Monday, November 28, 2011

Race against the Machine Review

I just finished the book, "Race against the Machine," and I cannot stop thinking about it.  The book tackles the impact of technology on the current unemployment figures.  The hypothesis is that technology is the driving factor behind high unemployment. The book points out that while unemployment is high, corporate profits and GNP are at record or near record levels.  Why is that?  Broad swaths of the economy are being automated by technology and this is likely to continue or accelerate.  Due to Moore's Law, the power of computers is growing at an exponential rate, and now we are starting to be able to do things with computers that really can replace humans.  For example the book covers the fact that just a few years ago it was inconceivable that cars could drive themselves.  Recently Google cars have driven over 100,000 miles under the control of the computer.  That is some very fast progress, and it isn't hard to imagine our cars driving on their own in the not too distant future.

The book also makes the point that as computers automate much of our economy, we will see more stratification of the workforce.  One group will be the winners. These could be the folks who have created the new technologies (e.g., Google, FaceBook, Apple, etc) or folks who really know how to leverage them.  For example, the book says that the best chess players are teams that pair computers with humans.  A second group will be those in very manual jobs that are hard to automate (e.g., hairdressers).  Those jobs are not going away anytime soon. That leaves the rest of the economy which is at great risk of automation.

This book rings true on so many fronts.  I cannot believe it was just a few years ago that there was no iPhone. Just think about how much the iPhone (and other smartphones) have turned our worlds upside down in a few short years.  Siri, Watson, and some of the other great computer advances of the past couple years are proving that computers can finally do things that we may never have thought they could.

In addition, I see business after business using technology to streamline operations, thereby trimming headcount.  Look at the package delivery business.  Fedex, UPS, and others now rely heavily on GPS and automated delivery routes that make delivery routes much faster, enabling these companies to delivery the same number of packages with fewer people.  In addition, they have started to implement keyless ignition systems so drivers to speed up each stop.  These small steps drive down labor needs in these industries.

The book ends on a high note talking about all the opportunities of technology.  Having said that, it cautions that we need to get our education system in order to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.  I completely agree!  These new jobs require advanced skills and advanced degrees.  Many of them require sophisticated knowledge of math, technology, etc, and we are not training enough people with those skills.

Ironically the Wall Street Journal ran an article this past weekend that was very similar.  It talked about how certain industries cannot find people who have high end skills, even in these times of high unemployment.

The book is a must read for anyone interested in technology, whose job is at risk of automation, or with kids that will be coming into the workforce.  In other words, it is a must read for almost everyone!

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Why Should I Buy the New Nokia / WP7 Phones?

I just saw the announcement on the new Nokia Windows Phone 7 phones.  Unfortunately the Nokia site doesn't explain to me why I should buy these phones instead of an iPhone or an Android phone.  Given how much market share iOS and Android have, Nokia needs to sell the benefits of their new phones.  I see a fair bit of information on the Nokia site about HTML 5, IE 9, fast internet connections, staying connected with friends, etc, etc.  Consumers want to be excited by a vision. That has what Apple has done so well.  It is going to take a lot more than technical specs and high level marketing statements to get people to buy a Nokia Windows Phone 7 device instead of an iPhone / Android phone.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

More Background on the LifePics Photo Ecosystem

Internet Retailer did a nice article on the LifePics photo ordering ecosystem.  As the article says, our goal was to have an order button everywhere that photos exist on the Net. 

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Building a Mobile Photo Ordering Ecosystem

I recently presented at Mobile Commerce Forum on how we built an ecosystem for allowing partners to send us photo orders.  The stats are showing that consumers only actively use a handful of apps.  If that trend remains (which is likely) retailers will find it increasingly difficult to convince consumers to use their apps.  These retailers instead will need to adopt strategies that allow consumers to send them orders from inside other apps, much like the affiliate programs of many years ago.

View my presentation on building a mobile photo ordering ecosystem.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Fire - A Bold Move by Amazon

As  you have probably heard by now, Amazon will be offering a 7" tablet for $199 this holiday season called Fire.  Critics have complained that Amazon will be losing as much as $70 in hard costs per tablet, more if you include marketing / advertising costs for this new line of tablets.  Furthermore, Amazon's margins are already thin so how will they recover the lost costs?

I, however, believe this is the right move for Amazon for three reasons:

Tablets appear to be well suited to e-commerce
As reported in the WSJ yesterday, conversion on tablets is 4 to 5% compared to 3% on PCs (according to Forrester Research).  In addition, retailers are reporting 10% to 20% larger carts on tablets than PCs.  You bet Amazon is watching these stats and wants to make sure that tablet users are shopping at Amazon!  An Amazon tablet greatly increases that likelihood.

Apple and Amazon are on a collision course
Apple has built up a tremendous franchise selling digital content through iTunes.  At the same time, Amazon knows that in order to keep its growth going, it needs to put more emphasis on digital content.  CDs, books, and DVDs are quickly being replaced by digital music and video downloads.  If Apple continues their dominance of tablets, those consumers will be steered (by Apple) to iTunes or other Apple services instead of Amazon services.  Amazon needs to ensure that the iPad doesn't continue to dominate the tablet market.

Consumers are insisting on innovation
Consumers have no patience for companies that don't move.  Companies like Palm, RIM, Yahoo, AOL, and others that have played it safe and have seen their fortunes fall quickly.  When companies like Apple and Google are innovating at a ferocious rate, there is no room for hanging back and playing it safe.  Fire is just the kind of bold bet that will keep Amazon going.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Two Great Examples of Differences between iOS and Android

Today I had two experiences that really highlighted the differences between iOS and Android.  First we needed some screenshots of our Android app for the Amazon Android marketplace.  After a lot of research it appears that the only ways to take screenshots in Android involve either 1) rooting your phone or 2) working with a development environment on your PC while the phone is plugged in to the PC.  Never of these options is pretty.  By contrast on the iPhone you can click two buttons and instantly take a screenshot.  It takes a couple seconds and is super simple.  This is iPhone's UI elegance in all its brilliance.

Later we were testing to see how our high end creative engines would work on an Android tablet.  We think that long term tablets will be a great platform for building creative products like greeting cards, photo books, custom calendars, etc.   Our creative product engine is a high end Flash app.  As might be expected, the app ran great on Android tablets.  Apple doesn't support Flash so we are just totally out of luck on the iPad.  This is where the open nature of Android outshines Apple's closed architecture.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Acer Iconia Tab Review


Background
This is meant to be a real-world overview of the Acer Iconia Tab A500.  The focus is more on usability in the world than trying to cover all the speeds and feeds.

Hardware
It would be hard to start the discussion about the hardware without talking about the price.  I bought the Iconia Tab at Target.  With the special Target was running and my Target Red Card, the price was about $375!  This tablet has a generous screen, front and rear facing cameras, excellent performance, Android Honeycomb, etc. Relative to other tablets, the value feels very high.

I have struggled with the pricing on other tablets.  $500 to $800 is just too much for a tablet in my opinion for two reasons. First, look at the price of laptops.  I just bought an amazing Dell laptop for $450 a couple weeks ago.  Why should a tablet cost more than a laptop, in some cases much more?  It just doesn’t make sense from a value standpoint.  Second, tablets are evolving so quickly that the realistic lifetime of these devices is about 2 years.  Given that, who really wants to spend north of $500 for something that will only be used for 2 years?

My impression of the Iconia Tab from a hardware perspective is very favorable.  It is a nice package overall.  The screen is excellent – feels like just about the right size. I would love it if the tablet was smaller and lighter, but it felt very comparable to other tablets of this screen size.  (Thickness and weight will undoubtedly come down in the coming years.)  Performance was very good.  I used it for You Tube videos, email, photos, web surfing, games, etc. and everything was very snappy.  There was not one time where I felt myself waiting for it to do something (excluding downloading things via the Net).

There have been some reviewers who have complained about the battery life of the Iconia Tab, but it seemed quite reasonable to me.  My use case is to be able to use it all evening long and have plenty of juice to spare.  Several nights in a row the family passed the device back and forth on the couch all evening long.  This was real world testing, switching from videos to shopping to games, etc.  I know it isn’t a scientific test, but I find some of the standardized battery tests to be really silly.  At the end of each night, the tablet was still at 80% battery – very good in my book. The only situation where I could see where you might want longer battery life was if you were going to use the tablet all day long without any access to a power plug.  That isn’t a very common scenario for me, but it might be for others.

My only complaint about the hardware, and it is a minor one, is that I found the device a little slippery.  I worry that I might drop it at some point unless I get a carrying case of some sort.

Android Honeycomb
I started the device up and was notified almost immediately that there was a good-sized system update available.  I installed that update and the device was brought up to Android Honeycomb 3.1, the latest version of the Android O/S for tablets.  It was nice to know I was on the latest version!

Overall ease of use of Honeycomb was quite good but there are some challenges for users familiar to Android 2.x.  My best test of ease of use was that when I handed the device to my 10 year old (OK, he ripped it from hands) he got started in about 5 seconds.  He was immediately watching videos, playing games, etc.  Clearly it is not a hard system to use.

My biggest challenges came from things that were different than Android 2.x on a phone.  Who decided to bury the settings button on Honeycomb?  Seriously, those little things can drive people batty, especially if they have mastered how to use an earlier version of your O/S.  Instead of using physical buttons for options, home, etc. like you do on the phone, the tablet uses softkeys.  That took a little getting used to, but worked fine after a short period.

Apps
The biggest challenge for users is going to be that the market for Honeycomb apps is still very early.  The first thing you notice is that some big apps are either not available or are missing key pieces of functionality.  Netflix doesn’t work on this device – that is a huge disappointment.  Skype works, but there is no video calling yet on the Iconia Tab.

While I don’t know the specifics of why Netflix and Skype haven’t released full blown apps on the Iconia Tab, it is becoming clear to a lot of Android developers that Google needs to do a better job of hiding underlying hardware differences from the developers.  At LifePics we are currently wrestling with an issue where some Android devices take photos larger than what Android can handle with its built-in file uploader.  (More on that in a future post.)  When the app developers have to test on all these specific devices, it slows down the whole app development process enormously.  Google, hopefully you are listening. 

A few other apps would download from the Android Market but wouldn’t install. We mostly found this to be the case with some of the games from smaller publishers.

Some other apps worked flawlessly on the tablet even though they are not optimized for tablets.  I tried our own LifePics photo ordering app which we haven’t optimized for Honeycomb tablets yet, and it worked great, but there are certain features that it leaves you wanting for (e.g., the ability to drill down on a photo and see a larger view of it).  Some of those features aren’t really relevant in a smartphone environment but become key on a tablet.

In other cases there were tablet-optimized apps that worked very well. For example, I really like Touchdown by Nitro Desk for access to Exchange email systems.  They have a tablet version of their app that worked flawlessly on the Iconia Tab.

Overall Thoughts
Acer has done their job with this tablet.  They provide a lot of value for the money and the package feels well buttoned-up from a hardware perspective.

More broadly, it is clear that prices are really starting to drop in Android tablets.  When Android tablets hit $299, these devices will become mainstream.  When they go below $199, families will start to own several devices.  However, the app market is still far too immature on Android Honeycomb.  Google needs to help the big app players get their apps out.  By the time the holiday buying season comes around this year, Google really needs the big guys like Netflix, Skype, etc. to FULLY support Honeycomb if it is going to sell in any volume.  If Google doesn’t do that, Apple will continue their dominance in the tablet market through another holiday season.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Android Fragmentation

So I bought an Acer Iconia tablet this week.  Smoking deal at Target (about $370) - we are finally starting to see the prices fall in the tablet market.  However, I was disappointed to see that Netflix isn't available yet on this tablet. They only support certain Android tablets.  I understand the caution by Netflix, but this fragmentation of Android is a real concern for the ecosystem.  When some apps run only on certain devices, you no longer have one ecosystem but a bunch of smaller, related ecosystems.  Google needs to work to make it easier for app developers to just publish across devices without concern for the underlying hardware issues.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Android Developers Defecting to iOS

I am very surprised by this data showing that Android developers are defecting to iOS.  Will be interesting to see if it continues given how quickly Android is gaining market share in the smartphone device market.  Sometimes developers and marketers in the tech industry build for what they know, and they seem more comfortable with iOS than Android.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Android Orders Up 70% Over Q1

In July orders from our Android photo ordering app are running 70% ahead of Q1. That is some amazing progress in a short time.  We have done two new versions in the last 45 days which has been huge.  Huge kudos to our Android Dev Team!

Thursday, July 7, 2011

My Next Presentation on Building a Mobile Strategy

I will be presenting again on mobile strategies, this time at the Mobile Commerce Forum in October. See an overview of my presentation at http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/06/30/how-create-mobile-strategy

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Android Market Share

Android market share increases while RIM decreases according to Comscore.  Boy we could have seen that coming.  What is interesting though is how Android continues to pull away from iPhone.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Article on Android App Development

Chris Newton, @chrisnewton5, and I just published an article on Android app development.  We talk to how important it is to have an Android app and how much more flexible the platform is than iPhone.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Radio Interview on Android / Mobile Apps

I did a recent internet radio interview on WS Radio about mobile apps, Android, and mobile marketing.  The interview was geared toward small and medium businesses who are trying to figure out what their strategy should be for the mobile world.  Listen to the interviews at the links below:

http://filesource.abacast.com/wsradio/ecommercerssradioshow/052511/segment1052511.mp3
http://filesource.abacast.com/wsradio/ecommercerssradioshow/052511/segment2052511.mp3

Android and iOS Keep Growing

Nielsen shows that Android and iOS keep growing.  View the Nielsen report.

Presentation from Internet Retailer 2011

On June 17 I presented at Internet Retailer in San Diego on how developing mobile apps on Android is different from developing mobile apps on iOS and Windows Phone 7.  I compare the three platforms in terms of mobile app development, mobile marketplaces, and mobile marketing.  View my Android presentation here.