Beyond Tablets: The Next Five Computing Form Factors - Sarah Rotman Epps - Voices - AllThingsD
Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity | Xconomy
Excerpt:
For its next act, the Silicon Valley giant wants to put a supercomputer in your pocket, the better to sense, search, and interpret your personal surroundings. We talked to the scientists who are making it happen.
Sent from Mobile
Easier is Better than Better
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice.
“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”
Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message they are spreading and because we have heard of them before.
When it comes to our own designs, we imagine people being able to make informed decisions on what the next step should be. However, they are already making 400+ decisions throughout the rest of the day that are likely more important than what they will deal with in our design.
Do you think most people realize there are benefits to driving a manual transmission car over an automatic? Do you think they care? Automatic is easier to pick up so why bother with any other choice? How often do we stay in relationships that we shouldn’t, simply because it’s easier to just deal with it than face the repercussions of having to confront the person?
3 Reasons to Believe in the Death of "Smartphones" (GOOG)
Excerpt:
Devices that were once special aren't anymore. They're the standard.
Sent from Mobile
Millions of Reasons for Apple to Worry (AAPL, AMZN)
Excerpt:
A million Kindles cleared in each of the past three holiday shopping weeks -- even if it's lumping the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G, and $199 Kindle Fire in one pot -- is impressive.
Amazon also has some encouraging milestones to discuss specifically about the Kindle Fire that was introduced last month.
"Kindle Fire is the most successful product we've ever launched," Amazon exec Dave Limp is quoted as saying in today's press release. "It's the best-selling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we've already sold millions of units, and we're building millions more to meet the high demand."
Limp also goes on to say that Kindle Fire sales have been accelerating in each of the past three weeks.
Nice! Having already sold "millions" means that Amazon has shipped out at least 2 million Kindle Fire devices.
Let's frame this a different way. Market tracker NPD Group stunned tech watchers when its channel checks revealed that there were just 1.2 million tablets -- outside of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL ) iPad -- sold in this country through the first 10 months of the year. In other words, Amazon has already outsold every other non-Apple tablet maker combined.
Sent from Mobile
The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained - NYTimes.com
Excerpt:
These C.E.O.’s may have had their own internal business reasons for these unpopular decisions. But they were internal, self-interested reasons. Reasons intended to please stockholders, perhaps.
Even so, all three committed several cardinal sins: Putting customers last. Rewarding loyalty with rudeness. Failing to make their cases to the public.
Sent from Mobile
On Pivoting
But some startups have barely come up with a plan. One group of founders knew from the beginning of the session that they were going to have to ditch their original idea, which was a tool to make real-time plans with friends. They used it as a way to get into the class but always intended to abandon it once they came up with something better. The trio—two engineers and a derivatives trader with degrees from Stanford and MIT—has been spending 14-hour days in front of a whiteboard, trying to brainstorm a promising concept. Time and again, they have proposed potential businesses to Graham; none of them worked out. But just before the first weekly dinner, they lit upon the idea of building a curated mailing list of high-demand jobs linked to college alumni networks. Graham gave them the go-ahead, and they are just getting under way with their new company, Insider Posts.
That kind of radical reinvention is standard practice here. Indeed, a sizable percentage of YC companies will, at some point, drastically rethink their business—a process known in the startup world as pivoting. During last winter’s session, an 18-year-old Israeli founder named Daniel Gross pulled the most notorious pivot in YC history. Two days before Demo Day, soon after his cofounder quit on him, the young engineer realized that his original business plan was fatally flawed. Gross concocted an entirely new idea, a site that would allow users to search all of their social networks at once. He quickly coded a demo and gave the pitch. Within a year, he had launched the product. Now his company, Greplin, has $4.8 million in funding.
Helen Belogolova and Christine Yen are trying to accomplish a similarly successful pivot. When the two MIT grads interviewed for Y Combinator, they outlined their vision for Citythings, a site to help people discover local events. Over the next few months, they realized it wasn’t working and dropped the idea. But as they researched, they discovered another potential business: Because venues for special events often sit unused even as party and conference planners spend days trying to find space, Belogolova and Yen decided to set up a system that connected planners with available spaces. Citythings would become Venuetastic. Pivot completed.
HP Offers Business Savings With Two Leasing Promotions - Yahoo! Finance
Excerpt:
PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire -12/13/11)- HP (NYSE: HPQ - News) today announced two leasing promotions that can help businesses deploy the latest technology while conserving capital for strategic purposes.
The "1-2-3" and "90 Day" deferral programs are offered to qualifying businesses in the United States and Canada through HP Financial Services, the company's leasing and asset management subsidiary.(1)
The programs can help businesses expand their capabilities and evolve to Instant-On Enterprises, where everything and everyone is connected. Instant-On Enterprises require IT environments that are flexible, automated, secure and able to quickly adjust to changing demand.
Sent from Mobile
2012: Siri Is a Stunner, Amazon Is Amazin' and Security Gets Spendy - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD
Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”
What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”
Sent from Mobile
Design of Flipboard iPhone app
NPR: Making Facebook Private Is 'Oxymoronic'
Sent from Mobile
Here comes the Post-It Printer
Cute print box + easy connectivity + humor sense = http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/#!prettyPhoto
The King of Human Error
The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)
Tablet makers without content may exit
Excerpt:
A report from Asia on Thursday says that tablet device makers who don’t have content to sell may follow Hewlett-Packard Co. 's lead and pull out of the market before long.
The report in Digitimes cites unnamed Asian suppliers who said that Acer, Asustek and Dell Inc. are all contemplating phasing out of tablets in 2012.
The problem, according to the report, is that they can't compete on price against Apple Inc. 's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad, Amazon.com Inc. 's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble 's Nook Tablet.
That is because those three tablets are tied to companies with big content stores, enabling them to cut prices below what companies that are just making devices can offer.
The $199 Kindle Fire and $249 Nook Tablet are both said to be priced below what they cost to make.
Digitimes' sources even said that it is conceivable that some tablets will eventually be given away for free in order to sell products from these companies' stores.
Sent from Mobile
Comparison: Tablet v Smartphone
Excerpt:
There are several reasons why a daring company like Amazon, uninterested in having its fate determined by Apple’s total control of iOS and Google’s total lack of control over Android, would want to chart its own course in mobile. Dan Frommer at SplatF nicely outlined several reasons how this could work out well for Amazon.
—Different Paths: But as the iPad and tablet-wannabes mature, we’re learning just how different smartphones are than tablets. In these early days, the average tablet spends most of its time in the house. A huge percentage of them are Wi-Fi only, lacking a connection to mobile data networks through wireless carriers. And while apps are still important, Web surfing is more common on tabletsthan on smartphones.
Smartphones, on the other hand, need to be available and accessible everywhere. They’re mostly sold at retail by wireless carriers, who find ways to exert their own (and often competing) interests on the phones they sell. And applications are more important, which is why fragmentation is such a prevalent issue among Android developers confronted with an array of screen sizes and custom user interfaces across Android phones.
Sent from Mobile
How Fast Is Apple's IPhone 4S? | The Daily Feed | Minyanville.com
Even the venerable iPhone 4 gets a speed bump with IOS5! =)
Sent from Mobile
Apple Headed for 60 Percent of Handset Industry Operating Profits - John Paczkowski - Mobile - AllThingsD
Excerpt:
With the iPhone, Apple is doing to the smartphone business what it has done to the PC business with the Mac: Generating a disproportionate share of profits relative to revenue.
In its third quarter, Apple captured more than half of the handset industry’s overall operating profits — 52 percent, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley. And it managed it with only a 4.2 percent global handset unit market share.
Sent from Mobile
10 Years of iPod
When the original iPod first came out 10 years ago, the concept didn't seem novel to those who had already hopped on the MP3 player bandwagon. What was new—aside from its deep integration with Apple's music store—was the physical design. The minimalist layout, the screen with playlists, the easy-access buttons—and oh, the scroll wheel! These were all elements that made up a signature Apple design.
The iPod in all of its manifestations has now been part of our lives for a decade now, and it has become clear that the world fancies its design. Whether in its original form or in a shrunken downand slightly manipulated format, the influence of the original iPod has remained part of American pop culture for a decade. Everywhere you look, there are iPods—iPod shuffles attached to people at the gym, iPod touches and every generation of nano being fiddled with on the subway, iPod classics, and iPhones being toted on airplanes.
How did the iPod's original design morph over time? Let's look back.
Sent from MobileWhat Matias Duarte's been up to: Ice Cream Sandwich
Excerpt:
“I thought ‘okay you know what, I’ve tried to win so many times before,’ and it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter how great a product you have and how revolutionary the product is… distribution and marketshare are the things that matter.” Matias smiles, “Now I’m going the other way around.”
Mining data for competitive edges - Barrons.com
Excerpt:
"Big data" is the big new buzz phrase in technology, and Teradata is the Big Daddy of the field.
Big data refers to vast amounts of diverse, unstructured data that are difficult for traditional analytical systems to handle. Social media networks such as Google (ticker: GOOG) and Facebook, for instance, collect massive amounts of data—text, photographs, charts—that come steadily from all directions. Companies from a range of industries are digging through information mountains like these in search of patterns and competitive edges. Pursuits like genomics, astronomy, military surveillance and radio-frequency identification technology are also contributing to the explosive growth of the field.
The challenge in this kind of analysis is to dig deeply, quickly and widely. The industry calls it the Three Vs: volume, velocity and variety. And Teradata's systems master the challenge.
Sent from Mobile
Siri: Friendly & Conversational
Excerpt:
Based on $150 million of research by the Stanford Research Institute and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Siri melds speech input, a soothing-if-robotic synthesized female voice, natural-language processing technology, location awareness, and integration with Yelp and the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine into something new and amazing.
You begin by holding down the Home button or simply lifting the phone to your ear, then you tell Siri how it can help you. All of the following spoken requests, and dozens more, worked perfectly for me:
"Remind me to call my wife when I get home."
"Schedule a call with Tom at 2pm"
"Wake me up at midnight tomorrow."
"Find me a Portuguese restaurant in San Francisco."
"What is 14,000 Japanese Yen in U.S. dollars?"
"When did William Howard Taft die?
Apple says Siri is in beta, but it's already remarkably clever and conversational. It understands family relationships, and if you haven't told it who your spouse or mom is, it'll ask, then remember. If you have seven Toms in your contacts, as I do, it'll list them all and ask which one you meant. It notices when you've arrived at your home or office. You can tell it "I'm hungry" or ask "Is there a God?" or "Where is Apple?" and it'll understand and say something relevant in response.
(MORE: Siri: Can Apple Sell the Concept of Natural Language Computing?)
True, Siri isn't going to beat IBM's Watson supercomputer at Jeopardy anytime soon: There are lots of things you might want it to do—such as provide spoken driving directions—that are beyond its current skills. In fact, it's missing some cool features from the original Siri app, such as movie information and flight statuses. And as I've tried it, it's sometimes failed to understand me or just plain stalled.
Still, Siri is breathtaking for a beta. If voice-activated assistants are all around us in five or ten years, we'll look back and say it all started here.
It's the iPhone 4, Only More So
Excerpt:
"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." That was Steve Jobs talking in 2007, as he was about to introduce the first iPhone. He was right about it being a landmark. But he was also correct that it was a once-in-a-while event. Most products—including Apple ones—are merely evolutionary and only change some things.
Fortunately, Apple isn't just an expert at revolution; it also does evolution uncommonly well. Consider its newiPhone 4S, which went on sale on Friday. (The company loaned me one for review.)
As the 4S's very name acknowledges, it's no radical rethinking of last year's iPhone 4: There's a lot that hasn't changed at all, plus a few major new features and some minor tweaks. That's prompted somegrumbling, but it's okay: The iPhone 4 was an exceptional phone in the first place, and the 4S is that much more exceptional. And one new arrival—it goes by the name Siri—might just turn out to be the beginnings of a bona-fide revolution.
How Important Is iOS?
Apple
Back then, the company was doing $24 billion in annual sales, with desktops and laptops combined accounting for almost 43% of revenue and iPods contributing 35%. Over the past several years, the breakdown has dramatically shifted heavily toward the iPhone, while the iPad was just introduced last year. Here's a breakdown using full-year data.
Apple's fiscal year closes at the end of September, so this data above goes only through September 2010. The company is scheduled to report fourth-quarter and full fiscal 2011 results on Tuesday. The past three quarters have been whoppers, so it wouldn't be fair to leave them out.
The picture is crystal clear: iOS devices now comprise the vast majority of Apple's revenue.
Sent from Mobile
What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs
Excerpt:
We mentioned much of the good Jobs did during his career earlier. His accomplishments were far-reaching and impossible to easily summarize. But here's one way of looking at the scope of his achievement: It's the dream of any entrepreneur to effect change in one industry. Jobs transformed half a dozen of them forever, from personal computers to phones to animation to music to publishing to video games. He was a polymath, a skilled motivator, a decisive judge, a farsighted tastemaker, an excellent showman, and a gifted strategist.
One thing he wasn't, though, was perfect. Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees—the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements—have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple's success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.
Sent from Mobile
History and Technology Reality Promise Another Steve Jobs, Apple and American Economic Boom
Excerpt:
Sent from Mobile
Blurry Vision: How Corporate Boards and the Consulting Industry Undermine the Future of Great Companies
Excerpt:
When I wrote about “Kodak’s Entrepreneurial Failure,” last week, I didn’t have all the details about the company’s decline and fall from greatness. A few days later, however, one of the readers—a formerKodak (NYSE:EK) middle manager—connected the dots for me.
In the early 1980s, Kodak did undergo a successful entrepreneurial transformation from the traditional film business to digital photography—a $20 billion annual business. But by the late 1980s, the board of directors, at the advice of outside consultants, dismantled the digital business division, switching resources back to the company’s “core” film business!
Kodak’s blurry vision is neither new nor unique in the corporate world, as the boards of a number of great American companies have been blindsided by untested ideas promoted by the consulting industry—that often end up enriching its own bottom line rather than the bottom line of its clients.
Mashable - The Social Media Guide
Excerpt:
Quick Pitch: Pinterest is a digital pinboard for things you love.
Genius Idea: A bookmark that makes it easy to save photos from any webpage.
When Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann was looking for an engagement ring for his girlfriend, he turned to his own product for inspiration. He found the right one on the list of a jewelry enthusiast, and pinned it to his digital board.
He also used Pinterest to help plan the wedding, keep track of potential future vacation destinations, list his family’s favorite recipes and just remember images that fit the title “little things I love.”
This flexibility is part of Pinterest’s draw. Expressing passion for a hobby is just as easy as browsing for your next purchase. But what’s even more addictive about the site — a collection of collections — is that it’s just as much about the users as it is what they’ve posted.
“The things you collect say a lot about you, and we wanted to bring that experience online,” says Silbermann.
Here’s how Pinterest works: Users create lists about anything and fill them with photos from around the web. They can follow other lists and users, and “repin” specific items. An Instapaper-like bookmark makes adding to a list from anywhere much easier than writing a blog post or uploading an image to a photo-sharing service. And the browser experience is ideal for the small attention spans of web readers — almost no text, almost all pictures.
Pinterest revealed Friday that it had raised a $27 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
The site is still not open to the public, and users need to request an invitation to use it. Silbermann says that there are no monetization plans in the works. It’s unusual for a startup in private beta to get this much attention from a top investment firm — especially a startup with no clear path to making money.
Sent from Mobile
Cards app
Excerpt:
Were you surprised by Apple’s announcement of the new Cards app for iPhone? You shouldn’t be — it’s a multi-billion dollar industry that has so far weathered the recession better than most.
According to the U.S. Greeting Card Association, Americans send 7 billion greeting cards every year, with the average household buying 30 cards. Retail sales of greeting cards within the States are estimated to be in excess of $7.5 billion.
The figures are no less impressive when you leave U.S. shores. The UK’s Greeting Card Association reports £1.386 billion was spent on “single” (as opposed to multipack) cards alone in the last year. The UK card industry has also seen annual growth — a value increase of 3% and a volume increase of 2.7% — in the face of tough retail conditions.
Sent from Mobile
The cult of the superstar CEO
Excerpt:
That at least is the clear conclusion to emerge from research conducted by Jim Collins, the author of a number of best-selling books about what makes companies great. Particularly fascinating are the findings he reported in his book “Good To Great,” published a decade ago.
For that book, Collins identified companies in the Fortune 500 whose shares, at some point since the early 1960s, went from merely keeping up with the market itself to outperforming it by a margin of at least 3 to 1 over a period of at least 15 years. He then constructed a control group of similar companies that never underwent this transformation from good to great.
Collins found that the mediocre companies were far more likely than the great ones to appoint superstar CEOs as white knights. In fact, Collins told me in an interview a few years ago, more than two-thirds of these mediocre companies “tried the outside savior model, and it didn’t work.”
In contrast, more than 90% of the good-to-great companies appointed their CEOs from within, and those CEOs hardly met the criteria of being a superstar: They remained largely unknown to the outside world.
From this and other findings, Collins concluded that “bringing in a white knight to be CEO is a recipe for mediocrity.”
Sent from Mobile
How The Echo Nest is Powering the Internet's Musical Brain | Fast Company
Eventually, the most successful music companies may not be the ones that create, play, or sell music. Rather, they may be the ones to collect the most music data. In this race, Somerville, Massachusetts-based the Echo Nest is ahead. It's an ever-growing, easily searchable database (called the Musical Brain) of every possible data point for more than 30 million songs--and it's not for you, or any consumer. "We put it all in the hands of the people who create the new ways that we discover and interact with music," says CEO Jim Lucchese. Right now, that means 7,000-plus app developers, plus some heavy names like MTV. These folks create platforms to sell music, and the Echo Nest takes a cut. Below, a sampling of the services and how versatile music data can be.
Infographic: Melodic Middleman 
PlanetTran, Uber and RelayRides Want To Take You On A Fantastic (And Green) Voyage | Fast Company
Excerpt:
Sent from Mobile
The Zynga Conundrum
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/159/zynga-facebook-relationship
excerpt:
The oxpecker is an African bird that ekes out a living from the ticks that live on the backs of rhinoceroses. I imagine even it would be embarrassed by Zynga's dependency on Facebook.
That the details of the Zynga-Facebook relationship still had the capacity to shock--as they did when Zynga disclosed its financials in preparation for its initial public offering--underscores just how deeply the game maker's fortunes rely on Mark Zuckerberg's goodwill. Not only does Zynga derive "substantially all" of its customers and revenue (almost $600 million in 2010) through the social network, but in a five-year agreement that it signed last year, Zynga also promised to give Facebook a heads-up before it releases any new game on the social network and to grant Facebook exclusive access to those games.
Of course, Zynga is not alone. Silicon Valley is littered with companies whose fortunes are tied to what you might call "OPP"--other people's platforms. There are multitudes of Apple and Facebook app developers, Twitter clients, and Google-dependent content farms. These one-sided relationships rarely end well. So why do so many promising young developers resign themselves to building barnacles rather than great new ships?
PNLS | Home
Event Coordinator
Telephone #
Park #503-829-6866
Questions / Concerns
Upload Center
Train Park Location
31803 S. Shady Dell Rd.
Molalla, OR 97038
Sent from MobileAmazon, the Company That Ate the World - BusinessWeek
Tablets represent a huge opportunity for Bezos, not only to sell a new kind of device but also to entice people to buy more stuff. Even with only 28.7 million iPads sold, e-commerce sites say they see an increasing amount of traffic coming from tablets.Forrester Research (FORR) reported this summer that online purchases made on tablets now account for 20 percent of all mobile e-commerce sales, and that nearly 60 percent of tablet owners have used them to shop. Bezos says tablets “are a huge tailwind for our business.” Amazon once saw spikes in traffic during the workday lunch hours. Now traffic is more evenly distributed as people pick up their tablets anytime of the week, buying the books and albums they see on television and making impulsive decisions about replacing their dishwashers.
The Kindle Fire (internal code name: Otter) is designed to ensure that even more of those purchases go to Amazon. The company has built a tablet-optimized shopping application, with simplified and streamlined pages but none of the clutter of the main website. The app is pre-installed and sits at the bottom of the Fire’s main screen (users can get rid of it if they want). The device also comes with the enticement of a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year two-day delivery program that tends to convert members into Amazon addicts who triple or even quadruple the amount they spend on the site. Since March, Amazon has also administered its own app store for Android devices, culling Google’s more comprehensive selection and removing everything that’s offensive and unreliable. Kindle Fire owners will have access to apps from Pandora (P), Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix (NFLX). Other competitors such as Barnes & Noble (BKS) can submit their apps, but it will be much easier for Kindle Fire owners to find Amazon’s own content.
Google Plus & the Data Scientist Who's Navigating It to Hell
Horowitz and O'Reilly talked dreamily about a sensor-rich future where almost unimaginable technologies were built on tidal waves of data. "Imagine we all opted-in and donated our microphone sensors in this room to capture an aggregate of data," he imagined. "There will be sensors like dust everywhere and it will be [technologists' job] to harvest that data and return it as killer apps."
Sent from Mobile
Amazon's New Cloud-Fueled Web Browser Will Predict Your Browsing Habits
Another way the browser aims to speed things up is by predicting the future. Silk uses machine learning to predict browsing patterns and pre-load pages that the user is likely to request next. Just as Amazon can guess which books and other products you'll be interested in, it can also figure out which pages you're likely to navigate to on the Web.
"The browser observes aggregate user behavior across a large number of sites," said Jon Jenkins, Silk's director of software development. "For instance, we might notice that people who view the New York Times homepage, often go to the New York Times business page afterwards. Our browser is capable of detecting these aggregate user behavior patterns and actually requesting the next page you're likely to need before you even know you need it."
Banking -- Reframed, Rebooted
BankSimple, the most-hyped pre-launch web application in the nerd-o-sphere, is about to make its web-only personal banking service available to its first customers. An incredibly ambitious little project that promises no surprise fees, hot web design and real time data processing, BankSimple is very eagerly anticipated. Today the company released a video demo of its web interface and the feedback has been enthusiastically positive.
