Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: iPhone (Page 4 of 5)

Biggest Macworld Ever, But More Sedate?

January 14, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The lines were blocks long around Moscone West early this morning, and that was just people wanting to get their badges.  The real stuff doesn’t even start till tomorrow morning — the Steve Jobs keynote and the opening of the exhibitor floors. Somethingintheair

From the Starbucks a block away, and now from the media lounge, the best stuff I’ve seen online so far:
• Troy Wolverton’s piece in the Merc News comparing to last year’s event, Macworld: Always cool, but calmer?

• A UK site that reported Job’s keynote speech outline has been spied on the web, which was repeated by another site here: Steve Jobs Macworld 2008 Keynote Speech Leaked on Wikipedia. True?  Who knows. (Any Apple employee discovered leaking anything gets summarily fired and forfeits every penny of their financial benefits, based on the contract they sign when they accept employment.)
• Macapper ran this Pre-Show Link Orgy post.
• Mainstream blog Techcrunch reported earlier today about Google Beefing Up the iPhone Interface.
• And I discovered I only need to carry my iPhone to navigate the Macworld showfloor, thanks to this little iPhone app. Great, cuz this laptop bag is already getting heavy….

More soon.

Steve Jobs: ‘iFlubbed’ – I Don’t Think So!

September 11, 2007 / / 1 Comment

So, have you heard about the term being applied to Uncle Steve’s move last week regarding the iPhone? Yes, you could have guessed — it’s “iPology” 🙂 …. There’s some interesting insight on this whole overblown thing on a great new blog called MarketingApple. This guy (also named Steve) I think really sets the record straight. An excerpt from that post:

Folks, you are living through what has to be the Golden Age of marketing and Steve Jobs is its king.  Enjoy the ride.

Stevejobsiflubbed

Then, a followup post yesterday on the same blog heralds the latest news that — you got it — one million iPhones have now been sold.

I was discussing this whole thing as it happened with my close colleagues — all of us huge Apple users and supporters — and I got a great summation from one of them over the weekend. He doesn’t want me to use his name, but he’s a very smart guy (serial entrepreneur), and I just have to share his recap and insights with you:

Jobs is the king of concept and design. It’s easy to market the coolest phone ever and the best MP3 player ever, but good luck conceiving, designing, and developing them.

By cutting the iPhone prices, Jobs created a problem, then conceived and developed a solution. Typical Steve Jobs.

When the first rumors surfaced about Apple getting into the cell phone market, people laughed and predicted instant failure. Before the iPod, the Diamond Rio had more than 50% market share, and they were dropping the price quarterly to meet new competition. Apple came out with the iPod (with a hard drive) at 3-5 times the price of the average price of MP3 players at the time and couldn’t make enough of them. Other MP3 players with hard drives came out shortly after at half the price, and those companies couldn’t sell the ones they produced for the launch, while Apple couldn’t make enough of theirs. Then, when you could buy flash MP3 players for $20, Apple released the Nano at $250 and the Shuffle at $150, and, again, they couldn’t make enough of them.

Steve jumped on 2.5″ and 1″ hard drive technology for the iPod and, later, on multi-GB flash, when they were both expensive, new technologies, and Apple’s volume alone drove the technology towards commodity pricing. Apple never dropped prices, they just come out with new models at the same prices with thinner designs and more storage.

They can’t release iPhones the same way, even though their prices have fallen, because they are using so much flash. It costs them less to make the 8GB today than the 4GB four months ago. They could drop the price to gain wider market acceptance, so they did. Adding more storage and making the iPhone thinner won’t be enough to release a new model. They need to bump up the speed, make the display as big as the case (40% larger), add faster broadband, and add a VoIP softphone. (Nokia has them and HP just released the new iPaq with more features and a VoIP softphone built in.) All the new cellular chips designs have WiFi embedded, so ALL new phones next year will have WiFi. The cellular carriers may block the SIP (the de-facto standard for VoIP, session initiation protocol) ports to disable VoIP, and there will be a new RTP (real time protocol) invented to transmit VoIP over any open port — maybe that’s what Steve is up to next? 🙂

People just keep laughing every time Apple does the unexpected, but their concept and design is so good that they become the market leader. I can’t wait for the iTV-LCD, the iDVR, the iCarStereo, and the iGameBox.

Now, does that nail the situation, or what? (And also raise some interesting new possibilites.) I told you I hang around with smart guys….

UPDATE: To correct a typo….sorry.

Hello, Cingular? This is AT&T – We Just Killed Your Brand

January 12, 2007 / / 1 Comment

The new AT&T next week will start phasing out the Cingular brand it acquired full control over recently, this after several billions of investment in brand advertising over the years, a Reuters story reported last night. Attcallingcingular It quoted a highly placed AT&T official and said the process is expected to play out over the several months, with communications in the interim showing dual Cingular-AT&T identity.

So, I guess the naysayers of Cingular being the choice of carrier for the iPhone deal now have something else to talk about. The brand slate is in essence being wiped clean, with the “new” AT&T really just building its brand. That’s nice for Steve Jobs and Apple, in my opinion, being partnered with a fresh new face in the cellular brand space. What’s ironic is that Cingular actually acquired the old AT&T Wireless, which had been a good early player but began having problems with an aging network. That company, however, has no connection at all with the new AT&T — which is really the old SBC. Got that? I can personally relate to this whole thing because I was an AT&T Wireless customer for many years, then went through the changeover to Cingular, and now will go through the changeover back to the AT&T brand.

Hey, how about that AT&T? What do us round-trippers get for hanging in there all these years? How about a free iPhone? [HAH! The cellular industry treats loyal customers like trash. All they care about is sucking in new customers, offering them the world.]

But where I really relate to this story is this: I was one of four consultants involved in the Cingular name development process, hired by their branding firm — back in ’99, I believe it was. That was fun. No, Cingular wasn’t one of my name ideas. Mine were much better… 🙂 I came up with some 50 of them — all coined, clear name candidates. I originally thought the word Cingular sucked (naturally), but then absolutely loved what the company did to build meaning around the brand — which was the work of their outstanding advertising agency, the New York office of BBDO. I thought it was really stellar branding work, one of the best new brand development efforts I’d seen in years. Of course, they had the budget for it, too, and they poured on the bucks — including Super Bowl ads. It was the kind of thing I’d put in the class of Apple. And, for that reason, I wasn’t surprised to hear in Jobs’ iPhone announcement that Cingular was part of the deal. Both firms get consumer branding, bigtime. Now I guess we’ll see how much the new AT&T (nee SBC) really does.

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CES Post 8: Whoa! Cisco Sues Apple

January 10, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Well, I guess it’s one more post from the airport. Cisco just sued Apple over the iPhone name, according to this Wall Street Journal alert that just hit my in-box here in the sports bar:

TECHNOLOGY ALERT from The Wall Street Journal — Jan. 10, 2007 — Cisco sued Apple for trademark infringement over the “iPhone” name Apple chose for its new cellphone, unveiled yesterday. Cisco obtained the iPhone trademark in 2000, and had been in talks with Apple over rights to the name.

“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name,” said Mark Chandler, Cisco’s general counsel. “There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.”

Iphonelogo_1

I was just talking about this situation with some guys last night at the Blog Business Summit party. I said Podtech had reported a source told them Apple had reached some sort of licensing agreement with Cisco for the name. Guess they were wrong!

I said I still didn’t understand why Cisco did a PR announcement of their iPhone line a few weeks ago, if they were in fact negotiating with Apple to let them have the name. One guy I was talking with last night said the December announcement was obviously them posturing to pressure Apple in paying more for the name — that is, to actually raise a higher awareness of the name being associated with Cisco, in an attempt to hold up Apple for more bucks. I said back in late December that I thought it was a really lame, kind of rushed-looking marketing intro. But, at that moment last night, I thought that guy might be onto something. He said they probably reached some 11th-hour agreement with Jobs since then for Apple to buy the rights to the name. But then I still wondered how Cisco would retract, or correct, that recent introduction of their iPhone product line…

Alas, this guy’s conjecture was wrong, too! The parties obviously didn’t reach any agreement at all. And it just amazes me that His Royal Steveness would have the cajones to go on stage yesterday and tout this name as his own! But, then, I guess I shouldn’t be. He’s basically just saying, “Screw you guys, then — sue me.” Obviously, he knows the market wants Apple to have this name, feels it’s theirs, and somehow this overwhelming force will overcome all.

This will get interesting, for sure. Unfortunately, we may never know how much he pays Cisco to give up the name. But I am definitely NOT betting against Jobs prevailing here.

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CES Post 7: Winding Down

January 10, 2007 / / 1 Comment

This will be my final post from the BlogHaus, at about 11:00 am on Wednesday. It’s been great. Now sitting here with Tom Hawk of Zooomr and Andru Edwards of Gear Live and some of his people, who are all busy publishing. (Tom told me he won’t make his 1000 photo upload goal, but he’s halfway there. He only uploads really, really nice pix, though. Somebody else just said there are 30,000 photos now up in Flicker tagged CES 2007. Yikes! I did a bunch myself, mostly of the BlogHaus.)

Had a great time last night at the Blogger Business Summit party — met a lot of interesting folks. Then back to the BlogHaus, which was going at full capacity, Robert Scoble holding court in one corner, pizza in another. And lots in between. One new person I met was a guy who’s launching the first trade show for the the blog world….called, guess what? BlogWorld! Sounds like a serious endeavor, from a guy who’s run lots of successful shows — Rick Calvert is his name. It’s scheduled for November — in Vegas! Don’t know if there’s a site up yet, but looks like it’ll be at www.BlogWorldExpo.com.

Anyway, I’m going off to some other business soon here, then heading for the airport about 3:00. Just picked up all my email, and learned I missed the cut for a lunch with Guy Kawasaki in Minneapolis on the 19th, before his big talk at the U of MN. Apparently there were only 7 slots at the table, and my friend Gary Smaby tried to get me on the list, but too many muckety-mucks already, I guess… 🙂 [Thanks for trying, anyway, Gary.] But I’ll sure be there for the talk following, which is already sold out.

Guy should be very happy the temps are finally dropping in Minnesota (lows below zero this weekend, I hear) — because, as you may recall, what got him to our state in January was the National Pond Hockey Championships, which are held on one of our city lakes. And people were getting real nervous they wouldn’t have ice, with our temps hovering around 40 for so long. Sounds like the ice will be real hard by the time Guy gets here! Anyway, looking forward to seeing Guy again, hearing his talk, and seeing him play hockey.

Cheers from Vegas! It was a good trip…

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