Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

IDC is showing some interesting stats on the number of tablets shipped in Q1 – in particular, for every 3 PCs shipped there were 2 tablets shipped.

Since PCs seem to be on a downward trajectory, and the tablet market grew 142% y/o/y, it won’t be long until tablets are just bigger than PCs. Probably this year. Reminds me of my “tablet time” post from last year…

Microsoft seems to be failing in their attempt to get into the tablet market. As this article on extremetech points out, ”Just so you have some idea of how poorly Microsoft’s combination of big-and-expensive tablets are doing, get this: After shipping some 900,000 Surface RT units in Q4 2012, IDC estimates that just 200,000 Windows RT tablets in total — including OEMs! — were sold in Q1 2013. Despite a huge amount of publicity, IDC estimates that the Surface Pro sold around 700,000 units in its first quarter. For comparison, the first iPad sold more than three million units in its first quarter — and the tablet market was a lot smaller back then.”

If I was MSFT, I’d buy share at this point. The whole HP webOS exit from last year, when HP sold tablets for super cheap, clearly showed that the market wants cheap tablets. If Microsoft wants share they should drop the price, lose money and get share. I don’t see any other way.

OK, well, in case you were living under a mobile rock and didn’t know that the iPad was HUGE here is a chart from Chitika.

Android is still a ways away… and MSFT is just so far behind it’s hard to imagine how they catch up at this point. Poor MSFT.

Wow, shoppers now prefer tablet browsing for product research and search OVER the PC, according to a press release by OpinionLab. “Tablets are great for browsing but not buying: Consumers embrace the tablet as hands-down the best platform to research, browse and price hunt. However, satisfaction plummets when making a purchase, indicating profound frustration with the actual buying experience available on the tablet today. Tablets topped all platforms in terms of Site Opinion rating (3.61) – and consumers were particularly happy when using the tablet to research, browse and price hunt (3.64 vs. 3.47 for mobile and 2.94 for desktop). Ratings plummet 40% to 2.39 for consumers who were using tablets to purchase a product.”

I would not have guessed that tablets would over take the PC just yet for browsing for purchases, but then I started to think about how I search for products… and I seem to do a lot of research on the iPad. I guess this is because I prefer the form factor and fast boot up. Searching for a product on the couch is so much easier with a tablet.

Average tablet pricing is coming down, as tablet’s share of “connected stuff” is rising, according to IDC. “Looking forward, IDC expects the worldwide smart connected device space will continue to surge well past the strong holiday quarter and predicts shipments to surpass 2.1 billion units in 2016 with a market value of $796.7 billion worldwide. IDC’s research clearly shows this to be a multi-device era, although market dynamics are shifting in terms of product category. In 2011, PC’s – a combination of desktop and portable PCs – accounted for 39.1% of the smart connected device market. By 2016 it is expected to drop to 19.9%. Smartphones will be the preferred product category with share growing from 53.1% in 2011 to 66.7% in 2016. Tablets will also grow significantly with share growing from 7.7% in 2011 to 13.4% in 2016. The shift in demand from the more expensive PC category to more reasonably priced smartphones and tablets will drive the collective market ASP from $534 in 2011 to $378 in 2016.”

In summary, PC’s lose, smartphones and tablets win. And, of course, as these devices get more affordable the entire process will accelerate.

Not totally sure I understand this whole retreat from mobile first! Just because figuring out a monetization and engagement strategy is hard in a competitive app marketplace doesn’t mean that startups shouldn’t try to figure it out.

Lots of good content all of a sudden on both mobile and online marketing. Here are some good ones:

• Triggered emails have HUGE open and click throughs: Online Media Daily reports on a study that shows that triggered emails (emails that are sent when a user takes a specific action, such as abandons a shopping cart, have a much higher click through than ordinary marketing emails.”Triggered open rates performed at 75.1% higher”
• I recently posted about email marketing subject line performance. Here are the subject lines email marketers should avoid, and which ones drive good open rates.
• The best email marketing frequency depends on your industry & users, but in general the more you can do the better.
• Yup, people are really opening emails on mobile devices these days; Returnpath “reports that mobile open share has increased 300% since 2010, and shows no sign of slowing, with four out of 10 emails sent being read on a mobile device.” Read more.
• “The iPhone and Android smartphones remain the most popular smartphone platforms for messaging. iOS users account for more than half of those opting into MMS and text-messaging campaigns, compared to 34% coming through Android phones. Those levels are up from 23.6%, and 16%, respectively, in April. BlackBerry accounted for 7% of opt-in messaging.” Read more.

A company called Knotice is reporting that, during the time around the Thanksgiving holiday, 45% of emails sent by retailers were opened on MOBILE DEVICES!

Yup, my two of my favorite marketing channels, mobile and email, are getting closer and closer…

I’ve been making an effort to share more on Twitter (Follow Healy Jones on Twitter if you want.) Some of these tweets have been popular:

• RT @ttunguz: Data on the seedpocalypse. What the NVCA data show about silicon valley’s fiscal cliff http://bit.ly/SkvjkQ
• Why won’t MSFT buy share in their most impt market since the PC? RT @ron_miller: Surface Pricing Dooms it to Failure.http://bit.ly/U6yJFe
• Simple but effective logic: RT @dh: The economic logic behind tech and talent acquisitions http://buff.ly/V8kUHL
• Shooting this video was a lot of fun: Local Webinar Taken Over By Mayan Apocalypse Believers http://bit.ly/TqIli1 via @BostInno@officedrop
• 90% employed at startups! RT @BostInnovation: Where is Boston Startup School’s Inaugural Class Now? http://bit.ly/WwVe8C@BOStartupSchool
• Seems like price really matters w/smartphone purchases: RT @businessinsider: iPhone Beating Android In US by @jyarowhttp://read.bi/U0VWbS
• RT Here’s How Retailers Like Target And Nordstrom Are Winning The Battle For Mobile Shoppers http://read.bi/U0RTfN

Not too surprising that a lot of the clicks are on VC/seed investing topics. I’m happy that people seem to like mobile as well – I probably spend half my day thinking/doing mobile related marketing, so it’s good to know that my tweeps are aligned with my interests that way as well.

So Apple continues to beat Google in terms of revenues from app sales – by a factor of four. However, Google Play’s revenue is growing an amazing 311% ytd vs Apple’s 13% ytd growth.

This info is from a cool report by App Annie (which I have never heard of but am about to sign up for cuz it sound cool) that I saw written up in thenextweb here.

At that pace, Google app store revenues will catch up to Apple in something like a year (my calc).

Will it really be a year that Google Play really be as big of a revenue driver as Apple is as little as a year?

I think it will.

The OfficeDrop iOS Apps were driving over 4x as many daily new users as the OfficeDrop Android app was in July of last year. Now they are basically neck and neck, with Android just a good PR event away from leading the pack.

Why is Google Catching up?

In my opinion, Google Play has become a real contender for several reasons.

1. Tablets. Our user data shows that there are a lot of aggressive Android tablet users out there. The first gen of Android tablets really didn’t do the trick, but in a post Nexus world there are a lot of dedicated Android tablet users, reducing the iPad volume bump that iOS has had historically. It’s since we released the tablet friendly version of our app that Android caught up with iOS (note that we intentionally timed the launch of our tablet app with the launch of the Nexus tablet; kind of like building the hotels on Boardwalk as your opponents round the “go to jail” corner.
2. Foreign markets. Android really seem to be big outside the US for OfficeDrop – for us in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. The App Annie report references Android’s dominance in Asian countries with the following charts (Our results are clearly a little different, but we have focused first on translating our file search engine into romance languages prior to hitting Asian characters):
3. Android devices are just getting better and getting more share (although the iPhone  recently staged a market share comeback after the new iPhone came out.)

I do hope that mobile doesn’t become a two horse race. I’d love it if BlackBerry or Windows Mobile achieved meaningful marketshare. But, maybe the smartphone market will be like the computer market, with Apple and one other company pretty much controlling the entire market.

No surprise here, but tablets are growing quickly as a medium for viewing TV programming. I came across this cool infographic pointing out how quickly video on the tablet is growing:

via Ooyala

Have I mentioned before that it’s tablet time? Or that tablet sales are surpassing PC sales? Or have I mentioned how fast tablet growth is happening or pointed out tablet growth numbers? Maybe I have, just a little bit…

Wonder if Santa will face supply chain issues getting iPads to all those little kids?

In a related note, I also want a new iPhone for Christmas.

Of course, the bigger thing is that 1/2 of the top 10 things are mobile devices.