Versatile Amphibian

I think that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This (last!) week – Daily, RIM blow their own trumpets, DSL trumps cable in the UK, why startup investing isn’t like Moneyball and how Africa is becoming a creative force in media Digital Media The headline here is that The Daily (of Murdoch ownership/ fame) is the highest grossing iPad app... currently and only in the US. Apple doesn’t release global or granular statistics, so who knows what this really means. http://blog.thedaily.com/post/18196083686/betcha-cant-guess-whats-currently-the App download volumes keep rising – to be expected given the vast number of devices sold every quarter – however per person this isn’t a big number. In reality, most people don’t download many applications and when we do, they’re the most popular ones. We’re herd animals, after all. http:/...

Some thoughts on the Playbook 2.0 delay , since it's topical. I think the 2.0 upgrade issue is embarrassing for RIM and will be bad for their relations with the developer community, but it’s a small part of a wider dynamic in the tablet industry. If you look at the distribution of tablet sales so far, it almost exactly follows the distribution of wealth in the population, which suggests that early adopters are buying as a luxury and therefore buying on appearance, brand and reputation as much as they’re buying on the technical features of the platform. Software is definitely a major part of the tablet experience, but actually the Playbook (or Android equivalents) are not significantly more or less user friendly than the iPad in this respect. Where all of the competitors are currently falling down is that they’re taking the iPad on head-to-head with high concept products at the same price point, but without the great marketing and retail experience that Apple offer. So everyone is p...