Backlink: http://www.slideshare.net/yvonne99/what-did-you-miss-7718647
Motorola shipped fewer Android smartphones during the Christmas quarter than expected, and it expects to lose money this quarter.
The handset maker said today that it shipped 4.9 million smartphones during Q4, which is below the 5.5 million shipments expected by Morgan Stanley's Ehud Gelblum.
And as Motorola's top customer (Verizon Wireless) starts shipping Apple's iPhone this quarter, Motorola says it expects to lose $26 million to $62 million.
Check Out Big Pictures Of Android 3.0, Google's Tablet Operating System
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Motorola Android Sales Miss Expectations (MOT, GOOG)
Innovator's dilemma, e.g. in order to compete with Twitpic we would have had to be willing to sacrafice our own login system in favor of Twitter's (insecure) one. The Yahoo! Paranoids would have shut us down in a heart beat (See also: http://laughingmeme.org/2009/07/...)
Additionally we fell into the trap of thinking like an incumbent, we spent 6 months off and on talking to Twitter about preferred product placement rather then just shipping the integration we had built.
We also spent *years* debating whether or not to build iPhone apps/iPhone optimized sites or bet on a HTML5/multi-device strategy. And work like the award winning iPhone optimized Flickr mobile site was viewed ambivalently even within the team as it happened largely as a skunk works and was very much hard coded around iPhone's limitations.
Lastly, Marco Boerries was the without a doubt one of the most viciously political, and disliked Yahoo! execs and he reigned for 4 years over the Yahoo "Connected Life" team which had universal control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo. Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly. The Flickr iPhone app that eventually shipped was built by CL.
That said it's easy to look at the successful products and wonder how **anyone** could have missed something so obvious, but the debate about what the future of mobile photography and photo sharing looked like was a fairly active one. Perhaps less remembered the innovated Radar.net social/mobile photo app/site was very visibly struggling to gain traction throughout this whole time period, and many less interesting attempts never made it to the gate.
Prototypes like Flickr for Busy People (http://flickrforbusypeople.appsp...) and the semi-integrated Photos Nearby (http://www.flickr.com/nearby) both built by Aaron Straup Cope, as well as the afore mentioned iPhone optimized http://m.flickr.com were partially byproducts of those long running internal debates about how to do mobile.
It would actually be incredibly straightforward to build something like an Instagram on top of Flickr using the API, especially if you could convince Flickr to release an API to "Beehive" the friend finder tool, which among other things, benefits from Y! backdoor deal with Facebook.
This post originally appeared as an answer on Quora and is reprinted with permission here. Kellan Elliott-McCrea formerly worked at Flickr and is now a VP of engineering at Etsy.
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Why Did Flickr Miss Out On The Mobile Opportunity Instagram Is Winning? (YHOO)
America is at a "Sputnik moment", Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said today, and the government's next moves will determine whether the country leads the global cleantech race or loses it to China.
"This is the threat that I see," Chu said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. "The U.S. still has the opportunity to lead in a new industrial revolution. It is a way to secure our future prosperity, but I believe our time is running out."
The timing of the speech was no accident. It came as new global climate talks got underway in Mexico and as President Obama prepares to sit down for talks with the new Republican leadership in the House of Representatives.
When the U.S.S.R. launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it shook the American industrial and military establishment; few knew the Russians were capable of such a feat. Eleven days afterward, President Dwight Eisenhower announced a new commitment to scientific R&D that led to decades of American technological dominance.
Of course, today's announcement was made not by President Obama, but a cabinet secretary. And that just begins to state the differences between 1957 and 2010. Eisenhower faced a clear enemy at an emphatic historical moment. He wasn't saddled with a $13.7 trillion national debt or an opposing political party whose top priority was denying him another term in office.
To fend off likely Republican opposition, Chu steered away from divisive issues like climate change and instead turned his attention to the threat from China. He cited figures from a report about China's rising scientific prowess, designed to scare even the most angry and penny-pinching Tea Party congressman.
In the last 15 years, Chu said, China has gone from 15th place to 5th in international patents and from 14th place to 2nd place in published research articles. Of 50 or so nuclear reactors under construction around the world, 30 are in China. China just surpassed the U.S. with the world's fastest supercomputer, has a 220-mph rail line that is the fastest in the world, and has broken ground on a rail network almost four times larger than the next most developed rail country, France. The U.S. is just sketching out its plan for high-speed rail.
Furthermore, Chu cited figures that eight of the ten global companies with the largest R&D budgets have set up research facilities in China and/or India. And then there's the fact that U.S. tech giant Applied Materials has built the world's largest private research facility -- in China.
Chu remained upbeat that the U.S. could win the energy race by building on investments the Obama adminstration has made so far, notably through the Energy Department's ARPA-E program that gives seed funding to promising energy technologies. ARPA-E has set ambitious targets, like a car battery that can go 500 miles on a single charge, synthesizing fuels from sunlight, and reducing the cost of photovoltaic solar by a factor of four, so it can compete with coal.
"Let's seize this opportunity," Chu said. "We can't afford not to."
David Ferris is the managing editor of the Matter Network.
Chu: Will America Miss Its "Sputnik Moment" on Energy?
Backlink: http://featured.matternetwork.com/2010/11/chu-will-america-miss-its_3210.cfm
