Is there a Run-a-something winner of the Internet Awards?

April 30, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 

The 29 strong shortlist for Nominet‘s Internet Awards 2013 were announced yesterday and we’ve initially analysed the domain names that appear (TLD’s).

The results are as follows:

  1. Deservedly in this position is  .co.uk with 31%
  2. A close runner up is .org.uk at 24%
  3. The podium, unfortunately is joined by the ubiquitous .com with 20%

Overall just under 2/3 of the shortlist have a .uk but that of course means that more than 1/3 don’t!

Here’s the shortlist by category:  

Innovative Internet Business Online Skills and training Doing good online
4Networking  Enterprise Education Trust   Age UK
My Mummy made it Ltd The Dementia Centre Virtual Care Home Global Giving UK
Signable Listening Books Guess 2 Give
Simple Shop Brightside Online Mentoring Pennies
Trademark Direct BrainPOP UK Selfless
Connect <> Lockleaze V-inspired
Making the Internet Safer Digital innovation in Public services
BBC – Share Take Care   G-Cloud with Skyscape
Business Crime Reduction Centre   Lambeth Library Challenge
Internet Watch Foundation Online Watch Link (OWL)
Oii My Size Run a Club
Online Compass School Guide
Safer Internet Day 2013 UK Online Centres

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We’ve had a very superficial and entirely subjective look at the candidates and our top five (one from each category) would be:

  • Innovative Internet Business - Simple Shop (bright idea & local)
  • Online Skills and training – BrainPOP UK (lovely name & sound effects!)
  • Making the Internet Safer – Business Crime Reduction Centre (All very neat and tidy)
  • Doing good online – Pennies (expansion of a tried and successful concept)
  • Digital innovation in Public services – Run a Club (nice concept & looks uber practical and pretty!)

Our top three would be Simple Shop, BrainPOP UK and Run a Club., with the brains just edging out  the shoppers & clubbers!

We were rather disappointed:

  • A – That none of the Public Services sites appeared to be umbrellaed under GOV.uk
  • B – That BOOKMARK Your Library didn’t appear (but we don’t know the rules etc etc)

Both individuals and businesses can apparently, sort of vote, both on the website or on twitter with the hashtag #nia2013. We may come back with some suggested abbreviations for the names a little later.

The results will be announced and a shindig is taking place at The British Library on July 4.

Filed Under: Net t'internet

The iDisappear Act

April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Increasingly various apps and systems are appearing which disappear your messages and attachments! These range through virtually all media forms including text, photos, videos, voice messages etc etc.

Some of the available systems / apps are:

 efemr seems to be of French origin and is a Lean Startup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup. Their app uses a simple hashtag system of #xm or #xh where x is a number and m=minutes and h= hours used to nominate a deletion timescale. It appears that it may still be possible to view at least certain retweets etc particularly on the older Twitter apps.

Gryphn is a secure text messaging system for Android with a destruct option. It also includes videos and pictures.  

Poke is a Facebook iPhone app system introduced by them at the end of last year. A viewing limit is set in seconds (1,3,5 or 10) for recipients.

Snapchat arguably is the most well known app (on both iOS and Android) and was developed by 4 Stamford students and was launched back in 2011 There’s a 10 second destruct scenario again. They even have a very detailed parents guide!

Wikr was founded “by a team of security and privacy experts” and says it has “military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages with sender-based control over who can read messages, where and for how long.” iPhone / iOS availability only at present.

We can forsee commercial (eg both privacy and promotional) uses for these facilities as well as the obvious personal ones.

Surprised no one has come up with a system or an app called iDisappear 

We’ll leave you with a Snapchatter video which hopefully will not self destruct!

Filed Under: Social

Keep an I on our week (Hello Indigo edition)

April 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Indigobells!

 Our top three articles this week were:

  1. The Tech Rich List 2013
  2. Smart outships Feature in Q1
  3. Apple Revenues may Flatline for the first time since 2003

We also as usual covered Apple’s latest quarters results in some detail

At Easter we mentioned the  ubiquitous personal assistant Indigo and it’s arrival in the not too distant future.

Well it’s here and freely available now for Android phones and tablets (OS V4 upwards) Windows Phone 8 and Desktop/Laptop devices (Safari, IE or Chrome browsers).

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Get the app and/or info from:

Initial impressions from the video are favourable and we will start using it over the weekend and possibly report back later with a more “hands on“ opinion after we’ve run it for a few weeks.

Its primarily voice based and, sort of, has its own mini ecosystem in that it is obviously cloud based and available on any internet connected device hence switching across your smartphone, tablet and desktop/laptop.

While the video is 10 minutes worth, it comes recommended due to its featurefullness!

We’re off now to find a more appropriately coloured header graphic possibly some indigobells! Only limited success as it appears that the English bluebell season is as retarded as the asparagus one!

Filed Under: I week

Smart outships feature in Q1

April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Click to enlarge

Both IDC and Strategy Analytics have released their preliminary smartphone shipments estimates and Samsung leads the way and they both agree on the top five rankings.

Their headlines though differ:

  • “More Smartphones Were Shipped in Q1 2013 Than Feature Phones, An Industry First According to IDC”
  • “Samsung captured one-third of all smartphone volumes worldwide, while LG became the world’s third largest smartphone vendor for the first time ever.” Commented Strategy Analytics

Both actually agree that numerically smartphones oustripped/outshipped feature phones although Strategy Analytics come in at 56.3% (210 million out of a total of 373mn) whilst IDC show 51.6%% ( 216 mn of a total of 419).

Click to enlarge

Trendforce have estimated a figure of 216.4 million shipments in a rather colourful portrayal of the top 10 with distinctly differing # 3-5 vendors. The figures are from their DRAMeXchange division.

We have had a rather interesting report of Adobe‘s brought to our attention (The State of Mobile Benchmark Q2 2013 pdf) and we couldn’t but help notice the chart per our graphic showing the UK as having the greatest proportion of web browsing from iOS smartphones amongst the 6 countries. The UK also led the iOS field on tablets.

We’re not sure if these countries would constitute our M6 and will give further consideration to this in due course together with Adobe’s report.

M6 = The world’s six Mobilest countries (ref G8). Founding member USA, others to be decided. Nominations by Comment!

Filed Under: Mobile, Phones

Worldwide Tablet Shipments – First out of the Blocks

April 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Very rapidly, after Apple announced its results on Tuesday (post Wall Street’s close), Strategy Analytics  today were the first to come up with their Global Tablet Shipments by Operating System for the quarter.

Interestingly they also allow us to calculate a total including White-box tablets. This figure at 47.6 million is some 7 million above the branded figure. They define “A white-box tablet” as “…. a product produced by one company (the manufacturer or ODM) that other companies (the vendors or OEMs) rebrand to make it appear as if they made it. White box tablets invariably use different components to branded tablet in order to keep costs to a minimum.” (ODM stands for Original Design Manufacturer).

Whichever global total figure is used it certainly confirms the strength of the market. The bumper holiday Quarter 4 figures (per IDC) were some 52.5 million so the drop this quarter is only 23% (on the branded figure). The equivalent figure in 2012 was 42%.

Apple can take some pleasure in increasing its market share to 48% v’s around 43% in the previous quarter.

Microsoft at least warrants a mention and might even creep into the top 5 in supplier terms with its Surface we shall see when the other estimates are released. Strategy Analytics also think it has some way to go as “Very limited distribution, a shortage of top tier apps, and confusion in the market, are all holding back shipments.”

 In other news earlier this month IDC  reported an exceptionally weak PC market with shipments down by 13.9% on the comparable quarter last year. This brings them down to 76.3 million which on Strategy Analytics Tablet estimates means the gap has narrowed again. We will report further on this when IDC release their Tablet estimates but it looks as if Tablet sales could overtake PCs in 2015 and it could be even earlier!

In completely unrelated news IHS iSuppli estimate that worldwide shipments of 10 million smart glasses by 2016 could take place. We shall see!

Filed Under: Tablets

Apple Revenues may flatline for the first time since 2003

April 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 The guidance given by Apple and our high low mid earnings per share calculations show the following:

Apple guidance Q3 2013 
Apple I.co.uk
High Low Mid
Revenue $ billion 33.5-35.5 35.5 33.5 34.5
Gross margin % 36-37 37 36 36.5
OpEx $ billion 3.85-3.95 3.85 3.95 3.9
Other O/I $ million 300 300 300 300
Tax rate % 26 26 26 26
Earnings per share $ n/a 7.50 6.58 7.03

The EPS figure is calculated on the 946 million shares as at March.

Now exercising our calculator a little further, in somewhat hypothetical mode, we reckon if the whole $50 billion share buy back was undertaken today at a price say of $420 about 119 million shares could be acquired of the fully diluted number of 946 million. This would add something like $1 to the earnings per share.

That increase could optionally be obtained by:

  • A quarterly revenue increase of $4 billion
  • A gross margin increase of 4%

The latter would appear at least difficult! The former incidentally would be roughly equivalent to 6.5 million iPhones!

Our graphic looks at the moving annual total revenues and their quarterly growth. It does look as if with the top end guidance of $35.5 billion being achieved revenues will flatline this quarter which hasn’t happened since 2003.

Our question is whether a $50 billion share buy back will help innovation and growth?

Filed Under: Apple

Apple’s new Results Guidance

April 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

ROUNDUP am April 24

 From Apple:

 From elsewhere:

  • Conference call transcript Yahoo

Well keep looking for a complete version and add it later if found! 

Instant analyst opinions/headlines:

April 23 updates & article

Apple‘s results, for their Q2 2013 (13 weeks ended March 30) should be released at about 9.30 pm BST followed fairly rapidly by their Conference Call at 10pm BST (2pm PST) which you can listen to live.

UPDATE  9.45pm BST – Results announced:

  • Revenues $43.6 bn
  • EPS $10.09
  • Dividend +15% (to $3.05 (?)
  • Increasing its buy back programme by $50 billion
  • Share price after hours  sharp movements but post conference call virtually unchanged (Formal close was at $406.13) Dipped initially but came back & then rose quickly & then fell back! – Possibly  buy back programme stsbilissed the price. Nasdaq after hours price  Wall Street Journal after hours price
  • Unit sales millions Macs  4.0, iPods 5.6, iPhones 37.4, iPads 19.5
  • Guidance Q 3 Revenues $33.5 – $35.5 Gross margin 36% -37%

Info:

We’ll do a full wrap up tomorrow with transcripts and instant reactions. The conference call was introduced with almost funereal music! Tim Cook, sort of, apologised for the share price performance. Quite a lot of discussion on margins unsurprisingly. Also more detail on the buy back programme which seems to be starting almost immediately and goes through 2015.

UPDATED Results schedule

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The, sort of, headline figures to look out for we think are:

  • Quarter 2 results consensus Revenues / Earnings per share – $42.4 bn / $10.00
  • Quarter 3 mid guidance  consensus Revenues / Earnings per share – $38.91 bn / $9.08 (based on last quarters guidance this might imply an expected range of revenues of $38-$40 bn and gross margins of 38%-39%)
  • Some believe the dividend may be lifted by over 50% to $4.14 (from the current $2.65). At this level it would yield more than most dividend paying stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and be up there with the highest yielding technology stocks. Others think it will remain unchanged!
  • The share price continues it’s weakness but had a mini rally yesterday to close at just under $400 ($398.67) down from its peak of just over $700 in mid September last year. Early on today it was over $400.

The source of much of our information is Philip Elmer-Dewitt editor of Apple 2.0 to whom we, and likely many others, are indebted. We’ve collated certain of his information and apologise lest we have miscompiled in any way!

Our normal graphic uses simple averages (mean) for the Professionals and Independent figures and the mid guidance information from Apple. We also add our guesses. We’re going low on the iPad as the tablet market is hugely competitive. We will update these after the results come out.

This is the first Quarter in which Apples new guidance will be tested – we mentioned before that this departure from their historic practice was significant and we as well as they will be disappointed if they under (or over) shoot their range.

To put this in context Philip Elmer-Dewitt’s graph shows the extent to which Apple have historically overshot their guidance. This go round we think their guidance range is probably something like $9.33 to $10.33.

We will report back later after the results are released and the Conference call has taken place. Usually the Q & A session adds value. We shall see, or rather hear, if this continues to be the case!

Filed Under: Apple

The Tech Rich List 2013

April 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Tech Rich List 2014

We have as last year produced our Technology take on the latest UK Rich List. As ever it is our subjective definition of Technology. Remarkably little change from last year  (TECH RICH LIST 2012 {Link}) in either the UK or US listings. So here’s the UK for starters.

UK Technology Rich List 2013
  Tech  All  ___ Name Link Worth £ million Source
 ’13  ’12 ’13  ’12 +/- £mn
1 (1) 7 (8) David & Simon Reuben 8,281 1,198 Property, internet
2 (2) 19 (16) Sir Richard Branson & family 3,514 104 Internet, transport, finance +
3 (3) 48= (42)= John Caudwell 1,500     - Mobile phones
4 (5) 70 (70) Michael Moritz 1,125 43 Internet
5 (4) 71 (69) Sir Terry Matthews 1,122 32 Computers
6 (6) 78 (86) Charles Dunstone 1,080 220 Mobile phones
7 (7) 98= (92)= Alan Sugar 860 60 Electrical goods
8 (9) 113 (139)= Niklas Zenstromm 785 185 Internet, software
9 (11) 117 (155) Simon Nixon 733 197 Internet
10 (10) 122 (153)= David Ross 710 170 Mobile phones, property
11 (8) 135 (112) Ruth Parasol & Russ DeLeon 667 -33 Gambling
12= (16) 158= (184)= Peter Rigby 550 70 Computers, hotels, aviation
12= - 158= (164)= Peter Wood 550 50 Insurance
12= (18) 158= (212)= Dou Steyn & family 550 130 Insurance
15 (12) 168 (158)= Mo Ibrahim & family 520     - Mobile phones
16= (13) 173= (164)= Andrey Andreev 500     - Internet
16= (14) 173= (164)= Kevin Cash 500     - Internet, property
18 (15) 192 (184)= Mike Lynch 480     - Software 
19 (19) 195 (218) Peter Jones 474 72 Mobile phones
20 (20) 258 (232) Peter Wilkinson 335 33 Internet

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The only addition, which was really an omission of ours last year, is Peter Wood of Direct Line & eSure.

Interesting to note that all of our top 20 have a worth greater than The Queen who comes in at £320 million!

At an overall level the top 20 this year have a combined value of £24.8 billion (£22.5bn) so that’s an increase of some 10.2% even in these austere times!

Just outside the top 20 there are some up and coming individuals who may well appear next year. They are:

·       Nick Robertson of Asos fame valued at £278 million

·       Daniel Ek of Spotify – £250 million

·       Charlie Sharland of AppSense - £250 million

Worthy of mention is Jony Ive (or Sir Jonathan as the Sunday Times call him) of Apple with an estimated worth of £120 million.

Overall at the top of the UK Rich List is Alisher Usmanov with a worth of £13.3 billion. The top Techie(s) have a worth representing some 62% thereof!   This is, sort of, confirmed in the Forbes billionaires listing where he comes in at #34 with $17.6 billion.

Now on to the worlds (mainly US) top tech billionaires.

Forbes Lists – World Billionaires (March 2013) 
Technology All   ____ Name   Worth $ million Source
’13  ’12  ’13  ’12 +/- $mn
1 (1) 2 (2) Bill Gates 67,000 6,000 Software- Microsoft
2 (2) 5 (6) Larry Ellison 43,000 7,000 Software – Oracle
3 (5) 19 (26) Jeff Bezos 25,200 6,800 Internet – Amazon
4 (3) 20 (24)= Larry Page 23,000 4,300 Internet – Google
5 (4) 21 (24)= Sergey Brin 22,800 4,100 Internet – Google
6 (7) 49 (41)= Michael Dell 15,300 -600 Computers – Dell
7 (9) 51 (44) Steve Ballmer 15,200 -500 Software – Microsoft
8 (10) 53 (48) Paul Allen 15,000 800 Software  Microsoft
9 (6) 66 (35) Mark Zuckerberg 13,300 -4,200 Internet – Facebook
10 (8) 91 (41)= Azim Premji 11,200 -4,700 Software – Wipro

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No change here at all but should we all feel a little sorry for Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Premji who have lost 24% and 30%  of their fortunes? Good to see Mr Bezos on the podium!

In spite of this the overall total has increased by 11.2% to $258 billion ($232 bn).

Just outside our list, at number 11 is Laurene Powell Jobs and family at $10.7 billion. It looks as if Forbes don’t have a concept of inheritance! Their profile introduction starts “Silicon Valley’s wealthiest woman, …..” Accurate but perhaps a mention of Steve might have been appropriate!

Overall at the top of the World’s billionaires is the Mexican Carlos Slim Helu & family with a worth of $73 billion. Bill Gates, in spite of the philanthropy, has a worth representing 92% of  this figure and is at #2 overall.

Filed Under: Technology

Keep an I on our Week (Spring’s Arrived Edition)

April 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Our top three articles this week were:

  1. How to Score with Big Data
  2. Explosive Mobile News 
  3. Digital Delight from Deloitte 

We also covered the record breaking Internet Retail Sales figures for March in our usual copious detail!

Click to enlarge

Next week (Tuesday evening BST) Apple announces it’s quarterly results for the 13 weeks ending March and there are has already been some gloom spread around by one of its supplying semiconductor companies. Cirrus Logic’s results were below expectations and its next quarters guidance was, how should we say, not bullish! We will of course be covering the results as usual.

We’ll leave you with a video from Katherine Jenkins who after a rather busy week winding up her 2013 European Tour last night at the O2 in London, amongst other attendances, is participating, in hopefully all of, the  London marathon for the first time tomorrow. You can support her, cousin Hannah, and the Macmillan Cancer Support charity here.

The video is of another of her live performances at the O2 a couple of years ago. She’s singing Angel.

Filed Under: I week

A Digital Delight from Deloitte!

April 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

CLICK to access The Deloitte Consumer Media Survey 2013

Deloitte have just released the seventh annual edition of their research “Media Consumer Survey 2013 – Love in a cold climate”.

We will return with a few comments on the content a little later but initially would like to recommend a visit to their interactive version of the report which we found rather engaging.

There are six chapters in the study:

  • Digital Britain
  • Scatter cushion computing in action
  • Technology rides to the rescue again
  • Newspapers and magazines
  • Paperbacks for the 21st Century
  • Video games

 In the interactive version each chapter has its own graphic with a clickable READ MORE facility which takes you to the relevant part of the pdf . Forward and back arrows take you to each of the six graphics. Where they have 2012 / 2011 buttons clicking those displays the relevant years information.

All in all rather neat we thought warranting another piece of alliteration to compete with their 3Ds “ a digital demographic divide”!

Now first the shocking news. This year smartphones were found to be used primarily to ……. make phone calls!

Here’s the 2012 (2011) order (from inspection!):

  1. Phone calls (2)
  2. Text messaging (1)
  3. Take still photos (6)
  4. Browse the web (4)
  5. Email reading (3)
  6. Email composing (7)
  7. Mobile online search (5)
  8. Play games (11)
  9. Listen to music (10)
  10. Updated social network page (8)
  11. Online banking (12)
  • Read news articles (9)

At an overall level the (YouGov) survey found that the average UK citizen owns 11.4 types of media devices, up from 9.7 in 2011.” Our individual count here currently (with no double counting) just gets us into double figures!

The growth rate (or lack of it) by selected devices we found interesting with six of the fifteen having negative growth, two zero growth and seven above the line!

  • Negatives were in descending order Desktops, DVDs, Laptops, Radios, Flat Panel TVs and Mobile Phones.
  • With sort of, no growth were Games Consoles and Portable Media players
  • Positive growth in ascending order were Smartphones, PVRs,  E-readers, Connected TV’s, Blu-ray players, Handheld games consoles and Tablets.

The only real surprise there, to us are the E-readers. We thought greater displacement/cannibalisation  by tablets was taking place. Perhaps that will become more apparent this year.

We do though agree with Benedict Evan’s presentsation we noted earlier this week that whereas TV’s are limited (by & large) to a total available market of household numbers (ie 25 million ish in the UK) virtually all the personal mobile devices have around double that market.

Much more to appreciate in the report – especially the interactive version.

Filed Under: Technology
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