Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Tim Cook Apple CEO Talks Intuition at Auburn Commencement Address
Following Steve Jobs’ resignation announcement, Apple has named Tim Cook its new CEO.
Cook, 50, joined Apple in March 1998. According to Apple, before Cook joined the company, he was vice president of corporate materials for Compaq and was “responsible for procuring and managing all of compacts product inventory.” Before that, he was COO of Intelligent Electronics’ reseller division.
This won’t be the first time he’s run the company, which he did for two months in 2004 when Steve Jobs had surgery for pancreatic cancer and again in 2009 when Jobs had a liver transplant.
The calm, quiet executive with a Southern accent is said to never raise his voice, starts sending emails to his subordinates at 4:30 a.m., and according to Fortune, can be a tough leader:
“I’ve seen him shred people,” says a former executive who now works for another consumer electronics company and refused to be quoted by name. “He asks you the questions he knows you can’t answer, and he keeps going and going. It isn’t funny, and it’s not fun.”
Since January of this year, Cook has been responsible for day-to-day operations of Apple, with Steve Jobs still said to be holding final decision-making authority — until today.
Here’s a video of Cook from 2010, delivering the commencement address at his alma mater, Auburn:
Read a book like a movie with Booktracks
Earlier this summer, we attended a party for a stealth startup that Peter Thiel backed.
Today, we can finally announce what the startup is, and why we're bullish on it.
Booktracks is a startup that could transform your reading experience forever. Like movies have soundtracks, now books can have soundtracks.
"It's difficult to imagine a movie with no soundtrack. Yet, until today, the technology did not exist to synchronize music and sound within an e-book," Paul Cameron, Booktrack's co-founder and CEO says.
"Tens of millions of commuters around the world listen to a playlist that's disconnected from what they're reading—perhaps a sad song with an upbeat story. Now they can replicate a movie-like sound experience and fundamentally transform their reading experience."
When we first heard the idea, we were skeptical. Many people find listening to music distracting when reading. And everyone reads at different speeds, so it's impossible for one track to cater to everyone.
Not so, we were told. You have to try it to believe it.
So we went off in a corner of the party, put on some headphones, and read the first few pages of Da Vinci Code. Immediately, music started to play appropriately with the words. Right as we read a line about a door slamming shut, we heard the exact same sound.
We tried reading at different speeds to trick the book soundtrack. It didn't work. It seemed to hover within a few seconds of the lines we were reading, and the track followed us with every page turn.
Some Booktracks are already available in the App Store. In the coming weeks and months, Booktrack will also create editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet and more.
Booktracks has a number of strategic partners behind it already, including major music company Sony/ATV, which will be making tracks for books and selling them much like iTunes would sell a song in the bookstore. It also has HarperCollins on board.
The founder of Booktracks is a Kiwi, Paul Cameron. Derek Handley, an entrepreneur who sold his company to Meredith Corporation, is the Chairman. Peter Thiel's right hand man, Andrew McCormack, led the startup's investment.
The startup is hosting a launch party tonight with celebrities like Georgina Chapman, James Frey, Courtney Love, Paul Haggis, Salman Rushdie, and Harvey Weinstein.
For more cool NYC startups, check out The 25 Hot NYC Startups You Need To Watch >>
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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/booktracks-2011-8#ixzz1W1jRYjGo
Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second and Third Acts in Business History
Earlier this evening, Steve Jobs stunned us all with the news that he isresigning from his position as CEO of Apple, Inc. Jobs took a medical leave of absence in January — his second since 2009. He will remain as Chairman and will be succeeded as CEO by Tim Cook.Steve Jobs’ stellar career is already the stuff of legend. He co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976. In 1977, the company’s first mass-market product, the Apple II, helped ignite the personal computing revolution. When IBM released its PC in 1981, it was largely in response to the Apple II.
In 1984, Jobs unveiled the Macintosh. Announced with the most famous Super Bowl ad of all-time, the first Mac introduced a mainstream audience to user-interface concepts — pointing and clicking on a desktop — that are still in use today.
Despite its polish and appearance, the Macintosh was not able to match the commercial success of IBM’s PC (and other PC compatible systems) — or even match the sales of the Apple II.
The NeXT Chapter
Disagreements over the vision and style of Apple forced Jobs out in 1985. After resigning from the company he founded, Jobs went on to start NeXT, a company that aimed to bring his vision of personal computing and programming to educators, engineers and designers.
NeXT wasn’t the success that Jobs hoped that it would be. It didn’t fulfill on its promise to change the computing industry — at least, not at first. But Mac OS X is a direct descendant of NeXTSTEP, the operating system developed by Jobs’ team at NeXT. Objective-C, the programming language that is still used in Mac OS X and in iOS, was developed at NeXT.
It’s easy to think NeXT’s track record was unsuccessful. But the technology products that have made Apple not just a successful company, but the most valuable company in the world, are direct descendants of work done at NeXT. iOS simply wouldn’t be iOS without the work that Jobs fostered at his second company.
And by buying NeXT, as Apple did in 1997, it was buying back Steve Jobs himself — who soon ousted the hapless Gil Amelio as CEO.
Pixar and the Future of Animation
Of course, Jobs’ business legacy is about more than just Apple. In 1986, Jobs acquired a small animation studio called Pixar. It would be Pixar, not Apple, that would bring Jobs major success in the 1990s.
After years of toiling away in obscurity, Pixar hit the big time in 1995 with Toy Story, the first completely computer animated full-length motion picture. In 2006, Jobs sold Pixar to the Walt Disney Company for more than $7 billion. Jobs became a member of Disney’s Board of Directors — and the company’s largest shareholder.
While the success of Pixar should be largely attributed to director John Lasseter, the decision to acquire the company and invest in its technology in 1986 is a great example of Jobs’ vision and understanding of the future.
A Second and Third Act of Success
Since returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs has lead his company through the most phenomenal turn-around story in business history. Since taking over as CEO in 1997 — initially, he said, for an interim period — Apple’s stock has increased nearly a hundredfold.
1998′s introduction of the iMac and the 2001 introduction of the iPod led many to call Apple’s early 2000s renaissance the “most successful second act in business history.” But it has been in the last four years — since the introduction of the iPhone — that Apple has utterly dominated. Earlier this month, Apple overtookExxon as the most valuable company.
It’s not just marketing rhetoric to say that the iPhone, and now the iPad, has changed everything. As we noted in June, “every major smartphone that has gone into production since the iPhone’s release has, in some way, been a response to the iPhone itself.”
This is even more true of tablet computing. From Samsung to HP, Acer to Asus, the tablets that currently exist in the marketplace are direct responses to the iPad. HP’s TouchPad was perhaps the most direct descendent — with everything from its form factor and scree resolution mimicking the iPad. We all know how that story has ended.
An Unknown Future
Steve Jobs leaves the company he co-founded in tremendous shape. With tens of billions of cash on hand, products that sell out as fast as they can be produced, and an ecosystem that continues to expand, the company’s future footing is solid.
Moreover, one needs look no further than Disney to see that it is possible for corporations to continue to succeed, even without their visionary founder at the helm.
Steve Job Letter of Resignation to the Board of Apple
This is the resignation letter Steve Jobs sent to the Apple board:
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.Steve
Monday, August 22, 2011
Social Media Intelligence Not Utilized to the Fullest: Competitive Advantages Diminishes
New research by Web Liquid and RTW/US amongst 237 marketing executives in middle-large and large companies (revenue > $51MM), has shown that just 24% of the interviewed found the Social Media monitoring tools they used were “Very Valuable”. Digital marketers who use paid Social Media monitoring solutions are twice as likely to be "extremely satisfied" as those who use a free solution, according to the study.
The results were surprising in a couple of ways:
What tools are you using for Social Media monitoring
Almost half of the organizations are still using Google Alerts. This is surprising when comparing it with the type of organizations and its yearly revenue. Besides this result, one on five is not even monitoring Social Media. The usage of free tools/Google Alerts could be part of the dissatisfaction.
First of all Google Alerts is far from complete in terms of returned results, secondly it’s intensive manual labor to extract intelligence from it to be really efficient and effective.
The next results show that the intelligence that is extracted is mainly tactical and regarding communications:
The purposes of the intelligence are limited, on tactical marketing level and within the fields of communications. This whilst it has much more applications, think of Social Media Research, which departments have challenges and/or chances, understanding ROI, spotting unmet needs and pinpointing the innovators and much more.
Not only can Social Media inform Communication Strategy as mentioned in the chart, it can also inform “higher” level strategies because Social Media data is full of customer insights, market- and competitive intelligence. Fast iterative adjustments to strategy are made possible.
The limited scope and tactical application could be another part of the dissatisfaction.
Cooperative Intelligence
Besides the aforementioned limitations and dissatisfaction, there’s a third aspect that has impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of Social Media tools/data. It’s being described by the concept of Cooperative Intelligence:
Many companies think they are conducting real-time competitive intelligence since they monitor the competitive environment continuously on the Internet and increasingly through social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as well as industry specific forums or social networks like Ning. While monitoring is the foundation of real-time competitive intelligence, it is not actionable. The action you take in real-time will give you a competitive advantage. As David Meerman Scott said at our AIIP conference, “Speed and agility bring competitive advantage…Act now before the window of opportunity vanishes.”
and
However, CI managers can inform people in our companies in real-time, and in areas where we have more knowledge, make recommendations for action. The balancing act in our job is to offer cooperative intelligence: don’t inundate people with too much information, just what you know is important to them.
In relation to the Social Media research, the CI manager can be replaced by anyone who’s responsible for Social Media within the organization. Efficient workflow of the relevant information to the correct person/department is key for Social Media intelligence to be effective. If this doesn’t happen, the “speed and agility” where Meerman Scott talks about, disappears.
The organizational pillars
The three above mentioned reasons for dissatisfaction can be placed within the three organizational pillars: Technology, Processes and People.
If there’s not a strategy for Social Media incorporation within the organization, the Social Media monitoring tools (Technology), purposes of Social Media intelligence (People) and speed of intelligence (Processes) can be ineffective resulting in disappointing Social Media results.
Social Media hasn’t got a one-size-fits-all solution, this counts for monitoring tools as well.
Gianluigi Cuccureddu is Managing Partner at the 90:10 Group.
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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-intelligence-not-utilized-to-the-fullest-competitive-advantages-diminishes-2011-8#ixzz1VlNi1J7o
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