Xyologic, a startup that searches and indexes through App Store data, recently published some interesting data regarding the App space.
According to Xyologic projections, by August 2012 there will be an equal number of apps available for the Android as there are for the iPhone, at roughly 680,000 apps available for both platforms.
Also, according to Xyologic, the total app downloads for Android will surpass the iPhone sometime in May 2013, at roughly 84 billion.
All of this makes a lot of sense with Apple’s 3 devices competing against Androids many manufacturers and many devices.
I wonder if Apple’s free iPhone 3GS will make any impact on these numbers.
I was all excited last night when I downloaded iOS 5.0 for my iPhone 4. I was really wired to use the new Siri technology, but to my dismay apparently Siri is not available for the iPhone 4, only the 4S.
I guess it makes sense for Apple to leave out this feature for “legacy” phones. Here’s a thread from the Apple support community on the topic. It makes me want to upgrade when before last night I was perfectly happy with my iPhone 4.
If your phone is jailbroken, there’s good news on the way. The popular iPhone hacker known as iH8sn0w and John Heaton (@Gojohnnyboi) have started to work on porting the Siri feature on iPhone 4.
Some are also saying that Siri won’t work on the iPhone 4 because it really needs the dual-core A5 chip.
Apple finally realized that the masses of newbie iOS programmers out there, most coming from the Java world, really don’t get it.
iOS memory management is just too difficult for most of these developers that have never coded in C, C++ or Objective-C, beyond maybe a college introductory course.
According to Apple:
Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for Objective-C makes memory management the job of the compiler. By enabling ARC with the new Apple compiler, you will never need to type retain or release again, dramatically simplifying the development process, while reducing crashes and memory leaks.
They chose not to call it a garbage collector for good reason. It’s not a garbage collector. It’s a compile time, not a run-time, driven memory management model. Meaning the memory management is built into the binary code.
Apple was really forced to implement this feature. Apple must compete with Java on Android and this is a critical feature.
This is crazy. The latest news is that the CEO resigned over the weekend and the CIO takes over as interim CEO.
The straw that broke the camels back? The $2.3 billion loss last week by rogue trader.
I don’t have all the inner details of what went on here, but there is one common theme I’ve seen over the years of working with IT for financial firms. The real issue is that many of the internal IT systems within these big banks don’t speak to each other.
In this case, I would assume that the UBS risk systems that were in place did not integrate with the systems that the rogue trader was using. My assumption: by the time the risk department picked it up probably via an insider tip on e-mail, it was just too late.
I had a quick conversation with Eric Best last week at a luncheon at the Strata conference in NYC. He’s consulted with some CIOs at the largest wall street firms.
We spoke about IT and what is needed most within these firms. It’s access to data, raw data. Most developers in financial firms shelter data within applications or a database and don’t expose this data to outside systems. This is dangerous.
A simple proposal to CIOs: All data for all applications within the entire firm should be exposed, at a minimum, to internal applications via REST or well defined web services.
And the next step, go external.
I use Tumblr all the time, in fact this blog runs on Tumblr. WSJ reported an $85 million investment from a series of investors including Sir Richard Branson. According to insiders, this puts the value of the company around $800 million.
Apparently there are 30 million blogs on Tumblr now, an impressive number. No wonder my blog slows down at times during the day, especially in the evening.
I just attended my first General Assembly presentation tonight in NYC and I was truly impressed. If all of the presentations are this good, I’ll be attending more in the future.
Tonight, the topic was “The Business of Big Data” by Brad Gillespie, Ben Siscovick (IA Ventures). How do companies harness and leverage the massive amounts of data being produced via the Internet and Smartphones, apps, etc?
Eric Schmidt was quoted recently “From the dawn of civilization up until 2003 human civilization created 5 exabytes of data. We now create 5 exabytes of data every 2 days”.
And it’s exponential. Why are companies now collecting more data on customer activity than ever before? Because it’s cheap.
Storage, bandwidth and CPU costs are declining while network access is increasing.
This project was a lot more work than we had originally anticipated, especially on a part-time basis. Many thanks to all to all that participated!
Check out the quick 2 minute video below.
So why a check-in app for stocks? I believe the concept of sharing stock picks and market ideas with followers via a social network is very cool.
Using Finster you can quickly express your views on a stock, option, index or just about any security listed on an exchange.
I just need Jim Cramer to start using it and we’re all set. :)
Download it and try it out, available in the App Store. Give me some feedback.
I wrote an article a few weeks ago entitled “Message to HP CEO: Give Away the TouchPad or Lose”.
I’m not sure why anyone would buy one, even at $99, now that HP has declared they are basically getting out of the business. I suppose people are assuming that someone will buy the beleaguered division and all will be fine.
If they continue at $99 or less, maybe it will.
There’s a trend going on right now that doesn’t help RIM with their cherished Wall Street clients.
I’m seeing this all over the place. People are tired of carrying two mobile devices, a corporate Blackberry and a personal Android or iPhone. Many IT departments on Wall Street are incorporating technology from GOOD to solve this problem. And saving big $$$ for the company.
If you haven’t heard of GOOD, think of it as a self-contained corporate Outlook for your Smartphone. It’s a secure e-email / calendar / browser / contact manager /etc app. All data is encrypted, and if the device is lost the application data can be wiped remotely.
If your company supports GOOD, you typically have the option of disposing of your corporate Blackberry and installing the GOOD app on your Smartphone. Given the option, everyone I know is doing the latter.
GOOD isn’t the greatest technology, and will most likely become irrelevant with iOS 5.0 (more on that later), but given the option I would rather carry just one device and that would be a Smartphone, not a Blackberry.
I just finished this book by Carlota Perez, written in 2002, and I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in how technological revolutions play out over time.
A couple of months ago Fred Wilson mentioned it on his blog and it was out of print. I had to buy it used. But probably due to his recommendation it’s now available new on Amazon.
The book seems to be accurate and provides very good insight as to where we are now in what Ms. Perez calls the current revolution, the “microprocessor revolution”. According to her, the microprocessor revolution started in 1971 and is still playing out.
Each technological revolution takes roughly 50 years from beginning to end with a new technological revolution starting and overlapping the end of the previous.
It starts with the Irruption phase, where financial capital shifts from the previous revolution to what is the beginning of a new revolution.
What follows is a Frenzy. For the microprocessor revolution, think 1990’s, where huge amounts of investment moved into internet based companies. There is a divorce between real value and paper value (the paper millionaires of the late 1990’s).
Inevitably, a crash occurs. Ms. Perez calls this the Turning Point. In a follow-on response to an e-mail (see below), she claims that we are still in the Turning Point phase. This phase can go on for years, as it did in the “mass production revolution” from 1929 to 1940. And there can be multiple crashes within a Turning Point phase.
In the Turning Point, financial reform is also required to create a shift of investment methodology from short-term gain to long-term sustainable profits. Financial Capital (fast moving money, think hedge funds, private equity firms, large financial firms) realigns itself with Production Capital (investment capital, slow moving, usually in the hands of corporations, long-term investments for future profits).
Once the appropriate conditions have been created, we enter a gilded age. A period of near full employment and substantial profits for corporations. This phase is called Synergy and can last 10-20 years or more. The Synergy phase was last seen during the “mass production revolution” from 1940 to 1960.
Finally, we enter the Maturity phase. Fast-growing and highly profitable sectors of production capital begin to reach limits to growth. Financial capital begins to search for new investments in innovative technology, and a new technological revolution develops.
Ms. Perez outlines the 5 previous technological revolutions in this chart below:
