Barrigüete - Externalidades de red en la economía digital

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Bagüirrete y otros - Externalidades de red en mercados electrónicos

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Externalidad de red

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Cómo Apple inventó el iPhone

“It Smelled Something Like Pizza”

New documents reveal how Apple really invented the iPhone.

By Farhad Manjoo

The original iPhone

Photograph by Tony Avelar/AFP.

Like many of Apple’s inventions, the iPhone began not with a vision, but with a problem. By 2005, the iPod had eclipsed the Mac as Apple’s largest source of revenue, but the music player that rescued Apple from the brink now faced a looming threat: The cellphone. Everyone carried a phone, and if phone companies figured out a way to make playing music easy and fun, “that could render the iPod unnecessary,” Steve Jobs once warned Apple’s board, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography.

Fortunately for Apple, most phones on the market sucked. Jobs and other Apple executives would grouse about their phones all the time. The simplest phones didn’t do much other than make calls, and the more functions you added to phones, the more complicated they were to use. In particular, phones “weren't any good as entertainment devices,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s longtime marketing chief, testified during the company’s patent trial with Samsung. Getting music and video on 2005-era phones was too difficult, and if you managed that, getting the device to actually play your stuff was a joyless trudge through numerous screens and menus.

That was because most phones were hobbled by a basic problem—they didn’t have a good method for input. Hard keys (like the ones on the BlackBerry) worked for typing, but they were terrible for navigation. In theory, phones with touchscreens could do a lot more, but in reality they were also a pain to use. Touchscreens of the era couldn’t detect finger presses—they needed a stylus, and the only way to use a stylus was with two hands (one to hold the phone and one to hold the stylus). Nobody wanted a music player that required two-handed operation.

This is the story of how Apple reinvented the phone. The general outlines of this tale have been told before, most thoroughly in Isaacson’s biography. But the Samsung case—which ended last month with a resounding victory for Apple—revealed a trove of details about the invention, the sort of details that Apple is ordinarily loath to make public. We got pictures of dozens of prototypes of the iPhone and iPad. We got internal email that explained how executives and designers solved key problems in the iPhone’s design. We got testimony from Apple’s top brass explaining why the iPhone was a gamble.

Put it all together and you get remarkable story about a device that, under the normal rules of business, should not have been invented. Given the popularity of the iPod and its centrality to Apple’s bottom line, Apple should have been the last company on the planet to try to build something whose explicit purpose was to kill music players. Yet Apple’s inner circle knew that one day, a phone maker would solve the interface problem, creating a universal device that could make calls, play music and videos, and do everything else, too—a device that would eat the iPod’s lunch. Apple’s only chance at staving off that future was to invent the iPod killer itself. More than this simple business calculation, though, Apple’s brass saw the phone as an opportunity for real innovation. “We wanted to build a phone for ourselves,” Scott Forstall, who heads the team that built the phone’s operating system, said at the trial. “We wanted to build a phone that we loved.”

The problem was how to do it. When Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he showed off a picture of an iPod with a rotary-phone dialer instead of a click wheel. That was a joke, but it wasn’t far from Apple’s initial thoughts about phones. The click wheel—the brilliant interface that powered the iPod (which was invented for Apple by a firm called Synaptics)—was a simple, widely understood way to navigate through menus in order to play music. So why not use it to make calls, too?

In 2005, Tony Fadell, the engineer who’s credited with inventing the first iPod, got hold of a high-end desk phone made by Samsung and Bang & Olufsen that you navigated using a set of numerical keys placed around a rotating wheel. A Samsung cell phone, the X810, used a similar rotating wheel for input. Fadell didn’t seem to like the idea. “Weird way to hold the cellphone,” he wrote in an email to others at Apple. But Jobs thought it could work. “This may be our answer—we could put the number pad around our clickwheel,” he wrote. (Samsung pointed to this thread as evidence for its claim that Apple’s designs were inspired by other companies, including Samsung itself.)

Around the same time, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, had been investigating a technology that he thought could do wonderful things someday—a touch display that could understand taps from multiple fingers at once. (Note that Apple did not invent multitouch interfaces; it was one of several companies investigating the technology at the time.) According to Isaacson’s biography, the company’s initial plan was to the use the new touch system to build a tablet computer. Apple’s tablet project began in 2003—seven years before the iPad went on sale—but as it progressed, it dawned on executives that multitouch might work on phones. At one meeting in 2004, Jobs and his team looked a prototype tablet that displayed a list of contacts. “You could tap on the contact and it would slide over and show you the information,” Forstall testified. “It was just amazing.”

Jobs himself was particularly taken by two features that Bas Ording, a talented user-interface designer, had built into the tablet prototype. One was “inertial scrolling”—when you flick at a list of items on the screen, the list moves as a function of how fast you swipe, and then it comes to rest slowly, as if being affected by real-world inertia. Another was the “rubber-band effect,” which causes a list to bounce against the edge of the screen when there were no more items to display. When Jobs saw the prototype, he thought, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” he told the D Conference in 2010.

The company decided to abandon the click-wheel idea and try to build a multitouch phone. Jobs knew it was a risk—could Apple get typing to work on a touchscreen?—but the payoff could be huge: If the phone’s only interface was a touchscreen, it would be endlessly flexible—you could use it not just for talking and music but for anything else, including lots of third-party applications. In other words, a touchscreen phone wouldn’t be a phone but “really a computer in your pocket in some ways,” as Forstall said in court.

Apple is known for secrecy, but Jobs wanted the iPhone kept under tighter wraps than usual. The project was given a codename—“Project Purple”—and, as Forstall testified, Jobs didn’t let the iPhone team recruit anyone from outside the company to work on the device. Instead, Forstall had to make a strange pitch to superstar engineers in different parts of the company: “We're starting a new project,” he’d tell them. “It's so secret I can't even tell you what that project is. I can't tell you who you will work for.... What I can tell you is that if you accept this project … you will work nights, you will work weekends, probably for a number of years.”

The iPhone team took over an entire building at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. "Very much like a dorm, people were there all the time,” Forstall said in court. “It smelled something like pizza, and in fact on the front door of the Purple Dorm we put a sign up that said 'Fight Club'—because the first rule of that project was to not talk about it outside those doors." (Thanks to The Verge for transcribing Forstall’s testimony.)

The iPhone team broke down into two separate but closely integrated groups—the guys who were doing the hardware and the guys who were doing the software. (I can’t find any evidence that there were any women working on the phone.) The software team’s main job was figuring out a way to make a completely novel interface feel intuitive and natural. One way they did this was by creating finger “gestures” that allowed you to get around the phone very quickly. Some of these, like pinch-to-zoom, had been used in multitouch projects in the past (you can see some in Minority Report) but others were Apple’s fresh ideas. For instance, Forstall used a prototype iPhone as one of his main computers, and as he used it, he found that constantly pinching to zoom in on the screen became tedious. In a flash, he thought, why not have the phone figure out how to zoom with a just a double-tap on the screen? This was a difficult gesture to implement—the phone had to “understand the structure” of the document it was zooming in on, he explained—but once engineers got tap-to-zoom to work, Forstall found the phone to be much easier to use. “It allowed me to browse the Web much more fluently,” he said.

The hardware team, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what the phone would look like. In court, Christopher Stringer, one of the Apple’s veteran designers, explained that the company created the phone through a process of rigorous refinement. A group of about 15 designers would regularly assemble around a kitchen table set up in Apple’s design studio to review, in painfully fine detail, every idea for various parts of the iPhone’s design. Apple has an extensive array of systems to quickly create physical prototypes of digital designs, and the team would handle all of these prototypes and remark on how they felt. “We’re a pretty maniacal group of people,” Stringer explained, pointing out that they would sometimes review 50 different refinements of a single hardware button.

 Documents in the trial revealed some of the many iPhone designs that Apple considered. There were thin phones; fat ones; ones with rounded glass on the front and back; some with flat sides and a rounded top and bottom, and others with rounded sides and flat tops and bottoms; and even one with an octagonal shape. Apple also looked to other companies as inspiration. In 2006, design chief Jonathan Ive pulled aside one of his designers, Shin Nishibori, and asked, “If Sony were to make an iPhone, what would it be like? Would you make it for me?” according to Nishibori’s deposition. The result was a skinny phone that looks much like today’s iPhone, except it had volume buttons on the front, rather than the side, of the phone. (Samsung attempted to argue in court that this design proved Apple copied Sony, but the judge barred that argument, which was bogus anyway—the design didn’t look like any actual Sony phone, and was instead only Apple’s take on Sony’s design aesthetic.)

By the spring of 2006, about a year before the iPhone’s release, Ive and his team had settled on a design for the iPhone. Their winning prototype looked similar to Apple’s 2004-era iPod Mini—it was a metallic device with rounded sides, what designers referred to as “extruded” aluminum. You can see it in a 2006 photo unveiled in the trial—it’s the one left.

Two iPhone prototypes revealed during the Samsung trial. On the left is a version that was scrapped just months before the phone's release.

The phone on the right is another prototype, one that looks a lot more like the iPhone that Steve Jobs unveiled in January of 2007. Indeed, the phone on the right seems almost identical to the iPhone 4, which Apple launched in 2010. What happened? Why did Apple go from building the phone on the left to a version of the one on the right?

We can’t know for sure, but we have some clues. One reason Apple switched the design was that the rounded sides seemed superfluous. “I’m really worried that we’re making something that is going to look and be too wide,” Apple designer Richard Howarth argued in an email to Ive. Plus, Howarth argued, if Apple cut volume control buttons into the rounded sides, it would remove “the purity of the extrusion idea.”

There was a bigger problem with the extruded-metal phone: One morning Jobs came into the office and declared that he just didn’t love it. As Isaacson describes it, Jobs realized that the design squeezed the phone’s glass display into an aluminum frame—but because the display was the iPhone’s only interface, the design had to put the screen on center stage. Ive realized instantly that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation,” he told Isaacson.

So, around the spring of 2006, a few months before the iPhone’s public debut, the team decided to start all over with something new. Looking through their old designs, they found a prototype they’d sketched a year earlier. This phone was a plain rectangle with rounded corners, a single button on its face, and a glass panel that covered the entire face of the phone. This was the iconic design that would become the iPhone.

Changing the design meant that Apple had to alter all of the phone’s internal components in just a few months’ time. The team would have to work nights and weekends in complete secrecy, and most of them would never, ever be able to take credit for what they helped accomplish. Of course, none of this is a surprise about Apple. In some ways, the trial only added fresh details to a story about maniacal precision and obsession that has long been clear. On the other hand, the story is a powerful reminder of something you tend to forget when you goof off on your iPhone: Nothing about it was obvious. Stuff that seems really small and intuitive about its design—things like inertial scrolling, the rubber-band effect, the simple idea of making the device a rectangle with rounded corners—only came about because Apple’s designers spent years thinking those things up and making them real. As designer Christopher Stringer said during the trial, “Our role is to imagine products that don’t exist and guide them to life.”

Slate

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Facebook y la amistad entre países

Facebook presentó un mapa que muestra la amistad entre países

La red social publicó un mapa que refleja el comportamiento de los habitantes en función de los vínculos que generan entre sí los usuarios en la plataforma

Con una atractiva animación que busca reflejar las relaciones que tienen las naciones entre sí, Facebook presentó un mapa interactivo construido junto con el estudio de diseño Stamen a partir de los vínculos internacionales que tiene cada país; mide las conexiones que tiene la red social entre los 900 millones de usuarios que utilizan la plataforma creada y liderada por Mark Zuckerberg.

Lo que hace el mapa es mostrar con qué países tienen más relación los usuarios de una determinada nación; en el caso de la Argentina, por ejemplo (ver imagen), la mayor parte de los vínculos de los usuarios argentinos de Facebook vienen de Uruguay, España, Chile, Paraguay y Perú.

Las corrientes inmigratorias son uno de los vínculos más identificables en esta visualización, como los movimientos que recibió Argentina en la últimos años provenientes de otros países de América latina. Otros se remotan a varias décadas atrás, como los vínculos que tiene Brasil con Japón, que posiciona a los habitantes del gigante sudamericano como la tercera comunidad extranjera más grande en tierras niponas, detrás de sus vecinos asiáticos geográficamente más cercanos, como Corea y China.

Otras relaciones son más extrañas de explicar, como el vínculo que tiene República Centroafricana, una de las naciones más pobres de África, con Kazajistán, o la de Ecuador con la República Democrática del Congo.

Uno de los motivos de este desarrollo de la red social parte desde la teoría de los seis grados de separación, basado en una investigación realizada por Stanley Milgram y que, con la llegada de Internet, volvió a cobrar vigencia con diversas experimentaciones basadas en la figura de Kevin Bacon , en donde cualquier actor puede estar en contacto en seis pasos o menos con el protagonista de Footloose .

No obstante, con su inmensa base de datos de usuarios, Facebook argumenta con este mapa interactivo que en esta representación las personas reflejan, a través de las relaciones internacionales de los países, que la teoría de los seis grados de separación en la red socialrequiere de menos pasos para estar en contacto con otra persona: apenas 4,7 saltos es el promedio mundial..

La Nación

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Lipczynski & Wilson - The Economics of Business Strategy (2010)

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Shy, Oz (2010). Breve revisión sobre la economía de redes

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Patentes: Apple versus Samsung

Apple ahora denunció a Samsung por otras 4 patentes

Entre los aparatos supuestamente plagiados están el nuevo Galaxy S III, el Galaxy Note y el Galaxy Note 10.1.

En busca de capitalizar una gran victoria legal sobre su rival Samsung Electronics Ltd, Apple Inc presentó en una corte federal una nueva demanda para determinar si otros cuatro productos de Samsung, incluyendo el reciente Galaxy S III, infringieron patentes de la firma estadounidense. 

El caso, que no debe confundirse con la reciente resolución a favor del gigante californiano, fue presentada por primera vez en febrero, dondeApple presentó ocho patentes utilizadas en 17 dispositivos Samsung.

Junto con el Galaxy S III y la versión utilizada por la compañía telefónica estadounidense Verizon, Apple añade a la lista de dispositivos ilícitos el Galaxy Note y el Galaxy Note 10.1, con lo suman un total de 21 dispositivos presuntamente plagiados.

Apple ya logró un fallo muy favorable en el juicio de patentes contra Samsung después de que el jurado encontrara a la compañía surcoreana culpable de plagio y le impusiera el pago de una indemnización de 1.000 millones de dólares.

Según la demanda de Apple, Samsung continúa "inundando el mercado con productos de imitación y "lanzando nuevos productos infractores, incluyendo su actual buque insignia, el Galaxy S III".

TN

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Empresas online

Cómo es crear un emprendimiento propio on line

De la mano de mentores que ofrecen desde inversión monetaria hasta la infraestructura técnica, los emprendedores argentinos cuentan con entornos que le permiten crear empresas tecnológicas lejos de EE.UU.

La Nación

 

Foto: Reuters 

Como cualquier iniciativa personal, iniciar una empresa no es una propuesta que aparece en los avisos clasificados como una búsqueda de trabajo. La idílica escena de un grupo de jóvenes iniciando un proyecto tecnológico en el estacionamiento de casa puede resultar un poco anacrónica, ante la infinidad de sitios que surgieron en los últimos años al calor de inversores que apuestan a ser parte del nuevo Google o Facebook.

Los emprendedores suelen llegar a estas instancias luego de presentar un proyecto desarrollado que funcione. "Aún cuando no se encuentra pulido y cuente con muchas fallas a mejorar, un servicio de este tipo vale mucho más que una buena idea que sólo queda en buenas intenciones", explica Ariel Arrieta, cofundador y director de Nxtp Labs .

A su vez, se les pide que formen un equipo interdisciplinario, en donde los roles se encuentren equilibrados. El proyecto es un modelo innovador, con proyección global

"Un emprendimiento de este tipo no cuenta con limitaciones físicas, y aquellos recursos como computadoras e Internet se volvieron mucho más accesibles en los últimos años", cuenta Andrés Saborido, responsable local de Wayra , la división de Telefónica Digital que busca potenciar los proyectos tecnológicos más prometedores de la región.

Telefónica aprovecha toda su infraestructura de negocios y comunicaciones para poner a disposición de los emprendedores que inician sus proyectos desde Wayra.

Los montos de inversión inicial varían entre 25.000 a 50.000 dólares a cambio de una participación accionaria de la empresa, que suele rondar en el 10 por ciento.

Tanto Wayra como Nxtp Labs son mentores de estos emprendimientos no sólo desde el aporte financiero, sino que también ofrecen un entorno de trabajo y la conectividad necesaria para desarrollar el proyecto. El arribo y la aprobación de los proyectos suelen llegar de la misma forma en que se desarrollan ellos mismos: por Internet o mediante contactos en común en una red de contactos.

Las áreas compartidas de trabajo, con grandes mesas comunes, sin divisiones ni cubículos, tienen una explicación: buscan fomentar el desarrollo creativo de los emprendedores, que deberán enfrentar un proceso de corto plazo marcado por un trabajo intensivo.

 

Andrés Saborido, country manager de Wayra Argentina, la división de Telefónica Digital que busca fomentar emprendimientos tecnológicos en la región. Foto: LA NACION / Ezequiel Muñoz

EL PERFIL

¿Qué es lo que debe tener un emprendedor? "Debe tener pasión. Es cierto que suena como una frase hecha, pero en general este tipo de perfiles se encuentran comprometidos con el emprendimiento, sin tener grandes sueldos o recursos, y confían en una idea que puede cambiar el mercado. Ese es el motor del emprendedor", cuenta Saborido, y detalla que debe estar respaldado en un equipo equilibrado tanto desde lo técnico como desde la gestión. Cuanto más multidisciplinario, mejor.

"Es importante que el equipo cuente con especialistas en diseño, es un factor clave para estos emprendimientos", agrega Arrieta. "A su vez, deben adoptar el perfil de empresas ágiles, que prueben cosas todo el tiempo y que no tengan miedo al error" en una etapa, que suele durar seis meses y sirve para la puesta a punto de la idea con la comunidad de usuarios.

¿Algo no funciona? ¿El procedimiento de registración es muy engorroso? ¿Las imágenes en el sitio no se cargan bien? Todo debe ser tomado en cuenta, incluso si requiere una reformulación drástica del proyecto en esta etapa inicial, señala Saborido: "hay que tener muy en cuenta los comentarios y observaciones de los usuarios, que serán determinantes para marcar el perfil del proyecto".

 

Ariel Arrieta, cofundador y director de Nxtp Labs, una aceleradora de proyectos tecnológicos con base en Buenos Aires. Foto: Archivo 

A nivel regional, Argentina cuenta con el respaldo de haber creado plataformas como MercadoLibre, Guía Oleo o Bumeran, entre muchos otros, que posicionan al país en el primer lugar de la región en cuanto a la gestación y consolidación de proyectos, señala Saborido. "Respecto al tema de capitales, Brasil representa el camino inverso, en donde los grandes fondos van a invertir fuerte en proyectos tecnológicos en su etapa inicial".

El panorama local cuenta con muy buenos perfiles, acostumbrados a las crisis, explica el responsable de Wayra. "Como algo común en la industria, lo más difícil es cubrir los perfiles técnicos"

"Los modelos de negocios en la industria son transparentes, y eso facilita la creación de emprendimientos locales basados en ideas globales o implementados en otros países. MercadoLibre, Buscapé, Three Melons u OLX son iniciativas que se inspiraron en otros proyectos", agrega Arrieta sobre cómo se gestaron estos sitios.

Y en el marco de este ecosistema, la experiencia de los ejecutivos que llevaron adelante este tipo de iniciativas también forma parte de una interesante agenda de contactos en donde los fundadores de estos sitios suelen acercarse a estos emprendimientos para colaborar con su visión, aportar su opinión e incluso formar parte del directorio.

LA MECA

Silicon Valley suena como el lugar soñado para todo proyecto tecnológico, incluso desde antes del nacimiento del proyecto. "Desde mi punto de vista, se puede iniciar una start-up desde cualquier lugar, dadas las condiciones y recursos disponibles. Es posible que, en el mediano plazo, una plataforma o servicio pueda crecer y ser firme sin tener la necesidad de dejar el país", opina Saborino.

"Todo depende del proyecto y su modelo de negocio. Hay sistemas que se adaptan a determinados entornos, mientras que otros son muy buenas propuestas, pero sólo podrían continuar con su crecimiento con una ronda de financiación en Estados Unidos", dice Arrieta, y señala a Brasil como uno de los nuevos puntos de inversión, al mismo nivel que en Silicon Valley..

No todo es privado 
En el país hay diversas iniciativas que buscan fomentar la creación de empresas tecnológicas. El Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología cuenta con un Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica ( FONCyT ) con montos no reembolsables y la financiación de proyectos. Por su parte, el Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires promueve diversas iniciativas como Baitec , la incubadora de emprendimientos de base tecnológica, además de acompañar a los emprendedores en las presentaciones en busca de inversores en Estados Unidos.

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Pago por celular

Square Debuts Monthly Pricing Option For Small Businesses With Zero Swiping Fees

TechCrunch

On the heels of announcing a mega-deal with Starbucks, mobile payments processing company Square is announcing another piece of key news—specialized, lower pricing per swipe for small businesses. Basically, Square is going to offer small businesses who make less than $250,000 per year the option of either paying the set 2.75 percent per swipe or one fixed price per month, at $275 per month, with no charge per swipe.

So either small businesses can pay the fixed fee, which all merchants pay using Square, or they can pay a monthly fee for any transactions that fall under $250,000 per year. With $250,000 in transactions, paying $275 per month works out to around 1.3 percent per transaction, which is significantly lower than the current rate of 2.75 percent.

If a business goes over $250,000 (and had opted into the monthly swipe fee) then the first dollar after will be charged the standard 2.75 percent rate, and so on. We’re told this new pricing should help a considerable amount of Square’s userbase, which primarily consists of small businesses, local merchants and even contractors. And by industry metrics, 90 percent of small businesses in the U.S. fit into the category of earning less than $250,000 per year.

Square CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey has been addressing the issue that many businesses have no idea how much they are spending in credit card fees. In a release, he said “For 62 years, merchants have suffered complicated, expensive processing fees. Square is the first company to rethink electronic payment pricing with the merchant in mind. We are giving merchants affordable, predictable pricing…With one monthly price, merchants know that the sales they’ve processed in a day is the same amount deposited in the bank.”

Square’s COO Keith Rabois tells us in an interview that Square has always been thinking about simplifying payments and how the company can remove additional friction and complexity with merhcants accepting credit cards. “Pricing in the payments space is complicated and at the end of the day there is a benefit to knowing what you are going to pay in fees at the end of the month.”

Square says that this is the first time ever that small business has has an advantage over big business with respect to credit card fees pricing.

This isn’t the first small business-friendly move Square has made on behalf of merchants. The company also started making funds available in merchants’ bank accounts the next business morning (for any sales made before 5 pm). Other merchant processors can take 2 to 5 business days to get merchants their money.

Last year, the company dropped its new user limits. Historically, if a new Square user processed more than $1000 in transactions per week, anything above that $1000 will be held for a certain amount of time. This time period ranged from a few hours to as long as a month. How much was help was also a variable amount based on an algorithm that scored merchants. Users had the ability to negotiate and work with Square to raise these limits, but it was on a case by case basis.

Square abolished those limits so all new businesses who use card reader will have funds triggered for processing the same day, the proceeds arriving in the merchants bank accounts the next business day. And you may remember, Square also dropped its $0.15 per transaction charge for businesses a few months ago in early 2011.

Square has been steadily expanding its payments network and reach over the past year. The company now has 2 million people and businesses accepting credit cards with the service (up from 1 million last year), and is processing $6 billion in payments volume per year.

And with a massive deal with Starbucks Square is set to potentially grow even further. Beginning this fall, Square will begin processing all U.S. credit and debit card transactions at participating Starbucks stores across their 7,000 locations. Pay with Square (the company’s loyalty and payments app for consumers) users will be able to find a nearby Starbucks in the Square Directory from their iPhone or Android smartphone.

It’s clear that as competition heats up in the mobile payments world, dropping fees may be the answer to winning merchant hearts, especially small businesses PayPal recently came out with their dongle and payments platform, which charges a flat rate of 2.7 percent per transaction. Square’s move is upping the ante, and will no doubt put pressure on PayPal and others to revisit their rates.

Of course, the choice of whether the monthly fee is cheaper versus the per transaction fee will depend on how much the merchant makes, how many transactions there are in a given month etc.

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