Apollo music app's temporary demise from Google play store

2012-11-25T14:54:00.001-08:00

Yes, you read correctly.

This app was in Google play store for exactly 4 days and was gathering huge praises and marketing momentum. It was sadly pulled out of Google play store, citing copyright infringement.

This afternoon, its flounder oops err..founder, Andrew Neal, quoted in his micro blogging, about the untimely temporary demise, stating that there exists an issue with the way the lyrics being fetched, according to the copyright infringement act filed by a company called Musixmatch.

We understand that this surprise act of Google was to reassure its stakeholders about its new found stringent standards of Google play store.

Well, we wish all the very best for Andrew for the quick recovery to be quick for his brain child, Apollo. That's what a wishful thinking all about, I guess.

Are you being exiled, Tablet PC makers?

2012-11-06T22:53:00.003-08:00

This morning, I was reading a continuous bad set of news from prominant Tablet PC makers. One being Amazon on trying to break even for their Kindle Fire HD as they are selling the units for $199 where as the production cost itself was $174 excluding marketing and other misc charges. Another being the the biggest Tech Flop of 2011, HP TouchPad story.

Gone are the days of the glory of Tablet PC manufacturers? Some one said, Desktop PCs are Titanic and Tablet PCs are icebergs. Are these icrebergs melting already due to their pricing and other dispositions? Let us see in detail...

How it all started? (Courtesy: Techopedia.com)

In 2012, the NPD Group, a leading market research firm in North America, forecasted that tablets are poised to overtake notebooks by 2016, with tablet sales expected to grow to more than 809 million in 2017 from only 347 million in 2012.

Microsoft also predicted that tablets will soon overtake traditional desktop personal computers. The company's vice president for Windows Web Services, Antoine Leblond, predicts that this will occur by 2013. This after PC sales have remained relatively flat for the past few years.

Tablets started gathering steam with the introduction of Apple's iPad in 2010. In just 12 months, more than 15 million units were sold, sales levels that shocked just about every analyst and tech blogger, and blew first year predictions of 4 to 5 million units right out of the water. It was also impressive enough to cause all the other PC, mobile phone and electronics manufacturers to drop what they were doing and start making tablets in an effort to get a share in the market.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers reported that in 2010, there were already about 30 tablets competing with the iPad. By 2012, that number was closer to 100.

PWC also said that the reason a lot of manufacturers were getting into tablet production is that they simply had no choice. With a growth rate of five times the growth rate for PCs and four times that of smartphones, tablet PCs are where the money is. They also represent a unique opportunity to corner both the smartphone and PC markets.

What went wrong?

The wild success of the iPad led to the assumption that consumers wanted tablets. However, what may be more true - at least at the time - is that consumers wanted an iPad. It certainly helps to explain why so many other table makers failed. The HP TouchPad, for example, was on sale for about a month before the iPad debuted. It was discontinued in less than two months, and is considered one of the biggest tech flops of 2011.

Why such a highly anticipated product failed so miserably has been debated all over the blogosphere, but most critics agree it was a combination of failed marketing and a price that was too high for a tablet that had fewer features compared to the iPad and other competitors. Oh, and it only had 6,000 apps, compared to the hundreds of thousands of apps available in the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace.

Speaking of a lack of apps, you just have to bring up Research In Motion's (RIM) PlayBook. When RIM launched PlayBook, it did not even have an app for Twitter, Facebook or, god help us, "Angry Birds". Nor did it support email, contacts and calendar apps. People didn't like the fact that they couldn't pull the PlayBook out of its box and start playing with it, and it didn't sell.

Dell's Streak 7, on the other hand, ran on Android, with dual core processing, 4G compatibility, Flash support and both front and rear cameras. It seemed promising - especially at its low $200 price point. But it was a flop, too. Users complained of software glitches and a low-quality display. Clearly, the company worked too hard on making Streak affordable, and forgot about usability.

Motorola Xoom held a lot of promise as well. It was powered by Google's Honeycomb OS, and had 4G LTE connectivity. Motorola called it the "iPad killer." It proved be a very lame assassination attempt for one simple reason: The 4G LTE connectivity wasn't available in the off-the-shelf product, which meant that users had to mail their tablets back for an upgrade. That didn't exactly say "cool" or "high tech." But what really killed the so-called "iPad killer" before it even bared its teeth was the price of the thing. No one wanted to pay $800 for what was essentially an iPad alternative when the iPad itself was selling for $499. The result? Xoom did not even ship enough units in the first quarter to make 10 percent of iPad's quarterly sales of 10 million units.

How are they fairing in the recent quarterly announcements:

Makers of phones and tablet computers have begun releasing results for the latest quarter. Many companies including Nokia and Research in Motion have been struggling to compete with Apple and manufacturers of devices running Google's Android software. Here's a look at how makers of phones and tablet computers are doing.

— Oct. 18: Google Inc. says its Motorola Mobility device-making business suffered an operating loss of $527 million, more than tripling from the same time last year, when it was still an independent company. Google is planning job cuts at Motorola, but says it still could take a few years for Google to turn that business around.

Nokia Corp. reports that its third-quarter net loss widened further to €969 million ($1.27 billion) with a 19 percent plunge in revenue, as it struggles against the dominance of Samsung and the iPhone in the tough smartphone market. Nokia gave a grim outlook for the rest of the year as it prepares for this fall's launch of Microsoft Corp.'s new phone software, Windows Phone 8. The Finnish firm acknowledges it expects no quick gains from the new Windows launch.

— Oct. 23: Apple Inc. unveils a faster, full-sized iPad and a smaller one called the iPad Mini. The smaller one will start at $329, much more than its competitors. Both new iPads will be available starting Nov. 2.

— Oct. 25: Apple Inc. warns that profits will be down in the holiday quarter compared with a year ago because it's releasing so many new products. When a production line is new, it costs more to run and the components are more expensive.

Amazon.com Inc. says its $199 Kindle Fire HD tablet is its best-selling product worldwide, but as usual, it did not give specific sales figures.

— Oct. 26: Strong sales of Galaxy phones propelled Samsung Electronics Co.'s quarterly profit to a record high, but there's concern growth will slow in an increasingly crowded smartphone market.

HTC Corp. reports a 79 percent drop in third-quarter profit, its fourth consecutive fall in quarterly profit. It predicts revenue will drop in the holiday quarter as well despite traditional pre-Christmas buying and its introduction of two new models running Windows.

— Nov. 1: Sony Corp. says sales improved in its mobile phone segment, but sales faltered in its digital cameras because of the popularity of smartphones, which typically come with cameras.

— Nov. 2: IDC says Google's Android software for mobile devices was running on 75 percent of smartphones shipped in the third quarter, as the search company extended its lead over Apple.

— Monday: IDC says Apple's share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition from Android devices such as Samsung's Galaxy tablets and Google's Nexus 7. Apple still had a solid lead and shipped more iPads worldwide than a year earlier.

Apple says it sold 3 million iPads of all kinds in the first three days the iPad Mini was available, double the 1.5 million iPads sold in the first three days after Apple launched the third-generation iPad in March and cut the price of the iPad 2.

IHS iSuppli releases analysis showing that Microsoft and Apple are garnering the highest-profit margins for their tablets, followed by Google and then Amazon.

With IPAD still monopolizing the market, is IPad still forcing the other players to get into self exile mode. Time is bound to tell the truth for sure!!

Note taking software - Microsoft OneNote Vs.EverNote

2012-11-01T22:04:00.001-07:00

Today I got into one of the biggest dilemma on choosing to continue with note taking software that I currently have Microsoft OneNote Vs. EverNote.

As most of my day dwelve upon the meetings, it is essential for me to take meeting minutes and action items for my meetings to follow up and track with.

Primary Criteria for the selection was to have my notes available in all of my gadgets, blackberry official phone, iPhone personal phone, Blackberry playbook tablet, WhiteBerry Android Tablet, my laptop, PC and the cloud, sky and beyond the milky way if possible.

With such criterions, I could ONLY filter out Microsoft OneNote and EverNote in what is available in the market.

With this backdrop, I am writing this serious of posts to lists down the pros and cons, though I have chosen what I wanted to pursue with.

The winner is .....

The winner is ....EverNote and you got to wait till tomorrow to know the reasons one by one.

Don't jump ahead with MS oneNote license just yet.

Pattern matching in Excel

2012-09-22T22:41:00.001-07:00

Today I have encountered a big confusion on building my annual goals spreadsheet review where some of the goals I have used SMART method of saying "This goal BY 21st JUNE 2012". As usual, some of these were missed out the deadline of the goals and caught up with the goal review.

I wanted to remove this "BY 21st JUNE 2012" as it was rekindling the guilty conscious in me of NOT completing them on time. Using my programmer brain, I obviously wanted to clear these "by.." goals (71 of them) at one go instead of manual editing. Obviously the Pattern Matching functionality came into my mind to perform the same.

In my perl and shell scripting background, I would have used "BY (.*) 2012" to do this simple change. However, the excel spit up the error when I used the same construct in the find and replace box. In my google search on the context, I saw the TILDE (~) symbol being used as "finding the next literal" and with that I have resorted into "BY (~*) 2012" but it did NOT work. With my extensive trial and error, I found the solution and felt stupid to have missed it.

What was the solution with fixed my issue?

It was simple use of *. Yes, the "BY * 2012" has fixed the issue and learnt that Excel support plain *(for everything - being greedy), +(Only the specified characters), ?(Only the next character). With that, I did the following.
1) Press CTRL+F to invoke FIND and REPLACE dialogue box.
2) on the find what, I have entered "BY * 2012" and did a find all and checked entries.
3) I did REPLACE ALL, to replace all of the matching entries after validating the entries in the step(2).

Wondering how come we complicate the things ourselves that are kept so simple out there? Did you get into similar thoughts recently? Share it!!

{E}-IT

Apollo music app's temporary demise from Google play store

Are you being exiled, Tablet PC makers?

Note taking software - Microsoft OneNote Vs.EverNote

Pattern matching in Excel