And now a little bit about Groupon IPO plans to raise $750mm. Some highlights from filing:
7,000 employees and 83 million subscribers in 43 countries
$714 mm in revenue up from $30mm the year before
With claims of a frothy valuation, not surprising to see All Things D report on the Groupon reporting “Smack-down” following the IPO announcement
Closing with a fun little conceptual hack worthy of a big Apple announcement week. This “invisible phone” uses hand gestures and a depth-aware camera to interface with your smartphone–essentially allowing it to sit in your pocket or purse.
Check out Little Thor, a miniature hero who gives this year’s favorite Super Bowl character, Little Vader from the Volkswagen commercial, a run for his money.
Will Turnage, VP, Technology & Invention for R/GA, shows off a shirt he hacked for a South by Southwest session. This shirt not only flashes when he taps his phone through a Bluetooth control, but also lights up when someone tweets his twitter handle.
AppNation
AppNation brought the growing consumer application trend to the forefront of the minds of all those who were fortunate enough to attend.
Drew Ianni, Chairman of AppNation, joined us at Anthem Worldwide in San Francisco to share his view-from-the-top of the Apps Ecosystem.
Mobile
I spoke at AppNation last week on Mobile Video. It’s going to be huge—already ½ of total mobile traffic in 2011. Here’s a run down of relevant data.
Perhaps the title question is too narrow and should focus on industries Apps will disrupt beyond Media, and my prediction is that Apps will disrupt nearly everything from the way we consume and engage with brands and media to how we transact, visualize, congregate and curate our daily lives and loves. With that thunderous prediction let me offer a couple of windows into the Apps EcoSystem which Gartner predicts will become $58 Billion in a few years and conclude with some thoughts informing these predictions:
AppNation Conference in San Francisco this Wednesday and Thursday, April 27-28, promises to deliver the “State of the Art” view of the EcoSystem. Register to attend in person and catch full-benefit of networking with founders and leaders in this emerging space or follow the hashtag on twitter: #appnationconf
Spend an hour with Drew Ianni, AppNation Chairman and Founder, presenting his view from the top of the Apps Ecosystem. Former Wall Street and Jupiter Analyst as well as top guy at ad:tech, Drew created AppNation to provide the best and biggest conference for the space. You can catch his Briefing at Anthem San Francisco here:
And, here are the companion slides to the video:
Some additional thoughts to complement my prediction that Apps will disrupt nearly every business and consumer interaction:
As Drew points out the value chain is shifting from the hardware–although the most elegant hardware can win massive share as we’ve seen with the iPad and iPhone–to the software or Apps on these devices. This content spans devices and channels jumping from Social/Web to Mobile and PC/Tablets and eventually connected TVs. This shift has been swift and taken the most immediately associated/impacted industries by storm and surprise. PC veteran, Michael Dell, admitted yesterday that he didn’t see Tablets coming and PC-maker Acer reported 24% drop in sales as a result of tablet disruption. The primary utility for Tablets? Apps.
As a result of this consumer draw, we can anticipate new, creative business models and entertainment forms to emerge and become as large a part of popular culture as anything Hollywood has ever produced. And, of course, Hollywood may spawn and will appropriate these new entertain forms.
As we’ve seen with Social Media, consumer adoption and new behaviors will inspire enterprise adoption as well. So, my prediction started in the title with Media, the most obvious place for disruption as we see media transformed with superior features, connectivity and transaction abilities to change how we think about distribution and engagement with Print, Radio, TV and even the Internet media that came before Apps. In establishing a new medium and channel it’s important to emphasize this is about disruption not replacing or destroying. Incombent business models will have to evolve and embrace the new medium to survive and thrive in the disruption.
Will Apps have their own mass-events like the Oscars, Grammy’s, Cannes or Tony’s? They already have their own conference. Hope to catch you at AppNation this week and every year going forward. Cheers!
Lots of theories buzzing around about Android’s growth, from carrier advertising to economic realities in developing countries, but the data is undeniable: mobile is a two-horse race and Android is just getting started. You can see the numbers (chart to the left) but there’s nothing as powerful as watching through time-lapsed visualization. Here’s a video Google released visualizing phone activations around the world. In fact, some of the spikes you’ll see in traffic come from Motorola’s Droid release in November of 2009 to support the first argument driving adoption.
FWIW, I have nearly all iOS (Apple) devices from ipods and ipads to laptops and desktops around our house. But I keep my mobile Android to keep a close eye on how the OS is driving parity in many areas with iOS and exceeding it in many other areas you’d imagine Google would win in, like visual/speech-to-text/barcode/text/you-name-it search & navigation. As you prioritize market entry in mobile you can’t count out Android. I’ll go as far to preduct that in 6-12 the platform will lead development conversations. What do you think?
Apps/Mobile: Perhaps in honor of Drew Ianni’s successfully launching the AppNation Conference/Empire September 13-14 in San Francisco, it seems like most of the round-up is flavored with Mobile/Apps news, even in those that relate to Acquisitions, Apple and Facebook. Here are some App-related news inspired by the event:
According to Nielsen the vast majority of phone owners are willing to pay for apps. Read more in SF Chronicle
app downloads–only one health-indicator and aspect of the apps economy which includes advertising, services, infrastructure and more–represent $4.1b in 2009 and will grow to $17.5b by 2012; 7b downloads today growing to 50b by 2012 according to research commissioned by #2 appstore, GetJar.
Zynga switches to Facebook Credits — this is a big deal and huge step towards a common currency across developers, ecosystems and eventually even devices, if you believe the next story
Pretty impressive 9/11 iPhone app examines & makes, history – designed to make those that weren’t there understand what happened, and perhaps feel as though they’d been there
VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra delivered an Android demonstration during his keynote at Google I/O conference today at the SF Moscone Convention Center. There’s a fair amount of flattery to the Apple iPhone/iTouch user interface and definitely signals progress for handset makers, content providers/media and perhaps carriers. My verdict’s out on the carriers as their data plans make little sense to the consumer, add little value (not much benefit over wifi) and feel short-term–lots of dislocation potential within these technologies demonstrated today.
And a quick demo of “streets” view–check out what happens when he flips it into compass mode. Location based content gets a big boost when this becomes the expected consumer outcome.
Slashdot brought to light a Popular Science articleon the amazing practice at work in China to appropriate intellectual property in the form of design, architecture, brand, packaging–you get the picture, nothing is off limits. It’s stealing and there seems no stopping it, so my attention shifted to other implications. The one that caught my eye was the iPhone clone b/c it includes open-source applications over Linux with the same fancy-schmancy interface. This generation may lack the yummy, bouncy “physics-IA” operating system perks of the iPhone, but give it time. Something like this may force Apple to reconsider its “walled garden” techniques to give consumers the choice they want.
I thought this chart was pretty telling in terms of Apple’s ability to generate, maintain secrecy (otherwise you would have seen more spikes between 1/03 and 6/29) and ramp awareness before street date. In entertainment marketing, this graph would approximate an idealized “event/tent-pole” movie that becomes a blockbuster. What I find more interesting than the advertising and PR flighting is that this is nearly all UGC. It’s the ultimate case study on buzz/WOM and value-generation through cultivating a measured dialogue with all influencers and consumers in an ecosystem. Continue reading →
Twitterverse has been down, but threw together this image from an old screencap to sum up 6/29.
People in line ageraged 35 posts (unscientific poll of three folks I follow–tbrunelle: 52; steverubel: 30; rexhammock 25). Even the people who weren’t in line joined the party as evidenced by my posts and others backlashing.
Apps/Mobile: Perhaps in honor of 
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