Horace Dediu is an analyst with a focus on the mobile phone industry and especially Apple. Blogging at asymco.com, he often posts surprising facts that confront the conventional “wisdom” of other analysts, who are often predicting doom-and-gloom for Apple.
We asked Horace to share his thoughts on technology, change, and how to anticipate the next big thing.
A short anecdote about the history of Silicon Valley told at Asymconf California last year using techniques taught at Airshow workshop.
Next workshop is in San Jose on Jan 30, 2014.
In a world where everyone needs to present, few know the power that lies under their fingertips.
Whether one-on-one or in front of millions on TV, presentations are the primary means of persuasion in business.
Have you ever cringed at text-only slides or puzzled over graphs that made no sense? Steve Jobs saw “PowerPoints” as “rambling and nonsensical” and had them banned internally. But he used visuals for all his keynotes. What made them tolerable, even persuasive?
The problem is that most people receive no training in how to compose the most crucial images they project to an audience and the tools available do not take advantage of motion, touch, processing power, mobility and high resolutions.
You’ll learn how to:
You have the data. You have the audience. All you need is a story and a screenplay. How do you build them?
There are techniques which are proven to work. They’ve been used by writers, performers and playwrights for centuries. Professional presentation coaches will teach you far less and at greater expense.
Airshow could be coming to a town near you but to make it happen you need to act now.
Here’s how it works: For every month in 2014 an Airshow event will be hosted. The location for that month will be locked-in when the first 20 registrations for that city will be recorded. Any registrations that take place before the location is locked-in will be half-price.
In other words, early registration means you get half off!1
Now is the time to learn presentation skills for the post-PC era. Just like there is no writing which does a movie justice, I can’t write here how it’s done, you have to see it live.
“Airshow was amazing. Business stories with cinematic impact made easy with perspective”
— Paul Brody, Global Business Leader, IBM“Airshow has fundamentally changed how I give client and industry presentations. It is an important tool in my toolbox which allows me to showcase my data and my story in ways that help audiences gain deeper insight and perspective.”
— Ben Bajarin, TIME, TabTimes, Techpinions“Nobody brings numbers to life like Horace Dediu does.”
—Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune/CNN“The unhurried nature of Airshow is just terrific and in contrast to many other events. Anyone who goes will gain their own purposes.”
—Steve Crandall“Airshow is a treat […] showing how to make the audience wonder.”
—Bertram Gugel“Airshow is surpassing my expectations. Very interesting deep content.”
—Ryan Singer, 37signals.
My brief appearance on Bloomberg Surveillance last week:
Apple Success All About Customer Loyalty: Dediu: Video – Bloomberg.
Cinematic is to film as Literary is to prose. It’s not a measure of quality or of beauty. It’s mainly the application of technique to impart an additional layer of meaning to the writing, performance and direction of the medium. Cinematic technique lifts the viewer to another, more profound point beyond the literal.
Whether it’s film, literature, verse, stagecraft or other visual arts, techniques vary but they have the same purpose. They make the audience feel more than what is said.
The quality of a good work of art is that it tells a truth without saying it.
And this, I believe, is what the analyst should also strive for. It is at least what I try to do and, having practiced for a while, I think I can convey some of the techniques I learned.
We don’t have a better word for describing these techniques than “cinematic”. They allow the presenter of complex and rich data to convey meaning with an economy of rhetoric. They draw the audience into completing the picture thus making it their own. They persuade without pleading. They teach without lecturing. They create, in a way, a poetic language for data that combines techniques from several arts, especially cinema.
The means for teaching this is a workshop called Airshow.
Together with IBM, we are proud to bring Airshow to Boston, New York and Helsinki this year.
Register here.
Airshow New York was our best Airshow ever. We sold out to an audience who engaged and challenged us to our best performance. We are learning more each time and after three shows we have honed the show to a fine performance.
Due to the demand met in New York we decided to return there in December 5th but to also present in my home town of Boston on December 3rd. We are also presenting in my second home town of Helsinki in November.
You can sign up for any of these events at Airshow.asymco.com.
The purpose of Airshow is:
The method we devised borrows heavily from the techniques of Cinematography and screenwriting to impart meaning to the audience beyond the literal words spoken or images shown on screen.
This includes:
These techniques are demonstrated with “feature presentations” and then deconstructed in interactive lectures. Throughout we also weave Aristotelian rhetorical tips and present from the Asymco repertoire of stories.
The day ends with a hands-on exercise. iPads are required.
At the end of the seminar you should be able to:
We are looking forward to seeing you at the next Airshow.
The latest comScore data places penetration at about 61%, up over 10 percentage points from the same time last year. The 50% last year is itself up nearly 14 percentage points from the same time in 2011. This progress in the diffusion of smartphones is shown the following graph:
I set the time frame for the graph to start in 2005 because there was still a market at the time. We can estimate the number of users from data supplied by Continue reading “When will the US reach smartphone saturation?”
My thanks to Tania Chen for organizing my appearance on Bloomberg Surveillance in New York on September 26th.
Is Apple Really Dominating the Tablet Wars?: Video – Bloomberg.
Although there isn’t much one can cover in 5 minutes, there were some good questions around tablets. The role of Amazon and Microsoft in particular.
Asymcar 4: Death of a salesman | Asymcar.
Are cars sold or purchased? Horace Dediu and Jim Zellmer discuss automotive “ecosystems” vis-à-vis Apple and Tesla’s direct sales model. We further dive into the rigidity and risk of such value chains and divert a bit into automakers’ attempts at aviation. Finally, we consider the potential monetization of automotive metadata and what that might mean for new, perhaps “over the top” style entrants.
Also history lessons: Ford Trimotor, Ford production system, The Kaiser people’s car.
Tracking the mobile phone market hasn’t been getting any easier. The lack of published data from many incumbents (including the largest) is compounded by the lack of visibility into entrants. It’s not just ZTE and Huawei which are up-and-coming, but companies such as Lenovo, Xiaomi and Yulong make up an increasingly large part of the overall market. (Not to mention BBK, Meizu, OPPO and TCL).
Canalys suggests that China’s top five vendors make up 20% of the world’s smartphone shipments. This is mostly due to the rapid rise of the category in China and the advantages local vendors have in that market. Absent this large segment, a complete picture of the market is simply not possible. Nevertheless a fuzzy picture of the entire market can be still be painted.
