Archive for The Future
October 4, 2011 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Work Related Stuff and tagged: ios5, iphone4s
As you know at TigerSpike we work on multi-platform technology and so we get a good insight into where our customers are spending their money around the world. Admittedly our key markets of Europe, USA, and Asia are iPhone heavy, but we are seeing more and more interest (and budgets going to) Android. So what does Apple do to stay ahead (and they are still very much ahead in my opinion, and will remain there for at least 2 years.
So iOs 5 is being released mid October along with the iPhone4S and I thought that I would go through the key new features that I think will really change things. They are listed below.
Everything gets faster
The key thing about the iPhone4S is the new A5 chip. Basically this will make things go alot faster. 2x faster download times for apps, 7x faster graphics, 2x faster CPU (everything gets processed twice as fast), dual core means things can run at the same time quickly.
Artificial intelligence assistant
This is a persona called Siri who theoretically understands what you are saying and then helps. She reads your texts to you, finds restaurants, answers questions, takes dictation, sets alarm times, creates appointments etc.
I haven’t ever seen voice activation work well. So my expectations for this are low. But this could be something that appeals to an older demographic, which is one of the fastest growing segments of iPhone users. Colby at the office (and my youth focus group) says that he will ‘feel like a douche bag talking into his phone’, and asks ‘can you get pissed off with her when she messes things up!’.
Colby and my opinion is that this will go the same way as the Microsoft paperclip (i.e. fail)
Cool built in apps
Apple are generally very good at building apps. We work with their developers on some of ours from time to time, and they are all very good. I remember the first app that I played with was Poker that they built, and it was way better than any others.
Find a friend is built into the phone, which means that you can find friends with iPhones nearby (if they have opted to show it, which I suspect they all will – the media is far more worried about privacy than people are).
In my opinion this won’t affect FourSquare as FourSquare is more about the gaming components and find a friend is more about the utility of finding someone you know nearby, but you never know.
The Cards app that we pitched to a few postal companies around the world, is being build by Apple. This will let you create and send cards. You can also send the physical card and have it sent to an address. In my opinion this is something that will really take off. Not a bad money maker for Apple (sending cards costs $2.99 each!), and a potential life raft for the US postal service who are suffering at the moment.
Twitter is built in which will be a big boost to twitter, not that they needed it, they have been doing very well recently.
Newsstand will house magazines and newspapers all delivered in a similar way with new issues being downloaded automatically and reducing the need for separate apps for each publication. This is a good opportunity for publishers as it standardizes the format and therefore reduces cost.
for high end publications that we work with who have their own app, there is also a good opportunity as the differentiation will be more stark between high end and the standardized newsstand titles.
Camera
The Camera is now 8megapixels. Personally I think that anything above 2megapisels is a total waste, but the point is that they have improved many aspects of the camera and video (white balance, face detection etc.), and so the iPhone (and all camera phones) will continue to eat away at the low end of traditional camera businesses.
Also you can connect wirelessly to a projector and project in high definition.
CDMA and GSM
These will both be available in the new iPhone5 which is great news for people like me who are on Verizon and travel outside the USA. I can now use the same phone rather than having a new handset and sim, which did annoy me. All phones should have both CDMA and GSM inside in my opinion.
Monitisation
One of the stats that I found interesting was the game infinity blade making US$20m in revenue for Epic Games. It proves what we have been saying for a while, which is that iOs is a serious money maker for not just games companies but everyone who is willing to invest the time and money to produce something great.
Wireless Synchronization
One of our VPs Matt Turnbull’s wife lost her phone and with it, all her photos since the last time she plugged in and synchronized. Doing it wirelessly will help this. Although I can’t help thinking that it will annoy me somehow by taking time continually synronizing itself
Conclusion
On the whole there are alot of cool stuff and good efficiencies in there, but nothing mind-blowing. I was hoping for a new device, which I am sure will be next, so I’ll hold off on buying one until it comes out.
August 11, 2011 at 8:47 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future and tagged: android, apple
I have long believed that something was up with democracy. I had the feeling that it just didn’t work, and the recent stalemate in Washington certainly supports my argument. At the moment the Republicans and Democrats are trying their hardest to fill a ‘super committee’ on debt reduction with their least flexible candidates. Republicans put forward candidates for whom any kind of tax increase is out of the question, and Democrats put forward candidates for whom certain spending cuts are out of the question. huh? isn’t it supposed to be a committee designed to come to a compromise? why fill it with the people least willing to. Democracy has created a situation where we don’t get the best outcome. Too many voices all saying different things.
There is a link between Apple and Google. Google is an open democracy with many companies and developers collectively adding to the Android platform. Apple’s iOs is a closed system, dictated to a large extent by Apple. I get frustrated when I hear people saying ‘Android is growing faster than iOs’. It isn’t. It reminds me of the J2ME days where you have to make many versions of applications for phones (see there was a work angle). Android’s openness is not doing it any favors.
Anyway I’ll stop now and refer to this article, which sums it up pretty nicely.
August 31, 2010 at 3:16 am · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Tigerspike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: android, apple
Back in the old days (2004) we used to make games in J2ME. We found that we had to make about 15 different versions of the game because each different handset had their own way of dealing with Java. Nokia was the king back then (and still is in many markets), but even for Nokia we had 2 or 3 builds to get the game working across series 30, 60, etc… Multiply that by Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, and Samsung (these were the days before HTC and the other new guys) and you have an issue.
So Android was supposed to bring a solution to this with a common platform across many devices. Sadly this didn’t happen in practice as well as it did in theory. Firstly, because updating the operating system happens slower for Android – there are big blocks of people (over 25%) with Android 1.5, 1.6, and 2.1. Secondly, there are subtle differences that exist from handset to handset. In the end, while we are in a better position than we were in 2004, there is still a long way to go.
In this respect Apple is better because. a) they standardise better (to be fair its easier, because they have one device), and b) people update to the later versions much faster than Android, so making things backwards compatible is something that isn’t as relevant.
So if you are building an app, expect Android to cost more than Apple. Finding good Android developers is also harder than good iPhone ones.
What about cross platform solutions?
There are companies that claim that they have a ‘build once, port to many platforms model’. We do this to an extent, but there is still alot of tinkering. I have looked under the hood of many of those other companies (all the ones that pitch us), and their ‘clever tech that the VCs like’ never does what they preach. The closest ones I have seen dumb down the experience which means that the app suffers.
So if you are building a solution for multi-platforms, you can ‘build once’ in terms of usability (to an extent), design, and the guts behind the app (like APIs that you create), but getting the best out of each platform requires per platform builds for the front ends. There is no easy way (yet) from my experience.
June 7, 2010 at 8:39 pm · Filed under The Future, Tigerspike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: iphone4 iphone apple ipad
Here’s a brief summary of the key things announced by Apple just now from David So, the head of our apps team who is at the conference.
Also included are the implications
iPhone 4
- Release dates:
- US, UK, Japan, Germany, France = June 24th (15th preorder)
- Australia + 17 others = July 2010
- 24 more = August
- 88 more countries = September
- “FaceTime” video calling (how cool! I predicted this in an earlier article! – looks like it will be sooner than 2012 after all – over 3G at least)
- Over Wifi only in 2010
- Only on iPhone 4 to another iPhone 4
- New open standard based on H.264 and SIP amongst other things
- The whole implementation spec will be “open” so can be used on other devices once implemented.
- Implications:
- Video calls will finally become mainstream
- Prediction: Will more than likely need 1yr to uptake
- New “retina” display
- Essentially a 3.5″ sized LCD screen with really high pixel pitch (326 pixels per inch – older models are 163ppi)
- 960 x 640 pixel screen
- Apple claims our human eyes can only perceive pixels lower than 300dpi
- This means a more realistic “paper” feel as curves are more curved and less pixelated
- Implications:
- Standard text and icons in apps will automatically look better
- Design assets (and some custom fonts) in apps will need to be replaced with higher res ones in order to look better on iPhone 4 (change request for all existing projects)
- Bigger battery
- Physically smaller CPU – Using “A4 chip” (same as the iPad)
- Gyroscope:
- Better motion control (6 axis)
- Phone can now detect pitch, roll and yaw
- 720p HD video recording
- Tap to focus in video recording
- 5MP camera with LED flash
- New stainless steel design
- steel bezel is both structural and acts as antenna
- both sides are really strong glass
iAds
- Developer keeps 60% of ad revenue
- Apple has sold $60M worth of commitments from several big name brands (US market)
- = 48% of 2010 2H’s US Mobile Display
- Implications:
- Better mobile ad engagement
- Easier way for clients without existing ad sales departments to generate revenue in addition to charging for downloads
- The whole ad market will benefit from this, with many more brands ‘dipping their toe’ in mobile using this standard framework.
iOS
- iPhone OS is now renamed iOS
- Runs on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
- iOS 4 has new features as previously announced
- iAds, folders, multitasking etc
- Added ability to search Bing in Safari
- Implications:
- More app features now possible as previously discussed
- iMovie for iPhone announced
- improved iBookstore -PDF support and wireless syncing (like Amazon’s Kindle whispernet)
Other comments:
- Hold out for iPad2 whenever that’s announced (2011?). The next will definitely have a better screen worth waiting for.
Full details and photos here:
September 10, 2009 at 4:26 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future and tagged: business week, iphone, murdoch
Magazines!… grow some balls and charge for your iPhone and Blackberry apps. I hear so much whining about ‘oh the BBC is stealing all my eyeballs‘ or ‘boo-hoo the advertising revenues are down‘, well here is your chance to make some subscription revenue and you are squandering it!
iPhone 3.0 can handle subscriptions…. nice ongoing subscription revenue. Even $1 a month would help. I read the telegraph every day on iPhone and I would gladly pay that, and people will gladly pay as long as that becomes the norm. But they won’ t pay if people like Business week are pulling their pants down and destroying the model early.
Business week bringing out a free iPhone app is the WRONG approach. You don’t give away business week for free at the newsstands do you? I hear alot of back pedaling by publishers lead my Murdoch who is now trying to charge for on-line content when it was free before. This is the right idea, but its like closing the gate (10 years) after the horse has bolted.
Now we have a new horse and are thinking of putting him in a pen with no gate again!… why?. Magazines have a price, and also advertising revenues. Why change the business model just because the medium changes? Sure you don’t have printing costs, but you still have to pay journalists, who are being laid off faster than something very fast that I can’t think of right now.. And it doesn’t seem bad now, but believe me, we don’t want to wake up in 10 years to find out that we live in a world where journalists have been replaced by bedroom bloggers and Twitter!
So like I said – grow some balls, and charge for your valuable content (unless you think it isn’t valuable) AND get advertising revenue too – just like you do for the actual magazine. You never know you might actually make some money!… and as a bonus, you could save journalism too!
June 8, 2009 at 5:05 pm · Filed under The Future
Ok since it isn’t out yet, here are my three main predictions for what Apple will do, since everyone seems to be making predictions one of these will be announced at WWDC, and the others over the coming year:
iPod Nano phone
Cheap version maybe on Verizon / for Walmart. Also a Nano sized phone would look awesome and girls would love it. Especially if it is pink. Yep, that does sound sexist, but look what happened with the Pink Motorola V3. Unfortunately for the geeks, the fact is that design sells way more than features. There is a whole section of the market who don’t care about features at all as long as the phone looks cute, and feels nice in their pocket / handbag.
New iPhone 3G
Even though I firmly believe that features don’t sell phones, there will be a new iPhone 3G in response to the Palm Pre / others, with head to head competing features. The one area where a feature does sell is megapixels with cameras. Which is utterly ridiculous because all it means is that my mum sends me images that are way too big. With the age of sharing images on Facebook you don’t need or want high megapixels, and actually end turning on the ‘for web’ setting. Where Apple wins is usability. Usability trumps features.
Medium sized tablet
My Sony Vaio is excellent. You can’t travel with a PC that is bigger. But it is still too big. Often I use my iPhone (which I use alot, and haven’t made one call on it yet) instead, but it is still too small. So these two need to converge. And this is the Apple tablet, which will be less than half the size of my Vaio, and more than twice the size of my iPhone. Maybe an iPhone that you flip open with touch screens on both bits.
While I am at it, this is what sells handsets (in order)
- Design (external design – does it look and feel pretty, and not seem to plasticky. Also important here is what is cool. What does Paris Hilton have?)
- Usability (is it easy to use and not frustrating. In particular texting. For business users, this is important too, how to read, organise, search email easily. Better to have 3 features that are simple and usable, than 20 that are not usable)
- Price (what can you afford on what plan – what is being offered free. All manufacturers will need a low priced entry level handset to grab market and then move them through the range later)
- Features (the least important factor in my opinion. They have to have value and most importantly be easy to use. If I were in charge I would have as few features as you can get away with, but make them uber usable)
February 18, 2009 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Tigerspike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: apple, appstore, nokia, ovi
This blog entry is mainly about Nokia’s Ovi store. Loosely this is an App store like Apple’s, but it promises to be availble to 300m devices by 2012.
This is big. I am a big fan of apple, but iPhone sales are dwarfed by sales of Nokias. In my opinion Apple is still way ahead in terms of the phone design and useability, but Nokia (and everyone else with varying degrees of success) are all trying to copy; and as Motorola found out, you can’t just make one awesome phone (the V3) and then sit back and bask.
What does Ovi have?
- A general app store that gives developers 70% of sales revenue (like Apple) accross 15 set price points, and charges though the carriers (after the carriers take their share (which is SHIT – carriers take 40% to 50% – there won’t be anything left!), or through credit card. Apple is way ahead in this respect, and Nokia will have to come up with some more solutions – things like Paypal will help, but one thing Nokia hasn’t got that Apple has is the billing relationship. And that matters. Alot.
- Nokia music store does pretty much the same thing as iTunes, and also streams from your PC. It also has a recommendation engine which is good, but it isn’t as cool as Apple’s iTunes Genius (neither of which are as good as last.fm)
- Nokia Friend view, which actually pits Nokia against Google (their new Lattitude service). I think that Google has a better chance, as their solution goes accross all platforms wheras Nokia’s is only availlable on S60 handsets at the moment. They both look cool though – check out the videos here.
- MOSH which is Nokia’s UGC thing which I won’t go into here.
- A games capability which Nokia will be ahead of Apple for; due to their experience with the N Gage. That said, Apple is more Wii (because of the accelarometer) and NGage is more Playstation, and I prefer Wii over Playstation. Steve Jobs doesn’t really like gaming either, so he may be missing a trick here. Games outsold DVDs this year.
Distribution
- iTunes has between 100m and 250m users depending on who you ask, iPhone has tens of millions
- Nokia say that Ovi will be on 300m devices by 2012. This is bullish, but Nokia do have 40% of the global market, and there are more than 4bn connections out there (or thereabouts), and 40% of that is 1.6Bn!
- Something else to remember is that iPhone users use their devices way more than Nokia users do – even the new Nokia devices… we will wait and see what Nokia produces to answer the iPhone. I haven’t seen anything close yet (from anyone – confirmed by our guys Nic and Simon who are at 3GSM in Barcalona at the moment)
Can Nokia get it on the handsets?
All the new ones yes – the first one is the N97 in May, but they say that they will be able to get it on the Series 40 and 60. Through an ‘on handset’ application. Getting people to download that is by no means easy.
Also remember that Nokia will start to piss the carriers off as they will theorise that they will lose revenue (the credit card part). Who knows they may gain more (i.e. their share of the carrier charged downloads), but they will fight over it – which should be fun to watch! The carriers need to invest in this stuff too otherwise they will become dumb pipes, which they need to either accept, or do something about. And it has to be something more impressive than Nokia and Apple, and Google can do. And that is a very tall order…
So will Nokia win?
Even considering that Nokia has just laid off a load of their R&D guys due to the recession (Not a good time to need to innovate and develop cool stuff) in summary: If Nokia can connect effectively with their handsets: i.e. all the lower end handsets download the application OR all new Nokias pre load Ovi AND they sort their billing out, AND the carriers don’t kill them, THEN they will have the biggest network in the world. Even if they do this – Apple will still be there, they won’t go away because they are too cool and they do things right and their design is beautiful.
But while Apple is “cooler” than Nokia. it isn’t by that much…. Finnish people never hurt anyone, so Maito on calista, Sokeri on Halpa to you!
January 6, 2009 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Tigerspike Innovation Lab and tagged: projectors
In my last post I talked about mobile phones with projectors in them. This means that the small screen can become a big screen (then I saw this article about 3M designing miniature projectors today). So will this mean that all our business designing for the small screen and building mobile sites will dry up?
Well the answer is no. Even if ALL new phones have new projectors in them, it would take 18 to 24 months for those devices to get in people’s hands, so there will be 3 to 4 years before projectors become ubiquitous (god I HATE that word!). It took as long for cameras to get in all phones, which is pretty much is now; but remember the first one was on there 5 years ago.
More importantly, the nature of projectors is that you need to remain in one place (to project on to something), and the nature of mobile is that you engage alot of the the time, when you are on the move; and those two things don’t go together.
What it does mean is that mobile TV and mobile movies become more viable. Imagine going to iTunes (or bit torrent – lets be honest) with your phone and downloading a movie, then watching it wherever you find a nice surface. And the good thing is that it will look cool (so as I said, the geeks and gadget lovers will love it).
December 31, 2008 at 8:36 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future and tagged: 2009
So what will happen in 2009 for mobile? (and some other stuff)
- Companies will go bust. In my opinion these will be mainly venture funded companies without a viable business model whose venture capital backers refuse to give them more and they can’t raise it from elsewhere. I reckon more than one of the mobile ad networks will go under. Banks are still reluctant to lend to small and medium sized businesses despite government handouts and pressure
- Companies will get stronger. The good thing about downturns is a) it means you have to work harder and smarter, and people who don’t get axed (i.e. the company becomes leaner, as you separate out the high performers from the people who can’t cut it)), and b) because some companies will go bust, even a smaller market size with fewer players will lead to a larger market share for the surviving companies
- Mobile internet will become a no brainer. i.e. everyone will have a mobile enabled website. Smart companies will design and build these appropriately rather than just squashing their on line content into mobile. Because of this, mobile advertising will settle down and actually start making some people some money (the remaining mobile ad serving networks once some have gone bust)
- Mobile payments has to happen soon, but maybe 2009 is still too early for big adoption. I see someone like Visa / Mastercard winning this race, despite the lead being taken by start-up companies. Mind you Paypal didn’t do too badly against the big boys
- MMS will become bigger in the USA as interconnect happens. But it won’t go massive
- QR codes/Bluetooth/other peripheral mobile tech still won’t be mainstream enough for brands to seriously consider them for anything other than to get PR
- iPhone will continue to grow and push the market. We haven’t seen any devices that are as good. Yet. Mind you mine runs out of batteries in less than a day! something must be up!
- I think that we will see the first phones sold with mini projectors in 2009. Allowing full screen web browsing from the phone. Which will stir things up conceptually, but will be in the hands of GEEKS! and will be mainstream (if at all) in 2 more years
- Android may well become big, depending largely on whether Sony Ericsson / Motorola / others adopt it in new handsets… they have said they would…
- Facebook will get stronger as will Google and Apple (well Duh!)…. carriers and handset manufacturers will get weaker. Carriers won’t exist as we know them in 10 years time.
- Japanese toilets will become big in theUSA. Ok so that won’t happen… but it would be good if it did!
- The USA should do something cool with tech as they have a newly appointed CTO type person. Countries should start to cover themselves in WIMAX soon, and even if they don’t, internet access from laptops will happen everywhere. If not through WIMAX then standard wireless, or 3G cards. In the later part of 2009 you won’t be able to buy a laptop without as a minimum, the option to connect wherever, whenever. And it will be free. Maybe not in 2009, but certainly by 2010
- I hope they sort out international roaming charges. I am sick of having 3 SIM cards. The EU is legislating for this which is good news. But I can’t see it getting sorted in 2009. Carrier tech is actually way crapper than you think, it isn’t just the money men hoarding their pennies!
- Because of Facebook and myspace’s sharing of content it will become less important for politicians to be squeaky clean. Doing the odd line of coke or dressing up as a girl or kissing a dude won’t ruin your political future (or it better not otherwise we will be out of politicians very soon – and to be honest I wouldn’t trust someone squeaky clean to run things anyway. Hitler was squeaky clean vegetarian, whereas Churchill was a drunk)…. so I will add a quote from Abraham Lincoln “those with very few vices tend to have very few virtues!.
Happy new year….
November 25, 2008 at 9:11 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Work Related Stuff and tagged: patents
Apple is being sued for patent infringement over the way its iPhone surfs the internet by EMG Technology, who alleged that the company infringes on a patent it holds for navigating the internet on mobile devices. The patent was issued little more than a month ago, but relies on 76 claims that were originally filed in 1999. The patent covers how online content is displayed on mobile devices after being reformatted from HTML to XML.
Wake up call to all the old way of doing things: Gen Y don’t give a shit about copyright, and China doesn’t give a shit about Patents (ergo: they will be worthless within 50 years, and a good thing too!).
In my opinion if someone comes up with an innovative new product, they should get off their ass and commercialise it and make money from it, then by the time everyone has copied them and they therefore make less (which is good for the consumer) they should be continually innovating to commercialise their next product.
People like the Tetra pak moguls don’t deserve their millions. I can’t see any argument that can be used to say that they do. Sure, make a few million, but end it there; let patents last a maximum of 3 years. These guys are essentially sitting on their arses making money without hard work or continual innovation. And that is wrong.
With regard to the Apple case, it seems like EMG renewed a bunch of patents with the specific purpose of suing. Why don’t they stop being babies and make money from it themselves, not wait for Apple to and then try to bring Apple down for succeeding where they failed!. By the way I am not an Apple-phile; they took us to court in Sydney when we trademarked “mPod”, (which we did before the iPod came out, but they took all “pods” to court) to be honest it was just their Lawyers using up their retainers and justifying their own existence and producing nothing.
ok so I am sounding a little socialist (my granddad was in the Communist party when he was at Oxford!). And I am not saying lets redistribute the wealth, becoming rich is fine if you do it by working hard or innovating, or both. Not inventing one thing once, and then build a giant lazy-boy (reclining comfy chair) out of Patent protection lawyers.
