Linked List: April 26, 2012

Thursday, 26 April 2012

Inside Social Games: “Zynga Reports Highest Ever Bookings for Q1 at $329M”.

Same facts, different headline from Reuters: “Zynga Reports $85 Million Quarterly Loss”.

Funnily enough, the pro-Zynga headline is right from Zynga’s own press release.

Revenue is up year over year, although profits were down. This caught my eye:

“I’m excited to announce that we now have more than 130,000 new, in-copyright books that are exclusive to the Kindle Store – you won’t find them anywhere else. They include many of our top bestsellers – in fact, 16 of our top 100 bestselling titles are exclusive to our store,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

So 16 percent of bestselling titles are exclusive to the Kindle Store — and the Department of Justice is investigating Apple’s iBookstore. Got it.

Samsung Hires Mob to Protest Outside Apple Store ★

Embarrassing.

Correction 1 May 2012: Ends up it was put together by RIM, not Samsung.

Android in Early 2007 Looked Very Different Than It Does Today ★

Reminiscent in some ways of Windows Mobile 5. Doesn’t remind me at all of Android as we know it.

Why does this matter? Let’s forget about any sort of argument about whether Android is a rip-off of the iPhone. Of course it is. Put aside any sense of justice or righteousness. How could the Android team not change course and copy the iPhone after they’d seen it? Steve Jobs, quoted in Wired magazine back in 1996:

I saw a very rudimentary graphical user interface. It wasn’t complete. It wasn’t quite right. But within 10 minutes, it was obvious that every computer in the world would work this way someday. And you could argue about the number of years it would take, and you could argue about who would be the winners and the losers, but I don’t think you could argue that every computer in the world wouldn’t eventually work this way.

What the mouse/windows GUI was to computing, the iPhone touchscreen is to mobile computing.

What’s more interesting to me is the technical story. It’s no wonder Android has struggled to match the smoothness, touch responsiveness, and high-frame-rate graphics of the iPhone, given that this is where they were in 2007. They’ve come remarkably far in five years.

Google Expected Android Honeycomb Tablets to Have 33 Percent Marketshare in 2011 ★

Nilay Patel, with more juicy stuff revealed during the Google-Oracle trial:

According to a presentation given by Andy Rubin in July 2010, Google expected to sell some 10 million Android tablets a year in 2011 and 2012 and capture up to a third of the entire tablet market.

Reminds me of Eric Schmidt’s prediction that Google TV will be on half of all new U.S. TV sets this summer, and that mobile app developers will soon write for Android first.

Must be some good weed in Mountain View.

‘I Will Legally Change My Name to Yours for a WWDC Ticket’ ★

I don’t think this is a joke.