Apple said today that it has sold more than 25 billion songs on its iTunes Store.
According to Apple, the 25 billionth song, “Monkey Drums” (Goksel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch, was purchased by Phillip Lupke from Germany. Phillip will receive a €10,000 iTunes Gift Card for being the lucky downloader.
“We are grateful to our users whose passion for music over the past 10 years has made iTunes the number one music retailer in the world,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Averaging over 15,000 songs downloaded per minute, the iTunes Store connects music fans with their favorite artists, including global sensations like Adele and Coldplay and new artists like The Lumineers, on a scale we never imagined possible.”
Those are incredible numbers when you think about it. I sit here and download and album or a song, but when you look at the numbers on a larger scale it’s almost too much to comprehend.
I spend all day on Facebook, writing blogs, chatting up customers, whatever I need to do to ensure maximum ROI for our company; basically playing around on the internet. It’s pretty much every college kid’s dream job so I—oh god, I can’t do this anymore.
What have I become?
Hilarious, as always, from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
In 1947, Chuck Yeager strapped himself into the experimental Bell X-1 “bullet with wings” and broke the sound barrier 8 miles above the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Paul Larsen sees himself as following squarely in Yeager’s footsteps. To become the fastest sailor in the world, he’s going to have to break through the nautical equivalent of the sound barrier—the so-called 50-knot barrier (about 57 miles per hour).
“(The SailRocket Mark 2) is 50 percent plane, 50 percent boat,” Larsen explains. “If for some reason she lost the keel at speed,” Larsen explains, “than she really would be a plane, wouldn’t she?” The prototype version of SailRocket, Mark 1, actually did take off into the air, and Larsen survived what may be the most spectacular crash in sailing history.
I love sailing and sailboats but I don’t think there’s enough money in the world to get me into this fragile looking thing as it does 60 knots.
This is such a wonderfully weird video. It’s a pretty common thing to see on DVD – a blooper reel of actors messing up. What’s weird about it is that the bloopers are from the video game, L.A. Noire, and are motion captured.
For the extremely willpower-impaired (or the super-serious about exercise), this hack uses a FitBit activity tracker and a Belkin WeMo internet-controlled power outlet to make sure you exercise every day. If you don’t meet your daily activity goals, the system cuts the power to anything plugged into it, offering some serious incentive to get off the couch.
Charalampos, writing at Building Internet of Things came up with this idea as a way to combine the activity tracking capabilities of the FitBit with an severe punishment for not exercising. He chose his fridge as his “workout hostage,” so if he didn’t exercise, his food might spoil.
This is brilliant. We could hook it up to The Publisher’s Heineken fridge – he’d dropped 50lbs in 6 months.
The mainstream media had a field day last week when market research firm IDC revealed that Apple’s iPad market share had fallen slightly, while its competitors were on the rise. While organizations like the Wall Street Journal seemed to revel in the news, the stories were a bit misleading.
Apple’s iPad market share did in fact fall to 43.6 percent from 46.4 percent for the previous quarter. While the WSJ seems to think that “strong competition” from Samsung and other name-brand competitors lead to the iPad decrease, I believe it was something much simpler.
The fact is, for a while, the iPad was the only game in town — it had all the market share, because there were no competitors. As companies like Samsung copied Apple’s designs and put out cheaper, competing products, people started to buy them.
It doesn’t matter what company you look at — if you have the only product on the market and then suddenly have competitors, your market share is going to fall.
Let’s look at the car industry as an example. If Mercedes has the only car on the market, anyone that buys a car will own a Mercedes. They will, of course, have all of the market share.
However, when Hyundai releases a car, some people will buy that automobile. Mercedes market share will decrease over time as more manufacturers make cars.
That’s essentially what’s happening to Apple.
That doesn’t mean that Apple is selling fewer iPads. Despite the best efforts of the WSJ and other news organizations to convince you otherwise, Apple’s tablet business is not in trouble.
Looking at Apple’s last quarterly results reported on January 23, 2013, the company sold a record 22.9 million iPads, compared to 15.4 million in the year-ago quarter. That’s a hefty increase in iPad sales year-over-year.
There’s another thing to look at with the IDC report. While people have made a big deal out of Samsung being in second place and gaining on Apple, the largest market share category behind Apple is actually “Other.”
In fact, consider this — the market share from all of the other tablet makers combined is only 34.3 percent, still well behind Apple’s 43.6 percent. They would be Samsung (15.1%), Amazon (11.5%), Asus (5.8%) and Barnes & Noble (1.9%).
The more I look at the stories about Apple in mainstream media, the more I wonder about the news organization’s agenda.
A New Jersey Superior Court judge recently ordered a blogger to defend her status as a journalist and explain why the state’s shield law applies to her in order to avoid revealing the names of government officials she accused of wrongdoing.
What an incredible story told by Lex Friedman. Especially this part when Lex was asking the guy at the booth some questions:
“I’m done talking to you,” he said, as he moved to position himself directly in front of my face. His expression had gone from brusque to combative. “Did you hear me? I’m done talking to you.”
I’ll tell you what — that wouldn’t have ended the way he anticipated if he did that to me.
“Dell has a very tough road ahead. The company faces an extended period of uncertainty and transition that will not be good for its customers. And with a significant debt load, Dell’s ability to invest in new products and services will be extremely limited. Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell’s customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity.”
Dell Inc. today announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which Michael Dell, Dell’s Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, in partnership with global technology investment firm Silver Lake, will acquire Dell.
Under the terms of the agreement, Dell stockholders will receive $13.65 in cash for each share of Dell common stock they hold, in a transaction valued at approximately $24.4 billion.
Oh, how ironic. Dell isn’t going out of business, though, just going private.
Executive buy-in is a prerequisite for success, so make sure that it’s well understood that even though everyone gets a voice, not everyone gets to decide.
That may very well be the most difficult part for a lot of PMs.
According to the independent website analytics company StatCounter, Apple had a nice 25.86 percent of mobile Internet usage in January 2013. Although that was a decline of 2.81 percent compared to the same month in 2012, Nokia’s share in the same period fell from 37.67 percent to 22.15 percent, a significant decline.
The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.
