Tim Gregory » Apple

Amazon, Kindle, and the Apple Tablet

Tim — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:17:01 +0000

I spotted a piece of news today from Mashable claiming that for the first time, Kindle e-Books outsold real books. This is interesting for a couple of reasons…

First off, unlike Apple which is in the hardware business and make high margin on iPod sales but little to no margin on music sold through the iTunes Music Store, I believe that Amazon sees the Kindle as a mechanism to sell content rather than a hardware business unto itself.

iSuppli, a company that takes apart consumer electronics and estimates their cost of manufacture, shows that although Amazon is making some margin on the Kindle, it’s nowhere close to the 100%+ markup that Apple routinely enjoys on their iPods.

The other interesting thing is that the Kindle app on the iPhone already let’s you read books you’ve bought from Amazon on a device that is not a Kindle.

The worst-kept Apple secret ever is that they are working on a Tablet device that should be released some time early in 2010.

If rumours are to be believed, it will probably sport a hybrid LCD/e-Ink multi-touch display that can play back video in full colour and also display crisp text without a backlight in full sunlight. The screen technology that seems to be the best candidate for the Tablet is from a company called Pixel Qi, a company making a hybrid screen in a convenient 10″ size, perfect for a tablet computer.

Now we add this little nugget from TechCrunch in which Steve Jobs talks about eBooks:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

It all stacks up to a possible future where Apple sells a fantastic multi-purpose device that can act as a very good eBook reader by running a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon.

It’s possible that Jobs has cut a deals with book publishers in the same way he cut deals with the major music labels before the launch of the iTunes Music Store, but I think it’s unlikely.

What do you think? Will Steve add books to the iTunes Store, or will the Apple Tablet run a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon?

Perhaps both options can co-exist?

The Exhaustive Guide to Apple Tablet Rumors [Apple] (gizmodo.com)
The Apple Tablet’s Name: iSlate (At Least, It Sure Looks That Way) [Rumor] (gizmodo.com)

SEO and your personal brand

Tim — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:13:56 +0000

I am currently studying for my MBA through Henley Business School, attached to the University of Reading in the UK.
Right now I’m working through the ‘Strategic Marketing’ module. During the course of our module workshop, Professor David James spoke a bit about ‘Personal Branding’, the process of marketing people and careers as brands.
He got a mixed response from the group… some thought it was a practice bordering on deception. His pitch was that it’s important to present the elements of your professional and personal life that were most important in a consistent, understandable and marketable way.

It struck a chord for me, and I started to look more critically at my own personal brand online.

To date, I’ve done a terrible job… I’ve been online for 14 years, a professional in the Internet and Web Publishing industry for 12 years, and yet a Google search on Tim Gregory turns up:

Tim Gregory the actor on IMDB
Tim J Gregory on Facebook
Tim Gregory, the New Spaces host from Ohio
Tim Gregory ,the Associate Director at the Catholic University of America
Tim Gregory, the amateur photographer from the UK

And so on….
You get the picture – despite the opportunity I’ve had, I’ve not tried to ensure that I own my name online and shape the content associated with it.
An even more alarming case than my own of an individual who failed to actively manage his personal brand comes from RJ van Spaandonk, of the Core Group.

Now the Core Group has recently been under fire for their high prices and their public attacks on parallel imports of Apple products through their ‘stopgrey.co.za’ website. Instead of engaging meaningfully with his customers, RJ van Spaandonk launched a bizarre campaign of Twitter posts that made him look like a raving lunatic.

This campaign backfired horribly – his posts were picked up and reposted throughout Twitter and blogs, and further entrenched his reputation as an arrogant monopolist out of touch with his customers. It seems he thought social media was somehow still a one-to-many medium, and he could actively manage his convoluted campaign without anyone responding to the conversation he had started online before he was finished speaking. You can see his actual Twitter posts preserved at The Mac Blog
The result was predictable… the prolific bloggers and SEO experts that he “sought to engage with on their own territory” simply had to repeat his misguided utterances, and now a Google search for “RJ van Spaandonk” returns his regrettable statements in all their glory.

Google search for RJ van Spaandonk on 5 July 2009

Perhaps his first mistake was assuming that “journalists” were somehow different from “bloggers and twitterers”? RJ, a tip – as I’m sure you’re learning, it’s all the same thing on the internet.

In case I have to spell it out for you, Mr van Spaandonk has lost control of his personal brand online, and he’s going to have a tough time reclaiming it. And instead of showing some humility and seeking to open the conversation with his critics on more positive terms, he chooses to alienate them further, claiming that he “overestimated the wit and sense of humour” of his audience. Poor RJ.
For examples of people doing an excellent job of creating and maintaining their personal brands take a look at Google searches for my colleagues Brendan McNulty and Matthew Buckland. Most of the first page of results for these guys is all about them. Brendan goes as far as buying Google Adwords for his own name, which I imagine costs him very little as I suspect the bidding activity around the search term ‘Brendan McNulty’ is pretty low.

Moving on… So what am I doing about my own poor showing online?

Registered a vanity domain (tim-gregory.com)
Started blogging again. It’s about time I stood by my own thoughts and utterances
Applied some basic SEO techniques, like using dashes in my domain name to show the search engines that those are separate words
Leverage online profiles and social tools – follow Tim Gregory on Twitter, view the Tim Gregory professional profile on LinkedIn and the Facebook profile for Tim Gregory.
Continue to build a strong network of relevant industry professionals through LinkedIn
Start contributing across the ‘blogosphere’, leaving relevant comments against articles for blog posts where I have some industry expertise – most of them allow you to link your own site when you enter your name and email address against a comment. (Can get you some traffic, but not great for SEO because of the ‘nofollow’ command usually given to the search engines in comments)
Set SEO targets – it’s my ambition to knock the actor, host, and amateur photography off the top positions for MY name online
Look for media mentions where possible

If you have any interest in this SEO and personal branding experience, and would like to see whether an outsider can overtake established personal brands in search engine results, please link to my blog using my name, or simple post a link to this article. Feel free to drop comments about your experience maintaining your personal brand online.

If you have a website and would like to help me claim my name, please insert this into your site somewhere:

Tim Gregory Blog

Thanks!

Updated: Marcia Netto sent me a good link – Searcher Behaviour Research Update – “What about the branding aspect? The study found that 36% believe that companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top companies in their field.” Can we can infer from this behaviour that the top-ranked individual for a given name/term is regarded as a leader?

Misconceptions you might have about blogging (wsioms.co.za)

Core Group not helping grow Apple in SA

Tim — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:24:25 +0000

I’m in the market for a new Macbook (current one is 3+ years old and starting to feel a bit tired). Wanted to buy in South Africa, took a look at Digicape and other online stores, and could not believe the local prices, particularly considering the current exchange rate below R8/$.

Sure, I understand, we import in Euros mostly, and Core Group apparently took forward cover at a much higher rate. In my opinion, they need to take a knock if they got their rates wrong, and simply cut their own margin. You can’t punish your customers in a global market-place for mistakes made on currency speculation. It simply enforces the view that Core Group is a monopolist.

Please Core Group, it’s time to take a long-term view on growing Apple marketshare to the same levels as the rest of the world, even if it means sacrificing some short-term profit.

Sorry Core, would love to support the local market, but it’s probably not going to happen at the current prices.

Hot topics for 2009 – Realtime Web

Tim Gregory — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:11:55 +0000

Ok, this one is pretty obvious… you would have to be living in a cave high in the mountains and out of earshot of any internet-using humans to have missed the seismic shift from ‘kinda fresh’ to real-time on the internet.
This is big, really big, and it’s particularly interesting to me that it’s an area that seems to be a bit of a weak spot for Google and until recently some of the other giants like Facebook.
I’d go as far as saying that Twitter is not that interesting by itself, and it is really riding the realtime meme.
Twitter was in the right place at the right time, and pitched itself in the right way -the technology is not particularly interesting, and has existed in various forms for years.

Take a look at this timeline of the spread of news regarding Michael Jackson’s death from SEOMoz.

It took over an hour for a large entertainment site to break the news of the cardiac arrest (TMZ.com).
Another 42 minutes for Wikipedia to pick it up.
A further 18 minutes before CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital (meanwhile, TMZ had posted news of his death)
15 minutes after the CNNbrk tweet, Wikipedia freezes the Michael Jackson page after a flurry of edits.
A total of 2 hours after the 911 call, the TMZ story goes big on Digg
By this stage, there are over 2000 mentions per minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter
At 22:40, a full 3 hours after the 911 call, the first mention of Michael Jackson’s death make it onto Google News.

Not hard to see a pattern here… Twitter, Wikipedia, Digg… mainstream news and the mighty Google were slow out of the blocks compared to the social sites.

I won’t bore you with too many links and details, but here’s a quick scan over the topic…

The realtime web is being built on XMPP, the ‘jabber’ protocol.

Everyone is starting to use XMPP, including Google (for Wave), Apple (for iPhone push notification), Twitter (for feeds to Twitter search and a couple of others) and Facebook (promised soon for their chat).

The major IM networks are starting to ‘get it’, and AOL now talks XMPP.

XMPP has loads of great stuff built in, like presence, personal eventing, multi-user chat, federated authentication, publish/subscribe functionality and loads more.

The bridge between the web and XMPP is BOSH.

The development pattern is called Comet , and typically uses the long-polling technique. Holding connections open is better than polling – the latency is lower, and total overhead is lighter.

BOSH and XMPP are typically used in web-based IM clients, but some clever engineers are re-purposing XMPP for multi-player games at sites like Chesspark.

Realtime search is becoming a hot topic, particularly at Techcrunch.

Realtime search is the beginning – I can see us using this at 24.com for content syndication, real-time Sport scoring, multi-player games and a couple of other (top sikrit) apps.