Who is buying?

by closari

What’s driving iPhone 4 sales?
[Via Brainstorm Tech]

It’s a potent mix of new customers and old, says a Morgan Stanley analyst

One of the unanswered questions about Apple’s (AAPL) latest hit product is how many of the 600,000 iPhone 4s that were pre-sold on Tuesday were ordered by iPhone owners upgrading from their older models and how many by new customers who’d never owned an iPhone before.

Charles Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research, is a skeptic. “I doubt that a meaningful percentage of these buyers are new,” he told the New York Times.

Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty is more sanguine. In a note to clients issued Wednesday evening she cites a proprietary Morgan Stanley survey that suggests the upgrade rate will be more than 50%, but not that much more. Even 50% is considerably higher than the 18% upgrade rate found in a November 2008 survey and 25% since the launch of the original iPhone in 2007.

A loyal and growing installed base is a good thing for Apple, she argues. She estimates that if 30% of current iPhone owners upgrade this year, Apple will sell 42 million units in 2010. If 50% upgrade, it will sell 48 million. In her model, the iPhone installed base rises from about 30 million at the end of 2009 to 100 million by the end of 2011.

[More]

It seems that people are always surprised when Apple presents another item that sells at fantabulous rates. The fact that Apple seems to be the only one totally focussed on the user experience, rather than simply adding new specs, seems to escape most of them.

An example is discussed by David Pogue in the NYT, the Sprint HTC Evo. The specs have all the tech guys in fits of ecstasy.

For example, the Evo has an enormous 4.3-inch touch screen that dwarfs those of most phones. You can turn the Evo into a pocket Wi-Fi hot spot, so up to eight people can get online with their laptops. The 8-megapixel camera has dual LED flashes and records hi-def video.

The Evo is also one of the first app phones that can run Flash videos and animations on the Web, which the iPhone, notoriously, can’t. There’s even a second camera on the front, so you can actually make video calls to other Evo owners. Now you, too, can play Dick Tracy, or at least show your Evo-owning grandparents the new baby.

Above all, the Evo is the first 4G phone in America. That is, it can exploit the fourth-generation cellular towers that Sprint has been building, to bring you much, much faster Web pages and e-mail, and skip-free Internet video.

Sounds great. But, as David says, the fine print makes a huge difference. These wonderful specs produce a phone with very short battery life. The feel may be closer to a Newton than to an iPhone if you have small hands. The WiFi is great but it drains a battery in an hour. And it costs $30 a month to use.

Flash is hit and miss. It works on some sites and not on others. And what about video talks:

All right, what about video calling? Surely this is the killer app. Imagine: your friends and family can not just hear you, as with normal phones, but see you as well (assuming they also bought Sprint Evos, of course).

Well, let’s hope they’re NASA engineers, because this feature is head-bangingly unstable. After two days of fiddling, downloading and uninstalling apps, manually force-quitting programs and waiting for servers to be upgraded, I finally got video calling to work — sort of. Sometimes there was only audio and a black screen, sometimes only a freeze-frame; at best, the video was blocky and the audio delay absurd.

Apple worked to come up with a video calling system that seems to be mostly invisible to the average user, not something requiring NASA engineers.

And its battery is simply inadequate to actually use all the wonderful things it has available, like actually using it as a cell phone.

If you charge this phone all night long, then leave the house at 8 a.m., you’ll find its battery charge at 50 percent by early afternoon, even if you don’t make a single call or send a single e-mail message. By quitting time, or dinner time if you’re lucky, it’s completely dead. On this phone, the battery gauge practically shrivels as you’re looking at it.

Spint’s position is for the user to turn off all the things that make the phone such a technical wonder – 4G. WiFi hot spot, etc. What sort of tech wonder is it if you have to disable them in order to use it? Or render the phone an im-mobile device by tethering it to a power source?

Apple makes sure that its device will actually provide the user with a better experience, not one that just looks great on paper or that only works for a small minority of the population.

Perhaps that is why people trust it to make their lives easier, not simply to make the specs look amazing.

[Listening to: Sunrise from the album "The Magician's Birthday (Expanded Deluxe Edition)" by Uriah Heep]

Just another thing to pay for

I guess it was bound to happen. As I mentioned with oil wells and disasters, if you do it enough times and wait long enough, even low probability events can happen.

I work a lot in coffee shops that have free WiFi. I always buy some coffee to pay them back for the service. But I always get a cup with a lid, since I do have my computer there.

And I always have the coffee cup at least a hands width from the laptop. Spills can be a real problem.

But eve those good plans can go awry. Such happened yesterday.

The cup hooked my hand, fell sideways with just enough motion to pump out maybe half a teaspoon of coffee on my laptop keyboard – right on the A, S, D and W keys. I immediately shut down the computer, unplugged it, mopped off a little of the coffee, removed the battery and mopped off the rest.

I was hoping I cut any electric circuit before anything got through the keyboard. Maybe nothing would get fried and I would end up with just a few sticky keys.

I’ve been using this laptop – a 17 inch Macbook – for something like 4 years. I really could not believe that

It has been a real workhorse for me, even as it has gotten a little beaten up. Four years of lugging it around, upgrading the memory and hard drive. It did everything a desktop did.

When I turned it back on, after using napkins between all the keys, it was obvious that something was wrong. The ‘S’ key did not work. Unless the ‘X’ was and then a long stream of ‘S’ would rip out. The Command Key looked like it was off also, making it really hard to close windows from the keyboard. Crap.

I got home and plugged in a USB keyboard. Everything worked fine. So the logic board seemed okay. But the keyboard was no longer pristine.

Four years of a wonderful relationship.

Now it had been debauched by a few drops of coffee.

I took it into my favorite Mac shop – The Mac Store. Handed it over for them to check out. Looks like it is just the keyboard. A couple of hundred bucks to fix. But I may not get it back until early next week.

So, now I am realizing that not having a full featured back up is a problem. My iPad can do some work but it is not ready for really heavy lifting, especially for creating presentations, etc. I am going to have to figure something out.

I guess if I only have such a problem once every 4 years, that is not so bad.

The Gulf was once Over the Rainbow

Climate 411 » Somewhere Over the Gulf Coast: A “Glee” and BP Oil Disaster Mashup – Blogs & Podcasts – Environmental Defense Fund:
[Via Environmental Defense Fund ]

From a comfortable distance – in our classrooms, around our water coolers, through pictures on TV or newspapers – the BP oil disaster is depressing and horrific.

But up close where every breath you take fills your mouth, nose, and lungs with the toxic mix of oil and industrial chemicals, where you talk with resilient and proud locals and hear their frustration, anger, and concern, where the disturbing and unforgettable scenes of a precious and fragile ecosystem in crisis are just seared into your mind – all of it is just so bad, so repugnant, so wrong in the most profound way.

Two days in the Gulf of Mexico left me enraged – and deeply resolved. Both the widespread damage and the inadequacy of the response effort exceeded my worst fears.

[More]

The entire blog post is worth reading. Please do so.

In today’s amazing world, someone who is passionate about almost anything can rapidly produce works that are tremendously affecting. Here, the choice of music by a young girl resonated with the emotions of her father to create something very moving.

That they were able to get permission from Fox says something about their connections. But it also speaks to the passions of many people at all levels of American life are focussed on the Gulf.

The version of the song song by the members of Glee is based not on Judy Garland’s tour de force but on the other stunning rendition of this song by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

Judy’s is a fantastic version but always seemed to me to be the wishes of a young person dreaming of better things that are just not there for her yet. I always choke up with her version because of the longing in her voice. But it is a longing of someone who has never experienced those better things she dreams of. But she might someday, so there is still a twinge of hope there.

But IZ’s version makes me cry big fat tears. It speaks more of someone who knows what he is missing, who actually experienced those dreams earlier in his life. His longing is that of an adult longing for what he can never have again. Hope is almost gone.

In fact, on his classic album, Facing Future, he combines Over the Rainbow with What a Wonderful World. It is as he is describing the wonderful world on the other side of the rainbow. To me, it is one of the most devastating combinations of two songs which, when often song alone, have such different outlooks.

The lyrics of longing meld into a description of what he has seen and what he has lost, then move back to the longing seen on this side of the rainbow.

I think that when I die, at my funeral, I want his version of these two songs performed. It describes so much of what life on Earth is like – our longing for something better, often without ever attaining it.

That is why this video on the Gulf is so heartbreaking for me. It is a wonderful place on Earth and we have harmed it tremendously. It will most likely recover but neither it, not we, will likely be the same. The longing for a better place that the lyrics brings forth is just so sad when we can see that we had that better place.

And it is now gone.

Reading the nonsense of Apple pundits from 2007

by arquera

My Favorite Article Title in DF History
[Via Daring Fireball]

I had to hack my Movable Type database to make it work.

[More]

It is always a lot of fun watching someone take apart a fatuous pundit. BUt this entry, from 3 years ago also shows just how clueless the writer was. Not only using often purple prose but falling into the trap of ascribing everything that Apple does to just one man.

And almost everything he wrote failed to happen at all.

A nice funny read.

Many companies would like to be in this fix

600,000 iPhone 4s pre-ordered, Apple apologizes for issues
[Via Engadget]

We were amazed last night to see both Apple and AT&T sell out of iPhone 4 pre-order units despite the sustained ordering issues, and now we know why: Apple managed to move 600,000 iPhones in just a single day. Yes, that’s a lot — Apple says it’s the largest number of pre-orders it’s ever taken in one day, and AT&T says it’s ten times as many orders as it took for the iPhone 3GS. It’s not all sunshine and roses, though; Apple’s also apologizing to the large numbers of people who simply couldn’t get through yesterday, and AT&T’s suspended pre-orders entirely until the device is in stock. We’re guessing AT&T might also be putting the stopper on things while it gets those pesky security issues under control, but there’s a chance the carrier is just trying to deal with the insane order volume coming from Apple’s servers — it served up 13 million eligibility checks yesterday, shattering the previous record by three times. All in all, it looks like Apple has a hot item on its hands here — almost too hot to handle.

[More]

They sold 600,000 in less than 1 day. They sold all their pre-stock. And the white ones aren’t even on sale yet. I hope they can ramp up to meet demand. This is pretty amazin.

Wired, coffee and Tynt

by stephenccwu

How about making better coffee?
[Via Doc Searls Weblog]

Starbucks Announces Free Wi-Fi, Proprietary Content Network, the headline says, in a story by Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired. Some quotage:

“Free Wi-Fi is in my mind just the price of admission — we want to create … new sources of content that you can only get at Starbucks,” chairman and president and CEO Howard Schulz told the Wired BusinessConference. “This is a thing that doesn’t exist in any other consumer marketplace in America.”

Starbucks hopes to make money from these initiatives indirectly, by “enhanc[ing] the experience” and making the content “so compelling that it drives incremental traffic,” said Schulz as he announced the new initiative at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference on Monday…

Each customer must log in to Wi-Fi and the Starbucks Digital Network with a unique identifier, so Starbucks won’t only know where you are, but who you are, potentially allowing for targeted messaging to offset cost further. Focus groups have been quite receptive to the free Wi-Fi and local content customers will get in return, says the CEO.

So, where will all of this content come from? Especially, when Starbucks wants it to be updated multiple times a day, so people always see something new.

In addition to the inked partnership with Yahoo, Starbucks is talking to AOL’s Patch.com content-creation division about having it create customized content for the network. In addition, the network will include free online access to the Wall Street Journal, with a percentage of subscription revenue generated when coffee drinkers decide they want to access those articles elsewhere, too.

Salivating yet? Me neither.

The last thing I want from Starbucks — or any store, for that matter — is a target on my back. I do not wish to be tagged like an animal and tracked by marketers. The only identifier I want from Starbucks is the one I give them to call out when my coffee is ready. And that may not even be my name.

The free online access to the Journal is a nice deal, since the paper, both online and off, is freaking expensive. The “proprietary local content” is a big so-what. Sure, Patch.com is good at what it does, as is

[More]

I have found very few Starbucks worth sitting around in. Good coffee shops which encourage spending time sitting around offer a variety of approaches to help make one feel comfortable while browsing.

One is a variety of sitting options – chairs, stools, love seats – all give one a better feeling of welcome than a bunch of repetitious tables and chairs.

And electric plugs. Lots of them. I have yet to see a Starbucks with anything like a convenient number of plugs. You can not expect people to spend a few hours in you shop using their computers without providing power.

Doc also noticed something that is becoming more and more prevalent on the web – the appearance of Tynt as an unwanted traveller when cutting and pasting. Wired is apparently one of the sites now doing this.

It also annoys me that the Wired story lacks links to Patch.com and the Journal. It also forces me to copy this, even though it’s not visible in the story’s print:

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/starbucks-announces-free-wi-fi-proprietary-content-network/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29#ixzz0quYSZGhb

I hate that. I also don’t know how Wired does that, nor do I want to take the time to know it, though I probably will, so I can hate it more specifically.

Tynt is a ‘service’ that adds the entire ‘”Read More…” that follows along with any text copied from some web pages. As noted, it is not something that is visible on the page but will appear when pasted.

Of course, it is irritating and is usually immediately deleted. John Gruber at Daring Fireball first put me on to this new attempt to utilize the habits of users for profit. He details a lot of what is wrong but I think this expresses his sentiment:

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

So it is great that he led me to a new Safari Extension that blocks Tynt-based scripts. I have returned to using Safari with the introduction of the new version. The ability to finally add extensions, plus the new Reader function, make me really happy. It is easier than editing my ‘hosts’ file to block the site.

Companies as complex systems – Crosspost from SpreadingScience

[Crosspost from SpreadingScience]

by jurvetson

Seeing Your Company as a System
[Via Ackoff Center Weblog]

Much-needed guidance on making companies more employee-centered, adaptive, and capable This is an article from Strategy+Business by Andrea Gabor: … No matter how disparate the causes of failure, there is always a common thread: somewhere, somehow, management has let its attention slip…

[More]

Many of the failures we have seen over the last few years – the financial industry, the housing industry, the oil industry – have arisen because the organization involved are being run like a ‘machine’ – push lever X to get result Y. A better approach in these complex setting is to view the organization as a living organism – where small changes in initial conditions, coupled with network effects, can result in disparate, somewhat stochastic, outcomes.

We have done a great job over the last century solving the problems that could be attacked with a ‘machine-based’ management approach. What we have left are the really complex problems where a wide variety of levers can be manipulated with often unexpected outcomes.

Few problems involving complex processes can be solved by moving a single lever. One point of attack will not provide a solution. In fact it often create problems elsewhere in the process.

Today’s complex world requires a different approach, one that overcomes the faults of the ‘machine-driven’ management approaches. This article serves as a nice introduction to the works of Russell Ackoff and others that describe a systems-based approach to management.

Key to this approach is a view of employees that seems to be anathema to many:

All the works mentioned in this guide have been linked to higher performance. Yet their focus on the expertise of ordinary employees remains a hard sell in many companies, because it requires an enormous long-term commitment to training and to local control and knowledge sharing.

Moreover, employee-centered systems organizations need to develop trust — between supervisors and employees and among employees who have to work together to understand and improve the system. Making this work takes skillful management. Indeed, many quality improvement efforts in the U.S. failed because they absorbed rigid process guidelines but failed to build in flexibility.

Management approaches utilizing complex systems thinking require a relationship with employees, especially those most directly engaged with complex problems, that few companies seem to be able to foment. Yet those organizations that can accomplish this will be able to successfully deal with much more complex problems than those that can not, producing an advantage that will be hard for ‘machine-based’ thinking to overcome.

Part of what SpreadingScience tries to do is educate organizations about human social networks, helping them understand how to leverage new technologies to identify and empower the people they need in order to solve complex problems. We help them understand how to adapt their tools to make it easier to support a network-driven management style, and allowing the organization to solve a greater range of complex problems.

The companies that can accomplish this will have a selective advantage over those who can not.

Great discussion on file sharing of films

by gailf548

Film Director: File Sharing Only Hurts Bad Or Mediocre Films
[Via Techdirt]

TorrentFreak asked independent film director Sam Bozzo to comment on his experiences having his two most recent films leaked to BitTorrent. The stories in both cases were different. The first film, Blue Gold: World Water Wars was released normally, and then leaked online. The second, his documentary Hackers Wanted was shelved after internal disputes — but has now leaked to BitTorrent. Originally it was an old cut that was leaked, but now Bozzo’s “directors’ cut” has been leaked, and Bozzo seems fine with it. In fact, he claims that if you make a good film, having it leaked to BitTorrent can only help. It’s only bad if your film isn’t very good:

In a nutshell, I believe the only films that are hurt by torrent sharing are mediocre and bad films. In contrast, the good films of any genre only benefit from file-sharing. Due to this, I feel the current file-sharing trend is a catalyst for a true evolution in filmmaking…

That’s quite a statement, since so many in the movie industry disagree. But Bozzo does a good job backing it up by explaining his own experiences. In fact, he admits when he first found out that Blue Gold was available online he was “enraged and terrified I would never make my money back,” because of this. But he has since changed his mind, in part because he figured out how to embrace it:

I contacted the uploader of my film and asked she spread a message of support with the torrent, asking for donations if a viewer likes the film and explaining that was a self-financed endeavor. The result? I received many donations and emails of support from those who downloaded the film, but I furthermore believe that viewers spread the word of the film to their non-torrent-downloading friends and that DVD sales increased due to the leak. For me, the torrent leak was ultimately “free advertising”, and I am the only truly independent documentary filmmaker I know making his money back this year.

[More]

The needs and motivations of an independent filmmaker are different than a major studio. This example shows how free downloading of a film can enhance certain situations. Often giving people the ability to reward good work provides an incentive for more revenue.

I also like the mention that while this can enhance things for a good movie, it can harm revenue for a bad movie. I’d be interested to hear if this is true, although determining just what is a ‘bad’ movie could be hard.

What this does show is that the economics of major motion picture production make it very hard to allow any perceived loss of revenue to exist. It does not matter if there is really any loss. Just the perception is enough.

And marketing costs for a major Hollywood movie can actually prevent the release of a finished movie. The release of the remake of Red Dawn is apparently in doubt because MGM lacks the money to market it and is looking for a buyer.

But the economics of modern technology allows a wide range of new entrepreneurs to creative works that permit widespread copying, as this gives them greater marketing advantages than normal.

Perhaps MGM should just release parts of the movie to the web, asking people to send them money for a marketing campaign. If done well enough, perhaps they could get it into movie theaters.

Assuming it is a good movie, that is.

GoodReader for iPad just got to be GreatReader

by ChrisDag

GoodReader for iPad adds VGA output, performance boost
[Via Macworld]

GoodReader for iPad, Good.iWare’s acclaimed all-purpose reader, has received an update to version 2.8, adding support for horizontal page turning for PDF files, VGA-out, and a few other goodies.

[More]

Lots of performance boosts and increased readability in the new Good Reader but getting video out is a huge plus for me. At the moment, Keynote is the only presentation type app I have that will display video through the adapter.

Now I can use GoodReader to do the same thing but with PDFs. Since I can save all sorts of material as PDFs, even desktop Keynote presentations, this gives me greater flexibility of sources for presenting.

I may not get the great transitions, etc from Keynote but I can take someone else’s Powerpoint and just make a PDF of it rather than fiddle with Keynote, which often does some interesting things to Powerpoint.

Keynote is still the best way to create presentations but it requires tethering to a laptop with Keynote already on it to work on the iPad. Not so with GoodReader. I can sync wirelessly to a computer over WiFi, get the presentation as a PDF and go. It may even work with a PC (not having one handy, I can only guess.)

Wireless syncing and video out make GoodReader one of my most important apps on the iPad.

Now might not be a good time to plan on a summer trip to Europe

Signs and Portents
[Via Only in it for the gold]

This image, from the Department of Geophysics of the Icelandic Meteorlogical Service, shows locations of earthquakes in Mýrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull for a recent 48 hour period.

Hat tip to Mark Liberman of Language Log of all people.

Lifting text directly from Liberman,

Mýrdalsjökull (the “mire valley glacier”) covers the volcano Katla. According to the Wikipedia article,

In the past 1,000 years, all three known eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull have triggered subsequent Katla eruptions. Following the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruptions, on 20 April 2010 Icelandic President Ólafur Grímsson said “the time for Katla to erupt is coming close … we [Iceland] have prepared … it is high time for European governments and airline authorities all over Europe and the world to start planning for the eventual Katla eruption”.

[More]

Eyjafjallajökull erupts and then the big one erupts. That is the pattern. If Katia blows, it could put a lot of ash into European airspace. A lot of ash.

I’m hoping that it simply melts the glacier a little. If it decides to really go off, things could get quite bad in Europe, especially since the ash has been toxic to livestock in the past. A case could be made that the food shortages that helped lead to the French Revolution were caused by the ash from this volcano.

A further sign of the evilness that is Apple

Become a World Cup nuisance with the iVuvuzela iPhone app
[Via Edible Apple]

If you’ve been watching the 2010 World Cup at all, you’ve undoubtedly heard that annoying background noise, in the form of a horn, that lasts for the excruciating duration of each match. What you’re hearing, to be precise, is a Vuvuzela.

“A Vuvuzela?” you ask. Why yes. A vuvuzela, also known as a stadium or blowing horn, is a a meter long contraption that unleashes a somewhat irritating sound, the effects of which are only amplified when you have a stadium filled with thousands of people blowing their vuvuzelas at the same time. The horn is quite popular in South Africa, and by extension, was introduced to most of the world when World Cup play began last Friday.

Many folks, though, are endlessly irritated by the sound, and it can certainly put a damper on listening to the play by play on TV. Still, the folks lucky enough to attend the World Cup matches in South Africa apparently think otherwise.

But what about all the folks who want to get in on the horn blowing action but weren’t able to hop on a plane to South Africa? Well, iPhone developers have proven themselves quite adept at incorporating the latest trends and fads into fly by night iPhone apps.

[More]

The stadium horn is pretty popular in South America also. My son and I were at a US women vs Mexico friendly a few years back and some Mexican fans showed up with 3 if these. It was upsetting to the little girls severa rows up and their father asked the guys if they could please stop because his daughter wanted to watch the game.

The look on the faces of those 3 guys was priceless. How can you watch a game and not make noise? They apparently figured that Seattle people were crazy and left, so the man and his daughters could enjoy the game in peace in quiet.

I would imagine that listening to several thousand of these could be tremendously annoying. And Now Apple brings that sound everywhere.

Perhaps BP should embed some reporters

by lsgcp

CJR, NYTimes, a few more: BP tries to clamp a cap on another thing: the press
[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

It’s hard to cover a story one cannot get to. We’ve been reading occasional complaints for weeks that BP, with most of the hardware (however ancient it may be) for dealing with the worst crude oil spill in the nation’s history and thus having most of the people running the show, has been no help and plenty of hindrance to reporters covering their public demonstration of calamitous non-preparation. It’s no surprise that a private company’s suits would want to stifle press freedom to go to the spill, to take pictures, and to interview people in the know. But pathetic that they have been permitted to get away with it. I mean, does BP really have authority over air space and navigation in the Gulf of Mexico? ow about just going to a public beach? Who gave them that? Where are the federal agencies that say they are in charge? Are they in cahoots with BP in stifling press access?

Some reporters have bit back the best way they know: in print. At McClatchy, Erika Bolstad late last month wrote a furious story on the “litany of half-truths, withholding crucial video, blocking media access to the site and a failure to share timely and complete information” by BP. The story strongly suggests that the feds have stood by and done nothing to get information faster to the public – the success of one congressman, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, at getting a live video stream of the streaming well head made public being an exception.

That piece triggered at the Columbia Journalism Review an editorial castigating all involved for trying to manage the news. Also at CJR, Brett Norman in late May wrote on “the gall” of BP for shutting down its “top kill” effort for the better part of a day while the press, not told, blithely went on reporting that the ultimately failed effort was continuing as planned.

[More]

Trying to cover up what is going on, or appearing to, is always a problem when you want to manage the news. The military learned the benefit of embedding reporters, who then often gave quite glowing reports.

BP could stand to do some thing that might provide some better news, if that is possible at all.

The best way to ‘watch’ a Cup game

The NYTimes Visualization of Live World Cup Football Statistics
[Via information aesthetics]

Last week was one mainly dominated by the introduction of compelling data visualizations depicting real-time football statistics, with entries such as VisualSport, Adidas Match Tracker, a real-time World Cup Visualiser iPad app and a Total Football 2010 iPhone app.

Today, infographic powerhouse The New York Times has entered this emerging arena as well: their blog “Goal” [goal.blogs.nytimes.com] now features a new data analysis module that delivers detailed football match information in real-time, after which it acts as a detailed interactive archive once the game has finished. A live module also appears on the homepage of The New York Times – Global Edition.

[More]

Having this running while watching the game is a lot of fun. It provides heat maps and shows where the major action is minute by minute. I really wish some of the analysts would use something simlar to tell people what is going on.

Busy day and the Sounders

Lots of meetings today, more email and now I am off to see the Seattle Sounders last game before the World Cup break. I hope I will not be standing in the rain, as it seems every other Sounders game has had.

And I hope they win.

Did the NYT back down?

Pulse Back in the App Store
[Via Daring Fireball]

MG Siegler:

Pulse has already made a triumphant return to the store, their Twitter account confirms. So what happened? Did Jobs himself step into the fray and get the NYT to ease up? […] When asked how the app returned so quickly, co-creator Akshay Kothari wrote back: “We’re trying to figure that out ourselves. Keep you posted.”

[More]

Nice to see innovative apps get their reward. I’ll be interested in hearing just what happened. I guess having Jobs on your side helps. Pulse is back at the App Store. I wonder if the NYT is still a default.