Category Archives: Apple

iPhone economics, startup economics, angel investing economics

Tomi Ahonen has collected a lot of good data about the iPhone app ecosystem and applies solid analysis to reach the conclusion that, from an economic standpoint, on average, it is a waste of developers’ time to build iPhone apps. … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Mobile, startups | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Platforms, Feds, Ads

In trying to write a focused post on the threat of government regulation Apple is facing, I didn’t mention an area I’m personally very interested in from the standpoint of Better Advertising: Apple’s restrictions regarding data collection. Section 3.3.9 of … Continue reading

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Apple vs. Adobe Flash

VentureBeat published an analysis I did of Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Flash. As one would expect, the comments have been lively. Since I used to work at Macromedia, the creator of Flash, now part of Adobe, I wanted to share … Continue reading

Posted in Adobe, Apple | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Dogfooding vs. maintaining perspective

I’m all for dogfooding but not at the expense of deep competitive research. Sometimes you just have to live with your competitors’ products in order to understand them the way their customers do. I guess now that Bill Gates is … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, Microsoft | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Walt Mossberg and Verizon’s Move to Open Its Network

I’m listening to Walt Mossberg speak at the Dow Jones Consumer Innovations conference. He began by pointing out that Verizon didn’t give him any credit when they announced the opening of the Verizon network. This is a huge deal, by … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, Google, Mobile | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Steve Jobs: Apple iPhone Opens Up

Here is another great example of a company trying to walk the fine line between an open and a closed value chain ecosystem. From a Steve Jobs letter: Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Mobile | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

iPhone Also Suitable For Babies

I bought an iPhone yesterday. No waiting in lines. In fact, it was a 5min shopping experience, not accounting for having to call every single store in the Boston area ahead of time to find the only one with 8Gb … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Mobile, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Killer Consumer Applications for RFID

Mention RFID a couple of years ago and most would think about pallets of goods moving through warehouses. When the cost of RFID tags was high, it made little sense to do item-level tagging so goods were tagged at the … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, startups | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments