Morgan Stanley comes to the conclusion that the iPhone is dominate with pretty charts and graphs

"Morgan Stanley drinks the Apple Kool-aid":

In 1995 Mark Meeker researched, at length, and wrote a piece called "The Internet Report" which became known as "the bible" of the dot-com boom.

Graphics like the one at right charting the rapid growth of the iPhone/iPod touch/iTunes ecosystem — the fastest new-tech ramp up in history, according to Meeker's team of 27 research analysts — dominated the 92-slide PowerPoint stack.

This particular slide shows that the rate of adoption of the iPhone and iPod touch in their first nine quarters on the market outpaced NTT's DoCoMo two-fold, Netscape five-fold and AOL eight-fold.

Based on past performance, according to Morgan Stanley, Apple is in the "pole position" in the race to dominate mobile Internet computing, which is supposed to be for the 2000s what desktop Internet computing was for the 1990s, personal computing for the 1980s, mini computing for the 1970s, and mainframe computing for the 1960s.

"Apple has a two or three-year lead" according to Katy Huberty, thanks to an installed base of 57 million handsets, 100,000 apps and 200 million iTunes subscribers with credit card numbers on file. (She will keep her eye, however, on Samsung, Nokia and Google's Android.)

But much of the presentation was spent showing, in slides culled from research over the past two and a half years, that the iPhone is not like previous mobile devices, and its owners not like ordinary cell phone users.

For example, although iPhone and iPod touch owners represent only 17% of the global smartphone installed base, they account for 65% of the world's mobile Web browsing and 50% of its mobile app usage (see chart below).

Another slide, this one a pie chart, shows that the average American cellphone user spends 40 minutes a day on a mobile phone, making calls 70% of that time. The average iPhone user, by contrast, spends 60 minutes on the device but makes calls only 45% of the time. The rest of those 60 minutes are spent texting, e-mailing, listening to music, playing games and surfing the Web.

Finally, we have the Venn diagram below that compares Facebook's 350,000 apps and 137% year-over-year growth with the iPhone's 100,000 apps and 163% growth. The place where Mark Zuckerberg's 430 million users overlap with Steve Jobs' 57 million is the sweet spot of the mobile Internet. It's here, according to Morgan Stanley, where we find the future of computing.

There's lots more where this came from. You can see the 92 slides presented Tuesday at Morgan Stanley's website. But that's just an appetizer for the two main courses: a 659-slide key themes presentation and the full 424-page Mobile Internet Report.

The Mobile Internet Report

For Gruber

For Gruber from SeoulBrother on Vimeo.

XKCD: Geocities Tribute

Yahoo is finally closing down Geocities today, and XKCD did a tribute to them for today's comic page.

What Are Twitter Lists & Why I Think They're a Big Deal

Twitter has begun rolling out Twitter Lists to a limited number of users, starting yesterday (Oct. 16, 2009). When I noticed several of my followers discussing this, I went to check my own twitter profile and was presented with the image above. I did not notice the "don't tweet about it yet" message until after I'd already done so, and a follower pointed this out to me who also had lists enabled. Soon thereafter, tons of Tech blog's were posting about it as well, so I am going to take the liberty to follow suit.

First of all, I am very excited by this feature and look forward to the near future when all users have this enabled. In short, I've wanted a native Twiter feature such as this for a while now, since I feel in love with Tweet Deck & Nambu's "Groups" feature within their Twitter clients. I've sort of limited myself to following around 400 people because I've found that after much more than that, my Twitter stream becomes very hard to keep up with without checking it constantly throughout the day. When I used to use very-unstable-and-crashy Nambu and then very-bloated-and-inelegant-non-mac-like Tweet Deck, I loved the ability to group people I follow for easier filtering of their content. Brizzly, the web-based Twitter client that I recently got an invite to, has a 3rd party feature built into their app which enables similar functionality. After using all three of these clients, I've found myself using Tweetie for Mac once more (and eagerly awaiting Tweetie 2 for Mac). According to Tweetie's developer, Loren Brichter, Tweetie 2 for iPhone and the upcoming Tweetie 2 for Mac will both support the Twitter Lists feature nativley. So what are Twitter lists?

This is an example of a list I made last night. This list simply contains all people that I follow on Twitter whom I know to live in the Washington D.C. area.

As you can see on the right, the amount of people on this list is the amount of people this list is following. The amount of followers this list has, is basically the amount of people who've subscribed to this twitter list.

At first, I was hesitant to press that Follow button as I was not sure what would happen. Would I suddenly start following this lists of 200 tech bloggers that Scoble created? Alas, no. It simply subscribes you to that follower list. Those followers' tweets do not automatically appear in your twitter feed unless you follow the members individually. Subscribing to a list simply saves it in the right-side-column of your twitter profile page. When you click one of these bookmarked lists, you can then see the tweets of the people who are on the list.

Twitter Lists can be public or private. While I keep a private list of 'essential' Twitterers that, when on a busy day, these are the only people I really care about not missing any of their tweets. This list has around 20 people on it. So as to not hurt anyone's feelings, it's a private list. No one can know that they didn't make the cut. Public lists, however, are why I think this will really take off. Follow Friday? Twitter's Suggested Users List? Both concepts are now obsolete. Now anyone can play the role as social curator and group interesting people together in any way want all while sharing these lists with anyone who may want them. This is going to be big, if for no other reason, providing an easy mechanism to share followers.

Google Wave First Look

Gina Trapani former editor-in-chief at Lifehacker has posted an excellent article over at lifehacker (where she still posts from time-to-time) called "Google Wave First Look." I highly recommend reading her post to geek a feel of what Wave can do, that is, if you haven't already watched the demo video from the I/O Conference from earlier this year.  Gina also makes this excellent point which everyone who is lucky enough to receive an invite should keep in mind:

Wave is only as useful as the people who are in it, so if you get an invitation and the privilege of giving out invitations, do use them very wisely.

 Remember, you only get 8 "nominations" initially. If you blast these out to 8 of your closest friends, 6 of whom are really geeks and might not really use it, you've just run the risk of detrimentally affecting your initial wave experience because you now have no one use Wave with (unless you want to go out on Twitter and find random strangers to try it out with). Be selective with your newfound Wave granting powers :) 

Google Wave invites to be sent out Wednesday - Sept. 30, 2009

Google Wave, Google's answer to the question "What if email was invited in 2009?", makes it's first wide-audience debut tomorrow to approximately 100,000 people.

Google clarified things earlier today with an update to their blog. They specifically highlighted the four key ways you can secure an invite. Here are the methods and what you need to know:

1. You signed up early on for a Google Wave account. Google put up a request form for Wave invites not long after Wave was announced. Most of the invites arriving tomorrow will go to people on that list. Your chances improve if you signed up early on and wrote a message to the Wave team.

2. You have an account on the Developer Preview of Wave. The Sandbox version of Google Wave has been active for a select group of developers for several months now, allowing them to test Wave, report bugs, and build Wave extensions. They will all get accounts.

3. Some paying users of Google Apps will get accounts. It’s likely several companies asked Google for invites when the real-time tool launched. They will get accounts. Some schools that use Google Apps will also get early access.

4. You are invited by someone currently using Wave. This is the most intriguing revelation made today by the search giant. Here’s how Google explained it:

“We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”

I'm extremely excited and extremely hopeful I signed up earlier enough for an invite to make it in the first 100k.

How A Macworld Cover Is Made From Start To Finish

Cover creation from Peter Belanger on Vimeo.

Firefox 3.5 Released

You may already be running Firefox 3.5, if you grabbed it early from Mozilla’s FTP servers, where it’s been available for a little while now, but if not, head over to Mozilla.com to update. I’ve been using the Beta and the Release Candidate versions for some time, and aside from the usual incompatibility with a few add-ons, I can tell you that 3.5 not only works great, but also packs some useful new features.

For most users, the first thing you’ll notice is how much faster Firefox 3.5 is compared with the previous version. There are a lot of reasons for the speed improvements, but one of them is the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that is much more efficient when dealing with resource-hogging web apps. There’s a great post over at WebWorkerDaily that goes into more detail about how that works and what it means.

My personal favorite new feature is the ability to tear off tabs and move them to new windows, something which I used to have to use a plug-in to accomplish. I can’t count how many times I need to do this on a daily basis when I’m referencing something for an article, or for debugging code and HTML.

Here’s a brief list of some of the highlights of the new version to whet your appetite (and more here):

• Private Browsing and Clear Recent History features.
• Location aware browsing via geolocation.
• Gecko engine 1.9.1, with many rendering process improvements.
• HTML5, downloadable fonts and other new CSS property support, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
• Open video support, meaning that you won’t have to download any plug-ins or use external viewers to watch web video content.
• Improvements to session restore, anti-phishing and malware, the Awesome Bar, and browser customization.

Check out the full Release Notes for 3.5 from Mozilla for a complete list of new features and additions.