Klout recently announced that it raised a new round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins as the company prepares to make a big splash in 2012, but does your Klout score matter? I look at the future of Klout and the impact it may (or may not) have on the individual.
Want a quick and easy way to sell digital content online? Look no further then Gumroad. Gumroad is a web service that allows its users to sell digital content such as music, blog posts, graphics, website designs, and more with the click of the mouse.
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Well, there is always next year for the iPhone 5, right? Right. Despite the rumor mill churning up some juicy stuff – some believable, some not so much about an iPhone 5, larger screen, and even Sprint exclusivity the iPhone launch has come and gone and what were we left with this year? An iPhone 4S. The release of the iPhone 4S has left some with a bittersweet taste in their mouth, while others are still in disbelief over the release. Many consumers and investors (including myself) were expecting a newly designed shell and a larger screen to be included with the new iPhone, but instead, both were missing from the release. Leading me to the question — were our expectations too high?
Apple has been on a roll recently, soaring stock price, sales through the roof, and awesome brand equity. It is everybody’s favorite consumer products company. If there’s one thing Apple does well it is selling its products. It does this so well because Apple knows how to market to everyone, but it is also because the company is so meticulous in its approach to everything. Everything has to be perfectly crafted and executed. There are no half-baked releases at Apple.
In a post by Google’s Bradley Horowitz, he announced that blink-182′s +Mark Hoppus and +Tom DeLonge are going to be live talking about Google+, their tour, and their new album (Neighborhoods) at 3pm PST (6PM EST) today. They will be streaming it live on the YouTube channel AtGoogleTalks.
If you are not familiar with the Google Talks YouTube channel it brings authors, musicians, innovators, and speakers of all types to Google for talks centering on their recently published books (or in this case albums) and capturing the popular and intellectual zeitgeist of the day. In the past, Google has invited other notable people to talk including Dane Cook, Kevin Mitnick, and Penn Jillette.
According to the Michael Arrington’s new blog, UnCrunched, as well as an article on TechCrunch posted by Erick Schonfeld, MG Siegler has joined CrunchFund as a general partner. The news doesn’t come as too much of a surprise as most people who have been following the recent drama at TechCrunch probably expected something like this to happen. However, that being said, it appears that MG will stay on as a columnist at TechCrunch to cover Apple. Being that MG has gained a lot of notoriety for his Apple coverage, it doesn’t seem like much is really changing in terms of his writing at TC.
It should be interesting to see how MG’s input as a general partner will factor into investment decisions, especially since it seems he’s new to the venture capital world. It could bring an interesting new and fresh perspective to the fund. Nonetheless, congrats to MG and best of luck to CrunchFund.
BGR reports that Sprint may have secured exclusivity of the iPhone 5 leaving AT&T and Verizon with the watered down iPhone 4S. Is this true? I find it hard to believe. According to the article, Sprint would be committed to purchasing 30.5 million iPhone’s over four years for $20 billion regardless of whether how well they sell. That would lead to a nice chunk of short term cash for Apple, but in my opinion would have detrimental long term effects.
Additionally, the article goes on to say the Sprint iPhone 5 will be a 4G WiMAX device. Meanwhile, AT&T and Verizon would launch the iPhone 4S and get the iPhone 5 some time in the first quarter of next year as an LTE device. The rest of the world would be looking at the iPhone 5 as a 4G HSPA+ device.
Tomorrow is October 4th, the day a lot of us have been waiting for. Apple is expected to announce the next generation iPhone. We have take the time to break down and examine a number of the rumors.
iPhone 4S: The possibility that Apple will release a slightly modified iPhone 4S at a lower price to replace the existing 15+ month old iPhone 4 seems plausible. Prices of iPhone 4 components have come down and this would be an excellent opportunity to upgrade the iPhone 4 to make it even more appealing to customers looking for a “cheaper” smartphone. If Apple went ahead and did this it could be a huge blow to the competition.
iPhone 5: The release of an iPhone 5 is hard to say will happen for certain. Apple doesn’t always release new bodies when they announce an iPhone, just look at the 3G and 3GS. While I wouldn’t be surprised if the iPhone 5 was a completely new design with all of the speculated rumors (e.g. larger screen, CDMA/GSM, Assistant, etc), I also wouldn’t be surprised if all of that stuff was just implemented into the iPhone 4S and that was the only thing released.
June 18th of 2008 was a very big day for me and millions of savvy Internet users around the world. Although never being the kind of person to get overly excited for release dates, I took a special exception for this event; getting up early and immediately firing up my computer in sheer anticipation of the release ahead of me. What was I so excited to get my hands on? It wasn’t a video game, it wasn’t a fruit-branded mobile handset, and it wasn’t a new album. I was waiting rather anxiously for the 3.0 release of the Mozilla Firefox web-browser, which many at the time saw as the best browser for hardcore and casual Internet users alike. Having freed myself from the shackles of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only a few months earlier, getting my hands on the latest Firefox release was the only thing on my mind that morning.
Now, since then my love for Firefox has definitely dimmed down quiet a bit, and with the obsessive phase behind me I really don’t get excited for any releases of anything anymore. But when it comes to Firefox, my care about each update is night and day from what what it was only a few years ago. Especially with the new rapid-paced release cycle that has drawn criticism from all sides, no single update of the browser feels as “special” as it once would have.
If you’ve been following RIM recently you probably know that while the company is going strong in the enterprise mobile market their standing in the world of consumer handsets is lacking at best. The company’s image as a boring manufacturer that produces devices built for all work and no play is enough to make it an unattractive choice for consumers. Worse yet, the simple fact that RIM uses their own in-house BlackBerry operating system means that users are limited to a platform that offers very little in terms of third-party applications or features that users take for granted in more modern mobile systems really is the nail in the coffin for the company’s potential with consumers.
Of course Apple uses iOS, it’s own in-house operating system, on its iPhone but the difference here is that RIM’s BlackBerry OS isn’t established with consumers. Much like Apple and Google haven’t been able to get a grasp on the enterprise market, RIM’s potential in the consumer field simply is an uphill battle right now. But when it comes down to it, RIM only has one component that is preventing themselves from hitting it big; its own stubbornness as a company.
What do you get when you combine Amazon’s well-established “Kindle” eBook reader with the power and flexibility of Google’s Android mobile operating system on an elegantly designed seven-inch full-color touch-screen tablet? As this week has shown us, the answer to this question is Amazon’s new “Kindle Fire”; a much awaited tablet computer that offers a competitive (yet not cutting-edge) set of features for an almost irresistible $199 price-point. Sure, users who order this device on November 15th aren’t going to be able to lug their entire media library with them using the relatively small 8GB of storage, and users looking for a camera or 3G connectivity are going to be out of luck, but nonetheless Amazon has really pulled together to create what may very well be a killer product.
While the mobile industry is starting to become somewhat occupied with low-end tablets, what really makes the Kindle Fire an interesting device that stands out from the rest is the fact that Amazon has built an entire infrastructure over the last year or so that helps to make the Fire a very well-connected and attractive device for Internet-centric users. The little things like Amazon’s music store, application store for Android-based devices, video rental services, and of course the legendary eBook service that served as the foundation for the original Kindle line’s success more or less puts Amazon’s new tablet offering up to par with Apple’s concept of having everything built into the device as a native offering.
It seems as if unlimited data on mobile devices is simply becoming a way of the past. With major carriers like AT&T and Verizon having both discontinued the practice over the last year or so, consumers in the U.S. looking to subscribe to an unlimited data plan on a new contract have been forced to either look at geographic-specific carriers or one of the smaller national carriers that have continued to offer unlimited data service to customers willing to pay for it. Off the top of my head, the only moderately large carriers that have held onto this unlimited data practice have been T-Mobile and Sprint, and both companies have engaged in furious advertising campaigns flaunting unlimited data offerings as one of the primary reasons to use its service.
In particular, I’ve been somewhat impressed with Sprint’s unlimited data offering for some time now. So much so, in fact, that with Sprint being a likely candidate for being the next carrier to sell the iPhone I have personally contemplated if the carrier’s continued sale of unlimited data would come back to haunt carriers, namely AT&T and Verizon, that abandoned unlimited data. But now with news coming out that Sprint is possibly going to discontinue its sales of unlimited data plans, it’s being to seem as if the competition in the mobile industry to give users a bigger bang for their buck has simply gone out the window.
As a blogger I rely heavily on numbers and solid facts to be able to form the opinions, viewpoints, and commentary that I share with readers like yourself. Even though my job as a blogger doesn’t typically ask me to prepare numbers and statistics on my own, the fact of the matter is that without the flow of information that is readily available from the Internet I wouldn’t have anything to base my writings on, as the changes in statistics, information, and developments each and every day are what make the news that I report. No better example of this concept is the constantly changing market-share in the dog-eat-dog mobile industry where competitors are constantly one-upping each other and releasing better and more powerful products.
This week a new statistical figure from Nielsen has concluded that in the last three months sales of Android handsets have been double that of Apple’s iPhone. But while this number makes it sound as if Apple has really fallen behind in the mobile market, really following the ups and downs of the mobile industry really does prove that while Android-based handsets are definitely gaining in popularity, Apple is still an incredibly strong player in the industry. And even though Apple’s sales of iPhone handsets are indeed down right now the numbers aren’t as bad as some people may make them out to be.
