Posts tagged Much
What Tim Cook Really Meant About Apple’s ‘Very Grand Vision’ for TV, Wearable Tech & Much More
May 29th
On Tuesday evening, Apple CEO Tim Cook likened the wait for next month’s iOS 7 unveiling to being a kid on Christmas Eve, teased Apple’s interest in wearable tech and claimed the company has a “very grand vision” for the future of television. Cook touched on several topics during an on-stage interview kicking off AllThingsD’s D:11 conference, including what’s in the company’s product pipeline, the smartphone wars and even tax policy. But of course he didn’t give up the goods on anything specific the tech giant is working on. Just as important, he often spoke in a kind of code, so ReadWrite has helpfully supplied a “translation” where appropriate.
Apple’s Product Pipeline Surprises
If Cook is in a hurry to reveal Apple’s next big thing, he didn’t let on Tuesday night. “We release products when they’re ready,” Cook said. “We believe very much in the element of surprise. We think customers love surprises.”
Basically, Cook was saying, “Look, we know we haven’t released a game changer in awhile. And we know our stock has dropped. But we’re building cool stuff. Trust me. When it’s ready, we’ll show it to you. And then you’ll buy it and it’ll make your life better. Because that’s what Apple does.”
Whether you believe Cook’s implicit message or not, you’re probably not going to find out for sure until Fall at the earliest.
(See also Expectations Lowered For Apple’s Big Developers Conference (WWDC).)
Interactive Television
Apple has sold 13 million Apple TV units to date, Cook said. “About half” of those – roughly 6.5 million – were sold within the last 12 months alone. Not bad for a hobby that Apple has done very little to market, but as long been rumored, apparently there’s much more in the works. “There is a very grand vision,” Cook said in regards to bringing the world’s television experience up to date. “It’s an area of incredible interest.”
Still, Cook declined to reveal when Apple might launch a new TV-oriented product. We’re pretty much limited to Steve Jobs’ infamous, “I finally cracked it,” line about a new TV experience integrated with iCloud and iDevices. But, hey, at least we know that Apple sold a whole lot more Apple TVs last year than it ever did before.
(See also 5 Ways TV Will Evolve In 2013.)
What Does iOS 7 Hold In Store?
All Things D editors Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher asked Cook about what’s new in iOS 7, the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system expected to be announced at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.
Swisher: “So talk to us about the new iOS.”
Cook: “Remember what it was like on Christmas Eve?”
Swisher: “No, we opened our presents on Christmas Eve.”
Mossberg: “And I’m Jewish.”
Funny, but once again Cook wasn’t taking the bait.
Cook did mention that Apple may loosen up a bit when it comes to opening iOS up to third party customizations. “On the general topic of opening up APIs, I think you’ll see us open up more in the future,” he said, “but not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience.” So don’t look for Facebook Home on iOS any time soon.
(See also iOS Rumor Watch: Black, White And Flat All Over and What Apple’s Jony Ive Can Learn From Facebook Home.)
The Smartphone Wars
As the iPhone has lost its lead in smartphone sales to models running Google’s Android operating system, observers are wondering how Apple is dealing with the loss of its dominant position. Here’s Cook’s take on the matter: “We make the best phone, we don’t make the most phones.”
Translation: We make one phone. The three generations of that phone currently on sale generate billions of dollars in profit for our carrier partners, supply chain partners and us. The apps available for that phone in turn generate billions more for our developer partners and us – far more than Android phones generate. We make products that we think are the best on the market, and plenty of consumers agree, even at prices that support our above-average margins. Most of our competitors – Samsung excepted – aren’t making any money on smartphones. I don’t see what the fuss is all about.
That’s all true,
(See also Samsung vs. Apple: Samsung Is Winning Every Way But One [Infographic].)
Taxing Issues
Apple has been taking flack on Capitol Hill lately for sheltering its profits overseas. Cook had a very simple response: “We think we should bring all offshore profits back to the U.S.”
There’s a lot more to it than that. But Cook’s basic position is this: The U.S. tax code is messed up. Fix it and we’ll do all the business, accounting and paying of taxes that we can in the U.S. of A. Until then, we’re a corporation thata bides by the law, and we’re doing the best we can to abide by the law.
(Google) Glass And Wearable Tech
Tim Cook said Nike “did a great job” on the Fuelband he sometimes wears on his wrist, but he’s not about to put a computer in his spectacles. “I think wearables is incredibly interesting. It could be a profound area.” But he added that “The likelihood that [Google Glass] has broad appeal is hard to see.”
Cook said plenty more on the topic, but it boils down to this: Apple is definitely working on wearable tech and Cook is excited by the emergence of embeddable sensors of all sorts. But he isn’t going to throw Google even a tiny bone.
What else?
“To convince people that they have to wear something, it has to be incredible,” Cook said. “If we asked a room of 20-year olds to stand up if they’re wearing a watch, I don’t think anyone would stand up.” Would a curved glass smartwatch built by a team of 100 engineers to run iOS be incredible enough to capture the coveted 20-year old demographic? Reports from a few months ago say Yes, for what that’s worth.
(See also Why Google Glass Is More Important Than Any Smartwatch.)
Tim Cook takes to his own company’s stage Monday June 10 for the WWDC keynote address. The rumors and hype will only pick up steam in the meantime.
(Note: All quotes via transcripts culled from AllThingsD and The Verge.)
Image of Tim Cook courtesy of Reuters. Product images courtesy of their respective manufacturers. Apple tattoo image from Microsoft Windows Phone commercial.
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Is Tumblr Worth as Much as Overture to Yahoo? by @lorenbaker
May 20th
The Tumblr acquisition by Yahoo is smart in so many ways, from an advertising perspective to a “let’s be relevant again” perspective. And pair the Tumblr news with a relaunch of Flickr, and we’re looking at an end result of Marissa Mayer dominating a market where Google has a major weakness — photos. (Anyone use [...]
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So Much For Self-Driving Cars, These Robots Will Make You A Drink
May 16th
Google sure knows how to throw a geek fest. The After Hours party after the first day of Google I/O was packed full of augmented reality, food, fun, dancing, Billy Idol and… robots.
Lots and lots of robots.
It was hard not to miss the robots, considering that the main bar on the third floor of Moscone West had three robots mixing cocktails. The wait for a robot-mixed drink was considerable, as a human controller told each bot what concoction to make. Google may have come up with the self-driving car, but these robot bartenders are pretty awesome too.
Check out the photos from the Google I/O After Hours party below.
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How Much Should You Spend on SEO Services?
May 13th
For most businesses, SEO provides the highest ROI of all marketing investments. As long as you choose a quality SEO agency, your decision will lead to incredible amounts of revenue. Here’s everything you need to know to help make your decision.
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How Much Should You Spend on SEO Services? – Search Engine Watch
May 13th
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How Much Should You Spend on SEO Services?
Search Engine Watch The question every business professional must ask is, "How much will we spend on SEO?" Keep reading for all the information you'll need to make that decision, plus some helpful tips on how SEO agencies work so you can be successful as you forge a … |
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The Internet May Not Be Doing Our Brains Much Good [Video]
May 8th
Working on the Internet every day, you start to have certain suspicions about how it affects the way you think and process information. Turns out, there’s something to that.
Readers of Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains will certainly confirm this. While the Internet is a fantastic tool to conduct business and communicate with friends and colleagues, the constant distractions can and do have an interruptive effect on how we think and learn.
The animation team at Epipheo Studios recently interviewed Carr and put together a video on the topics expressed in The Shallows. It is presented to you here, somewhat ironically, as one of those distractions that the Internet can present you during the course of the day.
Pick a time to watch it on your own schedule, and then think about ways in which you can start unplugging a bit more in your busy online life. You may not buy into this, but we can share one thing with you: every writer who has written for our Pause series of stories has reported a reduction of stress or some other calming effect.
Taking time for yourself to just think and be is not only relaxing, it may help avoid the dinosaurs and sharks in your life.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Google Glass: Way Too Much Google For Its Own Good
May 7th
If Google is making us stupid, Google Glass is destined to make us even stupider. While consistent with Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google Glass may actually be too much of a good thing. Way too much.
Jay Yarow describes Glass as “a product plagued by bugs, and of questionable use, that’s generating a lot of buzz because people want so desperately to have some new gadget to latch onto, and fear being wrong about the next major technology trend.” Perhaps. But whatever its faults (battery life, tends to cause headaches, etc.), Google Glass’ biggest fault may well be its biggest feature:
Information overload.
By constantly presenting Glass wearers with information, or the opportunity to get information, Google manages to over-deliver on its mission statement at a time when we actually rely on Google to filter out noise, rather than fill our lives with more noise. As I wrote in 2007, the secret to Google’s business model is to embrace the abundance of the Internet’s information overload but then remove the detritus and give me only what I want, when I want it, and serve up context-relevant advertising.
But by sticking a computer on my face, always on and always connected, Google has ruined this model by giving me far more than I want, all the time, and diminishing my control of the flow of Google-provided information.
Google Now gets the balance nearly perfect. Google Now anticipates my information needs based on where I’m going, what I have on my calendar, the time of day, etc. It’s genius, and it’s particularly useful because it lets me discover its magic on my own terms; that is, I have to actually look at my smartphone. Robert Scoble may see this as a downside, but it’s a serious upside. When I have to look, I’m in control of the information. When the information forces itself into my view, I’m a slave to it.
Google Now is Google at its best. Google Glass? Perhaps Google at its worst, shoving information at me and never letting me disconnect from the Internet completely.
Nor will it end here. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has stated that “We want Google to be the third half of your brain.” I doubt many people will be enthusiastic about this, no matter how much Google anticipates my wants and needs and serves up ads against them, 24×7. With Glass, Google has taken a step too far toward pushing information on its users rather than letting them control the flow of information.
In short, Glass is way too much Google for most of us. And that is the major reason I expect it to fail.
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Curiosity Update Will Let Players Find Out What's Inside The Cube Much Faster
May 1st
Curiosity: What’s Inside The Cube, the one-part-smartphone-game, one-part-social-experiment that launched last November, is getting its most substantial update yet. In a move aimed at bringing the contest to a faster close, UK studio 22Cans has accelerated the game to its last 50 layers, in effect erasing the months and months of players tapping away on the giant cube it would have taken to get to the center.
This World Is Predicted To End On May 21
The studio’s current estimated end date – unless player participation unexpectedly spikes – is May 21, which coincidentally happens to be the same day Microsoft will announce its next-generation Xbox console.
“It has been an elongated, protracted experiment in curiosity, but if I’m someone whose fingers are bleeding now, enough is enough,” said 22Cans founder Peter Molyneux, known primarily for creating the Fable game series before leaving Microsoft last year to found the independent studio. “We decided that we could have just left it going and probably less and less people would be fascinated… or we could set a layer and it would be a race to the center,” he added. The new update comes on the heels of last week’s quiet addition to the game that let players pay to both remove and add cubelets to the current layer. This feature will remain for some, but not all, of the final 50 layers.
The idea behind Curiosity is simple: one giant cube, with a secret prize at its center, was handed over to millions of players who all collaboratively chip away at its many layers by tapping one piece (or cubelet) at a time, of which there were 68 billion spread out over hundreds of layers. Only the lucky person to tap the last cubelet gets to see what’s inside, and Molyneux has often described that mystery in grandiose fashion, referring to it as “life changing.”
(See also: Gaming Legend Peter Molyneux: What Makes A Great Game?)
Curiousity was meant to be both a social experiment in massively multiplayer smartphones games as well as a learning experience for 22Cans, which announced its first multiplatform title Godus on Kickstarter shortly after launching Curiosity.
Curiosity Now About Learning Different Things
“Part of our motivation in doing Curiosity was to learn how to do these things for Godus, like learning how to connect people, how to scale up our servers,” Molyneux said. Despite massive server issues hampering Curiosity’s launch, the game picked up steam and garnered more than 3 million downloads within one month. Godus also surpassed its Kickstarter goal of £450,000 on the final day, securing 22Cans’ future in cross-platform game development.
With only 50 layers to go, the race to the finish will tight, raising valid concerns that the final tap that wins it all might not be recorded accurately. ”When we get to the final five layers, we’ll have something called Cube Watch,” Molyneux explained. “We’ll be watching it 24 hours a day and we’ll be sitting in the office waiting for that end to come.”
He stressed that the studio has taken substantial measures to protect against cheating and will be able to validate the tapper of the final cubelet as soon as it happens. Players will also get a real-time reminder in the white space around the cube of how many layers are left and what the estimated lifespan of the experiment is.
“In our hyper-connected world, what happens when we put an objective that is so insanely far off that it becomes almost meaningless?” Now that the objective is almost within grasp, Curiosity is raising new questions about the player motivation and connectedness players await their chance to finally see what’s inside the cube.
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Web Design vs. SEO: It Doesn’t Make Much Sense – Search Engine Journal
Apr 30th
 Search Engine Journal |
Web Design vs. SEO: It Doesn't Make Much Sense
Search Engine Journal Anti-SEO posts usually cause myriad reactions – “oh wow!”, “goddamn, not again!”, “this debate is eternal, like seriously”, “oh look, a link bait”… My reaction is: does all this make any sense? Of course it should. But in reality, it doesn't not at … |
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Web Design vs. SEO: It Doesn’t Make Much Sense
Apr 30th
It’s a common sight: designers bashing SEOs and vice versa. We all have been seeing this happening for a long while now. And it’s probably not going to end any soon. It might get pregnant and more heated in a year or two, though. Unless, of course, both sides realize that they finally need to [...]
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