The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘concepts’

The bicycle, my friends, has gone through many refinements, but not as many serious changes.

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Concept bike from Peugeot looks amazing, but is it practical?

The SmartFish aircraft is a concept vehicle created by an engineering firm in Germany, based on the aerodynamic shape of a fish. So far, they have only built a remote control version of the aircraft, and a prototype is in the works. The prototype will be built from kevlar and carbon fiber; but, the designers expect the vehicle to be relatively inexpensive to build.

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SmartFish concept aircraft swims in the air

Remember that OLPC design that had two touchscreens joined at the hip, kind of like we saw with the Courier later? Yeah, it got canned , but the basic design seems to have lived on in this MSI concept

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MSI’s two-screen wonder looks a lot like that extinct OLPC 2.0

Short Version: The Sprint Overdrive is a small, compact portable 3G/4G cellular data network to WiFi dongle designed for use by up to five people simultaneously.

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Review: Sprint Overdrive 3G/4G WiFi hotspot

Gigantic TVs aren’t really my area of expertise, but this one was so big and beautiful that I couldn’t help snapping a few shots as I drifted by it on my way to who knows where.

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LG’s UHD TV: 3840×2160 pixels of goodness

Although the concept here is good, I can’t help thinking that if you need a Band-Aid (elastic bandage, sorry) longer than an inch or so, you probably need something more than a Band-Aid. Except for things like grass and paper cuts, injuries more than an inch in any direction generally don’t just go in a straight line

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Custom Band-Aid dispenser for those foot-long paper cuts

It’s just as Rob over at BoingBoing says: you don’t have to be mean, negative, or hip to make a good point. The Sun and its ilk are still worthwhile and will continue to be so for at least a few years. Don’t forget what years of experience, local contacts, and a nice big tabloid layout can do for you.

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UK’s Sun gooses Apple in this fun little ad

I’m pretty sure I wrote the complete opposite story several days ago, but who cares, right? It’s cold and rainy and there’s not much else to talk about

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Let’s blame Leno’s decline in ratings on the DVR rather than trying to acknowledge that media consumption is changing

It got skewered at last year’s TechCrunch50. Then when it finally launched in private beta, it “accidentally deleted” all of its initial user accounts. But iMindi is back and it wants you to help it build the Mindex.

iMindi wants to be a Twitter on steroids. Actually, it is the exact opposite of Twitter. It is more for people who want to have lengthy discussions and explore topics deeply. Instead of a 140-character limit, it has a 20,000-character limit.

You can have threaded discussions about different topics, follow people, and topic categories (”think tanks”). You dump in your thoughts or excerpts from articles, then iMindi does a semantic analysis of the concepts and connect those “thoughts” with other similar ones (this is what they mean by the Mindex). In the private beta, iMindi had some mind map visualizations, but it has abandoned those in the interest of simplicity.

Now all iMindi needs is for people to fill its database so that it can start linking people’s thoughts. I kind of think that going for long-form, blog-like discussions is going to be harder for people to get into than short bursts of micro-information. But it might appeal to people who want something deeper than Twitter.

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AdMob is out with its latest Mobile Metrics Report, this time combining its readily available network data with survey results from over 1,000 users of iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Just for your reference, AdMob claims to serve ads for more than 7,000 mobile Web sites and 3,000 applications around the world.

Here are the takeaways from the July report, with some commentary of my own:

- App discovery is mostly done by perusing through the rankings on the App Store and Android Market >> not much of a surprise since it’s a centralized platform for something

- Over 90% of users who browse the application storefronts do so from their mobile devices rather than their computer >> makes sense, because that’s where they end up too, but the percentage is very high regardless

- Android and iPhone users download 9-10 new apps per month, while iPod touch users download 18 on average. Furthermore, 22% of iPod Touch owning survey respondents download more than 20 free apps a month >> I’d expect downloading behavior to be similar for both platforms, but I have no clue why iPod Touch users would be inclined to download double the amount of apps than mobile phone users.

- Over half of Android and iPhone users spend more than 30 minutes per day using apps

- 19% of Android users download at least 1 paid app per month, compared to 50% of iPhone users and 40% of iPod Touch users >> this is the key finding in the report, although it would also be helpful to correlate these statistics with app pricing and actual revenue

- Users who regularly purchase paid apps spend an average of $9 on about 5 paid apps per month

- Dividing the average amount paid per month by the average number of paid apps downloaded yields an average app purchase price of about $1.80 >> this seems rather high

If you’d extrapolate the findings on app spending, which is not without risk considering the relatively small number of users surveyed, and combine them with estimated numbers of users of the devices / platforms, you could conclude that the App Store paid market is currently nearly $200 million per month (or approximately $2.4 billion a year) in size compared to $5 million per month (or $60 million on a yearly basis) for the Android Market.

Both strike me as overstated, particularly the estimated paid market size for Apple’s App Store, so I’d wager we need a bit more deep-delving analysis before reaching such conclusions.

You can download the full report here (PDF).

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