Recorded Future is a startup technology company that described itself as a "temporal analytics engine." It tries to uncover and analyze very faint signals, basically in order to predict the future. It's backed by Google Ventures and the data-loving VC firm IA Ventures.
Today, Recorded Future articulated its vision of the future of news. By news they don't just mean what's broadcast on TV at 5 and 11, they mean current events of interest to people seeking actionable information. The gist of the company's argument is this: real-time web publishing, best exemplified by the news-breaking social network Twitter, is ultimately a race to the bottom. Eventually the time between things happening and their entering the cycle of news recycling that goes on for days or weeks will drop from the 10 or 20 minutes that it's at right now...to zero. That's a losing proposition for competitive news gatherers, the company says, and will be replaced in the future by an endless competition to get better at predicting the news earlier and earlier, before it happens. It's a compelling argument, I think, and well worth considering.
Today Apple released its third quarter earnings. Perusing the revenue figures, I was struck by just how much the iPhone and iPad have overtaken computers and music as Apple's main form of revenue. The iPhone and iPad combined now make up 68% of Apple's entire revenue, compared to just 18% for what were (until the last couple of years) considered the main form of computers: desktops and "portables." What's more, music is now a relatively small part of Apple's revenue - the iPod contributes just 4.6% and iTunes sales about 5.5%.
Specifically, the iPhone is responsible for nearly half of Apple's revenue (46.6% to be precise). The iPad contributes 21.2% towards Apple's revenue. Computers, both desktops and portables (MacBooks), contribute just 17.9% of Apple's total revenue. It's been no secret that iPhones and iPads are very profitable for Apple, but these figures ram home just how much the computing world has changed. Who would've thought even five years ago that computers and music combined would make up less than 30% of Apple's revenue?
So the news this week is filled with ever-changing horror about how various reporters in the Murdoch's News Corp. "hacked" into the cell phone voice mail accounts of prominent Britons. How did News of The World reporters actually hack cell phones and should you be concerned that it could happen to you?
Questions abound about News Corp. and journalistic ethics. The media punditry on the Web is having a field day going after Rupert Murdoch and his son James and the News Corp. empire and the British Parliament is making them testify today concerning exactly what happened at NoW. Outside of the circus that News Corp. has become in the last week, phone-hacking is an alarming issue, no matter who has committed the crime. Turns out, it is not that hard to do.
"Google Plus may carry dangers for photographers," reads the headline on The Washington Post. While we agree that the Google Plus Terms of Service could use clearer wording (in fact, all Terms of Service, everywhere, could!) and we applaud those who have taken the time to actually read through the darned thing, the conclusions we're going to draw are different.
Should professional photographers stay away from Google Plus? Is Google going to steal the rights to your photos and stop you from making money from them? No, they're not.
With the story yesterday about the Netflix price increase, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to examine what is the total cost of my entertainment and communications package and what the actual overall impact would be of the price increase.
My wife and I are empty nesters, but we have a cell plan that also includes my stepson. The three cell phones cost us $175 per month with AT&T, and that is for my iPhone data plan and messaging plans. We live in an urban area where we can choose between DSL and cable options, although in our apartment building AT&T DSL/U-Verse is our only choice for Internet connectivity unless we want to go to a broadband wireless plan.
At their annual conference this week in St. Louis, an international group of botanists are working on two efforts to integrate the Web into their efforts. Called the US Virtual Herbarium and the Open Science Network for Ethnobiology, both are trying to make education and use of plant materials easier for scientists around the globe.
Famously thrilling and troubled web app platform Twitter announced today that it now has 1 million apps developed on top of its microblogging streams, social graph and API. The company says that at this time last year there were only 150,000 apps built on top of Twitter.
A 6X expansion of apps built on top of Twitter between the company's 4th and 5th birthdays is truly remarkable. It's even more remarkable because it's been widely alleged that the developer community is unhappy with Twitter's leadership and feels disinclined to invest in building more apps. Happy or not, this is a huge jump in activity and I think the claim deserves a little investigation. Many people have guessed that the numbers aren't very solid, but there are a number of explanations that if combined could add up to this big, big jump.
Just three and a half months after the company launched to the public, proximity-based photo sharing mega-startup Color has lost a second of its three high-profile initial team members, Michael Arrington reported this morning. Arrington said DJ Patil, who was LinkedIn's chief scientist until this Spring, has resigned. Co-founder Peter Pham, previously a leader at very successful startups Photobucket and Billshrink, left Color last month. That leaves co-founder Bill Nguyen, who sold music service Lala to Apple, as the last of the three rock stars that launched the year's most ambitious startup with more than $40 million in high-profile venture capital.
The reasons why Color appears to be imploding can't be known for sure, but the whole thing looks like a lesson in the Lean Startup philosophy. Perhaps best articulated by consultant and author Eric Ries, the Lean Startup philosophy says the last thing you want to do is raise a whole lot of money, build a product in secret, then spring it on a world that may not want what you've built at all.
With the new social networking service Google+, Google introduced the concept of Circles to allow users more control over what content is shared with whom. Baby pictures? Family Circle. Thoughts about Google Plus? Well, everyone. But the idea that only some content is (or should be) public is foreign to me. The only thing I've ever cared about is being able to filter the stream on the receiving end. From Twitter lists to Facebook Groups, I've traditionally organized people in ways that make sense to me: Apple bloggers, analysts, VCs, locals, extended family, school friends, neighbors, etc.
With Google Plus, Google now has an interesting opportunity to make similar organizational choices for me, without any manual effort on my part. In other words, I'm ready for automatic Circles. Are you?
Researchers for the Chetan Sharma Consulting group have put together a 2011 State of the Global Mobile Industry mid-year assessment and have come up with some very interesting results.
The entire global mobile market weighs in at about $1.3 trillion or close to 2% of the world's gross domestic product. Of that giant $1.3 trillion pie, about $300 billion is expected to be through data revenues. That means that people are starting to use data at much higher rates and Americans are on the forefront of data usage even as India and China are the fastest growing mobile markets in the world.
