The iPad tsunami

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

A pair of surveys released today detail the latest trends in what people are doing with their iPads. The interesting bits in a nutshell: The wildly popular Apple tablets are being used more, and more often for business purposes.

The third annual iPad usage survey from Business Insider found that people are spending significantly more time on their tablets. 47 percent of those polled use their iPad between two and five hours a day, up from 41 percent last year and 38 percent in 2010, and 10 percent use it five to eight hours a day (up from 8 percent last year). Overall, 64 percent reported increasing their time on the iPad once they got past the giddy initial exploratory phase. That increased usage is coming at the expense of desktops and laptops — 47 percent now consider their iPad their primary computer, up from 29 percent in 2010. Web surfing is the most popular iPad activity (taking up 37 percent of users’ time), followed by email and social networking (21 percent). The survey found almost 60 percent of web browsing by those polled is now done away from a traditional computer, with 45 percent using their iPads the most and 14 percent using smartphones the most. People also seem to be happy with their iPads — 84 percent have no interest in a Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 tablet, and 70 percent say they wouldn’t be interested in a smaller iPad.

How to blow $6.2bn

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Verily, you could not make this up. A headline saying that Microsoft had made its first-ever loss caught my eye. I assumed it must be a mistake: Microsoft doesn’t make losses for the simple reason that it has a licence to print money. It’s called Windows+Office. But then it turns out that Microsoft blew $6.2bn a while back on an advertising company which has now turned out to be worthless. What always amuses me about tech company valuations is how solemn are the assurances from men in suits that the valuation they have arrived at by consulting the entrails of a goat is in fact a perfectly rational assessment of the asset’s value. I am sure that that $6.2bn valuation was likewise quality-assured by the same clowns.

Microsoft has written down the value of an online advertising firm it bought five years ago by $6.2bn (£4bn).

Microsoft bought Aquantive for $6.3bn in cash in an attempt to catch rival Google in the race to increase revenues from search-related advertising.

The writedown effectively wipes out the acquisition’s value, although there was little impact on Microsoft’s shares in after-hours trading on Monday.

The purchase of Aquantive in 2007 was then Microsoft’s biggest acquisition.

It has since been eclipsed by the company’s $8.5bn purchase of internet phone service Skype last year.

Microsoft said in a statement on Monday that “the acquisition did not accelerate growth to the degree anticipated, contributing to the writedown”.

Google Nexus 7: first impressions

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My Nexus 7 arrived yesterday. Here are first impressions:

Upsides

  • Yay! It does fit in a jacket pocket. In fact it’s easy to carry about unobtrusively.
  • Battery life: no rigorous test, but seems reasonable. At any rate it’s largely untouched (67% remaining) after a day’s text and browsing work (no multimedia). The Settings panel is very informative about battery use, showing which Apps are using most power.
  • Settings are easy and intuitive.
  • On-screen keyboard: Nice but seems erratically unresponsive at times. (Or else I haven’t figured out how to drive it.) Better layout than the default layout on iPad keyboard. Big plus: because of the physical size of the device and the portrait orientation I can type with two thumbs, like I used to do with my Psion 3 in the dim and distant past.
  • I tried it with Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Pairing was a bit fiddly. But once done, it worked just fine.
  • Nice screen.
  • Lighter than iPad. Easier to use as e-reader.
  • Great autocorrect when typing in Write app.
  • Very simple setup. Google ecosystem works well. Well, it ought to: if they can’t get that right, then they ought to quit.
  • Immediate auto-upgrade to Jelly Bean (where do they get these idiotic names?) You can also set Apps to auto-upgrade. Wonder if that’s also true of the OS. One of the bugbears with Android that drove me into the arms of IoS was the problem of upgrading from one Android version to another.)
  • Neat packaging and small charger.

    • Downsides

  • Portrait only – except for YouTube. I naively thought that this was controlled by software. But it seems to be baked in. This is very restrictive, especially for web pages. Unacceptably small print is the only way it can get everything in. I was completely wrong about this. Jeff Jarvis kindly explained (on Twitter) that there is a tiny icon in the Notifications panel which enables screen rotation to be toggled on or off. But there’s a cunning kicker: the home screen doesn’t auto-rotate; it’s only when one is running an app that rotation works.
  • Front-facing camera. Hopeless for photography. Not particularly impressive but adequate for Skype.
  • Twitter app not as good as the iPad version.
  • Only WiFi. No 3G. (Worked fine with iPhone as modem, though.)

    • Mixed

  • Apps ecosystem seems more chaotic than the IoS one. (This may be a reflection of my unfamiliarity with Android, not having used an Android device for 18 months.) Some apps, however, seem pretty good. Kindle for example. Ditto a note/journal writing tool called Write. Ditto Evernote. Nice integration between apps — eg between Write and Evernote. WordPress blogging app seems better than the IoS one. (Memo to self: check for upgrade on IoS).

    • Overall

    Pretty good. Half the price of an iPad. Reasonable performance, good screen and some really good apps. And it fits nicely into your pocket.

    Can’t figure out what the business model or marketing rationale is, though. I don’t think it’s really aimed at the iPad. So is it aimed at the Kindle Fire? (Since I haven’t tried the Fire I don’t have any basis for a comparison.) Most of the existing reviews seem to say: nice kit, pity about the content. But I’m not interest in ‘consuming content’: I want a device that I can use for the work that I do, which mainly involves thinking about, generating and editing ‘content’ (note-taking, newspaper columns, lecture drafts, outlines, photographs). At the moment, the iPad software ecosystem is proving brilliant for all of these uses — but it took time for the necessary apps to appear. The Nexus 7 is nowhere near as good for these purposes at the moment. But perhaps the necessary software will eventually arrive.

    Other reviews

    Charles Arthur — Guardian

    Wired.co.uk

    Tech Review

    PC Advisor

    Daily Telegraph

    Arstechnica

    The end of Assad

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    Steve Coll thinks that Assad is finished.

    Now, Assad’s coming demise seems less of an argument than an observation. It looks probable that the President will take his place among the war’s victims, at the hands of a coup-maker within his ranks, or else at the hands of a rebel attack, in the manner of Muammar Qaddafi’s death at the climax of Libya’s rebellion. It is conceivable that Assad could slip into exile, perhaps to a dacha outside Moscow, where deposed Soviet clients and spies used to settle into retirement and give the occasional bitter interview to a Western correspondent back during the Cold War.

    Venture Capitalists: the slash-and-burn artists of technology

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    Eventually the generation that Fred Wilson [of Union Square Ventures] leads will fall behind, as did the one led by John Doerr at Kleiner-Perkins. What they will be replaced with is one that is not only aware of the usability of products, but also has a sense for the flow of open technologies to fuel the ecosystem. These VCs will make side investments in technologies that are not intended to produce an IPO or acquisition, rather are intended to produce a new layer of technology that a whole generation of startups can feed off. At the same time, some percentage of each fund will be plowed into programs designed to generate the next layer after that.

    The VCs will tell you that it’s not their business to fund innovation for the sake of innovation. That’s as short-sighted as saying that an oil company wouldn’t invest in exploration or research into new extraction methods. Or if you got good service at a restaurant you wouldn’t leave a 15 percent tip. Of course you don’t have to do either. But if you don’t do some exploration or leave decent tips, you’ll be out of business one day, or get hot coffee spilled in your lap.

    I’ve always felt that as long as Moore’s Law is operating, and it shows no sign of letting up, that we aren’t doing our jobs if the tech industry isn’t tracking its growth in a linear fashion. The boom-bust cycle is a product of the lack of vision of the VCs. Or our over-reliance on VCs to lead the investment decisions of the tech industry.

    This post by Dave Winer is interesting because of its rarity. Insiders in the technology industry rarely write or talk in public about venture capitalists, probably because they think they might need them some day. Or they believe in appeasement (defined by Winston Churchill as “being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last”.) As a result the public has a peculiarly rosy — and misleading — impression of them. There are, of course, good VCs: I know a few. But there are an awful lot of creepy, destructive ones too. One of the lovely stories in Michael Lewis’s great book about Jim Clark concerns Clark’s decision to exclude from the Netscape IPO the VC who had screwed him at Silicon Graphics. The guy committed suicide as a result, and I remember thinking at the time that it looked like a fitting conclusion to a sordid career.

    TIJABP

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    Lovely blog post by Dave Winer.

    I’d like to propose a new acronym. TIJABP.

    This. Is. Just. A. Blog. Post.

    In other words, this is not the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

    Or the Treaty of Versailles or even legally binding.

    It’s not Hey Jude or Beethoven’s 9th.

    Not Catcher In The Rye or Annie Hall.

    And it’s definitely not the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. (Yo Mookie!)

    It’s just a blog post, so read it that way.

    Twas written quickly, by one (busy) person, who then moved on to something else.

    After Vermeer

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    After Vermeer, originally uploaded by jjn1.

    I like Vermeer’s work, for several reasons: it reminds me of the time I lived in Holland; I love his use of window lighting; and my former colleague Philip Steadman wrote a convincing book establishing that the ‘photographic’ feel of much of his work arose because Vermeer used a camera obscura. So whenever I see a window shedding interesting light on an interior, I go for it.

    Interestingly, David Hockney, in an equally fascinating book went further than Phil, arguing that Vermeer and some other artists probably used lenses as well.

    Why the Net matters

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    From the Pew Internet Survey

    Thirty percent of U.S. adults help a loved one with personal needs or household chores, managing finances, arranging for outside services, or visiting regularly to see how they are doing. Most are caring for an adult, such as a parent or spouse, but a small group cares for a child living with a disability or long-term health issue. The population breaks down as follows:

    24% of U.S. adults care for an adult
    3% of U.S. adults care for a child with significant health issues
    3% of U.S. adults care for both an adult and a child
    70% of U.S. adults do not currently provide care to a loved one

    Eight in ten caregivers (79%) have access to the internet. Of those, 88% look online for health information, outpacing other internet users on every health topic included in our survey, from looking up certain treatments to hospital ratings to end-of-life decisions.

    The Real Scandal of Mitt Romney and Bain

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    I really don’t understand the US. I mean to say, here’s a rich, inventive country stuffed full of innovative and smart folks. And yet the best it can do by way of a presidential challenger is a hypocritical creep like Mitt Romney. Now, serious folks tell me that he might even beat Obama, despite the astonishing contradictions and evasions in his account of himself. This nice New Yorker blog post by James Surowiecki ponders the recent revelations which suggest that Romney didn’t part company with Bain, the private equity firm that made him rich, when he claimed he did.

    What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars. (Henry Blodget suggests here that Romney’s ownership of Bain Capital shares may explain how that I.R.A. could have legally gotten so big.) And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.

    Osama bin Laden meets Thomas Hobbes

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Every time I go through airport security nowadays the thought that comes to mind – as I take off my shoes and belt, unpack my laptop and display my toothpaste in a transparent plastic bag – is that Osama bin Laden won hands down. The same thought pops up when taking a photograph outside the London Stock Exchange – or inside an airport or a railway station – and a uniformed jobsworth appears from nowhere to inform me that photography is “not allowed, sir”. And it also comes to mind whenever the home secretary opens her mouth on the subject of the draft communications data bill, aka the snoopers charter. Terrorism – or the perceived threat of it – has turned democracies into paranoid armed camps in which the state feels justified in assuming that every citizen is a potential terrorist.

    The intrusiveness and ubiquity of state surveillance is already shocking. But we ain’t seen nothing yet – the technology is just getting into its stride…