GOLDMAN: Demand For The iPad Is Fading. Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope released a somewhat troubling report on Sunday for Apple bulls, saying demand for the iPad is fading. He's not adjusting his estimates for iPad sales, but he does think Apple will have to do something to address the first hiccup in the iPad's growth. Here is the key paragraph on demand, we've bolded the key phrase: ...the new Hon Hai forecast implies more limited upside to iPad units, which is disappointing for a December quarter.
While improving holiday demand into late November could certainly push the momentum in the other direction, we believe it is prudent to assume the iPad is facing some near-term demand challenges. We believe there are several factors driving this pressure, but we also believe these issues are temporary and will likely be solved by three key factors in early 2012: (1) the continued adoption of iCloud, (2) the launch of Siri on the iPad, and (3) the addition of lower price points. Goldman Sachs. Apple releases iTunes Match to US subscribers. Apple has pushed out the latest version of its media player and management software -- iTunes 10.5.1.
The latest version of the app is not big news in itself, but the release coincides with the much anticipated launch of iTunes Match, in the US market at least. The service has been expected for some time, but a series of delays pushed the release date back slightly. Now, at long last, iTunes Match is here. The subscription service will set you back $25 per year and enables you to access your entire music collection in the cloud.
The latest version of iOS has seen Apple expressing a greater interest than ever before in life in the cloud and this foray means that it will now be possible for those willing to stump up the annual fee to access their music collection from any internet connected device without the need for manually copying of files. However, Apple's cloud servers are failing to meet demand, with widespread reports iTunes Match isn't available (we've had troubles, too). STOP SOPA, SAVE THE INTERNET. The future of online advertising. I gave a talk on Thursday at the AppNexus Summit in front of a few hundred digital advertising types.
The first part of the talk was a macro overview, but when the Q&A session started, all that anybody wanted to talk about was my take on online media. And given how granular the discussions over the course of the rest of the day were going to be, I wanted to push back a bit against some of the unexamined assumptions which I encounter most of the time when I meet online-media people. The first is that there’s something necessary and inevitable about ad-driven models dominating the online media industry. That’s certainly how things have worked out to date, but there was nothing inevitable about it. From the very early days of the World Wide Web, many extremely smart people pushed very hard to develop a workable micropayments architecture online. Meanwhile, people were happily paying small sums for newspapers, for magazines, for coffee, for any number of fast-moving consumer goods.