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Historically, we are used to thinking of Apple as a niche player, it still is in many ways, but its new businesses appear to be scaling pretty fast.

Movies

According to Variety, Apple's move into the movie business appears to be working quite well.

"Studio execs said that iTunes movie sales and rentals -- which the computer company said tops 50,000 daily -- dominate the small but closely watched digital movie biz. Apple is now on track to sell or rent 18.25 million movies a year, or triple the number of last year, before it inked deals with all major studios for new-release rentals and sales."

Phones

Apple placed an order with Samsung for 50 million NAND flash chips. It's basically taken over Samsung's production. The order is so big, Samsung is asking its other customers to wait. A fascinating development when you consider that Samsung also wants to play in the phone wars, but here it is helping a foe with a critical component.


Posted by Ed Cotton Influx recently wrote about the power humans have to process images and how this impacts web site design. It now appears Google is placing a value on fast. It is now adding load time as a factor in how it applies quality scores to keywords.

The company explains the reasoning behind the move as follows..

"Two reasons: First, users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate."

We are now in a world where milliseconds matter and clearly now there's a price to pay for being too slow.



Posted by Ed Cotton Nick Carr rants in The Atlantic about Google because he fears it's making us all stoopid.

"I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

Skimming has become the norm. Attention spans are in decline, but it's likely there's no turning back from this. In the end, real analytical thinkers will be prized and those who have the foresight to spend time to work out arguments and spend deep time thinking about issues. Great ideas and thought will still be needed and it will have to come from somewhere, there just might be fewer people doing it.

I am encouraged by the desire for live and virtual debate and discussion. I believe this is the area where analysis and thought is happening, not in the act of search. Conferences like TED and PopTech have never been busier or more widely distributed.

In the past 18 months, I've been astonished by the number of people who've told me they never heard of TED, but were inspired by the 15 minute films.

Thinking is still valued, it's just how it manifests itself that's changed. Ideally, it should be neatly packaged and collapsed into a nice televisual format that's snackable.


Posted by Ed Cotton On Wednesday, I ran a panel of twentysomethings at the AAAA's Digital Conference.

Anyone who was there will hopefully echo my views- they were a great bunch.
Creative, inspiring and full of love for the possibilities of the digital world.

They had no time for brands pretending to be their friends, but plenty of time for
brands who helped make them cool.

At one point the session turned into an Apple commercial, nearly all the panelists owned an Apple laptop.

The idea of reading a newspaper in the conventional sense was beyond them, they were somewhat divided on the issue of pirating and intellectual property rights, they hated pop up ads, didn't much like banners on Facebook, but couldn't live without it unless they had to pay a subscription to use it.

According to these guys, we are already in the post-TV age, they were consuming loads of video content from the internet and directly onto their laptops that it had rendered the television irrelevant.  They like the idea of watching stuff in their time and without those pesky ads.

Most of them created content in  some form, many of them had blogs to share their viewpoints, experiences and to promote themselves and their friends. One of the panelists had even created his own social network.

There were numerous mentions of sustainability and social responsibility and an expectation that corporations should be doing more than grab money.

A big thank you to my amazing panelists; Jessica, Pia, Nick, Chris and James, a huge shout out to Jo and her team at Flamingo who hand picked them, to Jerry McGee at the AAAAs for having the idea and to Paul and Kate at Naked Communications for letting me use their offices for the rehearsal.


Posted by Ed Cotton According to the BBC, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen's latest report finds web users less tolerant and patient when it comes to web sites.

Some key quotes from Dr Nielsen in his BBC piece

"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so.."

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience.."

"I do not think sites appreciate that yet,they still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

It's a big challenge for brands to get their emotions, richness and feelings across, when all a user wants to do is find out the price of a product.

I guess this is all about options and navigation, allowing the user to get to a place fast if they need to, but according to Dr Nielsen,  most want to take the expressway.

Posted by Ed Cotton Our minds process visual information at a rapid rate, which makes it tough for designers who need to create both instant impact and depth.

However, if people get the chance to click their mouse and move away because their perception tells them there's no point to going deeper, it means impact is everything.

Recent research conducted by the University of Vienna shows just how fast people process visual information. Its study focused on art and asked subjects to compare similarities and differences in various pieces.

Researchers found that subjects could register content in less than 1/100th of a second.

Within 1/20th of a second subjects had already started to interpret style.

All this happening before recognition of the whole object.

It shows that art directors and designers have less time than we originally thought to capture attention and stop people from clicking away with their remote button or mouse.


Posted by Ed Cotton