I am writing this in Copenhagen where we arrived yesterday. This are the first impressions from the capital of Denmark:
- the weather is much colder than I was expecting for mid May, it feels like January in Lisbon
- the city is small with 1.2m people
- everyone is riding bikes, even more than in Amsterdam, so they say. There are all kinds of bikes including cargo bikes and others prepared to transport small kids. Every street seems to have a bike lane
- people are not afraid of the elements (how could they, really?) they are outside with small kids even if is raining and cold
- most buildings are old but well preserved
- food is much more expensive than in Portugal – maybe 30/50% more
- lots of people run (again even if is raining). I did 10km in the morning and there were lots of people running in the rain around the lakes
- the city feels safe even if I have not seen any police
- it is somewhat similar to Vienna but in a more bohemian style.
Even if we don’t know the exact numbers for all markets, we all know this, but it’s always worth repeating:
Consumers spend 25% of their media time with digital media, Mr. Sorrell said, but marketers spend only 19% of their marketing budgets there globally, by WPP’s reckoning. The disconnect is greater in mobile, with 8% of time spent vs. 0.5% of budgets, he said. TV is relatively balanced, at 41% of time spent and 42% of budgets. Mr. Sorrell said that print is the only medium with a substantial overallocation of media budgets compared with time spent — and hence most vulnerable to the shift.
Things are really slow here at my blog because they are going really fast at work and also because I’m a few weeks away from atempting the second marathon.
Besides some pretty hectic days at WayNext with really interesting projects and growing the team, I have been logging anywhere between 50/65km per week, so there goes all my free time. And the wind season is also starting meaning a couple of hours riding when it blows decently.
I have lots of drafted posts that I expect to finish as soon as things slow down a bit.
While searching for some stuff online about Batô, a nice old school rock disco on my home town I found an interesting post about the music they used to play there. So here goes a self-reference post with a bunch of link to some good old music, just in case you are in the mood for some good music.
Credits: songs stolen at Remember Batô – good old, good old.
A Flock of Seagulls – I Ran
The B52′s – Love Shack
Iggy Pop – Lust for Life
Led Zeppelin – Black Dog
Morrissey – Everyday Is Like Sunday
Peter Murphy – Cuts you up
Primal Scream – Rocks
Pulp – Common People
Simple Minds – Alive And Kicking
Soft Cell – Tainted Love
The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry
The Smiths – Bigmouth Strikes Again
U2 – Sunday Bloody Sunday
Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun
After this extensive list it is still missing Garbage and a couple of others.
With the advance of the digital age it seems that more and more written content is being created every second. As of this writing, Youtube is claiming 48 hours of video being upload per minute, but I guess billions of characters are being keyed in every minute in all kind of connected devices (emails, sms’s, blog posts, status updates, webpages you name it).
I find it very awkward that so many people often commit huge spelling errors (and I don’t mean typos) while writing in their mother tongue. I know this blog is not written in perfect English and perhaps a native speaker would feel the same way I feel when I read stuff written in Portuguese, mainly on social networks, that is so poorly written (in terms of grammar and even more shocking, in terms of spelling).
And this seems to be more of a problem with mine and also younger generations, because older people, even those that didn’t went to high school or university (and there are a lot of them) seem to be able to write better than many highly educated 20/30-something.
Considering writing is still one of the primary forms of communication, more effort into correct spelling and grammar should be put in, because it really leaves an impression about who you are. And for this I am thankful for my parents being so merciless when it came down to writing correctly.
For several reasons I have been loading up on mobile for the past 12 months. I had been involved in some mobile projects a couple of years ago and then for some reason it seemed to go into a an halt, because we didn’t do a lot of mobile (I guess there was little market demand) but that changed since the beginning of 2011 it seems like this is it.
If you are around of this internet thing for as long as me, you have surely heard, several times, year after year, that this would be the year of the mobile. Whatever that means, I still don’t know if this will be the year of the mobile, but, I know there is finally strong market demand for all things mobile. There are a lot of reasons contributing to this evolution: improved device capabilities, fairly priced data plans, price drop for smartphones (namely Android), user need to stay connected away from the desktop, just to name a few.
Of course the way each company can take advantage of mobile is very different and I have devoted quite a bite of my time to go through that and understand the mobile challenges companies are facing. Mobile isn’t the same for a retail company as it is for a newspaper or even a service like Gmail or Facebook, and there is a lot to learn on that field.
I will post below some charts stolen from the “comScore 2012 Mobile Future in Focus” whitepaper that I find interesting. Please beware that there are both charts for the US and EU5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK) for some of the topics.
Traffic share by device type (US)
Interesting to see that less than 10% of traffic is generated on mobile devices. It might be because heavy media consumption (read: video) is still the land of the desktop.
Top selling smartphones (EU5 vs US)
I would highlight the superior EU5 market maturity since they have gotten rid of BB and they adopted Android with Samsung. It is also interesting to notice that Samsung places a middle level equipment and also it’s Galaxy top end smartphone on the list.
Smartphone share evolution (EU vs US)
This one is expected and proves the strong advance of smartphones on the mobile arena.
Smartphone users by gender and age (EU vs US)
The adoption on the 25/44 would suggest either a business usage pattern or the higher equipment costs. Or maybe it’s both but with Android bringing cheaper smartphones the latter will soon be irrelevant.
This chart show the market share by OS and it is interesting to see that although the Android is obviously the stronger player, IOS was also able to grow it’s market share by eating RIM and Nokia’s lunch on the last months.
Smartphone market share by OS (EU)
Nokia is still accounting for nearly 30% of smartphones, meaning Android and IOS still have lots of room to grow in the EU.
Mobile Web vs Apps (EU5 vs US)
As the users become more dependent on their smartphones, both mobile web and app usage grows over time. It would also be safe to say that there are more mobile-ready/optimized websites and also more and more apps to support this trend.
Smartphone activities at retail stores (US)
And now for something very real: mobile phone usage and smartphone specific usage inside retail stores. Even if there are lots of retailers still not caring about mobile, users find multiple uses for their devices while at the store (I believe all smartphone specific usage like price/product comparison, coupons/deals and product research can only go stronger).
Tablet users by OS (US)
And now for the tablets, or should we say iPad’s? Well no. Just like with the smartphone market, IOS made the revolution but Android is getting stronger by the day, even if I suspect the Android tablet growth is somewhat slower in the EU.
Mobile traffic by OS (US)
It seems like IOS is the most data hungry device. From my personal experience I can see why, but on the other hand I can seem to get around with a fairly limited data plan, so I’m curious to know how this chart would translate into Gb.
Crosswalk - Photo by Alex Goldmark posted on Flickr
I must say I am surely not the most well behaved driver on the road, at least when I am in a hurry. Having a busy schedule and trying to squeeze as much as I possibly can out of each day makes me fill my agenda and many times I am on the rush going to meetings. Anyway, there are some lines I don’t cross (this is a good metaphor…) no matter how late I might be running and I do respect traffic lights and crosswalks.
Portuguese drivers are not known for being good drivers, at least when compared to most of the European drivers. If you go to Austria, for instance, no one will “floor it” to pass through an orange-redish traffic light, few people hit the horn and drivers do use their turning lights 90% of the times.
The idea of disrespecting crosswalks is something I really don’t understand and a point should be made about that. The more I am a pedestrian, and I do long walks on our neighborhood crossing the street a few times, I find myself trying to cross with drivers still flying through the cross walk about 50% of the times. I don’t believe those people have ever wondered what might happen to them if they run over someone at a crosswalk.
But when I am driving I also don’t understand why people don’t use turning lights. It is not that hard if you make it an habit, just like most people now just strap on their seat belts immediately after sitting inside a car. Everyday we see people changing lanes, sometimes at high speeds without notice and the turning lights could avoid some accidents I am sure, but it is something I don’t see most of the people using.
And, to finish this rant, I would just like to make another point about speed. Whenever there are those debates on TV or elsewhere about driving, I rarely see anyone admitting to speeding. Yet if I travel on the A1, Lisbon/Porto (something I do very often) for 300km and if I set up the cruise control for 120km/h, I am the slowest vehicle on the road, besides trucks and buses; so, just get real and tell the truth.
BTW just a final note about speed and have heard all kinds of arguments pro and against raising the speed limit on highways. I understand mainly the fear that an average driving speed increase that might lead to more and deadlier accidents; also some countries seem on the reverse route adopting lower speed limits to reduce fuel consumption and the carbon footprint. But, like I stated on the example before, I know it is hard to drive long distances under 120km/h, so I would be in favor or raising the speed limit to 150km/h except under rainy conditions, considering cars are generally safer nowadays (better handling with ESP, improved tyre grip and ABS brakes as a default for almost every car in the market) – my own personal perspective about that, when thinking about highway speed, is that the speed limit should be adjusted using categories, even if cars are generally safer, there are still differences and those could be factored in.
Since I took the iPad home for the first time and as we got more and more addicted to it we’ve been missing multi-user support. Currently you can not have separate accounts on the device so you can efficiently share it with other people. That would allow a more personal usage of the device for each user I understand Apple prefers each person in the household to buy his own iPad but from what I mostly see around that is not how it works.
This represents an annoyance because you can’t have separate logins, so every iPad user could log into his area and have all his apps and settings ready to use. I find myself logging in and out of several websites to be able to get to my stuff when I was not the last one to use the device.
I have thought about this inconvenience a couple of months ago and I wondered that even if it is not as efficient it could be done on an App basis, meaning that each App would implement it’s unique user authentication allowing for multiple accounts (not necessarily simultaneously logged in). But I expected that since this was something missing from the OS itself and knowing the way Apple fights for the ecosystem control I would not expect them to approve Apps with this feature.
So it came as a surprise when they did approve Flipboard’s latest version which includes multi-user support and that is a good thing. I’m not sure whether they would have the same approach towards a low profile App, but they did it for Flipboard and that can lead us to wonder if they will release native multi-user support for iOS itself (which I think is not relevant for the iPhone being a de facto personal device, but the iPad being in the living room is a different story).
Yes, I know it sounds awkward coming from me, because I believe in entrepreneurship, but this post is so brilliant pointing out the many of the risks of becoming an entrepreneur and launching a company. To fully understand how huge the issues are you must really the whole post.
This is about the Hungary status quo, but if you do a find & replace and put Portugal in there, it is very close match.
I have been a Nokia guy since mobile phones were a mature product (I still have the 7110 matrix style phone!). As far as I can remember I have owned about 4 or 5 Nokia models and I enjoyed using them until the last one I bought which was the E71.
I recall I went out to buy the E71 after the aquapack I was using while kitesurfing failed and the phone drowned. At the time I still thought the iPhone was too expensive and besides I felt like I needed the full qwerty keyboard to really be productive on the road (mainly doing emails away from my laptop). I even considered Blackberry but that thing about being tied to their servers (for increased privacy, so they say) when accessing data didn’t made much sense so I went with the E71.
Since the first power up of the phone I disliked the ugly graphics. Could Nokia really have paid someone to redesign the application icons again in 2010 instead of using the ones from 2007 E51? They could, but they didn’t do it so the phone’s desktop really looked crappy for a 2010 model. Also email support was far from being flexible but I was mostly using mobile web Gmail so it was working for me. The web browser was also very limited and inefficient (ahah) so using Twitter or Facebook was a really bad user experience!
So I just got in the mindset of buying the new iPhone and when the iPhone 4S hit the stores (I was hoping for the iPhone 5) I bought it together with a decent data plan. After about 1 month of usage I am almost as productive as I was with the E71 physical keyboard when writing stuff and I can now take the most of my downtime (you know, waiting for a meeting, being in line at the supermarket and other daily stuff).
One of the things I am most interested is email and I am still trying to make my mind between the native Mail.app or Gmail App. As for the rest my beloved Flipboard is something I also use regularly but I think it is no where near the same killer App it is on the iPad. I’m also enjoying Intragr.am filters for the quick and dirty photo shooting. Of course I am also using Runkeeper to track my runs and it does a much better job than Nokia’s Sports Tracker I can say! It is also a good thing I can load the iPhone with Youtube videos and listen to them while running. About Siri I still couldn’t find much effective use for it but I didn’t had the time to test it in full – it would be interesting to be able to dictate text and email messages but so far I could only ask some dumb questions about the weather and use it to set the alarm clock. I also must say the phone’s battery is far from perfect because it’s hard to make it last for even 2 full days, if I use it heavily it will last no longer than 24 hours, but it seems that other top smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy II have this same issue, unless you turn off 3G which is beyond the point for any of this devices.
