Looks Like The iPhone 5 Is Officially Coming

Apple is hosting its next iPhone event at its Cupertino, California headquarters on Oct. 4. Press invites landed in media inboxes first thing this morning, with a very enticing tag line: “Let’s Talk iPhone.”

Tim Cook is expected to be master of ceremonies at the event now that he is Apple’s CEO. The media event is taking place at Apple’s 1 Infinite Loop HQ, out of the norm from past iPhone events held in the city of San Francisco.

At the event, we’ll find out once and for all if we’re getting an iPhone 5 or an additional budget iPhone 4S. The iPhone 5 is reported to have a larger, possibly edge-to-edge display, a thinner silhouette and an elongated home button. It’s also expected to house an A5 processor, like that of the iPad 2.

'GazeHawk: Eye Tracking For Everyone'

Came across this little gem at AdAge west.  Going on their second year in existence, GazeHawk is an eye tracking technology company that provides consultative research and reports to publishers and advertisers to improve ad effectiveness.  Their technology accesses a users webcam, asks for permission to track their visual patterns, and then runs that user through a quick calibration test.  After that, it's open season.  GazeHawk can determine which ad units on a page are most effective aka get the most exposure to the eye, and then passes back that info to the pub/advertiser.

For a publisher, you can see this being a HUGE asset when it comes to valuing their ad space, charging premiums for the units with more attention, and vice versa.  For an advertiser, you can better determine what you should be paying for those same units.

On the macro level, this is in fact a big step away from using click throughs as a measurement of success.  As a player in the video space this is music to my ears.  My only drawback is that they ask for permission from the user.  This absolutely needs to be an opt-in system, however as soon as the user knows what you are studying, their behavior changes.  There is no way around that.

Detractors from The Hawk (are they not using that nickname yet?) will press on the creepyness factor here, which is in no way helped by their aggressive company name.  But if you talk to the fat cats in Washington, opt-in makes it a free zone, so Gaze on my friends.

AdAge Digital West: a Semi-Diary

Well, another conference on the books for today. Checking out AdAge's first digital focused conference on the West Coast. The morning started strong with the Global CMO and Digital Director for Levi's giving us their perspective on the world and intro'ing the Go Forth campaign. Here's a crappy cell phone pic of them for you to decipher:

What a Gem!! Qwikster Twitter Feed Owned By Some Hoodlum

So, on the day that Netflix announces that their DVD service is now named Qwikster, and that they are launching a new business with separate P&Ls, the online community was quick to seek out places where the handle "Qwikster" was already in play.

Well let's heap the praise to the crew at Gizmodo for their find of the @Qwikster Twitter handle.  As they put it, "Netflix Doesn’t Own Qwikster Twitter Feed. This Foulmouthed Pothead Does."  Enjoy:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/netflix-qwikster-elmo-pothead/?pid=2457

An Exciting Weekend in LA No Doubt

the homestead quatro

4.1 miles / 6.5983104 km
Created 09.15.11 by abergman21

An Actual Apple TV In 2012?

We've all known this was coming, but Bloomberg seems to have dug up the real evidence proving that Apple is investing in an actual television.

There's a $14 billion rationale for this prediction but first, let's explore the rumors. This summer Piper Jaffray (NYSE: PJC - News) analyst Gene Munster dug through component suppliers and found evidence that Apple is gearing up to produce a real TV set by late 2012. Venture capitalist Stewart Alsop, a former board member at TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO - News), has published rumors that Apple has a television coming. And Steve Jobs himself hinted last year that Apple might build a real television unit.


"The television industry ... pretty much undermines innovation in the sector," Jobs said at the All Things Digital Conference in July 2010. "The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign, and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it."

Jobs's quote is good advice for his successor as chief executive officer, Tim Cook, who needs a hit. The TV industry is changing more than at any time in the past 50 years, and billions of dollars are going into play for the winners. As Apple crests in the phone and tablet markets, its investors will want a new frontier.

TV is the future because it remains king of all media. While handsets get hyped, the typical U.S. consumer watches 5 hours and 9 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN - News), and even younger adults 18 to 24 years old—the supposed digital generation—view 3 hours and 30 minutes on televisions daily, vs. only 49 minutes on the Web and 20 minutes on mobile. We all love to lean back. With so much of the consumer's time, TV has become bloated with waste. The average U.S. home receives 130 cable channels but "tunes to"—or punches in the exact channel number on the remote—just 18 channels a year. Channel surfing has died. A whopping 86% of available channels are never used by an individual viewer.

Lots of Disenchanted TV Subscribers

Consumers pay a lot for all this video waste and they don't like it. The average cable bill is $75 per month, which means that each year 83 million households pay $74 billion to the top eight TV-subscription services. This is why so-called "cord cutting," by which consumers drop cable to watch videos on Roku, Hulu, or the Xbox 360 from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - News) is accelerating; Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA - News), the leading U.S. cable system, lost 238,000 subscribers in the second quarter. If Apple were to offer a better service, people might pay up for it.

A second lure for Apple is TV advertising. Unlike U.S. mobile-ad spending, which EMarketer says will barely break $1 billion in 2010 despite years of hype, the TV ad spend in the U.S. totaled $70 billion in 2010 and is forecast by Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR - News) to reach $84 billion by 2015. If Apple could gain just 10% of the $74 billion in current video subscription fees and $70 billion in television ad media, it would take in more than $14 billion in additional annual, recurring revenue.

Apple faces plenty of hurdles. For one thing, TV sets are an infrequent purchase. Apple likes to sell products with built-in obsolescence that you "need" to replace every 18 months—iPhone 5, anyone?—and a flashy TV set doesn't call for an aluminum upgrade next year. Apple also has struggled to get content providers to embrace its current Apple TV box. In August, Apple stopped renting TV shows for 99¢ on the gadget, claiming that consumers overwhelmingly prefer to buy TV shows. But it could be that Apple's media partners considered 99¢ far too cheap. With billions of dollars at stake, media producers and cable giants will fiercely defend their video-distribution modes.

Apple noted this risk in its 2010 annual report, in which it said it "relies on third party digital content, which may not be available to the Company on commercially reasonable terms or at all." Bear in mind that the record labels were losing to digital pirates when Apple's iTunes came along to save them; the video giants have no similar motive to play along now.

TV as Bold as the IPhone

That's not an insurmountable obstacle. Apple has some $76 billion in cash and a history of entering unexpected partnerships. AT&T (NYSE: T - News) and Verizon helping to sell iPhones? Who'd have thought? The biggest fight may be with new video competitors that are emerging everywhere. Netflix has embedded itself in scores of hardware devices, including TV sets and the Wii from Nintendo (Nasdaq: GOOG - News) also has a TV service and its acquisition of Motorola shows that it also wants to own related hardware devices. To win the living room, Apple will need an innovation comparable to that of its iPhone—something that changes TV sets in a fundamental way.

What about 3D? In 2010, Apple won a patent for a revolutionary new 3D screen system that would not require glasses and could be viewed by multiple people at the same time. The patent went so far as to slam current 3D systems, noting that most people dislike goggles and dismissing current non-glasses systems as "essentially unworkable for projecting a 3D image ... to an entire audience."

What solution did Apple propose? An "unobstructed 3D viewing device" that would give each viewer a different line of sight for both left and right eye, perfecting a stereoscopic image for a group of viewers watching one giant screen. The Apple patent even had a cool name for the result: a hologram. Could Apple put holograms in every home, break the stranglehold of cable companies, and unlock a $14 billion TV revenue stream? It's an audacious and perhaps crazy idea.

Tim Cook, I like the way you think.

___

Are We Surprised People Are Pissed at Netflix?

via AllThingsD

Turns out Netflix customers took the service's recent price hike harder than expected. As a result, the multiplatform video rental company has had to cut third -quarter U.S. subscriber projections by 4% from 25 million to 24 million. "The majority of the shrinkage, Netflix says, will come from its DVD-only customers," reports All Things D.

Still, "Netflix now sees 9.8 million streaming-only customers, down from 10 million previously, and 2.2 million DVD-only customers, down from 3 million expected previously," Barron's Tech Trader Daily reports. "Total streaming  said it expected a bump in third-quarter revenues as a result of the price hike (for DVD and streaming video joint subscribers).

Despite the new subscriber growth projections, "Netflix said that its financial outlook hasn't changed," ZDNet writes. "In other words, the financials add up for Netflix."

Netflix also originally said it expected its growth trajectory to resume by the end of the year, but the chances of that are now looking less likely. Regarding to change, GigaOm writes: "That appears to have had an effect on the number of people subscribing to the service."

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he saw all this coming. "We knew what we were getting into," he said, according to All Things D. "We tried to be as straightforward as we could, and that has worked out very well for us."

Said Netflix in a statement: "We know our decision to split our services has upset many of our subscribers, which we don't take lightly, but we believe this split will help us make our services better for subscribers and shareholders for years to come."

Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL Merge; The Blind Leading The Blind

I've said it once, I've said it a million times...there is more banner inventory than the market demands. Period. Now the Three Stooges are grumbling in a dark room somewhere trying to steal back ad dollars from networks because Google is kicking their ass and they can't figure out up from down. So they are pooling together all their remnant crap that they can't sell, but they figure whatever fill rate they can pool together collectively, at least they'll split the revenue as opposed to paying off the big display networks. Why does this seem like a skit in a bad movie where three high school jocks with zero sense of things team up to dump spaghetti down the pants of our heroic nerd who is going to bang the hot chick at the end? Here's the one interesting twist. Yahoo is a disaster organizationally. No CEO, no back up plan. Maybe a fire sale of assets coming. But does the public and more importantly, the media buying community care? Yahoo.com is still the homepage of champions, and dominates the world over. That's off topic, but I was thinking about it no less.