Apple Stiff Arms the competition with iPhone 3.0

Posted by melting on Jun 15, 2009

With the latest HW set to launch, Apple is also gearing up for it’s latest firmware update for its iPhone and iPod touch users.  This update is just what Apple needs to keep the competition at bay.  There are many new features that are great for usability, should have been in the original software, and help developers make even better apps. 

First, the features that should have been there from the start: cut, copy, and paste.  Since people are thinking the iPhone is the start of truly mobile computing vs. a smartphone, there is no excuse from not having this capability from the beginning.

There are so many features that will truly make this device even more usable and powerful.  The first is the landscape built in apps.  Even though the biggest complaint about the iPhone is the lack of a physical keyboard, it is actually pretty easy to type on in landscape mode.  Apple has realized this and improved all of their apps to take advantage of this ease.  Apple has also added MMS.  While their are many features that make the iPhone a multimedia device, “syncing is so nineties”.  This is at least one more way to share some of that media without syncing. 

Apps will only get better from here with all of the new api’s available to them.  The feature with a likely big impact is the push notifications.  Apps that talk to services can now leave you logged in to their service and push messages to you.  AIM, google talk, yahoo messenger etc., will now be able to let have continuous conversations.  Another feature to have a big impact will be the ability for Apps to talk with custom hardware accessories.  

On a slightly gloomy note there are a few things that won’t be coming for US users.  The coolest feature that won’t be supported by AT&T is tethering.  Tethering was created to allow users to connect to the web on their laptops via their iPhone when out in the wilderness of the world.  

 The upgrade will be free for current iPhone users and $9.95 for iPod touch users.   

Read about the iPhone 3Gs 

YouTube, getting paid

Posted by melting on Jun 1, 2008

Even though YouTube has only been around for about three years there has been longtime speculation on if they will ever make money. Advertising on YouTube has had very minimal success with many differing problems. Advertisers aren’t used to user generated content that some of their customers may find offensive. Users tend to balk when they get overcrowded by advertising and navigate away from the site.

Forbes’ article bring very vague numbers which in and of themselves are not very interesting. Much like this article, they don’t really site where they get the information or how they draw there conclusions. The numbers sure can be very dismal. YouTube has had tremendous growth and is almost ubiquitous for certain types of video. The article points to data that 30% on internet videos are served by YouTube, yet they will only get 15% of the targeted 775 million this year and 1.35 billion next year in online video advertising revenues.

These numbers are telling of the current viewership of this type of business. 350 million and growth of 75% aren’t bad and will soon prove to be enough for Google to be right in purchasing YouTube. But if I could guess I think 3 things will improve the monetization of YouTube. Channel growth will continue to grow. Advertising on pages particular to individuals will grow because advertisers will continue to get used to how to monetize user information. Lastly Google will increase revenues by leaning on its true business, search.

Search for videos will help twofold. First is using the tradition Google search page will get its traditional pages. Where search can improve is when their users click YouTube from the “more” section it only takes you to the YouTube homepage. Better monetization of YouTube via search will be key.

Thanks again to TechCrunch for linking to a nice article by Forbes.

FeedBurner serving AdSense at a feed near you.

Posted by melting on Jun 1, 2008

On Friday FeedBurner has done the unthinkable, it announced it will begin serving AdSense in publishers feeds. In case the sarcasm didn’t come through, this announcement has been expected ever since the large company from Mountain View CA, Google, acquired them in mid 2007.

I am sure in that time period the sales teams have been fully integrated in order to provide more options to customers who want more options to reach their customers. The perfect next step for Google is to integrate AdSense and AdWords into all the feeds that are served by FeedBurner.

I have noticed Feeds have extra inventory that is easily filled by Google’s behemoth of an add biz. The next big thing is the final roll-out of AdSense for feeds.

Read the full news release via TechCrunch