What Happens When Your Products Just Work?

You don’t have to spend money on marketing and promotion. None.

According to marketing chief Phil Schiller’s testimony on Friday in the Apple vs. Samsung patent trial, Apple relies on two strategies:

• Rely on the media to create buzz for its products through positive reviews
• Product placement in TV shows and movies

When the iPhone was launched in 2007, the company didn’t do any advertising for a period of time. They didn’t have to.

Mass media reports, reviews, and pop culture buzz alone was enough to lift the iPhone to the forefront of public mindshare around mobile device technology. This should come as no surprise, but I find it fascinating that this strategy was successful before anyone even knew how much this phone would change the world.

Read more at Business Insider

Apple Considered Creating An iCar?

Loads of crazy stuff coming out of the Samsung vs. Apple trial. Basically Apple says Samsung has ripped off their designs and the court proceedings are to either prove that or to show that Samsung products are not, in fact, Apple clones.

One of the more interesting pieces of information was revealed by Phil Schiller on the stand. According to Nick Bilton’s tweet, Schiller said Apple was having discussions around making a camera or a car – quote, “crazy stuff.”

What would an iCar look like? Maybe a car will fully integrated electronic links between computers, iPods, and radio? Something similar to Sync technology?

-Designer, Franco Grassi, Concept Design

Interesting to think about…and probably a better business strategy to get into iPhones instead.

Hood ornament image borrowed from: DVICE.com

Goodbye Hotmail…

Yesterday Microsoft announced the end of Hotmail.com. Over the next few months, they will be rolling out the new and improved Outlook.com.

Hotmail users can already start using the new service at Outlook.com. It features social networking tie-ins and you can see friend’s status updates and tweets right from an email from the same person. The interface is very “Metro-like” and is right in line with using new Windows 8 and Office 13’s UI elements.

From Microsoft’s blog:

Webmail was first introduced with HoTMaiL in 1996. Back then, it was novel to have a personal email address you could keep for life - one that was totally independent from your business or internet service provider. Eight years later, Google introduced Gmail, which included 1 GB of storage and inbox search. And while Gmail and other webmail services like Hotmail have added some features since then, not much has fundamentally changed in webmail over the last 8 years - though yesterday's frustrations about the small size of inboxes are now things of the past. At the same time, email is becoming less and less useful as inboxes become cluttered with newslettersand social updates, and people increasingly keep up their personal connections in social networks instead of their email address books. All of this has led many to hope for a better solution so you don't have to settle for today's webmail.

With the social connection features, sure to be expanded to services like LinkedIn or possibly Google, this new Outlook.com is more focused on being social. Skype functionality will be built in and is coming in the next few months as well. This may just be enough to get me back and away from Gmail…

Read more at Microsoft’s Blog site.

App Development Is King

As a daily user of both iOS and Android, I can say that I like both platforms. I can make all my devices work the way I want them to within the confines of each universe. That being said, there is a definite difference between the two and they are simply not the same.

Without unique apps or configurations, both universes are completely capable of doing most, if not all, of the same things. It is when digging in to 3rd party developed apps where the true power of any mobile platform is discovered…and everything I see indicates that iOS owns this area. It is simply a more desired platform to develop for and thus a better experience on almost all multi-platform apps. Just look no further than Google themselves, their Google+ app for iPhone is far more elegant than the same app on Android. The Google+ tablet version doesn’t even exist on Android, yet it is gorgeous on the iPad.

And now I believe more than ever that Android fanboys and iOS haters who say Android is 'better' probably don’t really use their mobile device to its full potential. Either that or they simply don’t understand or care how important app development is for a platform. In an article for Techcrunch, Alex Williams points out how 53%, more than half, of developers surveyed would like to develop for iOS compared to only 38% of developers with desire to create on Android – down from 44% just last year.

It is easy enough to call a platform second rate when the rival's consumer app development is eons above; but it becomes even worse for second-rate platforms when developers are making a push for the possibly ‘more valuable’ enterprise space. Seemingly even worse for Android when Windows, a platform that no one cared about last year, now has 33% of devs wanting to produce for it

Read the full story over at Techcrunch.

Office 2013 on Display

Microsoft unveiled Office 2013 yesterday. Looks like they’re building it to match with the new Metro appearance of Windows 8 and there is a heavy

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/first-look-at-microsoft-office-2013-and-office-365-going-to-the-cloud/all/

Notable features:

· Cloud integration with Skydrive, Office 365, and possibly others.

· Touch interface

· Embed videos to Word docs

· Apps in Office (i.e. Bing maps in Outlook, Facebook in Power Point)

· Skype built-in?

Font-Bomb Webpages!!

Here’s a cool little Java plugin for your browser that allows you to plant bombs in places on a website and experience the joy when a bomb explodes, rendering the text unreadable and leaving a “hole” in the page. Pretty fun way to waste time.

fontBomb - Stylishly destroy the web from Philippe-Antoine Lehoux on Vimeo.

HP's Windows 8 Business Tablet Details Leaked

HP looks like they are going to learn from mistakes and improve some things in the process. Some of the details on their Windows 8 tablet have leaked and this might just show some promise. They bombed on the HP Touchpad but if nothing else, they learned what 'not' to do in the world of tablet computing. I have always been a fan of WebOS and still think its a truly multitask-focused platform beyond how either iOS or Android handles it. The developer support just wasn't there for WebOS and Apple did, and continues to do, an incredible job luring and keeping devs developing on iOS. Developer support for Windows though? Different ball game than iOS. 

If Microsoft gets Windows 8 right and the experience on a touch interface is practical and fun to use, then potentially all HP has to provide is good hardware and some marketing. If an HP slate was able to come into an enterprise Windows environment and be completely at home and immediately compatible, all while offering a user experience on par with iOS on an iPad, then there's a huge opportunity. The company I believe that has the best chance of denting the Apple machine is Microsoft - especially in the enterprise because of their presence in enterprise infrastructures globally. 

HP's tablet will be geared towards business use, so chances of it having an ARM processor is probably slim because of the potential limitations on running legacy Windows apps. Here's an early look at what HP might have planned for later this year.

HP's Windows 8 Business Tablet Details Leaked - Everything Microsoft | Leading Unofficial Microsoft Site
http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/05/06/hps-windows-8-business-tablet-details-leaked/