iPod Touch & the Mobile Market

For all of those seemingly astonished analysts (via 512 Pixels) mulling over the fact that Apple owns the mobile marketplace (even after the rise of Android OS’s footprint): how did you not see this coming? Not only does iOS still rake in the largest share of all mobile app purchases, but let’s not forget they also sell and rent movies and TV shows, and are still the number one retailer for music.

But while everyone talks iPhones and iPads, there’s a sneaky product that’s probably contributing to these numbers a hell of a lot more than most people would guess. One look around the families gathered at our Christmas tree this year and it’s evident that iPod touches are selling very well to the younger (and teenage) crowd. Almost all of my cousins currently owned one or received one for Christmas — and every single one of them received iTunes gift cards to spend on Apple’s digital stores. While setting these things up is a bit tedious (I helped two younger cousins get through the process of creating email accounts and Apple IDs), once everything is operational, it’s clear that kids grasp digital frameworks quickly — just hearing them discuss games and apps, how important reviews are, and maximizing the credit attributed to their accounts is explanatory enough to reinforce this. It’s also obvious, as a result, that Apple and its developers are making a significant amount of revenue from customers without credit cards tied to Apple IDs and gift cards. It’s a fantastic method for permitting young customers to access and purchase on a mobile marketplace without the need of a credit card.

The bigger problem for the marketplace is that, after five years, there is hardly any competitor to the iPod touch (or phone-less smartphone). And just like Apple dominates the so-called “tablet” market, they too dominate a market without valid competition: the phone-less smartphone market (which isn’t really a phone-less market when you factor in phone-enabling apps over wifi like Skype and Google Voice). If no one can manufacture a version of a smartphone without subsidies, then the marketplace really does belong to Apple. Apparently some have tried, but none have succeeded in denting marketshare. It’s certainly worse than the digital music player market that Apple nearly owned entirely with its iPods during the 2000s. And just like that market, they’re doing the same to the tablet and smartphone-less ones. Good luck to anyone who can marshall the financing and resources to take on these markets. At this point, though, it’d be wiser to carve a niche into somethign new.

Apple Store App: In-Store Pickup

A few months ago, Apple updated their Apple Store app (the app tied to its physical retail stores, not the digital ones) to version 2.0. The added features circulated the tech blog rounds with applause, but they never caught on with mainstream media. Granted, the new features would be alien to a normal in-store shopper. And after having used them, it would take me quite a few times to ease habitually into them. But if more stores employed the features, shopping would certainly be more enjoyable.

So what exactly did Apple update? The big features released in Version 2.0 include the following:

• Browse and purchase products in-app, then pick up at store
• Easily purchase accessories on your own in-store with EasyPay

I did the former the other evening; the latter still seems too strange to me. Apple is granting enormous trust on its customers with the latter. And that’s actually something I did learn when speaking to the employee about the pick-up service — he reassured me that I should really try it and that they trust us — that they’re really trying to educate their customers on trusting them in their stores (which is fascinating considering the foot traffic they receive on an hourly basis).

So: while at work, I bought an accessory in-app (even picked out a specific color from a customize drop-down) and selected in-store pick up. It detected the nearby Apple Stores, and I merely tapped one and it automatically checked store inventory. Purchased it. Done.

About five minutes after receiving purchase confirmation emails, I was sent another email informing me that the product was ready for pick-up. Alas, I had to wait another five hours for work to elapse.

Propmtly after work, I jaunted over to the Michigan Ave store and checked my iPhone. This is what you see after tapping open the Apple Store app and initiating the pick-up screen:

Works Like It Should

The whole thing is magically slick. Stand anywhere you want in the store, tap Pick Up Now, and the app will initiate a process on the back-end that informs available Apple employees to the presence of a pick-up customer (I asked later about this, and was told that they have select individuals “on-duty” for these kinds of things).

I did, however, feel strange that somehow this wouldn’t exactly work, so I just went up to an Apple employee (a friendly guy named Pat) and told him what I was doing. He was rather surprised and genuinely excited about trying this out (apparently he hadn’t done it yet), so I re-did the Pick Up Now tap and we watched on his iPhone screen as an alert popped up. And just like that, my order information was provided so Pat could easily grab it from the back. (He had the option of returning me an alert that someone was on their way to me, but we skipped it.)

Within half a minute I had my product in-hand and a confirmation email sent to my phone. I know Apple retail stores aren’t the first to have a system in place for purchasing online and then picking up at store, but it’s by far the smoothest. I’ve tried Best Buy’s before and while it works, you have to stand in line and wait at Customer Service (which is the most awful part of their stores), as well as hope they’ve actually received the request for pick-up by the time you get to the clerk. For last-minute shopping, Apple’s process takes the cake.

The Bane of Share Buttons

If you have this on your site, please remove it. Just delete the code. Please.

Why would this look good — anywhere? Seeing a variation of this row of share buttons is just as vexing as seeing Flash ads initiate without your consent. Services like ShareThis are the bane of the Internet. If someone is going to share or link to an article (or product or service), they’ll likely do it by either:

1. Copying the URL and pasting (because haven’t we habitually been doing this for decades?)
2. Using their mobile OS’s built-in share service (which often includes the most important methods)

And for the sake of sensibility, if you’re going to do this, at least place them at the bottom of the article. Why the fuck would you put them at the top, near the title? By doing this, you assume your reader has read the content already — just as they land at the top of the page. This is impossible. And publications that send out newsletters with the share buttons affixed to the titles of featured articles (ahem, Atlantic) demonstrate even more incompetence.

You should loathe seeing share buttons on pages because of the following:

• Off-color, different-sized buttons clash with the aesthetic of your website
• Share options typically load pre-written text surrounding a link that doesn’t reflect your sentiments or your readers’
• Low share numbers recorded on some of the buttons can depress readers’ trust in your content
• More numbers to keep track of by way of more analytics on shared links — which, by the way, may even conflict with readers’ own methods for shortening URLs or doing other things to your URL that you can’t even track with a service like ShareThis

This isn’t a rant. It’s good advice. Take it and make the Internet a better place.

“Modern” social media is shit.

Pinboard’s maestro says it best:

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.

Why is Wunderlist Free?

Every so often I run a trial of a new task/project manager and see how well it flows into my daily needs. One of the most recently popular task managers is Wunderlist, a product of the Berlin-based development studio 6Wunderkinder. As a task manager, is it useable and pretty, but hardly efficient. It’s somewhere between Ta-Da List and Reminders.app, and really can’t touch something as extensive as Things or Omnifocus. But it is cross-platform, does exhibit cloud syncing, has custom backgrounds (who cares?), and is priced at $0.00. I’m sure the reason they have over 1 million users can be attributed to these very features. But how, and why, is Wunderlist free?

For supporting a growing team of 13 and hiring like crazy, Wunderkinder is likely sucking down VC or angel investments. But I wonder how this is paying off. How many times do companies that know how to successful run a business need to clarify? Wunderkinder, for being a perceptively clever and lean company, must have something to sell, right? There are currently no ads associated with any Wunderkinder app or the site, and I doubt they’re selling any kind of user information, so there must be a projected revenue stream somewhere down the road.

Recently, I received an email requesting an early beta sign-up for a new product they’ve been working on called Wunderkit. Perhaps since I only trial ran their task manager, I never got around to following development updates, so Wunderkit came as a surprise. After having read their announcement blog post, I was still miffed as to what exactly Wunderkit was, and how it fit into the Wunderlist ecosystem. Presumably, it’s some variation of project management, or even a re-imagining of it. From the few screenshots and conceptual previews, the product addresses various shortcomings found in Wunderlist (namely, recurring tasks), and expands upon the aesthetics and design found in the skimpier task management software.

So if Wunderkit is the studio’s answer to the current negative revenue stream, will it suffice? Can it render them monetarily successful? Wunderlist has been out for around a year. It arrived right when productivity software was hitting its peak — there are so many apps out there claiming to offer easy project and task management it’s utterly nutty. Is there room for one more, let alone one that isn’t free? After all, we can assume that’s one of the reasons Wunderlist has been so successful. But they’ll be up against monolithic titans of a completely different marketplace — Basecamp, Salesforce, Flow, etc.

Depending on the price point for Wunderkit (if there even is a price point), it’s going to require a lot of features and a significant number of upgraders/switchers to justify further software development, as well as to address the number of different platforms on which Wunderkit will presumably reside. Who knows, maybe they’ll redefine a market and register millions of paying users. Maybe I’m still vexed it’s taken Cultured Code years to implement their fucking cloud sync. Either way, I still don’t know how or why Wunderlist is free — but perhaps we’ll find out soon enough.

Shit That Siri Says →

We knew this was coming.

Sharing actions via apps for email/Twitter/Facebook typically provide annoying copy surrounding the link that needs to be deleted (which is strangely counterproductive to the ease of said sharing functionality). McSweeney’s app for iOS, however, provides the exact language I would use for supporting these kinds of emails: “You might like this.”

Well done.

The six-month digital subscription is also a wonderful value for only $3.00.

The Fans are All Right

Pinboard’s creator on staying true to his users with his bookmarking service, and refraining from buckling to the socializing plug-in layers that riddle so many other services. Pinboard, after all, has always intended to be “a bookmarking site and personal archive with an emphasis on speed over socializing.”

Pinboard is not a social site, and it has always been about archiving, not sharing. I don’t intend to make the same mistake Avos did and suddenly try to retool the site for a brand new group while neglecting the quiet link hoarders who form the Pinboard old guard. As a grouchy hermit, I like to think that other grouchy hermits should have a place to store stuff that will never feel like publishing or expose them to unwanted contact with other people.

At the same time, I think the fans are a very nice bunch who have been somewhat hard done by, and that their presence will be a long-term boon to the site. Like bees in a garden, the sudden arrival of a big swarm can be alarming, but all this swarm wants is a place to set up a hive and get to work. And I’ll end this metaphor right now before it provokes any pollination slash.