The Register has this article on essential netbook accessories. Now there are some nice gadgets there, and I am tempted to buy one or two of them myself (like the Pakuma bag). But wasn’t the whole point behind netbooks to make something cheap, and portable. So why would you load it down with costly and bulky add ons? If youy need speakers, a DVD drive, blue tooth (and your machine doesn’t have the last one) then why not just buy a normal laptop?

I spotted this article through a link from cellular news. It’s a calculation from an iPad app seller of how big the iPad business opportunity is. I won’t bore you with the details, and to be frank I jumped to the end myself to his summary (it’s 17:45 here and I want to go home).

He crunches numbers to come up these answers:

Based on the sales and ranks of our very own Weather HD, we estimate that the Top 1,000 iPad paid applications are making about $372,000 per day, which sums up to about $136 million per year. This figure is based on there being only 500,000 iPads in the market, and is accounting only for the application sales in the United States. If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.

Now, building business cases for the mobile industry is part of what I do for a living. So I would like to think that if I say -this is a bad case- I know what I am talking about.

One of the things you have to do when you crunch a set of number is “sense check” it. You approach the question from a different direction to see it the answer still makes sense. For market value calculations like this the easiest thing to do is to calculate an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) figure and see it is realistic. If you divide that $136m by 500k iPads you come up with $272.

That figure is this guy’s estimate of how much each iPad user is going to spend on apps per year. I am going to have to say I don’t buy it. That’s $23 per month. It just ain’t going to happen. And even if by some stretch it did in the US, and it might in western Europe it ain’t going to happen in the rest of the world where incomes are lower.

Now without looking at the full article (I will do that tomorrow) what he appears to have done is extrapolated the first month’s figures and said this is how it is going to be in the future. This is a bad idea for two reasons. First the people who buy a 1st generation product of anybody’s, let alone the Apple Fan-boys, are not typical users, and will not display typical user behaviour. Secondly as any engineer (or business and strategy consultant *ahem*) will tell you, you need more than one data point to make a trend. When I was responsible for delivering performance figures in the factory, god help me if I didn’t have 5 consecutive days of positive results before I could say that issues were fixed.

Exactly what duration to take is a bit of an art. The conservative engineer in me would say you need 5 years. Practically speaking though you really need 4 quarters of data, and even 4-5 months would have my skeptics warning light flashing.

Beware of sloppy number mongers!

This first one is from the BBC and is quick look at the impact on the world of a permanent air travel ban. I have sort of a fancy of returning to trains and ship travel. Until I imagine taking 3-5 days (in each direction) just to get to New York. That wouldn’t be as much fun, when most of your holiday is spent in the travelling.

The other interesting one is from Bruce Schneier discussing an article on the effectiveness of political assassination. People have done some research on this, and while you can’t call it comprehensive it shows that a decapitation strike on the head of an organisation actually reduces the chance it will collapse from 33% to 17%. That’s probably because the survivors, and the leader’s replacement, have a stronger grievance against whoever eliminated their previous boss. And I can imagine that it often happens that the replacement is more extreme than the predecessor, as happened when Hakimullah Mehsud replaced Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan. I remember once reading how the Hashishim stopped killing Templar leaders when they realised that the organisation itself (which was more of a meritocracy than the usual hereditary norm for the time) had little difficulty getting able replacements to fill the dead man’s shoes.

But I challenge anyone to come up with a good sound bite to justify to the public “terrorist leader X was in our sights, but we didn’t kill him”, for use by politicians cornered by outraged members of the public or media.

Virgin required for urgent one off job opportunity. Job is high risk, but there is generous compensation package
for next of kin. Must be available to travel immediately (by ship) to Iceland.

I was pleasantly surprised at the weekend when I came across this NYT story – “The triumph of the ordinary cellphone“. This guy shows that some people over the Atlantic might just be looking beyond the glare of the Apple sun to see the real revolution that is happening around the world. It’s not about over priced toys for the middle class of the west, it’s about basic communications for the next 2 billion who’s income is counted in dollars per day. I work in the industry, for one of the companies that builds mobile networks all over the globe. We don’t talk about the iPhone or smart phones that much. We talk about mobile broadband, because that is driving the huge growth in data consumption (three to four times as much as smart phones), we talk about the next one-billion users, and we talk about a world with 50 BILLION connected devices.

A few years ago when I was in India I was looking at the business case for low ARPU mobile phones. What I found was that people in the developing world seemed willing to spend about 5% of their income on a mobile phone. The Indian suppliers could get them a phone for about $25, and bundle some call credit. When you crunched the numbers it worked out that a person on $2 a day could afford, and would want a phone. Our focus then (and now) has been on making that possible through better and cheaper coverage.

When histories of communications are written in 50 or 100 years it is this explosion of connectivity that will be talked about as one of the most significant development in mankind’s history, and not some shiny terminals used by a few percent of the population in the rich west.

From Slate.

Some data for the end of 2009. Total usage is 234m, with smart phones at 45m. So they are a share under 20%. RIM continues to be the leading smart phone and has increased its market share to 42%. Some distance behind is Apple. Looking at the feature phones US consumers continue to show they haven’t got a clue by giving the biggest share of the market (22%) to the most god awful pieces of cellular communications equipment ever made – Motorolas.

It always amazes me that US commentators think they are world leaders in this area. Get your utilisation up over 100% (like every European nation), ditch the Motorolas, and stop thinking the iPhone is taking over the world (it has 5% market share FFS) and then we might start to rate you in the first tier.

Interesting take on the iPad from a non-techie. Without having played with one, these ergonomic issues are something I have mentioned to people in discussions. You don’t want to sit and hold something in your hands for ages, and if you are getting stand.keyboard, why not just have a laptop/netbook to start with?

The arguments will continue…

I was sitting in a Heuriger (an Austrian wine tavern) last night having some wine with some fellow Irish in Vienna. My mind must have been a little addled with the wine, because at the time I didn’t react when yer man, who works with the OSCE here, said he works with a Turkish army officer. It was only when I got home (and maybe sobered up a bit) that I realized what I heard and went – what the fuck! The nice easy stress free lifestyle here in Vienna, with its efficient public transport, excellent health care system, and best cafes in Europe has blinded us all to the threat in our midst – THE OTTOMANS HAVE THEIR SPIES AMONGST US.

They laid siege to this city twice in the past, once in 1529, and again in 1683. And these things always come in threes! Some people may quibble that the Republic of Turkey is not the Ottoman Empire, but I am with Gerry Adams when he says “They haven’t gone away you know”!

And that is another thing, I don’t know how the locals sleep soundly in their beds here. Back in Ireland, our island in the Atlantic is protected by the ocean on one side and the Irish Sea on the other. Stout natural defences against outsiders. But here in Vienna all that stands between them and the next barbarian invasion from the steppes is the Danube, and they have spanned it repeatedly with bridges.

Do they appreciate the threat? Do they what! The sit in their cafes sipping melange and nibbling sachre torte, not caring a whit that any day now a hundred thousand horsemen, led by a latter day Genghis Khan, or Timurlane will sweep in from the east to overthrow their city and pile a mound of skulls in the city plazas, and we are not talking about some fancy art installation here. Nothing stands between Vienna and eastern hordes but distance, and that is no defence against this enemy.

To give you an idea of how bad the security situation is here, do you know what they did to the city walls? They demolished them to make way for a ring road! That will certainly be useful to the new Golden Horde when they want to hauld their booty away. The Chinese, who take a much longer view of history, have cleverly kept their walls up, and are repairing them (while disgusiging the work as something for tourists so as not to alarm international monitoring bodies).

You would hope that some of the international organisations based here would be watching for this threat, but I doubt it. As I said above they have Ottomans working for them. The next time I am drinking with the Irish delegation to the OSCE I must try and convince them of the danger and get them to have it prioritised immediately!

P.S. Some people may point out that the Irish have had their problems with incursions as well. But we managed to defeat the Vikings in 1014. And we remain vigilent. Why do you think I work for a Swedish company – to keep an eye on the enemy!