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Illustration: Si Scott
You have to make choices.
Choose everything.
The online payment platform WePay designed its entire homepage through a testing process. “We did it as a contest,” CEO Bill Clerico says. “A few of our engineers built different homepages, and we just put them in rotation.” For two months, every user that came to WePay.com was randomly assigned a homepage, and at the end the numbers made the decision.
In the past, that exercise would have been impossible—and because it was impossible, the design would have emerged in a completely different way. Someone in the company, perhaps Clerico himself, would have wound up choosing a design. But with A/B testing, WePay didn’t have to make a decision. After all, if you can test everything, then simply choose all of the above and let the customers sort it out.
For that same reason, A/B increasingly makes meetings irrelevant. Where editors at a news site, for example, might have sat around a table for 15 minutes trying to decide on the best phrasing for an important headline, they can simply run all the proposed headlines and let the testing decide. Consensus, even democracy, has been replaced by pluralism—resolved by data.
The mantra of “choose everything” also becomes a way for companies to test out relationships with other companies—and in so doing becomes a powerful way for them to win new business and take on larger rivals. In 2011 a fund-raising site called GoFundMe was talking with WePay about the possibility of switching to its service from payment giant PayPal. GoFundMe CEO Brad Damphousse was open about his dissatisfaction with PayPal’s service; WePay responded, as startups usually do, by claiming that its product solved all the problems that plagued its larger competitor. “Of course we were skeptical and didn’t really believe them,” Damphousse recalls with a laugh.
But using A/B, WePay could present Damphousse with an irresistible proposition: Give us 10 percent of your traffic and test the results against PayPal in real time. It was an almost entirely risk-free way for the startup to prove itself, and it paid off. After Damphousse saw the data on the first morning, he switched half his traffic by the afternoon—and all of it by the next day.
Photo: Spencer Higgins
The person at the top makes the call.
Data makes the call.
Google insiders, and A/B enthusiasts more generally, have a derisive term to describe a decisionmaking system that fails to put data at its heart: HiPPO—”highest-paid person’s opinion.” As Google analytics expert Avinash Kaushik declares, “Most websites suck because HiPPOs create them.”
Tech circles are rife with stories of the clueless boss who almost killed a project because of a “mere opinion.” In Amazon’s early days, developer Greg Linden came up with the idea of giving personalized “impulse buy” recommendations to customers as they checked out, based on what was in their shopping cart. He made a demo for the new feature but was shot down. Linden bristled at the thought that the idea might not even be tested. “I was told I was forbidden to work on this any further. It should have stopped there.”
Instead Linden worked up an A/B test. It showed that Amazon stood to gain so much revenue from the feature that all arguments against it were instantly rendered null by the data. “I do know that in some organizations, challenging an SVP would be a fatal mistake, right or wrong,” Linden wrote in a blog post on the subject. But once he’d done an objective test, putting the idea in front of real customers, the higher-ups had to bend. Amazon’s culture wouldn’t allow otherwise.
Siroker recalls similar shifts during his time with the Obama campaign. “It started as a pretty political environment—where, as you can imagine, HiPPO syndrome reigned supreme. And I think over time people started to see the value in taking a step back and saying, ‘Well, here’s three things we should try. Let’s run an experiment and see what works. We don’t know.’”
This was the culture that he had come from at Google, what you might call a democracy of data. “Very early in Google’s inception,” Siroker explains, “if an engineer had an idea and had the data to back it up, it didn’t matter that they weren’t the VP of some business unit. They could make a case. And that’s the culture that Google believed in from the beginning.” Once adopted, that approach will beat the HiPPOs every time, he says. “A/B will empower a whole class of businesses to say, ‘We want to do it the way Google does it. We want to do it the way Amazon does it.’”
Says WePay’s Bill Clerico: “On Facebook, under the heading of Religious Views, my profile says: ‘In God we trust. All others, bring data.’”
Sunday, April 29, 2012
The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That's Changing the Rules of Business | Epicenter
Saturday, April 28, 2012
A father's lament: The real world is not a game | Internet & Media - CNET News
There was something about the Mama Bear family tech conference a week ago that creeped me out. I am the father of a 5-year-old boy, and perhaps a third of the people at this conference were trying to build apps for him. All the apps were well-intentioned. All were, at some level, educational.
Still, all the apps felt wrong to me. I wanted my son to have nothing to do with any of them.
I've been trying to understand why these educational apps were getting under my skin to this extent. It's not like I'm anti-technology when it comes to my child. He plays Angry Birds. We watch TV (together). He's a child of technology; how could he live in my house and not be?
A psychiatrist friend, listening to me rant about how these apps are trying to wilt my son's brain, sympathized, but not completely. Yes, he said, computer games can be addictive. In fact, in his opinion, teaching kids to expect the world to work like a computer game deprives them of learning real-world life skills.
But, he said, a truly good educational app can be effective like a book, or a teacher. You can't stick everything that pops up on a kid's iPad into the "evil" category.
So where are the really good apps?
The Vinci Tab II is an Android tablet preloaded with educational software for kids up to 5 years old.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)A few days ago, I handed my son a Vinci tablet to try out. This is another well-intentioned product for young children. It comes with pre-installed educational games carefully geared to kids up to about my son's age (actually he's a little old for it, but I occasionally make him earn his keep as a product reviewer).
I had the same feeling of foreboding about this product as I did about many children's apps I see. The Vinci reinforced this, unfortunately. While the game did in fact have educational payloads, the mechanics were, for the most part, dumb. How does pressing a button at exactly the right time to jump over a beach ball on-screen teach anything but how to operate a game, no matter what the game says it's supposed to be about?
The boy liked the tablet and its apps. But it's how he liked them that bothered me. The software sucked him in, and whatever lessons it tried to teach him were obstacles that seemed about as interesting as the flatly drawn beach balls. The real red flag came when I told my boy it was time to put the tablet down. He was so dialed in to the game mechanics that he panicked. He wasn't in learning mode, he was in addiction mode.
Did he retain the factoids and basic math and spelling skills he learned while playing? I think so. But I don't want him learning this way.
There is hope, though.
On the DIY app, kids snap pictures of their projects. On the Web site, shown, family and friends can award badges.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Yesterday, I read about the launch of DIY, a site and app for kids that's supposed to be a social destination for them to share their creative projects. They upload photos of stuff they've designed, built, written, or drawn, and then their friends and family members can award them badges.
Something about this site appealed to me as a father. Why was it better than all the learning games, with their impressive educational pedigrees? I couldn't put my finger on it. So I called up DIY's CEO, Zach Klein (formerly of Vimeo). Klein isn't a father himself, but he understands the child's mind. In a few words he crystalized for me what I find distasteful about most kids' programming.
"They are gravity-fed," he says. "There's a path of least resistance to get to the next screen." The player's job is to find that path, he says. Games like this "infantilize children."
The real world doesn't work like this. There are no shortcuts in life. You don't get a big reward for each tiny action. Real rewards take real work.
Related stories
DIY, he says, "gives children more responsibility than they are used to, not less." And the rewards aren't programmed. They come from peers and family. "We want kids to feel satisfaction, but we're suggesting it will take time and craft and love to earn it."
DIY is in a very early stage, and is too basic at the moment. In the interest of protecting kids, there's no personal information anywhere on the system; kids' identities are masked behind handles, and if a family member awards a kid a sticker, the kid can't see who it came from. But the thinking of DIY is right, at least to me: Encourage kids to engage with the real world. Use social-networking mechanics to reinforce it.
I loaded the DIY app on to my old iPhone 3G. I plan to let my boy use the app on this device without supervision. It's the first app I've seen that passes that test for me. I'm not sure he'll use it, but I bet he will. And I like it, because it's an accessory to his physical world, not a replacement for it.
This is an excellent article if you are interested in educational games for your kids. The best line is the description of most games:
"They are gravity-fed," he says. "There's a path of least resistance to get to the next screen." The player's job is to find that path, he says. Games like this "infantilize children."
Thursday, April 26, 2012
The Decline Of Android Foretells The Rise Of A Total Apple Monopoly | TechCrunch
I own an Android phone right now as well and completely concur with Matt's assertions around Android.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The Art of the Pivot
Very interesting article, with examples, of companies that have successfully pivoted from their original business model. It would be just as interesting to hear of pivots that didn't succeed but alas that would probably not get the same amount of click-throughs:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/the-art-of-the-pivot.html
Take Charge Product Management © | Advancing the Profession of Product Management ™
The project manager / product manager relationship
Sure we know that effective collaboration leads to improved outcomes and more effective teamwork. But what specific functional collaborations are key in triggering creativity, problem solving, fostering further team communication, and ultimately improving project outcomes? Just putting everyone together in a room at project inception doesn’t necessarily guarantee success.
From my experience, the most successful product development projects were those that had the product manager and project manger tightly coupled from the very beginning. Spending more time developing this relationship from the onset will pay dividends and increase the likelihood of project success.
If we can agree that the goal of a product development project is to create, develop, and deliver a product to the market, maximizing its value – the customer benefit and experience – while ensuring the return on investment (ROI). Then, nothing ensures maximizing ROI more than getting the definition correct at the onset of a project. Knowing where you’re going and how to get there, at the beginning of the life cycle, eliminates waste by avoiding unnecessary course corrections throughout a project.
Leveraging the expertise of project managers at the earliest phases of a project helps to get this definition correct by bringing their best practices and lessons learned to the table at a critical juncture – the start of the project. Engaging project managers early has additional benefits: (1) Project ownership is now ingrained into its leaders because they have helped shape the execution approach; (2) By working together to form the overall project definition in the beginning of its life cycle, the foundation of a team dynamic is put in place that spills over into the rest of the project organization as it is put together.
Product managers and project managers can strengthen this relationship by understanding three fundamental concepts from the beginning of every project:
- The product development and project life cycles are deeply intertwined
- The product’s production process needs to be collaboratively defined with clarification of the major deliverables and resources required to get the job done
- Shared incentives, performance objectives, and success criteria establish common ground for the entire team
Each one of these three concepts warrants its own discussion so I’m going to treat each one of these as separate blog postings. This should allow for more focused commentary allowing the concepts to be completely hashed out.
Monday, April 23, 2012
The Slow Decay Of The Microsoft Consumer | TechCrunch
Five years ago, Microsoft reported revenue of $14.398 billion. They reported a profit of $6.589 billion. Last week, for the same quarter, Microsoft’s revenue was $17.407 billion. Their profit was $6.374 billion. The company is still growing, but not fast. And they’re actually making less money.
Compare that with Apple. Five years ago, revenue was $7.1 billion. Profit was $1.0 billion — the first quarter with a billion dollar profit in company history. Last quarter, the company reported $47 billion in revenue. And they recorded $13 billion in profit.
On the surface, an apples-to-oranges comparison, perhaps. But it points to something that has happened. Apple has completely taken over the consumer market, while most of Microsoft’s growth these days comes from the enterprise side of things. Apple has destroyed Microsoft as a consumer technology company.
Sure, Microsoft is still making plenty of money — billions — off of their consumer goods. But the decent quarterly numbers they reported last week in some ways mask what is really happening: Microsoft is slowing morphing into a full-on enterprise company.
Everyone got all excited that the Windows division actually managed to grow last quarter. Because the broader PC market has been stagnant and Windows 8 is in testing mode, expectations were extremely low. 4 percent growth was considered a big win.
But Microsoft as a whole saw 6 percent growth year-to-year when it came to revenue. It wasn’t Windows driving it, it was the Business Division (9 percent growth) and the Servers & Tools Division (14 percent growth). Again, the enterprise side of things.
The Business Division is now by far the largest Microsoft division in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, Servers & Tools almost surpassed the Windows Division this past quarter. The last time that happened was the tail end of the Vista nightmare. It’s going to happen again. Microsoft’s two biggest businesses will be their enterprise businesses.
Even on the Windows side of the equation, this was the key statement in the earnings release:
Strong Windows 7 adoption continued with enterprise desktops on Windows 7 now up to 40% worldwide.
Nothing about the consumer side of Windows, just the enterprise side. That’s what led to the 4 percent growth surprise.
Windows 8 is due out at the end of the year, and I’m sure the Windows Division revenue numbers will jump as a result. But as these charts by Horace Dediu show, the jump is likely to be short-lived. Microsoft saw a huge revenue (and profit) spike when Windows 7 was released, then it immediately dropped and plateaued. It was back to the revenue grind and the profit stagnation.
Windows 8 could be better for the company, or it could be worse. The world is drastically different than it was even just three years ago. The iPad exists, for one. While Microsoft is going all-in (or at least half-in) on their tablet strategy with Windows 8, there’s no indication it will actually work. If it doesn’t that could significantly hurt the Windows Divisions’ numbers.
Another key difference over the past five years is, of course, the iPhone. Five years ago, no consumer had one. Microsoft controlled nearly 35 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. It was going to be a huge business for them. Today, that percentage stands at roughly 5. And even with Windows Phone, it’s shrinking, as Dan Frommer points out today.
Microsoft’s last-ditch attempt insert themselves into the mobile picture isn’t working. At least not yet.
Consider this: Apple’s iPhone business alone is bigger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined.
And that matters because again, that’s where consumers are today. Smartphones. Tablets. The PC business is going nowhere. Let’s just admit it: that’s not going to change.
The wildcard is the living room. This is the one consumer space where Microsoft has done better than Apple over the past 5 years. The Xbox 360 has been a big hit, and accessories like the Kinect have moved the market forward. Apple’s first Apple TV was largely a dud. The second one is much better and seems to be selling well, but it’s not a consumer hit in the same way the Xbox is.
But last quarter, a funny thing happened: Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division actually lost money. That had not happened since 2009. And it was the worst loss since 2007 — again, five years ago.
Since Microsoft reports Windows Phone numbers under E&D, some assumed the poor numbers were a result of things like Microsoft’s Nokia payout dragging the division down. But Microsoft themselves noted that the 16 percent decrease in revenue was the result of “a soft gaming console market”. This was later backed up by more numbers. The drop in revenue and the swing to a loss was all about Xbox demand evaporating.
Now, obviously, the Xbox is old — some may say “ancient” by gaming console standards. And a new one isn’t due until next year. That device will undoubtedly do well, but you have to wonder if Microsoft wasn’t surprised by this swift drop to a loss for the division. If they weren’t, why not aim for a new console this year? It sure seems like they were counting on things like the Kinect to extend the life of the device, and that worked for a while, then collapsed.
Meanwhile, gaming on iOS continues to grow. Anyone who doesn’t view the iPad as a legitimate living room gaming contender now is simply fooling themselves. And it’s a device that’s refreshed with the lastest hardware once a year. The Xbox is coming in three, four, or even five year intervals. That simply cannot compete given the rate of change we’re seeing.
Microsoft is smart to move more into the broader entertainment space, securing content deals for the Xbox. But again, Apple will be there as well. At first through the existing Apple TV (with a killer assist from the AirPlay functionality). Down the road, perhaps with their own actual television.
And then there’s the Online Service Division. Despite their “operating loss improvement“, they lost another $479 million last quarter. The total losses for the division over time are approaching $10 billion as they chase Google down a rabbit hole to claim a consumer market they’re never going to win.
To me right now, Microsoft’s consumer business feels like Nokia’s smartphone business a few years ago: the numbers look fine, and in some cases even good, but the world is quickly changing. If you just look at the past five years of what Apple has done versus what Microsoft has done, it’s not hard to imagine Microsoft’s business being completely dominated by the enterprise side of the equation in another five years. That will still make for a great business, but it’s not the Microsoft that many of us have known.
Everyone you know goes away in the end, I suppose.
Learn moreMicrosoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
This puts Microsoft's current position into perspective...
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs' Best Years | Fast Company
One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner's values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it's a corporate partnership or a marriage.via fastcompany.comSteve Jobs quote from a great article...
Monday, April 16, 2012
Some of Mom's Old Photos
It's great to be able to look at these old photos of my Mom and her family.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Kids in Victoria - ChatterBlock
Welcome to ChatterBlock!
As a busy parent, finding local events and activities for your kids and family should never be a chore. With ChatterBlock, setting up your clan with great programs, drop in events and camps can be efficient, social and fun!</p> <p>Based in Victoria, BC, ChatterBlock is a social media company built specifically for busy parents. ChatterBlock is a place to discover and learn about activities, resources and events happening in your community, allowing you to connect and share with other families and friends along the way.</p> <p>So, just what can ChatterBlock help you with?</p> <div class="help"> <ul> <li>Discover family-friendly events in Victoria BC and surrounding activities</li> <li>Search and browse a very large selection of programs and camps for your children</li> <li>Find drop-in schedules for all the major recreation centres, in one place</li> <li>Track what activities you’re attending (click I’m In) or short listing (click Maybe)</li> </ul> </div> <p>Share event and program ideas with your family and friends – because as we all know, the more the merrier!</p></blockquote>If you are a parent in Victoria or the San Fran area, this is the site for you! Check it out at http://http://www.chatterblock.com/kids-in-victoria/#
Saturday, April 07, 2012
Why You’re A Startup Founder: Nature And Nurture | TechCrunch
Editor’s note: Pokin Yeung founded two startups, GeckoGo and Askomatics, and is currently blogging and helping out various other startups. Follow her on Twitter @pokin.
Just over a month ago, a random conversation with another startup founder over lunch turned into a full-blown research project.
“You and I are both first-born children,” I mused to my friend, “I wonder if that had any influence on why we chose to start businesses.”
I theorized that first borns were often given more responsibility growing up, and wondered if this role served as training wheels for building startups. I also wondered if our upbringing had an influence on things like when we start, what we start, or how much money we raise — and ultimately, how successful we are with our businesses.
Four weeks, a survey of 318 founders, and a lot of data-crunching later, here are my conclusions:
Family Matters
- Your birth order does influence the likelihood you will be a founder.
If you’re a first-born, you are more likely to be a founder — 55 percent more likely than the population distribution. Just under half (46 percent) of our founders were first-born children, and I fit into this category. If you come from a two-child family, this effect is larger. You’re 63 percent more likely to be a founder than the second born child.- If you’re female, this effect is huge.
Female first-borns are 118 percent more likely than second-born females to be founders if they come from a two-child family. I fit into this category, too. Maybe the capricious nature of sibling relationships combined with the leadership (read: guess-who’s-in-trouble-if-something-happens-to baby-sis) role gives us more comfort in the rock-and-roll world of starting companies.- Second-born children are slightly more likely than the general population to be founders, but beyond that the chances actually decrease.
- Third-born or later children are 52 percent less likely to be a founder.
- Only children are underrepresented, and it’s statistically significant. Only children have been described as “First Borns on Steroids.” They are typically more likely to become CEOs and be hyper-achievement oriented. Yet they are underrepresented in our study. Could it be that only children prefer to rule larger, more established companies? Or is it something about the uncertain dynamic of having siblings to fight with that gives first borns the skills and motivation to take the leap?
- There is no correlation between your birth order and your chance of raising money or having a successful exit.
Startups run in the family
The data suggest that your parents can shape your inclination to become a founder – especially if your mom was an entrepreneur and you’re a girl. Female entrepreneurs are 1.4 times more likely to have a mom who was also a founder. Over 50 percent of our founders surveyed have a parent who had also started a business, and 14% of respondents have a brother or sister who’s taken the leap. So it seems having a good role model matters — especially for females. Organizations like Women 2.0 are a good start, and more access to mentorship programs during the formative years could make a big difference in bringing more female founders into play.
Higher education or trial by fire?
Startup founders have to do a lot of multi-tasking, but two things that don’t seem to mix are school and startups. Most founders tend to wait till school is done before starting their first business. In general, by the time founders are 25
- 74 percent of you had started a business if you didn’t have a college degree.
- 55 percent if you had a bachelor’s degree.
- 24 percent if you had a graduate degree.
Also, 50 percent of you waited till after 30 to start your first business if you had a graduate degree.
How else do you compare against the population? For starters, you overachieve.
Startup founders in general tend to overachieve. You are 6.4 times more likely to have skipped a grade, and 6 times more likely to start some sort of business endeavour (selling candies, anyone?) while still in school. Across the board, startup founders are more likely to more likely to do things like play sports, play a musical instrument, or hold a part-time job while still in high school. Maybe it’s a desire for learning, general well-roundedness and drive for growth that creates the motivations for founders to strike out on their own? Or maybe it’s a curiosity about the world. Lots of potential theories and areas of further research.
So what next?
The specific circumstances that push founders to take the leap definitely involves more than the sequence in which founders arrive to their families, but it does seem clear that once you become a founder, you stand to quite strongly influence future generations to come.
There were other interesting areas of research, including the types of adversity faced by startup founders growing up, and it’s what I want to dig into next. If anyone is interested who didn’t participate in my study before, I’d love to ask you some questions here.
Monday, April 02, 2012
AmEx Swipes Neal Sample From eBay for Digital Payments Push - Tricia Duryee - Commerce - AllThingsD
American Express has lured Neal Sample away from eBay to become SVP of technologies for its digital payments initiative.
Called
Serve, it is competing head-on with eBay’s own PayPal, as American Express attempts to expand its audience beyond briefcase-toting corporate users.
At eBay, Sample was the CTO of X.commerce, the open commerce platform the company unveiled late last year that gives technology tools to retailers at no cost. Prior to eBay, Sample was a senior executive at Yahoo, where he led the open, social and participation platforms. He left Yahoo in August 2010.
Sample’s technical expertise is focused on developing and building platforms and products for emerging technologies.
Serve is a complex platform that allows consumers to make purchases, take cash withdrawals from ATMs and make person-to-person payments from their computer or their phone.
The offering is fairly complex because it can be funded by a user’s bank account or credit or debit card — even from one of the company’s major competitors, like Visa or MasterCard.
In the future, American Express envisions expanding the platform to mobile phones, using near field communication or other technology.
Given eBay and PayPal’s extensive knowledge in the digital payments arena, many of its executives have left the company to explore the endless number of opportunities sprouting up.
Recently, Alyssa Cutright, a 12-year veteran of PayPal, left to join Square, a payments company in San Francisco; and of course, PayPal President Scott Thompson left at the end of last year to join Yahoo as CEO. Last week, eBay named David Marcus as his replacement.
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Chrome Multitask Mode
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
10,000 Year Clock
Checkout this pretty out there project that Jeff Bezos is involved in. It is amazing in it's scope.....
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Lobbyists, Guns and Money - NYTimes.com
Elephant Plays with a Galaxy Note! - YouTube
This is not a fake. Think of what this elephant could do with an iPad!
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Latest BlueStacks ARMs your PC | The Download Blog
Angry Birds Space running in the BlueStacks beta app player for Windows.
(Credit: BlueStacks)The BlueStacks app player for running Android apps on Windows has taken a major step forward today with the release of its first beta, which can run even graphics-intensive Android apps on desktop PCs.
The BlueStacks beta (download) leverages a new, patent-pending technology that the company has developed called LayerCake, which does two things necessary for running Android apps on Windows. First, it powers the app on hardware that it wasn't originally intended to run on. That's basically the ARM to x86 conversion which runs the apps, and it comes with the blessing of one of AMD's head honchos.
"LayerCake is a disruptive technology that enables PC manufacturers to bring the best of the Android ecosystem to their customers. We are excited to work with BlueStacks to make the emerging Android mobile apps market part of the broader computing arena," Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Content, Applications and Solutions at AMD, said in BlueStacks' statement announcing the new beta.
LayerCake also includes hardware graphics acceleration that wasn't available in last year's BlueStacks alpha. This means that it uses your PC's graphics card to make graphics-intensive apps, including Android NDK games like Air Attack HD, run more smoothly. "It's actually quite similar to the hardware acceleration in your browser," BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma said during a phone call with CNET yesterday.
There's more to LayerCake's hardware acceleration than that, though. It also can replicate accelerometer tilting in apps that utilize it via the mouse or arrow keys. Pinch-to-zoom is also supported on mouse trackpads.
Air Attack HD running in the BlueStacks beta app player for Windows.
(Credit: BlueStacks)BlueStacks saw enormous success during its brief, three-month long alpha test last year. "We had more than one million downloads in three months," said Sharma, who added that BlueStacks traffic equaled one-sixth of the Kindle Fire purchases during the same period. "It's possible that two months from now, we'll become the largest Android deployment on large screens," he said.
This beta debuts a significantly changed program. You can download apps directly from within BlueStacks, without using an Android phone, and it comes with a dock launcher that fits naturally with the Windows interface. Using BlueStacks' Cloud Connect feature for syncing apps, you can now send and receive text messages on your PC. There are plans, Sharma said, to expand it to include more of your phone's notifications, too.
Android apps such as Angry Birds, which cost money for their PC versions, can now run on your PC. So if the Android app is free, then you can run it on your Windows box for free, too. The multitude of simple photo editors are another example of Android app that BlueStacks can run on your PC. I'm not sure the world wants the Android version of Instagram on Windows, but chances are somebody will dig applying those filters to the photos saved on their desktop.
"This is a leveling of the playing field," said John Garguilo, BlueStacks' vice president of marketing and business development.
You can also run apps in either windowed or full-screen mode, and BlueStacks now comes localized for 12 non-English speaking countries including Korea, China, Germany, The Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, and Russia. Localization goes beyond translation, and includes region-specific apps. So, KakaoTalk will come with the Korean version of BlueStacks; Germans will get eBuddy; WhatsApp comes to the Spanish-speaking countries, and China gets Weibo.
Among the numerous pre-installed Android apps on BlueStacks for English-speakers are Fruit Ninja, StumbleUpon, and Evernote.
Monday, March 26, 2012
How Japan's Biggest E-Commerce Company Plans To Take Over The World - Yahoo! Finance
Japan hasn't had a single Internet company breakout to become a global success story.
Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of e-commerce site Rakuten, is hoping to change that.
He's gone on a shopping spree in the last few years to make it happen. He bought Buy.com in the U.S. for $250 million, Play.com from the UK for $38 million, and e-reader company, Kobo for $315 million. (There are other acquisitions, but the company was particularly excited about these three.)
To make all of these acquisitions work, Rakuten is forcing all of its employees in Japan, and elsewhere around the world, to speak English. The idea is that one common language will unite the company as it tries to expand internationally. It calls the program "Englishnization".
So, will Rakuten actually become a global powerhouse?
Before we attempt to answer that question, we should disclose that Rakuten flew us to Japan last month to explain what it's doing. The flight was business class, which is heavenly. The hotels it put us in were extravagant. The food was fantastic.
As a result, we're hopelessly compromised about the company. But, we'll try our best to be objective about what we think it's doing.
Rakuten has its work cut out for itself. It's going to take a lot more than English to make its global domination plan work. It's going to have to take the model that works very well in Japan and try to adapt it to the rest of the world. Further, it's going to have to turn irrelevant web properties into thriving sites.
But it's an admirable effort. Normally, it's American web companies trying to take over the world. It's refreshing to see a Japanese Web company trying to take over the world.
What Rakuten Does
Rakuten is an e-commerce powerhouse in Japan. It's sort of like Etsy, but for all sorts of stores, not just arts and crafts people. It's a portal that allows small businesses to sell stuff. It helps the small businesses optimize their sites and attract customers.
The big difference between Amazon and Rakuten is that Amazon emphasizes the product, and Rakuten emphasizes the seller of the product. On Amazon, for instance, you might search for "Reebok sneakers." When you find a pair you like, you might not even realize it comes from some third party seller. On Rakuten you would know which store you're buying from.
The model has worked extremely well. Rakuten generated $2.8 billion from its Internet services in 2011. Overall revenue was $4.6 billion last year, up 9.8% on a year over year basis, despite being hurt by the Japanese earthquake. Its market cap is ~$13 billion, and the stock has been up modestly in the last 12 months.
The company also has periphery businesses in the banking, telecom, and travel industries. It even owns a baseball team! The Rakuten Eagles.
Rakuten has 78% of all Japanese web users registered for its marketplace.
It controls 30% of the e-commerce market, easily beating Amazon in Japan.
However, Amazon is coming after Rakuten. And if it's going to grow, it needs to find new markets. It already has just about everyone in Japan using its site.
Thus, the global expansion.
So, will the Rakuten marketplace work in the United States?
So far, the answer is no. Only 10% of the company's revenue comes from outside of Japan.
ComScore data reveals Buy.com had 4.9 million unique visitors in the U.S. in December, at the height of the shopping season.
Amazon had 111.5 million average monthly unique visitors during the fourth quarter of 2011. Macy's, the tenth most popular e-commerce site in the U.S. had 16.5 million in that period, says comScore.
We asked a Rakuten representative how it would fix that problem, but didn't get a substantive answer: "We’re unable to share this information but the transition to the Rakuten B2B2C marketplace model is going very well."
"B2B2C" is the Rakuten model. Business to business to consumer. Rakuten is deals with businesses, who market directly to consumers.
It's working in Japan, but it's not working in the U.S. yet. When we asked a Rakuten executive if the model could work in the U.S. he said, "Absolutely." He thinks small businesses in the U.S. still haven't figured out a good way to be on the web. Rakuten is trying to solve that problem.
While it's been struggling to make a dent in the US over the last two years, there's still hope for Rakuten. It has an incredibly smart CEO, it has a lot of money to invest around the world, and it's attacking big markets that are still developing.
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