10 Years of iPod

Excerpt:

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.

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What 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.”

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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.


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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.

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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.

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How Important Is iOS?

Excerpt:

Apple 

(Nasdaq: AAPL)
 has transformed itself from a computer company to a mobile-device company, a change that began when it ditched "Computer" from its name in January 2007 -- the same day the first iPhone was launched.

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.

Source: 10-K annual reports.

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.

Source: 10-Q quarterly reports.

The picture is crystal clear: iOS devices now comprise the vast majority of Apple's revenue.


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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.


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Manufacturing, 3D Printing and What China Knows About the Emerging American Century

History and Technology Reality Promise Another Steve Jobs, Apple and American Economic Boom


Excerpt:

History is rife with similar stories, where prescient and driven entrepreneurs built new businesses and unleashed new economic paradigms.  Businesses that change the world are rarely single inventions, single devices – but are built on the maturation of collection of revolutionary components, and necessarily, emerge from the fertile mind of a passionate leader.


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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.

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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.


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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.


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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.”


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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 Popup-Icon

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PlanetTran, Uber and RelayRides Want To Take You On A Fantastic (And Green) Voyage | Fast Company


Excerpt:

In Boston and San Francisco, eight-year-old eco-livery service PlanetTran--funded by, among others, Tjan, CEO and managing partner of Boston VC firm Cue Ball--attracts customers with its fleet of Wi-Fi-ready hybrids, easy online booking, and customized services (they'll send you drivers you rate favorably, for example). For most of its life, the company existed in moderate harmony with city-run cab services. But then PlanetTran began to hype new technologies, including Tweet-a-Ride, which lets clients tweet their location, destination, and pickup time for instant service. Not far off, according to president Lori van Dam: the ability to sync your PlanetTran account with your digital calendar and Facebook; it'll adjust your pickup time if it knows you're running late or organize ride shares if it finds out that you and the PlanetTran user down the street both have Monday-morning flights.

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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?

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