Apple margin per device – expressed in Chinese
[Image by Sven Teschke] An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing “only” twice as many employees in the US than overseas – but indirectly more than ten [...]
The good, bad and ugly of cloud mobile apps
Since the introduction of the iPhone we have gotten used to expecting more functionality from smaller , more portable devices. Today smartphones ship with dual core chips and cameras more powerful than the digital camera I bought a few years ago. However, even with all the advancement in hardware for these devices they remain constrained [...]
Did Apple finally get hitched?
[Image by Roberta F.] Thanks to Peter Hicks for inspiring me for this title Lately I’ve noticed quite a few complaints regarding the upgrade to Apple’s iOS5. A few examples of that: the upgrade itself failing to complete, having to restore factory settings and lose all apps and files, battery draining like mad, Twitter failing [...]
Beating Apples system Amazon introduces Cloud Reader
Is this one of the first chinks in Apples armor for eBooks? I have tried repeatedly to use the eBook development kit for Apple, and honestly from a user friendly and programmatic viewpoint it is probably the worst chunk of software pushed by Apple. If the eBook fits all specifications and everyone from Amazon to [...]
Enterprise Tablets: Hurry and Get One Before They Are Gone
The Cius is here. That makes two enterprise UC tablets: Cisco Cius and Avaya Desktop Video Device with the Flare Experience. First some clarifications and differences, then a few conclusions. These devices do not compete with each other. The Cisco Cius is for Cisco UC customers and the Avaya Desktop Video Device is for Avaya [...]
Evernote Celebrates Birthday by Joining the Billion Dollar Club (Really?)
Evernote has recently celebrated their third birthday. I also recently had my 21st birthday – it feels good to be able to legally grab a drink finally. (Hey, if Evernote can lie about their age, so can I…). Joke apart, I have no idea why a company would pretend to be half as young as [...]
World’s Collide: Phones and Home Automation
A Man’s home is his castle laboratory. My last post was about phones needing more apps – and here is a great one for the home. There are two things I believe every home should have – home automation and a PBX. However, my opinion (in this case) does not reflect the opinion of the [...]
5 Techniques To Deal With Spam: Open Letter To Twitter
I love Twitter, but lately, I am getting annoyed by Twitter spam and I’m not the only one. I don’t want Twitter spam to become email spam. I don’t want to whine about that either, so I spent some time thinking about what Twitter could do to deal with spam. Consider this an open letter [...]
Four reasons enterprise software should skip native mobile apps
The desire to “consumerize” mobile apps for their own sake is stoking today’s outsized enthusiasm with device-specific enterprise mobile apps at a time when HTML5 is right there staring us all in the face. Tony Byrne, Enterprise 2.0 B.S. List: Term No. 1 Consumerization The runaway success of the iPhone app store has demonstrated that [...]
The Tethering / Hotspot Debate: No, You’re Not a Thief. But Somebody Else is a Highway Robber.
Interesting debate at ZDNet over wireless data plans: James Kendrick claims that unpaid tethering makes you a thief. Thankfully his fellow ZDNet-er Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has the common sense to dispute this tethering thief nonsense. Yes, technically if your wireless contract includes an anti-hotspot clause and you turn this feature on, you are in violation. Of [...]
My first experience with Square Credit Card Processing
Over the weekend we participated in a local comic book convention, and always there is some new gadget even at conventions where people might not think that there is going to be high technology.
Lessening the Pain of Data Roaming With Onavo
I am in the Belgian city of Brussels at the moment, which means that my mobile phone is ‘roaming;’ off my UK network and being charged a scary amount of money to access data. Travelling to Europe is less scary than going elsewhere in the world, as I’m ‘only’ charged about £3 per Mb here. [...]
Why I Invested in Gogii (textPlus) – My First Ever Later Stage Deal
This is a post I’ve been dying to write for 18 months. I invested in LA-based Gogii, one of the fastest growing, most exciting mobile social networking companies you’ve never heard of and maker of a product called textPlus. I know this because you’re not a young teenager. And if you are – what on [...]
What Honeycomb and Android Tablets Mean for Businesses
Google is set to announce their first tablet-oriented Android operating system, codenamed Honeycomb. At Box, we’ve been waiting for this moment since we started seeing significant traction with our apps for both the iPad and Android phones, with nearly 400,000 downloads to date. With the introduction of Honeycomb, we’ll begin working immediately on a tablet-centric version of our Box Android app.
How did we get to this point?
Control Swing
In 2007, Apple took the control from the carriers and put it in the hands of device makers when it launched the original iPhone. Here is an excerpt from a Wired article. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, [...]
