Linked List: March 4, 2011

Friday, 4 March 2011

My thanks to GroupMe for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. GroupMe is a new group messaging service, with a bunch of great features. The basic gist is that each “group” gets a unique phone number; texts sent to that number are distributed to the whole group. Anyone with any phone that supports SMS can be in a group.

Where it gets cool is with the brand-new iPhone app, developed by Cameron Hunt (Birdhouse) and Jeremy Schoenherr (MLB.com At Bat). It looks good, works well, and optionally allows you to use push messaging instead of SMS for sending and receiving. It’s easy to switch back and forth between push and SMS — but even when you’re using push, it all still works with every member of your group, no matter what kind of phone they’re using. (They’ve got apps for Android and BlackBerry, too.)

Sounds great for conferences, and GroupMe has that in mind: they’ve got a special promotion where if you’re heading to SXSW next week and set up a group for you and your friends, you’re entered in a contest to win “VIP tickets” to various parties. The service and the app are both free of charge.

Who Is the Customer? ★

From the official PayPal weblog:

As we’ve been saying since last October, Publishers need an easy way to monetize their content while also retaining information about their readers across multiple platforms. With Apple’s subscription service, publishers lose both these controls and have few options.

Publishers may well “need” access to subscriber data in their current business models, but there’s no reason they can’t change business models to adapt to a changing market. Just because at one point in history publishers could make large amounts of money selling their subscriber data to junk mail marketers doesn’t mean they have a right to maintain that business model forever.

PayPal understands that publishers and content providers need to make money. That’s why PayPal for Digital Goods pricing has not changed since 2005, and remains at just 5% plus 5 cents. This beats both Google and Apple, while also allowing customers the option to retain information about their readers across multiple platforms.

There are two aspects to this. First, the rate that gets charged. Undoubtedly, PayPal’s fees are far lower than Apple’s. But the second is interesting — access to subscriber data. PayPal uses “customers” when talking about the publishers, and they see the access to subscriber information as rightfully belonging to the publishers. Apple sees the subscribers — the users of iOS devices — as its customers, and they see the control over their personal information as belonging to them individually. Remember, Apple isn’t blocking publishers from subscriber data — they’ve simply made it an opt-in system controlled by the user. That’s a telling difference.

RIM Turning Away From Smartphone Market? ★

Interesting news from mobile CPU maker Marvell:

In a somewhat unexpected twist, Marvell’s report also underscored a shift by a major customer, Research In Motion Ltd., to lower-end and lower-margin smartphones in emerging markets. RIM shares declined 2.9% to close at $66.47. […]

The company is widely known to also be a supplier to RIM’s BlackBerry, which is still a major player in mobile computing, but which has struggled in the high-end smartphone category in the face of stiff competition from Apple Inc’s iPhone and devices using Google Inc’s Android operating system.

This makes sense, technically. But, alas for RIM, it isn’t good news financially. (Via Kontra.)

IE6 Countdown ★

Microsoft:

10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

Via Jeff Veen, who tweets:

I’ve never seen a company work so aggressively at getting people to stop using their product.

Points for Honesty ★

Jim Dalrymple, on Samsung’s response to the iPad 2:

“We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,” Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, told Yonhap News Agency. “Apple made it very thin.”

Currently, the seven-inch Galaxy Tab is listed on AT&T’s Web site for $549. The iPad 2 starts at $499 for the Wi-Fi version and $629 for the 3G model. But pricing is cause for concern when Samsung releases a larger screen model. “The 10-inch (tablet) was to be priced higher than the 7-inch (tablet) but we will have to think that over,” said Lee.

Apple’s ‘Post-PC’ World ★

Josh Topolsky:

It won’t be a debate about displays, memory, wireless options — it will be a debate about the quality of the experience. Apple is not just eschewing the spec conversation in favor of a different conversation — it’s rendering those former conversations useless. It would be like trying to compare a race car to a deeply satisfying book. In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.

The thing is, for some of us, it’s always been this way. That’s why we stuck with the Mac during the stretches where Intel CPUs were faster and cheaper. What the iPad changes is that it takes things even further in this experience-first/specs-second mindset. Spec-wise — CPU speed, RAM, storage, expandability, pixel-count — the iPad pales compared to a MacBook. But experience-wise, it’s better. The iPad is slower, but feels faster.