Apple is going to launch the iPad 3, or whatever they call it, the first week of March at a special event in San Francisco according to AllThingsD, a prophecy the punters regarded as being as good as a statement from the company. As a result Apple Thursday hit an all-time high, teasing the magic $500 number, with a closing price of $493.17, up from $315 last June, after seeing $496.75 during the day. The blog figures street availability a week or so later. The dingus, the same size as the iPad 2, will reportedly be built on a way faster chip with improved graphics and a 2048×1536 Retina Display – “or something close to it,” the blog said.
Mobile Business Applications should help users get their jobs done, intuitively, effectively and efficiently. This can be achieved with a Beautiful Mobile Application, which in turn means a great experience and that’s no different from consumer to business Applications. Now that the Prosumer (Professional with Consumer expectations and knowledge) is part of every workforce, it is most important to satisfy your Mobile Information Workers with adequate, correct, and consistent information, in new innovative ways
Mobile phone inventor and proposed Google acquisition Motorola Mobility apparently wants Apple to pay a royalty of 2.25% of sales to cover a FRAND license to its fundamental standards-essential patents according to an October 17 letter between the companies’ outside German lawyers unearthed over the weekend by patent sleuth Florian Mueller. That price, depending on MMI’s other terms, like how far back it’s talking and exactly what devices it means, could easily translate into a billion-dollar payment and give other essential patents owners similar delusions of grandeur imperiling Apple’s cost structure.
Since the early days of the PC, the software industry has operated according to a pattern described in Michael Cusumano’s classic The Business of Software: The successful software companies are the ones which gathered the largest number of users. The best practitioners were Microsoft and, later, Google. Both followed similar strategies: lower costs, add distribution partners, add users, and branch into related products.
USA TODAY–A Social Media Primer For Neophytes-How To Populate Your iPad or Tablet Town Hall.There has been an explosion in social media networks over the past ten years. The younger set gets it, and aggressively uses them.Via finance.townhall.com
In my last article I looked at the motivation behind and part of the iOS Developer's DNA. I mentioned that many great apps had started with a great 'iDea' that was either inspirational, formed by personal needs or to better apps that did not quite do it as well as they could have. It is very easy for the developer to get to thinking of how to use the technology first, but this is not a great approach and can limit the opportunities for applications. My friend Anne Skare Nielsen, at Future Navigator in Denmark (http://www.futurenavigator.dk/) identified the formula to be an innovator...
I have been lucky enough to travel over the last few years and either attend or work at events that centre around the iPhone and iPad, one of which being Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, but also regional iOS Developer User Group events. During this time I have met many great iOS developers each with their own stories of how their apps started with an 'iDea' (sorry for the 'i' pun, could not resist it) and more... Why they got into developing for Apple iOS, along with their motivation and each with pretty good levels of success in Apple's App Store.
This title may be an obvious statement to us all, but a lot of applications and therefore application developers on the Apple App Store seems to have lost sight of that fact. I believe that over 90% of these applications have the potential to be awesome on the best tablet device around, but are sadly falling short of the mark. I have been using the iPad since it was launched in the UK and there is nothing more frustrating to me than iPhone applications on the iPad. Let's face it, the iPad is the first computer designed purely for hand-held mode. It's not a tablet with a touchscreen. It's not a Windows PC that happens to be mobile...It's a custom designed purpose built device designed to view the web and operate applications purely by using the screen...Oh and what a device!
The temporary injunction that Apple got forbidding Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 to be sold in Germany survived a Düsseldorf appeals court, which found Tuesday that “Samsung unfairly imitates the iPad with its tablet.” The court said the ban includes the smaller Galaxy Tab 8.9. However, the grounds have changed. Originally Apple charged the Galaxy Tab with infringing its European Community Design IP, a claim the lower court bought. The appeals court said Samsung violated the German unfair competition law so the ban sticks but Samsung’s still selling the slightly modified Galaxy Tab 10.1N, and that widget, which Apple also wants banned, may survive a court decision due February 9 because – according to the appeals court decision – Samsung has effectively shot down Apple’s Community Design IP. FOSS Patents says, “If Samsung is allowed to continue to sell the 10.1N, the commercial relevance of today’s appellate decision is next to nil.” See, “Apple can’t replicate the German decision in other countries since German unfair competition law is pretty unique. A win based on an EU-wide design right would have been strategically more valuable to Apple. Even though Samsung formally lost its appeal because the preliminary injunction remains in force, it succeeded in defeating Apple’s design right.” Apple is going to have to come up with unassailable patent IP. A Dutch court last week found Samsung didn’t infringe Apple’s Community Design after the court narrowed Apple’s claims. Apple’s technical patent claims and infringement charges should hit a German court in the next few months.
The world is becoming a mobile place and even if you are not a mobile worker in your daily job, you will want to interact while on the move, in your personal life. That is why the Smartphone, iPad or Converged Mobile Device as I like to call it, is a great success... It gives you access to everything you want in the palm or your hand. Some may say that tablet devices will become our day-to-day third device along with the laptop and the mobile and I would partially agree with that statement providing one thing...The Laptop is the new Desktop and the Tablet is the new King of Mobile Computing. I use my iPad whenever I travel as a replacement to my MacBook Pro, for presentations, document creation, spreadsheets, email, etc. It is such a delight now to travel light with such a powerful and mobile device. Take it from someone that has 10 years of business travel under his belt, mostly with heavyweight Windows Laptops. So what I decided to do in this article was to list the reasons why I think the tablet devices are becoming hot stuff and making laptops less attractive to leave the confines of the home and office. In fact this article along with others was created totally 'on the go' with my mobile workhorse iPad.
Samsung’s cavalier assertion of 13 3G standards-essential patents it happens to own in its worldwide patent war with Apple has provoked the European Commission to open and prioritize a formal antitrust investigation of the Korean company for alleged FRAND abuse of ETSI-pledged patents. The regulator thinks Samsung may be distorting competition in the mobile space although so far it hasn’t got any European court to buy into its contentions and give them teeth. The EC can fine Samsung 10% of revenues. Samsung could also withdraw the suits. The EC said Tuesday it will investigate whether Samsung’s claiming Apple infringed the standards-essential patent means it’s “failed to honor its irrevocable commitment given in 1998 to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to license any standard-essential patents relating to European mobile telephony standards on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.” It will also examine whether Samsung’s behavior amounts to abuse of a dominant position. One might assume that Apple complained but the EC claims the probe is its own idea. FOSS Patents thinks the Samsung investigation may put Motorola Mobility at risk since it won an injunction against Apple based on essential-protected IP but hasn’t enforced it.
Apple has taken the International Trade Commission’s month-old decision finding HTC’s Android gismos infringe only one of the patents it asserted and letting it ship the products while it fixes the problem to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The patent-watching Foss Patents blog says Apple quietly lodged the appeal on December 29. The blog learned from an Apple filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in a case against Motorola Mobility that the ITC’s administrative law judge had sided with Apple and found HTC guilty of infringing Apple’s US 6,343,263 real-time API patent but that that decision had been overturned by the ITC’s panel of six commissioners.
Yesterday’s announcement of Apple’s fourth quarter result for 2011 was astounding to say the least. Growth from a year-ago quarter was 118%. Sales for the quarter at $46.3 Billion yielded profit of $13.1B. Wow – that profit is more than 3 times what General Electric earned in its most recent quarter. These figures blew analysts’ projections. Apple’s cash hoard is $97.6B, more than the market capitalizations of all but 52 publicly traded companies.
Nearly every web application that interacts with a user is faced with the dilemma of how to best support tablets and mobile devices. As entrepreneurs we can no longer put off supporting these platforms as a nice to have. The demand that is created by iPad users and the influx of Android tablets in the marketplace is significant especially for early stage companies. Zoomstra is no different and we are currently facing our biggest technology decision yet. What is our best option for supporting tablets?
Motorola Mobility and its puppet master Google are going to try to get the iPhone 4S and iCloud enjoined in the United States. The pair moved on the very day that Apple hit the ball so far out of the park they’re still looking for it after it announced it sold a record 37 million iPhones last quarter, described iCloud as the “strategy for the next decade, not a product,” and was lauded as the most valuable property on earth.
A Dutch appeals court Tuesday rejected an injunction-seeking Apple bid to overturn a lower court’s decision last August that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn’t a copy of the Apple iPad and doesn’t infringe Apple’s design rights. Apple was also denied a preliminary injunction in the United States on a design-related patent equivalent to its European Community Design IP and is appealing the decision. FOSS Patents says the Dutch appeals court, like the US district court, narrowed the scope of the Apple IP based on prior art and so came to its conclusion. Apple got a preliminary injunction in Germany using the design IP last summer, a decision a German appeals court could lift for the same reason next week. Last Tuesday Apple filed two more design-related suits against Samsung phones and tablets in Germany but didn’t ask for injunctions.
Apple crushed all expectations for its December quarter when it reported its results Tuesday. It earned $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share, on revenues of $46.3 billion. That’s up from up from a mere $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, on $26.74 billion last year. The best Wall Street thought it would do was $10.10 on $38.9 billion. Not only that but it guided higher than Wall Street estimates. The usually hyper-conservative Apple said it figures it’ll do about $32.5 billion this quarter and realize earnings per share of about $8.50. Expectations were for $32.1 billion, returning $8.04. Its stock tore through a record $450 after-hours, up ~8%. During the December quarter Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, up 128% year-over-year, 15.43 million iPads, up 111%, 5.2 million Macs, up 26% while PCs linger in the doldrums, and even 15.4 million iPods, down 21%. Wall Street figured it would sell 30.2 million iPhones, 13.8 million iPads, 13.6 million iPods and 5.16 million Macs. Needless to say Apple is “thrilled.” Its gross margin was 44.7% compared to 38.5% a year ago, international sales accounted for 58% of revenue, Apple retail stores posted sales of $17.1 million, up 37%, and there are now 315 million iOS devices floating around out there. The revenue Apple saw from that little sleeper, the iPhone 4S, originally written off as not different enough from the iPhone 4, more than double to $24.4 billion. At the end of the quarter there were less than six million iPhones left in channel inventory, Apple said during its conference call. Seems the phone’s better camera, faster microprocessor and Siri virtual assistant that answers voice commands worked. The widget, which is now compatible with the networks of most of the Fortune 500, didn’t start shipping in China, where demands is “staggering,” according to CEO Tim Cook, until this month. Globally the thing’s got 130,000 points of sale. Besides the $199 4S Apple also cut the older iPhone 4 to $99 and made the iPhone 3GS free with contracts through wireless carriers. Whatever Apple’s doing Android’s lead has narrowed. Revenue from the iPad doubled to $9.1 billion, leaving four-six weeks worth of inventory unsold. Cook said most of the Fortune 500 are “actively using” the thing. After looking at the data Cook figures Apple was unaffected by Amazon’s introduction of the cheap $199 Kindle Fire. Apple’s got 170,000 apps; at the most, he said, the competition’s got a few hundred and what it takes to stave off any competition. He’s tickled that Apple has sold 55 million iPads in 21 months. But Cook claims the tablet will eventually be bigger than the PC and that there are already indications in US that will happen. The usually slow-to-react K-12 education sector bought two times more iPads than Macs last quarter. Cook said the component environment, other than hard drives, is favorable. The HDD shortages in the December quarter didn’t materially affect Apple and won’t this quarter either although it expects to pay higher prices. Cook said iCloud, which he described as a “strategy for the next decade, not a product,” has 85 million accounts. Naturally Wall Street was hot to know what Apple is going to do about the $100 billion cash pile it’s run up. Cook would only say that the company is in “active discussions” about what to do with it and aside from declaring a dividend –unfashionable with so-called growth stocks – or doing a stock buy-back, it was thinking about acquisitions and investments in the supply chain. He would not give a date for a decision. He said the money’s “not burning a hole in our pocket.” It is with stockholders. Despite Apple’s optimism about this quarter the numbers still suggest a steeper sequential decline than usual. Among other things this quarter is only 13 weeks. The blow-out quarter was 14 weeks. As usual Apple claims it’s got “some amazing new products in the pipeline.”
The US International Trade Commission decided on Friday the 13th that Motorola Mobility’s Android-bearing smartphones don’t infringe the three Apple patents Apple claims they infringe. The decision by one of the agency’s administrative law judges is called preliminary because Apple is likely to insist that it be reviewed by ITC’s panel of six commissioners by May 14. FOSS Patents blogger Florian Mueller says one of the patents is “essential to Apple’s litigation strategy” and that’s US Patent No 7,663,607, the broadest touchscreen hardware patent Apple has. It used it to get Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 briefly outlawed in Australia. Mueller says the MMI decision might “adversely affect Apple’s lawsuits against Samsung in which the multipoint touchscreen patent is being asserted.” An initial decision on MMI’s ITC complaint charging Apple with infringing 18 of its patents is due April 23.
Apple has filed two new lawsuits in Germany citing 10 Samsung smartphones and five Samsung tablets with infringing its design IP, the kind of peculiarly European intellectual property it used to get the Galaxy Tab 10.1 outlawed in Germany last year. Apparently the Düsseldorf Regional Court will hear the phone case in August and tablet case in September. The FOSS Patents blog figures Apple’s design rights assertions may make it impossible for the two companies to structure a mutually acceptable settlement and that they “may just need the courts to clarify the boundaries of Apple’s exclusive design-related rights.”
I am already an avid believer of Mobility and Tablet computing in the Enterprise, so this week I decided to think about what could be achieved within Education. For the rest of my thoughts I will use my Converged Mobile Device of choice … the iPad. There is already a student web page on the Apple website saying why the iPad is ready for college/university. It obviously states its great features, the generally available apps and novel books but I think the next step will be beyond that and will leave us asking ourselves 'Why didn't we think of that already?'
Samsung’s bid to get a preliminary injunction outlawing the sale of Apple’s iPhone 4S in Italy has failed, according to ANSA, the Italian wire service. The decision is Samsung’s third failure in Europe. Last month a similar attempt was shot down by a French court and before that Holland said no. Apple, on the other hand, is appealing the rejection of its bid to get four Samsung widgets outlawed in the United States to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and the temporary injunctions it managed to get against Samsung in Germany, the Netherlands and Australia are being reviewed. If the courts find they shouldn’t have been granted Apple could wind up owing its nemesis money.
Today I noticed two very separate articles, though to me they are both interrelated and on a subject that I feel very strongly about, Tablet Devices and Mobile App Development. It is no secret that I am a total iOS convert in my personal life, living with my iPhone and iPad, but as a businessman and technologist I am just as much of a convert to Enterprise Mobility and Development, so much so that I have predicted that 2012 will be the year of the Mobile Developer, Enterprise Business App and Tablet Device… more than 2011.
Just because someone uses and iPhone to upload a 48-second video of a drunken city councilman or some idiot going the wrong way down a one-way street does not make him/her a citizen journalist.
An iPhone or a Smartphone can be a wonderful thing. You can do…well, darn near anything with it…including record for posterity any event within eye-range or should I say, I-range. Unless you want to become famous (or infamous), don’t lose your temper at the check-out stand or yell at your kid in the WalMart parking.
The Düsseldorf court that blocked Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Germany in September said Thursday that the changes Samsung has made in the modified Germany-only Galaxy Tab 10.1N are enough to distinguish it from the iPad and that Apple is unlikely to win a ruling against it on February 9. Apple had complained to the court that the re-worked “N” was still a dead ringer for its widget and wanted it blocked too. Apple objections are based on its European design IP. The “N” tablet has a thicker bezel design and the speakers are now on the front. Samsung’s label is also reportedly bigger.