iakttakelser (observations)

Well, as I also reported IDC 2015 numbers, here are @Asymco comments. A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story : IDC released a  new forecast  for the worldwide smartphone market which included a long range forecast–all the way to 2015. Most people fixated on the share data in 2015. Not hard to do since whoever wrote the press release highlighted this flashy headline. Putting aside the three significant digits of accuracy on every data point and the hard to swallow declaration that a painfully underperforming (in  more ways than one ) Windows Phone will overtake iOS and BlackBerry to become the second largest platform by units/year in 2015, there is much more to the report. Using only the public data from the press release we can put together a pretty good picture of the transition being forecast and determine some of the (unstated) assumptions being made. It’s these assumptions about the underlying market dynamics which illuminate far more th...

IDC expects Nokia together with Microsoft to be the number two in 2015. Even bigger than Apple. Update: Horace Dediu' comment: @asymco Horace Dediu In 2010 Apple shipped 48m iPhones and 90m since start. IDC forecast: in 2015 192m Windows Phones will ship. Total 479m between now and then 12 hours ago   via  Twitter for Mac   Favorite   Retweet   Reply A post from VentureBeat by Mikko Torikka has the whole story . Here is a part: Thanks to  a partnership with Nokia , Windows Phone 7 will be the number two smartphone operating system worldwide by 2015, predicts market research company IDC. ... The worldwide smartphone market is expected to grow 49.2% in 2011 as more consumers and enterprise users turn in their feature phones for smartphones with more advanced features. Smartphone vendors will ship more than 450 million smartphones in 2011 compared to the 303.4 million units in 2010, IDC predicts. The smartphone market will grow more than four times...

A post from bloomberg.com by has the whole story . Here is a part: Speeding up Nokia’s product development is at the top of Chief Executive Stephen Elop’s agenda as he tries to meld the Finnish company’s handsets with Microsoft Corp. software to narrow the widening gap to Apple and Google Inc. Photographer: Henrik Kettunen/Bloomberg Every summer for the last four years while  Apple Inc. (AAPL) shipped a new iPhone,  Nokia Oyj (NOK1V)  managers vacationed at their lake cottages in Finland. “In mid-July, Nokia House is a ghost town,” said  Adam Greenfield , managing director of Urbanscale, a design consulting firm in  New York , who worked for Nokia from 2008 to 2010. “If you need a decision and the key person’s at the summer cottage? Forget it. You’ll resolve that issue in September. It’s something that hampers their agility.” Speeding up Nokia’s product development is at the top of Chief Executive Stephen Elop’s agenda as he tries to meld the Finnish compan...

When Google is first out with new technology, Apple normally comes after, with strength! A post from VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi has the whole story . Here is a part: Making payments with your mobile phone is one of the great dreams of technophiles. Wave your phone in front of a reader and buy something just like that. To make that a reality, Google is teaming up with MasterCard and Citigroup to embed the technology in Android mobile phones, the  Wall Street Journal reports . The technology is known as “ near field communication ” and it has been used in Japan for some time. But it’s not easy to implement, since it requires standardized readers at merchants and wireless radio chips built into phones. Still, the companies are launching an effort to make it happen. If it works, the phone can become your electronic wallet. The enticement for the merchants is that Google will be able to offer them more data about their customers and help them target ads and discount offers to...

It took me months to leave Farmville. And yes, I think it was the sunk costs... A post from lifehacker.com by Kevin Purdy  has the whole story . Here is a part: ...Put simply, it's the feeling of "I've already spent X, so I'd better spend Y to salvage it." David McRaney's post makes good sense of how FarmVille is a master manipulator of the sunk cost emotion, but shows how it's hardly contained to pastimes and cheap addictions: Hal Arkes and Catehrine Blumer created an experiment in 1985 which demonstrated your tendency to go fuzzy when sunk costs come along. They asked subjects to assume they had spent $100 on a ticket for a ski trip in Michigan, but soon after found a better ski trip in Wisconsin for $50 and bought a ticket for this trip too. They then asked the people in the study to imagine they learned the two trips overlapped and the tickets couldn't be refunded or resold. Which one do you think they chose, the $100 good vacation, or the ...

When you’re a grandfather, you may begin to tremble a bit. I do, so I appreciate the anti-trebling feature of iTunes. A post from Lifehacker by Melanie Pinola has the whole story . Here is a part:   Melanie Pinola  —  If you take handheld videos (on your smartphone, for example), the videos may suffer from shakiness. YouTube has an easy fix for this issue with their video stablization editing feature. The YouTube clip above shows how to use the video editor's Effects button to stabilize shaky videos. It may take a few hours for the process, but once done, you'll have a new, less shaky video in your account.

Another great post from Horace. I like the translation part. It's really impossible to understand the left column. A post from symco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story . Here it is with kind permission: Yesterday RIM reported their quarterly earnings. The results were mixed to slightly negative and the shares were down 10% in after-hours trading. I’ll work through the smartphone market data at a later time but for now what I want to focus on is RIM’s strategy which really means understanding RIM’s intentions or their approach to the market. For that we have to go straight to the source: what management actually says. Trouble is, management often speaks in a jargon that is unfamiliar to people (sometimes unfamiliar to anyone outside the company). Strategy analysis involves translation. So here follows the interpretation of Jim Balsillie’s remarks during the conference call (transcript sourced from  Businessinsider.com ). What Balsillie Said My interpretation Fi...

Future IT has three devices, or form factors; mobile, tablet and TV. I like that! A post from VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi has the whole story . Here is a part: Samsung offered a window into the future with a broad discussion of the forces driving the smart mobile device market and the different fundamental components it is making to serve those markets in the future. The U.S. division of Korea’s  Samsung Electronics  took a deep dive into its mobile technologies today at its local U.S. chip headquarters in San Jose, Calif. today, highlighting everything from the coming flexible screens for tablet computers to dual-core processors for smartphones. The company’s marketers tried to present the idea that no one is better positioned for the future of mobile electronics than Samsung. The company competes with other integrated technology companies such as Sony, LG, HP, and Apple — but few can boast of the technologies it showed off today. Samsung’s bet on mobile stems from ...

Working on business plans, I've an eye on statistics, and here are some new numbers from CTIA. A post from .com by has the whole story . Here is a part: Hans Vestberg, [CEO of Ericsson] said this morning that his company expects there to be  8 billion mobile subscriptions live around the world in just 4 years . "Astute observers will note that there aren't 8 billion people on earth," he said. "We're definitely expecting multiple devices and subscriptions to be used by many people." Vestberg emphasized that those 8 billion subscriptions would all be from human subscribers, too. Beyond those subscriptions, he predicted that there would be  50 billion network connected non-human devices in 10 years , representing 2/3 of all electronics. "All devices that can benefit from connectivity will be connected," Vestberg said in one of many references here to what's called the  Internet of Things . ... Where is China in all of this, you mi...

Folk går over fra å bruke PC til til mobile post-PC enheter som smartphones og leseplater. Veksten av PC salget har nesten stoppet helt opp og salget av smartphones og leseplater har eksplodert. Store folkegrupper, som i India og Kina hopper simpelthen over PC-generasjonen , og starter sin internett-tidsalder rett på mobile enheter. Horace Dediu viser at mobilabbonenter har blitt mer enn doblet fra 2.2B i 2005 til 5.5B i 2010. Mobilt internett, eller 3G, har imidlertid økt med 14 ganger fra 67 til 940 millioner i det samme tidsrummet. Horace diskuterer her om hvordan iOS eller Android kan erobre denne milliarden . Facebooks har valgt å kjøpe Snaptu, produsent av apps på Java Phones. Snaptu har nylig laget en facebook app for Java Phones. Jeg tror dette er deres forsøk å nå deres milliard. For deg som bruker mobile enheter - nå kan du endelig få gjøre administrative rutinearbeid effektivt og rimelig! Min hypotese er at nye brukere i OECD og de fleste i utviklingsland vil fa...

What an innovate way explaining a collection of graphs. Horace is giving us work for thoughts for weeks ahead! A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story : data source:  ITU

A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story : When tallying up the  race to a billion  users, I noted that both iOS and Android seem to have the potential to reach that size of user base. However, that begs the question of where those users will come from. We have to note the fact that there aren’t a billion users to be captured today. If not today, then how soon, and where are they? The first question is who is addressable. If we stick with mobile cellular subscribers, there seem to be plenty of users (at least 5.3 billion as of October 2010 according to the  ITU ). However, the number of “mobile broadband” (i.e. 3+G network subs) is about 940 million. The chart to the left shows the difference and adds the subdivision between developed and developing economies. Over half (51.1%) of developed nations’ populations have signed up for mobile broadband while only 5.4% of developing country populations are on 3G. And whereas developing countries have a...

A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story : By one estimate (Gartner), about 81% of apps downloaded today are free. The way free apps are able to generate revenue is through advertising. 16 percent of application store markets’ $5.2 billion revenue was generated from advertising. But advertising what? It seems that most of the ad dollars spent on in-app ads are spent by developers to promote other apps. I’d like to get hard data to prove this, but assuming it’s true, we have to ask if the apps being promoted through ads in apps are free apps seeking more revenue from ads…from other apps. To put it bluntly, the $816 million that “comes from advertising” is not coming from consumers but churning around the ecosystem like a hot potato. This figure is said to triple this year. It’s arguable that this is only logical. App users are pre-qualified as app downloaders so it makes sense to target them through apps for more apps. But where does value actually flow int...

A webinar about the Post-PC enterprise starts in about 20 minutes. I'm looking forward to see if I can use this to describe our billing apps. A post from gigaom.com by Michael Wolf has the whole story . Here is a part: Last quarter, smartphones outsold PCs for the first time ever, leaving no doubt that we have truly entered the post-PC era. Nowhere is this more evident than in the workplace, where employees across levels and industries embrace mobility as a productivity and workplace communication lifeline. This growth of the mobile workforce will find additional fuel in the rapid acceptace of the tablet computing. As new devices such as the iPad, Android tablet and HP’s new WebOS based platforms become increasingly commonplace, they will both enable new applicaition and use-cases for enterprise mobile computing while at the same time increasing platform fragmentation to new levels. As new devices proliferate and today’s workforce becomes increasingly distributed, it becom...

Apple has killed the CD, the Walkman and the radio. It's on the way to eliminate video, DVD and TV series. Rovio now predicts that it kills console gaming. To put the story below in context: Sony reported yesterday on Bloomberg that there are 183M playing console games in a $24B market, where the average player is 35 years old and plays 13 hours pr. week. A post from VentureBeat by Anthony Ha has the whole story . Here is a part: Peter Vesterbacka, whose company  Rovio  makes the immensely popular Angry Birds game, has a big vision for the future of mobile gaming. Vesterbacka leads business development for Rovio, and he already outlined some of his vision earlier this week when  Rovio announced $42 million in new funding led by Accel Partners . But he was even more expansive today, at a panel I moderated at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. Innovation in gaming has clearly moved into mobile and social, Vesterbacka said, largely because tho...

A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story . Here it is with kind permission: I  last looked  at the race to a billion in September 2010. I’ve now added a few more data points to the tracked platforms and also added points for the major console game platforms and Symbian. When judging the performance of a platform, the adoption slope and sustainability over time is perhaps the most interesting measure. One can see how many platforms slow down before reaching 100 million and so far none have hit the billion mark (Windows has but not in the 10 year time frame of this chart.) Looking at game consoles also shows the limits of a narrowly focused platform. They performed better than i-Mode and Netscape but not as well as iTunes or iPod which themselves have growth limits. If you’re looking for the “fastest growing” title, it’s a toss-up. Both iOS and Android are following almost identical trajectories.[see Notes] The absolute highest cumulative sales total...

Are we serving groups by our iFacturas apps? We certainly serve small companies and freelancers. But groups. I think we still have to rethink this. A post from .com by has the whole story . Here is a part: In case you needed any further evidence that groups will be big for mobile apps in 2011, you need only look as far as  Facebook’s recent acquisition of group-messaging app Beluga . Beluga provides users with the ability to chat privately, with the express aim of helping them plan outings or share info and photos. Sound familiar? It should if you’ve ever been a BlackBerry Messenger user. Shortly following the announcement of Facebook’s acquisition of Beluga, the  possibility of RIM expanding the availability of BBM to other platforms was floated , suggesting the BlackBerry-maker isn’t eager to cede ground in this territory. But if Facebook does group messaging right, even a platform-agnostic BBM can’t compete. Groups are hot, and not just because they’re getting a lot ...

Horace Dediu offer a curated mobile report for less than $200, and I've got another item on my wish list. If you are dependent on the mobile internet, don't wait! A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story . Here it is with kind permissions: Ever since I started publishing this blog there have been requests for access to the underlying data sets. That’s not an easy thing to do. Spreadsheets are not “productized”. It’s very hard to explain how to use one and even harder for charts. Having been an user of commercial spreadsheet models, I know that it’s a massive undertaking to produce and support them. Many large companies can afford this but few individuals would be willing to pay $15,000 for an analyst’s data. In many cases even at large companies professional information services staff are employed to master the data sets and answer questions for the general user. The complexity and cost of comprehensive market research is a huge burden for innovation...

This graphic is quite pretty. And easy to read. A post from Engadget Mobile by Chris Ziegler has the whole story . Here is a part: They say a picture is worth a thousand words -- but in this case, a picture is worth tens of billions of dollars in market share.  Nielsen  has broken down its US smartphone market share stats between November and January in two dimensions -- by market share and by platform -- and stuffed all that data into a single block of mesmerizing color. It's interesting to see the Apple and RIM juggernauts flanked by two imposing, red slivers of HTC, isn't it? The research firm also took a look at platforms by age group; the shares are surprisingly consistent across the board, though Android does have a slight edge with the young'uns. Follow the break for that chart.

Med mindre du bare skal ringe og bruke google-tjenester da. Men hvis du skal bruke apper, må du ha en mobil som kan oppgraderes jevnlig med nye versjoner av operativ-systemet. Og det er det bare referanse-telefonene som kan. En post fra VG har hele historien . Her er en del: Først ut med fremtidens Android.   Nexus S er Googles nye referansetelefon. Denne gangen er telefonen laget av Samsung, og kan sees på som en oppfølger til den populære Samsung Galaxy S. Skjermen i Nexus S er ikke annet enn imponerende. Den fire tommer store herligheten oppleves som lyssterk med suveren fargegjengivelse og god skarphet. Noe som også er litt morsomt er at hele fronten på telefonen er litt buet, inkludert selve skjermen. Dette er en ny designvri, men utgjør ingen forskjell i brukervennlighet. Prosessoren er av den lynraske typen. Imidlertid ser det ut til å være litt småkluss i programvaren som gjør at telefonen lugger litt mer enn vi kunne ønske, blant annet når vi zoomer i nettleseren....