"itunes" entries

Commerce Weekly: Target doesn't want to be the showroom for online retailers

Target wants help fighting "scan and scram." Strong iTunes growth was tucked inside Apple's big earnings.

Target asks vendors for exclusive products so online retailers can't sweep in with lower prices. Also, Apple's monster earnings included strong iTunes growth. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Windows Mobile apps are more expensive than iPhone apps

The mean app price for the Windows market is nearly two times higher than the App Store.

The Windows Marketplace for Mobile now has about 1,400 apps spread across 16 categories. In this short post I'll provide some basic statistics and compare it with the grandaddy of app stores: the U.S. iTunes store.

Popular iPhone games stay highly-ranked only for a few weeks

With 40,000+ Games to choose from, the list of Top 100 free and paid games are frequently scanned by iPhone gamers. In this short post, I'll share some basic statistics on popular games sold through the U.S. iTunes app store.

Four short links: 22 December 2009

Four short links: 22 December 2009

Trading Systems, Streaming iTunes, Scheduling App, Crowdsourcing Lessons

  1. Trading Shares in Milliseconds (Technology Review) — With the rise of automation, the bulk of U.S. stock trading has moved from the once-crowded floor of Manhattan’s New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to silent server farms run by exchanges and broker-dealers across the country: the proportion of all trades that the NYSE handles has shrunk from 80 percent in 2005 to 40 percent today. Trading is now essentially a virtual art, and its practitioners put such a premium on speed that NASDAQ has considered issuing equal 100-foot lengths of cable to the brokers who send orders to its exchange servers. (via Hacker News)
  2. Stream iTunes Over SSH — short script that lets you tunnel itunes from one machine to another over ssh (by default iTunes only shares on the local network).
  3. Doodle — simple way to schedule a common meeting time. (via joshua on Delicious)
  4. Crowdsourcing — Simon Willison’s thoughtful “lessons learned” from his crowdsourcing projects at the Guardian. Crowdsourcing is not as simple as “give them a wiki and they will fill it” (this is related to the failed “everyone in the world wants to work on my broken payroll system” theory of open source), and Simon explains some of the subtleties. The reviewing experience the first time round was actually quite lonely. We deliberately avoided showing people how others had marked each page because we didn’t want to bias the results. Unfortunately this meant the site felt like a bit of a ghost town, even when hundreds of other people were actively reviewing things at the same time. For the new version, we tried to provide a much better feeling of activity around the site. We added “top reviewer” tables to every assignment, MP and political party as well as a “most active reviewers in the past 48 hours” table on the homepage (this feature was added to the first project several days too late). User profile pages got a lot more attention, with more of a feel that users were collecting their favourite pages in to tag buckets within their profile.

Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age – Part Two

This gem from Whimsley makes the point – with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument – that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through recommendations engines. “Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to “niche culture”. Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture.”

"E pluribus tunum: Uniform prices for online music are no way to maximise profit"

This research suggest maximum value in a digital media market like iTunes (for both producer and consumer) comes from a combination of subscription/membership fee and per-item purchase: "Charging an "entry fee" for use of the service and then a small, fixed per-song cost for downloads turned out to benefit both the seller and the buyer. The most revenue, according to…

ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos

If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled, "Real Hackers Program DNA" at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies Conference in March.

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well: If the iPhone App by itself had been…

History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts

A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative. The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly…

Open Question: Digital Ownership vs. Digital Subscriptions

Two tips in Dear Author's recent post "10 Things Epublishers Should Do for Readers" caught my attention: 1. Eternal Bookshelf. An eternal bookshelf means that every purchase you have bought can be downloaded at any time. Most of the larger etailers have this feature but not all. 2. Mass Downloads. Along with the eternal bookshelf should be the ability to…