January 2010
“20 Things that Happen in 1 Minute” Graphic » Sociological Images →
contexts.org
Fantastic social graphic (via laurawhitehead)
“This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.”
—Steve Jobs on Google (at recent Apple Town Hall Meeting) (via shaneguiter)
Why do I want an iPad…and more importantly why will you want one too?
Written at home Sunday afternoon while all around me sleep. Originally started out as a quick response to internal comments to my work blog I was unable to respond to last week it, but quickly developed into a posting in it’s own right…sorry about that!
* Written for an internal audience - tailored for wider tumblr dissemination
What a week. 7 days that didn’t so much change the world (as some were rather optimistically predicting) but rather got it talking to each other on a subject that everyone had an opinion on…the subject? – Why the iPad of course.
Monday morning I posted an internal blog about the upcoming iPad release which solicited a staggering 20 odd comments in a 24-hour period and I think it fair to say that the majority of them could be considered to some extent, positive. Tuesday had the official announcement from Mr. Jobs and Co. Wednesday morning I posted a piece entitled “iWant an iPad but do iNeed one?” with the response, again in the 20’s and again being fair, favouring the negative.
It’s important to note that this general reaction of rampant optimism followed by deflated disappointment was mirrored across the web.
So the obvious conclusion we can draw from this analysis is that the iPad is a lemon. All hype. When the facts were in, we discovered it to contain lots of style and very little substance. So why do I still want one…and more importantly why will you too?
Both the iPod (in 2001) and the iPhone (June 2007) were unveiled to the masses who at first glance dismissed them as underwhelming. Many of the comments we saw in the iWant blog were voiced after both of those launches. “Not impressed”, “meh”, “big deal”, “style over substance”, “it’s all hype”, “what a disappointment”, “majorly underwhelmed” were all directly attributed to both devices by influential commentators a day or two after announcement.
The reason?
Well, both lacked desirable features that at the time were deemed critical for success. When Apple let loose the iPod onto the world nobody could have imagined the implications for consumer electronics and the way in which we listen to and view media. Similarly nobody with the possible exception of Steve Jobs himself could have predicted the “game-changing” effect the iPhone would have as it evolved from the 2G “disappointment” into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass and GPS enabled market leader.
And let us remember that where Apple leads others follow, without the iPhone we can be very confident that the likes of Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Blackberry and especially Palm would not have produced the phones they have…every one of them attempting to be the next “iPhone killer”.
The iPad then is heir to a great technological dynasty. It has pedigree. Like it’s ancestors before it, it has flaws (some would argue many flaws). But when these flaws are addressed, and they will be, we will be left with a device that will define the way in which we interact with each other. We will have a new window into the web that will do things that we cannot yet imagine. Like the iPhone before it and the iPod before that, the iPad has the potential to change the way we do things in our everyday lives.
And that is why I want one, to be a part of that change. Trust me…you’ll want one too!
iPad About « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry →
stephenfry.com
From Stephen Fry’s wonderful wee bog…a few days old but well worth a read none-the-less.
Well bless my soul and whiskers. This is the first time I’ve joined the congregation at the Church of Apple for a new product launch. I’ve watched all the past ones, downloaded the Quicktime movies and marvelled as Apple’s leader has stood before an ovating faithful and announced the switch to Intel, the birth of iPod, the miniMac, the iTunes Store, OS X, iPhoto, the swan’s neck iMac, the Shuffle, Apple retail stores, the iPhone, the titanium powerbook, Garageband, the App Store and so much more. But today I finally made it. I came to San Francisco for the launch of the iPad. Oh, happy man.
The iPad And Chrome OS Netbooks Are On A Collision Course - TechCrunch →
techcrunch.com
Apple has made it clear all along that they had no plans to build a netbook. And true to their word, they haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that Apple didn’t feel there was a need for a device that resided in between a full laptop and a mobile phone — in fact, that’s squarely where Apple is positioning the iPad. With it, they feel that they’ve created a $500 (for the baseline version) device that is superior to every netbook out there.
Meanwhile, Google has decided to target the market in between the laptop and the mobile phone as well. But whereas Apple is anti-netbook, Google is very pro-netbook — they just want to make them better. That’s the reason behind Google OS, as Google clearly laid out during its unveiling event late last year.
“Javid Muhammedali, Monster.com Director of Product Management, explained two ways that semantic search can help. First, it can understand the meaning of words and use the context to help determine meaning. Second, it understands the hierarchy of concepts in such areas as job titles, skills, industries, etc. The context allows it to understand the different uses of a word like, Washington, when used in an address, school, company, person, etc.”
—The AppGap» Monster.com Employs Semantic Search to Speed and Enhance the Job-Candidate Matching Process (via smarterplanet)
Possible Nexus One with AT&T 3G support passes through the FCC
A new handset from HTC bearing a model number very similar to the Nexus One, has just passed through the FCC. The test documents reveal very little about the phone, as HTC has as usual requested that the FCC keep all details confidential. The model number of the device is PB99110 (the Nexus One carries the model number PB99100) and will support Quad-Band GSM, WCDMA bands I, II and V, Bluetooth and WiFi 802.11b/g.
Google have said that they will be expanding their Nexus One offering to support a wider range of networks and carriers and it looks like this could be a first step towards that. The added support for WCDMA II and V means that this handset will be able to use AT&T’s 3G network in the U.S. It will also support other 3G networks using these bands like Telstra Australia’s Next-G, Rogers of Canada and all carriers in Latin America.
Those hoping for a Verizon or Sprint version of the phone will have to wait a bit longer however as this filing shows no support for their CDMA network. Google have said that they will have a CDMA compatible version of the handset available in the spring.
20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited
- Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
- Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
- LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
- Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis.Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
- Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
- More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
- Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
- Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
- There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
- Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
- Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.
Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
- There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
- There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
- Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over27.3 million.
- The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
- More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
- Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
- 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
- At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
- India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
- More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
- 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
- 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
- More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
Impressive stuff, but as always, take these stats with a pinch of salt.
