I hope they’re not all full-time
The most interesting tidbit: Laporte’s TWiT (This Week in Tech) network does $1.5 million in revenue per year, doubling yearly. His costs, however, are more impressive: it only takes $350,000 per year to run the business with 7 employees.
If you watch the video, they do work full-time. Average salary of $50,000?
Multi-platform Households
More than 12 per cent of US homes have at least one Mac, according to NPD’s latest Household Penetration study – a rise from nine per cent the research company polled in 2008. But of those Mac owners, nearly 85 per cent have at least one Windows-based PC.
SpiceWorks Continues to Grow
- 250,000 individual contributions to over 78,000 IT discussions
- 18,000 IT products and services rated and reviewed
- 3,000 Windows events have been prioritized & analyzed
- 1,000 How-to’s and Best Practices
- 600 Reports
- 400 Groups organized by industry, technology, and geography/language
- 100 Scripts to automate IT tasks have been shared and reviewed in just the past 4 weeks since we launched the Spiceworks Extension Center
- 20 SpiceCorps, local user groups, have been formed from London to LA
What’s amazing here – and with most of Spiceworks’ life-span – is how involved they’ve managed to get a previously very difficult to motivate audience – sys admins. Most open/community/crowd source people had given up on this group as people who’d get all 2.0 soft over namby-pamby things like “crowd sourcing” (better to get excited about 100 gigabit ethernet, SSDs, and .conf files) but here you go.
Whose Building iPhone Apps
1/2 of the top 10 paid apps of 2008 were built by indie devs, according to Forrester. Today, only 1 app in the top 10 was built by an indie.
Related: Android to overtake iPhone in 2012.
New Tech-Ecosystem: Facebook Platform
From Blake Commagere‘s GDC 2009 session “Facebook: Is the Cake a Lie?” described as a session to “examine the opportunities that exist, the drawbacks of these platforms like Facebook and what it all means for game developers.” Here, he speaks to how frequent changes to Facebook effected his code work:
- Facebook pushes every Tuesday night.
- Major API changes in 2 year period that required a patch/release for me: over 30
- TOS policy changes that required a patch/release from me: 9
- Newsfeed integration has had 5 major rearchitecturings.
From the slide above, you can tell the rest of his deck is pretty fun.
Unified Racks
The UCS C200 M1 High-Density Rack-Mount server is one-rack unit high, and has 96GB of memory and four disk drives. It costs $2,589 and will be available in November.
The UCS C210 M1 General-Purpose Rack-Mount server is a two-rack unit device with 96GB of memory and 16 disk drives. It costs $3,039 and will be available in November.
UCS C250 M1 Extended Memory Rack-Mount server is two rack units, and has 384GB of memory and eight disk drives. It costs $10,339 and will be available in December.
“Sell something your customer throws away”
Second quarter 2009 revenue for ultraportable PCs was $1.48 billion, representing a year-over-year loss of 31 percent; portable PCs — those with 13- to 16-inch displays — brought in $19.73 billion but fell 13 percent year over year. Desktop replacement PCs earned $2.09 billion, falling 6 percent year over year, while notebook PCs — netbooks excluded — brought in $23.29 billion but fell 14 percent year over year.
The amazing marketing trick here is selling consumers something they already have: a laptop. Sure, it’s “ultraportible” and smaller, but to shift the product to make a point, you’re selling a smaller coffee maker to someone who already has a normal sized coffee makers.
Computers used to be $4,000 to $5,000 devices – I think my dad paid around that amount for his first IBM XT and then around that for an IBM AT, and that was after the employee discount. You sure as hell weren’t going to buy a new one unless you really needed it. But with Netbook pricing, they’re so cheap you might as well spend the extra cash, and buy that smaller French press even though you could get by with brew coffee.
Of course, maybe the people spending that $1.48B never had a regular sized coffee machine in the first place. In which case, yeah segmentation!
Turning Pirates into Paying Customers
Music streaming pioneer Spotify earns more than £1m a month from its premium subscribers, OUT-LAW.COM can reveal. Earnings could be as high as £72m a year. The figure is derived from statements made by Spotify executives.
This is what I call The Doctrow Theory in action: if you package up and deliver IP (“content,” like music, video, software, etc.) in the way your consumers want, they’ll pay for it.
Can’t ever get enough about mainframes
In aggregate, those companies polled by CA allocated about 38 per cent of their IT budgets to mainframe hardware and software, while 56 per cent of the budget covered those distributed [non-mainframe] platforms; the remaining six per cent of the budget went to hosted apps of one sort or another.
…
Attesting to the backbone nature of the databases running on mainframes at mainframe shops, a third of the companies polled said that if the plugs were pulled from their mainframes all their applications – even those running on distributed platforms – would fail. Another 27 per cent said a lot of important applications on distributed systems would fail, but some could keep running; 24 per cent said some would fail and another 13 per cent said there would little impact.
Disclosure: Spiceworks is a client, as are IBM and Microsoft.
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