Speaking at All Things D in 2010, Steve Jobs famously predicted that "PCs are going to be like trucks": specialised devices that only appeal to people with particular demands of their computing experience while ordinary people would come to prefer smartphones and tablets for all their computing activities. Last month, Enders Analysis consultant Benedict Evans gave a presentation at BookExpo America entitled "Mobile Is Eating The World." In it, he laid out a thorough series of metrics that suggest, when taken as a whole, that the scale of the post-PC opportunity is somewhere between 'ginormous' and 'staggering' -- and that Jobs's vision is coming inexorably to pass.

Now, I don't want to spoil the whole thing. I urge you to read the slide deck for yourself. But I am going to cherry pick a few of the figures I found most interesting to whet your appetite, and add in some of my own ideas as to what this all could mean for the future.

Before that, though, an aside about analysts. There's a strong meme circulating amongst Apple blogs that analysts are idiots and their writing to be universally shunned. Like most strong memes, this one presents a simple narrative; like most simple narratives, this one is wrong. Reality is far more nuanced than that. There are good analysts and bad analysts, as with people in all walks of life. Certainly, I cannot understand why Gene Munster is obsessed with the Apple TV, an idea that makes no sense to me. Evans is one of the good guys though.

The scale of the post-PC opportunity

Evans starts out by talking about just how big the post-PC device market could be in the future. Total global PC sales in 2012 were 350 million; there are 1.6 billion PCs in use, most of them shared between multiple users, and they are replaced every 4-5 years. For mobile devices (including smartphones, feature phones, and tablets), 2012 saw 1.7 billion sales -- almost five times as many as there were PCs -- to a total of 3.2 billion users, almost always used only by one person, and typically upgraded every two years. In other words, mobile is a whole different ballgame to computers, and it always has been. Dwell on those figures for a moment -- 3.2 billion means almost half the planet has a mobile device today (almost all of them low-end feature phones, of course).

Still, mobile sales have outnumbered PC sales for decades; that's old news. What's changed about mobile is the rise of the smartphone and (to a slightly lesser extent, because it started later) the tablet. Since 2007, although feature phone sales have been declining slightly, smartphone and tablet sales have grown very quickly. Today, smartphones make up about one in every three phones sold, and that ratio is continuing to move in smartphone's favour. Furthermore, unlike PC sales -- broadly stagnant for several years now -- there is no sign of growth in phone sales slackening off. There's still half the planet to go, after all.

So where does this lead? Evans predicts that in the next five years, we'll see no change in the size of the PC market -- but explosive growth in the smartphone and tablet space, three to four times bigger than where they stand today. That'll put tablet sales well above combined sales of desktop and laptop PCs, and smartphone sales far above that again.

So it seems Jobs was right. The scale of opportunity in mobile technology is huge. But how well positioned is Apple to benefit from this? And what of its competitors?

Is Microsoft withering on the vine?

In a slide entitled "the irrelevance of Microsoft", Evans paints a stark portrait. As little ago as 2009, almost all online access was done via PCs and as almost all PCs run Windows that meant Microsoft's share of the "connected device" market was pretty large: 80% or so. But as more and more smartphones and tablets have been sold, which almost entirely run non-Microsoft OSs, so that share has steadily declined ever since. It's now down to 25% or so. Certainly, in terms of things like determining web standards, Microsoft is a much diminished influence.

Does that bode ill for the company, however? Don't forget that although Microsoft's share of the connected device market has declined, that's mostly because the overall market itself has grown. PC sales, as I remarked above, have been largely static through this era, and therefore so has Microsoft's revenue from Windows licences. It had a revenue of $18.8 billion in the first quarter of 2013, and $6.06 billion in profit. Not too bad, right? This is because most of the mobile growth has been in smart phones, and very few people are buying a smart phone to use as a PC, so (so far) the affect of the growth in mobile tech haven't been felt in Microsoft's markets.

However, in the last two years, tablets have also been growing explosively (although far behind smartphones) and this is a product category that can replace a PC. So PC sales have, finally, switched from stagnating to declining, and there's the real threat to Microsoft's bottom line.

There's also another element to this story, which is Microsoft's other cash cow: Office. Office sales largely work through a sort of institutional inertia: the main value is that everyone uses it, so everyone shares files around in its formats, and no third party app has ever managed to do a flawless job of opening and working with those formats without munging the layout, breaking the fonts, or some other irritation. But today we're in a world where less than a quarter of people are using Microsoft devices online, and so less than a quarter of people online can choose to work on Office. Most of those of those people are on phones, of course, where it doesn't matter much -- only the brave and foolhardy are doing complex word processing on a smartphone. But many of them are also on tablets, and that could be a problem for Microsoft as tablets eat into laptop and desktop PC sales.

Now, this is a line of reasoning that leads you to the conclusion that Microsoft should port Office to the iPad. I used to have a hunch we'd have seen this happen by now, but so far, it's chosen not to do so, and instead use the existence of Office as an extra selling point for its Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. In other words, Microsoft is prioritising protecting Windows PC and tablet revenue over protecting Office revenue. It remains to be proven if that was a smart call or not; perhaps the release of Office 365 for iPhone means Microsoft's resolve is weakening, although I'd argue that's not quite the same thing. Few people would choose to use a smartphone rather than a PC for document editing, so the two products don't really compete; whereas people might well perfer to use a tablet to a PC, so the competition has more direct consequences.

The "Four Horsemen"

Evans's lists "four horsemen" of the post-PC world: Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon. (He sees RIM and Microsoft as rapidly becoming irrelevant and never gaining relevance, respectively.) How does Evans see competition between these companies today, and how does he see it playing out in the future?

Consider the business of selling devices. In this, Apple and Samsung rule supreme: not in terms of units (Apple and Samsung combined sell less than 30% of all handsets), but in terms of profit (Apple and Samsung hold more than 95% of the profit in the entire handset industry, with the lion's share of that going to Apple).

Note that it's a mistake to believe that this somehow means Android is a failure because Google doesn't make any money on it. Remember that from the very outset Android was supplied by Google to the handset OEMs (HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc) for free. If one's plan is to make a lot of money, one doesn't generally start by giving things away. Android was never supposed to generate any direct revenue for Google. Google makes money by serving up ads, and to do so effectively it needs people using its various products -- search, email, maps, coughReadercough. Android was designed to ensure that no-one like Apple could establish a stranglehold on the future mobile market and freeze Google out. Or, as Erick Schonfeld wrote for our sister site TechCrunch, "search is Google's castle, everything else is a [defensive] moat [around it]".

Evans also believes there will be significant growth in low-end Android tablets, with 7" screen sizes and prices below (often far below) the $330 price point for a poverty spec iPad mini. There could be as many as 125m cheap Android tablets sold in China alone in 2013, he claims -- compared to 120m tablets sold in the entire world in 2012 (of which 66m were iPads).

However, as many others have pointed out, Evans underscores that Apple products seem to lead the market in usage, far out of proportion to sales; depending on the exact metric you believe, anything up to 80% of all tablet web traffic comes from the iPad. I've yet to find an explanation that entirely addresses this. It's easy to list factors -- some Android tablets are shipped but never sold to end users; some of them are awful, and after a few weeks end up gathering dust; some of them are used regularly, but for much smaller amounts of time per day than iPads; some of them are mostly used for purposes other than web surfing (e.g. in-car satnav and entertainment centers); some of the metrics are biased towards English-language sites, whereas Android is huge in China. But to my mind, none of that convincingly adds up to the size of the difference in the stats. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and that's all it is; or perhaps there's some other factor I've overlooked. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

The ecosystem is key

Selling devices isn't the whole of it, though. For Google, Android devices itself are only a means to an end -- a way to make Google services more accessible and attractive to end users. It's about building and supporting an ecosystem.

Evans finishes on differentiating between ecosystem types and sizes between the key software platform players: Apple with iOS, Google with Android, but also Facebook and Amazon with its as-predicted-by-me (why yes, I am still smug about this; thanks for asking) Android fork.

He (rightly) points out that Apple is qualitatively different from the other companies discussed here. For Google, Facebook and Amazon the platforms are designed to facilitate and increase customer engagement with their services -- ultimately, to either serve them adverts or enable them to buy things. Apple, however, remains primarily a hardware company that uses a strong software ecosystem as a hardware differentiator rather than a end in its own right. If you're inclined to disagree with that, remember that iOS updates are free and OS X updates are cheap -- but iPhones and Macs are neither. Apple's main profit driver and main focus remains hardware sales.

The bottom line

Three years ago, Jobs predicted that mobile devices would come to compete with and ultimately domainate over PC sales, coining the phrase "post-PC" to cover mobile devices that overlap with PCs -- so, smartphones and tablets, as opposed to feature phones. He tied a significant chunk of Apple's future to this vision, by concentrating much of its effort onto iOS and the hardware that runs it. There's plenty of evidence that Jobs was right, and as these trends continue, so companies that are involved in this space -- Apple and Samsung being the most obvious -- will continue to thrive.

If you like his data, I humbly urge you to follow Benedict Evans on Twitter and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, where he routinely shares his insight and data like this. I would also like to extend my personal thanks to Mr Evans for allowing me to reprint some of this slides in this writeup.

Gauging the scale of the post-PC opportunity: "Mobile Is Eating The World" originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gauging the scale of the post-PC opportunity: "Mobile Is Eating The World" originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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John Maeda took issue with Jony Ive's recently unveiled design scheme for iOS 7 in a Wired post this morning, and it's apparent that the writer -- a well-known academic in the design world -- isn't happy with the new, flatter iOS or the direction in which Apple seems to be pointing the world of user interface design.

As Maeda points out up front, much of the buzz around the design changes in iOS 7 has been positive, noting that "skeuomorphism teaches by analogy" and that "it's time to remove the 'training wheels'" since most people now understand how a smartphone is supposed to work. Maeda, however, thinks that "design should boldly go where no user or interface has gone before," and that in the world of "infinitely available and infinitely malleable" pixels, designers "should focus on setting them free."

Ive and crew, in Maeda's opinion, are "hindering innovation" by sticking "to the dangerously reductionist, technology-usability centric view of design that surfaced in the discussions about flat design versus skeuomorphism."

With all due respect to Maeda, who is a graphic designer, computer scientist, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, artist, former associate director of research at MIT Media Lab and "one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century according to Esquire" (which apparently forgot that there are still 87 years left in the century), the Wired guest editorial does nothing to say what direction UI designers should be heading in. Sure, Maeda suggests that Apple and other companies should be moving in the direction of Oblong (co-founded in 2006 by the "chief computer visionary behind the film Minority Report") or Berg (makers of the playful, yet ridiculously expensive Little Printer), but offers nothing concrete in terms of where he thinks the device UI design movement should head next. Using those two particular companies as positive examples of the design seems awkward -- the "waving your arms around like an idiot" UI of Minority Report makes no sense in a mobile world, and Berg's latest product is priced out of mass-market reality.

Maeda doesn't seem to acknowledge the fact that iOS 7 isn't the final generation of Apple's vision for device interfaces; it's just another step on the long road towards a UI that will be constantly evolving with technology and what the public expects and desires. Certainly the Apple designers have a vision for the future and are working towards that, but is it really going to do any tech company any good to introduce a user interface that is ahead of its time?

I'm sure that Maeda's article is one of the first that we'll see in a long parade by design experts. When one of the experts finally comes up with concrete ideas for a next-generation UI that balances ease of use, user acceptance and device power requirements, then it will be time to start paying attention. In the meantime, posts by the design community either praising or defiling Apple's latest work are, in the words of Shakespeare's Macbeth, tales "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Wired on Jony Ive, iOS 7 and the future of design originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Wired on Jony Ive, iOS 7 and the future of design originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The last Reality Absorption Field discussed how most of the big names in the PC industry tried to take on the iPod and the fates of their eventual efforts. This week's column will look at PC peripherals companies and how the consumer electronics giants reacted, while next week's final installment will finish a look at the CE companies as well as discuss some of the pure plays that competed with the iPod.

PC Peripherals Companies

Diamond Multimedia and Creative. For many years, these two companies were two of Apple's most tenacious competitors. Diamond Multimedia, primarily known for its video cards, introduced the Rio PMP300 that opened many people's eyes to the promise of MP3. It also bore the brunt of the labels' wrath, which sued it into bankruptcy. However, the Rio name would resurface under the SonicBlue.brand (I was particularly fond of the microdrive-based iPod mini competitor Rio Carbon, which felt great in the hand.). Most of its portable devices were flash-based (including models it built for Nike and Motorola) but it created hard drive-based fixed devices for the home (Rio Central) and car (Rio Car). However, SonicBlue eventually went out of business as well, ending the line.

Like Diamond Multimedia, Creative was early in the MP3 player market with the hard drive-based, Discman-shaped Nomad Jukebox. It produced a slew of hard drive and flash-based players, including some large-screen video players under the Zen brand. Creative was also noteworthy for a patent dispute with Apple that resulted in Apple paying royalties. The company is still around, of course, but mostly focused on its roots as a PC periperhals and speaker company. You can still find a few MP3 players listed on its site, including the Zen Touch 2 that runs an old version of Android.

Iomega. A footnote in the history of MP3 players, the creator of once-adored Zip drives tried to crack the market smaller devices with a 40 MB disk cartridge called PocketZip and, later, Clik! Iomega convinced Ricoh to adopt the format in a camera and made its own MP3 player, the HipZip, which could not only play back MP3s on the disks but funciton as a general drive for reading them. The format couldn't compete with flash memory, and thus the HipZip had to RIP. The company was purchased by enterprise storage giant EMC in 2008.

Consumer Electronics Giants

Samsung and Sony. These two premium TV market rivals represented different kinds of competition to Apple. Sony, a pioneer in portable music, sought to maintain its Walkman heritage as it initially positioned Mini-Disc against the iPod. But the discs required transcoding the MP3 format to Sony's ATRAC codec with poorly received software called SonicStage. The company gradually came to adopt MP3 natively and drop ATRAC across mostly flash-based players and eventually even brought its Walkman brand to a series of feature phones it created in its Sony Ericsson venture.

Sony remains in the category today with a relatively robust lineup that includes music-playing Sports earbud models, the E and Wi-Fi Android-infused F series that roughly correspond to the 5th-generation and current-generation iPod nano, and the Android-based Z series that competes with the iPod touch.

Today, Samsung is Apple's strongest competitor in the smartphone space where it operates its own media store, but it was less successful competing against the iPod with a huge array of music players under the Yepp brand that spanned six full product lines of different form factors. Samsung now mostly competes with the iPod touch as a smartphone variant with a handful of products under the Galaxy Player brand.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.

Reality Absorption Field: iPod's trail of tears, part 2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 31 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: iPod's trail of tears, part 2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 31 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When he's not hanging around with rock stars (like Guns 'n Roses guitarist Slash, at left above) or controlling the Northern Hemisphere's supply of Heineken, Jim Dalrymple (right) is talking about Apple and those other things at The Loop. Jim's been an industry insider for quite some time, so when he talks, smart people tend to listen. Today Jim did all of us in the Apple blogosphere a favor by outlining what he feels are reasonable expectations for what we'll hear and see during the WWDC 2013 keynote.

Some of the highlights from his prognostications include:

• "The important thing to remember about WWDC is that it is a developer conference. It's not a place where Apple is going to show off the newest iPhone or iPad," followed by the admonition to bloggers that, "If you are going to write an article that Apple will release the new iPhone or iPad at WWDC, don't do it."
• "...Don't expect an iPhone or iPad at WWDC," followed by the brilliant footnote comment "If you write a story after WWDC stating that since there was no iPhone or iPad, the keynote was a bust, you are just stupid."
• "For me, the Mac products fit well with a Tim Cook keynote at WWDC. That's all I really expect from Apple in the way of hardware at the conference."
• Regarding the rumored "flat design" of iOS 7: "Personally, I don't think that Apple will take it as far as what some might think. The way I envision iOS 7 is more of a modernization of the look and feel of the operating system. Kind of like what Apple did with OS X over the years."

There's quite a bit more on The Loop, so head on over to read Jim's post. And dude, I owe you a Heineken or two for writing most of this post for me.

The Loop's Jim Dalrymple takes on WWDC 2013 expectations originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 29 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Loop's Jim Dalrymple takes on WWDC 2013 expectations originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 29 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, that certainly didn't take long. The modern tablet, introduced by Apple with the first iPad in 2010, is completely changing the market for computing devices. IDC today released projections showing that tablet shipments will beat those of notebook computers this year, and that by 2015 more tablets will be sold than all types of PCs combined.

That's not the only interesting information included in the IDC report: the company also notes that tablets with screens less than eight inches in size have already overtaken sales of devices with larger screens like the 9.7-inch iPad. IDC shows slight growth in sales of the smaller tablets into 2017, with devices with screens larger than the original iPad expected to pull in 6 percent of sales by that year.

[via MacRumors]

IDC: Tablets to outsell notebooks in 2013, all PCs in 2015 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 28 May 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

IDC: Tablets to outsell notebooks in 2013, all PCs in 2015 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 28 May 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The recent celebration of iTunes tenth anniversary provided an opportunity to remember that it debuted before the iPod and was initially positioned as a way to get Macs to play well with the CD burners that had come to the iMac as well as to early MP3 players from rivals. Before and (mostly) after the iPod, it's surprising to see not only how many different companies sought success in the portable media player category, but the diversity and depth of their approaches. While some achieved a degree of success and implemented a few things that were ahead of Apple, none came close to matching Apple's success.

This column will focus on how PC companies approached the portable media player market while the next Reality Absorption Field will look at how competitors from other industries fared.

Dell and Gateway

Prior to the arrival of Microsoft's Zune, Dell was probably the most serious PC company in the media player space. Putting its own spin on Creative's internals, it released a few hard disk models of its DJ (Digital Jukebox), tapping out at 30 GB. It also released a microdrive line to compete with the iPad mini and finally the DJ Ditty line of flash players to compete with the first-generation "pack of gum" iPod shuffle . Dell even created a networked audio player based on the Rio receiver, a brand descendant from Diamond Multimedia's breakthrough iPod predecessor. The former stock market darling is now taking itself private.

Just as Gateway's PC line sought to keep pace with Dell's, so did its media player line roughly mirror Dell's interest with entries in the hard disk and flash categories. Gateway also had a networked audio player, a rebadged version of the excellent Turtle Beach Audiotron. None of these products ever competed effectively, though, and Dell's failure to take on Apple beyond the PC set a precedent for the company's struggles in other categories such as smartphones and tablets where Apple has excelled.

Compaq and Intel

Compaq and Intel both dipped their giant corporate toes in the MP3 player market and their one-hit wonder efforts were actually not too shabby. Both were early flash memory-driven efforts, Intel's Pocket Concert and Compaq-s iPAQ PA-1 (and its nearly identical follow-on, the PA-2). Intel sold a dock that allowed its blue-and-silver music player to work with matched speakers and Compaq's player -- while hardly a looker -- had a clip years before the first iPod shuffle integrated one. Intel retreated from the consumer device market while Compaq was acquired by HP.

HP

HP had what was perhaps the most unique reaction to the iPod. After holding back from the market after what was allegedly a poorly received prototype based on a partnership with Napster 2.0, it decided to try to join 'em if it couldn't beat 'em. HP iPods were identical to Apple's in nearly every respect except for the branding, which Apple also worked its way into since they were called Apple iPod+HP. HP tried to differentiate by coming out with a line of printable "tattoos" that could be affixed to the front of the devices, but in mid-2005 the strange relationship dissolved a year and a half after it began.

Microsoft

Microsoft tried to compete with the iPod in three main ways. The first of these was the launch of Playsforsure, a horrifically named digital rights management service that was to ensure compatibility between various music stores and music players. It drew support from many of the player makers, including Dell, SanDisk, iRiver, Samsung and others as well as subscription music services such as Napster and Rhapsody. The effort ultimately fizzled, though, and Apple worked to get even its digital rights management software removed from iTunes music.

Microsoft also tried licensing its software to power portable media players with a focus on video for devices called Portable Media Centers, a way to take TV shows and other media recorded Windows Media Center on the road via sideloading. Creative, iRiver, Philips, Samsung and Toshiba all hopped on that bus before it broke down.

Frustrated by the failure of these efforts and true to Steve Jobs' prediction, Microsoft jumped in itself with Zune. The first version, with its "double shot" coating and bulky, optionally brown exterior coating Toshiba's Gigabeat player internals, was unimpressive, but Microsoft made improvementst, adding the excelle "sqircle" touchpad that gave the click wheel a run for its money and introducing the sleek "full-touch" Zune HD, all with proprietary iPod-like connectors.

But the iPod touch inheriting the iPhone's avalanche of apps was the final nail in the coffin for the Zune device. And in fairness to Microsoft, the MP3 player market was already starting to move past its peak anyway. Microsoft kept the now curiously named Zune software around a while longer, but ultimately replaced it and the service to which it served as a conduit to Xbox Music. The confusing branding continues as much of what it serves today is Windows Phone devices.

The Portable Media Centers and Zune had at least one important legacy for Microsoft, though. They iterated what would become known as the panoramic Modern, nee Metro, touch user interface that Microsoft now uses on smartphones and PCs.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.

Reality Absorption Field: iPod's trail of tears, part 1 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: iPod's trail of tears, part 1 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Asymco mobile industry analyst Horace Dediu is up to his number-crunching again, this time with numbers showing that Apple Stores continue to have the top retail revenues per visitor of any retailer in the US.

The first quarter of 2013 (Apple's second fiscal quarter) saw visitor growth of 7 percent and a new record revenue of US$57.60 per visitor. Average revenue per store was $13 million, a record-setting level for a non-holiday quarter.

Dediu noticed that the average visitors per store has steadied out at about 250,000 per store per quarter, and posits that number might be stagnant because fire regulations keep the stores from packing in even more visitors. Apple's employment in stores has increased as well to about 110 employees per store, climbing from less than half that level in 2007.

Apple's new retail strategy appears to be expanding US stores in size and opening new stores outside of the US. According to Dediu, that allows for growth in the number of visitors to the US Apple Stores and in "maintaining the brand's relationship with customers."

Asymco's Horace Dediu touts record Apple Store revenues in Q1 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 20 May 2013 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Asymco's Horace Dediu touts record Apple Store revenues in Q1 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 20 May 2013 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GungHo Entertainment is a game publisher based in Japan, and the company has just released some really wild financial numbers. According to the latest numbers, GungHo made US$118 million this past April alone, most of it from one game: Puzzle and Dragons, currently available on iOS. Puzzle and Dragons is pulling in so much money (from audiences in both Japan and around the world) that GungHo says it's making $3.75 million a day. In Japan alone, Puzzle and Dragons is claiming 13 million players -- which is over 10 percent of the population there.

That is a phenomenal success story, and it gives GungHo a higher market cap than even the legendary game publisher Nintendo. As a result, the company's stock has skyrocketed, and it's even challenging current megapublisher Activision Blizzard for market cap.

I liked Puzzle and Dragons, but I think this is a game more targeted at Japan and its vast audience of mid- to hardcore-level gamers. In addition to the addictive puzzle and pet-leveling gameplay, Puzzle and Dragons is also very well structured to keep in-app purchases high, which goes a long way towards explaining how this game has gotten so big so quickly. GungHo's definitely seen some success in North America, as the app has made a few appearances on the top grossing list. But as far as I know, the success in Japan has been much more incredible.

GungHo reports Puzzle and Dragons is earning $3.75 million a day originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

GungHo reports Puzzle and Dragons is earning $3.75 million a day originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the most common frustrations among mobile phone owners is the feeling that you're paying way too much for services you're not using. Being locked in a contract that doesn't fit your needs just because it's all that offered is the pits. Zact, a new service from the Verizon-backed software company ItsOn, is looking to change that. Zact provides a flexible, changeable data plan that empowers users to only pay for the services they actually use.

Along with customization of how many minutes and texts you pay for each month, users are offered an unprecedented amount of flexibility for data plans, down to forgoing traditional plans and just buying app-specific data. In addition, the service credits back any money you paid for a plan that was bigger than you ended up needing. Families can connect an unlimited number of devices to a single plan. The service also including powerful parental controls, including curfews on service, app lock outs and even contact restrictions. Check out the video below for a good overview of how the system works.

As of right now, the service is only available to preorder bundled with the LG Viper 4G LTW and LG Optimus Elite via Sprint. Despite the company's Verizon connections the service will only be available on Sprint's 4G network. As of right now there are no official plans to bring the service to iOS devices, but given the market share enjoyed by Apple users, it's reasonable to assume we will get access to it at some point. However, no matter what you might read anywhere else, there are no official plans at the moment.

While the service is not currently coming to Apple products, its potential to change the landscape of mobile pricing in the future means it effects us all. Hopefully for the better.

Zact rolls out no-contract data plans on Sprint for certain Android phones originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Zact rolls out no-contract data plans on Sprint for certain Android phones originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Despite the great success and momentum of the iPad, the iPhone is still probably Apple's product that continues to receive the most attention by the broadest number of consumers as well as by investors. The smartphone slips easily into a pocket, accesses cloud from virtually anywhere, has a slick and engaging user interface, and supports hundreds of thousands of apps. It has been updated every year since its introduction and makes billions for the company. Microsoft covets its success.

But Apple has another product that in many ways is the anti-iPhone. It usually never leaves the home, doesn't access any cloud services and has no apps or even local user interface. Its rare updates often consist of little more than a capacity increase. And if Microsoft, which keeps chasing the idea of a cohesive user experience, wouldn't gain much from the revenue it drives, it would still do well to offer its benefits.

That product is Time Capsule, Apple's router/backup appliance that sits quietly on a home network, seamlessly and reliably sucking in incremental backups of every Mac it can find. In an era where the best-selling version of Apple's once straightforward iPod music player is an iPhone-like software chameleon, where hard drives are considered the dinosaurs of consumer storage, and the cloud is the place where shared files are stored, Time Capsule is a throwback. It is the hardworking Morlock to Apple's converged device iLoi.

Like any tech product, Time Capsule has its share of compromises. Backups can get corrupted, causing Time Machine to falter at the beginning or end of a backup. Time Capsule's doesn't provide a ton of status information on what's going on. And if the unfortunate circumstances require that you use it to restore, it can take hours as is the case for any network backup product.

And when it comes to features, Time Capsule's name is more than just a clever play on words. Unlike with cross-platform "shared storage" products from storage and networking companies including Netgear, Seagate and WD, there's no access to Time Capsule storage from outside the home network. It can't send video to most TVs or Blu-ray players due to a lack of native DLNA. You can't add capacity to Time Capsule or back up the backup.

Other companies have created slick iOS apps for accessing photos and other data on home networks from across the Internet. In an ironic contrast, though, Apple hasn't created one for Time Capsule, which could serve as a personal cloud alternative to or extension to iCloud much as Pogoplug has married its home storage and cloud storage products. Instead, only Mac-owning iOS device users can take advantage of Apple's network backup device, and even then only indirectly by having their Mac-based backups backed up.

Ah, but in conjunction with Time Machine, Time Capsule remains the best integrated home network backup experience on the market. It may never be the kind of thing that convinces someone to buy a Mac, but anyone who has ever been saved by it will consider it a reason to stay with the platform.

In contrast, while Windows had an integrated backup app before Apple did, its network backup strategy has been divided between a feature found only in the Professional version of Windows and the sputtering path of Windows Home Server that came closest to Time Capsule's automation and integration, but couldn't approach its simplicity. Windows 8 has added a file history feature that's network-drive agnostic, but that's only part of the solution. If Microsoft would offer a simple backup appliance that works with software built into Windows, it would instantly strengthen the case for all Windows PCs, including tablets such as Surface for which a key marketing point is the robustness of the Windows ecosystem.

Of course, it would also be great to see Time Capsule expand to back up Windows PCs, or even iPads and iPhones, or enable remote access, but one has to wonder how much more attention Apple -- fighting Google with its head in the cloud -- will give to its reliable relic.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.

Reality Absorption Field: Backups Capsule originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: Backups Capsule originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 May 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft was late to the mobile phone game and has struggled to snatch market share away from their competitors at Apple and Android. They face a big problem: every smartphone has their own selling points, but they've mostly got the same basic features. So how do you set yourself apart?

Apparently the answer is pointing out how obnoxious your competitors' fans are.

In their new spot Microsoft shows a brawl breaking out at a wedding reception as the wedding party, segregated into sides by their choice of iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, fights over who gets to obnoxiously take cell phone video of the service. The captain of Team iPhone snidely asks a Galaxy user if he'd "mind moving his enormous phone," sparking a sea of shouts and put downs. Finally someone acts reasonable, and throws the first punch.

As the carnage unfolds the only two people who keep their cool are a couple of waiters, calmly documenting the chaos from their brightly colored Nokia Lumia phones.

It's a funny ad, but ultimately the two waiters are just as smug and annoying as their competition is made out to be. The only difference is they're being quietly smug. With the Lumia being the sole bright spot in Nokia's Q1 sales for the year, their fans should sing its praises a little louder.

Maybe in this ad, we're all the villains, simply for having our phones out at a wedding in the first place.

Microsoft ad shows the Apple and Android brawl you've been waiting for originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft ad shows the Apple and Android brawl you've been waiting for originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook has purchased Parse, a service that provides a cloud-based set of mobile services and development tools. This news comes on the heels of last week's Mobile Developer Conference where Facebook introduced tools making it easier to implement Open Graph on mobile along with the release of Facebook SDK 3.5. With the addition of Parse's toolset developers will be able to store and build server-based apps for Facebook in the cloud without the need for expensive infrastructure.

The best news regarding the deal is Facebook's plan to keep Parse's current tiered pricing. The basic level of Parse is free, with up to 1 million requests or pushes per month. Pro and Enterprise options are available for users seeking more requests and pushes, greater security, support, and collaboration features. This creates a new revenue stream for Facebook without losing the existing "freemium" user base.

As Facebook seeks to become a force in the mobile market, it has two major stumbling blocks; it doesn't own an mobile OS or have its own device. Parse's developer tools will help make Facebook integration easier, both inside the apps and via ad buys. Couple that integration with the monthly fees from subscribers and this purchase is an interesting way for Facebook to establish themselves in the mobile marketplace.

Here's Parse's statement on the sale.

Parse has come a long way. In just under two years, we've gone from a rough prototype to powering tens of thousands of apps for a very broad spectrum of customers.

Some of the world's best brands trust us with their entire mobile presence, and a growing number of the world's brightest independent developers trust us with their next big thing. We couldn't be happier.

As stewards of a good thing, we're always thinking about the next step in growing Parse to become a leading platform in this age of mobile apps.

These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger. Today we're excited to announce a pretty big one.

Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It's going to get better.

We've worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check out Facebook's blog post for more on this.

Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we've built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.

We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do. We're excited about the future of Parse!

Ilya, Kevin, and James

And here is Facebook's statement:

Last week, we hosted our first Mobile Developer Conference, where we launched several new products to help mobile developers integrate Facebook: Open Graph for mobile, better Facebook Login, and new developer tools. Today, we're making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers.

By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.

We've worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their products and community are to developers. We don't intend to change this. We will continue offering their products and services, and we're excited to expand what Facebook and Parse can provide together.

Continue reading Facebook buys mobile development tool house Parse

Facebook buys mobile development tool house Parse originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Facebook buys mobile development tool house Parse originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Priceline.com is one of the most well-known flight- and hotel-booking sites out there, and the company recently shared some information with TUAW about how its mobile device-based users tend to set up travel. The company identified three trends for the people booking flights from mobile devices like iPhones and iPads, presumably through the company's iOS app.

First, those who booked air travel on mobile devices tended to be younger than the average purchaser of a flight ticket on a desktop. The average age for a mobile booker was around 32, about six years younger than desktop users. That still seems old to me, but it makes sense that the people booking flights tend to be older, as they're most likely to have the money for traveling this way.

Mobile air bookers also tend to book things closer in advance, says Priceline, and about half of those booking flights by mobile device only booked one-way tickets, which the company says means those users like to make plans on the move rather than far ahead of time.

Finally, mobile bookers had one big advantage: They tended to pay less for their tickets, with an average price of $283 as compared to desktop users' $315. I'm not sure that means mobile bookers have a nose for deals necessarily; maybe it just means that people tend to book pricier flights on the desktop in general. No matter what the reason, it's definitely interesting that there are such clear differences between Priceline's mobile users and those on the desktop.

Priceline says mobile flight bookers like taking it easy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Priceline says mobile flight bookers like taking it easy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Among Apple competitors, it's become fashionable to pay the company a backhanded compliment regarding iOS. Yes, the patter typically goes, Apple created a breakthrough platform back in 2007. However, the paradigm has now shifted to... something. In the case of BlackBerry, that something is a smooth means of swiping in and out of all your communications at a glance without interrupting whatever else you're doing. In the case of Windows Phone (and for the new Facebook Home user interface layer atop Android), that something is seeing all the updated information around the people in your life.

Now, you don't have to be marketing a rival operating system to Apple's to make the case that updates from your personal connections should bubble up to the top of the interface. But there is also the case that business news should be at the top of that interface. Or information about where you currently are. Or your favorite games. Or, as a former colleague put it, everything related to Gilligan's Island if that is someone's preference (it wasn't hers).

The idea that communications should be the main feature of a phone is a quaint assumption these days. Apple showed its indifference if not disdain for this concept clearly when it designed the iPhone. Unlike previous phones and even many previous smartphones, there were no physical call or end buttons. And phone calling was just another app. Indeed, today a host of alternatives such as Skype, Tango, Fring and perhaps others waiting in the wings that one can use as their main dialer if they so choose. And of course, a host of voice alternatives -- messaging, video chat, -- now exist that were unimaginable when the phone was in its infancy.

A victim of its own success, iOS has given rise to an app sprawl that is difficult to manage once one acquires several pages of apps. But with the exception of not being able to delete those that come from Apple, apps are all given equal opportunity to be presented in the topmost layer of the user interface that Apple allows with the dock providing a favorable position to four of them on the iPhone (six on the iPad). Android widgets and Live Tiles provide different tradeoffs in taking that functionality to a higher user interface layer. Unlike the recently announced Facebook Home, they provide for multiple items to share the spotlight, not an environment that revolves around a single social network. That may work for HTC, but won't for Apple or other mobile OS vendors.

Of course, phones will probably always be used to communicate. Then again, just as voice has lost monopoly of the phone, the phone has lost its monopoly on long-distance, real-time communications. These days, tablets and PCs and even TVs in some circumstances can be used to reach out. By allowing users to choose the functionality that's most important to them, they can best manage when to have the exchanges they want, when to avoid the ones they don't, and how to improve efficiencies to eliminate the ones that don't need to happen in the first place.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.

Reality Absorption Field: Making the top choice originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: Making the top choice originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you heard the news? There's this pretty successful Apple product -- starts with an "iP," ends with a "d" and has a vowel in the middle. And its average prices have dropped. Apple is (cue ominous music) doomed (cue evil cackle). Doomed, I say, repeating myself loudly so as to be heard above the sound effects.

That product is called the iPod. For now, let's confine its definition to the dedicated media players, not the iPhone-without-a-radio that will likely live on for quite a while. The iPod has proved remarkably tenacious and dominant since its introduction in 2001, smashing competitive products and leaving only a handful of cheap players such as the SanDisk Sansa Fuse in its wake.

You don't hear too much about it these days, especially beyond the annual product revision. Incredibly, the iPod classic, despite not being revised in years, remains on sale, and the Shuffle seems to have settled into a pretty familiar form factor. The nano went back to a big screen last year and incorporated a home button as well as Bluetooth (finally).

While Apple's seeking to keep the product fresh, though, the market for standalone media players continues to decline. The iPod may still be refreshed for many years to come, but it is sliding away from view -- and that is a good thing for Apple.

The iPod was unveiled in 2001 as the first major new product category from Apple since the doomed Newton. While the iMac had been a promising harbinger of how things would improve in the post-Amelio Apple, the iPod really started the virtuous chain going that resulted in the juggernaut built over the past decade.

Apple's franchise in digital music and iTunes helped beget the iPhone and app sales, and the iPhone, of course, helped beget the iPad. The iPod's slow decline has come against a backdrop of Apple showing transition from one product arc to the next. It has helped to prove that the product Apple has been best at revising is Apple itself.

What's next? A television? A watch? The iBed? When? Cynics have a point that it will be difficult to top the smartphone opportunity, but that is a constraint that Apple's competitors face as well. And so, returning to the idea that the iPad mini is reducing Apple's tablet margins in exchange for volume when it must compete with $200 (or sub-$200 in the case of the new HP Slate 7) smaller Android tablets, those concerns were voiced about the iPod as well. And that was when market share didn't have the broader implications of furthering an operating system to attract, retain and expand the developer opportunity. Despite cheaper competition, Apple maintained its dominance in media players. However, it also moved on to other categories and other opportunities. Perhaps some of the skeptics will as well.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.

Reality Absorption Field: Apple's best product revision originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 16 Mar 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: Apple's best product revision originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 16 Mar 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One could say that the Apple of the Michael Spindler era was like today's Apple in name only. However, even that is not quite true. (Apple dropped the "Computer" from its name just over six years ago.)

In the mid-'90s, Apple had an aggressive if conflicted Mac cloning program. Beige boxes from the likes of Power Computing, UMAX and Motorola were available. At that time, there had been concerns that licensing the Mac OS to a really big PC vendor would create more competition than Apple could handle. Nevertheless, there were persistent rumors that Dell, for one, was interested. Coincidentally, long after licensing ended, the Round Rock, TX-based PC company was early to offer a "Mini" netbook that could easily be turned into a "Hackintosh."

These were aberrations in a long rivalry between Apple and Dell that has been filled with contrasts. As Apple focused on building its own vertically integrated PCs, Dell was a master of supply chain and cost reduction in the PC clone model. Dell was welcomed through the front door by most IT departments; Apples were snuck in by enthusiasts. Dell was an early e-commerce poster child selling its PCs direct online, but Apple ultimately trumped it selling its PCs via its white-walled physical stores. And Michael Dell infamously said during Apple's darkest days that he would close down the company and give the money back to the shareholders.

Today, of course, the tables have turned. Apple is one of the world's most valuable companies and Dell has opted to flee public markets, perhaps even veer away from the PCs that are the last vestige of the company's roots as a direct sales pioneer. But a twist of fate may have OS X plastered across the screens of PCs from Dell -- and other PC vendors -- after all. As part of its work with Wyse, the "thin-client" company that Dell acquired last year, the company has developed a device and service called Project Ophelia.

Ophelia is a USB stick-sized computer that runs Android. Several of these have come to market. But there would be links to what would presumably be a Dell-powered cloud that could serve up a host of different computing environments similar to how OnLive or CloudOn -- or Wyse's own PocketCloud -- do on the iPad today. Those environments could include Windows, Linux or OS X.

Of course, accessing OS X remotely, even in a world that offers ever more prevalent and speedy mobile broadband, is not the same as running it on Apple hardware or even a well-designed Hackintosh. And any number of remote apps can call up an OS X desktop to a Mac, PC, iPad or Android tablet. But Ophelia represents the greatest deviation from standard Windows computing that we've seen from Dell since its short-lived Android tablet dalliance, and the freshest idea from the company in even longer.

Time will tell if Ophelia turns out to be, like its tragic Shakespearean namesake, desperate for love, crazy, or even suicidal. But if not, a pocketable Dell device may soon be vying to be your means to OS X access.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.

Reality Absorption Field: The Mac clone that wasn't originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: The Mac clone that wasn't originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Asymco analyst Horace Dediu does a very good job of dissecting the Apple financial data released publicly to discover trends and tidbits of information. Today Dediu looked into Apple's international retail strategy and pulled out some tasty nuggets about Apple Stores.

Apple's rate of store openings is surprisingly slow, but Dediu goes on to point out that sales outside of Apple's retail channel are a much higher portion of the total than they were in 2007. The percentage of sales from Apple Stores has actually dropped from 17 percent in 2007 to 12 percent in 2012.

Dediu points out that while, currently, most Apple Stores are in the Americas, the company's strategy is to open more stores in other markets. Whereas almost 80 percent of store openings in 2007 were in the US, that number shrunk to about 15 percent in 2012. Dediu notes that, "It would seem reasonable therefore to expect that the priority for most, if not all, future openings should be outside the US to address the current sales/retail presence imbalance and to accomodate the bulk of future growth."

A look at Apple's international retail strategy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A look at Apple's international retail strategy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TechCrunch reports that Apple has seen a huge gain in sales in India -- up to 400 percent -- in July through September 2012, but still has a long way to go compared to its competitors in the region.

According to the research firm IDC (based on figures collated from that time period), Apple isn't in the top five of handset market share. Samsung is at the top, with a 46 percent share, and HTC at No. 5, with a 6.6 percent market share. Additionally, web browsing stats reveal that Apple has a tiny percentage of current mobile web traffic.

However, this is not so surprising given that in an earnings call last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he didn't see much opportunity for growth in India in the short-term. But that's not to say Apple isn't scouting the area and preparing for growth. India is a huge market, with less than 10 percent smartphone penetration.

TechCrunch reports that Apple's sales growth is attributed to a growth in Apple's India team, from 50 to 150 in the last six months, as well as distribution partnerships with Redington and Ingram Micro. Apple is also making its iPhone easier to purchase with installment-based payment schemes through its retail partners, including the nation wide retail chain, TheMobileStore.

Apple sees huge growth in India, but trails behind competitors originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple sees huge growth in India, but trails behind competitors originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you haven't read it yet, please check out Lex Friedman's account on Macworld's site of his attempts to view the Starfish smartwatch prototype. Lex does an amazing job summarizing how the company stumbled and stumbled again in its attempts to show the Mac community its competitor to the Pebble smart watch.

TUAW got lucky. It was by pure chance that I happened to return to the booth just as the working prototype was being passed from hand to hand. After about five minutes, the prototype was handed to me.

Tale of a failed watch

Midway through our Friday afternoon coverage of the show, TUAW editor-in-chief Victor Agreda forwarded the team a tweet from Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser that talked about the watch. "An AirPlay mirroring... watch? But... how would it.. and how do you.. can someone at Macworld report from Booth 214?!" Sasser tweeted. I was in-between stories, so I scooped up my camera and headed to the show floor.

Starfish was on the far side of the exhibit space. A few booths were clustered near the tables where people grabbed a hurried bite to eat or rested their aching feet. It was easy to miss Starfish's booth at first. There were no products, no people clustered around the table like at the Square Jellyfish booth a couple steps away. Two women sat at the table doing what we all do when we're bored -- messing with their phones.

I asked one of the booth attendants if I could see a demo. There was a delay, and the prototypes aren't here yet, one told me. I could come back tomorrow. I asked them a few more questions about the watch, but they didn't know much about it.

Saturday morning, I returned to find no one at all at the Starfish booth. I shot a few photos of the empty table and headed off in search of a better story, namely the monkey across the room. A couple of hours later, I swung by the booth with TUAW colleague Randy Nelson shortly before 12:30 p.m. to find that the prototype had arrived, along with several watch bands with empty spaces where the device should be.

The man at the table, who was not CEO Jason Buzi, admitted that neither he nor Buzi had ever used the prototype, and that he wasn't even quite sure of what it did. He told me to come back in 30 minutes to an hour.

During that wait, I did some research. I found the Pocketables story from November 2012 with the initial ad in the November-December issue of iPhone Life. I found SlashGear's post about the plan to debut the watch at Macworld/iWorld 2013, and I checked out Starfish's Facebook page.

About 30 minutes later, Kelly Guimont sought us out. She and Rod Roddenberry had gone by the Starfish booth after my initial report that the prototype had arrived. They approached the booth to ask some questions. The man covering the booth told them that he would be right back -- and then he walked off, leaving the booth (and empty watchbands) unattended. Kelly wasn't impressed.

I decided to check the booth one more time. There was the usual throng of people wanting to check out a new product. And there was the watch, looking nothing like the magazine mockup. I made sure to capture a video for posterity.

When it was passed to me, I held it, not quite sure what to do with it. I pressed a few buttons, tapped the screen, and nothing happened. I gave it to Buzi and asked for a demonstration. You could tell he wasn't used to this sort of attention, and he admitted on Facebook that it was a stressful experience because he didn't have a product to show. But neither he nor his friend were as combative toward me as his friend (the one who spoke with me earlier) later was when speaking with Macworld's reporters.

I returned to the media room and showed the raw footage to Victor. "That's not an AirPlay watch," he said as soon as the first frames flickered on his MacBook Air. His guess? Buzi was obtaining a watch from China and trying to re-sell it here for a profit, and that's why he knew so little about his own prototype. Friedman's subsequent interview with Buzi confirmed Victor's suspicions.

What can be learned from this?

One of the main reasons that the Pebble smartwatch was funded successfully was because of how prepared they were at the beginning of the process. While production delays caused the watch to be delivered months after it was funded, they had working prototypes on hand before beginning the publicity process.

Disclaimer: I have successfully run one Kickstarter in the past, and I'm in the middle of conducting a second one. Starfish has a long road to go if they want to succeed at funding any sort of Kickstarter, and to start with, they have to earn the trust of their potential backers. As one Macworld commenter pointed out, thanks to the catastrophic Macworld/iWorld experience, they're pretty much doomed from the start. As Friedman said, it's odd that this sort of vaporware doesn't show up more often at expos (though I am still waiting for that TARDIS iPhone dock from CES 2011).

What could Starfish have done differently?

• Hold off on advertising. They shouldn't have run any ads or reserved a Macworld spot until a working prototype was in hand. They should have known exactly where they were going with the watch before spending thousands of dollars on magazine ads and an expo booth. That's money that could have gone into research.
• Choose the friends helping you wisely. Whoever is helping to pitch the product -- from booth sitters to best friends -- needs to know just as much about it as the CEO, and given the circumstances that's not much of a bar. Supply them cheat sheets. We heard answers ranging from "the Kickstarter has been conducted" to that it was coming later (the latter being the right answer). Teach them how to interact with people asking the rough questions. The friend trying to help Buzi who got aggressive with the Macworld reporting staff wasn't doing him any favors. The entire point of the expo was for reporters to come and ask those questions.
• Make face time for yourself. A CEO launching a product should spend as much time as possible at the booth, even if the product isn't there. Have your laptop out, show people schematics and discuss the product with them. These are your potential backers, and you owe it to them to be as open as possible about the project. Also, show enthusiasm about your product. Be excited about it, be into it, and convey that to people. Yes, it's extremely hard when you're not used to doing that. But that passion about your own work will go a long way toward convincing people to back you.
• Use prior experience you have to show that this isn't just vaporware. When I launched our first Kickstarter, I had never published a print book. But, I did have 10 years of newspaper experience as a reporter and designer. My partner and co-creator had two books published in Canada. Between us, we had a 14-month archive of comic pages online. Having that content available, along with our combined experience, helped both Kickstarter projects to be successful.
• Be realistic about your project. As we know with Pebble and Nifty MiniDrive, there could be massive production delays. Components might be faulty, and other factors might cause you to adjust your schedule. Be open about them with potential backers. Perusing the Pebble and NiftyDrive update schedules on their Kickstarters will help you get a good idea as to what can go wrong. Even smaller products can have this happen. With my current Kickstarter, our printer suddenly bailed on us. I had to rearrange for the book to be printed elsewhere very fast.
• If all else fails, bail out of the expo. Yes, you'll be out a few thousand dollars, but it could have also saved face for Starfish in the end. A straightforward "our prototype didn't arrive on time, and we didn't want to show people a product we didn't have" will go a long way toward earning good will. It means you're acting in good faith and not trying to scam folks.

Things could turn around for Starfish, they could be successfully funded, and we could see Starfish watches alongside Pebble at some point in 2014. Or, they're not funded. Or, they could turn out like Code Hero developers and potentially face a class-action lawsuit, and that's something I don't want to see happen to anyone.

What Starfish can learn from its failed Macworld appearance originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

What Starfish can learn from its failed Macworld appearance originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few years ago, a senior Apple executive was once told that, even though Apple did not exhibit at the annual Las Vegas spectacle that is the International Consumer Electronics Show, its presence seemed to linger in the arid air and in the clouded minds of many attendees. "We love that," he replied.

But cashing in on the media attention around CES is but one reason that the the tech show from which Apple abstains has relevance to it. At this year's CES, for example, there were several trends that had relevance to Apple's business both from a cooperative and competitive perspective:

Displays

The main attraction in the CES circus is almost always television, historically the largest consumer electronics category. The show has long hosted advances in TV sets and their AV peripherals. Following in the footsteps of HD and 3D, 4K dominated the announcements of major consumer electronics companies at the 2013 show. Even with Apple's television set still a rumor, the heightened resolution represents an answer form HDTV manufacturers who have seen Apple boast that the iPad's Retina display contains more pixels than their living room behemoths (even though a 4K TV currently costs about 40 times what an iPad costs).

Radios

But it's not all a competitive story. The availability of TVs that can accommodate the iPad's Retina Display could add value to future versions of AirPlay. Of course, that would be helped by a bigger wireless pipe between the iDevice and the TV, and new Wi-Fi standards were on display at CES. 802.11ac -- the 5 GHz-only successor to 802.11n -- products are slated to be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance with this year. And right before the show, the Wi-Fi Alliance noted that it had merged with the WiGig Alliance; the combined work on short-range sharing in the 60 GHz range which should facilitate the sharing of multigigabit video in the same room, again providing more options. Alas, the Alliance is also again providing more options for future Apple TV products. On the other hand, the alliance is also gearing up to throw its weight behind Miracast, the AirPlay competitor that is already supported by some smartphones.

Chips

Speaking of competition, the number and kinds of products that compete with Apple's that are shown at CES varies. Following the release of the iPad, there were scores of tablets shown by exhibitors, nearly all of which flopped in the marketplace. With the exception of Lenovo, though, almost all major PC vendors shy from the hallways of the Las Vegas Convention Center. And with Microsoft now leaving CES, that left Intel to carry the PC banner.

The giant chipmaker employed some marketing mojo regarding the evolution of higher-efficiency chips that will benefit all of its hardware partners, including Apple, of course. Intel also continues to work toward expanding its role in tablets and smartphones, but it will face competition from ARM-based rivals, including Nvidia's Tegra 4. The new processor includes an impressive 72 graphics cores that should keep Apple on its toes as it evolves beyond today's A6.

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Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Opinions expressed in Reality Absorption Field are his own.

Reality Absorption Field: What happens in Vegas originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Reality Absorption Field: What happens in Vegas originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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