Apple reinvents education?

January 25, 2012

The release of educational platform is a strong move by Apple. Not only it’s a market that hasn’t seen any significant innovations for years. Getting young people hooked on the  iOS platform early is a great way to ensure they’ll be willing to buy Apple stuff when they grow up. However, it might be a bit too soon for Apple to celebrate. I expect the same move by Amazon in a few months. Eventually they will ship a better tablet than their current Kindle Fire is, and with the clout they have among traditional publishers, they’ll be able to grab the lead in tablet-based educational market.

Amazon is becoming a super-monster company of the new age. Their cloud services were basically the first large-scale commercial cloud available, and it seemed to be a bit weird for them to move into it. These days, after their strong tablet debut, it won’t surprise me if Amazon releases a personal cloud platform (think gmail and Google Docs), a browser (take Chromium), a search engine (becoming a commodity too), ad platform (hello AdWord). This all can happen thanks to their deep penetration into consumer market and democratic (think cheap) pricing. Now this is a threat that Google might not survive.

Leave a Comment » | AppStore, iPad and other tablets, Marketing | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Kindle Fire is a firestarter

November 27, 2011

Amazon released their Kindle Fire only about a week ago, but the sales our MobileNoter in Amazon AppStore have exploded. They are still not as big as those of the Apple’s or Google’s appstores, but an increase by 5 times is a nice thing. Amazon AppStore is definitely getting some traction after all. That’s why we are going to release our HD version into Amazon – it should be approved any day now. Also, we are going to do an update to our Android versions of MobileNoter with some really nice features in December this year.

6 Comments | AppStore, iPad and other tablets, Metrics, OneNote on Android | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

New MobileNoter SE for Android tablets tutorial video released

November 9, 2011

The new MobileNoter SE for Android tablets is awesome. People are not just saying that, they are also putting their money where their mouths are. Here is the tutorial video:

2 Comments | iPad and other tablets, Marketing, OneNote on Android | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

MobileNoter SE for Android Tablets released

October 22, 2011

Another addition to our MobileNoter family – this time it is MobileNoter SE for Android tablets. This release is so fresh that it is not even covered on our site, so I give a link to the app in the Android market. BTW, great job of the developers for releasing the application on Saturday! Not so great job of the marketing…

Onenote is a great application to use on the tablets, except that Onenote doesn’t exist for iPads nor for various Android tablets. That’s why people use MobileNoter – it is essentially Onenote ported to the mobile platforms.

It is worth noting that our sales for the Android platform have recently grown to 40% of the gross sales of MobileNoter. I believe the sales for Android will match the iOS sales with this release pretty soon. Still, there are more releases and updates of MobileNoter planned for this year.

 

1 Comment | iPad and other tablets, OneNote on Android | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

New version of MobileNoter for iPad released

August 18, 2011

Here we go again. A long awaited update of MobileNoter for iPad. I would say that this is much better than Microsoft’s Onenote for iPad, but they don’t have any. iPad is so much better for Onenote, and still Microsoft hasn’t released anything…

Even though some users did experience problems, this update is much smoother than the one for iPhone, which we released 3 weeks ago. We are fixing problems, and working on the Android versions too.

A new tutorial video for MobileNoter for iPad:

1 Comment | AppStore, iPad and other tablets, OneNote on iPad | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

“by clicking agree you are also acknowledging that Apple may sew your mouth to the butthole of another iTunes user”

April 28, 2011

An entire episode of the most brutal humor dedicated to Apple. That’s not surprising considering its dominant position in one of the most competitive markets of all times – consumer electronics.

Brilliant, nasty, definitely not safe for work.

Leave a Comment » | iPad and other tablets | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

iPhone & iPad game development teardown: Alawar

March 22, 2011

Everybody heard about riches of iOS game developers, but what if you are not Rovio and not even the author of Cover Orange? Can a company be successful in the AppStore without a blasting hit? Let’s take a look at Alawar, one of the most successful gaming companies in Russia. While Alawar publish games for almost every platform, including consoles, I will analyze only its iOS business, which started roughly 2 years ago.

For this, I will use the publicly available data, make some assumptions and educated guesses.

Assumptions:

- the price of a game has been unchanged for its lifetime;

- the free versions of the games don’t bring in any revenue;

- the paid games only bring sales revenue (i.e. no ads or in-app purchases);

- the total sales of a game are two times of the game’s sales in USA. This is important, because it’s relatively easy to estimate USA sales, but not for the rest of the worlds. However, this 2x factor usually works very well.

With these in mind, I ended up with the following guesstimate for the iPhone sales:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and iPad sales:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As it turns out, Alawar does have a solid hit: The Treasures of Montezuma. However, many games don’t reach a 5-digit level of sales. So the question is the cost of making these games. In this particular case, Alawar produces these games on the cheap, because they port their existing Flash titles to iOS. The cost of porting a single game is $5-10K. Even if we assume the cost at $10K and count the cost for iPhone and iPad versions separately, this line of business is wildly profitable.

However, if a small studio produced games like these without any prior work, it would hardy have cost more than $20K per game. Even in this case it would be a profitable business. No wonder more and more startups are being founded and funded every day to develop games for iOS.

Disclaimer: I have no any relation to Alawar and haven’t received any inside information from anyone in the company. If you want to provide more accurate details, you are welcome to do so. I will update this post accordingly.

 

1 Comment | AppStore, iPad and other tablets, Startups | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

Lesson learned: iPad wins

February 14, 2011

It was a year ago when people started making funny jokes about the iPad. Then the device showed up in stores and turned out to be a good one. People loved our MobileNoter for iPad, and it helped our sales a lot. But more interesting is that Apple sold 14.8 million iPads in 2010.

That’s huge for a market created overnight, out of nowhere.

Even more interesting are analysts predictions for iPad sales in 2010. Remember, these are high paid analysts, whose insights are taken into account by top investment banks in the worlds (figures are in millions):

- David Bailey, Goldman Sachs           6.2

- Kathryn Huberty, Morgan Stanley     6.0

- Shaw Wu, Kauffman Bros.              5.0

- Mike Abramsky, RBC Capital Markets   5.0

- Ben Reitzes, Barclays Capital           2.9

- Chris Whitmore, Deutsche Bank       2.0

- Scott Craig, Merrill Lynch               1.2

- Doug Reid, Thomas Weisel             1.1

- Yair Reiner, Oppenheimer             1.1

Analysts data are taken from here. It goes to show how disruptive this Apple’s shiny tablet turned out to be. Apparently, more surprises to come. Apple is about to unveil iPad 2 while there are still no worthy competitors out there for the old iPad.

 

 

Leave a Comment » | iPad and other tablets, Marketing, OneNote on iPad | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

iPad’s impact on our sales

May 14, 2010

We released MobileNoter for iPad about a month and a half ago, just at the iPad grand opening. Looking back, we can review the impact it had on our sales.

The release resulted in a huge spike in downloads and a modest spike in sales. It turned out that iPhone version sales were up, while iPad version sales were not good immediately after the release. How that happened? Simply enough:

1. The iPad version of MobileNoter had some problems that we could not find without testing it on a physical device. Thus not a lot of people was buying it.

2. All the iPad buzz and discussion of how Microsoft OneNote was good for tablets in general and for iPad in particular led to more downloads of the iPhone version of MobileNoter and consequently to more sales.

Therefore we were able to ride Apple’s marketing hype of iPad and increase our sales.

Once we got the device in our hands, we released a significantly improved version for iPad, and people are downloading and purchasing iPad version of MobileNoter in droves. The total sales increased by roughly 50% and continue climbing.

It seems that EverNote’s growth of paying customers is more or less flat recently. If this continues, we expect to match them in the number of new paying customers added monthly by the end of this year!

3 Comments | iPad and other tablets, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

iPad’s main problem…

May 13, 2010

Our iPad arrived a couple of weeks ago. We use it to test iPad’s version of MobileNoter. While all previous comments and comparison to the rock still apply, there is a new problem with the iPad.

It is surprisingly heavy. So heavy that it is definitely not going to become a widespread household device that everybody wants. The iPad is nice, sleek, and all that. But when you take it into hand, you immediately realize that it is just another computer, not a miracle device.

Most modern netbooks and tablets (iPad included) are powerful enough for average Joe. They can render sites, play YouTube and even run sophisticated games. Thus device weight and battery life are becoming the most important features and main differentiator. The iPad doesn’t have any significant advantage in these categories against netbooks. So the battle with netbooks is not over.

2 Comments | iPad and other tablets, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin

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