Wednesday, 6 September 2017

Remember when WhatsApp didn’t want to make money?

WhatsApp is preparing to make money by facilitating conversations between business and consumers.

It’s a great move.

Messaging is huge, and there is vast scope for bringing brands and businesses on board. It’s a process that’s been happening for years, predominantly with Asia-based chat apps that let users follow official accounts, but enterprising business people in emerging markets have long found ways to make use of the hugely popular WhatsApp service despite no features.

Two years ago I wrote that chat apps were becoming as important as social media for brands, and that shift has only continued. So it is high time WhatsApp got on board given its insane userbase of more than one billion people.

But it wasn’t always that way.

WhatsApp once had a very strict focus on messaging only, with plenty of negative words for rival companies who dared to mix business with their chat app product

Tuesday, 5 September 2017

SpaceX runs its Tesla-powered pusher at 220 mph on Hyperloop test track.

Elon Musk apparently felt left out when student teams competed to achieve top speed on the SpaceX Hyperloop test track last weekend, because he decided to run the SpaceX pusher vehicle, which includes a Tesla drivetrain, down the track on its own to see how fast it could go.

The Tesla/SpaceX vehicle, which works basically like a Hyperloop tug boat to propel some of the student pods that don’t have their own built-in motor for acceleration, managed to get up to 220 mph in the sealed vacuum tunnel, which is faster than the winning student team at 201 mph.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 is a cautious return for the world’s best phablet.

Between the explosions, the recalls and its subsequent afterlife as airport PA system fodder, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the Galaxy Note 7 was a very good phone. In fact, the line has always been one of the industry’s best and most innovative. It seems it only takes a few well-publicized explosions to tarnish a beloved brand.

But Samsung rebounded quickly. In fact, the company didn’t appear to take any real financial hit from the Note 7 fiasco. It did, however, do its due diligence, investigating the cause of the phone’s battery issues, publicly apologizing and instituting an eight-point safety check in hopes of assuring that it wouldn’t ever repeat its mistakes again. And in spite of some momentary speculation that the company might dump the Note altogether, it was pretty clear to Samsung from the outset that the name it had spent a half-dozen years building up was too valuable to abandon.

Unveiled late last month, the Note 8 is the product of a newly cautious company. It’s easy to see how Samsung’s relentless push to include all the latest bells and whistles might have contributed to its predecessor’s problems. The new Note isn’t a bombardment of new features. Much of what the product brings to the table was borrowed directly from the recently announced Galaxy S8. And most of the rest that’s new seems to largely be an attempt to distinguish the phablet as a more premium option than the similarly sized Galaxy S8+

But that’s not a bad thing, really. The new device is built atop one of the most solid foundations in the smartphone space. And the additions — refinements, really — mostly help to make it that much better.

Wednesday, 30 August 2017

Apple reportedly looking to price its next iPhone at $999

Staying on the cutting edge has always been pricey, but it’s starting to get a little wild.

A report today in the New York Times suggest that Apple’s new high-end bezel-less iPhone is going to have quite the price bump, starting at $999. The price hike would undoubtedly be a rather significant one over past models. Unlocked models of the company’s current generation iPhone 7 start at $649 while the iPhone 7 Plus starts at $769.

Rumors have suggested that Apple will be releasing several new iPhones at this event including a version that looks cosmetically similar to current generation iPhones with updated internals and a completely new iPhone which features a nearly bezel-less display, infrared facial recognition unlock features, magnetic induction charging and a next-generation set of depth-sensing cameras.

Apple is expected to host an event next month showing off its latest iPhones and possibly other rumored new products including an LTE version of the Apple Watch and an update Apple TV capable of supporting 4K.

Apple is definitely going to have to show consumers some worthwhile features to justify the new iPhone’s hefty price increase over previous models, but other phone manufacturers have already been pointing to higher starting prices on their latest devices.

Yesterday, Samsung released its flagship Note 8 smartphone which boasts a similarly toned-down bezel and the company’s largest-ever phone screen; the device begins at $930. Samsung’s popular Galaxy S8 starts at $725.

Apple and Accenture teaming up to help enterprises build advanced mobility tools

There is a general misconception that Apple is strictly about consumer tools, but the fact is that the company has a big presence in the enterprise just by the sheer number of iPhones and iPads in the business world. It also has some high-profile partnerships with hefty enterprise vendors like IBM, SAP and Cisco. Today, Apple announced that it is building on those relationships with a brand new partnership with Accenture, the global consulting firm.

The companies plan to work together to help customers build advanced digital projects on iOS devices. Apple of course brings its iOS expertise to the table. Accenture comes into play because it understands how to connect to legacy backend systems that are lurking inside every large enterprise organization. The company has also long worked with established companies that aretrying to become digital operations. Both of these are targets for the new project.

Ten years after the iPhone debuted, there are more in-house iOS programmers and more mobile development projects than ever before, but companies have struggled to take advantage of iOS to build digital tools to truly transform organizations and how they operate, according to Susan Prescott, VP for apps, markets and services at Apple.

“We’ve seen an increase in development efforts within companies. In fact, in the last three years, the number of in-house iOS developers has doubled,” she said. “So the demand is definitely there, but enterprises still need great partners to reinvent workflows and tap into backend systems.”

She adds, “This partnership with Accenture is about taking that further. What’s really exciting is that this isn’t just about optimizing existing apps and business processes — it’s about designing new apps and experiences using new technologies.”

Apple is looking to work directly with Accenture and enterprise customers to help them dig into enterprise data, and find new workflows that they have never considered before. This isn’t unlike what it has been doing (and continues to do) with IBM, but Apple says it’s going to have a seat at the table with Accenture personnel and share their expertise around iOS to help solve unique enterprise problems — and that is a big difference with this project.

As for Accenture, Gene Reznick, senior managing director for technology ecosystem and ventures for the firm, says they are looking to capitalize on some specific areas with this partnership including helping to create “engaging user experiences.” They hope to improve how organizations interact with customers in a digital way, something that continues to elude many companies. Secondly, they want to make that experience as meaningful as possible by building connections to relevant back-end systems and surfacing helpful data.

While this could take many forms, they see exploiting the burgeoning area of Internet of Things, where they could build iOS applications to help monitor large industrial machines or other complex operations from an iPad or iPhone. They could supplement this idea by building augmented reality applications with Apple’s AR development toolset, ARKit to help with training or repair assistance right on the iOS device.

For starters, the teams will work together in San Francisco, but the hope is that over time, they will expand the project and build additional teams at some subset of the 30 Accenture Studios located throughout the world.