Why the iPad will Win

[Types yesterday originally as an internal email]

$500 bucks a pop isn't going to make apple a ton of money on the iPad on margins.

But they are buying themselves into ubiquity via volume production and critical mass for media consumption on the device.

The app store is going to make them more money than the device itself -- easy.

I've been tracking the usage patterns of a few friends with Kindle.  Microtransactions on these devices are crazy impulsive and lucrative.

The print/newsprint folks are going to be all over this as their digital content delivery savior. 

The text book companies are going to see this as another interesting value add platform for schools.

The other reason the iPad will win is because its the ultimate gaming device.  Hands down.  Digital software delivery + Multi-touch + massive screen compared to the Nintendo DS + "subsidized" by productive uses of the device = a DS and PSP killer.

Pricing this thing at $500 bucks right out of the gates was the killer move.  Establishing ubiquity and a price point that the PC knockoffs can't really compete too much on a price basis brilliant.  IMHO: network effects and custom apps for this new form factor is the key to winning and creating a brand new category of usage and demand.

This is as important as the iPhone.  What the iPhone did to cell phones, is what the iPad will do for print, games and media consumption.

Steve Jobs just pwned Kindle, Nintendo DS, and any/all tablet PCs.

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Quick Blog

Awesome Upcoming Sony Android Phone -- Looks Slicker than Nexus One

The Sony X10.

Interesting to see that Rogers that dibs on it.

The videos look very very slick.

Plus device has a 8.1MP camera, totally custom UI / skin, very slick 3D capabilities:

World’s Premiere Social Networking and Entertainment Phone,The Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X10 Coming To Canada Exclusively At Rogers

World’s Premiere Social Networking and Entertainment Phone,The Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X10 Coming To Canada Exclusively At Rogers

Update:

Tried the phone. It sucks. It doesn't have anything close to the newest version of Android, the UI is sluggish, and the Phone is built on now relatively modest hardware. Sigh.

Where is the RIM/BlackBerry Nexus One? (or: some random mobile thoughts & open letter to RIM)

This is a great article from Bill Gurley on iPhone vs. Android.  Which is similar to much of my thinking.

Boils down to this:

iPhone = Apple of the PC Era = Control Platform for Superior UX (user experience)

Android = Microsoft of the PC Era = Open Platform and Cater to Customizations

But also inspired this rant what I think of the Berry

But what about RIM/BerryOS, Palm/PalmOS, Microsoft/WinOS and Nokia/Symbian?

- Nokia, Palm: too far behind to be a part of the real "super smart phone/OS" race.  Nokia still stuck in feature phone land, PalmOS/PalmPre is so slow, i could make coffee between switching apps sometimes.

- Microsoft: has a decent shot at being #3.  Windows Mobile v7 is way late.  Some devices like the HD2 look awesome, but too little too late IMO.

- RIM: Will sadly, likely go from a platform that should have stayed at the #1 spot, to going to fight MS for the #3 position

RIM's BlackBerry keyboard based smart phones are still the best PHONES of any smartphone on the market for a business user.  I've seen even consumers fall in love with the Berry without an email or data plan simply because of how functional it is, and how responsive the entire user experience is.

The issue is their OS and their lack of innovative consumer product DNA is killing them.  

Issues w/ the Berry:

1) BlackBerryOS Looks like Ass: The OS and UX still feels like Windows 3.1 in an era of Aero powered 3D desktops.  The icons used even in the latest version look like they are from the 80s (that said Nokia and Google both don't seem to have done a lot better and looks as if they keep hiring design school rejects to create most of their icons)

2) BlackBerryOS 3rd Party Dev  Platform Suck Balls: The platform is difficult for developers to build on.

3) RIM Has No Critical Mass Usage of Touch Screen: There are too few touch screen devices shipped from RIM to get game developers remotely excited about the platform.

So why do I still own RIM stock?   Besides the fact that my most favorite productivity device of all time is still the BlackBerry...

RIM does 3 things awesome well:

1) Great / Fast Email Experience (important to enterprise market)

2) Great IM/BlackBerry Messenger Ecosystem/Experience (important to consumer) 

3) Knows how to Build the Best Mobile Hardware Keyboard (important to everyone)

None of this matters however if they don't continue to innovate.  Here's a 3 areas that I think they should innovate on to help them stay competitive in 2010:

1) Own Location Messaging: They bought Dash Networks, put some of the Nav/GPS experience/IP to work and make BB Messenger even more addictive with great geo features.  If they can get this rolled out in an interesting way, the install base that they have will far exceed that of the tiny installation of Gowalla or FourSquare.  That said, I think those companies are all very innovative, and I don't think RIM should be focused so much on the fun element, but rather the P2P aspect of friend-finding.

2) Own Social Messaging: Invest and build the BEST Facebook Integration experience: you guys built the best email experience on mobile devices, now build the best social-messaging platform on top of the best mobile device with a hardware keyboard in the industry.  There's no better way to update your status than to use a Berry keyboard.  Just as Google allows you to sync all your data with your gmail account and gcal.  Look to Palm Pre as a starting point of making Facebook Connect as the basis for building a social messaging phone form the ground up.  Log-in w/ FBconnect, sync your contacts, integrate messaging and contacts with Facebook.  Be THE social phone that the Palm was suppose to be (but is way too slow to actually work, and not as integrated as it could/should have been)  

3) Own Flash: Get the best damn implementation of Flash on your devices -- which seems like ages ago since it was announced, and get a real browser working, and you'll have a shot at competing.  I don't think people care if you re-write the OS or not, or if you lose the existing applications that work in the legacy OS -- the thing that matters most is: will your 2010 phones with with Flash better than the other guys?  And will it have a competitive/fast browser experience.  Get flash right, and the Berry can immediate attract a massive number of developers that can contribute to its platform.

4) Own Style + Personalization: Bonus - Hire a good Sr. UI design director that has some real authority and influence: seriously, it wouldn't take that much to make your device icons and skins looks much better than the default AndroidOS.  The only people I've seen that come close to being decent are the Palm folks.  I mean, you could probably spend 1/10,000th of your engineering budget and get 10x better design than the Corel Draw clip art pack styled icons and look and feel.  Ok, that's a bit mean, but seriously -- give user experience design, and polish some thought.  You may never be Apple, but at least you could be competitive with Palm.

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Quick Blog

Burj Dubai Tower Is Insane.

The Burj Dubai, the massive buildings below looked just puny in comparison in the video from above.  The thing is more than 50% taller than the next tallest building (Taipei 101 -- see below) and also 50% taller than the CN Tower.  Another crazy thing is that the elevators hit 64km/hour.  Then again, when you consider that the tower is 8/10ths of a kilometer high -- I can see why you'd want that kind of speed.

I had the opportunity to visit Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat/Oman, and Fujairah not long ago, visiting the region was a real eye opener.

What I found most interesting was the amount of interest and investment that were being made not just in real estate, but what seemed like a real desire to build up a technology hub as well.

That said, Dubai still felt quite unfinished and seemed even at that time when things were going full steam ahead, perhaps 5-10 years away from being a real "finished" city.

What I also found interesting was the fact that it was build by Samsung C&T of South Korea (Samsung is insanely big -- turns out they have 276K employees with revenues of $170B a year), the same primary contractors as the Taipei 101 building (which I got to visit with, of all people, on a unforgettable trip with Stewart Butterfield and Mike Arrington as guests of the Taiwan government for a Web2 conference).

Totally random... I know.  Now back to our original programming.

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Quick Blog

Gigapixel-Dresden.de - Large Size Panoramas

This is pretty bad ass: 26,000 Mega Pixel Photo (largest photo in the world as of Dec/2009):

Gigapixel-Dresden.de - Large Size Panoramas

"Technical characteristics

The picture was made with the Canon 5D mark II and a 400mm-lens. It consists of 1.665 full format pictures with 21.4 megapixel, which was recorded by a photo-robot in 172 minutes. The converting of 102 GB raw data by a computer with a main memory cache of 48 GB and 16 processors took 94 hours. With a resolution of 297.500 x 87.500 pixel (26 gigapixel) the picture is the largest in the world. (stand December 2009)"

Make $1M on Apple App Store. Woop-Dee-Do.

So I was reading about this article on TechCrunch about how awesome this app was to make over a million dollars over 8 months.

Gut reaction was, wow, indie developer making real bank on the app store!

Then I put it into perspective: that's over 8 months, about $125k a month.  That's assuming that the $1M number if POST apple's 30% cut.

Lets forget that for a moment.  Lets say the app made a over $1M in one single month.

Woop-Dee-Do.

Now before you all start calling me a hater  -- I sincerely have crazy respect for the guys who built this awesome barcode scanning app (something I've always dreamt of wanting to have and even at one point contemplated building in the distant past). Lets put this in relative terms to the Facebook platform for indie developers:

I know for fact, indie developers that have made hundreds of thousands (to million+) a month, for many months, on Facebook.

If $100k-$300k a month is a big deal on the app store as a TOP paid app for multiple months is a big deal, with little in the way of recurring revenues off the one app is a fantastic success story:

Then I stand by my opinion that it still the economics still suck to build for the iPhone platform as compared to the Facebook platform, and perhaps this suckage is a good thing for apple for innovation as I've talked before in a prior posting.

That said, I suspect/hope things will change for the better on the iPhone platform.

Someone had to say it, but pound for pound, hour for hour, the pay off is still better for a developer to build FB apps than iPhone apps today.

As I said before, this is just another great data point for those that are evaluating between the two platforms to build for.

All that being said of course, if I had to build something -- I'd always build something that I'd find most interesting AND lucrative.  But never just one or the other -- as you'll never win if there isn't a good balance between the two.

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Quick Blog

Does iPhone's Suckage Breed Better Apps?

...Or Put Another way Does Lower Virality on App Platforms Breed Better Apps?

Here are some great iPhone apps demo videos from a recent AppsFire contest at LeWeb.  In spite of the crappy economics of building iPhone apps, I seem to keep finding more creativity employed in iPhone apps than FB Apps (granted the iPhone has a camera and location and touch screen to play with over most FB apps).

I'm starting to think that its the reasons behind the poor economics on the iPhone platform (i.e. crappy distribution channels, low virality, no re-engagement channels, etc.) that are driving/forcing more diverity and creativity with iPhone Apps over Facebook Apps.

Because there are no easy viral channels on iPhone, from a economic perspective, building a derivative game/app on Facebook that copy an existing proven game mechanic (farming, fish tank, mob-combat, quizzes) and model that:

1) have of strong viral loop opportunities (quiz apps)

2) lends itself to well to driving its users towards monetization behaviors (in game survival and personalization purchasing motives)

3) have a low cost of replication (i.e. no complex 3D engines) 

4) lends itself to opportunities that enabled developers to differentiate though easy "re-theming"

Where as in the iPhone world, derivative works tend not to stand out, and relies on short bursts of exposure (and high churn) of the Apple App store via large amounts of downloads via burst promotions/marketing campaigns and strong word of mouth and reviews.

The rational developer is driven to build profitable, derivative viral games that can take advantage of a fast growing ecosystem of "fresh blood" that grows at 20-40M users a quarter on the FB platform, whereas on the slower growing iPhone platform, the rational developer is forced to differentiate itself much more so in order to gain distribution without the benefit of virality.

So the questions is: does virality + explosive platform growth breed highly profitable, derivative app development efforts, crowding out and driving out creative efforts?  And is the lack of better economics for iPhone developers actually providing Apple a better and more diverse app developer ecosystem?

 

Either way, at Kontagent, we are seeing that developers are becoming much more focused than before about micro-tuning their virality, and putting more efforts on A/B testing given the more limited viral events/messages/channels that are available to them. 

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Quick Blog

6 Must Read Start Up Blogs

Here's the list of my favorite startup resources and blogs... not entirely conclusive, but I've picked the ones that I think have the highest signal to noise ratio from a startup content only perspective.

Collections of Top Resources:

• Noam Wasserman/Founder Research: http://www.founderresearch.blogspot.com/
  • HUGE Body of Reference on Founder Related Issues and Research from Noam Wasserman, Professor of Entrepreneurial Management at HBS
• Nivi and Naval's VentureHacks - http://venturehacks.com/ 
  • HUGE Collection of Real World Advice from the Trenches by Naval Ravikant and Nivi

Fantastic Start Up Bloggers:

• Mark Suster - http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/
  • Killer Advice from someone that's been on, well, both sides of the table.
• Andrew Chen - http://andrewchenblog.com/
  • Great Startup Thinking
• Eric Ries - http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/
  • Lean Startup Concepts
• Paul Graham - http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
  • This is why Y-Combinator Rocks

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Posterous Quick Blog

Another example of why Paul Graham rocks in my books.

Paul Graham On Two Kinds of Programmers and Painters

...In the world of painting there are some people who are just fabulously talented at drawing. They can sit down, these are like the kids who could draw in high school age fifteen they can sit down with a pencil ... sit in front of you ... wow, it looks just like me. But then when you say to these guys, "ok, use this amazing skill to just produce anything, just put it on the wall it's going to look great and then they lose". And within programming there is this distinction too. There are some people who are really really good at implementing code like if you give them a spec for a programming language and man, they will just implement it; The hardest stuff as long as you tell them precisely what to do, they will just do it. But you say, "ok, make up a product, make up some kind of new product that people want", and they are just utterly lost. This is actually a big mistake that companies make. There's a lot of companies who think that the programmers are basically implementers, that products are supposed to be designed by product managers. They are supposed to be designing what the products do. And they make mockups or something like that and they hand it to the programmers and the programmers translate their ideas into code. Like this one way process, no loopback - that loses! The best programmers are the ones that combine in one head both the ability to translate ideas into code and having the ideas.  Just like the best artists have both the ability ... (have) a great hand. They can make their hand do what they want. But they also know what to tell it to do and actually between the two, I would take the Cézannes. Cézanne could not draw, he makes the same drawing mistakes that every one makes in introductory drawing classes. Occam's razor said he couldn't draw, not that he was trying to transcend three dimension ... But what he was good at was sort of the other half - deciding what to produce. He was terribly frustrated he was like this guy who had all kinds of ideas, but he couldn't articulate them with his hand. When you put the stuff on the wall in a room full of other paintings, it looks like there's a spotlight shining on his paintings and other ones have been sprayed with a light coating of mud. It's just amazing when you look at side by side paintings. So I will take the Cézannes actually and one interesting thing that has been happening is because programming languages have gotten so powerful you don't have to be that good an implementer to get something built.

- Paul Graham in an interview with Russ Roberts (~45:30-48:25)

Posted via email from Albert Lai's Posterous Quick Blog

According to Compete.com: Facebook Reach/Usage Nearly Same as Google and Yahoo

Whats even more impressive is the growth rate over the past year alone...

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Albert's posterous