The Post-PC era dawns
April 16th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
For years I spent many hours tinkering in a desktop PC ‘box’ – you know, the kind with slots for memory, exchangeable hard drives and video cards or a new CPU that you swap out. Desktops are all but dead today. Laptops became the new desktop. And now the post-PC era has crept in. It took 21 years for PCs to go mainstream. Media tablets are expected to achieve the same in just four short years. The post-PC era is about no longer being anchored to a handful of solutions in the PC paradigm. Post-PC devices are driving enterprises to rethink their entire IT architecture.
This is the end of the web 2.0 era where we all consumed services through a browser on a computer. Replacing that era is a new, app-based, message-centric mobile Internet.
For the first time in decades, CIOs have the opportunity – and necessity – to completely re-imagine and rebuild their technology strategy from the ground up. Catalyzing this change is the fact that the technology switching costs are often less than the price of maintaining existing solutions.
As the “post-PC” movement grows, it looks to get away from a traditional desktop PC-centric model to promote a platform that is more virtual, visual, mobile and social. Working from anywhere and everywhere (where Internet is available) is just becoming a standard requirement, especially as tablets and smartphones become more common in the workplace. When individual workers look to the App Store for an immediate solution to their problem instead of calling IT (who in turn calls a vendor) you can tell things will never be the same.
Companies like CloudOn and Onlive aim to virtualize applications that we never imagined would be available outside the office walls. Entire industries are already being transformed: mobile healthcare apps will enable cutting-edge health outcomes, and construction sites will eventually be transformed by apps like PlanGrid.
The enterprise software shift mirrors that of the media and cable companies fighting for relevance in a world moving to digital content.
Fragmentation of devices and platforms define the post-PC era. Android, iOS, and Windows 7 and 8 all have different languages and frameworks, UI patterns, and marketplaces. The fate of mobile HTML5 is still up in the air. Fragmentation and sprawl of apps and data is now the norm. In shifting from one technology generation to the next, we minimize disruption by porting the old way of doing things to newer mediums or channels. The cloud is killing the resume (thank god) and, for the most part, it’s going unnoticed. As a web-era company, being heavily invested in a web-centric content and application ecosystem is becoming a liability. Facebook is challenged by this shift – hence Instagram; Google is also challenged by it. Yahoo has effectively been killed by it.
In this new era the essential unit of advertising a page based ad, whether text, display or anything else is simply the wrong monetization vehicle. Consider the recent earnings call from Google. Google, for the second consecutive quarter, suffered a decline in “Cost Per Click” rates that is in large part attributable to the shift in traffic from the desktop/laptop to the mobile platform. Horizontal keyword search is losing ground to vertical-specific apps like Yelp and Hipmunk and a stream of recommendations from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Along its frontiers, touch- and voice-driven interfaces write most of the laws. This landscape is unfriendly to traditional tactics like SEM and SEO.
The PC/client server marked a fundamental shift, and the Cloud now promises another set of fundamental shifts in architecture, usage patterns, and IT approach
Post PC humans are young and antsy!
And post-PC consumers are not patient (i.e. think young demo). When we want to engage with your business, we expect you to respond in an instant, on the communications channels we prefer to use. Responding to our emails in a few hours or days ain’t gonna cut it: depending on our demographics, we are either overloaded with email or hardly use email at all. However, we do consume almost every text message (SMS) that we receive. When we’re in info-gathering, entertainment or transaction mode, we tap on links that seem enticing and follow push notifications into our favorite mobile apps. And if your business offers a frictionless way to contact you, many of us will even call.
The “new era footprint” is Cloud-centric, where one platform exists for every app and homogeneous management that allows for on-demand, as well as the ability to scale up and scale out. This allows for architecture like VMware to provide ubiquitous service delivery as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Through IaaS, businesses are able to service catalogue and self service, policy-based automation and provisioning, and software defined storage, network, and security.
After this the next logical step is wearable and implantable devices. I do see microscopic chip implants probable as well (primarily aimed at self timed and bodily attached drug infusions – think diabetes and insulin at first since it would reach a wide swatch of the population) and other health related ailments at first. Your daily to do list would be quite convenient implanted and selectively visual through a ‘google glasses type’ display. All of this accessible from your body transmitted to your regular glasses or eye lenses on demand.
But there is no mistaking it – the era of the PC is over. Mobile networked wireless computing where all my ‘stuff’ is saved in the cloud is now the norm.
LinkedIn – The Latest and Greatest Scam by Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch.
May 21st, 2011 § 1 Comment
If there’s one thing we’ve all learned in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it’s that stiffing your client is not a crime. Not if you’re an investment bank.
Deutsche Bank, according to a recent report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sold its clients subprime mortgage bonds that one of its own traders at the time described as “pigs.” Goldman Sachs took unseemly advantage of unsuspecting clients to offload its most toxic assets in 2007 and 2008. During the subprime bubble, this kind of behavior was par for the course.
It still is, apparently. On Thursday, LinkedIn, an Internet company that connects business professionals, became the first major American social media company to go public. The company had hired Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division to manage the I.P.O. process. After gauging market demand — which is what they’re paid to do — the investment bankers priced the shares at $45. The 7.84 million shares it sold raised $352 million for the company. For this, the bankers were paid 7 percent of the deal as their fee.
For a small company with less than $16 million in profits last year, $352 million in the bank sounds pretty wonderful, doesn’t it? But it really wasn’t wonderful at all. When LinkedIn’s shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, they opened not at $45, or anywhere near it. The opening price was $83 a share, some 84 percent higher than the I.P.O. price. By the time the clock had struck noon, the stock had vaulted to more than $120 a share, before settling down to $94.25 at the market’s close. The first-day gain was close to 110 percent.
I have no doubt that most everyone at LinkedIn was thrilled to see the run-up; most executives at start-ups usually are. An I.P.O. is an important marker for any company. And, of course, the executives themselves are suddenly rich. But, in reality, LinkedIn was scammed by its bankers.
The fact that the stock more than doubled on its first day of trading — something the investment bankers, with their fingers on the pulse of the market, absolutely must have known would happen — means that hundreds of millions of additional dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn wound up in the hands of investors that Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch wanted to do favors for. Most of those investors, I guarantee, sold the stock during the morning run-up. It’s the easiest money you can make on Wall Street.
As Eric Tilenius, the general manager of Zynga, wrote on Facebook: “A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.”
There is nothing wrong with a small “pop” in the aftermath of an I.P.O.; investors, after all, don’t want to buy a stock that is going to go down immediately. But during the Internet bubble of the 1990s, the phenomenon of investment bankers wildly underpricing I.P.O.’s so that money could be diverted to favored investors got completely out of hand — stocks would sometimes rise 500 percent on the first day. It was obscene.
Indeed, most business journalists writing about the LinkedIn deal focused on the first-day run-up as evidence that we’ve entered another Internet bubble. But over at the Business Insider blog, Henry Blodget — who knows a thing or two about bad behavior on Wall Street — had the perfect analogy for what the banks had done to LinkedIn.
Suppose, he wrote, your trusted real estate agent persuaded you to sell your house for $1 million. Then, the next day, the same agent sold the same house for the new owner for $2 million. “How would you feel if your agent did that?” he asked. That, he concluded, is what Merrill and Morgan did to LinkedIn.
It’s worth remembering that most of the young Internet companies with those eye-popping I.P.O.’s back in the day are long gone. With their flawed business models, maybe they were doomed from the start — but the cash they left on the table at the I.P.O. might have allowed at least a few of them to survive.
Similarly, LinkedIn is still a fragile enterprise. Its business model remains unproved. It is going to have to grow awfully fast to justify its stock price. Its executives may yet rue the day they let themselves be sold down the river by their investment bankers. LinkedIn is supposed to be the client, but it was treated like the mark.
Ever since the financial crisis, investment bankers have been constantly questioned about whether they have any larger social purpose besides making money. What they invariably say is that they play a critical role in capital formation, meaning that they help companies raise the money they need to grow and prosper.
The LinkedIn deal suggests something darker. The crisis hasn’t changed them a bit. They’re still just in it for themselves.
Guest post by By JOE NOCERA, courtesy of the NYT.
Get ready to pay with your phone – presenting the iWallet via the iPhone 5 this summer!
March 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
NFC (short for Near-field communication) is a short-range, high-frequency wireless technology which lets devices – primarily mobile phones – communicate with other NFC devices. This can be utilized in a number of applications including mobile ticketing, mobile money, and smart billboards.
NFC + the iTunes checkout system, could truly become a payment method for many of us. Users are already familiar and comfortable with purchasing things via iTunes, and as we look to use alternatives to cash, checks, and even credits cards – it makes sense that Apple provides this. With a re-vamped iTunes that COULD hold not only users credit cards but also loyalty points and credits. And, lucky you! You’ll also be getting targeted ad through your phone for discounts and deals! It would not surprise me if we see Apple partnering or buying a ‘Groupon’ or ‘LivingSocial’ type service to deliver local ads and daily deals based on your buying preferences and history with iTunes, account profile and location. This effectively turns iTunes into a financial service. It also will help tame the fees VISA, MASTERCARD, AMEX and the rest have been charging for years.
NFC-enabled phones are still relatively unknown in the U.S., although they have been popular for years in Japan and other parts of Asia. A phone with NFC capabilities simply needs to pass within 4 inches of a receiving device to transmit account data for a purchase. In that sense, it’s just like the credit card in your wallet, except it doesn’t need to be swiped through a machine. My bet – we will see this in the new upcoming iPhone 5 this summer, perhaps as soon as July, 2011.
Question of the Month – What did I just receive via UPS that only a few other people have received?
February 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Hint # 1
Hint # 2
Hint # 3
Hint # 4
Hint # 5
and the answer is?
PROGRAM OR BE PROGRAMMED: 10 Commands for a Digital Age
January 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
One pretty smart guy. Cool book and no, this is NOT a paid advertisement.
“I am sure smarter people than us will figure this out,” he said. “But that’s why, when we say that Apple TV is a hobby, that’s why we use that phrase.”
August 24th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Apple Said to Seek Show-Rental Deal
By BRIAN STELTER and MIGUEL HELFT
Apple, which is widely expected to announce a revamped product for television sets next month, is pressing the television networks to rent their TV series through its iTunes service for as little as 99 cents an episode.
The News Corporation, parent of the Fox network, and the Walt Disney Company, parent of ABC, are close to deals for iTunes rentals at 99 cents each, according to network executives with knowledge of the discussions who spoke Tuesday on the condition of anonymity. But the executives emphasized that there were still sticking points in the negotiations.
The executives said NBC Universal, parent of the NBC network; the CBS Corporation, parent of CBS; and Time Warner, parent of the TNT and TBS cable channels, all had reservations about the proposal. But the companies apparently have not ruled out a rental deal at some point.
The companies uniformly declined to comment on Tuesday. The executives spoke on the condition of anonymity because their employers had not authorized them to discuss the negotiations.
Apple declined to comment on Tuesday about any coming events or products.
Apple has been frustrated in its efforts to penetrate the living room, but many analysts expect the company to continue trying. The talks with the studios seem to indicate that the company is making a renewed push in that area.
The iTunes store currently sells TV episodes for $1.99 and $2.99 apiece, but its rental activities are limited to movies. The company is said to believe that inexpensive rentals of TV episodes would enhance its Apple TV and iPad products.
Allowing some rentals at 99 cents would be a shift in attitude for the networks, which were said to be skeptical of the proposal when Apple made it last winter. At the time, they fretted about the possible damage that low rental prices would do to sales of DVDs and electronic episodes on iTunes and Amazon.com.
Apple, however, has apparently kept up the pressure. Bloomberg News first reported on the renewed talks about the rentals on Tuesday.
The talks appear to be pegged to an Apple product introduction. Analysts anticipate that the company will hold an event in September to announce new products, including an updated iPod Touch and a revamped version of Apple TV, a product that Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, has referred to as a hobby.
Apple TV helps to bring Web content to television sets, but it has been perceived as a dud. In June, Mr. Jobs laid out his frustration with the TV industry’s business model and seemed to suggest that any Apple efforts in that area would be modest.
“The problem with innovation in the television industry is the go-to-market strategy,” Mr. Jobs said at a technology conference, singling out the subsidized set-top boxes provided by cable and satellite companies.
“That pretty much squashes any opportunity for innovation because no one is willing to buy a set-top box,” he said.
Mr. Jobs suggested that until those industry dynamics changed, Apple was likely to continue tiptoeing.
“I am sure smarter people than us will figure this out,” he said. “But that’s why, when we say that Apple TV is a hobby, that’s why we use that phrase.”
The revamped Apple TV is expected to have a new user interface and employ the same iOS software used on the iPhone and iPad.
Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.
Steve Jobs is the most understaed man in the iTV biz – and brilliant too. Read on:
You gotta’ love this…Facebook still leaks BIG TIME.
July 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Security specialist Ron Bowes has once again proven how easy it is to glean valuable user information from Facebook, by spidering Facebook’s online directory and compiling it all into one neat little torrent that could be downloaded off his site, SkullSecurity.com.
Bowes created a torrent containing over 171 million entries with links to profiles that provide access to the names, addresses and phone numbers of 100 million users, one fifth of Facebook.
And you THOUGHT that your info was secure….HA!
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/?p=887
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- 100 million Facebook pages leaked on torrent site (thinq.co.uk)
Will TV last as it is today in its present form?
June 16th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
What’s going to happen when we can watch anything on-line we see on TV today or in the theaters instantly on-line (and that image is delivered to your living room or any TV) ? What happens to the ‘per subscriber’ guarantees that programmers pay cable ops to carry their satellite feed? And when I can get CNN for free on-line instantly via the Internet? Or Noggin? Or Lifetime? Or Disney? Right now I subscribe to Time Warner – I get about 150 channels. I think we watch the following: 3 ‘local’ channels (ABC, NBC and CBS), Lifetime (wife), Noggin and Boom (daughter) and ESPN and an occasional HBO movie. That’s 8 channels. If I pushed that I can probably include several others like Turner Classic Films, AMC and Discovery. But not too many beyond that.
Since I can remember, cable companies have controlled what I watch and when I watched it. If a cable op. didn’t like the a channel, it wouldn’t carry it and we couldn’t see it. We were in a closed, 4 wall environment. We are still in that environment, but the walls are coming down. Very slowly. And the big three TV guys are in total denial. They are programming like its still 1999.
In this new world of ‘TVnomics’, I no longer need to hope that my cable operator will carry a particular program. With the likes of Hulu, YouTube, TV.com, and a few other content aggregators, I’m no longer tethered forever to Time-Warner. Using Amazon or Netflix I can watch on-line nearly anything I can find on my Time-Warner delivered TV service. And this has only really been possible since approximately 2 yrs. and 3 months ago (May, 2008) when Hulu launched.
So we have been seeing very ‘non-traditional’ programming hawking itself as a TV show for the web. Shows on no budgets, small ones and even big one. Some of these shows are being pushed out to the web by the networks (trying to find some viewer traction), and some by independent suppliers. All of them for the most part are sub-par and relatively few advertisers have climbed aboard.
Instead, the networks think that if they tease the traditional TV audience they have with bits and snippets of content found on TV pushed onto the web, they can have TV on the web or call it ‘Web TV’. Why in the world don’t CBS, NBC or ABC stream this ‘live’ simultaneously with broadcast? Why can’t they put the same show and advertisers on-line day and date with its broadcast on TV? Won’t this substantially help grow the very business on-line they fear now? Yes, I bet it would.
And in the long run, not too much of what they can do will prevent us all from getting it on-line. Once the majority of us have fat pipes able to deliver a TV show and watch a show seamlessly (think FIOS) as if it WAS TV, then instead of their being 95 million cable homes and 200 million homes with TV’s, there will be hundreds of millions of homes with TV’s – they’ll just be connected to a fat, dumb pipe. This changing of the guard won’t take that long – figure in the 5 years or so, things will REALLY shift.
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Interesting bitsandbytes – celebrity data, new search engines, Disney’s views on content
May 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Interesting bitsandbytes:
Celebrity Data:
*Ken Sonenclar, managing director of DeSilva+Phillips, opened the media investment bank’s Future of Celebrity Media conference, by pointing out that entertainment mags are down 18 percent, not as bad as magazines in general. And as more bloggers create their one celeb-focused sites and media stars like Ashton Kutcher and Martha Stewart are reaching to fans directly via Twitter, bypassing the traditional avenues. It’s getting so bad, Sonenclar said, “Even paparazzi aren’t being paid well anymore. They’re competing with too many so-called amateurs.”
As for online, Yahoo’s OMG leads by far when it comes to uniques, Sonenclar said, showing a bar chart of celeb sites. OMG is distantly followed by TMZ and People, and Microsoft’s Wonderwall, which has come out of nowhere. However, 90 percent of Wonderwall’s traffic comes from people clicking on the “celebrity” channel on MSN’s homepage. The same is true for OMG’s success. While that may skew those sites popularity, versus celeb mag sites run by People and Entertainment Weekly, advertisers don’t really care, Sonenclar said. Still, whether those sites can create brands as well known as People and EW, remains a very open question. Ultimately, the power of celebrity brands still make it possible for established media to hold their own in terms of attracting users and sponsors.
A Studio head that gets it:
*Less than a week after the announcement that Disney (NYSE: DIS) was taking an equity stake in the News Corp-NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) joint venture. Iger told analysts: “We believe that broader distribution of our content makes sense given the growth in online viewing,” adding, “New media isn’t going away.
“We absolutely must be where our consumers are going.” One reason: if Disney and others don’t make programming available on a well-timed, well-priced basis, consumers will find it anyway. Iger said going with a service like Hulu helps fight piracy by offering better alternatives.
But avoiding piracy isn’t the only rationale. Iger wants to be where the audience is and, so far, the demographics for Hulu are younger than those for broadcast television. Just as he has with iTunes sales and ABC.com VOD, Iger stressed that cannibalization isn’t a concern. Instead, Disney sees a way to expand its reach to views.
Search Engines –2 NEW TYPES:
# 1- Systemic Knowledge – meaning its not searching but computing the answer (think Spock from Star Trek). Visit : http://www.wolframalpha.com/ 
# 2- And Real-Time search – is the second. They are: one from OneRiot 
and one from Tweetmeme 
. Real-time search also can be found here: Twitter Search, , FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. But for the most part, oneriot, tweetmeme and scoopler all are designed from the get-go as ‘real-time’ engines.
*Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that you can use to compute systematic knowledge immediately. You can put in anything you would like to know and you can compare multiple results with each other. There is no need to know how to search; just type in what you want to know.
This is significant in that real-time search s now becoming more important from a ‘social’ perspective than before. First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. John Bothwick describes it like this:
“In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.
A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow. “
TV is coming to the iPhone and it’s free and it will ‘rock’ rumor has it.
May 16th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Word on the street is
Hulu will be putting out a free iPhone app very soon that streams full length TV shows using 3G and WiFi. And any hopes of AT&T charging for TV flew out the window. Guess Apple 
will be sucking wind about charging all of us now through iTunes to watch the same things. Wonder what that will do to iTunes sales of these shows. My hunch is not too much and if anything will make more fans and will increase ratings. Why? Why do I say that giving away ‘Lost’ won’t cause a loss of
sales of the same at iTunes? 
Because, if you are really a rabid ‘Lost’ fan, you will want to own it anyway, whether you get to watch last night’s season finale or not. Giving it away for free (and on a very small screen) only whets the appetite of those that might decide to sample the show using the app. Come ‘on everyone, haven’t you all
heard of piracy? 
Well, this is simply ‘legal’ . Have you ever heard of the WWF? (or WWE today). They still give away wrestling on TV daily on TBS and charge $ 39.99 or more for essentially the same show on PPV. It seems like someone in Hollywood may finally be seeing the light.
