and I am eager to see how much weight the talk in "let's talk iPhone" has.

I think, if Apple does build their event around new iPhone and voice recognition, then it will be different than we saw before, and there will be a two way communication. Not only will the iPhone understand us, but as well respond with voice.
Apple voice Assistant interfaces with WolframAlpha--Stephen Wolfram's "fact computer" that can intelligently understand data-specific questions and return meaningful suggestions.
This means I could, ask my iPhone how many shopping days remain until Halloween, where the the nearest mall is and how often Germany lost in a world cup against England in one second and it will fed back to you from WA's computational systems all answers almost instantly.


As we know, Apple seldom does invent something really new. They are reinventing existing technologies or methods to make them mainstream. This is the real strengths of Apple.

Do you think I am totally off and over interpreting the event headline?


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Facebook is changing, will this change the world?

Mark Zuckerberg introduced only 17 months ago the like button. It seems it was around forever, because almost every website has the little blue like button. In the next coming weeks FB will go beyond the the like button with opening their Open Graph. Developers are now able to send more info than "like" back to a Facebook user profile. It will open the world to new verbs like eating, drinking, watching, listening etc. With Open Graph FB users will see when their friends watching a movie or listen to a song and can then at the same time listen to the same song. This is the idea behind. Timeline will be another big change. Facebook new layout will allow users to go easily back in time. Different content types are now placed into blocks.





My wife and i might go to a motorcycle shop and buy a new bike. We might use our smart phone to scan a QR code for more info to a bike. On our Facebook book page would be instantly a message that we are buying right now a bike in XYZ at dealer ABC.

Or you might play a game on your iPhone and in FB will be a post that you recommend the game and just played 16 hours straight. Such new Open Graph features will give developers and companies a new, never seen before way to brand their products and to get more attention.

Especially for app developers on iOS or Android. Both system have together more than a million apps. It is almost not possible as a developer to get users to buy or download their app, and at the same time, it is for users not easy to find the app they are looking for. I searched in the Apple app store for golf and got countless results. The only way to know if an app is good, is to download it or to look at the ratings.
With Open Graph, Facebook will open a new way to find mobile apps. And if a friend is recommending an app, then I might more likely buy or download the app, regardless of other ratings.

Facebook let us build a digital copy of our life. And wants to be the start page when we open a web browser, and be the last page we look on it, before we go to bed.

Which sounds great but is very dangerous. I hear and read a lot of discussions around FB and how it is different than Apple and how open FB is. This is true, they are totally different but Apple might charge developers for their apps a lot or have a walled garden but they don't try to be our digital copy.

Facebook does not charge anything to end users or developers. We all can use FB for free. There are some games with in games purchases but most parts are free. An easy out if the box personal free web page and email address. This is very kind from Facebook. But this has a price. Facebook is collecting all and everything written on their website, they are collecting all clicks and views. From where is the user coming, what he is doing and where did he go. All for the greater good to earn money by very targeted ads.

One company does know more than FBI or any government about 800.000.000 people. And actually Facebook does know even things about people who are not yet in Facebook. My son has of course no FB account, but FB could already know who my wife is, the name of my mother in law and that I have a son an his age. All this is just a matter of data mining, which FB does day in and day out to sell to higher priced and more targeted ads.

Adding timeline and Open Graph, does exactly what Mark Zuckerberg wants:
"Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by mapping out all of the things you are connected to. … As a first step toward this we made it so you could connect to things by Liking them. … This year we are taking the next step, so that you can connect to anything you want in any way you want. Now you don't have to Like a book, you can just Read a book. You don't have to Like a movie, you can just Watch a movie. You can Eat a meal, Hike a trail, Listen to a song, and connect to anything in any way you want. This will let you make an order of magnitude more connections than before. We are helping to define a new language for people to connect."

Is this not scary? We are all open and connected like in the real life and more. But the biggest difference is, that one will always know everything what happens in the FB country - Mark Zuckerberg.

Maybe Facebook acronym will be soon FBI (Facebook interconnected).

Does anybody remember the Stasi (The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS)?
Stasi in East Germany did try to know everything about their citizen. They had official Stasi employees, but as well many East Germans reporting to the Stasi information about their neighbors. All to keep the country safe.

Facebook is not trying to know everything. Facebook DOES know everything in their world.
As a good citizen, I would argue, that I have nothing to hide and therefore I don't care, if somebody is watching me all the time.

But unfortunately it is not so easy. There are a lot of things we don't know we should better hide. Remember, Palin's email account got hacked, because the hacker found the security phrase on her Facebook page.

Even if Facebook is not taking advantage of their knowledge, somebody will try.

Imagine you do post, that you went to a football game on Wednesday. But for some reason you thought it is better to delete the post. Do you really thing it is deleted because you did hit the delete button? Think twice. Of course it is not deleted. It is still in the DB but just flagged as "by user deleted".

East Germans did not like the Stasi, the wall and the controls and decided to change this and to revolute. It helped, the Stasi is gone and the wall is down. When do we start a revolution against Facebook?

Suddenly we are talking about 20 times more people controlled by one company, not state but company. Who is controlling this company? Who does make sure our data is not exposed or used for wrong doing?

How do I know, when I deleted something, that it is really deleted?

I understand that the situation is a little different. We decided to use Facebook and we decide to put as much or as less information on. We are responsible what we do with our life. However does this give one company the rights to be able to know everything? And remember it goes beyond what we put on Facebook. It is what other people put on Facebook. I could today invent a fake person and upload images to Facebook. Then I tag this image with me and the faked person. Maybe I as well write how great the day with XYZ was. Suddenly FB has info about a person who has no Facebook account or even does not exist.
I can see that FBI will create fake identities in the future by using Facebook.

Somebody could post a picture from a party showing me totally drunk hitting on a woman. I did never upload this image but it is now in Facebook and Facebook never forgets. A friend of this person might see the image, download it and send it to his friend which might be my boss. My boss would fire me, because the woman on this picture is his wife. Now you could say that this is my fault. I should not have been drunk and hitting on a woman.
This is correct, but what is, if this image was taken years before I even worked for my boss, before he met the woman and before I knew there will be something like Facebook?

Before timeline, not many people did upload anything old, so we might not care. But now people will upload and post things from the past. Within a short time FB will know more than anybody else about us even before FB did exist.

Or look at the kids who are using FB today. Do you think the know the impact of their posts and images they do today in 20 years? No they don't and they don't care. But it will be a problem for them in a few years, when they try to find a job and are wondering why nobody wants to hire them.

Somebody would argue that we use the Internet since 20 years and did post always a lot of things. This is true but the difference is that before we did distribute our info or not everybody was on the same website. It was much harder to collect info about people and their behavior because the data was stored on different servers which were owned by different companies.

Maybe it is time that our laws are changing to protect us with this new situation, maybe Facebook needs to be broken down into multiple companies.
What do you think? Am I too negative and FB is the best thing ever happened to us? Is Google better or worse? What about Apple, do they control us?


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods and Roger Federer did dominate for years their sport in a way not often seen before. Of course they have been outstanding athletes but they had two other advantages. They performed their sport different than anybody before and had the mindset that they only can win. Tiger, as an example, was not only a very good player, but as well much more athletic than many players before him or during his strongest time. He could hit the ball further and faster. He could move his body more than anybody else. The other players, on the other hand, did almost fear to play against him, just because he was so strong, that he even dominated much more.




Woods held the number one position in the world rankings for the most consecutive weeks and for the greatest total number of weeks. He has been awarded PGA Player of the Year a record ten times, the Byron Nelson Award for lowest adjusted scoring average a record eight times, and has the record of leading the money list in nine different seasons.
With 2: Set Masters 72-hole record with a total of 270 (70-66-65-69) and set Masters record with 12-stroke victory margin.
Tiger went in the last few years to a lot of private problems and did not make it into the FedEx Cup in 2011. But the biggest difference to 1997 or 2002 is that there are now many players hitting as long as him or even longer. Tigers average distance is even not much shorter than 10 years ago, but now there are at 40 other top player hitting as good as him and are as fit like him.
These are the new young players who watched him and learned from him. His advantage is not existing anymore and therefore he is not winning and we don't have just one dominant player.



We can find a similar evolution in Tennis with Roger Federer. He did dominate over 5 years the tennis court. He won everything he wanted and other players could just not win against him, because they might have been almost frozen when they had to play against him. His style was outstanding as well his mental strength. Today we have DJOKOVIC, Nadal, Murray and a few others; all as good as Federer or even better. Same happens here, the young player watched Federer over years and learned from him.

We can compare Apple and their products with them. Apple reinvented the phone. The first time when i heart the definition of a smart phone was in combination of the iPhone. Apple did dominate the smart phone business over a year. Unique hardware design and new type of OS. Google did copy (yes I think it is a copy) the iOS and some hardware vendors did copy the iPhone design. Not that they really copied it 100%, but before Apple, most phones were cheap plastic and not pretty, similar like PCs. They saw the phone as a tool we use which does not need to be esthetic. Apple changed this, and today almost every smart phone looks like an iPhone or even better. And Android from Google is now the number one smartphone OS.
Last year Apple did release the iPad. Nobody believed we needed an iPad but over 100,000 iPad apps and over 30 million sold iPads tell us a different story. Apple has today a market share of 78% of touch pads with just one product. And there are over 40 other touch pads on the market which are sharing 22%.



If Apple does not come out with a totally new product which we never thought we needed, or with a redesign of existing product (maybe a new approach for toasters or microwaves), then Apple will not be as dominant in 24 months as they are today. The world got transparent. And everybody is catching up. We went last week to
BestBuy and I looked at the Galaxy, Playbook and a Asus pad. All of them look more or less like the iPad and even the OS works the same. Regardless if it is WebOs or Android. All have the same basics like the iPad. Proof: My 3 years old son could open apps and zoom images as they are iPads.

If we compare Apple with sports, then I would say there are many players who watched Apple and are trying to copy it. But there is one player who not only watched Apple and tries to copy but does something totally different. This player will eventually take in 24 months for a few years the dominance till somebody else comes. The player (I am talking about) is Microsoft.



Microsoft's Windows 8 could really kill Android and Apple again. Windows 8 is not only totally different than all other mobile OSs but is as well the step which Apple is trying to do. Windows 8 will be one OS for all devices regardless of smart phone, mobile device or PC.

Microsoft has a lot of advantages to Google. They have already established customer support and a better relationship to hardware companies. And they have a much better enterprise integration than Apple and Google combined.

Apple is eventual too much concentrating on young users in the hope these consumers will keep buying Apple products when they are older. This concept is good, when your product is so much different than anything else.

As an example if you produce a car which has the shifting as tiptronic on the steering wheel and you would market young drivers. The parents might eventual buy for them a tiptronic car and when the kids are older, they would buy one too, because they would not know how to drive a different shifting system. If you are the only company with tiptronic then you will be set.

But Apple does not has this advantage anymore. Design is cool but for iPhone or iPad not much different than others and the OS is almost the same like Android. This helps the kids to switch much easier. Nothing new to learn. Apple does fear this, and this is one reason, why they try to fight against Samsung and other pad producers.

Apple has a lot of services like iTunes, but there is really no need to keep iPhone. Users can have iTunes and other devices or use Windows media center. Plus music future is in the cloud and Microsoft and even Google have much more cloud experience than Apple.

If we believe in 7 to 12 years cycles (which works in real estate, politics and everywhere we want) then Apples dominance will come to an end. And Microsoft can rise from ash like the Phoenix. MS lost so far the race in mobile but did build an even stronger enterprise empire with Sharepoint, Exchange, Lync and Dynamics products that they can close the gap between mobile and enterprise much easier than anybody else. And as soon the gap is closed, I foresee a lot of people buying for private use once again a Microsoft device.

Especially in a time where mobile, smart phone and PC is almost the same just different form factor. Whatever will come, the winner of the race will be the company which can provide for all devices same OS, a lot of software (not only apps) and can serve to end users and enterprises. For some reason I don't see Google to be in the mix neither.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple iOS, Google Android or Microsoft Windows?

At some point most of us would like to be a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs or Larry Page - Famous and rich and a part of our history. So do I.

Therefore I decided, it is time to do something which makes me rich and unforgettable. I decided to build an app.

The question is what the desired platform should be.

Let us start with a mobile app for Android OS. The SDK is free to download. There is a one-time $25 fee for registering to distribute apps on the Market:
http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113468&topic=15866
This seems to be right I can (with almost no costs) get an app into the android market. But I can't sell an app over $200 at Android market place.

Min and max prices of android apps:
AUD: 0.99 AUD - 200 AUD
CAD: 0.99 CAD - 210 CAD
CHF: 0.99 CHF - 200 CHF
DKK: 6 DKK - 1200 DKK
EUR: 0.50 EUR - 100 EUR
GBP: 0.50 GBP - 100 GBP
HKD: 7 HKD - 1500 HKD
JPY: 99 JPY - 20000 JPY
KRW: 999 KRW - 220000 KRW
NOK: 6 NOK - 1200 NOK
NZD: 0.99 NZD - 280 NZD
SEK: 7 SEK - 1500 SEK
SGD: 0.99 SGD - 270 SGD
USD: $0.99 - $200

If I want to use google cloud to develop my app, because I don't want to buy hardware for testing and developing, then the costs go up.




But of course I would save a lot of money for hardware and resources. But using the full service costs $500 and more a month.
Developing apps on Google App Engine takes one-fourth to one-tenth of the resources and one-fourth of the time compared to building something ourselves.”
Gary Koelling, Director of Emerging Platforms, Best Buy

Pricing seems alright but the big issue is the big chaos of different OS versions and devices available on the market. Google is not regulating very strong their OS distribution and is not telling the vendors what hardware to use. To develop an android app which should reach 90% of Android users must be tested on over 200 android devices. Ouch. There is no chance to build a professional enterprise app because the max sell price is too low and the testing to expensive.

May 2011:
Android activations swelling to over 100 million worldwide (112 countries) on 215 carriers and 36 manufacturers with 310 different Android devices


Developing an Android app might not cost a lot for licenses nor does Google take a lot for having an app in their store, but I am not willing to hire 20 testers to to test my app nor do I want to develop years to get my app running on all android devices.

Quote Netflix:
Because the platform has evolved so rapidly, there are some significant challenges associated with developing a streaming video application for this ecosystem. One of these challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones. In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback. We are aggressively qualifying phones and look forward to expanding the list of phones on which the Netflix app will be supported.

Maybe I should try Apple.
As we know there are only a handful devices we need to support and would still reach 100 million users. The iOS is running only on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Each of them have only a few versions in hardware and not many iOS in the market. 84% of iOS users are already on iOS 4.
The iPod touch has same screen size as the iPhone. These all sounds reasonable for me for developing an app. I can easily afford to by from each one device and would not spend more than $1,000 (phone contract not included). Apple allows to sell apps over $200. I have seen a few for $999 (there are 20). However the store is so full that it is almost not possible to create an app which not somebody else already did.
Total Apps Approved for US App Store: 589,391
Total Active Apps (currently available for download): 471,319
Total Inactive Apps (no longer available for download): 118,072
Number of Active Publishers in the US App Store: 106,423


Getting access to developer tools is inexpensive as well between $99 and $299 a year.



But there are some issues.
Apple has very strict guidelines how to develop an app. An app can be denied because the developer does not follow the guidelines.
An other issue is, that Apple will take 30% of each sale of an app. This can be very cost intensive. I was thinking about an enterprise app, which I want to sell 40,000 times for $23.99. This is $287,780 for Apple just because I use their app store. Yes I get maybe free promotion and the user does know where to go to find my app, but this a lot of money. I could build an app outside of the app store and publish it only for my enterprise clients, which Apple allows, but I might still pay 30% when Apple find out that I sold the app outside of the store. Apple allows corporations to develop apps which are not the app store, but only for internal use and not for sale of the app.
And then Apple is heavily promoting the iPad and iPhone as a game computer and not as business computer.



I don't want to get rich and make Steve Jobs richer.


As alternative I could develop software for Windows. There are of course many different hardwares to consider, but if I build a web based app with .Net then I could concentrate on 4 browsers (IE, Chrome, Google and Safari) to get most of the users a working app.



The investment would be $11.899 for Visual Studio ultimate with MSDN which gives a lot of developing tools 78 Microsoft products like office etc and $3,500 worth of Microsoft Azure cloud.





This is a lot of money for a startup, but cheaper than Apple in the long run, if I sell more than $35k a year in software.

Interesting is that the same package cost in Germany almost the double $20,900)





This is as much as two Fiat Panda cars.




The last alternative would be the amazon app store.
The Amazon marketplace has considerably less competition than Android store or the Apple app store, I actually might have better results there.
Just make sure that if you agree to be the Free App of the Day, you completely understand what you’re getting yourself into.

Anyway, Amazon has gone ahead and sweetened the deal just a bit: beginning September 2011, anyone who submits an app to the Amazon App Store store will get a free chunk of change to check out the Amazon Web Services suite (amazon cloud).

But apparently Apple isn’t the only company running an App Store with a penchant for secrecy.

In a blog post in August, mobile developer Shifty Jelly has publicly called out Amazon for covertly offering the company featured placement on its unofficial Android Appstore as the ‘free app of the day’. This is a well-known promotion that Amazon has openly talked about, but there’s a twist: instead of paying developers 20% of the app’s List Price, which is what it had previously promised, Amazon is asking them to take a 0% rev share.
People were very clearly told that even if Amazon decided to make an app free, developers would still be making 20% of their list price. In other words, they’d still make money. But not anymore as seen above. This means my $23.99 app which might have downloaded on the free day 20,000 times would cost me not 80% of my potential revenue but all.

I learned that developing an app is more than just being a developer. It is important to choose the right platform.

During my research I learned something really interesting. For PCs, everybody is talking about software. But for mobile devices and OS any kind, we only talk about app. I wonder what is the different between software and application.

After all I decided not to build an app to be as famous as Steve Jobs and that I am going to brew my beer and to sell it to restaurants by delivering it with one of my two new Fiat Panda.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Finally there is a market for tablets other than iPads

The iPad is on the market since April 2010 and already in it's second version and soon the 3rd generation will come out. Multiple other tablets from HB, RIM, Motorola and other manufactures came on the market in last year but still all other tablets together are just make 20% of the tablet market. The Apple iPad has still 80% market share. This is amazing. It seems there is no market for anything different than the iPad. But why is this? For me a tablet is a tablet, like a PC is a PC, what is the difference?
The difference is big. Non of the other tablets can yet compete with the iPad in design, weight or battery power. Some have faster processors (like Motorola Xoom) or have maybe a better OS like the HP touchpad (webOS) or higher security and business relevance (like the RIM playbook) than the iPad. Or some have cable less charging or Android OS which is on more phones than iOS. Some dan even play flash (which the iPad can't)

But non of them can offer the same package. Apple's iPad is light, has a long battery life, has a very stable OS and offers over 50,000 iPad native applications through the app store. The price starts at $499 and goes up to $829.

If would look at a matrix you would see that only the iPad offers right now all these features by being not much more expensive than the competition.

But since a few days we found the secret to get Apple from the throne. HP decided to discontinue their touchpad, after very poor sales. HP produced million of touchpad in the hope they will sell really well. And we have to admit it was not a bad tablet, there were many reviews that the webOS is actually pretty slick and working well on the touchpad. However there are not many apps yet available (btw the Facebook app is actually pretty good). The touchpad is heavier than the iPad and the battery needs to be recharged much faster than the iPad battery.

HP reduced the price for touchpad to $99 and up to $149 (bigger model). And suddenly we all went crazy to get one. I even drove instantly to BestBuy to get one. However I had no luck ,they were sold out like everybody within hours after the low price went public.






The only company which did not go as low in the price was Amazon. They sold it still for $289 which is still a discount of $200.







Many people bought the touchpad to sell it over eBay.







The 32GB versions goes in eBay right now in average for $300 which $150 more than the price would have been at Bestbuy.

Why is now everybody going crazy to get one? It is the price.

People don't buy the iPad because it is so much better than the others. They buy the iPad because of the package. Always a little better than the others in one or the point but not much more expensive. It is the same if you would need to choose between a Mercedes and Lexus and both would be similar models but the Mercedes would be only a few hundred $ higher. Most of the people would buy the Mercedes (if the Mercedes is overall a little better and nicer looking) and not the Lexus especially if all other choices would not be cheaper.

Many people do buy right now a tablet because they think they need one but don't really know why. At this point they prefer to buy something they know won't be wrong instead of a tablet which might be good but is not given.

Hopefully all manufactures did learn from the HP craziness. If they are smart, they are going to reduce the tablet price to around $300 for a 32 GB model and I bet the market would change very fast. The price of course would bring the margin down to 0% and unfortunately these manufactures are not in the same situation like Apple and have services they can sell through the iPad.

The only company right now who could do this is amazon, when they come out with their tablet, because they have enough services like ebooks, movies and Music service to make enough money on this to allow to have no margin on their tablet. Amazon will not succeed if they are too close with their tablet price to the Apple iPad.

Another new player in this game could be googlerola (google just recently bought Motorola). They would have the hardware competence, OS and services which would allow them to sell the tablets to 0% margin and still make money on the services offered around the tablet.

However google might only be interested in the patents from Motorola and not the hardware. And even if they are going to keep the hardware business, it would take at least 12 months till we would see an improved Googlerola tablet for the half of the price than today.

As an example netbooks only sold so well because of the low price. They were so much cheaper than an full notebook that it was a no-brainer to buy a netbook if you want to have something mobile and cheap. But then they died with the iPad because the iPad is just a little more expensive but so much more mobile and user friendly.

At the end we can see there is a market for tablets in the low price range. All this HP hypes on Facebook and twitter are showing us that tablet is the new notebook an there is a market in the lower segment and this market is big, very big. The company which will be able to get the lower income people to buy their tablets will be later the market leader.

Usually I would say the manufacture who is able to be number one seller to businesses will be the winner, but corporate world is slow in terms of tablets and it will still take 2 years till we see more tablets than notebooks in offices.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Why google+ is so important for google

Google started with their latest social network a couple of months ago and it is already reaching 40 million users. Right now over 80% are male. Facebook on the other side has a slightly higher female user base than males.
Google+ is still beta but every beta user can invite over 150 other people to join google+ as long these people have a gmail account.



Google+ is of course important for google to be a competition to Facebook and to be in the social market. However one of the most important parts is the social integration into search.

Google is still number one search engine, but it needs to have new features and if possible social features to stay in the first place.

Many search results are for us not always relevant, even if they are maybe based on our location or our surfing behavior. However we users tend to read articles from people we know. Google+ plus gives us this ability.
When you are logged into google plus and you use google to search you will find search results with the content written from google+ users you know.




I searched for "touchpad" and got in the first result page two articles written from google+ members in my circles.

This gives google a big advantage to bing which belongs to Microsoft (Microsoft has investment in Facebook). Same search with bing does not have anything similar as results even if they would be able to show in results FB friends if they are authors to relevant articles.





Both people shown in google are not displayed in bing, even if I am friend with them in FB.

I always said in the past that google has more results than bing, but if I need to find people or social information than bing is better. I think this is changing now with the growth of google+.

Google+ will grow and hopefully get more female users in the mix and not just geeks. But when google+ will reach 100 million in will get again a big growth because suddenly many search results will show the authors names and pictures.

This is for me one of the biggest advantages to Facebook. Facebook is trying to push their search within FB however results are only within Facebook content and will be never a replacement for a real search engine. We want to get results from all websites and not only from FB content.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Google to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings, but why?

To strengthen its mobile business, Google announced on Monday that it would acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, the cellphone business that was split from Motorola, for $40 a share in cash, or $12.5 billion.

Motorola is second biggest cell phone manufacture in the world.







And according to cnet.com the Motorola phantom 4G is even the second best smart phone on the market.










But in June 2011 data from Nielsen for the US shows that Motorola is only number 5 smart phone manufacture:






Motorola did fail to have same success with smart phones as they had it with the RAZR. Over the RAZR's four-year run, Motorola sold more than 130 million units, becoming the best-selling clamshell phone in the world (and is still today).

However Motorola is still a big name under cell phones and had the first real competition to Apple iPhone with the DROID.

The offer, Google’s largest ever for an acquisition is 63 percent above the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday. Many Motorola manufactures phones run on Google’s Android software and is therefore a good fit. The acquisition will bring Google very close to Apple in terms of phone manufacturing.

But Motorola would bring much more to the table. Google would gain 17,000 patents and a lot of service.

When Google first started to sell their own HTC phone called Nexus One, it was a disaster. The phone was only sold on Google website and Google was not able to give the needed customer support. Buying Motorola would Google give expertise in service and a sales force which knows already to get phones into retail stores.

This buy could catapult Google very far on top and shows where Google want to go next. If the deal goes through, it will take at least 12 months till we the merger comes to success, however the Motorola unit could help Android OS a lot. The biggest issue for Android is the variety of different phones and form factors. Therefore many Android OS versions are on the market and the user seldom knows which one is available for the phone. And it makes harder for developer to build and test an app against all Android phones and Android OS versions.

Apple success is, that there is only one phone with max 3 generations (iPhone 2 is not anymore with latest OS supported). This makes it so easy for Apple to build a perfect OS and easier for developer to build apps. As a result most iPhone apps are better in quality and iPhone users are more willing to pay for an app. The iOS is much smoother and iPhone users tend (maybe for these two reasons) to download more apps and listen to more music than Android users.







An Android user (as shown in Nielsen info graph) has a higher average Data usage than iPhone but overall less app downloads or online gaming. The higher data usage could result of less app quality and therefore more unnecessary package transfers.

If Google is smart, which I believe, then they will first dump all Motorola devices which are not using Android or which are not smart phones. Then they should take the top two models, like the phantom 4 and build their OS perfect for these models hardware.

Google would not do good, if they would keep all current Motorola models which are currently 32.






Having their own Android phone and the right sales and service behind is all Google needs to strengthen their OS. Even if Android is an open OS it is sometimes better not to have too much diversity.

Smartphones are much more than hardware. Smart phones are service hubs. Search, music, social every thinkable Internet service is combined in a smart phone and the better the OS is calibrated to the hardware the better these services are working.

And the future and money is in services and not hardware or OS. Apple already understands this concept and therefore they are building an infrastructure which will give the user no other chance then using their services. I am still cursing the day I bought my first iMac computer, from this day on I was married to Apple and even if I would like to get divorced today, I could not easily because of iTunes, and how well all my devices are connected to each other.

I am wondering if the Motorola Xoom is a part of the mobility holding (according to the website, yes) then Google does get much more, not only the smart phones but as well tablets, software, baby phones, two way radios, navigation devices and 17.000 patents.






Google could be from one day to another a second Apple, selling phones, tablets and other Android devices and would have finally an online store.






The $12.5 billion is a good investment to move out of "search" and "advertising" and to go from virtual to products which people can touch and Ro bind them to Google only devices.

Google has over $39 billion in cash and the $12.5 billion would not hurt but could bring a lot.

Maybe we see soon Google stores next to Apple stores.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Please don't forget to visit my blog http://new-kid-on-the-blog.com or follow me on twitter schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Google+ games are now available

Google+ offers now games like Facebook. However there are not many games yet which will change soon. Unfortunately google seems to make a mistake like FB. Granted the idea is good that games messages are not showing in your normal stream as prominent as in FB, but google seem not to understand that many users are using iPads or Android slates for their daily google+ usage.




But first to new games feature. Google+ added on top one more icon for games, where the user get a list of available games. At least it is much easier to find games with google+ but only now because there are not many games. I am missing a games search. You can use the find people search to find games but a special game search would be great. Finding games at FB is not possible if you don't know for what game you are looking for, I hope google does not do same mistake.
Install is easy. Click on the game and allow the game access to your info.

But here comes the problem. If you use your iPad, you have to switch to desktop version to see the games and to be able to play the games. Here comes the next problem, some of the games are developed in flash and require flash 10 player which even Android tablets mostly don't have.



Some games are done in html5 which allows to be played on the iPad. However the iPad will always switch to mobile version when you navigate to another page. I guess google does not want you to use desktop version on your iPad.

Other games like Angry Bird are recognizing that your are using the iPad and ask you if you want to download instead the Angry Bird version for the iPad. Which is odd because I have already Angry Birds installed. Why does it not open my Angry Birds instead going to the app store? On the other hand I might want to play in google+ Angry Birds to get better ranking because there are less players playing, but I did not get the chance. And Angry Birds has no google+ connect yet to post scores etc to google plus. The games are either to play in google+ plus or are not connected at all to google+.

After all it is important to have games on google+ because most people do play games on social networks, but I was hoping that google does a better job with integration and does not allow old technologies like flash, especially that many mobile devices don't have flash or only limited flash. After all social works best on globile (smart phone) and lobile (iPads etc.). Desktops and notebook are more and more only for business use and we better don't do too much on social networks through company network and on company devices.

Google+ gets from me right now only a C+.

What do you think about google+ games, do they do it right, or should google have wait a little?

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

No Samsung Galaxy 10 inch in Europe (only in Netherlads)

Apple did win for now against Samsung and therefore Samsung is not allowed to sell their Galaxy tablet in Europe Union besides Netherlands.

The main reason why Apple did not want to have the Galaxy sold, is the too similar design to the iPad.








I think there is more behind than cloning the iPad. The Galaxy does look little similar but is it not normal when creating a tablet? Should have Samsung put handles on the Galaxy or external antennas or maybe made it round that it does not look like the iPad?

There is not much vendors can do when the goal is to have a 10 inch tablet, very light and sophisticated looking. Look at desktop computers. They all look similar, even notebooks are now closer to Apple notebooks.

Honestly I don't like neither that many japanese cars look like Mercedes or BMW, but it is as it is. If the price is lower or quality better then we buy it.

I understand that Apple has patents (not that I agree on our patent system in the US) and did spend a lot of money and research to make the iPhone as a 9.7 inch device. But Steve, you honestly do not think we believe you that it is about the design.

Europeans have usually a less brand affiliation than Americans and sometimes they even tend not to buy a leading brand, because the brand has too much market share and control.

But more important is the picing strategy from Apple, that usually a device in Europe costs the same as in the US but in Euro which makes the poducts 30% more expensive. Apple is in the most part following this price philosophy and therefore the other vendors can score very easily by reduced prices.

And then, Apple does have in Europe much less stores than in the US.
The iPad maker has 52 stores in the region, compared to 238 in the United States.
Acerbic, Asus, HP, Motorola, Samsung and the other tablet companies have a much better and deeper experience dealing with local distributors. If Samsung would be able to sell the Galaxy they could have the device in thousands of stores over night.

Right now there is no competition on the horizon and Apple might be holding major of the tablet market till 2015. The biggest mistakes the other vendors did, was to build and sell 7 inch tablets. Surveys did show that the consumer does prefer 10 inch because 7 inch is too small as a tablet. As a result all other vendors starting to build 10 inch versions of their tablets.

There is a big chance that Apple will in 12 months not anymore dominate the European market like they do it in the US. Already now, Apple iPad has in Europe only 70% market share but in the US 80%.

I remember when I went in 2005 to Germany to visit my family, that only one of 4 mpg players were iPods. But in the US almost everybody had iPods. so I asked some people why they don't have iPods? Two standard answers. Either because iPods are just too expensive and don't do more than other mpg players, or because they did not want to support a big arrogant company.

Apple had with the iPhone in 2010 in Europe only 18% market share, but in the US 28%.








The same could happen with the iPad.

Now we know why Samsung is so eager to get into Europe market with their Galaxy and why Apple does not want this to happen.

I am disappointed that Apple is playing the patent card instead of doing what they are the best. Keep building new toys which have best usability, best battery live and do look just perfect. Even if the Galaxy looks not much different, the battery life is shorter, the usability is not as good as the iPad and it is still heavier. If Apple does fear this, then I don't know what will come next.

I am actually right now pretty annoyed about all these patents fights going on. Apple against Samsung, Google against Microsoft, Microsoft against Motorola and so on.

It is time that our patent rules a getting changed.

(info and statistics from Forrester, The firm surveyed nearly 14,000 online consumers throughout Europe to find that between 2 and 7 percent of consumers surveyed own a tablet and 10 to 14 percent are interested in buying one. Tablet ownership was highest in Spain and lowest in France. Interest in tablets was highest in Germany.).

Samsung is not allowed to sell the Galaxy in Europe, but i am wondering if I could sell them from the US through my online store to Europe? Could be the big deal. I should start to count my winnings.

Let me know what your thoughts are about the whole patents fights?

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

NYTimes goes crowd sourcing

4 years ago I did work at one of the pioneers of professional crowd sourcing for software development. Topcoder.com utilizes a crowd of over 200,000 developers to build enterprise applications, websites or Mashups for companies like AOL, Fidelity etc.

Jack Hughes founded TopCoder in 2001 and brought the company to Inc 500. The biggest difference to other crowd sourcing is that everything is done in competition and only the bests will win which helps to deliver better software.

TopCoder has competitions in these areas:
Algorithms (competition length about 2 hours): Competitors are given a set (usually three) of algorithmic problems and have 75 minutes to correctly solve as many as they can.
Design (competition length 1 week): Competitors are given a set of user requirements and attempt to convert them into a usable software design specification. Their efforts are judged on a variety of "real-world" criteria on how correct and practical their design is.
Development (competition length 1 week): Competitors are given a set of design specification and attempt to write software components that match those specification. These components are judged on their functionality and coding style.
Marathon Matches (competition length 1 or 2 weeks): Contestants are given a particularly difficult algorithmic problem. The scoring is done by computer based on criteria specifically suited to the problem.
Studio (competition length varies): Contestants are asked to show off their creative skills in a competitive environment.
Architecture
Assembly TopCoder has created Assembly Competitions as an extension of Component Design and Development Competitions. Through these competitions, competitors create high quality applications using completed components and TopCoder's established competitive method.
Testing
Bug Races Project teams, clients and members are able to log bugs they find in software developed and supported by TopCoder. TopCoder will communicate these bugs to the member community. Bugs that are open to the community will be posted on the Active Bug Races page.
(source Wikipedia.com)

Many companies did follow this principle without doing a competition, but with understanding that it is easier and cheaper to let the crowd develop software instead hiring thousand of developers. Take as an example salesforce.com, the true secret behind their success is not only their very innovative CRM but their appExchange platform. Companies or single developers can offer and build new plugins or extensions for salesforce.com. Appexchange allowed SFDC to offer constantly new products around their CRM to make it more attractive without doing the development. There thousands of add ons like project management or outlook integration.




Or take Facebook as an example. Facebook would have been not half as successful without their application platform. There are uncountable FB apps the user can choose from and people on Facebook install 20 million applications every day.

The iPhone or android phones would have been never so successful if there were only a few apps available. We can see right now the success of the iPad and the poor performance of Android tablets. Android tablets might have already overtaken the iPad, if their application pool would have been bigger.

Before the experts will complain, I am aware that these examples are not really crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing origin is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call.

For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.

However the salesforce, Facebook or Apple App store is for me a derive of crowd sourcing. They all had the task that they need to have a lot of extra features or functions to support their platform or device to attract the consumer. Therefore they did build an open API to allow others to develop new functions or apps. But to take advantage of it they did build a marketplace or one location where the consumer can find all offers around the main product. It is like accessories. We never tend to buy a computer if there are not enough accessories available.

Facebook, SalesForce.com, Google and Apple are following the long tail strategy. Long Tail is describing the retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.

(Finally I coming to the point) The NYTimes is now doing the same. They created beta620.



Beta620 is the NYTimes version to get the best and latest features for their website or iPad application without hiring product managers.

Beta620 welcome text:
At The New York Times, our software engineers, journalists, product managers and designers are constantly striving to create new and innovative ways to present news and information and interact with our readers. Yet it’s often difficult to try out new inventions on the world’s largest newspaper Web site. That’s why we created beta620, a new home for experimental projects from Times developers — and a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and products.

Many of these projects will live only on beta620. But a few, like the innovative Times Skimmer, which started out as an entry in one of our internal technology contests, will “graduate” to become full-fledged products on our main site or our mobile apps.

beta620 will also be a place where Times developers interact with readers to discuss projects, and incorporate community suggestions into their work. So, please, take a look around, and play with our new toys. We’re eager to hear what you think.

At the end it is a mix out of idea tank open to public and test platform for new products.

The whole beta620 is supported through The NYTimes developer network. Right now there are only projects on beta620 which are developed from NYT developers, however the developer network beta might merge in some point with beta620 together.




I have to say this makes sense for me. NYTimes is a very big newspaper but need to find new ways to generate revenue and to keep or gain their readers. If NYTimes will start to have their own app marketplace and people can modify their NYT experience as they wish with any function they want, then why should we need Google or Facebook?

Maybe NYT is on something, maybe they figured out that Facebook is great for keeping up with family, friends, wonna be friends and people we would like to remember why we friend them. But it is not the place to get news and celebrity info or any info we can rely on it's really important and relevant.

NYT could offer both, or be just a social network for news. But to get there, they need the long tail with their blue ocean strategy (Blue Ocean Strategy is a business strategy by creating new demand in an uncontested market space, or a "Blue Ocean", than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers for known customers in an existing industry.)

We all should keep an eye on NYTimes to see what their real strategy is.

Note:
The NYTimes app for the iPad is now 4 weeks in a row stable with no crash. The worst app OS for me now editions by AOL.


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Touch on the iPad is just the beginning

Apple did something revolutionary and did take the keyboard away from the netbooks, gave it a touch screen a fast mobile OS and called it iPad. Notebook and especially netbook sales slowed growing down and even declined since the iPad came on sale.




The statistic is one year old and the overall PC market slowed down, however Apple did take a big piece from the netbook market. last year Apple sold almost 15 million iPads and is expected to sell this year 44 million. All netbooks from all vendors did sell in 2010 together 33 million. And is expected to sell 30 million this year. I give netbooks not more than two years.

As great the iPad as, it is not yet a notebook replacement as I wrote in many blogs, but it will come. For now the iPad is mostly in use to read, surf the internet, to watch movies and to play.

But the iPad could be so much more, if we would go beyond touch. The iPad has a camera which could read gestures and has a microphone for voice control. However developers are not yet utilizing these features and Apple is not yet pushing for it.

The latest iOS 5 beta 5 version has a little microphone symbol on the virtual keyboard, which could indicate that voice control is coming soon. Knowledge should have Apple enough. They bought in April 2010 Siri which had their little butler app. Siri was specialized in voice search. By tying together various APIs from across the Web, from such services as OpenTable, Twitter, and Rotten Tomatoes, among many others, Siri has concocted a voice search that relies more on natural speech. With so many services to search, Siri also specializes in directing its software to find the right service for the best answer.

And then there is the collaboration with Nuance which makes Dragon an awesome speak to text app for the car. You speak your SMS that you don't need to touch your phone during driving.

The iPad is not as mobile as the iPhone. I think we can call the iPhone globile (global mobile, we take it everywhere and use it everywhere, even on the Mount Everest). And from now one I will call the iPad lobile. Lobile is a combination out of local and mobile. The fact is, we don't use the iPad everywhere we can to any time. We usually take the iPad to a place and then we use it there within a radius of 60 feet. We start to read on the coach, then we take the iPad to the kitchen to drink a coffee and to keep reading and so on.

But a lobile device needs more than touch. I have two hobbies and I am always frustrated that there is no app for what I am looking for. Even if Steve Jobs like to say there is an app for everything.

Did you ever cook? I do a lot, and before the iPad was even in the news as the new fancy device, I had build a 15 inch touchscreen with RDP to my computer in the office. The touch screen was mounted in the kitchen as recipe book. My wife and I like to cook and have tons of recipes. I was sick to print recipes out and did build a small recipe app and saved all recipes in there.

I sold my little 15 inch device on eBay, as soon the iPad came out and we use since then the iPad as recipe book. The dream of each amateur chef. Stop!!! Not so fast. Yes i use the iPad to look up recipes and guess what I still print them. Any idea why? Guess what happens when you cook? All get wet? Not necessary. But your hands are getting dirty, and you can't touch your screen without making the screen dirty.

The second little hobby, i have, is to work on my motorbike and my RC car in the garage. Actually it is even more. I like a lot of projects where I can use my hands to build something. As an example I did build last year a 4foot * 4foot * 8foot wood box for a magic trick.

It does not matter what I do in the garage, I like to have my iPad with me. When I am working on my bike I have a technical manual open to see where each part goes etc.

When building wood things, like the box, I look at my drawings on my iPad to know how I need to cut the wood.

But all the time I have something in both hands or they are pretty dirty.

Or imagine you have breakfast and you read the NYTimes. In one hand your coffee and in the other hand a bagel.

Did you ever ask yourself why we can't just wave our hand in front of the iPad? Or just could say next or play etc?

This is the next step for lobile devices. We need to be able to communicate with our device without touching it. It would be simpler as many think. Voice control could be limited to 8 words and gestures to 4. This is all we need. Start, stop, next, back, play, pause, continue, close. Or wave your hand from left to right from top to bottom from right to left and from bottom to top.

I hope the little tiny microphone will not just an icon but an indicator that voice control will be standard in the API and then we will see many cool apps.

Google, meanwhile, has voice-enabled every text field within Android, which lets users dictate text into anyplace it is possible to type. Google even has voice search in the official Google Search app for iOS. Further, Android users can perform actions such as "Call Bob's Cell" and have their phone automatically perform that action. iPhone has as well some voice control to call your contacts and it works more or less ok and is yet not so sophisticated like the Android voice control. But again even Android does not go far enough. I would prefer touch to fill out a form because of my accent, but for recipes app, manual and news, why not using voice or gesture?



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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Google (+) versus Facebook

There are some cool videos in the web which are parodies of google and Facebook.

I decided to do a comparison between facebook and google+ and before anybody starts to complain that I don't compare apple with apple, they should know that google+ is not just google+, it is eventual all google services. Google might bring them all together through google+







Fact is that google has a big network of services from search over video to email and document management. And I believe people will not go first to a social network for generic search, they will go to a search engine which then can give social relevant results. Facebook made a big mistake not to open FB to google search.

Here are some really good YouTube videos:








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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

First Palm, then RIM and then Facebook?

You might ask what Facebook has to do with Palm or RIM. But at the end of the article you might get the point.

Palm was in the 90th the rising star. They came out in 1993 with their palm pilot and their innovative Palm OS. One of the best OS at its time. Palm in the time did reinvent hand writing rather than the palm pilot needs to learn the users writing, the user had to learn how to write as the palm can understand. At the time all others tried to build complex software for computers to understand different hand writing styles. It took me maybe three days to learn how to write on the palm and then it was just easy.




Palm eventually became big and hired a lot of people. Every year came a new model out, better faster etc, even with a color screen.
Palm allowed other companies to write application for the palm and users could choose from hundreds of extra apps to install on the palm.
The concept was similar to Apple. Palm developed hardware and OS.

Palm was on top and the leading company for handhelds, but their biggest problem was, that they had only one product. Instead of working on new products, besides handled, they focused too much on the handheld competition and lost the race. Palm is today a small devision of HP and only delivers the webOS which is Palm's latest OS based on Linux.


RIM (founded 1984) a Canadian company started in 1998 to sell Inter@ctive pager 950 which had two way paging and wireless e-mail network. About the size of a bar of soap, this device competed against the SkyTel two-way paging network developed by Motorola.

The big break through came 1999.
In 1999, the Blackberry wireless e-mail device, the BlackBerry 5790, was revealed along with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for Microsoft Exchange. The BES provided the conduit between the wireless handheld and the corporate Exchange mailbox, with contacts and calendar, putting current business e-mail in the hands of the mobile worker. New content updated in the mailbox was “pushed” out to the BlackBerry keeping the worker up-to-date. The first fully integrated phones were shipped with the 6200 series after the 5810 and 5820 provided phone functionality only with an external headset. RIM also expanded its network coverage from GSM to add CDMA.

At this time cooperations started to buy cellphones from RIM because they could not only send and receive emails but were easily to connect to Microsoft Exchange and the data transfer were encrypted. RIM grew and grew. RIM was second largest smartphone company in the world in 2008




In 2010 RIM did fall back to 3rd place.






RIM had even a much higher market share in companies. But many companies did start to switch Apple iPhone. Our company had only blackberries for our sales people in 2008, today our salesforce is using only iPhones. We are not big, but we have hundred or so sales people.
RIM lost their momentum because they tried to fight against Google Android and Apple iPhone. RIM announced that they will lay off 2000 people. They should have extend their business to other types of products, when they were still the rising star. Now it is almost too late and RIM can be soon history. A much bigger fall is actually Nokia. Once unreachable number one cell phone company with over 50% market share, did fall down to just 20% in 2011.

Let us look at Apple. Apple was almost bankrupt when Steve Jobs came back in 1997. He did the right thing, he throw all kind of products away and concentrated on building just a few but great products (similar like Palm and RIM), However when the success started for Apple again, he did not stop. Apple did build new products. The trick behind was, that they took time to make the products good.
They started with a revolutionary iMac.



Just one form factor. It got successful. In the meantime they started to work on the iPod but did not release the iPod before it was ready for the world in 2001. And then a few years later the next product came and so on. But different than other hardware companies, they did not just throw products on the market, they took time to build them.

Apple could have just stopped with the iMac and build every year new models and some more sizes. But they did not. They have one product with max two versions. As soon the product does get very successful they bring out something new.

This Apple concept is genius. And any company should learn from it.
Imagine Apple would have stayed just with the iMac or maybe just with the iPod? Apple would be a small company today.

Back to my headline. What does this has to do with Facebook?

Everything.

Facebook did grow tremendous in the last 3 years and grew from 20 million to 700 million users. This is amazing. However Facebook has still one flaw which will kill Facebook (I think FB is already dead, they just don't know it). FB has only one product. The product which gave them success. But instead of building new products they just stay with their social network. Google+ will not kill Facebook but FB will kill themselves. Everything they do is around their FB, new features, layout changes or like recently a business Facebook. Google is smarter, they extend their business with new products. If nobody searches anymore on google, then they have still their ad servers for other companies to serve ads, and they have Android etc.

Bottom line is, that having just one product is great to get big, because you can concentrate just on this and make it perfect and it is easier for marketing. However when a company reaches the point, where they are market leader then they need to have already a different product to redefine their market niche. Jack Welsh once said, it is easier to get to number 1 than staying to be number 1.

Why is it bad to have just one product? First of all other can learn from your product and after a while they can make it better, because they saw the mistakes, the things which are missing and have more fresh ideas. Second, consumers needs are changing. Social is big today, but maybe not anymore tomorrow. I think social will not go away, however there will be no need in the future for one big social network because it will be a part of our online life. It is like the internet. AOL got big, because we needed an access point for Internet and there was AOL which offered it for us, but then when Internet got big, AOL was not anymore needed we suddenly could go to the internet without AOL.

Palm, RIM, Nokia, myspace, AOL were once the stars, now their light is out of fading.

And all ends that Palm, RIM and Facebook are so different but similar.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple walled Garden - a different view

here is another view to walled Garden.

People might believe that a wallet garden as a app store monopoly will not work, because regardless what Apple will try, they need the consumer and at the end a consumer can drive a lot. Consumers did not like Netflix’s price change and Netflix did feel it.
If Apple tries to keep the boundaries too close then the innovation will suffer.
Right now it helps Apple to keep the playfield closed to keep a lot of spam, virus etc out. And Apple did need to build the walled garden, because without this, the iPad would not have succeeded, as we can see with android tablets or before with netbooks which don’t have any success yet or are already dead.

We see more and more hacker attacks, this costs companies a lot of money and the consumer will lose faith. Recent examples are Sony or some Credit Card companies, which got hacked, in the last view months. Sony even could not get their system for months running - the online gamers were all, but happy.
With the ipad, users can very easy install thousands of software with a click. Apple need to keep the system very tied, that the user experience does not suffer otherwise the iPad would have been no success.

Apple is moving completely to Internet install, which we can see with the missing SuperDrive in the new products. And therefore no chance to use a DVD to install, but Apple is progressive and drives many times new ways to do things. They started to leave the floppy out of the computer and later the CD. Then they started to make phones without keyboard. All the time people were questioning, but now it is common not to have floppy or phones without keyboard.

Apple tries with the ipad the xbox principle - Easy to use, great design and innovative and extreme good pricing.

The MacBook Air is a different story. It is much faster than the ipad and a little bigger, kind of mobile but higher in price and still not scalable to not to interfere with the MacBook Pro and to keep the MacBook Pro in game. Maybe they learned with iphone and ipod. The ipod is almost dead, because of the iphone.

A big advantage is the Apple app store which other companies are now trying and actually Microsoft had it with Windows Vista before even Apple started with the app store, but nobody had such a good payment model for developers that Apple has now a big advantage. If we compare it with the Google app store, then we can see that most of the android downloads a free and revenue is much less than with Apple. One reason is, that Google does not control enough the store and the OS distribution. Developers have much harder to develop apps for Androids because testing will take forever. And the quality of apps are so bad (because nobody controls the app submission that users don't want to pay for the apps at google because the quality might be bad.
There used to be Digital River for buying apps online, before we had mobile app stores, but is was a mess and not easy to find apps. Apple reinvented software distribution and they did it really good.
I think Apple found the right riming. We are ready for centralized apps. Consumers knew this from Facebook or even from SalesForce, both have a big app platform.

I don’t think that Apple really wants to get rich with software or with financial companies because it is not their core business. Apple uses software to support their services and hardware. But even if so, if the money is too much, then the developers will go away. And if they go away Apple needs and will change their methodology. Again, it does not matter how big Apple get, at the end the developers and consumer will regulate the power of Apple.

I think the fight is on between Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all want to have the consumer and mid size companies and offer a 360 degree service - Microsoft with Office 365, Google with Google docs and apps etc.

Microsoft developed with Windows 365 and Windows 7 a great office pack, Google is totally concentrating on advertisement, Amazon on e-commerce and Apple will take the usability ticket. All of them are similar and totally different and therefore all of them will coexist.

However the big loser might be the Mainframe companies (metapher) like Oracle, IBM, SAP, HP etc. They might concentrate too much on the large cooperation till they figure out it is over, and that even the large companies moved to smaller data centers etc in clusters.

I believe Microsoft will move more and more into large companies and Apple will take the small and midsize market. Google will dominate in young start ups which eventual will grow very big.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Lion Server alternative to Windows or Google docs?

It was time to install a Lion Server after Apple released their latest OS. What were the results?

1. Lion server configuration
The standard configuration of Lion server is pretty simple. However some knowledge of networks is necessary to set it up. Somebody with no network knowledge could get lost. But to be honest I yet did find any server software easy to install, without basic network knowledge.
It is pretty easy to configure the server in a local network because there is no need for things like DNS or SLL certificate. However it gets much more complicated if the server should serve as a web server. Two things are important to have done before configuring the server.
A) have all DNS settings ready.
B) have already all necessary SSL certificates ready. SSL encryption certificates can cost between $30 and $2000 or more. It is a good idea to bing for the correct certificate, not everybody needs to have all in one certificates. If you have a lot of sub domains then you can use one certificate with wildcard.
If you install a Lion web server without SSL then it will get tricky to install the clients. A really positive part is that Lion allows you to apply for the CSR via Lion GUI.

2. Help/Support and usability
The configuration is very easy but not always intuitive and the manual is very poor. Apple seem not take enough time to write comprehensive manuals but at least they look good. Sometimes it is just not clear why a form asks for for domain and host name. It would be nice to get some explanation what the difference is between host and domain name. Apple help texts are far less extensive than Microsoft help. There, Apple can clearly learn from Microsoft. As an example when I installed recently Dynamics CRM, Microsoft did send with the disc tons of documents for installation, migration, configuration etc. And everything which I could not find in Word, I could find at Microsoft online. Apple forums and online help is not very good, but I guess it is, because the price tag is much smaller.
But other parts of the installation were simple good explained and just one click away. Lio Server install is half horrible to understand and half so easy a caveman could do it. This is weird.

3. Profile Manager
Lion allows to remote configure clients networks and connections to servers using the Profile Manager. for the software distribution and settings for clients is Apple Remote Desktop responsible, which is unfortunate not a part of Lion server and costs extra.
Profile Manager is not a thick client app, it is unfortunately a web app which works only good with Safari. And it takes forever because you don't call the client from server, you have to open safari on the client to connect to the server to make the connection. A company with 200 clients will take a while, maybe remote desktop would be able to do this. You can use the Profile manager from the server to push changes as soon the first install on client side was done.
What does the Profile Manager configure?
Global Address-book connection
email settings
ICal settings
VPN
And some other client settings.

Really cool is, that the power is now in the hand again of the IT guy. He can, if he is really in a bad mood, delete the clients with one easy click.
The wipe button is everywhere on almost each page of the profile manager and can be easily hit by accident.
The client configuration is not always intuitive. Sometimes the system asks for an alternative password but still i have to find out what the reason is to have an alternative password. Did not find anything documented.

4. VPN or not
Lion offers Encrypted connection without VPN for the clients. I can't recommend to do so, it is surely easier without VPN but I might not trust the security. In our company all enterprise apps are only accessible via VPN. But for some parts like a global address book no VPN is much better experience for the user. Most of our sales people even don't know how to switch VPN on.

5. Functions
File Sharing, iCal Server, Wiki and address book work like a champ. It is very easy to attach files to appointments which allows to get opened through iCal over other computers. This is almost like a mini document management with CRM. iChat and Podcasting are as well good company functions. However I had no time to test and don't know if iChat allows to add people outside from the company.

The mail server is horrible to use. Don't try to create email addresses or to create aliases. This works so easy in Windows but very user unfriendly in Lion. However the build in Anti Spam and Anti Virus softwares are pre configured. A big plus.

6. Why using a Lion Server?
Lion is a great server for companies which are too small to move their servers into the cloud but on the other hand don't want to spend $50.000 or more on MS Software licenses. The Lion server offers much more than google docs and and google mail combined and is more likely similar to MS Windows Server with exchange and SharePoint and communicator but as I mentioned before much cheaper. But the really big advantage of the Lion server in comparison to Microsoft is the integration of iphone and iPad. Lion server does make sense, In a time where companies are moving more and more to iPhone as company phones. The integration of address book, iCal and mail is just great. Exchange is maybe more scalable than Lion however Apple does not yet try to attack large cooperations like the government or Siemens. However if Google is able to sell to the government google mail and google docs then Apple will be able too.
I can see for large companies parts moved to lion like file server which is much more stable than windows file server and much easier to support.
Of course the integration of Office, SharePoint and Dynamics products is much more sophisticated than Pages with Lion Wiki, but we all know that even SharePoint with Office integration is not working perfect and a company needs to have very expensive license (Volume license) to do so, otherwise you can only read office documents in the web browser but you can't edit them in the browser through SharePoint.

7. problems and solutions

A) Lion installation
The installation went wrong, because I have been not in the mood to wait for my DNS and SSL certificate. I got it without running, but have been never sure, if it is s clean install or not.
I decided to restart the server and to try the CmD-R recovery mode. In one of the help texts I did read that best practice is to delete HD and then reinstall. I have been almost certain my recovery mode reinstall will not work. But to be honest it rocked. The recovery GUI is very nicely done and very intuitive. The recovery mode will guide you (after deleting the HD) to the main menu which hosts the button for the lion install. The computer downloads again the OS from Internet and when it is done the OS is installed including all server components. After this I could configure the system as the computer would have come just right out of the factory. I created a new user and was ready to rock.

7) Remote access
I decided to install on my MacBook Pro the remote control for my server, after Lion install number two and a few cups of coffee (black no sugar).
however the tool was tricky and I accidentally installed a complete Lion server on my notebook. Of course you can keep the server software offline and use your notebook as just a client, however it is nothing we want to have on a client computer.
But how to get Lion Server off without messing up my notebook? Of course time machine.
First i copied the TM backup to a local HD which took a while because it was 300GB of data to a USB hard drive. Time for another coffee.
After this I started with CmD-R again the lion recovery mode and activated the recovery of the computer from the backup I made.
It got late, so went to bed. The next morning I found my MacBook Pro automagically (funny cool word) in the same state as before I accidentally installed the lion server on it. This was cool.
Not only (as I wrote) is the New Lion OS easy to install (of course easier than Lion server) but to restore a OS over the Ethernet through TM is absolutely great and almost not easy to beat.

Note:
Most of this article is provided from a friend of mine in Germany who recently converted to Apple. Since then he bought more Apple devices than I ever owned. Right now he is working on some secret iPhone app (he does not want to tell me what) which, I am sure, will be great.




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Location:N Westshore Blvd,Tampa,United States