One Million Registered Twitter Apps

Case of Build an extensible Platform, Provide good support and Developers will come. Twitter now has One Million Registered Twitter Apps.

As an ecosystem, we’ve just crossed one million registered applications, built by more than 750,000 developers around the world. This is up from 150,000 apps just a year ago. A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools.

Investors and businesses are taking note. Since December 2010, more than $500 million has been invested in ecosystem companies, and more than a billion dollars has been paid out in acquisitions. This level of investment is indicative of the opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs to build successful businesses as part of the Twitter platform.

Android is a Billion dollar business for Microsoft

Trefis in a research note today.

Android is the leading smartphone platform in the world with over 500,000 device activations every day. It is one of Google's most successful businesses helping Google capture mobile  search market share and revenues that will top $1.3 billion in 2012. Microsoft owns several patents relating to Android technology and so Android's success is quickly becoming a boon for Microsoft, which has  established licensing agreements with several Android manufacturers to settle patent infringement claims. After landing several key licensing agreements and with a big Samsung  agreement reportedly in the works, Android is well on its way to becoming one of Microsoft's fastest growing money makers.

Since Microsoft has the rights to several patents related to technology used in Android, it has been able to turn Android into a huge revenue generating business by entering into patent licensing agreements with other companies which produce Android devices. Microsoft recently entered a patent licensing agreements with several manufacturers including HTC, General Dynamics, Wistron and Onkyo under which they will pay it $5-$10 for every Android device that they ship. With 500,000 devices a day, this implies around $1 billion in value if it received a $5 fee for each Android device. Current negotiations with Samsung, the top Android device manufacturer, could land Microsoft an additional $10-$15 for every Android device activated by Samsung.

Apple's App Eating Binge

Independent developers and ISV's need to take a serious hard look at investing in Apple Ecosystem.

Nieman Journalism Lab

Apple has also, from the looks of things, gone on a veritable app-eating binge. The company, it announced, has created: “Reading List,” a read-later functionality that allows users to time-shift their consumption of content (sound familiar?); a cloud-storage service, iCloud (which looks remarkably like this one); and a new camera and image-editing feature (kind of like this one). Among others. Possible follow-up announcements: Apple is introducing badges to reward users for visiting places in-person!

Apple is releasing a game that involves shooting birds at pigs!

Read also, Which Apps Are Threatened by Apple’s Upgrades?

Windows 8 - In with the old & new

Microsoft yesterday gave a preview of "Windows 8", the OS we all have been waiting for, an OS that takes the current Windows devices from being 'touch friendly' to being 'touch-centric', providing an alternative for iPad and Android Tablet devices. Here's what I liked.

  • Extends the Metro design to Tablet form factor
  • The Tiled Start screen, similar to Windows Phone like Live Tiles, much better than dumb icons as on iOS and Android devices today.
  • Ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen while running other apps side by side. Great design of presenting multi-tasking capability.
  • The new development platform is now based on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS so that opens up Windows platform to a whole new set of developers who don't need to know .NET/Silverlight etc
  • Controls are where they need to be, under your thumbs (especially in Landscape mode). On-screen Split keyboard is useful too although it will need some learning and adjustments.
  • Slick Performance.
  • Flipping to the traditional Windows is a snap. Your existing investments in software/apps continue.

Now to the dislikes. I also would have liked Windows 8 to provide simplicity by hiding desktop in atleast Slate kind of devices. John Gruber covers this nicely here. 

The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better. The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. iOS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS.

There’s a cost for this elimination of complexity and compatibility, of course, which is that the iPad is also less capable than a Mac. That’s why Apple is developing iOS alongside Mac OS X. 

While I initally thought that John nailed it and that simplicity could have definitely be addressed in a better way by hiding desktop in atleast Slate kind of devices. But I guess there is more to it.

  • One, Microsoft does not have to copy the current breed of tablet devices. Microsoft proved this with Windows Phone by revolutionizing the whole Metro design and live tiles. Microsoft is extending Metro to Tablets now and the Metro design principles are making more sense on larger form factors. 
  • Two, Microsoft is aware that 100s of millions of users have invested in traditional Windows and these users want to enjoy watching videos from their beds, read emails while traveling, read books while on a beach but when it comes to complex functions like replying to their bosses email with data in excel sheets, or approving vacations while flying using an in-house enterprise app, these users don't want to run to their desktops/PCs. Microsoft is targetting these users and believe me there are billions of such use cases out there (me included). And I am sure Microsoft like others would be spending efforts in making these entrprise tools more touch-centric. Same would be the case with enterprises. It would be so easy to make workflow based apps using HTML5/JavaScript which are touch-centric. Microsoft has inherent strength is extending the development suite to easily develop such apps and I am sure we will hear more about them in September. 

The only miss for me is the lack of support for Silverlight as a Tablet front end development tool (I am aware of the support for Silverlight in traditional desktop). Microsoft has invested a good amount in Silverlight on desktop and Windows Phone 7. Let there be support for Silverlight and let people use the existing investments. Also, not clear if there will be a way to use Windows Phone 7 Apps on Windows 8, something which iOS platform enables so easily. 

All in all, Windows 8 lives up to the expectation of a healthy competitor to iPad and it will be fun to see how they actually compete next year. Windows 8 allows you to shuttle between past, present and the future. In a winner takes all market, delays are expensive but design flaws are deadly. Microsoft seems to have addressed the latter, we now need to see the speed in which these devices reach market. 

HP's Desperation

HP's Leo Apotheker totally open to licensing webOS to other handset makers

When speaking casually about the future of webOS on non-HP handsets, he noted that the firm was looking to license webOS to various other hardware manufacturers. Granted, the bulk of these are likely to be wrapped up in the enterprise, but he's not tossing out the idea of using webOS on other mobile devices. When asked if he'd consider licensing webOS to a company like HTC, he confessed to being very willing to having that conversation should the scenario present itself -- a stance that's quite different than the one held by the "old HP."

Desperation.

Oracle donates "major" rival of Microsoft Office to Apache foundation

Oracle 'donates' OpenOffice.org to Apache foundation

Oracle has ceded control of the OpenOffice.org code base to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator project, it announced on Wednesday.

OpenOffice.org is the most popular free productivity suite, and a major rival to Microsoft Office. The software giant said it was 'donating' the open-source code so as to "demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities".

"Major" rival and Oracle still donates. Philanthropy at its best. Hmmm...

Gang of Four vs One

Eric Schmidt’s “Gang Of Four” Doesn’t Have Room for Microsoft

Google chairman Eric Schmidt says there are four companies dominating consumer technology today: His own, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. “It seems to me that there are four companies that are exploiting platform strategies really well.”

What about Microsoft? Not a player, Schmidt tells Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D9: “Microsoft is not driving the consumer revolution in the minds of the consumers.”

What about Xbox? That’s a big consumer success, right? Yes, Schmidt says. But “it’s not a platform at the computational level.” Microsoft is still fundamentally about Office and Windows. 

Problem is that all these companies have smaller compete-overlap and the only company which competes with all of these companies with nearly 90% overlap is Microsoft (most with Google and least with Amazon), which gets omitted by Eric. Or is it that Schimdt wanted to name the common enemy.

It's not the size

Outsourcing: Gulliver’s Travels

Outsourcing in many ways is at the crossroads. While some firms like Cognizant have been innovating and growing nicely (and this year cracked the Fortune 500 list), way too many have just become enamored with size in a world where individuals do seem to matter – and frankly have plenty of choices beyond becoming the 522,836th employee of a firm.

Vinnie misses the point. It's always the race to the top, imagine the joy of leading a 522,836 people company or being top 100 or even 1000 in such a company. 

XBOX and Entertainment

 Xbox: Now That’s Entertainment

Let’s look at the numbers and then take a look at what they mean and what the future holds. Just for starters, we’ve sold more than 53 million Xbox 360 consoles, and Xbox has been the top-selling console in the last year. There are more than 30 million Xbox LIVE members. And more than 10 million Kinects have sold to date. Those are pretty big numbers for a device that, until recently, had primarily been purchased by hardcore gamers. But something interesting has happened in the last few years. While people are still playing a ton of video games, 40 percent of all Xbox activity now is non-game. Put another way, we’re seeing an average of 30 hours of video consumption per month per Xbox, a number that is growing fast. And people are expecting more – more options, more games, more videos, more entertainment.

No secret that Xbox is more than a gaming device now and a product Microsoft is investing in and out-innovating competition. But still Microsoft gets lesser recognition than they deserve for the Xbox platform success. I hope that changes with the continued success of the device, peripherals and XBOX Live services. 40% of non-game usage is a pretty high number something the likes of Hulu are recognising and investing in.

Hashbangs

Dan Webb - It's About The Hashbangs

After quite a lot of thought and some attention to some of the issues that surround web apps that use hashbang URLs I’ve come to conclusion that it most definitely is about the hashbangs. This technique, on its own, is destructive to the web. The implementation is inappropriate, even as a temporary measure or as a downgrade experience.

I agree. Hashbang approach is a very fragile attempt to improve experience in an app-centric world. Suddenly you are at the mercy of the JavaScript developer whose implementation approach could be wrong or could easily break or overridden with simple embedded JavaScript or hacks. See some great discussion here, Breaking the Web with hash-bangs.

HTC Pays Microsoft $5 Per Android Phone

HTC Pays Microsoft $5 Per Android Phone, Says Citi

Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning. Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a patent settlement with HTC over intellectual property infringement. Microsoft is suing other Android phone makers, and it's looking for $7.50 to $12.50 per device, says Pritchard.

Asymco writes:

A rough estimate of the number of HTC Android devices shipped is 30 million. If HTC paid $5 per unit to Microsoft, that adds up to $150 million Android revenues for Microsoft. Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million Windows Phone licenses (though not devices.) Estimating that the license fee is $15/WP phone, that makes Windows Phone revenues to date $30 million. So Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone.

Look at the brighter side, HTC is still able to sell these devices. And. Developers are able to create great apps for these devices. All fair. 

Economists and Tech Companies

More and more a lot of Marketing decisions are being made or driven by Economists in technology companies like Microsoft. And boy, do they think differently. For instance this latest Microsoft promotion caught my eye.

Microsoft Announces New Back-to-School Offer for Students

Microsoft Corp. today announced a new offer for students who purchase a new Windows 7-based PC. Starting May 22, students buying a new Windows 7-based PC priced at $699 (U.S.) or more will also get a free Xbox 360 4GB console.

For a moment, I thought that’s a bold move giving away an XBOX 360, $200 value product along with a $700 or more Windows 7 PC. But some searches and half an hour later, I could do nothing but smile at the brilliance of the Economists or business economics savvy Microsoft Managers. Here’s why. Consider the below data:

#1, As of Q3, 2011 (which is March 2011 for Microsoft), Microsoft has sold 53.6 Million XBOX 360 consoles. Microsoft also sold 10 Million Kinects so far and this number is increasing at a rate of 2+ million per quarter. (source)

#2 As of Jan 11, Microsoft has 30 million XBOX Live members and more than 50% of XBOX Live members are XBOX Live Gold members (subscription for $50). (source)

#3 The attach rate for XBOX 360 is the highest for all game console makers at 8.8. From Wikipedia.

The attach rate of a product represents how many complementary goods are sold for each primary product. For example, the average number of DVD-Video discs (complementary product) purchased for each DVD player (primary product) sold, or the number of console-specific video games purchased for each console sold. 

The higher attach rate makes a product more valuable to content producers and the reason for better games on XBOX as compared to other consoles right now. The better the games, the more people will flock to XBOX, better the network effects, better the ecosystem, better feedback loop, better product, more users and the same vicious circle.

So what does Microsoft gain for 100 users, who lets assume take part in this promotion.

A – Took a $200 loss on giving XBOX for free. – Total - $20,000

B – Gained XBOX 360 user who has one out of five chances to buy a Kinect considering there are 10 million Kinects for 53 million XBOX 360’s. Kinect costs $150 so assuming 20 people buy Kinect, that’s $3000

C – Attach rate of 8.8 means people bought 8.8 games per console. Taking $30 average cost for an XBOX game, that’s $26,400 (8.8 x $30 x 100 users)

D – Then add XBOX Live Gold membership which considering above date you can assume half of people will take, That’s $2,500 ($50 x 50 subscribers)

As a simple math, the net value for Microsoft is B+C+D-A which in our case comes to (30,000+26,400+2,500) – 20,000 = Revenue of $38,900. While this may seem simple and straightforward, please see publishers are the main beneficiary of games sales and there are other costs like the marketing around this promotion (BTW,Check out this wonderful ad of a Halo Spartan blowing up a mini-fridge). Then there are indirect advantages also of young students learning using Windows PC while in schools and hopefully using Microsoft software and some becoming proponents of Microsoft software when they grow up and join large enterprises (playfield of Microsoft Office and Windows).

Lady Gaga, Amazon and 1-click purchasing

Amazon Almost Giving Away Lady Gaga’s New Album

It’s not free, but it’s close: Amazon is selling digital downloads of “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga’s newest album, for 99 cents. That gets you 14 songs and a digital booklet. The same album goes for $11.99 at Apple’s iTunes, which seems more interested in pushing a 22-song special edition for $15.99–that’s the one currently featured on the retailer’s home page.

You would wonder why Amazon is giving away Lady Gaga's newest album for 99 cents. To put this in perspective, recall this quote from Steve Jobs from March. 

“Recently we just crossed 200 million accounts,” Jobs told the crowd. “These are accounts with credit cards and 1-click purchasing,” he said. “Now, Amazon doesn’t publish their numbers, but it’s very likely this is the most accounts with credit cards anywhere on the Internet.”

So what Amazon has done is to get people to come to Amazon and give them their credit card numbers and enable repeat visits to be hassle free for the users and in return get Amazon repeat customers. Then look at the below stat:

On an average, an Amazon customer spends about $245 every year across all its sites. In comparison, Amazon customers were spending about $111 per year in early 2003 and about $138 in early 2006. I am of the first belief that this number is going to go up even higher as Amazon has started to add a whole different slew of services.

Now with Lady Gaga's help and 1-click, many of these new users will add $244 to the Amazon topline.

Amazon's Born This Way.

Horowitz on Skype deal

Ben Horowitz

Today, I tip my hat to an old rival, Microsoft. By acquiring Skype, Microsoft becomes a much stronger player in mobile and the clear market leader in Internet voice and video communications. More importantly, Microsoft gets a team, ably lead by the exceptional Tony Bates, that can compete with anyone.

Microsoft to acquire Skype

WSJ is reporting that Microsoft is close to buying Skype for around $8B, its biggest acquisition since it acquired online advertising company aQuantive for $6 billion.

Microsoft Corp. is close to a deal to buy Internet phone company Skype Technologies SA for between $7 billion and $8 billion—the most aggressive move yet by Microsoft to play in the increasingly-converged worlds of communication, information and entertainment.

A deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said, though they cautioned that negotiations aren't yet final and a deal could still fall apart. Including Skype's long-term debt, the total value of the deal is about $8.5 billion.

I am sure Microsoft will get some flak for this purchase but this is huge. Microsoft gets a very strong brand and #1 collaboration service in the consumer space to complement its Enterprise communication and collaboration (Lync, or communicator as it was known some time back) offerings. Microsoft has been perceived weak on the consumer side and what better way to strengthen the same than by adding 666 Million new users who can be leveraged to position other existing and new services/products.

In my view, it will be all about extracting value from this purchase and Microsoft sensible enough will not want to repeat its past mistakes (remember Danger??). Easiest levers to aid in value extraction would be Windows Phone 7 and XBOX/Kinect. Skype integrated into these two devices alone will be a winner for Microsoft. Then there's Enterprise collaboration space where Microsoft has had a decent offering but talk of consumerization of IT and you see a lot of consumer devices & technologies come into Enterprises and that is something Microsoft will want to achieve with Skype. I am sure we will see a lot of analysis on this topic in the coming days and many more great reasons for this purchase. Stay tuned.

Google's Dear Sophie Ad

Steven Levy

But “Dear Sophie” is more of a classic form of Madison Avenue pitching. It’s probably something that Don Draper would come up with if Larry and Sergey were his clients.

They would tell him that their product, the Chrome browser, has a lot going for it over its competitors, like speedier response and a single box to type in addresses and search queries. It runs web applications more efficiently than other browsers, they’d tell him, and if everyone used it, it would hasten a new paradigm of cloud apps. Draper would say that all that stuff is well and good. But for our commercial, we’re going to show a tear-jerking evocation of a father compiling an online scrapbook for to his daughter as she grows up.

Straight out of the Kodak playbook — don’t brag about your specs, but play that song “Where Are You Going My Little One,” and out will come the handkerchiefs. It’s also a stratagem used by banks and insurance companies.

And now Google does it.

Magic with Animated GIFs

I know there are many a photographers (or budding ones) who read my blog. This one's for you. New York based photographer, Jamie Beck in collaboration with Kevin Burg, a web designer with a background in video and motion graphics, has created some very nifty animated GIFs. Check these out. Pure Magic. I liked this one (look closely), and this and this and this and this and this and this.

See all.

Life in a Drive Thru Lane

Ever wondered what goes on inside when you pull into a Drive Thru lane. Businessweek covers the life inside a QSR, the technology advancements and the operational innovations.

Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru

Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you'll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald's (MCD), Wendy's (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: "I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day."

Dark horse of Indian IT Outsourcers

And you guess who that is. It's Cognizant. Cognizant had $4.59 billion in annual revenue for 2010 and reported a $1.37 billion quarter (ending March, 11) with profit of $208.3 million. Cognizant is projecting revenues of at least $5.925 billion for this year and has given a guidance of $1.45 billion for next quarter which will see it surpass Wipro, India's third biggest software exporter.

Cognizant overtakes Infy in North America

While Cognizant is set to overtake Wipro in terms of revenue in the June quarter, it has already overtaken Infosys in the North American market.

In the March 2011 quarter, Infosys' revenue from North America stood at $1,020.5 million while Cognizant's revenue from the same geography touched $1,070 million. Infosys' revenue from North America actually dropped during March FY11 quarter compared with December FY11 quarter when it was $1,025.5 million.

Cognizant has been closing the gap consistently with Infosys in the NA territory. The difference in revenues in March 2009 quarter, with Infosys leading, was $130.4 million. It came down to $101 million in March 2010 quarter. In March 2011 quarter, Cognizant overtook Infosys, exceeding its revenue by $49.5 million.