2013-05-25T12:11:00-04:00 Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=matthew-hussey Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Matthew Hussey Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1316516 2012-03-04T19:00:00-05:00 2012-05-04T05:12:01-04:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
The first video on YouTube featuring a cat doing something silly was back in 2006. Since that day, 'Cat vs Dog' has been viewed 10 million times. While that number is conservative compared with other videos online - Lady Gaga's Bad Romance has been watched 448 million times - it was a significant moment in internet history.

It was also in that year the domain name LOLcats.com was registered - a site that popularized images of cute cats with messages written below them - effectively bringing to the boil what had been more than 100 years of humans quietly documenting the silly things that cats get up to around the house. It has also magnified a psychological connection we have with our feline friends that we don't necessarily share with man's other best friend, the dog.

The History

It was way back in the 1870s when British photographer Harry Pointer first stumbled upon the potential for capturing cats doing silly things. He started out taking pictures of his pets in natural poses as part of a study on animal behaviour. But he soon realised that re-arranging the cats to look like they were roller skating, or taking pictures, followed by captions beneath each picture was more commercially lucrative. His series, The Brighton Cats, would go on to have exhibitions in London and Dublin and Pointer would invited to join the Photographic Society of Great Britain.

While Pointer enjoyed moderate success with the first ever LOL cat, it was only the beginning of a long line of copycats, who not only repeated Pointer's initial observations on a greater scale, they made more money out of it, too.

Harry Whittier Frees series of photos of animals was essentially a carbon copy of Pointer's Brighton Cats. He tried to introduce other animals into his photos, but found cats were far better at conveying the emotions he wanted than other animals.

"Rabbits are the easiest to photograph in costume, but incapable of taking many 'human' parts. Puppies are tractable when rightly understood, but the kitten is the most versatile animal actor, and possesses the greatest variety of appeal," said Frees.

The trend continued to grow in the twentieth century. In the 1970s, with the growth of office culture, a motivational poster featuring a kitten dangling precariously from a tree with the slogan, "Hang in there, baby!" written beneath it appeared.

It was so popular, it was presented to vice president Spiro Agnew by members of Congress when he was under pressure to resign in 1973. The poster would go on to be referenced in everything from The Simpsons, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and a host of other TV shows right up to the present day.

With the introduction of the internet to popular culture, our fascination with felis catus continued. Today, there are nearly two million different videos featuring cats on YouTube.

The psychology

But what drives us to document the actions of cats?

A recent study carried out in Switzerland on 212 different couples compared how both their cats and their partners affected their moods. The results revealed that cats were more capable than their partners at alleviating negative moods.

So, it seems we seek out our feline friends when we're feeling a bit blue - which, according to a Leeds University Study, the more we use the internet, the more likely we are to feel depressed. Our digital lives are dependent on having outlets that make us feel good - which is where cats come in.

But, if recent studies are to be believed, our attachment to cats goes deeper than that. According to a study conducted by Central Missouri State University, humans ascribe the same personality traits to cats that psychologists would use to summarise the four broad personality parameters in people: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness.

By attributing complex human emotions onto our cats, it gives them great capacity to mimic our own behaviour, as Ben Huh, CEO of The Cheezburger Network, explains.

"Cats have very expressive facial and body expressions, so they are a perfect canvas for human emotion, which makes them awesome for captioning and anthropomorphisation."

But what about dogs? In a study last year, 39 per cent of US households owned dogs compared to just 33 per cent for cats - so surely there are more dog lovers than cats?

A team of researchers led by psychologist Sam Gosling at the University of Texas in Austin discovered correlations in personality between those who own dogs and those who own cats.

It turns out that the 'dog people' - based on how people identified themselves, not on what animals they actually own - tend to be more social and outgoing, whereas 'cat people' tend to be more neurotic but 'open', which means creative, philosophical, or nontraditional in this context.

According to a study in the Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, people who spend the most time online, and therefore generate most of the content we see, tend to have personality traits that lean towards the "neurotic" side of the spectrum.

In essence, the makers of the internet are cat people, who are naturally inclined to share and create digital platforms for their wares, and their cats.

So the next time you're forwarded the latest LOL cat, remember there's a lot more going on than just our feline friends larking about. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1304391 2012-02-28T19:00:00-05:00 2012-04-29T05:12:01-04:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
If you've ever posted a photo on Facebook, used social networking, posted a comment on any website, published anything or played one of the millions of apps currently floating around Apple's app store, then chances are, you've been hacked.

Not by a legion of super spies locked away in a secret location doing the dirty work of the government. Nor are your details being used by a terrorist organisation to buy nuclear weapons on the black market - although they could be.

Your details are being used by sources far closer to home and by companies with better resources and technical know how then some band of 'freedom fighters' living in a cave. Do you know what the worst thing about all this is? You're letting them.

Your "digital DNA" is everything you've ever written, every site you've logged on to and every drunken moment you've shared with friends. According to a study conducted by Microsoft, just 42% of people in the US - and just 36% in the UK - have googled themselves or taken time out to explore the reams of data that currently exist online about you.

While that may sound like a strike against vanity, in reality, being ignorant to how freely personal information flows across the web could mean your digital identity is being shared, bought and sold, with your express permission.

One of the most popular users of your private data over the last few years has been both your current and your future employers. According to a survey of 450 businesses carried out by CareerBuilder.co.uk over half used social networking sites to research potential candidates, with another 12% planning to do the same.

While some Facebook users have attempted to combat this by turning their profiles to "private", people are still capable of seeing your details who aren't your friends, explains professor Pamela Wik-Grimm, a teacher of Tools for Internet Users in New York. "You might be having what you think is a private chat, but it could end up being forwarded or posted publicly." As long as someone in your friends network has an open privacy setting it means businesses can see easily follow a thread through friends' Facebook pages and find you.

It's not just business who are actively seeking you out online, your insurance provider is also snooping round looking for clues to better predict your next bill.

A report published in 2010 by Deloitte Consulting LLP found using people's online data was as effective in detecting potential health risks as a blood or urine test. So compelling was the paper, that several insurance companies, including Aviva and Swiss Re: have already started using it - although Aviva in the UK are still considering whether to follow their US counterparts. "Insurance analysts have found common factors within the friendship groups, interests and family backgrounds of people living beyond 100," says Craig Beattie, an insurance analyst with Celent consulting. "If you are selling someone life insurance, it's very useful to know if they have these indicators and insurers can find it just by looking at the person's Facebook profile."

With the incredible growth of the internet and our desire to share more data with our friends than ever before on new social networks, the rules for what can and cannot be used to turn your identity in to cash are essentially being made up as we go along.

Facebook is now required to have bi-annual audits on its privacy settings, and Google's recent privacy changes - it now wants to be able to move your identity and habits across all of its platforms - has already come under criticism.

IT research and consulting firm Gartner is advising private sector enterprise clients that use Google Apps to review their contract with Google to make sure it contains language that shields their organisation from potentially negative effects of this new privacy policy.

However, this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your digital footprint - and while large corporations like Facebook and Google are finally being scrutinised for how they use our data, there are still thousands of smaller, less obvious ways our identities are being traded.

So the next time you hand over your email address or username, be advised that not everyone has your privacy as a priority. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1236094 2012-01-27T19:00:00-05:00 2012-03-28T05:12:02-04:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
The result was a media blackout from some 7,000 websites including Wikipedia and Reddit - even Google posted a message on its home page about the problem with the bill.

The collective response lead to the shelving of the Act until someone could come up with a more digestible format. But the internet's problems didn't stop there.

Next came the arrest of Kim Dotcom and the executives of his file sharing company Megaupload.com for allegedly generating $175million in profits for criminals and half a billion dollars in lost revenues for copyright owners.

The result of freezing Megaupload's traffic - responsible, at its peak for 3% of all online web activity - has caused legitimate business owners to not have access to their work stored on Kim's servers.

Finally, and this is the most worrying, out of America's attempts to legitimise US companies attempts at suing individuals - the EU has now signed up to a similar bill.

The ACTA - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trademark Agreement - signed this week, is a voluntary agreement between the 22 EU nations designed to combat counterfeiting in both the physical and digital worlds. However, it has stirred up controversy for both the secretive 'behind-closed doors' way in which it was drafted- it was signed in Japan - and that it allows ISP's to introduce surveillance technology to monitor people's online habits.

In Ireland a separate SOPA bill has been pushed through government, without any referendum on whether people thought it was a good idea or not.

Why is this a problem? We are effectively handing over the power to censor and stifle the internet to unaccountable bodies at a time when the internet is the lifeline to many country's flailing economies.

Allow me to explain.

Private corporations want the ability to shut down websites that allow people to upload, download, and share illegal music, film and entertainment. However, as law-makers have discovered over the years, websites that aren't located within the country's borders are notoriously difficult to pursue.

So, the recent spate of acts being proposed have come up with a way round it. In the Protect-IP world, governments and private companies would be allowed to dictate to internet service providers what sites they can and cannot block. NOTE: You would still be able to access the banned websites by entering their IP address. But shhhh... I didn't tell you that.

What's more, any sites based within that country caught sharing any links to those banned sites can be sued or shutdown. So, for example, if you own a website where people are allowed to post their own content - such as FaceBook, YouTube, or tumblr - on to your servers, if that content is deemed illegal, then you're responsible.

In the cases of big sites like those just mentioned, they could feasibly afford to slip up every now and again. For the thousands of tech startups that, on the off chance, accidentally find one of their users has posted illegal content, this could destroy them.

Other parts of these bills also allow governments to tell online advertisers and payment services to cease trading with sites or persons deemed bad. As to what 'bad' actually means represents a huge problem. If, for example, a home video is uploaded to YouTube and it happened to have music playing in the background - is that a deliberate copyright violation, or just a hapless mistake? In 2010, Sony said it was the former and tried to remove a video from YouTube of a child dancing to Shirley Temple.

Do we really want to have an internet where corporations can tell us what we can and cannot do on such a minute scale?

Today, musicians earn on average more money with the aid of the internet than they did without it. So if it's not about protecting artists' cash flow, what is it all for?

Fear? The unknown? The reality is, politicians are looking for something to blame for the way the economy is going, and the internet seems the easiest thing to pick on.

The Protect IP acts allow companies to sue other companies if they feel they're not doing enough to combat online piracy.

This is what is happening now to virtual locker sites such as Rapidshare, Filesonic and Fileserve, who are being targeted as they are, "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works."

But who is deciding that these sites are bad, and sites like Dropbox, YouTube, and Google - which all host illegal content, conscious or otherwise - are good? The answer is, nobody really knows.

Corporations already have plenty of tools to fight piracy - the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the 2007 PRO-IP Act, the2011 Anti-counterfeiting trade agreement - so why do they need an even bigger arsenal?

Going after a few pirates with a Howitzer would, and is going to be catastrophic for the web.

An economist will tell you when an economy is starting to show signs of growth, you need to encourage it to keep going by keeping inflation low, interest at a steady rate, and creating incentives for new businesses to spread their wings.

At 2010 estimates carried out by the Boston Consulting Group, the internet will make up 7.2% of the UK's GDP by 2015. If punitive and misguided laws are allowed to pass, then the future isn't going to look so rosy.

Don't let governments ruin something we've worked so hard to make good. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1099576 2011-11-17T18:00:00-05:00 2012-01-17T05:12:01-05:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
A fairly typical presentation you might think. Except Suarez has yet to finish what we in the UK would call primary school.

His first app, Earth Fortune, used a picture of the earth which changed colours depending on what it predicts your day will be like, and his more successful Bustin Jieber app, a Whac-a-Mole style game involving hitting the popstar's face as many times as possible in the allotted time.

The crux of his presentation - apart from subtly telling you to go and download his apps - was the frustration he had when it came to developing software.

"A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them," he says. "It's difficult because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program...and not many parents have written apps."

This conundrum represents a key pillar in the technology revolution. If someone wants their phone or tablet to do something, they no longer have to wait for a company to create it, they simply make their own - and potentially make some money while doing so. According to IDC, an IT portfolio management company, by 2014 app downloads are set to expand seven fold from 10.9 billion in 2010 to 76.9 billion a year.

But, there's a problem. The next generation of app developers are still being taught a national curriculum from the Nineties: prioritising how to use software as opposed to teaching them to make their own.

However, the first seeds of this particular part of the tech revolution are being sown at a school in Stoke Newington in east London.

Decoded, a small start-up who has already taught the likes of the Guardian and Channel 4 how to code in a day, has invited pupils at the school to create their own apps with the top three to be launched as fully fledged businesses next year.

The scheme is hoping to demonstrate a model for delivering code teaching classes into schools. "At present, there aren't any teachers or facilities that allow the teaching of code," explains Ali Blackwell, one of the founders of Decoded. "What we're trying to demonstrate is that you don't need much to be able to teach code and give kids the opportunities to build their own software," he continues.

If successful, Decoded is aiming to roll out the programme across other schools in the area with the ultimate goal of changing the national curriculum.

While Decoded's goals may be huge in their scope, it does represent a trend that recognises the potential for engaging more people in the process of software creation. Crowd sourcing this isn't.

Stanford University has created a free iPad and iPhone Application Development course through iTunes that shows people - with an understanding of UNIX and C language - how to create their own apps.

But it doesn't stop at apps. The Common Crawl Foundation has indexed five billion web pages and made the data free and available to anyone. So if you wanted to create your own personalized version of Google, now you can.

In an interview with Newsweek in 2006, Steve Jobs, although talking about design, summed up the changing approach to coding rather well:

"When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often at times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there."

Coding has followed a similar trajectory. As developers and those in the tech world have lived with the growing number of languages used in software design, so the number of simple, elegant, and potentially revolutionary solutions have begun to emerge, such as Decoded.

"The internet is beyond doubt the prime medium for communications and commerce. Unlike TV, it's a two-way tool. And yet how many people know how it works? Probably less than 3%," says Steve Henry, the co-founder of the Decoded course.

The answer to broad economic woes in the UK may not be to teach everyone how to make their own apps, but ensuring the workforce have all the tools they need in an uncertain future, is. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1032902 2011-10-26T12:28:08-04:00 2011-12-26T05:12:01-05:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
But, in London today, a glimmer of silver appeared in the lining of the enormous raincloud that has sat above the Finnish firm's headquarters in Espoo. The first fruits of the Nokia/Microsoft partnership arrived in the form of the Lumia 800 and 710. And they're not bad.

The former is a high-end smartphone with a 3.7-inch touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera, and 16GB worth of memory. The latter will have the same processor as its bigger brother, but with half the memory for Nokia's resurrected music service.

When Elop announced he was forsaking the operating system (Symbian) his current employer had struggled to modernize for that of his former employers in February this year, eyebrows were raised. Not only was Nokia going to have to politely tell the 100-million odd users that its future wasn't in the operating system currently sat on their phones, it was going to have to tell, in slightly more stern terms, that thousands of software developers were out of the job.

Nokia was also going to have to deliver results on its new partnership, and fast. Since Apple's introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Nokia has watched in agony as €63 billion in market value fell of its balance sheet. The rot had to stop, and fast.

What personal hells the teams involved in today's unveiling went through in the past eight months to deliver a new phone, OS, and ecosystem is anyone's guess, but they did do it. We have to applaud them for that.

But, the overwhelming impressions of Nokia's first tentative steps out of its self-induced funk have been that they are baby steps at best. Windows Phone 7.5 - or Mango as it was codenamed - has been around for a while, and the features aren't exactly mind-blowing. By choosing Windows Phone OS, Nokia isn't just competing with Android and iOS, it's also competing against other handset makers who also offer the platform, but with better hardware to go with it.

Instead, these releases feel like tasters or prototypes of a far more impressive line of phones somewhere down the line. Which is fine, you can't expect a company to completely redefine itself in eight months. But, as the stock markets have judged - an initial rise of 3% before slumping back to close on 0.7% above the day's starting price - this isn't enough to excite people weaned on the yearly advances of Google and Apple.

The head of Nokia in the US has already told potential buyers these phones won't be crossing the Atlantic, and almost seemed to suggest that when the next-gen Nokias do arrive Stateside, they will be a new offering entirely. America was the Finns' most prized market, is it holding out for a better range of phones before it cautiously wades back in? Time will tell.

While the Nokia/Windows grand unveiling was the focus for the media, the announcement of three, Symbian based phones is a far more telling story about Nokia's future. In his speech at the launch, Elop indicated these phones were for the next billion people who have yet to buy a smartphone.

Nokia has been quietly gobbling up market share in emerging markets in Africa and Asia, providing cheap, simple phones that perform tasks well, if un-spectacularly. While this isn't likely to grab any headlines, it represents a way out of Nokia's stagnation.

But, there is another Scandinavian rival who is also capitalizing on this revenue stream, Sony Ericsson. The collaboration between the Swedes and the Japanese firms has just reported a 17 per cent rise in sales year-on-year, along with a four per cent leap in profits. How? By admitting the two-horse race between Google and Apple is not the only race out there. Instead, the firm has heavily invested in the Chinese market and mobile infrastructure. Glamorous? No. Profitable? Yes.

I hope Nokia does recover from its slump, but it might not be via ways we in the UK might expect. IBM went through the painful process of selling off its PC manufacturing division - the very thing that defined the company in the first place - choosing instead to focus on services and infrastructure. By spotting emerging trends early enough, Nokia too can follow Big-Blue's climb back up the blue-chip ladder.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1022084 2011-10-21T19:00:00-04:00 2011-12-21T05:12:01-05:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
While the piece focuses mostly on editors' extraordinary abilities to remove entire sections of celebs' physiques without sense checking to see if anyone would notice - it does highlight a trend that appears to be gaining traction in certain circles. People don't want to see manipulated images of celebrities any longer.

One couple in the US has gone so far as to take this fight to the US government. Seth and Eva Matlins have started the Self Esteem Act. The petition wants images to carry "Truth in Advertising" labels to ensure people know if they're looking at something that has been artificially enhanced, or that person really is that lovely to look at.

While this sounds like a very sensible idea, it is not. The world needs Photoshop and photo editing, not just to make people look more lovely.

The history of doctoring images stretches far beyond the invention of the digital image, and even the camera itself.

The Egyptians elongated limbs and necks in their wall paintings to make their rulers look more elegant. Henry VIII paid painters to make him look taller and more handsome than his ever increasing frame suggested. With the advent of photography, this practice continued.

One of the first, and most significant photographic touch ups came in 1865, when photojournalist Matthew Brady shot General Sherman and his top officers only to add another officer to the picture in post production.

Photographer John Filo's Pulitzer winning image of Mary Ann Vecchio that came to symbolise the anti-Vietnam movement in the US was touched up as the original photo accidentally depicted Vecchio with a pole coming out of her head.

Images of the Beatles, Lenin, Oprah Winfrey, Hitler, Kim Jong Il, even an Iranian missile test have all been tampered with to make the recipient respond to the photo in a different way to how the original intended.

The reasons for changing an image are myriad. The Beatles' iconic album cover for Abbey Road for example, originally featured Paul McCartney holding a cigarette as he walked across the road bare foot. But, American publishers had it removed to conceal Paul's habit.

Propaganda images of Lenin featuring Trotsky, at the insistence of Stalin were altered to give the impression Leon was never present. Stalin believed Trotsky was a threat and so had him scrubbed from the Soviet Union's photographic record.

The simple matter is, the motivations for tweaking pictures are far more complex than to simply make the person looking at it feel miserable about themselves. Should Filo have not won the award because he wasn't telling the truth? Or did his changes make an already compelling image even more powerful?

The Matlins' argue that artificially beautified images are making teenage girls unhappy with their own bodies. This is an argument sociologists call the 'hypodermic syringe model' - whereby an audience is passively consuming messages without interpretation or resistance. Girl opens magazine, girl sees images of thin women she admires, girl immediately hates own body.

This theory - largely discredited in the 1960s - ignores the complex exchange that happens when people are exposed to images, words or messages. In essence, what the Matlins are saying is that we, and in particular, teenage girls are incapable of thinking for themselves.

I believe people are a bit smarter than that. Especially teenage girls. It is true that some will look at heavily retouched images of their icons and obsess over trying to emulate that at the detriment to everything else. But, is that because of the images, or are there deeper, more personal issues at play?

I'd argue the latter. Photoshop is not the cause of female body issues, but an unfortunate symptom of it. Stamping every picture that has been altered, for artistic, political, or some other reason is unnecessary, not to mention insulting to people's intelligence.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1016566 2011-10-17T19:00:00-04:00 2011-12-17T05:12:01-05:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
The cracks started to appear when BlackBerry decided against any new mobile handsets in the first half of 2011. Shareholder confidence dipped - and, unsurprisingly, in a market that now expects new handsets every year, so did sales. Meanwhile, rivals such as HTC and Samsung pushed phones capabilities way beyond what BlackBerry's already ageing handsets could do.

BlackBerry did however enter the tablet market with the release of its PlayBook. Sales were poor, and, RIM has subsequently admitted, it got the marketing strategy wrong. In a recent interview with Patrick Spence, RIM's MD for global sales, he openly conceded, "we could've done a better job."

As a result, RIM cut 2,000 jobs back in July, and more recently slashed the number of people working on PlayBook production by 1,000 at source in Asia.

When it did finally unveil five new handsets in the second half of this year - although technically it was only three - many questioned if this was the bold step RIM needed to convince skeptics it was still in the game.

Hardware had been updated and a new operating system speeded things up. At the demonstration after the unveiling however, there were glitches with the touch screen and the OS's infrastructure wouldn't do the things BlackBerry demonstrators wanted it to do. Was this the corporate message BlackBerry was looking for?

Another key concern was the absence of QNX - a new operating system that would give the BlackBerry user experience the kick up the backside it was in desperate need of. The latest is that its still in development, with a soft-launch expected at BlackBerry's DevCon in San Francisco this week.

But, none of these events would match the failures over the past two weeks to fix what was essentially a failed server in the UK. Users reported problems with emails in the UK on Monday when engineers in Slough tried to update systems serving customers in Europe, Middle East, Africa and India. When the update failed, engineers attempted to revert back to the old system, causing a total collapse. Within three days, RIM's global customer base of some 70 million was affected.

Malik Saadi, an analyst at Informa estimated compensation for the system failure could cost RIM £7.6 million a day, not factoring liability fees or loss of data that could emerge as companies reliant on BlackBerry calculate the costs incurred. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has also said problems with email access could echo on until December.

While the failure was unfortunate, angry users had to wait four days before Mike Lazaridis, who shares the role of CEO came out an apologized for the fault. In a year when the company's stock value has dropped 50 per cent, has lost jobs, and has come under fire from shareholders demanding to know why RIM has gone so awry, RIM's leadership structure appears to be failing in its most basic capacity: to lead.

Further damage came when BlackBerry handsets were named as a key tool used by rioters in London to communicate and evade police. While this couldn't have been foreseen, RIM's delayed, and lukewarm response to calls to assist police in capturing looters further tarnished its reputation.

Despite the colossal amount of damage RIM has done to itself over the past nine months, the BlackBerry brand still commands an enviable position among business and teenage users. But it has to acknowledge it has lost its position in the wider smartphone market. For now. It needs to retrench and rebuild its core user base first, instead of trying to mimic market trends and spread its dwindling resources across a field too big for BlackBerry to straddle.

Nokia accepted its software was holding it back and teamed up with Microsoft - whose Windows Phone system is a joy to use, but never managed to capture a significant market share. This combination - which we're starting to see the fruits of now - represents the first significant player in the Android/Apple software war.

RIM isn't a software or hardware powerhouse, but it has a user base of 70 million that are still willing to give it another chance. The sooner it recognizes this and begins to put them first, the sooner we may see BlackBerry return to the top table.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.951761 2011-09-07T19:00:00-04:00 2011-11-07T05:12:02-05:00

Matthew Hussey http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hussey/
Tablet makers should do what HP did and quit before pouring in more millions into developing new platforms that no one is going to buy, or care about. Why? Look at the numbers - a different set this time.

As of June this year, Apple sold 28.7 million of its iPads worldwide. It's predicted to ship another 20 million in the run up for Christmas. The total amount of tablets due to be sold worldwide this year is 54.7 million. That's 89 per cent of the world's tablets being sold by Apple.

When you consider there are around 150 different tablets currently on the market, that gives you an idea of just how dominant Apple are, and how successful its rivals have been in combating it.

This isn't the first time Apple has done this - and this is isn't the first time rivals have tried to stop them - Microsoft's Zune anyone? When Apple unveiled its Jonathan Ive designed iPod in 2001 - people shrugged. They weren't first to produce an mp3 player, and it was white. White! But, what made this special, and what would go on to define Apple's new technology policy is you don't have to be first, you just have to be the easiest to understand.

Before Apple started making i-things, it made a decision it was going to sell computers, not for businesses, but for people. It's main rivals at the time, Xerox and Altair were expensive - ten times as much in Xerox's case - difficult to use, and lived inside corporate offices. Apple's Macintosh, released in 1984, was designed to be a home appliance, simple like a TV or stereo. The Mac was for the home, and was designed to help make your life better.
These early seeds grew through Apple's R&D department culminating in the iPod. The product was designed to hold people's music in one place: their pocket. That's it. It didn't want to make toast for you, it just wanted to play music.

Within two years, Apple had achieved what Hoover did before it: lodge a brand name in people's minds that became the de-facto definition of a product. People no longer ask, "do you have an mp3 player?" they say, "do you have an iPod?" The same has already happened with tablets. I was recently playing with a Samsung Galaxy Tab in a coffee shop in London and a complete stranger came over and asked, "Is that the new iPad?" Not very scientific, but it shows that the public's conscience has now changed from "tablet computer" to "iPad".

Speaking to sales teams across the country, warehouses are groaning under the weight of surplus tablets from manufacturers who built tablets because Apple did.
This is not a sensible way of doing business. Apple has been working on a tablet since the late 90s, everyone else has had to cack out one in little over a year to try and stave off Apple gobbling up the market - good job trying to stop that, guys. Rush jobs do not work.

But, there are some lessons that can be gleaned from how Apple does business: create products in areas of the market where competition is low or fragmented - the iPod - don't try to copy the competition - had Apple tried to compete with Dell's stack-em-high-sell-em-cheap mantra of the PC market in the early noughties, it would have gone bankrupt - and keep as much of the technical jargon away from the consumer - there isn't one piece of tech lingo in any of its advertising.

Apple have won the tablet battle - but there are wars elsewhere in the technology market still to be won. ]]>