I’ve written numerous times about the growing importance of curation (see Curation and Discovery, The future of Curation, and Context and Curation). Wedding Snap is a service available as an iPhone and Android that curations photos taken around a single event but from multiple devices into a single location.
Good Technology is a privately-held company which offers a mobile solution for corporate and government clients. The core offerings include email, calendar, and secure mobile access to applications and company data. While the customer base is likely small relative to the entire universe of tablets and smartphones and many end-users are likely bringing personal, mobile tech devices like smartphones and especially tablets into the enterprise directly (ie the consumerization of IT, or CoIT), the companies activations are up 50 percent in the last year. More, the technology has been deployed with more than half of the Fortune 100 companies. Each quarter, Good Technology releases a summary of the past quarter’s activation activities so exploring the trends there within can be insightful for understanding some of the trends currently influencing the tablet ecosystem.
Good Technology recently released their Q1 2012 Activation Report. Here are a few of the highlights:
- iOS devices accounted for 80 percent of the activations in 1Q12
- the top 6 devices are iOS devices.
- iPad (both the new and the old) represent 97 percent of tablet activations in 1Q12
- iPads were activated the most in three industries: Financial Services, Business/Professional Services and Life Sciences, with Life Sciences showing disproportionately higher rates of iPad activations when compared to overall device activations
- Good released support for Windows Phone 7.5 in April 2012, so activations of Windows Phone devices like the Nokia Lumia might be underrepresented in the Q1 results. Related data will be included in the Q2 2012 activations report
A recent NRF study shows about 12.7 percent of consumers plan to buy tech this Mother’s Day. Sixty-six percent plan to buy flowers.
NPD is reporting 85 percent of U.S. consumers say price will be an extremely important/important factor in deciding where to shop in the near future. This is consistent with CEA research that continuously finds price and feature set are the two primary factors influencing purchasing decisions. While other factors – notably environmental-related factors like use of recycled materials or energy consumption – have increased over time, price and feature set remain the top two factors driving purchasing decisions.
Apple surprised to the upside (though it really shouldn’t be a surprise) with their quarter results today. Here is a quick overview of what they reported for fiscal 1Q12:
- Revenue: $46.3bn (+64% q/q +73% y/y) v. consensus of $38.9bn and company guidance of $37.0bn.
- Gross margin: 44.7% for the quarter (up 440 bps q/q) v. consensus of 40.8%.
- Operating margin: 37.4% (up 660 bps q/q) v. consensus of 32.5%.
- Earnings Per Share: $13.87 v. consensus of $10.08 and company guidance of $9.30.
- Mac sales: 5.20M (+6% q/q +26% y/y) v. consensus of 5.16M. This figure includes 1.48M (+16% q/q +21% y/y) desktops and 3.72M (+3% q/q +28% y/y) portables.
- iPhone sales: 37.04M (+117% q/q +128% y/y) v. consensus of 30.2M
- iPad sales: 15.4M(+39% q/q +110% y/y) v. consensus of 13.9M
- iPod sales: 15.4M (+133% q/q) v. consensus of 13.6M
There has already been much written on the results so I’ll just add my thoughts (in bold) to the commentary below:
Later today, Apple will report Q1 figures. We know much has changed in the tablet market over the last three months. Earlier this week, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported tablet and eReader ownership (unsurprisingly) surged during the 2011 holiday season.
This is consistent with what I expected (and subsequently reported) following Black Friday and the (unofficial) start of the holidays. Starting with Black Friday (but really through the entire holiday season) several things too place to help drive tablet sales. First, prices came down significantly. Prices for many of the “high-end” tablets were marked down significantly and lower priced tablets entered the market in calendar Q4. A declining price helps up-take. Secondly, both devices have been in the marketplace for 18+ months and are moving quickly into mass market appeal. We are moving into the fat part of the adoption curve. Finally, tablets were the loss-leader for many retailers on Black Friday. While the volume wasn’t high on a single-store basis, in aggregate there were a plethora of tablets (from a variety of OEMs) bought during the weekend across a myriad of retailers from Best Buy to Big Lots to Radio Shack to Staples, to ToysRUs. CEA estimates 14 percent of those who purchased tech over the weekend bought a tablet – up from six percent in 2010. eReaders also did well over the weekend with an estimated 15 percent of tech shoppers buying an eReader. This figure is up from 13 percent in 2010 and two percent during the 2009 Black Friday weekend.
According to Pew, both tablets and eReaders are now owned by about roughly 1/5 of the US population. More than a third of those living in households earning more than $75,000 (36%) now own a tablet computer and almost a third of those with college educations or higher (31%) own tablets.
I’ve written in the past how adoption always follows an s-shaped adoption curve. When it comes to digital data adoption we are in the fat (steep upward sloping) part of the adoption curve.
Reuters reported on Monday that Google is now streaming 4 billion videos a day. Moreover, 60 hours of video content is uploaded every minute -suggesting it would take 10 years to watch just want is uploaded in a single day. Sure there is duplication. Storage is “free” and whenever a resource is free, it tends to be wasted. Reuters reports YouTube is only making money on about 3 billion videos streamed weekly – would be interesting to know the make-up of those videos.
Perhaps most interesting will be what YouTube does with their Original Channels. Some of these media partners include the likes of Madonna and Jay-Z. YouTube has become the MTV of the digital decade.
It surprises me how many Internet properties overlook network theory. With storage prices at zero for the end user, aggregators win. Aggregators are the bookmaker of the digital decade.
Here is my presentation on some of the trends I was tracking headed into the 2012 International CES. I also highlight some of the product launches at CES. You can skip past the opening video which takes you through the week of CES in 3-4 minutes.
[prezi id=’gx1myc0u1-ka’ width=’600′ height=’450′]
This month Amazon’s new tablet the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet go on-sale this month. While both products are technically the house brand of competing retails, they’ll be widely available in a variety of retail channels. One would typically presume that a consumer interested in the Kindle Fire would just go to Amazon.com to make the purchase while someone interested in the Nook tablet would go to BN.com or a B&N store.
In fact, shoppers like to compare – even when they think they’ve made up their mind. A series of new tablet offerings – both garning strong media buzz – is a positive for retailers. While it is always difficult for a retailer to make margin selling what is a akin to the house brand of their competitors, the introduction of several competing devices creates a catalyst for consumers to enter into stores and compare. This will help drive traffic, potential sales of the devices, but even more important is sales of the higher-margin accessories. With the significant decline in physical media, several other elements are becoming traffic drivers. Today’s hottest hardware devices are now traffic drives. Confusion or multiple available selections within a category are also key traffic drivers.
ESPN is hosting live fights in a ring they are erecting in the middle of the 2012 International CES and I can’t wait. Read more here.