Two noteworthy pieces of new yesterday regarding the move of gaming to the digital decade. First, Sony announced they would be acquiring Gaikia, the streaming video-game service. The second article was on EA’s full move to digital.
A lot of ink is spilled on the ownership rate of devices, but often overlooked or at least underexamined is the average number of each device owned by households that own the device at all. While aggregate ownership rates speak to the adoption cycle, the number of devices owned by owning households have important implications for upgrade cycles (I wrote about adoption cycles and upgrade cycles here). The average number of units owned per owning households for a given device are some of the most valuable statistics to come out of CEA’s annual Consumer Electronics Ownership and market Potential Study.
A look at how some companies are leveraging crowdsourcing for strategic input.
Something Henry Ford and Steve Jobs would have strongly opposed.
Over the last few weeks both Google (see Nexus Tablet and Nexus Q) and Microsoft (see Surface) have announced major hardware initiatives. In both cases, these hardware initiatives have been primarily focused on the mobile/tablet ecosystem. Even Microsoft’s recent software announcement – Microsoft SmartGlass – is targeting the growing tablet ecosystem. Both companies are taking a more hands-on approach to the growing tablet ecosystem as they seek to more closely integrate their software strategy with a hardware component. These moves are partly in the hopes that a hardware component will spur software demand and help buoy their entire platforms respectively.
Often I see individuals talking and writing about adoption cycles and upgrade cycles as one in the same cycle. However I think an important differentiation can be made between adoption cycles and upgrade cycles.
Several sections within Nick Bilton’s recent NYT’s article on the changes underfoot at Twitter makes me question if companies are approaching their mobile strategy in the most appropriate way. Near the close of the article, Nick writes:
Much has been written about big data (insert air quotes) over the last 12 months and articles are now regularly showing up in mainstream publications (also see: Six Provocations for Big Data, IBM‘s Big Data landing page, and a couple of NYT articles from the past few months here and here). During a panel during The TV of Tomorrow conference held earlier this month in San Francisco, Jeremy Toeman suggested big data was a bubble. He made this comment with a reference to twitter and other similar data. I’ll call these data public data – which suggests there are private data which I’ll talk more about below.
Second screen is today’s Wild West. It’s a nascent market with a ton of experimentation. There are going to be a few winners over the next three years, but there are going to be even more losers as the market shakes out and consumer preferences firm. There’s been much written about ruining the second screen experience, but lately I’ve been thinking more about how the second screen experience might ruin the first screen experience.