The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘presentation’

An independent study released this morning by neutral app store GetJar indicates that the market for mobile apps should grow to a whopping $17.5 billion within the next three years.

This would basically mean that the value of apps sold would be greater than the value of CDs sold in 2012 ($13.83 billion).

According to the same study, downloads of mobile apps to handsets will leap from slightly more than seven billion in 2009 to nearly 50 billion in 2012, representing a YOY growth of 92%.

The figures are pretty much in line with other forecasts, such as research2guidance’s prediction that the worldwide smartphone application market will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013.

GetJar had commissioned independent consulting firm Chetan Sharma Consulting to look into the global mobile apps market, in order to analyze the potential and real value of the mobile apps market worldwide, using first-hand data.

According to the study, by 2012, off-deck paid-for apps will be the biggest revenue generator, accounting for almost 50 per cent of all apps revenue. By comparison, in 2009, on-deck apps available from mobile operators accounted for over 60% of all apps revenue, but this will fall significantly to just under 23% by 2012.

The average app selling price for apps in North America was $1.09, significantly higher compared to that in developing markets such as South America ($0.20) and Asia ($0.10).

According to the study, revenue opportunities in Europe are set to soar from $1.5 billion in 2009 to $8.5 billion in 2012, while in North America the figure will rise from around $2.1 billion to around $6.7 billion in 2012.

Currently, apps are most popular in Asia, with the region accounting for 37% of global downloads in 2009. However, while Asia had the highest number of downloads, users in North America spent the most money on apps, accounting for over 50% of revenue.

GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs first presented the results of the study at my conference, Plugg, last week. The full video is embedded above, or you can jump straight to the Vimeo page.

As for the presentation slides:

JVC in Japan today announced [JP] the NC-SP1, an ultra-slim active speaker that’s just 34mm thick and can be connected to your computer via USB. Marketed as a device that’s particularly suitable for presentations, it supports Windows XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS X 10.4 machines and requires just one USB port. The 12W×2ch (4Ω) speaker is sized at 300×34×186mm.

Originally posted here:
JVC’s ultra-slim PC speaker for business use

9to5Mac found these delightful buttons.

Here is the original post:
Future iPads to have front-facing cameras, flash (bulbs, not software)

Get thee to the Wootery! There’s a Woot-Off going on right now (I think it’s a slicer they’re selling now) so get over there ASAP!

View post:
CrunchDeals: Woot-Off is happening right now

Venture Capitalist Mike Maples gave a talk last week at the Future Of Funding event in Silicon Valley put on by Adeo Ressi.

The talk is highly entertaining and thought provoking. He argues against the notion that startups that want to have a huge exit need to raise big money, noting that Microsoft raised just $1 million and eBay just $5 million, in venture capital.

He says small startups can be hugely disruptive, and have proportionally huge exits. he calls these companies Thunder Lizards. He’s talking about Godzilla, which eats his competitors and disrupts like crazy. These are the market leaders, he says. Second place is boring.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tend to be wine sippers, he says, when beer slammers tend to be the big winners. He uses Chegg as an example, which grew to $50 million in revenue in just three years, but it took them two years to raise funding. The company, which rents textbooks to students, just didn’t make sense to most VCs.

This is a perfect situation, he says, because there’s no real competition out there getting funded, either. He calls this being “non consensus right.” That’s the sweet spot. The key is to attack a huge potential market, with an emphasis on “potential.” You want to be right, and you want to be one of the only people to see it ahead of time.

Great presentation. I’ll try to get the presentation to post as well. The video is below.

Last fall, TechCrunch50 startup ClientShow presented its innovative application to help creative, advertising and marketing professionals show, pitch, share and sell their work to clients more effectively through real-time collaboration and communication. Similar to a WebEx for creative professionals, ClientShow allows users to essentially create a “virtual agency” to collaborate and share ideas with clients. This week, the startup is debuting its platform in private beta. We have 1000 invites for Techcrunch readers here.

The application, which is built on Adobe Air, includes a dashboard which lets the agency view client lists, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can view the projects.

To engage in a virtual “pitch,”clients are given a link that lets them view the session in their browser. While the users who are pitching the idea are using an Adobe Air application, the client will see the actual pitch within their browser. Here’s where ClientShow brings in the collaboration angle: as you are pitching an idea, decision makers on a client team can approve (or dismiss) different ideas and files and give feedback automatically by adding notes and comments to the pitch that are updated in realtime.

After a pitch has ended, users will want to look back on clients’ comments and feedback, which is where the fourth part of ClientShow’s software comes in. The “vault” captures and stores all interactive feedback from sessions. You can also see session reports”in the vault that shows you every file that was documented in the presentation in the order they were presented.

The entire application is free, but ClientShow will be monetizing by offering a paid version that includes additional premium features. The startup has raised $750,000 in funding so far from undisclosed angel investors and will be launching the application to the public in the next two months.

Of course, my one complaint about the application is that it is built off of Adobe Air which is buggy and has other problematic issues. However, the realtime collaboration functionality of the application is compelling. The ability to create threaded discussions around a pitch and collaborate easily is sure to be useful to the creative industries.

Expensify, the startups that’s looking to take the endless headaches out of expense reports, is ready to get down to business. The site has just launched its 1.0 release, which introduces a revenue stream, as well as a totally revamped UI and new features designed to suit the needs of its users.

A lot has changed for Expensify since we last covered it. For one, the company has largely ditched the pre-paid credit card it intially launched with as its core product back in September 2008. The card was meant to serve as the designated card that you’d use exclusively for any business expenses, which would make them easy to keep track of. CEO David Barrett says that as it turns out, most people don’t really want another credit card — they just want to keep using their regular credit card and have Expensify figure out which charges should be expensed. Now, that’s exactly what Expensify does.

As with sites like Mint, Expensify can pull in your transaction records and automatically categorize them. Barrett says that one of Expensify’s competitive advantages is that it has built its own system for importing these transactions, rather than having to rely on a third party like Yodlee. It can automatically import E-receipts (so you often don’t need a paper copy), and in the cases where one isn’t available you can just take a photo and import it. Once your transactions are in the system, you can ensure that all of the expenses are properly tagged and then submit the expense report to your business’s bookkeeper for reimbursement.

The submission process is another area that’s seen a big change. Barrett says that when Expensify first launched, the startup thought that most users would be submitting their expense reports to their company bookkeeper. As it turns out, many companies actually outsource their bookkeeping to a third party (so you might have one person in charge of 20 different company accounts). And many people who are self employed were using the site to simply track their expenses, even though they didn’t really have anywhere to submit them. Expensify’s workflow is now more flexible to better suit these users. To make the site easier to use for bookkeepers, it now features improved support for Intuit’s QuickBooks (you can now import Expensify reports straight into QuickBooks).

From a looks perspective, Expensify has cleaned up nicely. To paraphrase Barrett, the site has finally hired some designers instead of relying on C++ coders to figure out the presentation. The site is also launching mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPhone and Palm Pre.

Up until now, Expensify has been free for users. All beta users will be grandfathered into free accounts going forward, but from now on new users will have to pay to use the service. It will still be free for anyone to submit their expense reports to the site, but in order for a business to approve those reports (and pay employees back through Expensify) businesses will have to pay $5 per reporting employee, per month, with the first two free. In other words, if you have four employees submitting expense reports in a given month, you’d pay $10.

Expense reports stink, and they’re something many people have to deal with on a regular basis. Expensify may not have quite nailed the solution with their initial launch, but they’ve adapted quickly. We’ll be keeping an eye on them in the future.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Good afternoon, chaps. Do you feel underdressed, under-accessorized, and smelly? Nooka has something nice for you. Our buddies over there are giving out a new Nooka Watch (your choice), a Nooka Belt (shown above), and the new Nooka fragrance.

That’s right: you can smell like a Nooka.

This evening at its Campfire One event, Google showcased a number of new technologies coming to Google Web Toolkit (you can see my live blog of the event here). The big announcements include the release of a new Speed Tracer tool to help developers speed up their web apps; a code splitting tool that enables developers to deploy apps as incremental downloads; and UiBinder, a UI framework that allows developers to separate the ‘logic’ presentation of their apps from the presentation portion.

Speed Tracer is a new extension for Google Chrome that is meant to help developers streamline their web applications. In particular, the tool is built to help optimize AJAXy applications. Obviously there are other tools for speed optimization, but many of these have to do with load time. Speed Tracer is meant to track performance over an extended period of time, as users tap into an app’s various functions. Google’s Andrew Bowers explains that Speed Tracer can track performance bottlenecks in ways that were not previously possible, because it taps into APIs that were built into Webkit for that very purpose (APIs other browser engines don’t offer).

The tool will allow developers to isolate exactly which functions in their app are taking a long time to perform, allowing them to monitor performance in real time. It will suggest that developers take a look at certain problem functions (namely actions that take over 100ms, which is when users begin to notice a lag time).

The second major addition announced at tonight’s event is developer guided code splitting. Bowers says that when the Google Wave team was first building Wave, the size of their JavaScript app grew to 1.4 megabytes (that’s a lot, and will lead to a long initial loading time for users). To help deal with this Google found a way to split code into chunks and to only initially serve the portions users needed. In other words, when you go to Wave now, your browser is only downloading the portion of the app it needs to run the most basic functions. If you decide you want to access something beyond that — say, the Settings menu — the app will quickly fetch that once you click the ‘Settings’ button.

This isn’t the first time developers have been able to split their code — in fact, some of them try to fully automate the process. Bowers says that Google is taking a different approach. Rather than try to fully automate the code splitting, Google Web Toolkit will allow developers to pick and choose which functions users will need to be able to access. The tool will then identify which code corresponds to those functions. In effect, developers are still responsible for choosing which functions they want to have available on the app’s initial load, but the tool can manage things beyond that.

The third tool to launch this evening was UiBinder, which came out of some of the work Google has done with AdWords. Bowers describes UiBinder as a declarative UI that allows developers to bind a layout template and associate it with a Java file, without having to merge the two. He explains that in a typical Java file, developers often have to combine the layout portion of the application with the logic portion of the app. In that scenario, when a designer wants to tweak the look of the app, the logic has to be tweaked too. Using UiBinder, developers can keep the two separate, so layouts can be adjusted without having to rewrite any logic code.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

FriendFeed Co-Founder, Paul Buchheit has taken the stage at Startup School at UC Berkeley. Buchheit is talking about what he’s learned so far as an entrepreneur, from creating Gmail to founding FriendFeed. Buchheit made some interesting points from his career at Intel, Google, FriendFeed and now Facebook. He’s also winging his presentation to see how it goes (and he’s doing a good job at it).

Buchheit talked about his past at Google, where he is of course known as being the creator of Gmail, as well as Intel. At Intel, Buchheit learned that he didn’t enjoy working at large companies. People often ask what’s the formula to startup success. Buchheit answered with that Google had a formula for making successful products that everyone had to follow.

Buchheit also mentioned that he left Google because “it seemed like a good idea.” He said the same thing for why FriendFeed sold to Facebook. Buchheit’s biggest learning experience from Facebook so far is that Facebook ins’t like Google.

Buchheit talked about college, and whether or not to go. He said that you have to pay for college, while if you have a startup, you get paid. Also, the formula of success — there is none. You have to figure it out yourself.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.