Category: Uncategorized

My thanks to Dan Benjamin for taking the time to chat and for preparing this program:

The Pipeline #52: Horace Dediu – 5by5.

Apple’s cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter. Cash increased by $6.1 billion.

The increase in cash is net of approximately $900 million for prepayments and capital expenditures related to the strategic supply agreements that Apple announced last quarter.

The following chart shows the historic cash, short-term and long-term liquid assets Apple holds.

As in previous quarters, the securities Apple holds are: Continue reading “If Cash is King, Apple's is an Emperor [Updated]”

We removed the malicious applications from Android Market, suspended the associated developer accounts, and contacted law enforcement about the attack.

via An Update on Android Market Security – Official Google Mobile Blog.

It’s great to see that Google is quick to call law enforcement to prosecute those who took advantage of its open(!) market. Now I wonder what Google will do about policing copyright infringement on the same market .

In September I wrote a note about how some of the top applications in the Market seemed to be infringing on copyrights (and attempting to hide the fact). Today I went back and searched for “Disney”. I was offered about 350 apps and I am pretty sure that none one of them is endorsed by Disney.[1]

Continue reading “Disney (still) loves Android”

Ever since I started publishing this blog there have been requests for access to the underlying data sets. That’s not an easy thing to do. Spreadsheets are not “productized”. It’s very hard to explain how to use one and even harder for charts. Having been an user of commercial spreadsheet models, I know that it’s a massive undertaking to produce and support them. Many large companies can afford this but few individuals would be willing to pay $15,000 for an analyst’s data.

In many cases even at large companies professional information services staff are employed to master the data sets and answer questions for the general user. The complexity and cost of comprehensive market research is a huge burden for innovation in analysis.

As an independent analyst, I’ve struggled with the question of how to provide this access to a large audience on any device.

Fortunately, modern browsers have the capability to allow interaction with rich charts. Inspired companies are taking advantage of this and implementing data viewers which extend the way users can visualize complex data. Timetric is one such company.

Over the past few months we’ve worked together to find a way to deliver Asymco charts and data as an interactive and downloadable product.

Our first result is this report: Mobile Phone Market Overview: Q4 2010

The video below highlights the main features of the Asymco Interactive report:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maNxiXmKVTA

While a low-end 3G Android smartphone could be sold currently at U$80 (wholesale price) and the adoption of ARM’s Cortex A5 should allow smartphone costs to fall to around US$50, they’ll still have some way to fall to catch up with the cost of 3G feature phones that are already reaching price points of below $30.

via » #MWC11 Day 3 – Same old song. (Informa)

The ubiquity of smartphones is inevitable.

Here’s what a platform jump looks like:

The devil is in the details. Although there was great excitement among investors at the prospect of platform agnosticism, the reality of the press releases shows that Nokia may have some significant short term pain.

Continue reading “Visualizing jumping off a burning platform”

I’m registered as a member of the Press and will be attending the MWC 2011 in Barcelona February 14 through 15th. Please email me if you would like to schedule a meeting.

When looking at unique visitors as a proportion of population, this site is more popular in Finland and Canada than in the United States.

Very impressed with Singapore and New Zealand who punch above their weight. UK is second in overall volume. Honorable mention to Australia, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.

It’s interesting to compare this list with Newsweek’s ranking of the world’s best countries.

1. Finland
2. Switzerland
3. Sweden
4. Australia
5. Luxembourg
6. Norway
7. Canada
8. Netherlands
9. Japan
10. Denmark
11. United States
12. Germany
13. New Zealand
14. United Kingtom

The correlation is uncanny.

Charles Arthur provides a convincing back-story to the Google exec re-shuffle.

Google shuffle: why Eric Schmidt had to be pushed from the top | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

There is evidence of execution failure and indecision or muddled messages to stakeholders. Shared leadership arrangements never end well.

But in this forum I’ve been critical of their strategy. Though I’ll be the first to admit that such criticism is not founded on data but on intuition, strategy is always made in a vacuum of data. It is just an unfortunate fact of life that we don’t have data about the future.

But what data we do have is about the past and it shows the contrast between Apple and Google.

As a sample, let’s look at the performance in the last quarter: Continue reading “Why Eric Schmidt had to go: Google's innovation dilemma”

There are many thoughts which are not substantial enough to be posted as blog entries. There are also questions that need to be asked or answered which are not yet ‘baked’ enough to be cast into a permanently linked posting.

For these reasons and for the simple fact that it’s fun, I am using Twitter more frequently. Since I know not everyone has or wants an account, my twitter feed is now shown in the second (right-most) sidebar. It’s limited to the last eight tweets.

For those who would like to keep the discussion going in this new medium, my Twitter app (from the Mac apps store) is always running.