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In Two Years, Most Of You Will Be Reading TechCrunch From An Apple Device
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The iPad 2 and iPhone 5 are likely to push the Apple share forward immediately. But don’t sleep on OS X Lion either. The early indications are that Apple has indeed made it much more iOS-like. That means millions of iPad/iPhone/iPod touch owners who have traditionally been PC users, are going to feel a lot more comfortable on a Mac than ever before.
And a new PC-to-Mac data migration system built in to Lion will only help that.
OS X Lion is going to feed off of iOS users, and vice versa. And the Mac ecosystem is going to continue to expand. Just as happened in the browser world with Chrome taking over, a transition is happening among TechCrunch readers in the ecosystem space. The numbers don’t lie. And Microsoft better pray that our readers aren’t leading indicators of overall trends in the space — which is exactly what you have been in the past.
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Kinect幕后功臣：中国硬件团队设计核心部件_业界_科技时代_新浪网
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与美国总部的硬件团队相比，中国团队的强项是工程设计、电子电路、模具、机械、生产。但在最重要的前端研发、工业设计方面一直不强。微软亚洲硬件中心两年前开始转型，希望成为一个强调创新、能独立开发全球产品的团队。一方面，中国的高速发展吸引了更多国际工业设计人才加盟，另一方面，胡君明要求自己的团队尽快缩小与总部工程师之间的差距。为此，硬件中心特别制定了一个“请客吃饭”计划。每个到总部出差的工程师，不放过任何机会，边吃边聊结识总部最棒的工程师。在良好人际关系的基础上，获得那些天才们的指导和帮助，迅速提高自身能力。
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Motorola Xoom Android Tablet Review | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD
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easing its Xoom tablet on Feb. 24, and I consider it the first truly comparable competitor to Apple’s hit iPad. That is partly because it is the first iPad challenger to run Honeycomb, an elegant new version of Google’s Android ope
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Hacker News | I Disagree with Fred; Marketing is for Companies that Have Great Products
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Promotion is only a part of marketing.
The first thing you learn when studying marketing is the “four P’s” of the marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion. Advertising is a subset of promotion. How applicable advertising is to your company’s marketing strategy depends on your company.
I don’t see much value in any broad-stroke commentary, but it’s at least good to understand what marketing is and what it’s composed of. Creating a product is as much about marketing as buying an ad.
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How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors
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Media is all about profit margins. eHow was originally founded in 1998 & had $36 million in venture capital behind it. But the original cost structure was flawed due to high content costs. The site failed so badly that it was sold in 2004 for $100,000. The original site owners had GoogleBot blocked. Simply by unblocking GoogleBot and doing basic SEO to existing content the site had a revenue run rate of $4 million Dollars within 2 years, which allowed the site to be flipped for a 400-fold profit.
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Archive for February, 2011
My daily readings 02/28/2011
February 28, 2011My daily readings 02/26/2011
February 26, 2011-
华为终端换帅新政：攻击前进才是最好的成长_通讯与电讯_科技时代_新浪网
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2003年下半年华为终端公司成立时，最初是作为华为网络设备的终端配套。2004年至2005年，华为终端抓住了一次全球机会——过去的上网卡都需要安装使用软件，每次启动时要输入密码，不是很方便，而华为利用USB接口，将上网卡改为即插即用，初次使用自动安装软件，之后基本上都是一键登录，这种上网卡迅速击败其它外国品牌上网卡厂商，华为终端由此崭露头角。
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无论是前述的智能手机还是平板电脑，都是智能终端。如何保障华为在智能终端技术上的领先呢？一个名为“管端云”的战略被提出来了。
按照华为内部的说法，所谓“管端云”就是一种业务和运维架构，其中的“云”主要是新一代数据中心和新一代业务平台。第二，其中的“管”，就是指管道，即能支撑大流量、做到智能化的管道。第三是“端”，就是和用户的界面，需要做到终端的智能化、信息的多媒体呈现。
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“2010年我们发货约为1.2亿台，在这样的规模格局下，不进则退，防守就是死亡，攻击前进才是最好的成长。”在由万飚签发的一份致华为终端员工的邮件中，万飙如此吹响了他的新政号角。
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My daily readings 02/25/2011
February 25, 2011-
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The killer apps on the iPad continue to be centered around content consumption and, more recently, gaming. Productivity apps exist, however there are still many usage models that demand the fast response time of a full blown PC or the convenience of a keyboard/mouse, higher resolution display and real working desktop.
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Enterprise Cloud Storage Platform Box.net Raises $48M From Andreessen Horowitz And Others
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So how is Box performing in terms of sales? CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie says that Box tripled revenue in 2010, which he says was in the eight figure range, and he fully expects to double, triple or even quadruple that number this year. While the company is not yet cash flow positive, Levie says that Box is approaching that milestone.
Levie clearly has big ambitions for Box. First and foremost, Box.net wants to take on Microsoft Sharepoint, and has aggressively campaigned for existing Sharepoint users to switch to the company’s cheaper, simpler option. Levie says, “Box is positioned to redefine an industry, much as Salesforce.com has done for CRM and NetSuite for ERP…We want to bring Box’s cloud content management to businesses of all sizes, all over the world…”
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My daily readings 02/24/2011
February 24, 2011-
(5) What motivates an early employee to work in a startup? – Quora
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Hacker News | MIT OpenCourseWare Turns 10: What’s Next for Open Education?
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Hacker News | Buying VMWare Fusion: A lesson in how to drive customers away
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Hacker News | TinyGrab abandons iOS because of new App Store rules
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MIT OpenCourseWare Turns 10: What’s Next for Open Education?
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Chromium Blog: Amping Up Chrome’s Background Feature
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Apps and extensions that use the new “background” feature can continue to run in the background—even if the user closes down all of Chrome’s windows. “Background apps” will continue to run until Chrome exits. The next time Chrome starts up, any background windows that were previously running will also be re-launched. These windows are not going to be visible but they will be able to perform tasks like checking for server-side changes and pre-emptively loading content into local storage.
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One way you can use background windows is to preload content and data so that they are immediately available when the user opens your app. You could also issue HTML5 notifications to alert the user when important events occur—for example, a friend wants to initiate a chat session. There are plenty of possibilities here, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do.
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My daily readings 02/23/2011
February 23, 2011-
(Founder Stories) David Karp: “Making Money Off Tumblr Would Be Incredibly Easy”
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So why doesn’t he do that? As he goes onto explain, he’d rather find ways to make money that also “enhance the experience for our users.” Tumblr does charge for things like being featured in its directory or $9 themes users can buy to spruce up their Tumblog. Karp notes that some theme designers are making tens of thousands of dollars month. Still, these seem more like ancillary revenue streams than what will end up being Tumbr’s main revenue source down the line. Fortunately for Karp, he has patient investors and just raised $30 million to keep scaling the service and figure out a more natural business model.
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Google Pushes Gingerbread To Nexus One, Improves NFC Support On Nexus S
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Until now Tags has allowed users to tap their phone on NFC tags at various venues to read information off of them (unfortunately these aren’t very commonplace yet — I have yet to actually use the feature in a real-world situation). But this update also adds write support — you can now create your own tag on the phone, and specify what information you want to share, be it your contact information, a link to a website, or a snippet of text. Then, when someone else with an NFC-equipped device taps your phone with theirs, they’ll be able to immediately receive this information (much in the same way you would using Bump). And, if you happen to own any of those NFC stickers that Google likes to show off, you can use the phone to write data to those, too.
At this point the feature is going to be more of a novelty than anything, but it’s likely that the next iPhone will support NFC, and it won’t be long before we start using it for payments and third-party applications take advantage of it, too.
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My daily readings 02/22/2011
February 22, 2011-
(Founder Stories) Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don’t Work For Most People
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Tumblr CEO David Karp recently sat down with Chris Dixon for a Founder Stories interview in which explains how he started Tumblr four years ago as a reaction to other blogging tools out there. “All blogs took the same form,” he notes. “I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose.” People wanted to express themselves and blog, but he felt that the standard blogging platforms available at the time—Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad—were too complicated. “These tools I just don’t think worked for most people. It’s a commitment, you need to sit down for an hour and hammer out a post.”
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But don’t Twitter and Facebook lower those barriers even further? They do, but they lack a strong expressive identity, argues Karp. “They are not tools built for creative expression,” he says, adding: “Nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook.” Okay, he’s got a point there. Tumblr, in contrast, is built to be a place you can be proud to call your online home. It’s very design-oriented and you can customize your Tumblr to reflect your personality, but not in a cheesy MySpace way. For Twitter and Facebook, “expression isn’t necessarily something they care about.”
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An Open Letter to Apple | Readability Blog
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It’s worth restating that there already is a mobile web version that works across Android, iOS, etc. We’ve got big plans for mobile/tablet coming soon.
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Is The First Official Chrome OS Device A Monitor Or All-In-One PC? Nope.
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Long story short: the first official Chrome OS device will not be a monitor or an all-in-one PC. It will be a notebook. And it will launch in the middle of 2011.
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Despite 861.5 Percent Growth, Android Market Revenues Remain Puny
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According to a chart making the rounds from UK-based research firm IHS, Android Market revenues in 2010 came in at an estimated $102 million, up from $11 million the year before.
And how did that compare to revenues from Apple’s App Store? Apple App Store revenues came in at an estimated $1.7 billion in 2010, almost 20 times bigger than Android. And Apple App Store revenue grew at a not-too-shabby 131.9 percent rate. More importantly, Apple accounts for 83 percent of the total estimated app store revenues.
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My daily readings 02/19/2011
February 19, 2011-
Q: Insight to ranking Algorithm? – Android Market Help
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My app did pretty well in the ranking with 45% retention rate, but then after almost a year i released a new version and apparently some user realized that she still have my app installed and this dropped the retention from 45% to 36%.
However the comments and ratings are now even better. I had good ratings 50%+ 5 stars, then 10% for 4, 3, 2, 1 stars, and very well comments. Nowdays I got only 5 stars, but now I’m dropped from 6-8th place to 30th place.
Probably retention rate has much to do with app rankings.
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Google outlines plans for Android Market (Wired UK)
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Chu admitted that Google is a bit disappointed by the sales ofpaid apps on the Android Market, describing the company as “nothappy”. As a result, it’s planning a number of initiatives to tryand boost the figures a little.
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Firstly, Android will be getting an in-app payments system in the first quarter of 2011, whereusers can make purchases within an app.
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Access to a social graph is increasingly important for appdevelopers too. Google is planning to utilise your handset’saddress book to tap your social network, as the likes of Facebook,Twitter and others already interface with it on Android.
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Android Market Ranking Algorithm: The New Black Box – Asteroid B613
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In my time working with the Android Market (which would be about a year and a half), I’ve watched two different apps, one paid and one free, fluctuate in rankings. I’ve also watched how other apps across all categories perform over time. Early on I realized there was no standard order like on the iPhone app store. With iTunes, rank is purely download based. Sell the most, you’re the top. It’s simple, it works, and people want to sort products by bestselling (e.g. BestBuy.com, New York Times Bestseller list, etc). But Google had other ideas…
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All of this was gathered at Android conferences like Google I/O and keeping my ears open in the Android development community. I saw a tweet once from what I believe was a Google Labs session where the audience was told that anonymous usage statistics (i.e. length an app is usage and frequency) is a factor. How does that even make any sense? I can run a GPS app for 8 hours, but only spend 10 seconds with a Tip Calculator app. Both are listed in the same category. One would benefit and the other would suffer.
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My daily readings 02/18/2011
February 18, 2011-
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There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests.
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The point of all of this is not to argue about the value of the interest graph compared to the social graph. It’s simply to recognize that they’re different things, obey different social rules, have different opportunities and challenges and different types of value, and ultimately are influencing each other in increasingly interesting and complex ways.
Like always, the most successful entrepreneurs and investors will be the people who not only take advantage of the increasing clarity between these two graphs, but through their products and services amplify how we use them to make business and life more fun, easy, and successful.
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Levchin and Gurley Say That Next Big Company Will Capture The Interest Graph
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Facebook looks to capitalize on this by “renting” their graph to websites through Facebook Connect, which, he says, “is exceptionally powerful” and in turn may lead to their successfully “replacing core messaging services.” And if Facebook does become the Web’s next communication platform, then it will “be undoubtedly in the running for the most valuable company in the world.” Considering the importance of communication in our digital world, I think few would disagree with his conjecture.
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In support of Levchin’s point, Gurley recounted the similar example of how Netflix had originally implemented a social graph model into their movie recommendation system but quickly found that it wasn’t nearly as effective as other types of recommendation algorithms. For many, it would seem intuitive that socially-generated recs would be great indicators of what we’d like, but it’s also true that most of us hang out with friends that have at least a few special hobbies or passions that are very different from our own.
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As such, what everyone in Silicon Valley and “Venture Land” conceive of as the real game-changing model involves capturing and capitalizing on the “interest graph,” he says. The company that succeeds in doing so would be “close to the Google search paradigm because it would be right in line with demand generation and with discovery that relates to product purposes.”
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I think we can be sure that whoever can collect a record of your current interests and package them for advertisers stands to make a lot of money. Levchin says that Twitter may end up being a more advantageous platform to advertisers because it allows you to follow a brand and get realtime information and updates — through brand discovery and celebrity discovery — which is more likely to be informative than what you get from your friends, who may not be experts. Twitter has said that it believes that it has control over the interest graph, but status updates don’t really provide the depth and contextualization that is really needed. Of course, the interest graph isn’t exclusive. Facebook, Twitter, and startups like Gravity are hoping to capitalize on it — though something tells me that Levchin wants to bring a slice of the interest graph to Google as well.
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The only hope for truly assembling a person’s interest graph is to connect implicit user data across a huge swath of web and mobile services. Google knows what you search for. EBay and Amazon know what you own. Apple knows what music and media you like. Apps like foursquare, GetGlue and CardStar know where you spend your time, what you watch on TV, and where you shop.
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“citing demand generation and demand discovery (search) advertising as a prime example of the limitations of the social graph. “
Google ads are not for demand generation, nor discovery; Facebook ads are. You already know what you want to get when you search for it. That part is demand fulfillment. On the other hand, you might “discover” that you really like those Nike shoes your friend just bought when you see his status update about it.
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My daily readings 02/17/2011
February 17, 2011-
Apple’s Digital Newsstand Just Disrupted The Publishing Industry
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You could argue that iTunes is the new digital newsstand, and so it deserves a cut. True, it does deserve something, but let’s compare what Apple wants to take with what a real newsstand collects. Typically, magazine companies take as much as 75 percent of the cover price of a magazine sold at a newsstand, which shows who has the pricing power in that relationship. But that is on a per-issue basis. The newsstands are merely lead generators which get people to sample magazines and newspapers before a portion of those people convert to paying subscribers. The newsstands don’t get anything extra for helping to bring in a new subscriber, forget about an ongoing cut of the subscription fee. Of course there are services that deliver subscribers to publishers, but even they don’t get an ongoing cut of the subscription. It’s more of a lead-gen type deal.
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My daily readings 02/15/2011
February 15, 2011-
Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn’t Want to See Carol Bartz
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A lot has changed since the last time Ma was in negotiations with Silicon Valley. Back then it was companies like Yahoo that were surging, while China seemed an uncertain gamble. Today, two of the five largest Internet companies are Chinese, and TaoBao and payments company Alipay are two of the hottest private assets on the global Web. As we saw with Tencent’s purchase of Riot Games this month, a decade after most Valley companies failed to do well in China, China is getting more aggressive about expanding in the US.
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3 Months To The First Million Users, Just 6 Weeks To The Second Million For Instagram
获取用户好快呀
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Back in late December of last year, we noted a huge milestone for photo-sharing app Instagram: a million users. As we noted at the time, remarkably, it took them only three months to hit the mark. That’s crazy when you consider it took Foursquare a full year to hit that mark. And it took Twitter two years! Well now Instagram’s insane growth has also been made to look small: by Instagram.
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