News tagged ‘Lion’

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported that this year Apple is going to charge companies 1$ million for iAds on its mobile devices. Citing an unknown but reliable source familiar with the matter those companies that want to become a part of the iAds launch will pay $10 million to be first in the door.

The pricing policy of iAds is pretty simple. Every time user sees an ad the advertiser is charged a penny. If he's tapping the banner, Apple charges $2. So $1 million ad buy will provoke a big amount of its views and user taps.

In addition to a higher price Apple wants to take more control over marketing campaigns of its clients. But still it doesn't reduce companies' interest in iAds:

"Despite the high price, ad executives at agencies from Boston to New York and San Francisco to Los Angeles have crowded into conference rooms in recent weeks to listen to the tech company's pitch for iAd".

One of the advertisements that is already developed is an ad for Nike's Air Jordan basketball shoes. It includes iAd logo and animated banner. If you select it, you'll see an interactive store locator, special videoclip and exclusive offers taking place at local stores. This iAd was also shown by Apple on its iPhone OS 4 preview event.

Some experts think Apple's appearance at the market of mobile advertisement may convince some other selling ads companies to switch to other mobile platforms (for example, Google Android).

With a growing popularity of apps for Apple devices advertisers and developers see iAds as a potential opportunity to reach a wide audience and raise more money on it.

Recently Сhitika estimated the number of iPads sold by making a study based on its own online advertising network. The report reveals than Apple has sold more than 1 million of their tablets. The exact number is being refreshed every second so you can check it out here. And this is a current scale of iPad's popularity in some U.S. cities:

• California - 19,12%
• New York - 8,3%
• Texas - 8%
• Florida - 5,88%
• Illinois - 3,84%
• Wyoming - 0,03%

The report also has information than an average iPad has approximately 2,33 different IP addresses. Necessary data was received by tracking browser cookies.

Earlier Apple has also revealed that at the end of the first week there were sold more 500,000 iPads. The company claims it's very surprised with a level of initial demand.

According to the US FTC, today Apple has purchased a virtual assistant application Siri. The cost of the deal is $200 million.

Scobleizer's author Robert Scoble thinks the purchase is very important to Apple:

"The value in unlocked is huge. This shows Apple is very willing to buy its way into the new mobile web and the new API-driven web. This also could be a major cornerstone in how it competes with Google."

Siri is a voice-guided application that acts as a concierge or personal assistant. It helps you to interact with your mobile device via your voice only.

Yesterday Apple closed a deal of acquiring Intrisity, a small company in Austin, Texas, that specializes on mobile computer chips producing.

This is a second time for the last two years when Apple buys a small chip company to have the facilities for making fast and power efficient processors. In 2008 Apple purchased P.A. Semi for $278 million, but with the lapse of time many chip maker employees had left company because of inadequate compensation (by the way, some of them are now in Agnilux, another company that was recently acquired by Google).

Well-known chip analyst Tom R. Halfhill has information from his sources that Apple paid $121 million for Intrinsity, but company’s representative Steve Dowling didn't comment on this information.

Such a deal isn't expensive for Apple at all, thinks Tom Halfhill:

“The purchase price is like pocket change to Apple, and they get a lot of benefit”.

It is widely speculated that iPad's A4 chip is based on Intrinsity technology that improved its processing power from 650 MHz to 1 GHz without increasing the battery consumption. With acquiring this chip making company Apple will be able to increase that 350 MHz by itself. Moreover, the company seems to be looking forward for creating its own version of ARM chip. Some other companies like Qualcomm, Marvell and Nvidia had the same experience and spent millions of dollars to gain a satisfactory result.

It is interesting that rumors about this deal started when some people saw that a significant number of Intrinsity employees changed their employer section to Apple in LinkedIn.

Also Apple's desire to create its own mobile chip contradicts to its strategy of purchasing Intel chips for computers.

Recently Oprah Winfrey declared herself a fan of iPad in the front of millions of TV viewers. She called the device "amazing" and said that its hardware will "change the way kids learn." TV host admires its backlit touchscreen and thinks it has great opportunities for reading, playing games and sharing photos.

Some time ago Oprah has been promoting Amazon Kindle on TV, and once the sales of this device were boosted so strong the company had problems with keeping up with demand. When she has been speaking about iPad she also mentioned Kindle in the past tense, like she "HAD a Kindle". But later her spokesperson said she still uses both devices.

Oprah's Book Club may be viewed in iBookstore for iPad, and its books may be purchased for a standard fee.

Today mobile ad firm AdMob has released another Mobile Metrics report that consists of information about the software and hardware that had been used by Apple's handsets owners in March.

The study reveals that only 2% of all Apple devices with iPhone OS are first-gen iPhones. But it is important to notice that since the first sale of iPhone OS-based device Apple sold over 85 million of its worldwide. If we'll take the period between June 2007 and July 2008 (time when iPhone 3G was shipped), then it turns out that company sold 6.1 million of iPhone 2G, which is approximately 7% of the total sum of handsets that were sold.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech journalist Philip Elmer-Dewitt continues to count and then sums up:

"If 7% of those iPhone 1Gs are driving 2% of AdMob's traffic that suggests that nearly one in three is still ticking - and visiting the Web."

Obviously, the popularity of the first-generation iPhones will be further reducing without iPhone OS 4.0 support.

AdMob also found that the most popular iPhone in March 2010 was iPhone 3GS, which generated 39% of all traffic. This is much higher result than 9% in September 2009.

Other information can be seen above on the graphs.

Finnish company Nokia admitted last week that the competition on the high-end smartphone market is high enough and it is finally affected on quarterly earnings. In the first quarter of 2010 Finnish cellphone maker earned 465$ million. In the same period of the 2009 they earned 162$ million. Well that can be explained by an economical situation in the world, but this year results were expected by analysts to be higher.

Nokia conceded the average selling price of their cellphone products dropped down from 66 to 62 euros. The numbers for smartphones are more significant - from 190 (first quarter of 2009) to 155 euros (first quarter of 2010).

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is pretty obsessed about this fact:

"We continue to face tough competition with respect to the high end of our mobile device portfolio".

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Recently Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer had a financial conference call with the press and analysts. Here are some interesting facts we gained from the conversation:

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One of the developers named Vimov made some quick math and figured out that in two years the iPad apps market will probably be worth at least $1 billion by 2012. It can even be much higher if the iPad will gain the same success as the iPhone had a year ago.

Vimov, who developed the Weather app for iPad, says Apple makes $136 million in a year from the first thousand of apps available for the 500,000 iPads that have been already sold in the US.

“If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.”

As you remember, the iPhone helped Apple to gain 4 billion downloads in 19 months.

Charlene Gallion from San Francisco has recently filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company in unfair declines of warranty coverage for its products. Such decisions are based on the results, shown by Liquid Submersion Indicator that is integrated in every latest Apple product. The lawsuit alleges that the LSI is unreliable evidence of abuse.

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Dave Johnson from Bnet's blogs has written a post about why iPhone OS 4.0 and, particularly, iAds is a reason to get rid of your iPhone. He says that even such a big company as Apple cannot stay of the road when there are opportunities to gain additional billions of dollars with their new advertising program. It is announced that iAds service will work only in a free apps, but in a while there will be nothing to stop it from showing up such advertisements in paid apps too. That is why it is time to look at iPhone rivals.

Mike Schramm from TUAW develops this thought further - if iAds will bring significant revenue to Apple, why not deliver it to Mac OS X?

But at this moment these thoughts are not confirmed with any of the Apple actions, so there is no need for panic yet.

Today Opera announced their Opera Mini browser has been finally approved and included in App Store. The app was submitted to Apple almost a month ago. Some people thought the Cupertino's company won't approve it because it competes with Safari, the browser that included with the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Opera Mini is a choice of more than 50 million people because it compresses up to 90% of content before sending it to the end user. Such an algorithm significantly improves page loading and helps to save money on traffic.

You can download Opera Mini here.

New forecast published by iSuppli on Friday revealed that approximately 14.4 million iPads will be sold in 2011 and 20.1 million - in 2012. This year won't make a sales record because most of the consumers will buy it for its unique touch-screen. By 2011-2012 the device will become more popular with the increasing number of App Store applications, declining prices and improved functionality, so people will more clearly understand its possible purposes.

But iSuppli claims the research to be "conservative", because it doesn't take into account unforeseen features that Apple can quickly add to iPad to boost sales (for example, integrating Adobe Flash support). However the numbers rely on a patented multi-touch technology that will mainly define the popularity of a new device.

iSuppli director of monitor research Rhoda Alexander admires iPad:

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Few hours ago Steve Jobs and Eric Shmidt were spotted talking at Calafia in the Town and Country shopping center in Palo Alto.

The photos were made by the Gizmodo tipster. It is interesting that the Calafia cafe is owned by Charlie Ayers, who is a former Google chief. Gizmodo source doesn't know what the men were talking about, but he heard two phrases:

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This week Apple posted ten new vacancies on its site. They all are related to North Carolina Data Center. Currently Apple is looking for Engineers and Technicians, though the position of Chief Operation Engineer hasn't been filled since January.

Apple's new North Carolina Data Center is approximately 5 times bigger that existing 109,000 sq. foot Newark facility. It is supposed to be a key component of the company's cloud computing strategy. Apple is going to invest in this project $1 billion for the next 9 years and expects to hire at least fifty full-time employees.

The flyover of the North Carolina data center is under the cut.

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