Saturday, September 28, 2013

7 Stats Proving Google's Global Internet Domination

As Google celebrates its 15th birthday, we think its as good a time as any to look at the scope of the search giant.

More than 1.1 billion people use Google search each month, making 114 billion searches. Google's Android operating system is found on 79% of smartphones. Google Maps is the most used smartphone app, employed by 54% of smartphone users.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Monday, September 23, 2013

BlackBerry Agrees to Be Acquired for $4.7 Billion

Fairfax Financial Holdings has agreed to acquire BlackBerry in a deal worth $4.7 billion, both companies announced Monday.

The Toronto-based financial holdings conglomerate has agreed to pay $9 per share for the beleaguered mobile company — a premium of about 9%. Shares of BlackBerry were trading at $8.23 per share before a freeze was initiated.

It's not a done deal yet: According to the terms of the agreement, Fairfax can walk away at any time. Fairfax already owns approximately 10% of BlackBerry common shares.

News of the takeover comes two days after BlackBerry announced it was cutting 4,500 jobs — about 35% of its workforce — and taking a loss of nearly $1 billion in its second quarter.

How the mighty have fallen. At its peak in mid-2007, BlackBerry was worth more than $100 billion. Should the transaction go through, BlackBerry will go private for 2/3rds the price of Nokia, which Microsoft acquired a year ago for $7.2 billion.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Watch A Boring Sedan Rip A $400K Lamborghini Aventador In Half

The $400,000+ Lamborghini Aventador destroyed dramatically at the hands of a midsize sedan in Brooklyn this weekend conveniently did so in front of a couple of cameras. While this is terrible carnage, it does show off how modern safety equipment is supposed to work.P

As you can see in the video, the sedan (apparently a Mazda) is attempting to turn into a street or driveway when it clipped the Aventador. Witnesses have described the Lamborghini as "approaching at a high rate of speed," which is hard to determine in the video but plausible.

What's easy to determine is the person in the sedan didn't exercise great judgment or vision in deciding to turn in front of the Lamborghini.

The safety cell of the Aventador, for its part, did what it was supposed to do and reduced the energy of the accident by separating itself from the rest of the car. That's probably less comforting when you see the bill for reconnecting it.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Saturday, September 21, 2013

GoDaddy Purchased the Domain Name Market Today

Today is an interesting and perhaps historic day in the domain industry. GoDaddy has acquired Afternic and SmartNamefrom Name Media. Name Media is probably best known for the BuyDomains brand. They own one of the largest portfolios of domain names in the world at nearly 1 million domains.

GoDaddy is the largest player on the consumer side of the domain market by a wide margin. However, they aren't the biggest player and/or have serious competition in a lot of the secondary and domainer markets.

Domainer / Secondary Markets

Market	Large Players
Domain Registration	GoDaddy
Selling Domains (Secondary/After Market)	Sedo, Afternic, BuyDomains, GoDaddy, DomainNameSales
Expired Domains	NameJet, SnapNames, Pool, GoDaddy
Domain Parking/Monetization	InternetTraffic, Google, Yahoo, Sedo, (many more)
Domain name Conglomerates	Demand Media, Marchex, GoDaddy, Name Media, Oversee

Why Most Of These Markets Don't Matter Anymore

The expired domain names market is drying up as companies switch to pre-release agreements. With pre-release, the registrar where the domain is kept automatically sells off the domain and there is no competition. As GoDaddy grows bigger, they will capture more of the this market automatically in the long run.

Domain Parking and monetization has seen a pretty steady decline since about 2007-2008. Consolidation is happening, the market is shrinking. The vested interests are large portfolio holders, which GoDaddy doesn't have like all of the other conglomerates.

The Conglomerates with the exception of GoDaddy all have their own domain name portfolios. They are focused around monetizing their assets rather than customers. Almost all the conglomerates have failed to see major growth (Demand Media just turned its first profit in 2012).

What Does Matter?

With GoDaddy's acquisitions from Name Media today they have taken a serious foothold in the secondary market. Afternic is one of the largest markets and GoDaddy is probably on equal ground in terms of selling domain names from Premium Listings (pre-acquisition), although they don't publish any numbers that I could find. If we were to assume Sedo, Afternic and GoDaddy were similar in size, GoDaddy just became the dominant player by 2:1.

Why does it matter?

GoDaddy's strategy has long been economies of scale and cross-promotion/cross-selling products/services. They dominate the consumer side of the market and have the audience to sell products to. Now they own the market for secondary sales as well. They already charge a minimum 32% commission to sell a domain name with them. My intuition tells me they've struggled with getting the best inventory and streamlining the process to their liking. This isn't the first time we've seen them partner up to sell secondary market domain names, they tried it once before with Domain Distribution Network but there hasn't been much talk about the results. There was even a short termination between the companies over the deal. This deal expired on June 7, 2013 according to DNN. I could find no evidence of it being renewed.

Meanwhile, Afternic has solved this problem. AfternicDLS has a deals with many of the biggest registrars: Network Solutions, Register.com, Enom, Moniker, Name.com, and more. This solves the listing and selling problem. Their current Premium Listings only work for domain names at GoDaddy. A lot of domainers don't use GoDaddy and don't want to put their domain names there. Acquiring Afternic solves the technical and business problems that may have blocked GoDaddy in previous attempts to gain more of the secondary market.

What About SmartName?

I am not as sure about the SmartName play for GoDaddy. They could be trying to make a more serious run into the domain monetization space with a parking platform. They could be looking to upgrade their auction platform. Both of these could improve their bottom line, and it makes them more attractive as a larger one-stop shop for domain services.

Conclusion

GoDaddy is now the biggest player in the domain name sales channels both for new registrations and selling in the secondary market. With the upcoming release of new gTLDs, they couldn't be better positioned to sell more domain names and make more money. It doesn't hurt that they offer fairly comprehensive offerings for business owners such as web hosting, email, marketing and more. Economies of scale are real and GoDaddy is taking advantage of them more than anyone else in the business.

Consumers may actually be the big winner here. If this gets executed well, the customers who use GoDaddy will get access to a larger inventory of domain names listed on the secondary market and purchasing them may become as easy as registering a new domain name.

Update

(9/20/2013) I made a mistake with saying the auction platform was Smart Names, it's actually Afternic. Also, someone linked me Godaddy's auction stats. They don't give dollar values, only sales volume. So it's still apples to oranges to pears with Sedo/Afternic/GoDaddy.

I have also received a lot of criticism because of the company in question comes off in a positive light. My startup tracksGoDaddy's reviews and it's overwhelmingly negative. I understand a lot of people don't like them for a multitude of reasons. That being said, the point of this article was to acknowledge a very prudent business move by them. I went into this open minded and came out surprised. I think this is a win for consumers in the short to medium term because it's reducing the friction and pain involved with buying domains in the secondary market. It makes it far more accessible and easy than it ever was before with a brand consumers recognize. Consolidation of the secondary domain market also puts a downward pressure on domain prices if it stays integrated as an option versus buying new registrations. The consumer who is thinking about spending $10 is far less likely to spend $100,000 instead. But $100, $500, $1,000 may be more reasonable and likely to induce a sale on the secondary market.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Apple’s iPhone 5 touchscreen is 2.5 times faster than Android devices

Apple’s iPhone 5 is 2.5 times faster at responding to touches than Google Android devices, according to a benchmark test by game and app streaming firm Agawi.

The results confirm what users believe about the devices, and they highlight a feature that is usually left out of technical comparisons.

In its first TouchMarks benchmark test, the iPhone 5 responded to touches at an average time of 55 milliseconds, compared to 85 milliseconds for the iPhone 4. The closest Android device was the Samsung Galaxy S4 at 114 milliseconds.

“Apple trounced the competition,” said Peter Relan, chairman of Agawi. “There is this whole other dimension of responsiveness that Agawi cares about.”

Agawi studied the iPhone 5 and compared it to Android touchscreen smartphones such as the Google MotoX, the HTC One, and the Samsung Galaxy S4. It also compared results for the Nokia Lumia 928 on Windows Phone, which came in at 117 milliseconds. The company started doing the tests as part of its work in delivering Flash-based Facebook games and other apps as interactive streams to iOS devices.

The TouchMarks benchmark measures the touchscreen latency, which is as important to users as display quality. Most competitive discussions focus on pixels per inch and quality of image. The TouchMarks benchmark measured the minimum app response time [MART] scores. The benchmark tests the lightest possible apps, measuring how immediately they respond on a given device.

“Even a two-year old iPhone 4 beat out the other Android devices,” Relan said. “You expect this from Apple’s design team, while others may view their responsiveness as good enough. Now we know why the Android touch keyboard is not as snappy.”

Agawi is making the benchmark and methodology available on its web site. Agawi’s AppGlimpse division plans to measure other phones in the future, including the upcoming iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. It will also measure response times for games, tablets, and apps streamed from the cloud.

“App responsiveness is judged by how quickly the app can respond to your inputs,” said Rohan Relan, cofounder and CEO of Agawi. “Smartphones with touchscreens that have lower MART scores feel snappier. This is probably why, to many users, the iPhone keyboard feels more responsive than an Android phone keyboard.”

Agawi specializes in tech that runs rich, interactive apps in the cloud and streams them to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8 devices. The company’s team of engineers test responsiveness so they can measure just how acceptable the cloud-based content is to users. The team built a device dubbed Touchscope that can measure response times to a level of accuracy that is plus or minus 4 milliseconds. It then adds the cloud processing response time to calculate the actual delays experienced by users.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Another iOS 7 Bug Lets Anyone Make Calls From Locked iPhones--And This One Has No Quick Fix

Apple has yet to fix one nasty bug in the lockscreen of iOS 7, and the next one has already appeared.

On Friday, Karam Daoud, a 27-year old Palestinian living in the West Bank city of Ramallah, sent me the video above, showing how he’s able to make a call to any number from a locked iPhone running iOS 7 by exploiting a vulnerability in its emergency calling function. The trick includes international calls and calls to premium numbers, is simple enough that any phone thief could easily take advantage of it, and unlike the first bug revealed in the iOS 7 lockscreen Thursday, there doesn’t seem to be any immediate fix for users.

Anyone who gets physical access to a locked iPhone running iOS 7 can simply tap “Emergency” on the lock screen, which brings up an emergency calling screen. Then he or she can dial any number and rapidly tap the call button until the phone reverts to an empty screen with an Apple logo at the center and make the call to that number. says Daoud. “Once the black screen appeared, it was pretty clear that this is a bug,” says Daoud. “You can dial a number anywhere, any time.”

I tested this myself on two iPhone 5′s running on different carriers, and it worked in both cases, although it took more than a minute of tapping the second time. Daoud has tested the trick on earlier iPhones running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, and says it works on them just as well.

Daoud, who runs a marketing and business development firm but has worked in the past as a bug tester for a mobile network company, says he’s already contacted Apple’s security team and described the flaw. After requesting more information and a video, an Apple contact wrote to him again to thank him for the information, telling him it would be fixed in an upcoming software update. I’ve also called Apple asking for more information and I’ll update this post if I hear back from the company.

Daoud’s bug is the second major flaw in the iOS 7 lockscreen to be revealed in just two days. The first, shared with me by a soldier living in Spain’s Canary Islands named Jose Rodriguez, allows anyone to gain access to a locked phone’s photos through its control center, including the ability to access the user’s email, Twitter, Facebook page and Flickr account through the photo app’s “share” functions.

Though the latest bug may create less potential for privacy violation, it may also be much harder for users to fix for themselves before Apple issues a software update. Users can block the photo-accessing bug by simply disabling access to iOS’s control center from the lockscreen. As far as either I or Daoud could tell, there’s no easy way to disable emergency calling on the iPhone, an option that I’d discourage for safety reasons even if it were possible.

Daoud says he appreciates Apple’s response to his emails, but was slightly annoyed that the company ignored his request for a financial reward for exposing the lockscreen flaw and helping to get it fixed. Facebook and Google, by contrast, offer thousands of dollars for information about bugs in their software. (Although it’s worth noting that Google doesn’t pay bounties for Android flaws or for bugs related to its Motorola devices.) “I don’t need the money…I would have been fine with them saying ‘We’re not Facebook, we don’t pay rewards,’ or whatever,” says Daoud. “But instead unfortunately they just ignored that part of my email.”

It’s not the first time iOS’s emergency calling screen has caused problems. Another lockscreen bypass trick used a flaw in the same feature in iOS 6.1 to gain full access to the phone’s contacts and calling features.

And why does it seem that Apple has had such continuing trouble in locking down its lockscreen? Daoud says he’s a loyal Apple fan, but argues the company has focused too many of its resources on adding new features to handsets, and not enough ensuring that their basic functions work. “I think this is a part of iOS that they’re not paying much attention to,” Daoud says. “They’re more interested in copying Samsung on new things than fixing their bugs.”

www.mohanvamsi.com

Lock Your New iPhone with Nipples (Apparently!)

Apple's new scanning security tech is pretty clever. It's not only smart enough to identify different fingers, but supposedly also clever to i.d. different nipples. Welcome to the future!

According to Japanese site Rocket News, the new iPhones can recognize your nipples (um, okay!), keeping it locked for different nipples.

In the above video, you can see an iPhone owner register his nipple and lock his new iPhone. Then, a different man unsuccessfully tries to unlock the phone with his nipple. Guess this proves our nipples are all different. That's good to know!

It's not only nipples that apparently can be used, but also toes. So, if you think using your finger to lock your new iPhone is tres passe or if you are simply worried, bust out a nipple or a toe to secure your iPhone. One day, maybe you can bust out both.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Apple’s iOS 7 includes a surprise: a ticket to the next generation of the internet

For five years, researchers have toiled over an obscure bit of fundamental internet infrastructure that promises to make the connections to our mobile devices faster and more reliable than ever, and if you’ve already downloaded Apple’s iOS 7 to your iPhone or iPad, you could be using it already.

It’s called multi-path TCP, and here’s why it matters and how it works: At present, if your phone or tablet is connected to Wi-Fi and a cellular network at the same time, it can only use one or the other connection to transmit data. But what if your Wi-Fi connection or your 3G connection drops? Whatever data was being transmitted—data for an app, a webpage, an iMessage—will fail to arrive, and you have to try again, usually after getting a frustrating error message or a blank page. Just as importantly, if one of your connections to the internet slows down, or speeds up, your phone has no ability to use its other connections to its advantage, leading to a poorer and slower experience overall.

Activate Siri to feel the power of the future

Multi-path TCP allows your phone to send data by whatever way it’s connected to the internet, whether that’s Wi-Fi, 3G or ethernet (say, if it were running on a laptop connected to the internet via a cable). And if you want to activate it, says one of the researchers who built multi-path TCP, you have only to use Apple’s voice command software, Siri.

This is the first time that this new means of connecting to the internet has appeared in a commercial product. That it showed up in Apple’s software and not Google’s shows that Apple’s technical chops are substantial, even when the company isn’t highlighting what it’s up to.

What this means for the internet as a whole

The ability to connect and maintain a continuous connection to the internet over multiple wired and wireless connections might sound like a nice-to-have feature rather than one that’s all that important, but there’s a reason researchers worked on this problem for five years before coming up with a standard that could be widely implemented: Multi-path TCP is the future. It’s arguably the first and most important change to the low-level architecture of the internet to reflect the fact that our connections to it are more mobile and wireless than ever.

In a September 2013 presentation (pdf) to the Australian Network Operations Group, computer scientist Mark Smith suggested that Multi-path TCP was the beginning of a larger change in how the internet is built, in which individual devices decide how they will communicate with one another, rather than simply relying on the protocols that have already been built into the computers that pass along all our traffic to and from the internet. Such a “dumb” network connected to “smart” hosts—the smart hosts being our phones, tablets and PCs—would allow for rapid experimentation and evolution of the fundamental language of the data devices are passing back and forth.

This will be especially important as the internet—and our airwaves—become ever more congested. Already, the protocol that handles most requests for web pages and data for apps, plain old TCP, is being crowded out on some networks by another, less well-behaved protocol designed to stream video and audio. In some ways, multi-path TCP is an effort to address this competition: If your phone sees that your Wi-Fi network is begin strained by that episode of Breaking Bad you’re streaming or pirating, it can switch to your 3G connection to maintain a reliable connection.

So far, the only way that Apple’s devices appear to be using this protocol is to communicate with Siri, which makes sense: Understanding speech is a difficult enough problem that Apple, like Google, probably sends recordings of our voice into the cloud, where powerful servers can parse our speech, rather than processing it on our relatively wimpy mobile devices. For an application like this, speed is of the essence, and having as many paths to get data to and from Apple’s servers is critical.

www.mohanvamsi.com

BlackBerry announces a $1 billion loss and a doomed plan to dig itself out

BlackBerry isn’t supposed to announce its quarterly results until next week, but already the company has admitted that they will include a $1 billion loss and will result in layoffs of 40% of the company’s workers. As just about everyone has predicted, the company will soon be forced to do something drastic, which might including selling itself.

The full release on BlackBerry’s disastrous results includes a plan for recovery: to double down on the company’s enterprise products and customers. But that almost certainly won’t work. (More on that below.)

Company to refocus on enterprise and prosumer market, offering end-to-end solutions, including hardware, software and services.

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Future smartphone portfolio will transition from 6 devices to 4; focusing on enterprise and prosumer-centric devices, including 2 high-end devices and 2 entry-level devices

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Why it’s too late for BlackBerry to return to its enterprise roots

Enterprise has always been BlackBerry’s strength, but there are some major drawbacks to falling back on business and government customers. BlackBerry’s phones lagged in features and the company’s dwindling market share failed to attract the app developers who are the core strength of both the iPhone and Android phones. Meanwhile, both Apple and makers of Android handsets like Samsung have been busy capturing the enterprise market by making their phones evermore business-friendly.

Samsung’s SAFE (Samsung for Enterprise) has been available on new Galaxy smartphones since June of 2012, and the company recently followed up with a very BlackBerry-like security technology called Knox—as in the fort where the US keeps a large supply of gold. Apple has added all sorts of enterprise-friendly features to its iOS 7, making the two platforms more or less competitive with each other, not to mention with BlackBerry, for even the most demanding enterprises.

These programs, and the allure for employees already accustomed to using Android and iPhones as personal devices, have worked against BlackBerry. In October 2012, the US Department of Defense dropped BlackBerry’s exclusive contract for smartphone services, as did US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, whichmoved to iPhones. There are rumors that Samsung is about to score huge contracts with the FBI and Navy. Apple has been winning big contracts all over the world.

So while while BlackBerry was busy trying to compete with Apple, Google and Microsoft for everyday consumers, it missed opportunities to expand on its base of enterprise customers. Investors had floated the plan to double down on the enterprise market a while ago but failed to raise the billions needed to execute it. By now, it’s probably too late. Get ready for the dismantling of BlackBerry.

www.mohanvamsi.com

The Complete Evolution of Apple's iOS in One GIF

iOS 7 is the most colorful version of the operating system we've seen yet, ditching the skeuomorphism of years past and embracing a translucent, bubbly facade.

www.mohanvamsi.com

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

How to stop iOS 7 from destroying your iPhone's battery life

iOS 7 is all kinds of sexy, but with a slew of fancy new features comes more strain on the ever-important statistic of battery life. iOS 7 is compatible with iPhone 4 or later (though not all features are supported on older devices), so if you're upgrading your current device to the new operating system, there's a good chance you could see a noticeable decrease in battery life.

If you're looking to avoid any pitfalls in the battery department, here are a few settings you can tweak to keep iOS 7 from sucking your iPhone's life like an evil, software vampire.

Disable background refresh

iOS 7 lets certain apps refresh even when you're not using them, which is both super convenient and a big problem for users who want the most out of their batteries. Disabling Background Refresh entirely would be your best bet, but even disabling the feature on just a few apps should help your device remain lively for a bit longer.

Alter your location services

It seems like just about every app wants to track your location these days. For some apps, like Maps, this makes a lot of sense, but if you've authorized other apps (Twitter, Facebook) to track your location without actually using the in-app features that go along with it, you should turn it off. In addition to apps, iOS 7 has a whole host of system-level options for location tracking, including local advertising and even the compass. If you don't use the apps to begin with, turning off the GPS tracking won't do much, but if you can disable tracking for a few of your most-used apps, you could see a decent boost in battery life.

Not using AirDrop? Kill it

iOS 7 introduces AirDrop to the iPhone for the first time, but even if you find yourself using the handy Dropbox-style feature from time to time, you should be turning it off when you don't need it. This is made easy by the new Control Center in iOS 7, which can be brought up by swiping upwards on the home screen. From here, it's just two taps to either enable or disable AirDrop, and while you're here, you can also disable Bluetooth and/or WiFi to help save additional battery life when you're not using them.Note: AirDrop is not available on the iPhone 4 or 4S.

3D goes bye-bye

OK, this one is going to hurt: You know that fancy 3D parallax wallpaper effect that iOS 7 introduces? Unfortunately for users who want the most out of their battery, it's a luxury that does nothing but burn power to make your home screen look cool. You can disable this feature by toggling on the "Reduce Motion" option in the Accessibility menu.

The same goes for the new dynamic wallpapers. Yes, a moving background image is a pleasant bit of eye candy, but it serves no functional purpose other than shortening your time between charges. Kick these features to the curb and your battery will thank you.