Unlike the minimal Firefox and Chrome rolling releases, Opera has a more traditional approach to software engineering. It’s been almost one year in development so you know Opera 12 will provide a slew of shiny new features. Let’s look at the best…
Camera Support
Forget keyboard, mouse and touch control — that’s old human interface technology. All the cool kids will be using webcam gesture recognition now Opera has become the first browser to support the W3C getUserMedia specification.
Several demonstrations are provided, including:
Facekat — move your head to avoid asteroidsExplode — break someone’s faceReal Life Color Picker — capture colors from your webcamPhoto Booth — what did you expect?
More are available from shinydemos.com/getusermedia/.
While the technology is experimental it has a promising future. Browser-based Kinect-like control and augmented reality has become possible.
Themes
Opera has provided alternative skins for many years but version 12 introduces lightweight themes.
In essence, they’re different background graphics and are similar to themes you find in Chrome and Firefox. A couple of dozen examples are available at addons.opera.com/themes/ but expect more to appear very quickly.
Better Security Badge
Several interface improvements have been made to the web address security badge. It’s a good move — personally, I think Google and Mozilla have gone a little too far in removing address bar clutter.
Improved HTML5 and CSS3 Support
Opera is often ahead in the HTML5 feature race but version 12 adds a number of overdue facilities such as drag and drop, CSS3 transitions and animations.
Other Features
Miscellaneous improvements include:
Over 60 languages with five new additions: Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew and Kazakh.Do Not Track support.Experimental hardware acceleration. To enable it, set opera:config#Enable%20Hardware%20Acceleration to 1 and restart the browser.Better plugin handling. Plugins now run in their own process to make the application more stable.A page zoom slider.A 64-bit edition of the application.
And let’s not forget Opera’s speed. Version 12 is faster than ever and, while it doesn’t enjoy the speed differential it had a few years ago, it’s more than a match for the competition.
I like Opera 12. It’s more of an acquired taste than some browsers, but the application has some revolutionary features and deserves a bigger market share. Give it a try if Chrome, IE, Firefox or Safari are failing to satisfy your browsing needs. Oh yes, if you’re creating websites or applications without testing Opera, you deserve to have your web development license revoked!
Download Opera 12 for Windows, Mac, Linux or FreeBSD from opera.com.
Unlike the minimal Firefox and Chrome rolling releases, Opera has a more traditional approach to software engineering. It’s been almost one year in development so you know Opera 12 will provide a slew of shiny new features. Let’s look at the best…
Camera Support
Forget keyboard, mouse and touch control — that’s old human interface technology. All the cool kids will be using webcam gesture recognition now Opera has become the first browser to support the W3C getUserMedia specification.
Several demonstrations are provided, including:
Facekat — move your head to avoid asteroidsExplode — break someone’s faceReal Life Color Picker — capture colors from your webcamPhoto Booth — what did you expect?
More are available from shinydemos.com/getusermedia/.
While the technology is experimental it has a promising future. Browser-based Kinect-like control and augmented reality has become possible.
Themes
Opera has provided alternative skins for many years but version 12 introduces lightweight themes.
In essence, they’re different background graphics and are similar to themes you find in Chrome and Firefox. A couple of dozen examples are available at addons.opera.com/themes/ but expect more to appear very quickly.
Better Security Badge
Several interface improvements have been made to the web address security badge. It’s a good move — personally, I think Google and Mozilla have gone a little too far in removing address bar clutter.
Improved HTML5 and CSS3 Support
Opera is often ahead in the HTML5 feature race but version 12 adds a number of overdue facilities such as drag and drop, CSS3 transitions and animations.
Other Features
Miscellaneous improvements include:
Over 60 languages with five new additions: Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew and Kazakh.Do Not Track support.Experimental hardware acceleration. To enable it, set opera:config#Enable%20Hardware%20Acceleration to 1 and restart the browser.Better plugin handling. Plugins now run in their own process to make the application more stable.A page zoom slider.A 64-bit edition of the application.
And let’s not forget Opera’s speed. Version 12 is faster than ever and, while it doesn’t enjoy the speed differential it had a few years ago, it’s more than a match for the competition.
I like Opera 12. It’s more of an acquired taste than some browsers, but the application has some revolutionary features and deserves a bigger market share. Give it a try if Chrome, IE, Firefox or Safari are failing to satisfy your browsing needs. Oh yes, if you’re creating websites or applications without testing Opera, you deserve to have your web development license revoked!
Download Opera 12 for Windows, Mac, Linux or FreeBSD from opera.com.
Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Amit Runchal, who blogs at Interactioned.
The speculation of what Apple is going to do with all their cash has long been a favorite topic in the tech and financial press. But the thinking along those lines is often akin to the cognitive dissonance one experiences when seeing a billionaire driving a Civic. What’s the point of having all that money if you’re not going to spend it?
That thinking is what we saw when Apple recently announced their cash plans. Two common reactions went something like this:
Saddened by Apple’s plan for a huge dividend. Apparently, they have nothing truly capital-intensive in the product pipeline.
— Max Levchin (@mlevchin) March 19, 2012
@mlevchin But they haven’t been investing it! They’ve been hoarding it. They clearly have no idea what to do with it.
— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) March 19, 2012
The first argument is easy enough to pick apart, as others have explained this past week. In short, even after issuing dividends and repurchasing shares, Apple’s cash reserves will likely grow this year. They added more than $35 billion in cash and equivalents last year alone. There’s nothing “capital-intensive” that they can’t do, short of opening an Apple Store on the moon. That Apple television set that’s rumored to be in the pipeline? That’s nothing. Foxconn’s factories, for example, have a gross book value of $14 billion as of the end of 2010. Apple makes that much in a few months, and only needs a fraction of that to actually get the production lines going on a television.
The idea floating around before Apple’s Monday announcement that they would be buying a company like Foxconn or building factories of their own seems to make sense, since Apple is one of the more vertically integrated consumer electronics companies in the world. And they are, after all, notorious for both control and quality. But they’ve managed to lead the industry on the latter without owning a significant portion of their supply chain. And as for the former: they have the factory owners right where they want them — by the short and curlies. Hence the razor-thin margins Apple deigns to give them. Here’s New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg in This American Life’s recent retraction episode:
Apple’s the gold standard. As a result, Apple has this enormous negotiating power, and they use it, I am told by our sources, very aggressively to come in and basically say, “Show us your entire cost structure, every single part of what you pay and what you… and piece of your, your, your internal economics, and we are going to give you a razor-thin profit margin that you’re allowed to keep.
In other words: Why buy the cow?
Apple also, more importantly, finances the factories by loaning them cash and buying significant amounts of components in advance. This “Bank of Apple” strategy further establishes control over the factories, locks out competition and seems to be why competitors can’t seem to match Apple’s cost structure for products like the iPad. And let’s not forget that if Apple did own the factories, they’d also have to deal with the additional scrutiny of being responsible for factory employees, which no Western company in their right mind wants to do right now.
This brings us those who think Apple has run out of ideas on what to do with their cash. The fevered result of this are the acquisition talks — hence the recently oft-mentioned and largely nonsensical suggestion that Apple should buy a company like Twitter. But Apple’s approach to acquisitions has always been extremely conservative, especially compared to their brethren. Since 2010 Apple’s bought a grand total of nine companies. In that same period Google has bought 52.
People like Henry Blodget may think that Apple’s been hoarding money Scrooge McDuck-style because Apple doesn’t know what to do with it. But if you take a look at Google’s list of acquisitions, you can make the argument that Google doesn’t know what it’s doing either.
Apple’s acquisitions — with admitted 20/20 hindsight — paint a clear picture of what each of those acquisitions were for. LaLa: iCloud. Anobit: Flash memory components. Siri: duh. In short: tactical acquisitions.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that you can’t say the same for Google. Perhaps the grand master Google plan hasn’t become apparent to me yet. But given the inability of Google to make real money off anything besides advertising and their continued struggles in social seem to show a company that’s trying to buy a strategy for the future instead of the tools to make their strategic vision happen.
That last point, I think, engenders a lot of the thought behind the conversations we see about Apple and their cash. Five years ago, a frequently discussed acquisition target was YouTube. Everybody wants to watch videos on their iPod! Apple makes iPods! Ergo YouTube. Today, it’s Twitter. Social is big, so Apple should buy Twitter. Everyone’s tweeting from their phones! Apple makes phones!
Ergo, foolishness.
Apple’s strategic vision for their future has always been clear: they want to sell highly profitable consumer electronic devices. Lots of them.
That’s it.
So how does buying Twitter — or any “social” company — help them sell more devices right now? The notion that Twitter as an acquisition target has to be “kept from the hands Google, Facebook and Microsoft” doesn’t scan. Never mind that Twitter has given no indication of being up for sale — even if they were, how does a Google acquisition of Twitter slow down iPhone sales? In this world, does Google block Twitter and third-party apps from Apple products and a significant number of Twitter users? Does that lead to massive amounts of users fleeing iPhones for Android devices?
The answer to all these questions is clear. Twitter’s success at this point is largely dependent on remaining as platform-agnostic as possible, acquired or not. A company still trying to find a serious revenue stream that is highly dependent on mobile can’t afford to cut themselves off from a huge portion of the mobile market. See also: any social network trying to monetize mobile, including Facebook. Apple’s position in mobile means they doesn’t need to spend a penny to give a strongly-worded “suggestion” on how high these companies should be jumping.
That’s why acquisition targets like Twitter don’t make sense for Apple right now. Again: why buy the cow? Apple doesn’t need Twitter or any company like it. Twitter needs Apple. Twitter needs the massive iOS user base and now the system-level integration. Apple is making bit factories like Twitter as dependent on Apple as actual factories like Foxconn are.
So what’s that cash for? Besides the absolute freedom and control that $100 billion gives Apple — a company that probably still remembers the time they had to approach Microsoft, hat in hand — it’s important to remember that Apple isn’t close to achieving the success they want. Tim Cook said it himself:
In our most recently recorded quarter we sold 37 million iPhones. That’s a very large number but it represented less than 9 percent of handsets sold during the quarter.
Apple still has a long way to go with all their products in markets that have been much less hospitable to the company. China, where iPhones are still not available on the biggest carriers, is a perfect example. When you consider the new territories Apple still wants to conquer — and especially in territories where Apple’s current carrier-subsidized selling approach for phones isn’t the norm — Apple’s cash stockpile doesn’t reflect a company that doesn’t know what to do with their money.
It reflects a company that packed an enormous steamer trunk for a long and treacherous journey.
The NTSB is calling for all states to put a complete ban on personal electronics use by drivers. A summary of the proposal’s worst elements and why we think it’s such a huge and potentially dangerous ban.
Startups love to point to big growth numbers, and the press loves to publish them. We are as guilty as anyone else in this regard: one million downloads, 10 million registered users, 200 million tweets per day. These growth metrics can often be signs of traction (which is why we report them), but just as often they are not. It is important to distinguish between real metrics and what Lean Startup guru Eric Ries calls vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are things like registered users, downloads, and raw pageviews. They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter: active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits. The latter are more actionable metrics. As First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman recently advised on Founder Office Hours, “The real data is retention and repeat usage.” Startups that focus on the real metrics can make their products better, attract more customers, and make them happier.
It is important for startups to properly instrument the data they track so that they can get a handle on the true health of their business. If they track only the vanity metrics, they can get a false sense of success. Just because a startup can produce a chart that is up and to the right does not mean it has a great business. A mobile apps could have millions of downloads but only a few hundred thousand active users, or a freemium website might see exploding traffic growth but barely any conversions to paying users.
Many startups, of course, track one set of numbers internally and selectively share another set of vanity numbers externally with the press. The worst is when startups try to pitch us with raw growth numbers (we are up 400%), but without any context (400% from what, 1,000 users or 100,000?). We always ask for more meaningful numbers, but those are not always forthcoming.
The vanity metrics aren’t completely useless, just don’t be fooled by them. There are ways to back into real numbers from the vanity metrics. VC Fred Wilson blogged today about his 30/10/10 rule: 30 percent of downloads or registered users are active once a month, 10 percent are active once a day, and 10 percent of the daily users will be the maximum number of concurrent users. These are the patterns he is seeing in his portfolio companies and the startups pitching him.
Startups would be better off, however, reporting real metrics from the start. Vanity metrics can catch up to them, especially if those numbers do not correspond to the real numbers. Facebook is a great example of a company that focuses on the right numbers. Even in its college-only days, it would always talk about daily active users (the users who come back every day) and how fast it took them to take over a particular campus. If more startups would measure and share the right metrics from the start, the rest of us would focus on them too.