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Showing posts from March, 2012

Apple acquiring Twitter? Here's why not and what instead

There's nothing better than huge juicy speculation.  Usually they're Tweets starting "Google rumored to buy..." but lately, since Apple announced its $100B in cash reserves , the speculation has shifted to Apple. The latest rumor is that Apple will buy Twittter.  This blog article is the best explanation of why people think that this makes sense. The problem is that if you look closely at the two companies, it doesn't make sense. Apple exists to make money from devices. Specifically devices for content consumption , but the devices.  Store sales, even iTunes, are a minimal percentage of their profits that are there to get people to buy iDevices. I haven't seen a single move they've made that hasn't been around the business model of selling devices.  All the acquisitions they've made have been small ones that they hope will give differentiation to their devices. Twitter exists to be a platform for information and links. They have very little

1.5 million apps using Twitter does not make an ecosystem

Everyone was gasping when Twitter announced that they've reached the landmark 1.5 million different applications that use their API to access or post Twitter content.  Blog articles like this one went wild with the news, concluding that Twitter was a hugely successful ecosystem just like Facebook. At the risk of nitpicking, I think if we want to understand Twitter and their success, we need to differentiate "platform" from "ecosystem."  And we need to take a look at the 1.5 million apps accessing Twitter's API, and how different they are from the apps within Facebook. I'll bet that 96% of the "apps" under discussion have absolutely nothing to do with Twitter. These are "apps" like newspaper web sites that give a button to Tweet an article you read, GPS apps that give a button to Tweet your location or something you just saw, other social network sites (like LinkedIn) that give a button to Tweet a link to something you post on tha

Nokia indoor location positioning research shown at MWC 2012

Grizzly Analytics has been looking closely at indoor location technology, both technology research at major companies and technology solutions available to store-owners and other site managers .  At MWC we expected that indoor location would be prominent, and we weren't disappointed! We had the pleasure of seeing a large number of demonstrations of indoor positioning in action.  This is the first of several blog posts looking at these demonstrations, starting with Nokia. First I'll give some explanation, then below is a video showing Nokia's demo in action and hearing comments from their researchers. Nokia has been researching indoor location technology for years, and the technology has advanced each year but not yet reached market.  Their demo is, in a word, breathtaking, in the speed and precision at which it tracks people walking around the room.  People are seen on a computer screen or phone screen, in real-time, moving as they walk around the demo room floor. T