Global Nerdy

If you look at IDC’s 2Q13 figures on smartphone operating system market share, it boils down to two fights. There’s the one with the two giants in first and second place:

And then there’s this one:

First, IDC’s numbers…

	Android	iOS	Windows Phone	BlackBerry
Place in market	1	2	3	4
2Q13 unit shipments (millions)	187.4	31.2	8.7	6.8
2Q13 market share	79.3%	13.2%	3.7%	2.9%
2Q12 unit shipments (millions)	108	26	4.9	7.7
2Q12 market share	69.1%	16.6%	3.1%	4.9%
Year-over-year change	+73.5%	+20%	+77.6%	-11.7%

Some observations:

Windows Phone

• Having had the biggest year-over-year growth of all the smartphone OSs, Windows Phone has pretty much locked its position in third place.
• The vast majority — 81.6% — of all Windows Phone shipments were from Nokia.

iOS

• IDC Research Manager Ramon Llamas says: “The iOS decline in the second quarter aligns with the cyclicality of iPhone. Without a new product launch since the debut of the iPhone 5 nearly a year ago, Apple’s market share was vulnerable to product launches from the competition. But with a new iPhone and revamped iOS coming out later this year, Apple is well-positioned to re-capture market share.”
• In spite of having lost market share, iOS still grew shipments by 20%.

Android

• There were more Android phones shipped in 2Q13 (187.4 million) than the sum of all smartphones — Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and others — shipped during the same period in 2012 (156.2 million).
• Android shipments grew at a rate nearly as great as Windows Phone’s — 73.5% over 2012 — and in Android’s case, a percentage point of growth represents a much, much bigger number.
• Android’s biggest vendors: Samsung was the biggest, followed by LG, Huawei, Lenovo and ZTE.

BlackBerry

• BlackBerry’s market share dropped below 3%, and as IDC puts it, sank to “levels not seen in the history of IDC’s Mobile Phone Tracker”.
• Ouch.

Jeff Bezos.
Wikimedia Commons photo by Steve Jurvetson. Click the photo to see the source.

I agree with Business Insider’s Henry Blodget’s reasons why he believes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Read his article for the details; in the meantime, here are the three points I agree with:

1. Amazon’s already in the content distribution business, and news is another form of content — but one that Amazon doesn’t yet distribute.
2. Amazon’s already in the subscription and media-gadget business. The former is where newspapers used to excel, and the latter is where they’re lagging far behind.
3. News is a high-traffic intersection, and where there’s traffic, there’s walk-through traffic…as in shopping! Simply put: come for the news, stay to buy shoes!

The one I don’t buy is: Amazon is getting into the physical delivery business, which the Washington Post is already interested in. Yes, Amazon’s interested in the physical delivery of goods, but only because it’s currently the only way to send physical goods. I think the actual ink-on-paper part of the Post is the least interesting thing about the institution, and I think Bezos would agree.

I think that the purchase is great news for the Washington Post. Bezos has historically played a long-game, enduring short-term pain for long-term blue-sky gains. In today’s business environment, where everything is about what the balance sheet will look like next quarter and damn everything else, this is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Bezos bought the Post for $250 million, which Business Insider says is a bargain, based on their financial reports. In case you were wondering how this purchase compared to other big purchases by high-tech companies and people, I put together the chart below:

Company	What They Do	Acquired By	Year	Purchase Price
Pixar	Computer animation	Steve Jobs	1986	$5 million
Ticketmaster (80% share)	Event tickets / legalized scalping / ripping off people in general	Paul Allen	1993	$243 million
IMDB (along with BookPages and Telebook)	Movie facts database	Paul Allen	1998	$55 million
YouTube	Online video	Google	2006	$1.65 billion
DoubleClick	Online advertising	Google	2007	$3.1 billion
Feedburner	RSS feed aggregator	Google	2007	$100 million
Postini	Email security and acrhiving	Google	2007	$625 million
P.A. Semi	Semiconductors	Apple	2008	$278 million
Zappos	Shoe and clothing sales online	Amazon	2009	$928 million
FriendFeed	Social networking update aggregator	Facebook	2009	$47.5 million
AdMob	Mobile advertising	Google	2009	$750 million
Quattro Wireless	Mobile advertising	Apple	2010	$275 million
Slide.com	Photo sharing / 3rd-party apps for Facebook	Google	2010	$228 million
Anobit	Flash memory	Apple	2011	$390 million
Zagat	Restaurant reviews	Google	2011	$151 million
AuthenTec	Mobile device security	Apple	2012	$356 million
Zenprise	Mobile device management software	Citrix	2012	$355 million
Face.com	Facial recognition	Facebook	2012	$100 million
Instagram	Social photo sharing	Facebook	2012	$715 million
Meebo	Online chat	Google	2012	$100 million
OMGPOP	Games	Zynga	2012	$180 million
Waze	Navigation	Google	2013	$1 billion

 

Also worth reading: Salon’s The Iceberg Just Rescued the Titanic, which includes this bit:

Even better, Bezos is a man who knows how to lose money.

Amazon did not become profitable for seven years after its IPO. Just last year, Amazon lost$39 million. Amusingly, the most recent quarterly filings for both Amazon and the Washington Post Co. have WaPo making a profit of $5 million on total sales of $959 million while Amazon lost $7 million on total revenue of $12.8 billion. (Of course, the Washington Post’s profits presumably are mostly generated by its educational testing subsidiary Kaplan, which is not part of the sale.)

One can well wonder how Jeff Bezos managed to become a billionaire 20 times over while presiding over a company that has lost money in more years than it has made money. The standard explanation for why Wall Street hasn’t left his company riddled with bullets on the stock exchange floor is that Amazon’s losses stem from Bezos’ determination to invest heavily in the future. In the long run, Wall Street seems to think, we will all buy everything from Amazon — and that should earn the company a tidy profit … in the long run.

Yeah, yeah, but to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we’re all former employees of shuttered brick-and-mortar bookstores and employees of publishing houses who lose money on every Amazon sale and writers who will never earn out our piddling advances because Amazon has made it impossible for anyone but Amazon to make money from publishing. In other words, we’re all dead. But the point is this. Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has never paid even the semblance of lip service to Wall Street’s insistence on pumped-up quarterly earnings statements. That’s the kind of owner today’s newspaper desperately needs? He can wait out a wrenching period of technological transition longer than anyone this side of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Click the image to see it at full size.

This page from an old issue of Mondo 2000 (think of a late ’80s/early ’90s gene-splice of Wired magazine, High Times and Omni, and you’ll get a general idea of what it was like) shows what the 1992 idea of cyberpunk was. It gets posted over and over again on Reddit’s “Cyberpunk” subreddit (much to their chagrin), but it’s been ages since I’ve seen it — the last time was in the original magazine — so I thought I’d post it here.

The R.U. in the title of the photo spread is a tip of the hat to R. U. Sirius, Mondo 2000′s editor.

Most of the gear in the photo — the cameras and scanners, audio recorders and playback devices, the encrypted communication tools, and even much of the functionality provided by the old-school PowerBook — could easily be replaced by a single present-day smartphone. You have to keep in mind that 1992 was a time before browsers, when surfing the net was something few people did (and they did it on Gopher or Usenet), when 14.4kHz modems were blazing fast, email addresses were rarities (I had one — 3jmd2@queensu.ca), and a household without a computer wasn’t a strange and rare thing.

In case you were wondering, the PowerBook 180’s specs were:

• Processor: Motorola 68030 running at 33MHz (that’s right, megahertz, not gigahertz)
• Cache: 0.5K L1 cache, no L2 cache
• RAM: 4MB (Once again, megabytes, not gigabytes) on the motherboard, expandable to 14MB
• Display: Maximum resolution of 832 by 624, 512K VRAM
• Operating system: Came with System 7.1; the latest Macintosh OS that supported it was System 7.6.1; here’s a video of a PowerBook 180 booting up this OS

While many of the tools in the pictorial have changed shape or have been amalgamated into newer devices, the following have remained more or less the same (at least in appearance and functionality) and would still be recognizable to a cyberpunk from 20 years ago:

• The laptop: Still a design that folds shut, and still based on the Dynabook concept. Sure, they’re thinner and have way more processing, memory and networking capabilities, but a person from 1992 would still recognize a 2013 laptop.
• Voltmeter: Aside from a couple of convenience features and being pretty much all digital these days, multimeters from 2013 look pretty much like multimeters from 1992.
• Laser pointers: Perhaps a little smaller these days, but still mostly used to entertain cats or annoy humans.
• Torque wrenches: More of them come with the nice rubberized grips these days, but otherwise they’re the same.
• Shotgun microphones: Aside from packaging, they’re pretty much the same.
• Black clothing: The classics never change.
• Metal briefcase: Still in use today. The coolest use at the moment: as a housing for a portable Bitcoin miner, pictured below at this year’s Defcon:

Before I return you to 2013, one more blast from the past: the trailer for the 1995 film based on the William Gibson short story of the same name, Johnny Mnemonic. Enjoy!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

If you were to go to the site of local user experience design heroes Jet Cooper today, you’d see that they’ve just been acquired by Shopify. Congrats to Satish and all!

The news is in several places, including:

• TechCrunch
• Financial Post
• Ottawa Citizen
• TechVibes
• ITBusiness.ca
• Ottawa Business Journal

This company:

• They make the ecommerce platform that makes it easy for anybody to open and run an online shop.
• In the past 7 years, over 60,000 online shops have been created with Shopify, moving over 13 million orders and accounting for over 2 billion dollars in sales.
• Here are a few big names with Shopify-powered shops: Amnesty International, Austin City Limits, Beck, Bon Jovi, CBGB, the CHIVERY, Epic Meal Time, Evernote, 50 Cent, Foo Fighters, GitHub, Hooters, LMFAO, Lollapalooza, Penny Arcade, Tesla Motors, Tori Amos, and xkcd.
• Profit magazine called Shopify the smartest company in Canada, Fast Company named them one of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies, and here’s how ThinkEcommerce ranks them against their competition:

They’re looking for a couple of good people to fill a couple of job positions:

in this city:

Here’s one of the positions…

There are more details about the PR Manager position on Shopify’s “jobs” site, but here’s the general gist:

• The ideal candidate is probably doing one of the following in his/her current job:
  • Managing PR, communications, or media at a tech company.
  • Working at a PR firm, primarliy with tech clients.
  • Journalism, with a fair bit of media outreach.
• To do well in this job, you have to have a solid understanding of, and at least a few contacts in, tech and business media. This job is about putting Shopify’s best foot forward on TV (think tech business news segments on cable news), national newspapers with a tech business bent (think New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), national magazines with a focus on tech, business, and entrepreneurship (think Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc.), and tech-meets-business sites (think Mashable, TechCrunch, The Next Web).
• Whoever gets this job will effectively be a one-person PR firm, doing all sorts of things from planning global PR campaigns to doing media relations to creating supporting promotional materials to working with the product team to measuring the impact of various PR initiatives.

…and here’s the other one:

There are more details about the Social Media Manager position on Shopify’s “jobs” site, but I can sum it up for you:

• The ideal candidate should have:
  • A solid grasp of how social media works, and how it can be used to get more people open Shopify shops, make Shopify shopowners happy, and boost Shopify’s online reputation.
  • A presence on the “usual suspects” of social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter at the very least, with Google+ and Pinterest as nice-to-haves. It’ll help if you have a decent Klout score, say like mine.
  • Enough graphic arts skill to create images to be used in social media campaigns.
• The major goals of this position is to make more Shopify users, and to keep the existing Shopify users happy — all through social media. Doing this will also require measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Whoever gets this job will effectively be a one-person social media machine, doing all sorts of things from planning global social media campaigns to maintaining Shopify’s presence on various social media platforms to actively monitoring social media channels for mentions of Shopify and responding when necessary, and building trust.

At Shopify, they equip everyone with a nice set of really cool gear to get their work done:

The picture above shows the gear that was waiting for me at my desk on my first day at the job. I’m sure they’ve updated what comes as “Shopify standard issue”, and I’m sure it’s fantastic.

…and you get to work in a fun, stimulating environment instead of a joyless, soul-killing, joyless cubicle farm…

These are all photos of the mothership in Ottawa, but they’ve gone to great lengths to make the Toronto office a great place to work as well. Much of the credit goes to Chief Culture Officer Daniel Weinand, whose job is to keep Shopify feeling like a fun place, even as it grows from scrappy startup into established middle-sized company.

Better still, you’ll be working in an industry that’s only getting started, and growing like gangbusters!

Ecommerce used to be a nichey “early adopter” sort of thing, but not anymore! It’s harder and harder to find someone who hasn’t ordered something online, and with ecommerce growing at twice the rate of regular bricks-and-mortar retail and still less than 10% of all retail (that’s still something on the order of $50 billion every quarter).

Does this sound like the kind of place where you’d like to work?

So how can you get yourself one of these jobs?

You’re going to have to do more than just fill out the application form and submit a resume. Having a resume puts you in the not-so-elite group known as “everybody”:

Shopify sets itself apart, and you’re going to have to do the same:

One successful applicant created a Shopify shop as his application, “selling” himself and also proving that he understood the product:

Hint, hint: If you’re applying for the PR Manager position, perhaps you should put together a press kit about yourself. If you’re applying for the Social Media Manager position, perhaps you might want to start a social media campaign to explain why you’re the best candidate. You might want to make use of this hashtag:

Do you know who Shopify’s competition are? You might want to look that up.

Hint, hint: There’s a graphic near the beginning of the article that might help!

“Draw the fucking owl” is a mantra at Shopify. If you’re applying to work there, make sure you’ve internalized the comic below, and be ready to explain how you’d draw the owl if you landed the job:

Make sure you touch base with Mark Hayes, marketing and PR guy at Shopify, and tell him Joey sent you.

He’s mark.hayes@shopify.com and @allsop8184 on Twitter. Try and strike a balance between being creative in how reach out to him and not wasting his time!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Music Hack Day is coming to Toronto on Saturday, August 10th and Sunday, August 11th! An event that’s taken place in many cities all over the world, Music Hack Day is when people with different skills and talents — programmers, musicians, designers and artists, to name a few — get together to brainstorm and quickly build prototypes of interesting musical creations. It’s happening here, and it’s free!

Here’s what their registration site says:

Music Hack Day is a hacking session in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + mobile + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related.

This is the first time that Music Hack Day has come to Toronto! We’re calling on all programmers, designers and artists to come and help us build the future of music.

Music Hack Day has been a great way to demonstrate the creativity around music that comes from the tech community, fostering cross-platform and cross-device innovation.

What’s It Like?

Music Hack Day is whatever the participants (everyone who attends is a participant — there are no spectators) make it out to be. The best way to get a feel for what it’s like is to look at some past Music Hack Days in other cities.

Creative Commons photo by Thomas Bonte. Click to see the source.

Music Hack Day London took place in their Facebook office in November 2012. Some of the goodies that were created in the 24 allotted hours were:

• Barbertron: A software-based audio processor that turns a solo voice into a barbershop quartet.
• Theremin.js: A JavaScript-powered Theremin that uses your computer’s webcam as its sensor.
• Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere: What happens when you mash-up Google Maps and I’ve Been Everywhere (it’s not his song, but his version’s probably the best-known)? This.

Creative Commons photo by Duncan Geere. Click to see the source.

Music Hack Day Stockholm happened in January. Here are a couple of interesting projects from that event:

• Super Mutroid: A Metroid-themed platform-jumper videogame that generates levels based on the music you give it; you jump over and duck under obstacles to the beat.
• The Sampler Formerly Known as Magnum Infinity takes a folder of MP3s, looks for samples with a reasonably pure pitch and assembles those samples into a musical instrument.
• Joggify is a mobile exercise music app that plays music at regular speed while you keep jogging, but slows it down as you slow down and slack off. Stop jogging, and the music stops completely.

Creative Commons photo by “grossvogel”. Click to see the source.

Music Hack Day Reykjavik gave the world:

• Droplocker: Lets you stream MP3 stored in your Dropbox and play them through Spotify.
• Glovesynth: A glove-controlled synthesizer.
• Daft Hanger: An amusing project that takes a Raspberry Pi, a MaKey MaKey and coat hangers to let you customize your very own version of Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster Stronger:

Here are some goodies from Music Hack Day Boston:

Specklesounds is a sound generator based on Specklesense hardware.

Bohemian Rhapsichord takes snippets from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and turns them into a full-screen sample playing instrument. Get your hands on a big-ass toucscreen start jamming!

And then there’s Drinkify. Tell it what you’re listening to, and it’ll suggest a cocktail.

There’s been at least one Music Hack Day project that became a full-on commercially-available product: Arpeggionome!

Okay, I’m Sold. What’s Up with Music Hack Day Toronto?

Music Hack Day Toronto is being put together by Toronto Ruby development shop (and excellent putter-together of amazing conferences) Unspace, along with Soundcloud, Rdio and The Echo Nest. It’ll take place at the Glass Factory, located at 99 Sudbury Street (nearest major intersection is Queen and Dufferin).

Here’s the official description of the event, taken from their “About” page:

Mission

• To fast prototype and create brand new music apps (web, mobile or physical) in just24hrs.
• To bring together the music industry and the developer community.
• To highlight and showcase the platforms and API’s of companies working in and around music tech.
• To foster cross-platform and cross-device innovation.

Overview

• Taken place in 17 cities in different countries: London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, San Francisco, Stockholm, Barcelona, Cannes, New York City, Denver, Philadelphia, Paris, Vienna, Reykjavík, Edinburgh, Sydney & Montreal.
• Over 1.200 people taken part including developers and invited members of press/music industry.
• Over 60 companies officially involved and associated with Music Hack Day.
• Over 200 apps built during Music Hack Days, some of them launched commercially.

The sponsors and API providers for the event are:

• Soundcloud: Online audio hosting and distribution.
• Rdio: Music streaming service with a big-ass linrary.
• The Echo Nest: A powerful music search engine that lets you search for songs by artist, similar artist, who’s hot, tempo, key and lots of other criteria.
• Semantria: Text analytics and sentiment analysis. If you didn’t know that the Kinks’ song Lola was a bout a dude (I’ve met such people), Senatria will tell you.
• GigaTools: An API for search for who’s having a live gig, where, and when.
• LyricFind: A song lyrics search engine, powered by a lot of agreements with music publishers.

I Can’t Make This Event, But You Should Go!

An event like this — one that mixes music, technology, and the chance to hang out with old and new friends — has my name written all over it, but alas, I’m going to be out of town. I may be missing out, but that means you shouldn’t. If you’ve been dying to work on a music+tech project, go sign up for Music Hack Day Toronto! And once again, it’s free-as-in-beer!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Jennifer Dewalt is on a mission: to learn to how to code. She’s doing it by building a web application and then posting it online, every day, over 180 days. Day 1 was on April 1st this year, and on that day, her assignment was to make the home page for her learn-to-code project. Since then, she’s gone on to make web applications of increasing complexity, from a dice game (day 12) to Pong (day 47) to a weather app (day 49) to a commenting system (day 75) to an animated terms of service (day 99) to a game where you get to shoot flying strips of bacon (day 115).

She could’ve signed up for a course or “boot camp” — there are no shortage of these things in San Francisco, where she’s based — but she instead to Yoda’s advice to “do, or do not”. She made sure that she’d set aside enough money to live on while teaching herself programming full-time, then set out to create a small web application every day, using each assignment as an opportunity to learn something new. She set the following rules for herself:

1. Build a different website every day for 180 consecutive days.
2. Every website must be accompanied by a blog post.
3. Any code I write must be made publicly available on GitHub (open source) so that everyone can see it.

Her project recently became one of the most-discussed topics on Hacker News for the week. In the discussion, Derek “CD Baby” Sivers posted this comment:

There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that’s very appropriate here:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.

Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Advance congratulations to Jennifer. This is amazing.

Simply put, Jennifer’s taking the old adage, “practice makes perfect”, and putting it into practice. I think it’s time to borrow a trick from her book.