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iPad Gladiator

Apple, iPad and Accelerating Growth in the Enterprise

Feb 2012/in /by

The most exciting development in the Enterprise today is not, as Salesforce and Jive would have you believe, “social networking for business” but the not-so-stealthy explosion of the iPad as a productivity tool.

We see dramatic deployments every day, especially into the enterprise sales and customer marketing teams which are the teams we work with most often. Eric Lal of ZDNet keeps a site updated with iPad pilots — often documenting large company decisions we have already seen on the ground — thousands at a time!

Even big blue IBM may now have one of the largest Apple and iPad deployments in the world. As an Apple fan it’s terrific to see the corporate world finally seeing the light. Even my own R&D team (for a long time PC-based nerds) are adopting a mix of Apple in with their PCs, iPads (of course for development) and iPhones in with Android phones (which after all you can hack and play with so much more easily than an iPhone).

I also agree with Peter O’Neill at Forrester that many market researchers are falling behind in their methodology and not including broad enough sources of corporate deployment. They have a PC bias and may be missing the rapid growth of BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policies at companies large and small. BYOD is not only popular but in the end it’s cheaper. Cisco pioneered this policy 5 years ago, showing that it was, in the end, cheaper for IT to support. And while IT departments still worry about data security, I was convinced this was solved the day my Symantec customer told me in 2011 that he could now work officially work on the iPad (Symantec is the most paranoid company on security – appropriately so given that it’s their business).

There are two major waves happening for enterprise sales teams right now: social collaboration (yes I don’t think Salesforce and Jive are wrong) and the iPad. And the FirstRain customer intelligence system is right at the intersection of the two – with our sizzling hot iPad app and integration into the top collaboration portals. We have customers deploying in all of them: Jive, Salesforce, Microsoft and Quad (Cisco) and in every case enterprise sales reps also have iPads (either their own or company issue) so they can stay on top of their major customers wherever they are.


And I hope I never have to use a PC again… although this is a false hope since my husband is the lone hold out in our family because he is an electronics designer and needs the high end tools which will probably never be on Apple (sigh).

Image from AllThingsDigital

Tablet and Finance and Data

Financial Firms Fastest Adopters of iPad

Jan 2011/in /by

Interesting report from Good Technology was written up by Securities Technology Monitor today on the different rates of adoption of the iPad between different segments – and not surprisingly the financial services industry is way ahead.

Typically we have seen financial services be more conservative among our customers – especially when it comes to security and technology on the desktop (IE6 anyone? Ugh) but when it comes to facing the client the financial services industry has always been nimble at creating the most attractive image. Having your financial advisor, or your sales person, show up with an iPad has sex appeal and raises the client’s confidence that the advisor is on the leading edge. And the visual appeal of the iPad’s crisp, clear screen would make almost any performance charts just look better.

Good’s fourth quarter report shows that in the battle between iOS and Android tablets the iPad is taking share – activations climbed from 60% to 68%. Blackberry is not included in the study since Good’s value to their customer is adding Blackberry-like security to non-Blackberry devices. It will be interesting to see what changes, if anything, once RIMM has a competitive tablet.

water ripple

Can the Telcos calling business survive the iPhone now?

Feb 2010/in /by

A warning tremor rippled through the telco business last week – did you notice it? Apple announced that it will now allow iPhone users to use Internet calling services over cellular networks. Up until now you could use VoIP but only through Wi-Fi, i.e. not in most of the places you’d like make a phone call.

Last week “Apple … confirmed the change and said it applies to applications for the iPhone and the new iPad tablet device unveiled this week, some of which will come with 3G capabilities”.

You may remember that not long ago Apple blocked Google Voice which then triggered an FCC inquiry. Now “FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Thursday praised Apple’s latest decision”.

This is just the beginning of a disruption that will eat away at the core calling businesses of AT&T and it’s competitors. iPhone 3G apps from VoIP providers like fring, iCall and a soon to be upgraded Skype will start to eat away at call time and, while there are some technology challenges that are still annoying today, it’s only a matter of time.

Like many other technology trends it’s starting small but the disruption will be long term and profound. If your customers are in this space, or you invest in this space, there is a How To on our support blog you can use to get FirstRain to watch this space for you.

book store

Do the Kindle and the iPad ring the final deathknell for the traditional bookstore?

Jan 2010/in /by

There is a fundamental change already underway in the world of books and it just accelerated yesterday. I don’t know whether to be happy to sad.

I have a Kindle. I love it, but I know I am a bit of a geek. To me, evidence that the world of books was shifting forever came when my mother (who is over 70 but how much over is private!) stated that she wanted a Kindle. And then yesterday Steve Jobs announced the iPad which has my kids friends all a’twitter (actually a’texting would be more accurate since Twitter is for old people) about ebooks now.

A couple of days ago I starting researching Amazon in FirstRain and, thinking about this phenomenon, went hunting for interesting content. As with most of our users, I tend to read certain sources and types of content more than others because of I believe they have better insight and are more reliable. FirstRain helps me sort through the noise easily by choosing the content type or sources I want to read. By selecting blogs only, I noticed a story from November titled Amazon (AMZN): “The best is still ahead”

“Amazon announced that its Kindle e-book reader is now its most popular selling item, both in units and in dollars. That led to a big acceleration in revenue growth (28%, the fastest in five quarters), while earnings leaped 67%.”

Expectations are that the holiday season was extremely successful for Amazon as online retailers, by most accounts, took share from brick-and-mortar retailers. The economic disruptions of the past two years have actually meant an acceleration in consumers’ adoption and use of the Internet as a retail channel.

Amazon’s earnings call is today so I’ll be looking for the transcript on FirstRain tonight (I can’t take the time to listen but I will speed read it) since this change to ebooks is such a ground shift in my way of consuming books – which I do voraciously.

But Amazon has bigger plans than my reading addiction. “Amazon is no longer content to be the world’s biggest e-tailer. Its new goal is to become the world’s leading retailer. Period.”

Aside from the other markets that Amazon has aspirations to dominate, I believe the company will own the market for books, both hard copy and e-books, in the next few years. Sadly the independent bookstore will all but disappear – although maybe there is room for one large single chain for the older readers who like to walk the isles, touch and smell (Yes, one of our engineers at FirstRain actually used the word smell) the books.

From looking into this in our system, it looks like the winner here will be Barnes & Noble (BKS), but I don’t believe the company will grow organically. Over the next few years, Barnes & Noble can prosper by becoming the brick and mortar bookstore choice and Amazon and Apple will garner the rest of the market share for books with both online hard copy sales and e-book sales.

Borders is definitely in decline. It will close an estimated 240 stores during the three months ending January 31, 2010 for a total of roughly 300 Waldenbooks stores over the past 13 months, or close to 70% of all Waldenbooks outlets! Retail analysts at Davidowitz & Associates give Borders Group a 50-50 chance of survival. (Added note – right after I posted this I saw the CEO has announced he is leaving and they are cutting 10% of their corporate staff).

From the Barnes & Noble website, as of October 2009, the company operates 775 stores. However, keep in mind the number of stores Barnes & Noble had at the end of 2004 was 820 so they are also down a bit. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that analysts expect an avalanche of bookstore closings this year. A new report by Grant Thornton report says 10,000 retail stores will have closed by the end of 2009. Of that number, 400 will be bookstores, which is a 500% increase in bookstore closings over 2008.

Within large department stores like WalMart and Target, the small numbers of book titles are probably safe and books will continue to be sold in niche markets like the point-of-sale newsstands in the airport where Hudson Booksellers seems to have most of the market – unless everyone who flys gets an iPad the way everyone who flys today has a cell phone .

Sadly used bookstores will probably disappear as well as no industry undermined by its greatest partisans survives for very long. Remember when CD sales plunged after music could be downloaded? Today, we can find any used book in the World for pennies on the dollar on Amazon and on other sites. “With the Internet, nothing is ever lost. That’s the good news, and that’s the bad news” says author Wendy Lesser in a New York Times piece by David Streitfeld (12/28/08).” But would this mean when I buy a first edition as a gift (as I did for a dear friend’s 50th birthday last year) I would not be able to hold it first? Hmmm… not sure about that.

What is certain is that the earthquake for books has hit, the after shocks and still coming – the iPad being the latest – and ten years from now I will probably only be buying the really hard to find history books I read in hard copy. Everything else will be coming from the cloud… another area Amazon wants to dominate but for another post.

apple

Tracking Apple rumors with FirstRain

Jan 2010/in /by

On the eve of the rumored Apple tablet announcement, after Apple has just announced the best quarter ever, it’s interesting to look at how we stay on top of a hot topic like Apple rumors.

FirstRain has a topic called “Apple Rumors” because there is an abundance of chatter on the Web trying to answer the question “What’s next for Apple?” and it takes our ranking algorithms to pull out just the interesting stuff and remove the junk, duplication and noise.

The topic works particularly well since we crawl many of the sources of chatter for the company, which include 100s of blogs worldwide that seem to only discuss Apple’s future products. Anyone who has ever followed the blog the Boy Genius Report would know the valuable insight that select bloggers can provide. To reduce the noise on the Web, FirstRain uses a proprietary system to rank blogs in terms of authoritativeness and content quality.

This is how this topic is reported within FirstRain – and you can set up a saved search that will push the ranked web results to you in RSS or email.

In one quick summary using our signals on the right hand side or in the chart, you can see the rumors that may be interesting to follow up with additional research. Or, if you’re about to step into a meeting with Apple or listen to their conference call, the rumors could provide you with ideas for questions of the team.

  • Will iPhone OS 4.0 use Bing as default search engine?
  • Will iPhone 4 casing will be touch sensitive?
  • Will iPhone 4G gets OLED removable battery and video chat?

And you’ll notice what appears to be a possible June launch date for a Verizon iPhone, which has been speculated about for quite some time.

Note – Apple does try to shut down rumors too – as when they sued Think Secret and got it to shut down because it seemed to have too much inside information.

AAPL_1

Reading the Signals on Apple and the Mobile market

Jan 2010/in /by

The three most recent Signals on FirstRain tell an interesting story:


Combine this with a look at volume of content on the web around Apple. This is a chart of web content volume for Apple – here you can see that the discussion on Apple went quiet for a while, it then heated up around the Mobile computing discussion, but despite all the considerable chatter on the much-rumored Tablet on the web, the Quattro acquisition generated an even larger spike in web content.


All signs are that 2010 is the year that marks the major transition in Mobile computing platforms. The explosion of smart phones, the rapidly growing tablet choices, ebooks etc. all free consumers from their PCs and even from their Macs.

If the new Apple “Tablet” is as sexy a product as the iPhone was (and there is no reason to believe it won’t be) – their new move will allow them to grab an interesting piece of the mobile ad market and put Apple again in a commanding position.

This is probably why the Quattro acquisition is such a hot topic on FirstRain.

Jobs_health

Steve Jobs’ health – blogs and rumors lead the AAPL stock price by a week

Jan 2009/in /by

Here’s an interesting chart on the relationship between rumor, blogs, news and the stock price for Apple around Steve Job’s health . The period is Dec 22 thru Jan 5. The red line is blog volume on his ill health, the blue line is formal reported news on his health and the black curve is AAPL stock price.

Initially Apple announced that this would be the last MacWorld and that Steve would not be speaking. The stock dropped. Then Dec 30 the rumors start that Steve’s health is deteriorating. The blogs are ahead of the news and in higher volume than news, and the stock again dips. Then, when the news is official from Apple that Steve has a “hormone imbalance” (sadly no longer the whole story) the official news sites spike up, and blogs have a lower spike.

This is an example of the type of thing we see in FirstRain all the time. Blogs are ahead that something is up. They are often written by specialists with inside visibility into what’s changing – in this case people close to Apple. News follows and the stock moves on news, but that’s the same time everyone else gets the information. Most investors don’t yet have access to tools to help them sort out the junk in the blogosphere and filter for reliable sources. Queue FirstRain.

 

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