We were told that carriers will be an important part of the go-to-market strategy for Apple’s TV ambitions and subsidize the $1,500-$2,500 “iTV”, offering customers a single bill that will include a wireless plan (i.e., iPhone, iPad), Internet connection services, an “iTV” plan and other services.
The main roadblock to revolutionising TV is access to content outside of a cable box. The ideal situation would be that the content providers license their shows for playback on the iTunes Store the same day as they air and, by proxy, their programming would be available on the iTV as well.
As has been discussed a million times, the cable providers don’t want to be commoditised. By offering premium tier services, these companies believe they can extract higher margins from customers. As the cable providers also hold rights over TV content, at least in the US, they currently block deals with Apple and other entrants to ensure they remain more than ‘only’ dumb pipes.
Up to now, this has been the ultimate barrier. Google TV and the Xbox One try to get around this with passthrough video inputs and IR blasters, but this is known to be a sub-par experience.
To revolutionise TV, you need to control the UI. To control the UI, you have to have direct access to the content. Therefore, if Apple can appease the parties who have typically been seen as the “enemy” financially, it could get them onside and convince them to allow Apple free reign over their live channels and rich back-catalogue.
These financial incentives could come from a bundle deal which combines phone service, 3G tablet service, a subscription to TV content, home broadband and more. By making iTV a tenet of the proposal, Apple goes along way in coercing the incumbents into complying, because there is the potential for big profit margins for the service providers, if Apple gave the companies reduced prices on hardware. Essentially, Apple exploits the immense popularity of its iOS devices to make the idea more attractive and swing the bargaining power in their favour.
Rather than try to circumvent the TV providers, Apple embraces them via the draws of increased profitability. Obviously, this speculation has limitations (for instance, whilst it works in the US — where the carriers are also the cable providers — it might not apply so well internationally), at some level, it does solve the issues of content availability. I think the idea has merit.
Engineers and sales staff in Apple’s iAd business have been charged with supporting the new digital-radio service, which the company plans to debut as early as June 10 at its annual developers conference, said the people, who asked not to be named because the moves aren’t public. The music service won’t be publicly available until later this year, when Apple’s iOS 7 mobile-operating system is released, one person said.
Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is shifting how the company courts advertisers after failing to make much headway against Google Inc. in the $4.11 billion U.S. mobile-ad market. Apple will seek to land big brands for the new streaming-radio service — akin to Pandora Media Inc’s business model — scaling back its role as a network that places marketing messages in mobile software from its App Store.
Fill rates on iAd, to date, have been pretty poor. It will be interesting if they can do any better with audio ads. Unlike Pandora, which is only available in the US, Apple has to sign deals around the world for their service.
In fact, anything involving ads and Apple is interesting because it is a new area for them. What other Apple product is supported by advertising? In the past, Apple has presented itself as a company that shuns advertising. For example, at WWDC 2011, Jobs stressed that iCloud Mail would be ad-free.
As part of a shift to lower repair costs, Apple has begun replacing iPhone 5 screens at its retail locations. The new display replacement service is priced at $149 and can be purchased with or without AppleCare+.
Changes to Apple’s repair policies first surfaced last month, where a town hall session revealed that Apple would begin in-house repairs of displays in June in an effort to save approximately $1 billion per year.
This initiative is aimed at benefitting Apple, by saving Apple money. Assuming the actual service is good, at only $150 per repair this is a big plus for customers too, in my view. This is very competitively priced for an “official” repair.
Apple’s dedicated app for its Worldwide Developers Conference arrived today, and it offers a look at some of the sessions happening during the event next week, but it also shows off a dramatically different UI compared to past iterations of the app. The changes sound a lot like what’s said to be on tap for a visual refresh in iOS 7. It also might be a good early indication of what Apple will be bringing not only to its own apps, but also what it will expect from those from the developer community, as well.
The developers of the WWDC app have no insider-knowledge communication to the team who are responsible for making iOS 7. It is possible that somebody told them to design the WWDC app in a manner that replicates iOS 7’s look, but this is by no means a certainty.
Of course, iOS 7’s design is going to change and is going to be ‘flatter’. This has been reported by a myriad of people in the last few months. The design of the WWDC app though, shouldn’t be relied on as a foreshadow for next week’s unveiling. For instance, the WWDC 2012 app had an inexplicable silver theme.
If you want to do some fruitful speculation, I’d look at the black-outs in the schedule, as Panzarino has done.
Instead of entering passwords and secondary codes from a key fob all day, you could just take a vitamin authentication pill every morning. The pill features a small chip with one switch that uses your stomach acids to activate creating an 18-bit ECG-like signal inside your body. Dugan, who came to Google from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), likened taking the pill to having a super power. “My hands are like wires, my arms are like alligator clips,” Dugan said. “When I touch my phone, my computer, my door, my car, I’m authenticated.” The FDA-approved pill is produced by Proteus and currently used for medical applications such as detecting heart rate, physical activity, and resting state.
Having to swallow a pill every day to authenticate is just as much of a hassle as entering an alphanumeric string into a textbox. To catch on, alternative methods of authentication need to be more convenient than the password.
Tim comes off as trying too hard to not say that Apple will play in the wearables space. If it turns out to be true that Apple doesn’t dabble in glasses, I think that’s a huge turning point in Apple’s culture. So far Apple hasn’t avoided a new category just because it might fail.
I disagree. They are known for making great products because they say no to the things that will fail until they believe they are good enough to be successful. That’s Apple’s culture.
Walt on whether Apple might allow others to make changes to the home screen or keyboard. On Android, third parties can give you a choice. Have you given any thought to a little less control?
Cook: As for opening up more programming hooks, “I think you will see us open up more in the future,” he said. “But not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience.”
We think the customer pays us to make certain choices on our behalf. Some want full control, but not the masses.
“But will we open up more,” Cook said. “Yes.”
Its not clear whether Cook is providing a direct response to the question or not, which makes discerning the meaning in his answer impossible. His answer is vague enough that it could just mean ‘adding more APIs for developers in the future’ (which is an inevitability) rather than adding more APIs for integration with Mossberg’s specific examples, like the keyboard and the home screen.
Personally, I would expect Apple to relax their control over iOS to a degree, but I think custom keyboards are out of bounds. I think third-party keyboards fall into the “risk of having a bad experience” category.
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.
