iphone blog

March 16, 2010

Video: How the iPhone Helped Make Game Startup Unity a Winner

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 4:31 pm

It goes without saying that timing is everything. You can be like Friendster and show up too soon to the social networking party and then blow it. Or you can be like the iPod and make a splash despite being a late entrant to the MP3 player market. Unity Technologies, a 3-D gaming platform, has seen this movie from all sides. After struggling for nearly six years, the company’s gaming platform took off when Apple released iPhone and iPod touch.

With a platform that lets developers build lightweight, online 3-D games — perfectly suited for the iPhone OS-based devices — Unity became a disruptor in the games business virtually overnight. And it’s been on a bit of a roll over the past year, with a client roster that includes big names like Electronic Arts, the Cartoon Network and Disney. Mobile developers love the company, which secured a $5.5 million Series A round led by Sequoia in October of 2009. But it wasn’t always salad days for the company, which was originally based in Copenhagen, Denmark and is now headquartered in the Bay Area, as is made clear in my chat with Unity CEO David Helgason.

Helgason recounts how the company made it through some some of the darker days during its eight-year history. Some highlights from our talk include:

  • The co-founders would live off bread that was supposed to be thrown out from the cafe in which Helgason worked.
  • Since the company had no money, the three co-founders could focus on development and customer support, building a loyal fanbase.
  • When Apple included Unity at a developers conference, the company didn’t have the infrastructure to support the publicity, so that opportunity was wasted.

Perhaps the best (or grimmest, depending on your point of view) advice Helgason has for entrepreneurs is that when you find your idea, devote your whole life to it, almost like a religious movement.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Unity

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Video: How the iPhone Helped Make Game Startup Unity a Winner

BlackBerry to Lose More Ground to iPhone, Android: Survey

Filed under: theappleblog — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 4:25 pm

A new survey by research firm Crowd Science brings bad news for BlackBerry maker RIM, and some good news for Apple. The company that comes out best of all, though, is Google, whose Android operating system seems poised to see some major growth in the near future.

The survey, which Crowd Science performs semi-annually, addresses smartphone brand loyalty. This time around, it found that iPhone and Android customers were well satisfied with their choice of smartphone, but that BlackBerry is hemorrhaging users badly to both of those primary competitors.

A little over 90 percent of both iPhone and Android smartphone owners plan to stay with that OS when they purchase their next device, while nearly 40 percent of BlackBerry owners said they would opt for an iPhone next time around, and 34 percent said they’d go with Android instead of a RIM device.

It’s bad news for the Waterloo-based BlackBerry maker, and this latest survey shows that Apple isn’t exclusively to blame for the company’s steady decline. According to Crowd Science CEO John Martin:

These results show that the restlessness of Blackberry users with their current brand hasn’t just been driven by the allure of iPhone. Rather, Blackberry as a brand just isn’t garnering the loyalty seen with other mobile operating systems.

For me, the real surprise is not that many are dissatisfied with RIM, which seems to have done very little but make incremental cosmetic upgrades with its devices over the last couple of years, but that Android is nearly matching the iPhone in terms of consumer awareness and desire.

Apple still has the advantage in terms of who its customers are and what kind of money they’re willing to spend, and on what, though. iPhone owners tend to be slightly older and more affluent, and are much more likely to buy paid applications compared to other smartphone users. Android owners skew younger and less affluent, and accordingly are much less likely to spend money on paid applications. They do download more free apps than any other user group, though.

Finally, the Nexus One is making a big splash, even if it isn’t selling in droves. Android awareness in general jumped six percentage points to 66 percent since the last survey period, and 32 percent of BlackBerry owners would swap their current devices for a Nexus One right away, given the chance. That number jumps to 60 percent for users of smartphones not made by Apple or BlackBerry.

While RIM is the company that should really be scared by the results of this survey, Apple shouldn’t exactly be patting themselves on the back, either. Android is making steady gains, especially among current smartphone users, and they seem to have scored a special place in the hearts of young consumers, which, when combined with the 90 percent plus brand loyalty result, could pay off huge going forward.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Report: Surveying the Mobile App Store Landscape

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BlackBerry to Lose More Ground to iPhone, Android: Survey

March 15, 2010

Google/Apple Feud Gets More Impassioned, Personal

Filed under: theappleblog — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 6:23 pm

A Google employee expressed his distaste for the way Apple does business in no uncertain terms in a recent blog post. Tim Bray, a co-inventor of XML and a well-known blogger in his own right, is also a Google employee on the Android team, having recently joined following his time at Sun Microsystems.

The blog post at issue, which appeared on his personal blog, details his reasons behind joining Google, which include a passion for the rapid pace of development on the platform and the fact that it’s an open source system. Another reason is that he “hates” the iPhone. Or at least the context in which the iPhone operates.

Bray doesn’t shy away from sharing his opinion of what Apple’s done wrong with the iPhone, in no uncertain terms:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

Even though I wasn’t sad to see Apple nix a whole host of “sexy” apps recently, I can’t help but agree with where Tim Bray is coming from. Apple is effectively packaging and selling back to us a polished and pristine version of what we used to have only free and unfettered access to. Giving them too much control might start to inhibit our ability to continue to have that free access.

I’m not sure handing the reins to Google won’t have the exact same effect in the long run, but that isn’t what will happen if some people side with them in this developing conflict. Luckily, unlike in professional sports, there doesn’t have to be a winner in clashes between mobile device makers. A healthy balance should keep the power of both in check.

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Google/Apple Feud Gets More Impassioned, Personal

Analyst Estimate: 150,000 iPads Pre-Ordered Already

Filed under: theappleblog — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 4:40 pm

While the number isn’t official (Apple isn’t exactly free and easy with its sales figures), one analyst is saying that although its early yet to tell, it looks like the iPad is on track to break some pretty significant records in terms of order volume. Amateur Apple analyst Daniel Tello, who regularly outguesses the pros, is now saying that around 152,000 iPads have been pre-ordered in the first 72 hours of availability.

Tello’s approach involves extrapolating Apple web order numbers. This time around, he worked with Victor Castroll, a Valcent Financial Group analyst. Together, they surveyed a sample group and found 120 orders for 137 iPads over 58 hours beginning at 8:30 A.M. Friday morning.

From there, Tello applied a formula that subtracts non-iPad orders on Apple’s site and multiplies the resulting number by an average of 1.125 iPads per order. Finally, he added in 2,000 units for late-night hours during which time they had no data. In the end, the total arrived at was 152,000 ending at midnight on Sunday. The number doesn’t factor in iPads reserved for in-store pickup.

Tello is quick to note that even though the number seems fairly impressive for a brand new product, there was actually a huge dip in pre-order numbers following the initial day. First day sales saw 120,000 pre-orders, at a rate of around 25,000 per hour. By Sunday, that hourly rate had slowed to about 1,000. The initial spike is explained by “overexcited fanboism” according to Tello.

Based on the current numbers, Tello estimates that pre-order numbers won’t exceed much more than half a million. He anticipates when the iPad will hit the magic million-unit mark in an interview with Fortune:

My best guess, although very tentative given the early stage and few data we have so far, would be that they hit the 1 million unit milestone by the second week after it ships. But this is a very speculative guesstimate based on just a weekend of pre-orders.

To hit 1 million two weeks after shipping would be a major milestone, not only for Apple itself, but for the entire tablet market. The iPhone took 74 days before it reached 1 millions sold, and the sales numbers for the entire tablet industry is only around 3 to 4 million a year according to Engadget. Apple would then be on pace to actually double or triple the sales numbers of its entire market segment on its own in the first year of sales, if the iPad sells roughly as many units as did the iPhone in its first year.

Tello’s numbers also provide a snapshot of what kind of iPads are being sold in what quantities. The Wi-Fi only model is strongly outselling the Wi-Fi + 3G version, by a margin of almost exactly two to one. It’s not surprising given the price difference between the two, and the growing prevalence of MiFi devices that convert users’ existing cellular data plans into usable Wi-Fi. Surprisingly, storage capacities are more evenly divided, with the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models taking roughly a third of the pre-orders each.

Remember also that these sales figures are only for the U.S. so far. International versions of the device aren’t due to go on sale until sometime in late April at the earliest. The real challenge for Apple will be the first few weeks of in-store availability, which is when the general public will be making purchases, and not just the devoted Apple faithful willing to put down a pre-order. If both international customers and the general buyer reflect anywhere near the enthusiasm of the pre-order crowd, Apple will definitely have a hit on its hands, but I’d wait till the hype effect has passed before placing any real bets about the iPad’s future success.

Related Research from GigaOM Pro:

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Analyst Estimate: 150,000 iPads Pre-Ordered Already

For Apps, iPhone Bigger Than Facebook Platform

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 1:00 pm

When it comes to apps, the iPhone platform is now bigger than the Facebook platform, according to a report by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. Flurry said today that Apple’s iTunes App Store has over 140,000 applications compared to 60,000 apps available on the Facebook platform.

“Since the App Store launched in July 2008, 35,000 unique companies have released applications, which translates to 58 new companies launching apps each day,” Furry said in its Smartphone Industry Pulse report for February 2010.

iphonevsfacebook.pngThat’s quite amazing, considering that Facebook launched its platform more than a year earlier than the iPhone platform and has north of 400 million users. In comparison, the iPhone OS platform has about 70 million devices. And developer momentum for the iPhone platform isn’t going to wane anytime soon.

Why? To paraphrase Jerry McGuire, Apple is showing developers the money. Thanks to its one-click payment option, it’s easy for app developers to make money -– whether it’s by selling apps or selling virtual goods within apps.

With the iPad showing up as a platform extension, more developers are looking to focus their energies on the iPhone platform. “Over six weeks since Apple announced the iPad, Flurry continues to measure a significant increase in iPhone OS new application starts within its system,” the analytics firm said. Much of it is said to be developers looking to adapt their applications for the larger-format device.

ipadpushesiphoneapps.png

The most interesting part of the Flurry report was the iPhone developer DNA. Its analysis revealed the following categories:

1. Native iPhone: Companies founded to create applications for iPhone (e.g., PageOnce, ngmoco)
2. Traditional Media: Companies established on Film, TV, Print and Radio (e.g., Disney, TBS, New York Times)
3. Mobile: Companies having started on J2ME, BREW, BlackBerry, etc. (e.g., Digital Chocolate, eBuddy)
4. Retail & CPG: Brick-and-mortar companies or ones that manufacture goods (e.g., The Gap, DKNY, Kraft)
5. Online: Companies who began on the web including e-Commerce, social networks, online gaming, streaming music, etc. (e.g., Google, eBay, Facebook, Pandora, PopCap, Zynga)
6. Traditional Gaming: Video game companies from console, portable or PC (e.g., EA, Activision, Namco, etc.). iphonedeveloperdna.gifDespite the fact that the App Store is now maturing, reaching its two year anniversary this summer, we are encouraged that native iPhone application developers are still relevant, representing 20% of the heritage pie, the second largest category. This means that the barrier to entry is still low enough for start-ups to enter and innovation to flourish. However, those days may be numbered as “discoverability” has become a significant issue, and now “marketing muscle” is starting to count more in the App Store.

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For Apps, iPhone Bigger Than Facebook Platform

iPhones — They Only Come Out At Night

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 6:59 am

iPhone users tend to use their devices in the evening and on the weekends, reports Localytics, a Cambridge, MA-based start-up offering mobile analytics services. According to as study conducted by the company, the mobile app usage in the US peaks at around 9 pm EST on week days. Over the weekend, the usage is at its peek during afternoon and nights.

These findings are not surprising — during regular week days, many of us are busy working and more often than not, use the device to make phone calls or send text messages. The report says that iPhone “app usage on weekends and weekdays is both different in usage patterns and overall scale.”

The iPhone users typically generate 7% more traffic on the weekend than the average weekday. Saturday traffic ramps quickly from a morning low at 6:00 am to over 90% of peak usage by 11:00 am—and stays near the peak for the rest of the afternoon and evening. By comparison, weekday app usage is more concentrated in the evening with a slow ramp during the working day and a peak at 9:00 pm EST, when East Coast users are at home and West Coast users are commuting home.

In short, iPhone is still quite a ways off from becoming a “business” phone. The report also concludes that these heavy weeknight and weekend app usage could be interpreted as a sign that consumers may be willing to try more convenient devices than their laptops to entertain themselves, plan a trip, check sports scores and listen to music. No wonder Apple has big hopes for its iPad.

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iPhones — They Only Come Out At Night

March 11, 2010

Kayak’s Projected Market Cap: More Than $705M

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 11:30 pm

One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent from 2009 to 2012. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million.

Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You decide. Here are some of the relevant assessments:

  • Meta search engines like Kayak accounted for less than 8 percent of online travel booked in 2009, due mostly to low awareness.

  • Kayak is spending heavily to make itself better known — NeXt Up estimates an advertising budget of $50 million a year, but Kayak has said itself it plans to spend $100 million on marketing.

  • The travel industry should recover from the recession and see a CAGR of 4 percent from 2009 to 2013, with online travel agents growing with a 7 percent CAGR.

  • Promising Kayak initiatives include its iPhone apps (see our story) and Travelpost, its TripAdvisor competitor.

  • Kayak is projected to have revenue of $180 million in 2010, growing to $305 million in 2014 with EBITDA margins of 30-35 percent.

  • Kayak has raised about $224 million in venture funding and debt from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Tenaya Capital, Trident Capital, Gold Hill Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and AOL.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

What Twitter Airfare Sales Tell Us About Real-Time E-Commerce

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Kayak’s Projected Market Cap: More Than $705M

AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been

Filed under: techcrunch — Tags: , , , , , , — @ 7:48 pm

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

Information provided by CrunchBase


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AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been

Street Fighter IV Arrives on the iPhone

Filed under: theappleblog — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 5:05 pm

Square-Enix recently brought its popular Final Fantasy series to the iPhone, and now another heavy-hitter, Capcom, is bringing yet another marquee title to the platform. That title is Street Fighter — and Street Fighter IV, a port of the latest installment in the series, is now available for purchase in the App Store for $9.99.

But wait, that’s a fighting game. On the iPhone. Which has no physical controls. Sure, there’s been a few to date, with mixed results, but there must be a reason the genre hasn’t caught on with developers with the ferocity of, say, accelerometer-based driving games, no?

That’s definitely what I thought, but I purchased and downloaded the game anyway, against my better instincts, because I love the series, notably Street Fighter IV for the PS3. And because when I was considering a purchase, it had only received five-star reviews, which is rare even in the early going for any iPhone game.

Luckily, I was not disappointed. Street Fighter IV does indeed make the very best of an admittedly bad situation with its iPhone port. As you might expect, it uses a virtual joystick and virtual kick/punch buttons superimposed on the gaming screen. As you might not expect, this approach feels neither clumsy nor half-hearted in this particular Capcom game, something which could not be said for earlier releases from the same company (Mega Man II, anyone?).

Special moves are easy to execute, or at least as easy as they are to do using a traditional controller, probably more so. I’m usually pretty inept at even getting off a decent Shoryuken, but I manage it no problem most of the time on the iPhone. The graphics are amazing, and the game runs perfectly smoothly on my iPhone 3GS, with no lag or visual oddities. The intro movie is particularly mesmerizing if you’re keen on CG’d graphic treats.

For $9.99, you get a variety of modes of play, including Bluetooth multiplayer with nearby opponents. Eight characters are playable in the iPhone version, but that’s plenty considering the platform and the more casual feel of the game. Kudos to Capcom for focusing on delivering awesome gameplay over unnecessary extras like a massive roster of fighters and levels.

If I were Sony or Nintendo, I’d be watching these releases mighty closely. Major studios are definitely going to be keeping an eagle eye on sales of ports like this one, especially as the investment/risk ratio of App Store development continues to become more and more appealing. Sony in particular had better make good soon on those smartphone/gaming platform plans if it wants to remain relevant enough for anyone to care when and if it does.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Is There Any Demand For a True Gaming Phone?

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Street Fighter IV Arrives on the iPhone

Verizon Whittles Down Date for LTE Phones

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 3:02 pm

Verizon Wireless will bring its first 4G handsets to market by the middle of 2011, CTO Anthony Melone said in a Wall Street Journal piece (hat tip Engadget). But using those super-fast Long Term Evolution phones is going to cost you.

We learned last year that Verizon would launch its first LTE phones sometime in 2011, but the new ETA is several months earlier than the company had previously forecast. The phones will support promised speeds of 5-12 Mbps on download and 2-5 Mbps on uploads on the LTE network, which will launch in 25-30 markets this year.

But Melone also said that all-you-can-eat data plans are “the big issue that has to change.” (AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega made similar comments in December, pointing the finger at data-hungry iPhone users.) Verizon Communications CTO Dick Lynch in January told the Washington Post that LTE pricing would likely involve a base subscriber fee plus usage charges for bandwidth consumed. That scenario could apply to several different pricing models, as Stacey has noted. Regardless of how, exactly, Verizon chooses to bill for 4G service, one thing is clear: High-end users are going to pay substantially more than they’ve been paying for 3G.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Metered Mobile Data is Coming and Here’s How

Image courtesy Flickr Hector Milla.

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Verizon Whittles Down Date for LTE Phones

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