PayPal’s New Card Reader Seems Very Familiar

The new PayPal payment dongle is to Square…..

As the Saber Pyramid tablet is to the iPad. 

The sad part, is that only one was meant to be a joke. 

[Image credit: The Verge and The Huffington Post]

Maybe There Really Will Only Be Five Computers...

Thomas J. Watson in 1943:

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

John Battelle 2011:

Right now, I’d wager that the handful of brands leading the charge to win in this market might be Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and….IBM. About five or so. Maybe Watson will be proven right, even if he never was wrong in the first place.

Things change really fast in this industry. 

Amazon may sell 3-5 million tablets in Q4: Forrester

Amazon is not going to create a Kindle/iPad hybrid. Jeff Bezos knows that LCD technology can’t match e-ink for real reading. That is why I wouldn’t expect the current Kindle form factor to go out the door like most analyst are predicting. If anything Amazon could release a brand new competing product, which brings me to my next issue.

Where do analyst get their data? Predicting Amazon is going to sell 3-5 million of a product they haven’t seen yet is just plain stupid. Even for them. 

Evernote's $50 Million in Funding Goal: Build a Hundred Year Company

This is great strategic thinking:

So when we make any big decision, whether in fund-raising, or product design, or partnership strategy, we ask, “would this make it more or less likely that we’ll be around in a hundred years”, and if the answer is less we don’t do it. This financing is just one more solid step in building the hundred year company.

Why Android will gain HUGE tablet marketshare later this year

Robert Scobles’s vision of Android tablet future is of single app devices for business and institutions. Apart from the low margins the device manufacturer earns(if they’re lucky), who else gets to win here?

Do developers get to sell dozens of apps? Does Google make any money? 

Nope.

Then how is this sustainable?

Why go back to the silly notion that market share is everything. It has to be the right market share: People or business who buy apps. Dozens of apps. No just a large installed base that is virtually useless to the developer ecosystem. 

Note to entrepreneurs: Your idea is not special

Brad Feld:

Often these entrepreneurs think their idea is brand new – that no one has ever thought of it before. Other times they ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect their idea. Occasionally the emails mysteriously allude to the idea without really saying what it is. These entrepreneurs think their idea is special and magic. And they are wrong. The great entrepreneurs are already focused on the implementation of their idea. They send me links to their website or software. They describe the business they are in the process of creating (or have already created). They point me to what they’ve done to implement their idea and show real users who validate that the idea is important. And they quickly move past the idea to the execution of the idea.

As part of working with entrepreneurs, I see this all the time. People that don’t share their idea freely usually have never built anything before, and thus don’t know how hard it is to build and scale a unique product that pay love or pay for(which ends up being the same depending on you’re market) .

Google Announces ‘Instant Pages’

Here’s Google full use of it’s infrastracture to blast past competitors. 

Duke Nukem Forever: barely playable, not funny, rampantly offensive

Ben Kuchera from ArsTecnica:

In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It’s not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.

Software(or video game development) is not like wine. Don’t forget to release early and often. This fiasco could have easily been avoided. 

IBM's centenary: The test of time

The Economist:

But [Apple] has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price.

I think Apple applies this principle very effectively, but completely disagree it charges a premium. iPhones, iPads and Macs compete on features and price with their competitor’s products. 

iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows

Robert X. Cringely on iCloud:

The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

I really don’t pay attention to what Cringle usually says, but this time he’s kind of right. Apple really dosen’t have much to loose if the PC becomes just another device with iCloud. Microsoft does.

The mobile revolution is about data, not files. Until iCloud is released, all data in mobile apps rest in silos, unlike desktop apps. iCloud frees that data and makes it available to other devices in the ecosystem. It’s the bold move and it’s worth it for whoever controls it.