Apple - Magic Number $340 for Most Valuable Company

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is poised to become the most valuable company in the world. The magic number is Apple stock price at $340, with Apple Market Cap of over $310 Billion.

It's a matter of when... i.e. in 2011.

Bravo Apple & Steve Jobs!!

How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?

What is Apple's Innovation Strategy and Innovation Process? Download these Apple Innovation insights, case study and report, and innovate like Apple... and think like Steve Jobs, the top innovator and CEO of Apple.

"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote
that I love. 'I skate to where the puck
is going to be, not where it has been.'
And we've always tried to do that at
Apple. Since the very very beginning.
And we always will." —Steve Jobs, Apple CEO

Apple innovates through:
• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation Process
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs Visionary Leadership

This Apple Innovation Strategy ebook provides insights, strategy, best practices, process, facts and much more...

Apple has built an Innovation Factory – one that harnesses unbridled creativity from its people, stimulating bold & enterprising new ideas, and launching successful, profitable new innovations... time and again! Apple leverages its diverse ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers, partners & global networks, proven innovation process, and a winning culture that doesn't accept second place - to seize the new opportunities in the marketplace and grow its business... exponentially…

How did Apple do it?
• Increase revenue more than 400% in 8 years…
• Increase net profit more than 650% in 8 years…
• Increase market cap more than twenty times to over $250 billion and counting…


How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?

Download Apple's Innovation Strategy, and learn how Apple became the #1 innovator through:


• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs, CEO & Co-Founder
Learn more

Google Instant : Awesome Engineering To Result In Enhanced Revenue

A few hours back today, Google launched an ambitious effort to make search faster for all . In the process they have laid the foundation for a new version of SEO to take roots. Lets look at the details here.

To quote Google:

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type."

Marketers and SEO professionals cant ignore this ..
"Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need."

This essentially means that different people would potentially get to see different results for the same query. Up until now, search queries used to return identical results for users ( i think in the same continent/region). Now with this, Google is introducing a ground shift : adding a new dimension to search and bringing out in the open a loop in play. Today’s new dimension is the user.Tomorrow,it can potentially add language,location, nature of access device to the mix and this spins a new territory. The basis of operations of search engines and by extension the discipline of search engine optimization is fundamentally altered. The new loop of response and feedback is going to make this field more and more sophisticated. . Like an aircraft on flight path monitoring direction, altitude, wind speed, payload etc to help pilot take the right instanteous decision,Google Instant search results gets predicated on a variety of factors. Marketers, SEO professionals have quite a task at hand moving forward.


In a webcast today for select attendees, Google shared additional details - rather it put on display it’s massive engineering prowess. Google estimates that a search typically takes 9 seconds to enter, 0.8 seconds for data transfers between its data centers, and 0.3 seconds to process. The user then spends 15 seconds choosing a link. For consumers, Instant can save the average user 2-5 seconds per search via dynamic search results, enhanced predictive technology, and scroll-to-search functionality that changes results pages as users choose search suggestions. You can read more about Google Instant here (including crazy statistics, like "If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That's 11 hours saved every second."). Some users may find the new process a little bewildering but may soon get acclimatized.

What does Google get out of this :more query volume, increased market share and loyalty - but more importantly overtime traffic may shift more to head ( recall the last time you looked at the 47th result). Optimizing search results around query volume makes access to such results more precious and by extension turbocharges average price per keyword click thus boosting Google’s monetization initiatives much better.

So massive engineering prowess pushing better monetization efforts sums up the development - consumers have nothing to complain but rejoice at the next massive leap that Google has taken.

The Cascading Power Of Institutional Innovation

For a long time, it is an almost universally held view that a very wide majority of established big companies are slow innovators – while these were very disciplined in their execution , their ability to keep making game changing innovations were suspect. The innovation ethos inside large enterprises remains a goal worthy of pursuit. Sometime last year,John Seely Brown (JSB), John Hagel and Lang Davison published the results of a major research project, they have been conducting at Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. The Big Shift, a very insightful report that calls for immediate concerted action, highlights the deep rooted transformation that is pervading the global business. As one can easily spot out, last few decades of global business have been significantly influenced by advances in digital technologies amidst other major influencing factors.

The Big Shift brought out the fact the return on assets (ROA)of US companies,( this study looked at some 20,000 US companies) - a direct indicator of economic value add has been over a period of time in the last few decades progressively falling and is now hovering around 25% of what was recorded circa 1965. This is counterintuitive and paradoxical so to say. After all the general consensus is that the labor productivity has been raising and measured now , it is perhaps around twice the 1965 levels. So this begs the question why did this happen besides an appreciation of what and how the supposed benefits got lost in translation?

John Seely Brown, Johan Hagel and their teams came out with more than two dozen metric trackers that can be seen together to understand the massive shift that is happening in business which in turn contributed to the noticeable fall in rate of business value generation. With that as the background, the authors – John Seely Brown, John Hagel & Lang Davison have now attempted to look for solutions to overcome the slide and there they are here with the new book The Power of Pull: how small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion,

Traditional management techniques of centralized management in areas like planning , resource allocation, investments , branding , marketing etc are firm pillars on which the “push based management" is centered upon. The raison-d’être of the traditional firms lay in centralizing all planning and resource allocation to ensure the transaction costs within the system get optimized. Conventional management is so structured that the ability to create an environment of constant innovation and swifter response gets compromised as everything gets tied to a model of central planning and resource allocation – the actors in this model are also so aligned to this way of working – it requires a huge swathe of change to try anything different and the opportunity for optimizing this model is also getting very limited as it is in vogue for a long time – so scope for incremental innovation gets much harder and harder.

This can be best corroborated by the fact that the life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 has already fallen to less than fifteen years—down from 50-60 years around 1960. The authors predict that if these current trends continue, with no change in management, the life expectancy of Fortune 500 will fall to five years. Clearly, this can be attributed to the fact that at a certain point, the economic rot of the traditional organization will be clear to all , so much so that even traditional managers will be forced to embrace change, irrespective of their preferred way of work. Has this model delivered in terms of generating sustainable business value is the question that the authors asked as they began to investigate corporate performance of business in the last several decades.

In this business world of heightened global competition, the authors argue that the pace of change and buyer power inflicts enormous demands on enterprises and the basis of competition shifts from strengths centered on scalable efficiency to scalable collaboration. The span of influence of collaboration extends to hundreds and hundreds of participants in the “pull platform”. This is in contrast to techniques techniques like lean manufacturing which encompasses tighter integration amongst small number of select partners.

Let’s begin at the beginning. The book sees pull as the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.” “Pull, “gives us unprecedented access to what we need, when we need it, even if we’re not quite sure what‘it’ is. . . The power of pull provides a key to how all of us - individually and collectively - can turn challenge and stress into opportunity and reward as digital technology remakes our lives.” How’s this different. Let’s look at the push economy that has been in vogue for many many years. The book points out that “Push approaches begin by forecasting needs and then designing the most efficient systems to ensure that the right people and resources are available at the right time and the right place using carefully scripted and standardized processes. . . Push programs have dominated our lives from our very earliest years.”


From our education framework to institutional planning and execution, the authors point out were all centered on a push culture. Push was a suitable mechanism to support the industrial age companies performance characterized by incremental growth, hierarchical style of management in a deterministic world where correlation between yield and plan remained in a satisfactory state, The fading push economy had given way to a more dynamic world with more linkages showing more dynamic, complex and emergent behaviors. Dispassionate employees, disloyal customers, fast churning brands, dysfunctional governments all are clear indicators of this complex interplay.

Lets switch to the “pull model” The key premise in this model is that tapping the benefits of what is happening at the edges of organization and typically passionate and motivated employees and their networks make such things happen – the pull model leverages such participation and efforts. Deep performance improvements are made possible by embracing the pull model and this unleashes the power of individuals towards achieving such goals. The Power of Pull argues that the network effects of scalable collaboration can flip the experience curve and create what was unthinkable in traditional 20th Century management: an increasing performance improvement curve.


The Power of Pull is anchored on a framework that includes multiple dimensions in which interventions and initiatives happen and in their interplay comes out a very different mechanism of operation that encompasses business, process and people.

Some of those key levers of influence as identified by the authors include:

Access : the ability to fluidly find and get to the people and resources when and where we need them.

Attract : the ability to get resources and people wth right expertise both within and outside the enterprise.

Achieve : the ability to get results based on the partnership , collaboration , production leveraging amongst other things knowledge flows.

Within the achieve dimension, the book brings a new concept called “creation spaces”. These are defined as “environments that effectively integrate teams within a broader learning ecology so that performance improvement accelerates as more participants join.” These creation spaces “ . . . allow large numbers of participants, often in the millions, to come together to test and refine the practices required to master this third level of pull - achieving their potential more effectively.” “Although from a distance it may look like they are emerging spontaneously, self-organizing in response to the needs of the participants, a closer look reveals that creation spaces are carefully crafted by their organizers, especially in the early stages, to engage the right kinds of participants and foster specific types of interactions, all within environments that unleash the potential for increasing returns.” I like the emphasis the book makes on “Passion” of individual as cornerstone of their success. All these interplay at the individual, organization and network of organizations. The nature of interplay could range from “shaping views (direction or trajectory)”, “ shaping platforms (creates incremental values at individual, organizational and network wide)” and “shaping acts and assets ( interventions of rightly aligned resources)”.


Though the book may be short on real life examples that we can relate to, it is a very important body of work. We have to recognize that happenings in the edge (of the business ecosystem) may not be so obvious as we are accustomed to recognizing corresponding happenings at the core of the business ecosystem, The book succinctly argues that in this emerging 21st century economy, scalable mass collaboration brings together the people centered expertise and innovative ideas needed to address the very complex challenges, as well as the humongous opportunities all around us. This is hugely different from the last century model of mass production. The book convinces us that it is clear that our existing institutions, firmly rooted in the world of push, will require significant redesign in order to effectively harness the potential of pull. Institutional innovation - redesigning the roles, relationships and governance structures required to bring participants together in productive endeavors - will be a key requirement. In fact, the book argues that institutional innovation will trump either product or process innovation in terms of potential for value creation. Clearly this calls for well studied efforts to make this leap and I believe that The Power of Pull is one of the companions that shall help us navigate through this transition to conquer greater heights!

(Article first published as Book Review: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison on Blogcritics).

Apple iPad ignites the Ebook readers market

"Yankee Group forecasts that the already hot United States ebook reader market is about to catch fire, sparking from $1.3 billion in revenue in 2010 to $2.5 billion by 2013.

What’s the key finding of the research and why?
Yankee Group forecasts sales of eReader devices to rise from 6 million units in 2010 to a little over 19 million units sold in 2013.

Revenue from the sale of these devices will similarly catch fire, sparking from $1.3 billion in revenue in 2010 to $2.5 billion by 2013.

Additionally, by 2013 the U.S. ebook reader sales will reach 19.2 million, a CAGR of 34 percent, with 6 million ebook readers sold in 2010 alone.

The U.S. installed base of ebook readers will hit over 36 million, up from an installed base of 9 million by 2011.

Half of all consumers who indicate interest in buying an ebook reader will have bought one already, so device makers should act quickly.

"Our forecast is built around a model that factors in the effects of price elasticity, network effects and adoption risk and is loosely based on product diffusion models developed by Everett Rogers and Frank Bass." - Dmitriy Molchanov, an analyst at Yankee Group, regarding the research firm’s new study, “Yankee Group’s US EBook Reader Forecast: Kindling a Fire”

Apple (AAPL) launched the iPad on April 3, 2010... at unbelievable pricing:

"With iPad, you get all our latest innovations. And all our most advanced technologies. In one of the most revolutionary products we’ve ever created. All at a price that’s well within reach." Apple

iPad Wi-Fi 16 GB starts at $499

iPad Wi-Fi + 3G 16GB starts at $629

Pre-orders were brisk for Apple's new iPad

Neither recession nor gadget overload shall slow the mania surrounding the introduction of Apple's iPad mobile computer.

On Friday, the first day that buyers could pre-order the device (it arrives in stores next month), Apple racked up an estimated 91,000 sales in just the first six hours of availability, putting temporarily to rest the Internet's persistent "iPad fail" meme. Analysts predict the first-year sales could reach 5 million.

Engadget.com asked its tech-savvy readers whether they planned to buy an iPad, which starts at $499. The result: Nearly 19 percent of 60,000 respondents said yes; 65 percent were negative; and 16 percent clicked "What's an iPad?"

Apple Sells One Million iPads

CUPERTINO, California—May 3, 2010—Apple® today announced that it sold its one millionth iPad™ on Friday, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. iPad users have already downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store and over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.

“One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”

New Survey Shows Huge Wave of Apple iPad Demand Striking Amazon

A ChangeWave survey of 3,171 consumers – conducted in the aftermath of that Apple announcement (Feb 1-10) – shows a huge wave of pre-launch demand for the iPad and offers key evidence that the Apple tablet will have a major impact on the e-Reader, laptop and home entertainment markets.

Moreover, the survey shows Amazon (AMZN) and its e-Reader competitors are poised to take a big hit early on from the iPad's entry into their market.

The survey shows the Apple iPad is now poised to capture an astonishing 40% of the e-Reader market going forward in the first 90 days after its launch.

Bottomline:

According to Yankee Group, there will be at least 6 million eBook readers sold in 2010 (this survey was done before the Apple iPad announcement & launch). However, this is assuming the eBook reader market grows according to the baseline forecasts by Yankee. In all likelihood, the eBook readers market will grow much faster, rather ignite exponentially, with the introduction of iPad.

If Apple takes 40% of the U.S. market share, Apple will sell at least 2.4 million iPads in 2010 - new business worth at least $1.2 billion in the first year of launch - WOW! Apple has already sold 1 million new iPads. Apple creates a new category of devices that combine eBook readers, multi-media players, web browsers, music players, productivity apps, e-mail, business & entertainment apps & more. Apple is poised to sell at least 4 million iPads in 2010 (Apple will begin selling iPads in 9 countries in May), thereby creating yet another successful, disruptive aka "killer innovation"! Only Apple knows best how to create new businesses that grow from 0 to $1 billion plus in less than one year... this is simply AMAZING!

What does this mean for Amazon & Kindle? Would iPad relegate Kindle to second place, and deliver a knock-out punch? If history is a guide (and considering what Apple did with iPod and then with iPhone), Amazon has got to be worried... What will be Amazon's answer to the iPad? Kindle 3 better be good!

Apple's Innovation Strategy

How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success? What is Apple's innovation process?

― "There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will." —Steve Jobs

Download Apple's Innovation Strategy, and learn how Apple became the #1 innovator through:
• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs

Apple's Innovation Strategy & Process - Download Now