Tuesday, April 24, 2012
I’ve taken my Apple earnings chart porn over to ReadWriteWeb this time around. Most impressive: The iPhone, of course. But really, Apple’s growth overall: Find me another tech company generating $40 billion in quarterly revenue and 60% growth… Oh, right, they don’t exist.
Monday, April 23, 2012
NYCAviation’s Matt Molnar chats with Virgin America CEO David Cush:
Any idea what the wifi usage rate is on Virgin America compared to other carriers?
We’re certainly higher than other guys. On a system average we’re in the low- to mid-20s. However, that varies widely by flight. If you look at our San Francisco-Boston, which is our highest penetration flight, we generally are over 50 percent on that flight. Same thing on San Francisco-JFK.
And it’s becoming a little bit of a problem. The network is slowed down. This is now an expectation of business travelers. With US Airways announcing last week they’ll be putting wifi on their planes it’s becoming more difficult.
We will be the launch customer for the new Gogo antenna, which will be a multi-directional antenna that can point to the most underused cell. We hope we can get that on an airplane this summer and test it out. But our plan is, if it does what they say it will do, which is four-times the speed that we currently have, then we’ll put it on all the airplanes.
(Context: Gogo’s IPO filing late last year suggested 4% lifetime take-up for in-flight wi-fi. It’s higher now, but low-to-mid-20%s for Virgin still seems well above average. Not surprising, given Virgin’s hipness.)
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From Netflix’s quarterly letter to shareholders PDF:
In the past, we have said that our licensing of complete back seasons of on-air TV series is not only a great experience for Netflix members, but can help build the audience for new seasons. We saw this demonstrated recently with the premiere of Season 5 of “Mad Men” on AMC achieving its biggest audience yet (20% higher than last season’s premiere), subsequent to the first four seasons becoming available on Netflix last summer. Even now, the most watched episode of “Mad Men” on any given day on Netflix is the first episode of the first season. This means we are still growing the fan base for this show nearly 6 years after it first premiered on television.
I’m not sure if Netflix can take credit for more people watching the ‘Mad Men’ premiere — I’d love to see data that proves that — but it’s an interesting hypothesis, and it makes some sense.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Amazon will finally pass Best Buy in revenue this year, and my latest post at ReadWriteWeb charts the companies’ growth in sales and profits dating back to 1995.
What happens when you toss in the Apple Store?
As this chart shows, Apple’s retail revenue is still much smaller than Best Buy’s — approaching one-third, or so, this past year.
It’s also smaller than Amazon’s. But a better comparison to Amazon might also include Apple’s $7 billion iTunes business, and then you’re getting close to half of Amazon’s sales. (In 2011, some 60% of Amazon’s sales were “electronics and other general merchandise” and 37% were “media”.)
Anyway, these are obviously different companies with different businesses, but it’s particularly interesting to see how big Apple’s own retail business has grown relative to Best Buy. (See also: This Asymco chart highlighting Apple’s dramatically higher retail efficiency vs. the competition, especially Best Buy.)
Related: Amazon vs. Best Buy: A Tale of Two Retailers
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
A nice (and smart) change from prior years, when many key events weren’t streamed live, as NBC was “saving” them to air later on TV. There will be one hitch, though, to make the primetime broadcast more special, the NYT’s Richard Sandomir reports:
An important event like a gold-medal race involving Michael Phelps will be streamed live on nbcolympics.com, but will not be archived on the Web site until sometime after the prime-time show. Other staples of NBC’s prime-time coverage — including swimming, diving, gymnastics, track and field, and beach volleyball — will be treated the same way.
So, thinking back to four years ago, if there is an insane Usain Bolt sprinting race happening, it will be streamed live by NBC this time, so we won’t have to dig up pirate livestreams. But if it’s supposed to also air later on the primetime TV broadcast, you won’t be able to officially re-watch it, share it, or embed it in a blog post until later on. I guess we’ll still be trolling YouTube for those clips.
Why the additional live streaming? It’s not just because everyone called NBC a bunch of dinosaurs over the years and made them feel bad. It’s because it can actually help TV ratings, apparently.
He said that NBC had data to show that live streaming could increase viewership of a event shown hours later on delay. “We’re not scared of cannibalization,” Mr. Cordella said, adding, “Anytime you have a great event that happens before it shows on the air, it increases ratings and generates buzz.”
No word in the NYT story on whether NBC will shove Silverlight down everyone’s throats again for its video this Olympics, or whether it’s using something else. But I’ll say this now: If there isn’t an awesome iPad app to watch the games live, NBC is blowing it.
Update: Via NBC’s Olympics site, it appears you’ll actually need to login via cable or satellite credentials to watch the “Live Extra” streams. Of course NBC’s new owner Comcast was going to insist on something like this. There will also be “tablet” and mobile apps, and browser-based video will apparently require Flash. All the major cable, satellite, and telco TV providers seem to be on board.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger announces the new “Innovator’s Patent Agreement”:
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
I have a hunch that the devil’s in the details about something like this, and that someone who wanted to do evil with these patents could eventually figure out a way.
But on the whole, this is a great move by Twitter — for recruiting, public image, and potentially for patent reform. It would be nice to see others — like Facebook, Apple, Google, and the jerks at Yahoo — adopt something like this. Not holding my breath, though.
Another takeaway: It now seems all but okay to use the “pull to refresh” concept that Twitter has a patent application in for. Perhaps now we’ll finally see it in Apple’s official iPhone apps?
That’s roughly 10% of Netflix’s streaming subscriber base, and roughly a million fewer subs than AOL dialup has. But it’s something. (And, hey, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has stuck around.)
Hulu subscriber stats via a new profile by the New York Times’ Amy Chozick and Brian Stelter (via Peter Kafka).
Monday, April 16, 2012
We've all made some big changes since 2010. (Even Lou.)
After a month with Apple’s new iPad, it’s easy to see why this is the future of the personal computer.
It’s not all the way there yet, but the original vision behind the iPad — combined with some upgrades in this latest version — make for a really compelling product. I highly recommend it.
- The best feature is the new iPad’s speed. I was upgrading from an original, first-gen iPad, and that had become uncomfortably slow after two years. I know that some the stuff I do on my Mac isn’t stuff most people would ever do, but with the new iPad, I’m almost fast enough switching between apps to be able to work on it. Now I’m running into the problem where the iPad versions of my apps aren’t powerful enough to handle the work I want to do with them. (WordPress, for example.)
- LTE wireless is amazing. If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that I originally bought a wi-fi-only iPad on launch day, but after a week, took it back to get a Verizon LTE model. That was a smart upgrade. Verizon LTE is impossibly fast, and that I can tether my MacBook Air at no extra charge — that’s how I’m writing this right now — is just awesome. I often don’t even look if a café has wi-fi anymore, because my LTE connection is faster and always available. This is finally a mobile Internet revolution that I can get behind — 3G just wasn’t fast enough for anything bigger than a phone, at least in my experience. But with LTE, I think the mobile Internet is really going to explode in usefulness. I don’t want a mobile device without LTE anymore.
- Apple TV is a must-have accessory. We’ve barely cracked the potential for AirPlay. One thing we did the other night that was fun: Played a bunch of YouTube karaoke videos on the Apple TV, using AirPlay and multiple iOS devices to switch between songs. (When the iPad was playing, we used an iPhone to find the next song, then switched off, etc.) At $99, it’s a no-brainer add-on. Some games are playable via AirPlay mirroring, but there’s a bit of a lag still, which makes things like steering a race car a little tricky. Real potential there, though.
What’s that? Oh yes, the retina display. How could he forget that?
Right, yes, the retina display is pretty great. But it didn’t hit me over the head like it did when I first switched to the iPhone 4 from the iPhone 3G. Maybe because a bunch of apps (and almost all websites) still don’t support it yet with retina-tuned graphics. Maybe because it actually makes my old SD videos look like garbage.
Or maybe because the retina display just seems like the way every screen should be now. And that’s where it’s actually hard to be in Apple’s position: When your best seems like what’s natural, it can get lost. But yes, I wouldn’t trade the retina display for the old one. Reading books/documents is particularly great. I just wish my Macs had it now.
Which iPad to buy? If you can swing it, the 64 GB Verizon LTE version in black — the one I have — is the one I’d recommend. If you need to save some money, I’d drop down to 32 GB of storage capacity before I let go of LTE. (Although there will probably be an LTE iPhone in a few months, so that decision could be different then.)
Bigger picture, it has been interesting to see how the iPad has evolved over the past two years, and especially to see many people using it in public — at cafés, on planes, on the subway, everywhere.
Apple was right with the idea that this thing — as powerful as a laptop, with incredibly natural feeling touch-based controls — is finally the computer that people will want to carry around with them. And it has been amusing to see the competition fail to understand or replicate the iPad’s magic — not one particular feature or quality, but the entire story — and flop in the market.
For Apple, the iPad is huge and is only going to get bigger. And I don’t see anyone catching up for a long time. It’s one of the reasons I’m going to be betting the next several years of my career on making software for the iPad and iPhone. (More on that later.)
But wow, what a fun, useful little tool. It’s really getting good.
Also: 500 Days With The (Original) iPad
Good questions (and post) from David Pakman, Venrock VC and former CEO of eMusic:
Absent from most of this coverage are two main questions: a) what is the right price for eBooks and who gets to set it, and b) why are eBooks not interoperable on different devices? These questions, in my mid, are far more interesting than the ongoing struggle of publishers to adapt to Amazon’s dominance in book retailing.
Well, e-books are interoperable on different devices in the sense that Amazon’s Kindle app can display them on Kindles, iPads, iPhones, Macs, etc. But the bigger picture that Kindles can’t read Apple iBooks is, I think, what he’s getting at.
Then again, would it be better if some body — a government or publishing oversight organization — were to require all e-books to be interoperable? Wouldn’t that hinder progress? Could Apple’s amazing interactive iBooks textbooks exist if Apple had to make sure they could run on the Kindle Fire, too? Probably not.
So maybe this competition is better for the future of e-books, even if it requires some compromise on our part. (Although, unlike HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray or iTunes vs. Microsoft PlaysForSure, there isn’t yet a clear e-books format winner in a short period of time. And there may never be one.)
