By now, we’re pretty familiar with the term 4G LTE. But that in and of itself is somewhat surprising. It took 12 years for GSM wireless technology to reach one billion connections, and WCDMA took 11 years. But LTE will hit the same mark in just seven years of existence, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a brief explanation would be that LTE (or Long Term Evolution) is a fourth-generation wireless standard that provides users with faster data speeds, all the while making more efficient use of a carrier’s wireless spectrum.
We’ve already seen a plethora of LTE devices hit the U.S. market, and now that the technology is established in major markets like Korea, Japan, and the U.S., the growth trajectory for LTE will only continue to rise. Strategy Analytics expects over 90 million LTE connections to be activated before the end of 2012, and that figure should reach the 1 billion mark by 2017. This is far and away the fastest implementation of new wireless technology to date.
At the same time, however, previous technologies were born into a world with far fewer overall connections. LTE launched with over 6 billion connections in existence in the world, whereas CDMA was first revealed at a time when less than 1 billion connections had been activated.
“The race is on for mobile operators to reduce cost per GB to match the rate at which revenue per GB is falling,” said director of service provider analysis Sue Rudd, in a prepared statement. “LTE is one of the key tools to deliver this improvement, with the early volume in LTE devices an encouraging sign for operators looking to maximize return on their LTE investments.”
To her point, we certainly wouldn’t mind a reduction in data costs, considering that we’re more data hungry than ever and unlimited data has basically been nixed across the boards.
It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2,280 downloads for paid apps.
For free apps, other competitive categories include ‘entertainment’ (6,700 daily downloads), ‘social networking’ (5,800), ‘lifestyle’ (3,900) and ‘music’ (3,900). Interestingly, in the paid app charts photography apps rank just behind games and entertainment apps. Still, it currently only takes about 270 daily downloads to rank in the photography top 25 for paid apps.
These numbers, of course, are always changing and this just represent a snapshot of what Distimo found when it compiled this data last month.
Update: We just talked to one source with a lot of experience in building mobile apps and who also currently runs a top App Store app. According to this source, Distimo’s numbers are too low and may just represent data from a relatively small number of apps. Keep that in mind as you read Distimo’s data.
Given the popularity of games on iOS, Distimo also took a closer look at the various gaming subcategories. Here, arcade and action games lead the pack:
This is the first time Distimo is releasing a detailed set of these numbers. It’s worth noting, though, that at the end of 2011, the company reported that it still took about 45,000 daily downloads to rank in the top 25 of most popular free apps. Since then, though, Apple has been working hard to shut down various scams and bots that automatically downloaded apps and allowed developers to rank in Apple’s charts without having a real user base (then, once you are in the top 25, of course, real users will automatically find you, of course). Judging from Distimo’s latest data, these efforts are starting to pay off and will hopefully make life a little bit easier for legit developers.
New Samsung trademarks for terms like WAMOLED and YOUM suggest it will begin producing flexible OLED displays this quarter, meaning consumers will begin seeing them in device by the end of the year.
You’re paying your developer $150,000 a year plus change. Why let them get distracted by dry cleaning or grocery shopping?
While the very biggest companies like Google and Facebook have figured out that they need to import barbers, car washes and gourmet food onto their campuses to keep their talent focused, smaller companies don’t have the scale for these luxuries.
That’s the reason why Exec, the task-management service from Justin.tv founder Justin Kan, is opening corporate accounts today. Companies will be able to set up an account and allot a certain amount of money every month for employees to delegate errands they don’t want to do. If they don’t use the credits, then they will just roll over into the next month.
Exec is a task-management service that gets people to run errands on-demand like getting keys copied or cleaning for $25 an hour. Unlike other services, it doesn’t make users manage a bidding process and vet offers.
“If you want to have someone do a gig, there are usually a lot of steps involved,” Kan said. “I’m trading mental energy to save physical effort. I want money to replace mental energy and physical effort. I want this to require as little thought as possible.”
Kan said he’s launching corporate accounts because so many startups had asked him to do it. Stripe, a mobile payments processing startup, used Exec to get beer and 50 chairs from Ikea down to their office for a developer meetup. Greplin, a personal search company from Y Combinator, also uses Exec to get food for the office from Trader Joe’s.
Right now, Kan is focused on preserving user experience over growing too fast. He says 91 percent of the app’s reviews are five-star ratings and 98 percent are either four- or five-star ratings. Exec is only available in San Francisco at the moment.
“For an app like this, the first time that it doesn’t work for you is the last time you’ll use it,” he says. He’s hired lots of workers and sent through a multi-step training process to make sure supply outpaces demand for now (just like Uber had to do when it first launched).
Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Amit Runchal, who blogs at Interactioned.
The speculation of what Apple is going to do with all their cash has long been a favorite topic in the tech and financial press. But the thinking along those lines is often akin to the cognitive dissonance one experiences when seeing a billionaire driving a Civic. What’s the point of having all that money if you’re not going to spend it?
That thinking is what we saw when Apple recently announced their cash plans. Two common reactions went something like this:
Saddened by Apple’s plan for a huge dividend. Apparently, they have nothing truly capital-intensive in the product pipeline.
— Max Levchin (@mlevchin) March 19, 2012
@mlevchin But they haven’t been investing it! They’ve been hoarding it. They clearly have no idea what to do with it.
— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) March 19, 2012
The first argument is easy enough to pick apart, as others have explained this past week. In short, even after issuing dividends and repurchasing shares, Apple’s cash reserves will likely grow this year. They added more than $35 billion in cash and equivalents last year alone. There’s nothing “capital-intensive” that they can’t do, short of opening an Apple Store on the moon. That Apple television set that’s rumored to be in the pipeline? That’s nothing. Foxconn’s factories, for example, have a gross book value of $14 billion as of the end of 2010. Apple makes that much in a few months, and only needs a fraction of that to actually get the production lines going on a television.
The idea floating around before Apple’s Monday announcement that they would be buying a company like Foxconn or building factories of their own seems to make sense, since Apple is one of the more vertically integrated consumer electronics companies in the world. And they are, after all, notorious for both control and quality. But they’ve managed to lead the industry on the latter without owning a significant portion of their supply chain. And as for the former: they have the factory owners right where they want them — by the short and curlies. Hence the razor-thin margins Apple deigns to give them. Here’s New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg in This American Life’s recent retraction episode:
Apple’s the gold standard. As a result, Apple has this enormous negotiating power, and they use it, I am told by our sources, very aggressively to come in and basically say, “Show us your entire cost structure, every single part of what you pay and what you… and piece of your, your, your internal economics, and we are going to give you a razor-thin profit margin that you’re allowed to keep.
In other words: Why buy the cow?
Apple also, more importantly, finances the factories by loaning them cash and buying significant amounts of components in advance. This “Bank of Apple” strategy further establishes control over the factories, locks out competition and seems to be why competitors can’t seem to match Apple’s cost structure for products like the iPad. And let’s not forget that if Apple did own the factories, they’d also have to deal with the additional scrutiny of being responsible for factory employees, which no Western company in their right mind wants to do right now.
This brings us those who think Apple has run out of ideas on what to do with their cash. The fevered result of this are the acquisition talks — hence the recently oft-mentioned and largely nonsensical suggestion that Apple should buy a company like Twitter. But Apple’s approach to acquisitions has always been extremely conservative, especially compared to their brethren. Since 2010 Apple’s bought a grand total of nine companies. In that same period Google has bought 52.
People like Henry Blodget may think that Apple’s been hoarding money Scrooge McDuck-style because Apple doesn’t know what to do with it. But if you take a look at Google’s list of acquisitions, you can make the argument that Google doesn’t know what it’s doing either.
Apple’s acquisitions — with admitted 20/20 hindsight — paint a clear picture of what each of those acquisitions were for. LaLa: iCloud. Anobit: Flash memory components. Siri: duh. In short: tactical acquisitions.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that you can’t say the same for Google. Perhaps the grand master Google plan hasn’t become apparent to me yet. But given the inability of Google to make real money off anything besides advertising and their continued struggles in social seem to show a company that’s trying to buy a strategy for the future instead of the tools to make their strategic vision happen.
That last point, I think, engenders a lot of the thought behind the conversations we see about Apple and their cash. Five years ago, a frequently discussed acquisition target was YouTube. Everybody wants to watch videos on their iPod! Apple makes iPods! Ergo YouTube. Today, it’s Twitter. Social is big, so Apple should buy Twitter. Everyone’s tweeting from their phones! Apple makes phones!
Ergo, foolishness.
Apple’s strategic vision for their future has always been clear: they want to sell highly profitable consumer electronic devices. Lots of them.
That’s it.
So how does buying Twitter — or any “social” company — help them sell more devices right now? The notion that Twitter as an acquisition target has to be “kept from the hands Google, Facebook and Microsoft” doesn’t scan. Never mind that Twitter has given no indication of being up for sale — even if they were, how does a Google acquisition of Twitter slow down iPhone sales? In this world, does Google block Twitter and third-party apps from Apple products and a significant number of Twitter users? Does that lead to massive amounts of users fleeing iPhones for Android devices?
The answer to all these questions is clear. Twitter’s success at this point is largely dependent on remaining as platform-agnostic as possible, acquired or not. A company still trying to find a serious revenue stream that is highly dependent on mobile can’t afford to cut themselves off from a huge portion of the mobile market. See also: any social network trying to monetize mobile, including Facebook. Apple’s position in mobile means they doesn’t need to spend a penny to give a strongly-worded “suggestion” on how high these companies should be jumping.
That’s why acquisition targets like Twitter don’t make sense for Apple right now. Again: why buy the cow? Apple doesn’t need Twitter or any company like it. Twitter needs Apple. Twitter needs the massive iOS user base and now the system-level integration. Apple is making bit factories like Twitter as dependent on Apple as actual factories like Foxconn are.
So what’s that cash for? Besides the absolute freedom and control that $100 billion gives Apple — a company that probably still remembers the time they had to approach Microsoft, hat in hand — it’s important to remember that Apple isn’t close to achieving the success they want. Tim Cook said it himself:
In our most recently recorded quarter we sold 37 million iPhones. That’s a very large number but it represented less than 9 percent of handsets sold during the quarter.
Apple still has a long way to go with all their products in markets that have been much less hospitable to the company. China, where iPhones are still not available on the biggest carriers, is a perfect example. When you consider the new territories Apple still wants to conquer — and especially in territories where Apple’s current carrier-subsidized selling approach for phones isn’t the norm — Apple’s cash stockpile doesn’t reflect a company that doesn’t know what to do with their money.
It reflects a company that packed an enormous steamer trunk for a long and treacherous journey.
