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Here’s my fair contribution to the impending iPhone hype tsunami..

From BusinessWeek:

JMP Securities’ Ingrid Ebeling used conservative price-earnings ratio projections for 2008 to calculate that the Mac business, with revenues of $11.7 billion and net margins of 11%, would be worth $42.70 on its own. The iPod, with $10.8 billion in revenues, 12% margins, and a slightly lower multiple given slowing growth, would be worth $38.87. Add in $6.36 for other music products, $6.76 for peripherals such as Apple TV, $5.91 for software, and $14.18 per share in cash. You’re already at $114.78—with no help from iPhone…

…It plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29, two sources say. (Apple won’t comment.)

Apple went down 3.5% today to $120 following the lack of news on iPhone at WWDC. Awww.. let it drop so I can get back into the game

And this is a funny picture Apple won’t laugh at:

(via TUAW)

In 1984, Apple pioneered the Graphical User Interface (GUI)’s usage on computers and began the killing of the mainframes along with IBM. They were the first, real PC company although they didn’t really benefit from the PC boom over the next decades. Thankfully, Steve Jobs retained his visionary instincts to launch the iPod at a time when Apple was a lackluster competitor in the ever-increasing competition of the PC industry. Its integrated software-hardware approach to making computers was not going to hold against Dell and Microsoft in their respective strongholds.

Faced with increasing ecosystem pressures, the business organism we know of as Apple, simply evolved. From Apple Computer Inc to Apple Inc, the Apple of 2007 made more than a cursory semantic change in its name, but a paradigm-shifting strategy that had taken shape over the past 5 years. Apple and Steve Jobs (to be used interchangeably here) realized they were no longer in the business of digital education, as was the 19080s vision of Bill Gates who wanted to “put a computer in every family”. No, Steve Jobs just hated being beaten to that goal by Gates. So what did he do when he lost at that game?

He changed the rules and created a new game. Read the rest of this entry »

For those who watched the iPhone keynote address at Macworld 2007, and even for those who didn’t, Steve Jobs had 3 different executives come up on stage to talk about their partnerships with Apple - Eric Schmidt (Google), Jerry Yang (Yahoo) and Stan Sigman (Cingular).

While Jobs was at the top of his game, and Schmidt and Yang weren’t too boring either, Stan Sigman stood out like the sore thumb he was, dressed in a suit and speaking from cue cards. Here’s what Presentation Zen thought of him (entire article here) :

I am tempted to call this the difference between “old school” business presentations (stiff, dull, cue-cards, etc.) and “new school” business presentations (passionate, interesting, conversational, etc.). But that would be a mistake because what seems like a “new school” approach is really not new at all. And what appears to be merely a conservative “old school” approach has never been recommended.

While the comment appears to be an affront to business school graduates like myself, I must sadly agree. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Jobs predicted that the iPhone will ensnare about 1% of the global phone market, which was about 1 billion last year. So he expects to sell about 10M phones, probably in 2008 when the iPhone is available worldwide.

I have been wondering about how to value the stock since I watched the iPhone keynote address (Sidenote: which might turn out to be as revolutionary as the first imac or iPod keynote). I found this nice comparison chart from Seekingalpha:

Some key observations, based on the criteria of comparison in this chart:

1. Expect Cingular to announce a $100-$200 price subsidy. The iPhone is way overpriced now compared to the rest in terms of retail price and we have yet to know how Cingular intends to package this product to the market.

2. Enterprise email services is a glaring weak point of the iPhone. All the other smart phones are compatible with services such as Intellisync, Visio, Blackberry, Visto, MS Exchange. This chart lists iPhone as having none. We shall await for more confirmation of this from Apple as the launch date nears. This point is crucial for the enterprise market to consider the iPhone as a replacement product since the price point may be too high for consumers and college students.

There is also more on the smartphone market from this BusinessWeek report on the Future of Apple.

Market research firm M:Metrics estimates that fewer than 6.2 million smartphones were in use in the U.S. as of the end of November. Of those, 2 million were based on Microsoft (MSFT) software, 1.76 million were BlackBerries, 1.72 million were Palm devices, and some 669,000 ran the Symbian operating system from London-based Symbian Limited, which is jointly owned by several companies, including Nokia, Ericsson (ERIC), Siemens (SI), and Panasonic (MC).

More analysis on the iPhone launch and the AAPL stock can be found here.

Copyleft Engadget

No other product in the world is that breathtaking, as only those by Apple and Stevie J. could.

No other product quickens one’s heartbeat and raises adrenaline like Apple’s could.

No other product can make you fall in love. Period.

The iPhone is finally out. Months of speculation, guess-timations and suspicions finally bore fruit today in another landmark product launch. The technical details are still sketchy for now, but the blogosphere will fill the gaps over the next few hours as citizen media kicks in and carries on the next lap of Apple marketing, almost on autopilot as they report live from the show over thier wifi-enabled laptops.

*Commercial Break* But a tip here for those with cash and fast fingers, go buy Apple and short Motorola and every other phone maker, Apple stock is rumored to be up by $6 so far upon news of this launch.. *End*

The iPhone has a screen fully operated by touch. Just move your fingers to make iPhone do your bidding.

It is 11.6millimetres long and a snug fit on your palm. With a 2megapixel camera, 4Gb-8Gb flash storage, wifi support, 3.5 inch screen, 5hrs of talktime and 16 hours of music-playing time, runs software compatible with iTunes and other internet-based apps such as widgets, GMail, Yahoo Mail or Google Maps…

It does everything you want in a phone, but looks everything like you wish a phone could look like — Fashionable and cool. Something to wow the chicks for the dudes or something to look chic for the chicks.

Its .. Almost like Life in Your Pocket.

Available only with Cingular Wireless in US, it will go on sale only from June onwards, at $499-$599. It only goes on sale in Europe in end 2007 and the disappointing is Asians will only see iPhone in 2008.

WTF. . So Apple tempts us and frustrates us and we all hold our breaths again.

** All pictures taken off Engadget and the original post can be seen here, here and here. And of course, the Apple official site here. The keynote speech can also be found here.

Click on image to watch the video makeover of a “Microsoft-ed” iPod. Its a parody created by not Apple, but Microsoft workers.

From Macworld UK,

• Apple's iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as £27 per month
• In one of the factories, i.e. Foxconn's Longhua plant,  200,000 workers, a population bigger than Newcastle, is hired to make iPod. 
• The same workers (above) live in dormitories that house 100 people, and…
• visitors from the outside world are not permitted.
• Workers toil for 15-hours a day
• Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, makes iPod shuffles. The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn £54 per month - but they must pay for their accommodation and food, "which takes up half their salaries", the report observes.

Not Steve Jobs which we all know but the other Apple Computers Founder — Steve Wozniak, affectionately known as Woz.

Here's excerpts from his upcoming book, "iWoz" due for release in November 2006:

1. Woz is now, and always has been, an Apple employee.
2. In the sixth grade Woz scammed gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon with a certificate from the school’s ham radio club. The certificate was made with crayons just before the ceremony, and Woz was the only “member” of the club.
3. The Apple IPO made the most millionaires in one single day in history up to that point in time.
4. Woz and Jobs worked as Alice in Wonderland characters at shopping mall in San Jose.
5. Woz didn’t return to the University of Colorado after his first year because he ran up too much computer timesharing costs.
6. Woz tried to call the Pope by impersonating Dr. Henry Kissinger. He almost got through except that the Vatican called the real Dr. Kissinger to verify the call.
7. Woz and Jobs got robbed of a blue box at gunpoint in Sunnyvale.
8. The statement that convinced Woz to leave HP to start Apple (uttered by Allen Baum) was, “You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich.”
9. Woz lost approximately $12 million in each of the two US Festivals that he put on.
10. Woz taught computer technology to elementary school students for ten years.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki's great post here.
As I read Guy's blog, several things jumped out at me reading it as a Singaporean citizen. We all know the following statements to hold a lot of truth.

In the context of why Silicon Valley succeeded and why others couldn't,

Absence of multi-national companies—especially the finance industry. If your companies have to compete with conglomerates or banks like Goldman, Sachs throwing money at people, it’s going to be hard to get anyone for a startup. Pity the startups in New York, London, and Singapore. Come to think of it, how many tech success stories have come from these cities? There is intense competition for employees in Silicon Valley too, but we’re using the same currency: the upside of equity, not high starting salaries…

Yeap, very true. We have a lot of pple applying to banks because in Singapore, that appears to be the MO to a prosperous life. I have blogged about this before in my earlier article, its sad that many fresh graduates, especially those in the technical disciplines strived the hardest for a career in finance and banking. We have no innovation in the high tech sector when our best and brightest engineering minds opt for banks over engineering companies. Where A*Star pumps millions into training dozens of PhDs in overseas colleges, we forgot the thousands in NUS and NTU and the polys every who see engineering as a dead-end education in Singapore and cast eyes of envy towards the business schools. We should be pumping millions instead into changing the mindsets of local engineers, especially engineering undergraduates to not just be involved in procedural, process-oriented, maintenance-related engineering tasks and be engineering drones but product innovators, creative, disruptive engineering breakthrough work. I am not an engineer, but I have observed enough enginners in Silicon Valley and Singaproe and it doesn't take an engineer mind or a genius to observe and hypothesize why Singaporean engineers lack the passion and drive in their engineering education.

The answer does not lie in the next papragraph, but it gives us a direction towards which many NOC returnees like myself should aspire for after our stints in the entrepreneurial hubs of SV and Route 128.

The goal is to infect them with the disease called entrepreneurship and show them that there can be more to life than “a job;” that two guys/gals in a garage can change the world; and that a lot of money = millions of dollars. Sure, some people will never return—like me. But those who do return come back with a much broader perspective on what life and a career can be. Maybe they will build another Silicon Valley because they’ve seen it done before. Here’s a dirty little secret: Silicon Valley is more a state of mind than a physical location, and you can’t alter a state of mind by staying at home.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, gets restless every few years by what it considers “irritants” that threatens its hegemony in the software industry. It started off by crushing Apple in the ’80s and dominating the desktop OS market, then notably the Netscape browser in the late ’90s unfairly by bundling its Internet Explorer and distributing it for free with its Windows platform. Crsushign these rivals consolidated its position today as the cominant software maker for PCs.

But the PC age is dead. In the new Web era, Google is the new threat but thats another story.

It is the resurgence of Apple that it wants to suppress and kill again, especially when the uber-cool iPod and its accompanying iTunes are dominating the digital music market. Check out the array of alliances and weapons Microsoft is gathering in its arsenal against the iPod/ iTunes Generation.

The latest Microsoft (military) campaign is named:

Against the dual Apple combination of iTunes as the software (for downloads and PC playing) and iPod as the hardware (MP3 player), Microsoft has a 3-component combination as a competitive alternative:

1. the Windows Media Player,

2. URGE, a collaboration with MTV

3. MP3 player partnerships

Somehow, neither the Zen, clix, Urge, Playsforsure has the same buzzword appeal as an iPod. The iPod appeal is more than just a hodgepodge mix of disparate components. Its an integrated user experience.. some call it a religion. And more proof of it below:

The new Apple “Church” at 5th Avenue, New York City.

Here’s the Pope of the Apple Religion.

To beat a religion, you need to be another religion. Somehow, Microsoft is far from it.

Windows-related products just dun evoke the same passion. The sentence “Microsoft is coollll… ” is simply a misnomer.

Will the days of centrally-planned marketing campaigns that views you (the customer), as a target board ready for bombardment by million-dollar ad campaigns end? Where tons of brochures, pamphlets and other marketing crap all seek to brainwash u into thinking Company X's new product is the best thing since sliced bread.. 

Apple's iPod leads a new wave of marketing, one that seeks to place the customer back into the saddle/ dominant role of the firm-customer relationship again.  A new way which is called a more pull-based marketing that depends more on the customer reaching out and asking for a good because he/ sghe really desires it and has a perceived need. Well, some brainwashing might still eb responsible for the "perceived need", but in pull-based marketing, the influence of the marketer is more subtle and sophisticated, i might say. I am a sucker for Apple products. Keep ur new 7th-generation iPod under wraps and that immense shroud of secrecy for months and chances are i will still buy it. =)

 An excerpt from this article:

This leads to the third, most important and least obvious of the iPod's trumps: the power of 'pull'. Most companies distribute their product by 'push'. They estimate demand, build according to the estimate and then sell ('push') what they have built. This is essentially business as central planning, and it works little better at company than at country level - hence the need for advertising and promotional price-cuts to reconcile sales with estimates, extra features to help sell the product and, finally, huge computer power to keep track of all the product variations, sales estimates and production plans.When, as with iTunes, the product is 'pulled' by the customer, on the other hand, the engines required for 'push' are redundant. It's like using gravity instead of fighting against it. Pull inherently uses fewer resources; tells managers directly what consumers want; and above all delivers on customers' own terms.

In their book The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin charge that the rising tide of consumer discontent amid material plenty is the result of companies failing to change along with their customers. People are no longer grateful for what companies give them; they want what they want, in the form they decide. Part of the iPod's phenomenal success is that as one of the first of a new breed of products to put customers on equal terms with producers, it begins to respond to this need.