Amazon, The Best and Foremost Enemy of Apple Part.II

Amazon's strategy could not be further from that of Apple, who swears by the gross margin, but the two companies come together on several issues, starting with the extreme loyalty of their customers. Better roads Amazon and Apple seem to be closer to the point of cross soon: as Apple has expanded the distribution and service (iTunes Store, App Store, icloud), Amazon’s has ventured into the field equipment (Kindle, a tablet soon). Soon, the two companies may well be in direct competition: each will have a complete ecosystem of distributing content to custom equipment designed and equipped with built-in software.

Amazon launched its music store in late 2007, more than four years after the opening of the iTunes Store. The lack of DRM, the highest quality and lower prices than iTunes Store helped catch up: Amazon has quickly become a viable number two, at least in the United States. The size of the catalogs of the two shops is now similar (14 to 16 million according to the counts): Amazon is characterized by regular lower prices, and generally a more flexible fee schedule, while Apple is known to afford some exclusives (the Beatles to name a few).

Jeff Bezos's company managed to consolidate its position as she was only 4% of purchases of digital music in the United States in early 2008, it now accounts for 11.6% of the market. This growth is currently not at the expense of iTunes, solid leader slight increase, reaching 70% market share. In a sense, Amazon helps strengthen Apple, eliminating weaker competitors such as Rhapsody, but Amazon is growing quickly: Apple may need to be wary.

Amazon's business practices are in fact just as formidable as in the early days. For the promotion of Amazon MP3 and its natural extension, the Cloud player, Jeff Bezos has not hesitated to sacrifice millions of dollars to provide music for song bread and gain new customers. Obviously the transaction cost as much as a traditional advertising campaign, with a different conversion rate.

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Amazon, The Best and Foremost Enemy of Apple Part.I

It is frequently contrasted with Apple to Microsoft, Apple and more recently in Google. Amazon is to forget: in many ways, the firm of Jeff Bezos is perhaps the most formidable competitor to Apple, the electronic book to digital music, sales of applications for sale of equipment.

Amazon-smile, The fictionalized story of Apple based much of its current image: the return of the prodigal son has helped to revive the phoenix from the ashes, to replay the scene of the Macintosh iPod, iPhone and iPad and iTunes in the background. Less well known is the story of Amazon, so it is no less exciting.

Founded in 1994 and launched in 1995, Amazon.com is designed as the "largest bookseller in the world" free from physical constraints, the site was ambitious to sell more books than all its competitors combined. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, quickly launched an ambitious acquisition policy, increasing the acquisition of electronic bookstores (Bookpages, future Telebook and Amazon UK, Amazon DE future, in 1998, Audible in 2000) and many and varied many Internet services (IMDb, Wise in 1998, Alexa in 1999, several management systems in 1999 and 2000).

Amazon's business model has long been atypical in the first version scribbled by Jeff Bezos, it was not about generating profits, but simply to attract capital (the company goes public in 1997) and grow fast enough to reach many markets. The competitive advantage allows it to keep prices low. The genius of Bezos was to take calculated risks: to provide the delivery is a dead loss, but can attracting customers and hope to sell enough to generate a high margin on volume. This set of communicating vessels is the trademark of Amazon.

After years of losses as investors impatient and have to find all the patches available to present the results at their best, the activity becomes profitable Amazon bookstore in mid-2000 before all the activities going on green end of 2001. The demonstration is striking: 80% of sales are made by regular customers, who then spend about € 30 a month on Amazon.

Consolidation accounting rules, limiting or omitting certain practices disguising costs, Amazon is in the red board? Bezos offers delivery and conceded large reductions: sales explode and losses are reduced by half. Amazon MP3 should be promoted and its companion Cloud Drive? Jeff Bezos's company made loss of $ 2.6 million in selling off the last album in fashion; But earned nearly half a million users.

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FoneSync brings Mac OS X and Android together

The German publisher nova media offers new Mac OS software to synchronize a mobile device Android with his Mac. As doubleTwist before him FoneSync looks like the iTunes Android Smartphone and tablets, at least in terms of synchronization. His presentation is so very close to the Apple software and FoneSync can also sync media (music, videos and photos), but also its data as the address book or calendar.

Mimicry of iTunes goes a long way, there are exactly the same form used for space and can synchronize virtually the same elements, and play lists for music events in iPhoto.

Counterpart of this tight integration, FoneSync does not work with all Smartphone Android, far from it. Currently, the application is only compatible with two Nexus Google phones from Samsung, Sony and Motorola. HTC expected to follow those, but if you are not listed, you cannot use the software. The publisher does not specify whether the tablets Honeycomb are compatible with its software.

Each version costs € 9.99 and if FoneSync is a Mac application, it actually buys the corresponding Android application before installing the utility on Mac by connecting the USB terminal. The operation is complex and involves paying the software again if you change brand of phone. DoubleTwist in turn is free and works with many Android devices...

Apple more aggressively against the jailbreak with iOS 5

With iOS 5, Apple would have become more aggressive in the struggle between the supporters of the jailbreak. Recently, Apple seemed rather free rein and let teams do their job jailbreak: iOS 5 has been unbridled and Apple has dug some ideas in the world of jailbreak for the new version of its system.

If one could think that Apple turned a blind eye and allowed, he is not. According to the Dev Team, Apple has stuck with the possibility of iOS 5 go back and install an older version of IOS. This is useful in the world of jailbreak; it facilitates the return to a previous version, a practical procedure in case of problems with an update including IOS. With iOS 5, Apple could easily block the back. The jailbreak tethered (the terminal cannot restart without the computer) will always be possible, but not the jailbreak not tethered.

The Dev-Team does not despair of finding a solution to counter this deadlock, but until the release of the final version, the group will not publish anything before then.

LaCie CloudBox

Before the announcements at Apple developer conference (WWDC), there was talk of a Time Capsule that can bridge the gap between the Mac and the cloud. We imagined such as Time Machine backups stored on the Time Capsule will be transferred gradually to Apple's servers in the background without the computer having to be permanently lit.

If you dream of such a feature, then the LaCie CloudBox you might be interested. This is a 100 GB NAS specialist backup. Once your data stored on this device, they are automatically transferred in the background Wuala, the online backup LaCie. The system supports version management. When backups are transferred from the Cloudbox, is encrypted 128-bit AES.

Once the data online, users can access them from anywhere and this from an iPhone for example. The Cloudbox will be sold $ 200 and will include a trial period of one year Wuala with 100 GB of storage space. Thereafter, the subscription will be charged $ 100 per year.