Mark Sigal
Mark Sigal is the Chief Product Officer at Unicorn Labs, a builder of iOS Games, eBooks and Educational Apps. He is an eight-time entrepreneur, whose ventures span mobile, digital media, social networking and platform development. Sigal maintains a personal blog called The Network Garden.
APPLE is EVIL, You're All Fanboys and other half-truths
There is a meme afoot. Apple is evil. Its arrogant ways and dependence on the cult of personality are to be its demise. Developers are said to be unhappy. And, Apple Secrecy Doesn’t Scale. Google-ification is the way, the RIGHT way. The Apple Way can’t possibly persist ad infinitum. But, you know what? It’s a crock. In the here and now, Apple’s success is unparalleled, and the engine is humming better than ever on multiple vectors – products, margins, developers, profits and consumer engagement.
APPLE is EVIL, You’re All Fanboys and other half-truths
There is a meme afoot. Apple is evil. Its arrogant ways and dependence on the cult of personality are to be its demise. Developers are said to be unhappy. And, Apple Secrecy Doesn’t Scale. Google-ification is the way, the RIGHT way. The Apple Way can’t possibly persist ad infinitum. But, you know what? It’s a crock. In the here and now, Apple’s success is unparalleled, and the engine is humming better than ever on multiple vectors – products, margins, developers, profits and consumer engagement.
Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road
My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been "hollowed out," reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition. Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages? Remember record stores? Whither Blockbuster? When analog media collides with digital media, "creative destruction" occurs with brutal efficiency — unless you can truly differentiate your offering, a tall task, but not an insurmountable one.
The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud
“Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.” – Carver Mead The DOS-era was marked by a certain style of computing. It was primitive, largely devoid of graphics, and for developers, an exercise in scarcity management. In fact, the scarcity mindset was so endemic to the time that it gave rise to the urban legend that Microsoft’s…
Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix
I have written about Apple's inevitable assault on the Tablet market before. What I hadn't factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers. Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons
that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse. One, such a bookish-sized tablet device — I'll call
it the Boomer Tablet — would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, thereby
obviating the mobile access costs associated with iPhone, a significant barrier
for a generation that is programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight
spending range. Two, because a larger-form factor device would offer Boomers a bigger viewing screen and "lifestyle" settings, like fatter keys and a more forgiving
keyboard to ease input, and wizard-like shortcuts to simplify recurring tasks.
3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone
A light flickers from two distinct points in time. As a child in the early-1970s, one of my toys was a View-Master, a binoculars-like device for viewing 3D images (called stereograms), essentially a mini-program excerpted from popular destinations, TV shows, cartoons, events and the like. Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.