A single thought on each OS manufacturer and my biggest concern for each:
Ever since the rumors cropped up again about Apple and Verizon, I have been thinking about the impact of that deal. I have thought, at various times, that Apple won’t do it because it is a completely different device infrastructure (CDMA instead of the world-standard GSM), that Apple would wait for LTE, the fact that Apple is letting Google catch up by not moving to Verizon, the fact that Verizon’s network can’t handle voice and data at the same time, which is a big deal for Apple and a chief selling point of the iPhone.
And then Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and lead developer of Tumblr, wrote a great piece on his experiences and thoughts this morning. Spot on, Marco, and thanks for killing my LTE hopes. Hmmm…. now I have no idea if and when Apple will ship iPhone on Verizon but am concerned it won’t happen soon enough. Or maybe Apple’s strategy is to skip the carriers and go straight to VOiP services with multi-tasking on an iPod touch. (But I still think Apple wants Verizon.)
(Hey, I make money from this platform, iOS. I want Apple to sell 3 trillion units per year.)
Many major movie studios are restricting movies from being rented (via Redbox or Netflix or other means) during the first 28 days after release. The belief is that the studios will sell more movies. This is stupid.
But before I get into why it is stupid, let me explain my own movie set up. First, my wife and I watch lots of movies. We are aficionados and have 300 or so movies in the house plus use Netflix, both rentals and on demand. We do not have cable (just the local channels and Discovery) as I could no longer justify paying the cable company $70 a month for crap so instead we have higher bandwidth Internet and our Netflix subscription. We don’t go to the theater much because most movies aren’t worth seeing on the big screen.
First, when my wife and I see a movie we want to watch, something just hitting theaters, we add it to our Netflix queue. We only know it is a “new release” when Netflix tells us so. With that, we could care less whether it became a new release four weeks ago or today.
Second, we only buy movies that we really would watch again. Since few movies are of that caliber we don’t buy many movies any more. In fact I would say we buy less than three movies/TV shows a year, whether they are in the new release window or not.
We devised a rating system years ago: buy, theater, rental, cable, no way. A “buy” movie has to be exceptional. A “theater” movie has to be best on the big screen. A “rental” is interesting but not qualified for the top two. “Cable”, a category we abandoned a while ago, is the recycled movies you find on standard cable and “no way” is, well, self explanatory.
So for you movie studios paying attention, it is not rent v. buy. It is more like watch v. don’t watch. And to be honest, lately you’ve been failing at that one, too.
How exciting to wake up in the morning and see that the sales have doubled. I never expect it but it has happened a couple of times. After a moment of shock, I now know to go check out the App Store and see what honor we received. For the first time, starting last night, powerOne was a staff pick!
A few images to commemorate the occasion. Thank you, Apple!
When I started in this business (1997), advanced calculators — scientific or financial — were expensive. The cheapest full-featured scientific calculators were $20-30 and easily ranged up into the hundreds of dollars. Real financial calculators were $40-120. So we wrote financial and scientific calculators and charged money for them. Our first financial calculator was $39.99, written for PalmPilot, and our first scientific calculators were $29.99 and $49.99 for basic and advanced models.
Fast-forward a decade and our latest calculator for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is currently $5.99. The product is far more powerful than anything we wrote in the late 1990s and early 2000s but the market has changed. Calculators, especially scientific ones, have become a commodity in the software world. There are hundreds of them, most of them cheap-looking, poor-quality products.
Instead of fighting this trend we have embraced it by releasing powerOne Calculator Lite Edition. It is Lite as it has only a couple of templates and restricts how many you can create (1) rather than the 60 we include plus endless number you can create with the full version.
The calculator included with powerOne Lite functions in standard and RPN input mode, performs real, fraction and feet-inch math, and includes power, logarithm, and trigonometric functions. It includes a history of computations plus ten memory locations for storage. The same application runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
In addition, powerOne Lite Calculator includes templates — think mini-spreadsheets — for calculating percent change, tips, date conversions, exchange rates (with auto updated data), and summary calculations like average, max and min. In addition, you can create one for yourself, taking advantage of powerOne calculator’s simple formula-based language.
The full version includes all this plus 55 additional templates for conversions, finance, investing and real estate. You can also create an endless number of templates. [link to App Store]
The trend toward less expensive calculators is pervasive now. Everyone deserves a high-quality, beautiful calculator to call their own. And we will move where others won’t follow: ability to create your own templates, add-on templates and choose from those calculations that meet your specific needs for business and school.
