Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Boom Decade

Allied lines of communication in India, Burma,...
Allied lines of communication in India, Burma, and China in 1942–43. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is yet another sign that this is going to be a boom decade.

NEA Has Closed On $2.6 Billion For Its 14th Fund, Perhaps The Biggest In VC History
“We’ve been very active in India and China for over a decade, and we’re interested in investing across a lot of different geographies. Brazil is very interesting to us, other parts of Southeast Asia [beyond India] are interesting to us. There are a lot of exciting economies that are really ripe from our perspective.”
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Samsung Deserves Room To Play

Image representing Samsung Electronics as depi...
Image via CrunchBase
Samsung: Apple wouldn’t have sold a single iPhone without stealing our tech
Samsung has been researching and developing mobile telecommunications technology since at least as early as 1991 and invented much of the technology for today‘s smartphones. Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung‘s patented technology.

For good measure, Apple seeks to exclude Samsung from the market, based on its complaints that Samsung has used the very same public domain design concepts that Apple borrowed from other competitors, including Sony, to develop the iPhone. Apple‘s own internal documents show this. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked “excessive ornamentation” such as buttons, fit in the hand, were “square with a screen” and had “corners [which] have been rounded out.”

Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. . . . Also contrary to Apple‘s accusations, Samsung does not need or want to copy; rather, it strives to best the competition by developing multiple, unique products. Samsung internal documents from 2006, well before the iPhone was announced, show rectangular phones with rounded corners, large displays, flat front faces, and graphic interfaces with icons with grid layouts.

Apple relied heavily on Samsung‘s technology to enter the telecommunications space, and it continues to use Samsung‘s technology to this day in its iPhone and iPad products. For example, Samsung supplies the flash memory, main memory, and application processor for the iPhone. . . . But Apple also uses patented Samsung technology that it has not paid for. This includes standards-essential technology required for Apple‘s products to interact with products from other manufacturers, and several device features that Samsung developed for use in its products.
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Apple's Surprise Enterprise Entries

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
Good Technology: iPad, iPhone dominating enterprise markets
While smartphone activations outnumber tablet new-installs by around three to one, Apple continues to dominate in the corporate tablet space, crushing all competition. ..... more than 80 percent of American employees continue business-related communication from their mobile devices after they have left the office. The amount of usage averages seven hours per week -- adding up to more than a month and a half of (typically unpaid) overtime per year. ...... top ten devices activated in the second quarter of 2012 are led by the iPhone 4S, followed by the iPad 3, iPhone 4, iPad 2, the Samsung Galaxy S II, Motorola Droid Razr, iPad, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the Samsung Galaxy Note. ..... Windows Phone 7.5 accounted for 1.2 percent of the total smartphone activations, with Apple holding 70.8 percent and Android gaining ground to 28 percent...... The financial services industry leads mobile device activations .... the "bring your own device" movement in information technology.
Steve Jobs was all about the consumer space. But then there are unintended consequences. You build factories. You end up polluting rivers. Only I think the smartphone, tablet penetration of the enterprise is a good thing, though inevitable. It was only a matter of time.


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Google Awesomeness (2)