Out of a pool of 50 million active users during Q1 2013, we examined over 1.7 million new Non-Arcade players who joined during the first two weeks. For those players only, we observed their monetization behavior over the entirety of the first quarter. By the end of Q1 2013, almost 14,000 players in the cohort of 1.7 million had monetized, roughly 0.77%.
These are some mind-blowing statistics. 0.77% of their audience generated all of Playnomics’ first quarter revenue, totalling a tad under $600,000. The other 99% of players contributed zero to the company’s income, but have the essential role of attracting the 1% of players who become devoted to the games and are willing to pay for additional content.
Furthermore, 1% of the 1% who payed any money are responsible for a third of total revenue. That’s 134 people contributing a combined sum of $190,000, with an average spend of over $1,400 each.
Now, visualise expanding the sample population, slightly, to the top 20% of the 1% who payed any money. This tiny group (approximately 2700 people) accounts for 90% of total revenue.
The area where manufacturers can distinguish themselves from their competitors is in the services they offer. Samsung has understood this and so has Google. Apple also knows that it needs killer services to keep its crown, but the ones it currently has aren’t all that great. Siri, for all its hype, still remains relatively useless. I still don’t quite understand iCloud, and developers now have better cross-platform choices than Apple’s cloud storage service (including Drive and SkyDrive from Google and Microsoft). iMessage is nice, but it’s not a killer feature and not something WhatsApp and other third-party developers haven’t already replicated and improved upon. The less said about Maps, the better.
As we previously reported, the latest iOS 7 builds being tested include new panels for quick access to information. For example, in addition to local weather and stocks information (like as introduced in iOS 5), Apple is testing other widgets for Notification Center. Sources shared examples such as localized news feeds. Additionally, Apple is testing a dedicated, easily-accessible panel for WiFi, Airplane Mode, and Bluetooth toggles.
I would greatly prefer if Apple would add a Notification Center widget for these quick-access toggles, rather than another dedicated panel. I think Apple should only add more system-wide gestures, which have significant implications on the third-party app ecosystem, with extreme moderation.
Case in point: multitasking gestures on the iPad are off by default. If they caused no harm, users wouldn’t have a choice to enable it or not — it wouldn’t be optional as there would not be a downside to having them always active.
Google’s discussions with Waze, which one of the sources told Reuters remained fluid and could change in tenor at any time, come amid reports Facebook is willing to pay $1 billion for the crowd-sourced service, which relies on information provided by its 47 million members to craft its mobile-oriented maps.
A billion dollars is quickly becoming the lower bound for high-profile acquisitions these days. Paying less than that is almost insulting.
Twitter for Mac is continuously receiving updates and today it received a highly requested feature: Notification Center integration. Users can configure the setting in the preference window within the app.
I am thrilled that Twitter seems to have given up on their attempts at forcing desktop users onto their website.
Just imagine if Apple could replace all those tax lawyers with creative new software geeks or industrial designers. It might win back some of the market share it has been losing to Android in recent years.
I recommend reading the article to get an understanding of how Apple’s tax structures are set up (spoiler: the same way every multinational does) but the closing remarks are off-base, because Apple is not resource constrained financially. They can afford tax departments and comfortably afford as many software engineers and designers as they please. Many companies are hurt by broken tax code, but large international organisations are not the primary beneficiaries of policy reform.
With the rapid adoption of portable electronics, Eesha Khare, 18, of Saratoga, California, recognized the crucial need for energy-efficient storage devices. She developed a tiny device that fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds. Eesha’s invention also has potential applications for car batteries.
Amazing stuff by someone my age. And yet, because this fair attracts so much incredible talent, Khare’s invention didn’t even win the top prize.
“Xbox on” turns on the hardware to power up an instant-on system with a new Home dashboard that is near-identical to Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. Voice commands let you navigate the system, with options to control live TV. A new Instant Switching feature lets you move between applications and live TV streams instantly. Microsoft has also built in a number of new gestures with Kinect, allowing players to navigate and close applications. Snap Mode follows a similar path to Windows 8, allow Xbox One owners to run multiple apps alongside each other. Microsoft demonstrated a method where an app, like Internet Explorer, can run side-by-side while a movie plays.
On the entertainment side, I am once again saddened that a ‘new generation’ set-top box can only achieve cable TV integration via HDMI passthroughs and IR blasters. There was also no explanation of how the Xbox will communicate with your cable service provider, to get information on your available channel selection and such.
In regard to the games, I don’t think I can make any sort of judgement in this field. I have no clue what portions of the shown footage was pre-rendered cut-scene material. My guess is that not much was actual gameplay content. Hopefully, E3 will shine more light on what next-generation games will actually look like.
The Veterans Administration might want to talk to Seattle Children’s Hospital before it starts buying those 100,000 iPads. According to a recently published article in CIO, the tablet devices were a complete flop in a small test run at the Washington facility.
While it’s true iPad use is growing exponentially in healthcare, not one of the Seattle clinicians who used them were convinced.
Why? The apps weren’t designed for touch. It wasn’t a fault of the iPad; it was a fault of the deployment — relying on ported, keyboard-orientated desktop apps was always doomed to fail.
Electronic medical record systems are bad enough on devices they were designed for.
Windows Phone posted the largest year-over-year gain among the leading operating systems, more than doubling its size from a year ago. Nokia was largely responsible for driving these volumes higher, accounting for 79.0% of all Windows Phone shipments during the quarter. Since Nokia began shipping Windows Phone devices, the company has shipped a total of 20.3 million units and grown the footprint worldwide to include address multiple market segments. Meanwhile, other vendors continue to offer Windows Phone devices, but mainly as an alternative to their signature Android devices. Still, the gains made by Windows Phone demonstrate both end-user demand and OEM support.
They insist Apple will employ a capacitive touch home button for the first time with the iPhone 5S, eliminating one of the most unreliable components in an iOS device (the physical home button has a tendency to fail after long periods of use).
Not only will it be a capacitive touch button, but it’ll also incorporate a fingerprint sensor, the sources claim.
The idea conflicts with this report from March that purported to show the 5S’ (mechanical) home button. However, I actually think a capacitive sensor replacing the physical Home Button is a very plausible scenario, for a couple of reasons.
It’s clear that Apple wants to have a fingerprint sensor on the next iPhone and they need to put it somewhere. The Home Button, conceptually, is the most elegant location. In practical terms, though, integrating the biometric sensor into a mechanical button is a significant engineering problem. Making the iconic Home Button capacitive makes that integration simpler without sacrificing most of the usability of the Home Button. Capacitive buttons are already very common across Android phones — consumers are used to them.
Moreover, Geniuses have told me that one of their biggest support issues are related to faulty Home Buttons. Eliminating the mechanical elements of the button would both improve the reliability of this part of the phone and remove considerable burden from Apple’s support services, including the Genius Bar.
No more sneaking peeks at toys in the mall: SideWays, a new eye-tracking device, will catch you at it. As soon as you walk up to it, it automatically starts tracking what you peer at – which could allow shop owners to show you adverts on a video screen for products that you seem interested in.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Bang With Friends. It’s a rather controversial thing. Simply put, it’s a Facebook and mobile app that lets you pick which of your friends you’d like to “bang.” Oh, but it’s more clever than that: the app won’t reveal your intentions until that friend picks you back. Then, theoretically, you can clandestinely meet for a night of sex without any fear of rejection, or the need for awkward dates, and none of your other friends will be the wiser. Needless to say, some people aren’t so happy about the idea. They’re worried that it objectifies people, that it could promote infidelity, and other things of the sort.
Using the symmetric follow-pattern for potentially embarrassing interests is a clever idea.
“You shouldn’t expect an iTunes app on Windows 8 any time soon,” said Tami Reller, chief financial officer of Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows division. “ITunes is in high demand. The welcome mat has been laid out. It’s not for lack of trying.”
Does this shock anyone at all? This quote from a Microsoft executive is just confirmation of the obvious situation: Microsoft wants it, Apple won’t do it.
Apple put iTunes on Windows originally because they were the underdog, but in tablets they are not the underdog. In the Isaacson biography, Jobs said he “didn’t want to make Android users happy” by making iTunes for Android. Naturally, the same reasoning applies to Windows 8 as well or any of Apple’s lesser competition.
Get closer to your ideas. Pinch to bring up zoom without losing your place.
Rather than scaling the entire canvas, pinching in Paper pops up a loupe that sits on top of the canvas, magnifying only the area beneath the loupe’s glass. It keeps the context of the wider picture visible, whilst still enabling finer-grained editing on the zoomed-in area.
Please try this out in person, because the delight is in the details. For instance, the developers have made it such that the zoom scale is a fraction of the overall loupe size — it doesn’t scale 1:1. This creates a wonderful ‘parallax’ effect as you make the loupe bigger and smaller, mimicking how a lens functions in real life.
Everything was falling into place for CocoaConf Alt this June. We had secured space in the hotel directly next door to the big show, and we were putting together a phenomenal list of speakers. Ticket sales were better than we had hoped. All was well until we got an email from the Intercontinental San Francisco, saying that they had determined that our event was in conflict with Apple and that due to their contract with Apple, we couldn’t use the space.
A flurry of frantic emails followed, but to no avail. We tried finding another venue close enough to make it work, but that didn’t pan out either. Since many of our speakers had tickets and were going to be at WWDC, we had to be close enough for them to pop over without missing much of the action. Nothing within our radius was available at a price we could manage.
Regardless of whether Apple forcibly pushed this decision through or not, the fact the conference is cancelled at all puts a bad taste in my mouth. It’s sad.
