a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Hey it’s Lego’s 55th year and they are celebrating with some very cool riddle based posters getting you to use your imagination to solve the “mystery.” The series is really very cool and some are quite challenging as well. Just like Legos … They’ve got a Tumblr apparently as well though the page seems to be MIA at the moment.
via PSFK, though Gizmodo has captured some higher res versions as well.
I just had the pleasure of this message when calling AT&T. Their site seems to be down at the moment from enabling account info so I was directed to this number. I didn’t even hear my state … Amazing.
Great piece in Fast Company profiling Kevin Rose and his investing process, not too mention his lifestyle which seems remarkably balanced these days. Recommended reading …
I stumbled across a great piece on Network World recapping a presentation from Tony Fadell from the Bloomberg Design Conference. The most amazing point captured was that Apple would ship 99% of the products worked on vs his experience at Philips earlier in his career where the ratio was the exact opposite!
The video above comes from Behance via Wubbahed and is well worth a watch.
Some additional highlights …
2.2 Billion of us are using email to send 144 Billion daily messages of which 61% are considered non-essential. 68.8% of mail is considered spam of which 50.76% was related to pharma.
Brazil is the most active country on Facebook with over 85K posts per month. There are an average of 2.7 likes per active monthly user on Facebook.
Google+ has 135 million active users, but generates 5 Billion +1 clicks per day!
This seriously looks amazing. Open ended game play with a ton of characters from the Disney universe. Physical toy integration as well as a whole digital universe.
I cannot wait to play this … with my kids! Have a feeling we are going to need a few different sets to get this going. Launches with 3 … many more to come.
via PixarPost
Remember when everyone could get a new iPhone on release day regardless of when their contract was set? I do … That’s changed and now we are all back to the standard mobile upgrade cycle. Price matters.
Apple’s orders for iPhone 5 screens for the January-March quarter, for example, have dropped to roughly half of what the company had previously planned to order, two of the people said.
The Cupertino, Calif., company has also cut orders for components other than screens, according to one of the people.
Apple notified the suppliers of the order cut last month, the people said.
The move indicates that sales of the new iPhone haven’t been as strong as previously anticipated and demand may be waning. It comes as the company has been facing greater challenges from Samsung Electronics Co. 005930.SE +1.24% and other makers of smartphones powered by Google Inc.’s GOOG -0.20% Android operating system.
via WSJ.com.
Twitter Engineering reveals how they ensure short term spikes in search lead to qualified content. Pretty awesome. The new news.
More power to Aereo … I’ve played with a demo account and it works quite well. Tempting even.
Ad Age: So broadcasters shouldn’t have dual revenue streams, like cable channels?
Mr. Kanojia: I don’t know their business at all. All I know is the current paradigm is this: They have [broadcast] spectrum. They are required to program in the public interest and to offer it widely for free. You are allowed to have an antenna. There is no prohibition on where you have it; it can be on your roof, your window or 50 feet away; in my computer or in the cloud. Tell me what the dispute is? Because you didn’t see it coming? That is really what it is.
Ad Age: But since fees are so important to broadcast now, why shouldn’t they fight it?
Mr. Kanojia: Technology catches up. When the VCR came out there was the same hyperbole: It’s going to kill television. They made billions. It spawned a whole industry of home video. These technologies [Aereo] are single-cast, they know where you are. I think they are just ignoring that technologies like these are immensely helpful in attracting younger audiences and are helpful in creating new ad models.
via Advertising Age
Solid piece on The Verge about the risks and rewards of paid vs free apps for the end user and your data. People assume that if it’s paid there’s likely to be more of an implied trust your data and time spent accruing the data is safer than with free where you are more likely to monetized. Things are far from black and white however as plenty of companies still sell access to you or even sell ads on top of the experience. Others go bust or get acquired changing the original plans. What’s needed is a sure-fire system to get your data out when the time comes …
Mike Masnick at Techdirt nicely covered this recently as well.
The online gaming market reportedly represented over 90 percent of revenue, bringing in $9.1 billion (RMB 56.96 billion). Mobile gaming still represented a small part of the market, with just $520 million (RMB 3.24 billion) in revenue. Dedicated gaming devices, which operate in a legal grey area, accounted for just 0.1 percent of sales.
Looking ahead, the report expects the Chinese game market to swell to $21.7 billion (RMB 135.2 billion) by 2017 with a projected annual growth rate of 12.4 percent.
via The Next Web.
Time Warner Cable is going to let you use a Roku to access your cable subscription. While this isn’t fully decoupled service it’s still pretty awesome for Roku owners. Being able to do everything through a single box – that’s not your crappy cable box – would be excellent.
“The availability of a service like TWC TV on an open platform represents significant milestones for both Time Warner Cable and Roku as well as for the industry overall,” said Anthony Wood, Roku’s founder and CEO. Unfortunately, there are some restrictions to just how “open” that experience is. Like the TWC TV apps for iOS, Android, and the desktop, compatible Roku hardware will need to be running on a subscriber’s home network to access live TV; you won’t be able to stream your favorite channels remotely. And while over 300 stations will be available, you’ll obviously be limited according to whatever’s included in your cable package. via The Verge
Speaking of TV … In what’s being seen as a very strategic maneuver, HBO has re-upped it’s contract with Universal to ensure it maintains exclusive access to the content – through 2022!
So what does this likely mean for us, the consumer? I’d say more of the same. No way to access HBO beyond extending your MSO relationship. Our household isn’t quite ready to cut the cord, though we certainly find plenty “over the top.”
I suppose things would be radically different if we didn’t have to authenticate first on things like the XBox where Cablevision has yet to cut a deal. We can connect the ESPN application which is quite solid, but there’s no way to add in additional content really beyond the usual sources like Netflix etc and that’s not replacing even the moderately poor TV the family enjoys. Without being able to watch Bravo, I’m never convincing the wife there are alternatives.
MG Siegler has solid POV on the potential for Samsung this year. I don’t normally quote this much, but for context …
Not only is it bigger than Apple from a revenue standpoint, it’s almost twice as large as the three other “horsemen” combined ($190 billion versus what should be about $100 billion for Amazon, Facebook, and Google in 2012). And unlike Amazon and Facebook which make little or no profit, Samsung is hugely profitable. $12 billion in profit for 2011 should move closer to $20 billion in 2012. That’s not a ton compared to Apple ($55 billion in profit in 2012), but it should be roughly twice as much profit as Google pulls in for the year.
But let’s forget the money and go back to Android. Samsung is so important and deserves a place with the other horsemen because it is the most important piece of the Android ecosystem beyond Google. And it seems that the company is at least exploring the possibility of taking a step back from that ecosystem, or hedging its bet. That could be the story of 2013.
Imagine Samsung, with 40 to 50 percent of the Android market, breaking away to focus on Tizen. Or perhaps more realistically, imagine Samsung forking Android for its own purposes while exploring the Tizen possibilities. Not only can the company afford to do it, there may be several incentives to do so.
Amazon is closing in on its own phone running a forked version of Android in a similar manner to its Kindle Fire tablets. The first iterations of that tablet weren’t great, but they’re getting better. And because it now has its own forked Android app store, Amazon is going to be in control of the entire ecosystem. Samsung has no such control if it remains a loyal Android partner.
Maybe it’s okay with that, but Samsung must be looking at how profitable Apple is as a result of its total control. Shitty mobile skins only give the illusion of control, Samsung needs to control the full stack. And given its position of power, the company has the leverage to do that if it chooses to.
And it’s not just an offensive imperative, it’s a defensive one too. Google continues to say the right things publicly about maintaining distance from its Motorola unit with regard to Android. Of course, it says this with the Google X phone project well underway. A true Google phone.
Perhaps it’s a project meant less to scare Samsung and more to fight back against Google’s true bane: its carrier partners. Or maybe it’s Google hedging against Samsung’s position of power. It doesn’t matter. The Google/Samsung relationship is starting to show signs of strain, and they’re only going to get more pronounced — exhibit A.
Beyond mobile devices, the hot topic for 2013 is the future of television. Most of this is focused around Apple with a little bit reserved for Google’s TV projects. But it’s once again Samsung that is already the leader in the space. Sure, it’s the old school (shitty margin) television space, but why doesn’t anyone think that Samsung can translate its success in smartphones here as well? It simply hasn’t really tried yet.
Perhaps that’s another part of the Tizen equation. Or maybe a forked Android will find its way here as well. But Samsung has a huge head start on Apple, Google and everyone else. via TechCrunch.
Bloomberg’s report on Samsung’s desire to launch Tizen-based handsets to push away from Android is definitely interesting. The initial product is apparently going to NTT Docomo in Japan which means we’ll have to wait here in the US. Should Samsung decide to release a Tizen varient of the Galaxy IV later this year, most (Samsung) consumers would probably consider it the next generation Galaxy rather than focus on the operating system. If Samsung can successfully migrate their existing apps and deliver against some of the core Google bits they are going to have a winning hand. This is far from simple or a sure thing …
The future of TV is a big deal. While everyone is waiting for Apple to reveal their solution, Samsung already has massive scale, huge profits to accomodate risk (like Apple) and an existing ecosystem of devices along with a brewing selection of branded apps. Now, it’s been pointed out more than a few times, that the current Smart TV market is a complicated mess and it’s also likely to be massively expensive to get the ala carte services we all want.
This week CES will reveal some likely candidates … let’s hope they aren’t just based on speeds and feeds … we need some connected systems here to make it all work and work well.
I share a lot. Perhaps not so much here these days as it’s a been more challenging for whatever reason to balance client flow with the blog, but maybe 2013 will provide an opportunity for more.
Anyway recently I’ve discovered Quibb which is an interesting new platform for content sharing within an organization. It’s designed to share links and ideas somewhat vertically but also provide access to the usual friend / follow mechanism so you can find interesting things as well as jump into discussions.
As I’ve played around a bit there, it has me reflecting more on the potential for Branch and their recent addition of Groups which are focused areas of discussion though also publicly viewable.
Quora is the elder statesmen of this newer generation of discussion and has been building out beyond the initial tech-set who built the base. I’ve spent the most time here historically though recently my interest has waned … I don’t think these suggested hot topics are doing much to bring me back either:
I’d be curious to see what if any places people are using for both content discovery as well as discussion beyond the facebook and twitter zones which are fine, but the depth of discussion tends to be much deeper elsewhere. At least that I’ve found …
Amazon has a very cool subscription manager for magazines which I’ve just seen today thanks to a holiday gift subscription from my dad. But check out the estimated delivery window …
Gotta hand it to PayPal … they pretty much have every base covered now. Whether people use all this stuff is another thing, but the pre-paid enablement for eCommerce is very smart.
I don’t see any mention of fee structure … which is typically and unfortunately fairly predatory in under-banked products.
via TechCrunch.
The inevitable reality of ads appear to be en route to Instagram via the Facebook acquisition. I get it, it can’t all be free (I do work in marketing) but I was hoping there might be more attention to things like integration as a first priority.
Only recently have Facebook notifications been including Instagram content that you can actually see. For a while many of the times I’d see someone had liked a pic (via FB) and not been able to click through to the actual media. This was particularly annoying on mobile as the link would essentially be a dead end. Now, that’s fixed but those likes don’t travel into Instagram and comments are carried through two separate streams … One on Facebook and another on Instagram. Once these merge, we’ll have a single coherent thread which will be quite excellent … If people still keep sharing through all the ads of course.
When I learned via The Verge that Twitter’s long rumored photo filters were live for Android, I loaded up the Google Play Store and updated my app to snap my first filtered pic. The experience was certainly functional, but that’s about it.
Twitter image with filter. Probably won’t use this much. twitter.com/atmasphere/sta…
— Jonathan Greene (@atmasphere) December 10, 2012
I don’t ever snap pics from within the Twitter app to start so that makes it a long shot right from the beginning for my usage … That said, just adding a filter doesn’t really make a difference to limited sharing experience. Instead, Twitter seems to have released a very poor man’s Instagram – and right after Instagram decided to remove it’s twitter card-based sharing.
Unfortunately for Twitter, simply adding a filter to an image doesn’t change how sharing, discussion or notifications work within their system … all critical features elsewhere. Twitter is a very real time focused zone and that’s it’s real strength. There is limited if any threaded discussion (no real threads) and certainly nothing really orgainzed fashion at the core of the service either. By comparison, when I share a picture on Facebook, Instagram, PicPlz (now dead), Google+ or others you can create social engagement around that object. Twitter does make things easy enough to link to, but there’s no sense of activity on that shared piece and no real draw back to it from those who have engaged. Those last two pieces are what twitter needs to fix … Disposable stylized media was the easy part.