From a conversation with John Markoff…
Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Direct link here (courtesy of Engadget). These annual presentations are the hottest tickets on the trade circuit, but this one had an oddly perfunctory air, despite the raft of new products and services that Steve Jobs announced. The audience was oddly muted and respectful; new products or features were greeted not with the raucous, foot-stomping, whistling euphoria of yesteryear, but with ripples of polite applause. And the reaction shots suggested an audience comprised of a high proportion of suits. Could it be that the Jobs Keynote has become the tech equivalent of the Annual General Meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company — where people pay over $100k for a single share in the company (currently trading at $129,720 a share) just to buy the right to attend the meeting and sit at the Sage of Omaha’s feet?
There were the usual nauseating interludes when the Chief Execs of Apple’s commercial ‘partners’ are invited on stage for a brief share of the limelight. This year’s scene with Paul Otellini, the Intel CEO, rated three on the Sickbag Scale.
Still, Jobs remains the best embodiment of CEO-as-evangelist there is. And what other company would be able to round off a technical presentation with a live performance by Randy Newman?
Rory Cellan-Jones has taken a sceptical look at the ‘newsworthiness’ of the Apple announcements. He rates the iTunes movie-rental deal at 7/10 and the new ultra-thin laptop at 6/10. His colleagues think Apple gets too much media attention. In terms of its impact on people’s lives, the Ford Focus is more important than anything announced by Steve Jobs.
Which is true. The laptop is called the MacBook Air, btw. Why ‘Air’? Because, says TechCrunch, that’s the only thing left in your wallet after you’ve bought one. It’s £1,199 in the UK, apparently. Shipping in two weeks.
And, for busy folks, here’s the gist of the 90-minute keynote in 60 seconds.
Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business Editor, has a hunch that the published figure (£500k) is a bit low…
Whatever your political bent or view of the Blair years, it would be a national humiliation if the sticker on his forehead said $1000k.
His franchise is worth more.
For a million dollars to be the number on his ticket, Wall Street and the City would be in total meltdown and we would be in the grip of a worldwide recession (we may get there yet).
It couldn’t be the right price – especially since Blair takes advice from a bunch of astute business people and he isn’t famous for knowingly underselling himself.
So when the Daily Telegraph reported that he is being paid £2m a year, I thought that was more like it.
But it still didn’t feel right.
My intuitive view was that you couldn’t have a Blair for less than $5m a year.
And having now spoken to bankers close to this deal, I am told $5m is what JP Morgan is paying (though Morgan’s and Blair’s office are refusing to publish the pecuniary details).
Thanks to James Miller for the link.
(With apologies to Magritte.)
I don’t have an iPhone but I do have an iPod Touch which runs most of the iPhone software and I’ve been blown away by the version of the Safari browser that runs on the iPhone/Touch. It’s the first time I’ve ever found it acceptable to browse the Web on a handheld device. Accessing the Web on my BlackBerry is like having one’s teeth pulled without anaesthetic. It’s simply dire.
Looks like I’m not alone in this:
On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.
The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.
The iPhone has taken the frustration out of browsing on a mobile phone, said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company.
Other companies confirmed the trends, if not the specific data, observed by Google. Yahoo, for instance, said iPhones accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic. And AdMob, a firm that shows billions of ads on mobile Web sites every month, said it saw traffic from iPhones surge drastically around Christmas.
“Consumers are going to demand Internet browsers” as good as Apple’s, said Vic Gundotra, a Google vice president who oversees mobile products…
The stats are significant: Google is seeing almost as much traffic from a device that has 2 per cent of the phone market as from Symbian phones which have 63 per cent of the market. There’s a lesson there, Nokia.
… or is it back to the future? Lovely column by Stephen Fry on walled gardens and social networking…
I am old enough to remember Prestel and the original bulletin boards and “commercial online services” Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online. These were closed communities. You paid a subscription, dialled in and connected. You made new friends and you chatted in “rooms” designated for the purpose according to special interests, hobbies and propensities. CompuServe and AOL were shockingly late to add what was called an “internet ramp” in the 90s. This allowed those who dialled up to go beyond the confines of the provider’s area and explore the strange new world of the internet unsupervised. AOL offered its members a hopeless browser and various front ends that it hoped would keep people loyal to its squeaky-clean, closed world. This lasted through the 90s as it covered the planet in CDs in an attempt to recruit subscribers. A lost cause, naturally, and the company ended up as little more than an ordinary ISP. Made millions for Steve Case on the way as AOL merged with Time Warner, but that’s another story.
Opening and closing like a flower
My point is this: what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern…
Thanks to Pete for the link.
No — this is not a story about a hedge fund manager, but about a guy who founded an online dating site.
MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.
For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right…
Bully for him!
From openDemocracy…
A third assessment of post-invasion violent deaths in Iraq was published on 9 January 2008 by the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious platform for medical research and scientific debates edited in Boston, Massachusetts. The lead article in the journal – “Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2003 to 2006” – reports the results of an inquiry by the Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group (IFHS), involving collaboration between national and regional ministers in Iraq and the World Health Organisation (WHO). It finds that 151,000 (between 104,000 and 220,000) people died from violence in Iraq between March 2003 and June 2006…
I’ve been wondering for weeks why the BBC and the UK newspapers are devoting so much attention to the primaries. Today, in a perceptive piece, my Observer colleague Peter Preston puts forward an interesting conjecture:
Two things follow. One is a new connection that needs making more clearly. British editors are more fascinated by this presidential race than ever, and not just because it comes with black or feminist drum rolls of history attached. This time, for the Mail, Times, Guardian and Telegraph in particular, there are millions of American readers of their websites to be wooed and served, unique users with ad potential attached. So, who wins in November matters much closer to home.
When the Mail lays into Hillary and Matt Drudge’s site carries that copy, the hits grow exponentially. If Mrs Clinton makes it to the Oval office, the Telegraph would reckon to pick up web readers as it leads a conservative attack that consensual US papers might initially shy away from. If Obama or Clinton win, then the Guardian, which has scored so many points by belabouring George Bush, has a different climate to work in.
And the other thing – on behalf of British readers and viewers at least – is to wonder how many miles and hours of faraway, self-cancelling stuff about moods and hunches the market can endure before the real and abiding election starts next autumn…