My god is this app gorgeous. One of the best-looking iPad apps ever created, and a perfect example of creativity/creation on the device.
It’s free, but there is an in-app charge for many of the tools. Totally worth it.
It’s too bad the Japanese hate the iPhone or Apple might have finished better than first.
Yesterday, Heavy Bits launched Snapguide, an iPhone app for making and viewing how-to guides.
Since we’re investors in Heavy Bits (through a personal investment Michael brought into the fund), I’ve had the privilege of trying the app out for a couple weeks. It’s both brilliant and beautiful.
The reality is that co-founder Daniel Raffel probably could have launched the app a couple months ago, but he was beyond meticulous here to make sure everything was just right. The dedication has paid off.
There are already guides ranging from how to bottle beer to how to make origami birds to how to catch crabs (the kind you eat). The app has exposed my utter lack of expertise in being able to make anything. But now I can learn!
Lots of good coverage yesterday, I like Brit Morin’s who is an ideal user, and has already made a few great guides.
Bryan Bishop, The Verge:
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will open up its own online store, where it will market and sell tablet devices directly to consumers. In an interesting twist, it’s said that the company won’t actually manufacture any of the offered hardware itself, instead leaving that duty to partners (Samsung and Asus are both named). The tablets will reportedly feature official Google co-branding, however. Google is even said to be considering subsidizing the cost of the tablets, in order to make them price-competitive with the Amazon Kindle Fire.
I’m somewhat bemused by this. On the one hand, the “Nexus” brand tends to effectively mean “reference implementation” in the Android world, and that’s good. And a great Android tablet that was priced like a Kindle Fire would certainly make inroads against the iPad.
But subsidizing the tablets to get to that point is boggling. This isn’t like a game console, where you expect to make all your money on the ongoing purchases. Apple makes most of their money on the hardware, and Google makes nearly all of their money on advertisements. If Google spends $100 to get a Nexus tablet into your hands, they’re going to need to serve you a lot of ads to make that up.
A lot of ads.
Watts Martin has this exactly right. If Google does intend to release even a halfway decent tablet for under $200, the still-just-hinted-at implication is that they may subsidize it. A tablet sold for under $200 and not sold at a loss is going to be a piece of shit, pure and simple.
So let’s assume that Google does sell it at a loss (subsidizes it). They only way they make their money back is if people click on Google ads. More than they do now. A lot more than they do now. Or the product is going to be a black hole of money. Sort of like Microsoft’s entire online services division.
David Streitfeld and Nick Bilton:
Google’s long-awaited tablet might finally be on the way to becoming a reality. For at least two years, there have been reports that the search giant was working on something that could compete with Apple’s iPad. A Google employee briefed on the project now says it will be out later this year.
That makes it sound like Google hasn’t really been trying to compete with the iPad for the past two years. Of course they have — they’ve just failed. Miserably.
The sole purpose of Honeycomb was to invigorate the Android tablet market. It was an OS built for tablets. It was supposed to make Android tablets competitive with the iPad. It crashed and burned.
What they mean, of course, without specifically saying it, is a “Nexus” tablet. Not built by Google, but with Google branding. Maybe that competes better, maybe it doesn’t. At sub-$200, I fail to see how it can possibly compete with the iPad. We’ll see.
But it’s nonsense to imply that Google hasn’t been trying to compete with the iPad until now.
…yet.
The writing is so very obviously on the wall here. And not just the consumer market, eventually all markets. If RIM exists in 5 years, I’d bet it’s solely in services and/or some suite of apps like BBM. If.
Good luck with that.
The problem isn’t that Android tablets are hard to find, it’s that they suck. Google selling them directly won’t change that. The focus needs to be on the product, not the distribution method.
Given all the talk about how cheaply Google will sell these tablets (sub-$200), I’m not holding my breath for any semblance of non-suckage.
A year ago, RIM reported nearly a billion in profit. Just in the past quarter, revenue is down $1 billion and they’ve swung from $667 million in profit to a loss.
How fast they fall.
Danny Sullivan argues that the conclusions about Android revenues based on the Oracle v. Google court document are flawed. That’s certainly possible, but it doesn’t sound as flawed as Sullivan seems to believe.
Sullivan says he struggled to figure out how Guardian editor Charles Arthur arrived at the $550 million number based on the document. But if you look at the document, it’s actually pretty obvious.
Google says the following in its proposal:
Specifically, in the event of a finding of patent infringement of the ’104 patent, Google is willing to stipulate that un-adjusted damages for the ’104 patent through 2011 are $2.72 million, and in the event of a finding of patent infringement of the ’520 patent, that un-adjusted damages for the ’520 patent through 2011 are $0.08 million.
They then go on to say:
Speaking of Android being a nice little business for companies not named Google, it’s only fair to point out that the iPhone is also a nice business for companies beyond Apple. In fact, as Charles Arthur writes for The Guardian:
The figures also suggest that Apple devices such as the iPhone, which use products such as its Maps as well as Google Search in its Safari browser, generated more than four times as much revenue for Google as its own handsets in the same period.
So while Android may have only made $550 million in revenue for Google in the past three years combined, at least they’ve been able to squeeze over $2 billion out of Apple’s devices in the same span.
Of course, Apple has squeezed well over $100 billion in revenues just on the sale of those products alone over the same span.
Dan Levine for Reuters:
For future damages, Google proposed paying Oracle 0.5 percent of Android revenue on one patent until it expires this December and 0.015 percent on a second patent until it expires in April 2018.
Oracle rejected the offer for being too low, but it’s interesting that Google (if found to be infringing on Oracle’s patents) was willing to pay a percentage of all the revenue they make from Android. This would have continued the trend of the mobile OS being a nice little business for everyone not named Google.
For Google itself? It sure looks like a pretty poor little business given the resources they pour into it.
Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 on May 14. That is a Monday.
Om Malik says Google is planning to launch Google Drive next month (maybe as soon as next week). Yes, finally.
He touches upon some of the illustrious history of the Google Drive rumors throughout the years, but they haven’t actually been rumors. Google had a project several years ago that they were widely using internally, but they killed it. The project started up again last year and again, Google started widely testing it internally, which they’ve been doing for months now to make sure it’s just right.
This time they will launch it.
Just in case my love letter last November didn’t make it abundantly clear, I’ll reiterate: I love Square. We’re not investors, but I wish we were. I love both the business and the product. And if that level of admiration makes this post biased, then color me conflicted.
Apparently well aware of my tweets and posts, the company brought me in to show me the latest thing they’ve been working on. It’s the evolution of their Card Case product to morph it into a more central part of their overall strategy. It’s technically called “Pay with Square”, but when installed, the new app simply reads “Square”.
That’s telling. Square, the card reader (now appropriately called “Square Card Reader”), has been the way most people think of the product and company. But that’s limiting because it’s so focused on merchants. It’s a great business, and an important one — but if Square is truly going to revolutionize payments, they need to get the consumers fully on board.
Enter Pay with Square. Using Card Case has been nothing short of magical. It’s one of those experiences that when it happens, you wonder how the hell they did it — and also why the hell it hasn’t been done like that before?
But there’s a flipside. Because the experience is so magical — so natural — it almost seems as if something is wrong when it happens. It simply can’t be that easy. You can’t possibly pay for something simply by saying your name and doing nothing else, right? The most common reactions I’ve seen to Card Case in public are “now what?” and “that’s it?”
That’s Square’s biggest barrier to entry with Pay with Square: they need to convince people that they don’t need to put up with the nonsense they’ve been doing for decades. You don’t have to swipe a card. You don’t have to sign anything. You pay by having your smartphone on you. And your payment is verified by your name (and face).
With Pay with Square, Square is ditching the wallet metaphor (of Card Case) and simplifying things to just be a list of venues of interest that are close by. At first, I was a bit surprised by this change because I liked the design and the card metaphor (which is still sort of in place). But this actually makes a lot more sense. Don’t cater to the baggage of the past, replace the past.
I’ve been using Pay with Square this past weekend and it’s great. The transition from Card Case is seamless because it’s essentially the same thing, just reworked in an attempt to take it more mainstream.
To that end, Square also put in quite a bit of work to make Pay with Square work on Android as well. Because Android doesn’t have the same geofencing capabilities native to their SDK like iOS does, this was undoubtedly a huge pain in the ass. Square essentially had to build the technology from the ground up to make their Android app work in the same way that the iOS one does.
Thanks to this work, Square has managed to do the seemingly impossible: make Google Wallet look even worse. While Google is wasting time (and apparently employees) trying to move from a credit card swipe to a tap-to-pay by way of NFC, Square has been busy building the future. A tap is a bit more simple than a swipe, I suppose. But screw that. You should be able to pay by doing nothing at all.
As you may be able to tell from my posts on our portfolio company Highlight, I love the idea of mobile apps that work without the user have to do anything. Highlight alerts you as you move around. Pay with Square allows you to pay for things by walking into the place you wish to buy something.
Again, magic.
The next trick is signing up more vendors to accept Pay with Square. Luckily, products like Square Register are complimentary. They just need iPad adoption to keep growing at the pace it has been. And it will.
And Square needs to convince people that the ability to pay without doing a thing isn’t actually magic, it’s just one of those things that should have always been done this way that technology now allows for. It’s a more natural way of doing payments that just happens to seem like magic because of the baggage we all carry.
It’s technology at its best.
More about Pay with Square on Techmeme.
You’ve probably already read it from the 1,000 others who have linked to it, but just in case, I’ll add to the chorus: read Mat Honan’s take on Google in its current form.
The most interest takeaway to me is the notion that Google isn’t being evil in the traditional sense of the world (they’re not killing people, for example), but they are being “evil” now by their own previous definitions. In hindsight, it was a mistake to try to set a definition, but who knows, maybe Google doesn’t get to where it is now without taking such a stance initially.
It was inspiring at the time. Which makes it all the more disappointing now.
Honan’s entire piece is thought-provoking. Most people I talk to are opposed to the new Search Plus Your World (SPYW) Google (read: Google Search infused with Google+). But from Google’s perspective, they likely view themselves as having no choice. Get busy living, or get busy dying, as it were.
I just think the social components are the wrong choice for Google. I agree that they should do something different to stay ahead in the game, but to me, social feels done already. They should be trying to go after what’s next after social. Instead, they’re shoving the social stuff in our faces. And it’s just doesn’t work. It’s unnatural.
Maybe in some parts of the company (Google X) they are going after what’s next, but now it feels like a race to see if they can get there before the Google+ initiative drive the company into a downslope of negativity that they’ll have a hard time recovering from.
Honan’s post sums all this up well.
