Recently, I posted about the amazing, Ultimate Customer Experience that I had received, thanks to ONE Apple employee named Josh. Here’s a video about the story — and Apple CEO Tim Cook’s follow up!
When iPad was launched did you imagine that it would be more successful compared to iPhone? I did not. I could not think of that killer application which is required for a new and innovative device to succeed. (Will iPad Succeed?) Neither did organizations like Forrester. After being way off the mark Sarah Rotman said… …consumer product strategists, even those not in direct competition with Apple, should pay attention to the iPad, because it’s defying common assumptions about consumer technology adoption…
The ITC’s six-member board of commissioners said last Monday that it’s going to review allegations that Apple’s iPhones and iPads tread on four Motorola Mobility patents. In April one of the agency’s administrative law judges found Apple infringes one of the patents, which happens to be a 3G FRAND-pledged patent that eliminates signal noise, a little number Motorola is asking a price Apple refuses to pay to license. An import ban could be riding on what the commissioners decide. A ruling is due in August and the commissioners appear to be looking to nix bans based on FRAND patents.
Apple has agreed to pay $60 million to make the Proview Technology (Shenzhen) Company’s claims that it owns the iPad trademark in China go away. Apple bought Proview’s iPad trademarks in 10 countries through a UK lawyer and a specially organized company for about $55,000 (£35,000) in 2009 before the iPad came out and sued when Proview claimed the Taiwan affiliate it dealt with wasn’t authorized to sell the Chinese rights. Apple lost the suit and appealed. The appeals court, which announced the settlement on its web site, reportedly mediated the deal, which, it said, was struck on June 25. The dickering took since the end of February. Proview, which is bankrupt and $400 million in debt to the Chinese banks, was supposedly angling for about $1.6 billion. The settlement money will go directly to its impatient creditors via a court-designated account and Apple will presumably release the new iPad it’s been holding back in China, its second largest market.
US District Court Judge Lucy Koh has forbidden Samsung to sell any more of its Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets in America once retail inventories are cleared. Judge Koh ordered the ban late Tuesday at the point of a decision issued by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, where Apple went after she rejected its injunction request in December. Unwilling to second guess the appeals court, she rejected a second injunction request from Apple on June 4. The Court of Appeals found that when all is said and done Apple will probably win its pending infringement suit against Samsung based on a single design patent. The trial is set to start July 30.
Red Hat is planning to commercialize its 13-month-old OpenShift PaaS later this year when it splits the widgetry into two initial tiers: FreeShift and MegaShift. Until then it’ll be available as a developer preview. FreeShift will offer three small gears, the ability to auto-scale and access to the languages, frameworks and data stores developers like to use. It will leverage community-provided support. Developers using the OpenShift PaaS now will be able to automatically migrate to FreeShift. MegaShift, the initial paid tier, will offer up to 16 gears, and the ability to add storage past the 1GB-per-gear limit in FreeShift. MegaShift users will get support from Red Hat. The platform fee is supposed to be $42 a month with a per-gear-an-hour fee for gears past the first three. However, Red Hat says the pricing is provisional and subject to change.
Why Apple will kill it in the TV market. If we consider the recent news of TV manufacturers like Sharp , Samsung and Sony they are all having trouble making money in this space. Samsung , arguably the largest panel maker has divested it's TV arm as a $7 billion business. Sony has lost money for 8 straight years and LG can only manage 3% or so in it's latest year. So why would Apple launch a product into todays market. The TV consumer is now trained to wait 6 months for prices to fall on the latest products, and the market is saturated for displays. Moreover consumers see little reason to update to 3D tv's early.
Surface has reportedly made Microsoft OEMs edgy about competing with their usual ally, especially since Microsoft designs are more like Ultrabooks than rival tablets are. Acer founder Stan Shih thinks Microsoft is using its branded tablets to prod its followers into making their own Windows 8 tablets. And once they do, it will withdraw its own, according to what he reportedly told DigiTimes. Sort of like Google and the Nexus but perhaps also like Google and Motorola Mobility. Selling its own hardware would be less profitable to Microsoft than licensing its software, Shih said, and anyway it will have difficulties with marketing, production management, distribution and after-sales maintenance services.
Roger Sippl, who co-founded Informix a generation ago, then Vantive and Visigenic, all acquired after going public, is staging a comeback with new database widgetry that does real-time data integration from multiple sources in the cloud. He’s been working on it for four years recruiting along the way 20 guys from the old days who are already rich thanks to Roger but still want to be “useful.” Elastic Intelligence, the company he started a few years ago, is going to productize this newfangled virtual relational database technology as Connection Cloud, a real-time data connection service infrastructure and all.
Apple has been fined $2.25 million in Australian money or $2.28 million in American greenbacks by an Australian court for running advertising about its new iPad that implied the widget with Wi-Fi and 4G was compatible with Telstra’s local 4G LTE mobile data network when it’s not. They work on different frequencies. It also going to have to pay A$300,000 in court costs. Apple has already offered refunds and agreed to post warnings. Apple’s mistake the court said was “global uniformity.” The online and in-store promotional boilerplate came from Apple’s head office. The court did fret a bit over the size of fine compared to Apple’s revenues but consoled itself with the thought that Apple’s reputation was tarnished.
After lodging upwards of 50 infringement suits around the world against Apple, Samsung finally won one in Holland. The District Court of The Hague found that Apple trespassed on a FRAND-promised 3G patent of Samsung’s and ordered Apple to pay unspecified damages limited to the Dutch market and unlikely to be near the 2.4% rate Samsung wants. During the process three other Samsung 3G/UMTS-essential patents were thrown out. The Koreans wanted to get iPads and iPhones enjoined – probably to get Apple to cut a worldwide settlement – but that gambit failed.
In a previous article I mentioned the Companion App. Basically a Companion App is one that extends the reach of an existing brand, even a brand that could be a TV/Film or a non-mobile system. I have stated my opinion before that if you are a brand, then you have got to have a app store presence with a mobile app. This is mostly due to consumer expectations or even internal pressure to keep ahead of your immediate competition. That presence in turn reflects on your company and the perceived way you do business with the mobile majority whether they be internal worker (Information Worker), external consumers or partners.
I was recently asked how to calculate the ROI after implementing a Mobile App and immediately thought of the less tangible part Prosumer Satisfaction. I have mentioned in a previous article that to aid creation of Mobile Apps that the Enterprise needs, companies should be putting in place a regularly meeting group of specialized individuals... the MIC (Mobility Innovation Council). As a recap think of the MIC is an incubator/ideas lab powered by the CMoO (Chief Mobility Officer) along with the architects, developers and most importantly key stakeholders from the business users, aka Prosumers!
Oracle Monday put out its fiscal Q4 numbers three days early amid talk of a major management reorg and reports that long-time North American sales chief Keith Block was out. Seems he badmouthed Oracle’s “Exa” hardware business as “a dog” and “dead dead dead” and said Oracle co-president Mark Hurd not Larry Ellison should be CEO in instant messages exchanged last year with Oracle’s HR chief Anie Dodson. The IMs got out in a discovery dump last month by HP in connection with the ongoing HP v Oracle trial over Oracle’s refusal to continue to write software for Itanium. A hurried Oracle CFO Safra Catz said Oracle put the numbers out early so it could “speak more freely.” Guess she meant that otherwise it would be in a quiet period until Thursday evening. Presumably Oracle didn’t want to take more of a hit than the 2% it was off Monday on the gossip and give HP the satisfaction. Hurd said in a conference call that there’s no management reorg – well, at least there are no changes anywhere to speak of and no serious attrition – but Block is evidently toast. CNBC said so, which is more than you could divine from the call. His bio is still on the Oracle web site last we looked. To quiet things down the company said it will buy back up to $10 billion worth of its stock. Oracle’s performance in the May quarter was better-than-expected which pushed the stock up nearly 3% after-hours, making up for its Monday losses. Fiscal Q4 revenues were up 1% to $10.9 billion returning guidance-besting earnings per share of 82 cents (non-GAAP), up 10% to $4.1 billion. The company said earnings would have been a few cents higher if the dollar hadn’t gotten stronger. Ditto revenues. It was expected to return 78 cents on $10.89 billion. New software license revenues were up 7% to $4 billion. Software license updates and support revenues were up 5% to $4.2 billion. Despite reports of a $100 million contract Catz said the results weren’t dependent on any large deal. Hardware revenues were down 16% to $977 million, as widely expected. In a canned statement Hurd said, “Engineered systems business is now operating at well over a billion dollar revenue run rate. For the year, the Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, Sparc SuperCluster and the Oracle Big Data Appliance product group grew over 100% year-over-year.” Block apparently felt Hurd should be paying more attention to Oracle’s overseas business. However, all products and all geographies including a euro-tossed EMEA were up double-digits and Catz described systems growth rates as “amazing.” The Oracle crew expects its high-end “Exa” machines to pass IBM’s Power-based systems in revenue in FY 13. CEO Larry Ellison waded in with the statement that “The development of Oracle Cloud is strategic to increasing the size and profitability of Oracle’s software business. Our Oracle Cloud SaaS business is nearly at a billion-dollar revenue run rate, the same size as our engineered systems hardware business. The combination of engineered systems and the Oracle Cloud will drive Oracle’s growth in FY 2013.” Non-GAAP operating income was up 5% in the May quarter to $5.5 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 50%. Catz said new software licenses this quarter should grow 5%-15% in constant currency and total revenue should be up 3%-6% with EPS at 54 cents-58 cents.
When did you last hear Apple being sued for issuing ads that were “fundamentally and designedly false and misleading”? That is what happened to SIRI which is the first major innovation coming from “post-Steve Jobs” Apple. Suit filed by Frank Fazio alleges that Apple is in violation of the Consumers Legal Remedies Act, California’s Unfair Competition Law, is in breach of warranty, and has committed both intentional and negligent misrepresentation. (Apple has filed its motion to dismiss the consolidated class action complaints.)
Building innovative Enterprise Mobile Apps starts with a great idea from your MIC (Mobility Innovation Council), which in turn is made up of key a Business Users and Stakeholders - think of the MIC as an ideas factory. These seeds of an idea should then be formed into an ADS (Application Definition Statement) of a mobile application that will ensure the secure delivery of Enterprise Content to the Information Worker Where and When they need it! The key point is that the mobile app you need to build should ensure that the mobile user has access to the important information they need regardless of the location, even if that location has NO access to cellular or wireless networks!
Check out this really nice blog/tutorial on how to use Tiggzi to build a mobile app connected to cloud-based MongoDB, written by Ben Wen from MongoLab.
In a traditional modern enterprise, information can be a key factor in delaying business process control, as people who own information can own control over the process. Mobility is challenging this traditional process control hierarchy by making it easier for decision makers (this means decision makers at all levels of an organization) to have direct, un-delayed access to information. This means control will move away from executive levels and closer to the people who are hands-on with customers, processes and products... The Information Workers. Already more mobilized employees (and even customers) spend less time going through a hierarchical structure to “get” information, they need it immediately. Mobile information consumers find their own paths to the information they need. But will corporate authority structures allow this to happen? In a word, YES!.. Ricoh UK earlier this year completed a study which shows that nearly two thirds of business leaders in their market expect just such an evolution in decision making.
When finance managers think of data consumption, it is often in the context of controlling mobile phone bills and business mobility costs. Yet application developers are busily creating new mobile applications that provide mobile information workers with greater access to corporate data, in more innovative ways than before. Many of these applications also collect standard data, as well as new forms of data and feed it back to corporate information systems. Recently I happened upon this remarkable statistic.
In our company it became a tradition to run an annual symposium on software development in New York City. This is a technical event with zero marketing, where our engineers are given an opportunity to share their experience gained while develping real-world applications.
Apple has gone back to the International Trade Commission with a fresh complaint that claims the HTC workaround that let its Android widgets clear US customs is a bunch of baloney and that HTC is still infringing Apple’s data tapping patent. The ITC enjoined some HTC imports into the US effective April 16 and customs seized a couple of shipments until it was persuaded HTC had changed the code in two new phones.
HP Wednesday named Bill Veghte chief operating officer, a newly created position that relieves the former Windows executive of running the company’s poorly functioning software operation two years and three CEOs after he got the job. Veghte is keeping the corporate strategy charter he was given a few months ago as well as responsibility for Autonomy, HP’s great problematic British acquisition that he was given last week when Autonomy founder Mike Lynch was fired. HP doesn’t have much of a strategy, at least nothing that doesn’t resemble what everybody else is doing and that – as of last week – is to focus on Big Data, cloud and security – all of which depend on software.
Right before the long weekend Dell was supposed to be negotiating to buy Quest Software. Quest is looking for an offer better than the $2 billion Insight Venture Partners, the private equity house, bid in early March and Quest accepted barring a superior offer. Bloomberg says it knows from unnamed sources that Dell is among “several companies that made offers” during Quest’s so-called “go shop” period. And Quest has all but said it expected to get the superior offer it’s looking for. Whether that offer will come from Dell or from any of a handful of companies that could theoretically include HP, IBM, BMC, CA, Microsoft (Quest’s wares have a Microsoft bias) or Oracle is anybody’s guess. Insight offered $23 a share; JPMorgan Chase says it’s worth $28.
Whew! That loud sigh of relief you hear reverberating from Silicon Valley is a reaction to the June 1st Oracle-Google ruling, which declared that APIs are not protected by copyright. While this case could be far from over – Oracle may appeal and force another $50 million round of litigation – a knowledgeable judge and a well-argued 41-page decision will likely make for a strong precedent.
Oracle is walking away with next to nothing after spending two years and what is believed to be tens of million of dollars prosecuting Google and its Android operating system for patent and copyright infringement. US District Court Judge William Alsup, who has been responsible for the case since the beginning, including a six-week jury trial that ended last week, finally decided Thursday that the way Google used the structure, sequence and organization (SSO) of the 37 Java APIs Oracle asserted didn’t infringe copyright law.