Hipstamatic Sucks
I posted a while back about how much I hated Instagram. Turns out I was misinformed. Instagram isn’t the target of my dislike: it’s Hipstamatic.
I spent.. no.. wasted $4 on Hipstamatic and two filter/camera sets today to test out the software. It’s really dumb. The filters are taken to the extreme… to the point where I’m convinced that people who use it don’t understand what art actually is. It reminds of me HDR photography and how some amateurs bump up the saturation in their photos to ridiculous amounts because it “looks cool.” No, it doesn’t look cool. It looks like you don’t know what you’re doing.
At least Instagram’s filters are much more subtle (see http://goo.gl/mSSJz). So yes, maybe I should issue a revised statement: Instagram isn’t the problem, it’s Hipstamatic.
Chief Operating Officer of Operations
Jim Rowan is taking on the expanded role of COO, Operations and will continue to be responsible for manufacturing, global supply chain and repair services.
So Rowan’s title is now the Chief Operating Officer of Operations. Yep, this company is doing great!
Apple and the future of tablets
If you agree that the main source of growth in consumer technology over the next few years will be in tablets, you should take a look at John Gruber’s article from yesterday.
A big question people have been asking is how to measure tablet market share, particularly because Android doesn’t disclose Android sales outright. They disclose shipments, but that’s only the number of tablets that have been sent to stores, not actually sold to customers. Apple’s shipment numbers can be substituted for sales simply because they’ve sold every single tablet they’ve shipped.
So using some wonky (but pretty clever) math, Robert Synnott estimated on Twitter that there are about 1.35 million tablets (135 million Android devices multiplied by 0.9% using Android’s 3.0 “tablet” operating system). Apple disclosed on Tuesday that they’ve sold 28.73 million iPads. Do the math, and that means Apple is a 95.51% market share. That’s a practical monopoly.
I’m not saying that there isn’t room for a competitor to jump in and take market share away from Apple, but who would it be? Google clearly isn’t successful so far, and based on their roadmap, it doesn’t look like they will be anytime soon. Microsoft is so far away from a real tablet strategy that you can pretty much count them out (at least in the short term). And then there’s… no one else.
Coupled with favorable supplier contracts due to their ridiculous cash horde, Apple seems poised to keep holding that tablet market share steady or even (this sounds crazy) grow market share over the next few years. That means that once again, I posit that the third largest corporation in the world (by market cap) is also still one of the fastest-growing corporations in the world. And trading at only 15.3 times earnings, it’s a value company too. Buy this now.
Nothing is more humbling about technology than watching someone who doesn’t understand computers try to use a computer. Doesn’t matter how smart you are or how great your engineering is: if a regular person can’t use your product then it’s an utter failure.
Apple’s earnings
Looking for a stock pick? Buy Apple. 125% net profit growth year over year and the second largest firm in the world is still a value company at a price to earnings under 20. Q3 top and bottom revenue figures higher than 2010’s holiday season (typically Apple’s most profitable quarter), so you can expect 2011 to be an absolute blowout (especially with a new iPhone coming out in late September/early October).
Not only that, but the consumer tech industry’s largest growth segment at this point are tablets, and Apple retains a practical monopoly over the market (and continues to stronghold that position with favorable agreements with suppliers). Ever wonder why Apple’s iPads have aluminum backs and their competitors’ tablets don’t? It’s because aluminum is expensive, and Apple’s supplier agreements keeps costs down and product quality high.
Quote me back on this post in six months and tell me I’m wrong.
Instasheil
I started a new project a few days ago which I’m calling Instasheil (creative, I know). It’s a new Tumblr blog featuring photos I’ve taken with the Instagram app on my new iPhone. Yes, I know I’ve spoken out about how much I hate Instagram and Hipstamatic before, but the fact is that Instagram makes sharing photos on Facebook and Tumblr so damn easy, it’s hard not to use it.
I used the built-in filters in Instagram the few first days I used the app, but I’m finding that taking a photo with Camera+ (a much more powerful photo app) and then posting it with Instagram works much better. Instagram would have butchered photos like this, but using Camera+ and Instagram together allows me to keep the integrity of the original shot, while still sharing it on Facebook and Tumblr.
Hopefully, the ease of taking and sharing photos means I’ll be taking a lot more of them, something I’ve been trying to do for years. Keep watching that blog for updates.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog wrote today that January 8th marked the tenth anniversary of iTunes. Wow, what a decade it’s been. From this video, you can see a (much larger) Steve Jobs talk about the application that lets you “rip” CDs (a concept that people over thirty apparently don’t understand) to your computer.
It’s funny to think that this was such an advanced piece of software back then. It’s also weird to think about a time without the iPod. Makes me feel very old.
“Girls Like You” by The Naked and Famous from Passive Me Aggressive You
Here’s typically what happens when I discover a song by a new band:
- Hear new song on website/radio.
- Enjoy new song.
- Tell all my friends about new song.
- Ignore the rest of the songs on the band’s album completely.
- Be completely surprised when the band releases a “new single” that’s as good, or better, than its first.
This happens all the time. Why should I be surprised that a band is capable of producing more than the one good song they’ve already released? That’s why in 2010, in addition to seeing more concerts, I resolve to listen to a band’s entire album once I hear them put out a great single.
I gave this a shot with The Naked and Famous, a band that I first heard on Sirius’s Alt Nation. In their first single, Young Blood, they sounded a lot like a cross between MGMT and Passion Pit, while still maintaining an original sound. I listened to their entire album Passive Me Aggressive You while at work the other day to see if there were any other decent tracks to be found.
To my surprise, the entire album is really impressive. Start to finish, The Naked and Famous has a seriously great album with thirteen catchy and fun songs. Here, I posted the last (and longest) track from the album, “Girls Like You”. Another great song is track one: “All of This”.
I’m going to try my best to keep listening to full albums by new artists and if I discover any new, “hidden” songs deep in an album that haven’t been released as singles yet, I’ll be sure to post them here.
“Folsom Prison Gangstaz (Easy E vs. Johnny Cash)” by DJ Topcat from Best of Bootie 2010
I love December. This month brings many great things: Christmas presents, New Year’s parties, and best of all, the annual Best of Bootie mix.
For the uninitiated, Best of Bootie (in this case, Bootie stands for “bootleg”) is a mix of the year’s greatest mashups, all smashed together into one eighty minute dance track. It was started in 2003 by A plus D, two DJs out of San Francisco, and has become one of the internet’s (and my) most anticipated annual events. Previous years have showcased some incredible mashups, including Party & Bullshit (in the USA) (Notorious B.I.G. vs. Miley Cyrus) in 2009, If I Were a Free Fallin’ Boy (Beyonce vs. Tom Petty) in 2008, and Going Back To Dani (Notorious B.I.G. vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers) in 2006.
Best of Bootie always seems to follow the same pattern every year: a group of very danceable tracks at the beginning of the mix, and a group of crazy, strange, and absolutely amazing tracks towards the end. This year is no exception. The standout track in my eyes comes courtesy of DJ Topcat from Seattle who mashed up Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues with Easy E’s Luv 4 Dem Gangsta’z. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does (fantastically), and it somehow makes Johnny Cash sound even more badass than before.
To download Best of Bootie 2010, as well as all the older Best of Bootie albums, visit BootieMashup.com.
About a month ago while on a vacation in San Francisco, my sister and I were driving in a car with our cousins when we heard Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” on the radio. My sister pointed out that the song sounded exactly like Perry’s other single “California Gurls” (why does she have to spell it like that?), and to prove the point, she sang “California Gurls’s” chorus over the chorus of “Teenage Dream”. Sure enough, it sounded exactly the same.
But how close were the two songs exactly? I decided to try to splice the songs together and see how it sounded.
The result is the snippet featured here. “California Gurls” plays in the clip’s left channel, while “Teenage Dream” plays in the right. I cut out the choruses of both songs, put them together into a new audio file, and adjusted the tempo so the songs played at the same rate.
While it’s not as perfect as I had hoped, it’s clear the songs sound very similar. The beginning and end of the choruses sound particularly alike, thus proving my sister’s point that the songs are indeed almost carbon copies of each other. And yet, people still bought both songs. Pop music is indeed amazing.
It’s worth pointing out that Pink’s new single, “Raise Your Glass”, follows this exact same musical pattern. Hey, no point in fixing what ain’t broke, right?
Update: Probably worth pointing out that both songs’ choruses start exactly 45 seconds into the song and last for almost exactly 15 and a half seconds. The tempo change I had to make was very, very minor.
