In this series, I will evaluate health of various businesses within Microsoft. While it’s easy to bash the biggest software company on the planet, I will be as objective as possible and give Microsoft credit when it’s due.
Augmented Reality — the ability to superimpose data and information over a view of the real world — is arguably hot these days, and there’s no scarcity of articles and blogs on the space and AR apps. VentureBeat first reviewed AR apps two months ago. Read the full article »
Voice has been transmitted as data for a number of years now, through Skype for example. But the way we use voice hasn’t fundamentally changed: consumers still communicate and leave voicemails in very similar ways as before. Read the full article »
While the iPhone and Android platforms and their ilk have certainly opened up the playing field to a long tail of developers, they are by no means cash machines. In fact, if you had planned on quitting your job to get rich developing apps for these platforms, you might want to reconsider — the chances of your making enough money to build a sustainable business or even survive are slim (see my earlier article on iPhone apps). Read the full article »
Apple’s iPhone has triggered “apps store” wars (with the iPhone as the clear leader so far), with almost every major mobile platform vendor now launching its version of an apps store. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even remember their names: Google’s “apps store” is called Android Marketplace, RIM’s is called BlackBerry App World, Palm’s is called Palm Pre App Catalog, and so on. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to all of them simply as “apps stores”. Read the full article »
Earlier we talked about several platforms on which to showcase your talent (the iPhone, Facebook, Android, Palm Pre, BlackBerry, and MySpace, to name a few). Having so many choices might cause developers to overlook the most obvious platform of all: the World Wide Web, plain HTML, and Flash. Read the full article »
While the “real” economy has been tumbling for the past two years or so, social applications, online gaming, and the virtual economy have proven to be fairly resilient in the face of the economic slump. Some reasons for this resilience could be that people have more free time, and that they generally don’t mind making small payments on virtual goods. The worldwide virtual goods market (which is a subset of the virtual economy) is estimated to be around $5 billion, with 80% coming from Asia (China, South Korea, and Japan) and only $200 million to 400 million from the US. Several players have emerged to take advantage of this opportunity. Third-party developers on Facebook are projected to make $500 million this year, and while most end users think of social applications (and games) as the only players in the space, there are several others. In this article, I will touch on only one missing piece of the puzzle: the virtual economy. Next week, I will cover some other players which together with social apps and online gaming make up the social media and online gaming ecosystem. Read the full article »
After reviewing social gaming companies, I move on to RockYou and LivingSocial — two very successful companies in the social applications space — to find out more about the similarities and differences between social games and apps.
You can see from the top Facebook apps list here that although they are fundamentally different, apps and games that are popular on Facebook and other social media are generally entertainment-based rather than utility-based. What’s more, on the iPhone, one out of three apps is an entertainment app or a game. Let’s look at some specific similarities and differences. Read the full article »
Social gaming is changing the way games are marketed and distributed. Rather than relying on big publishers and distributors such as Electronic Arts, studios are leveraging the power of social media to virally spread their games. In order to better understand how they have built sustaining businesses, I talked to the CEOs of some of the top social gaming companies. You will see that all of them have different yet successful strategies. Read the full article »
In an earlier post I argued that Google would benefit from acquiring search engines in verticals such as travel, jobs, and products. By doing so, Google can retain “rich” traffic which otherwise might directly go to those search engines for specific needs. Read the full article »
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
This is not just a book for designers, but for design thinkers. If you are involved in managing, designing, or launching a product of any type, I highly recommend this book.