Apple’s Massive Numbers...

Simply looking over the numbers , it might be hard to wrap your head around what Apple just announced for their Q1 2012 results. A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both. The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos — especially coming after a quarter that was a “ miss ” (though we can now clearly see what a joke that “miss” was ). So perhaps it’s best to point out some bigger numbers and to frame some of them in ways to make them easier to understand. That’s what all of Twitter seemed to be doing anyway during the earnings call this afternoon. Apple’s profit of $13.1 billion was equal to their revenue in Q4 2010, as Jordan Golson notes . To be clear, that was just a year and a quarter ago. That’s how quickly Apple is growing. Apple added $38 billion in cash to its reserves just in the past year alone, as Horace Dediu points out . They now have $97.6 billion in cash and equivalents. $64 billion of that is offshore, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer stated during the call — meaning, it would cost money (taxes) to bring it back into the U.S. Apple’s cash hoard alone is worth more than all but 52 companies on Earth, as Dennis Berman notes . Apple earned more money last quarter than the entire company was worth (in terms of market cap) just eight years ago, as Mathew Ingram relays from Eddy Elfenbein. Apple likely sold three times as many iPads as Amazon sold Kindle Fires. At twice the price. And at a profit, as Jon Fortt notes . When asked about the impact of the lower-cost tablets, Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically mentioned the Kindle Fire and noted that when looking over Apple’s numbers, they didn’t seem to see any impact (positive or negative) from the Kindle Fire being on the market. Apple’s revenues, while massive, are nothing compared to a company like Walmart, which reported $109.5 billion in revenue last quarter. BUT that $109.5 billion only turned into $3.3 billion of actual income for the quarter. In other words, Walmart has more than double the revenues of Apple, but Apple has more than four times the profits of Walmart. That’s remarkable. Apple’s profits place them on this exclusive list

Forecast: ATA CEO Revea...

Jonathan Linkous, Chief Executive Officer of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA), has issued 7 trends he expects for the year ahead in terms of telemedicine and overall telehealth services as we begin 2012. Linkous predicts major changes for the telehealth industry, covering everything from the rise in so-called “virtual medical centers” to the multi-nationalization of the industry and even the concept of telemedicine becoming a standard of care.  Of course, the rise in mobile access to healthcare in general is included as well. For the entire list, visit this press release issued recently by the ATA.

Sharp SmartCentral Brin...

Sharp is getting smarter. The company is moving into the smart TV space with SmarTCentral. The smart TV platform brings industry-standard apps and functions to the entire Sharp 2012 TV line. The platform should be familiar. In all honest there isn’t much new here. Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, and all the other standard content apps are present. But at least Sharp is keeping up with the Jones. The one somewhat novel function pairs live customer support with Aquos Advantage, Sharp’s product guarantee. Owners will be able to contact support directly from SmartCentral. The smart TV platform comes on all the TVs Sharp is introducing at CES 2012 including the monster 80-inch.

How People Watch TV Onl...

At this point, video is just a regular part of the web. But how is it gaining on regular TV watching. Just in terms of audience reach, Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population. Yet for all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. In a report put out yesterday on the State of the Media summarizing 2011 data, Nielsen estimates Americans spend an average of 32 hours and 47 minutes a week watching traditional TV. They only spend an average of 3 hours and 58 minutes a week on the Internet, and only 27 minutes a week watching video online. All those billions of videos watched online still only represent 1.4 percent of the time spent watching traditional TV. In this light, online video still has a long way to go before it can hope to match the time spent in front of the TV in the living room. Except it’s not quite so simple. Remember, these are averages across the entire population and across the entire Internet. When you drill down into the watching patterns on the biggest video sites on the web, a different picture emerges. Even on the web, there is a huge difference between the video sites which attract the biggest audiences and those which are the most engaging. The top 5 video sites by unique visitors are YouTube, Vevo, Yahoo, Facebook, and MSN. But the top 5 video sites by time spent are Netflix, YouTube, Tudou, Hulu, and Megavideo. The real outlier in terms of time spent is Netflix, which boasts an average of 10 hours a month per viewer. Viewers spend about four times as much time on Netflix than on any of the other top 5 video sites, including Hulu. People tend to watch 2 hour movies on Netflix instead of 30-minute TV shows or 3-minute video clips, which explains the difference in time spent. Compare the 10 hours on Netflix to about 130 hours a month for TV, based on the weekly numbers cited above. The gap is still huge, but not as vast as the average numbers between TV and online would suggest. And the number of hours spent on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and the other top video sites will continue to expand rapidly, narrowing that gap. How long will it take Netflix to go from 10 hours a month (the equivalent of 5 movies) to 20 hours or 50 hours? When it comes to video, time spent is the best measure of audience attention. As the leading video sites command more and more of our time, advertisers and major media companies will notice. The more time we spend on these services, the better chance they will have to compete on an equal footing with cable TV channels. It is still early days, but once we are nearing an inflection point, and once we reach it, the video industry (both online and off) will change very rapidly.

CrunchDeals: Get Yourse...

Makerbot’s Thing-O-Matic is pretty pricey – $1,299 for the kit and $2,500 for the assembled kit – but (and this is my professional opinion) it is amazing and everyone in the world should own one. That said, Fab.com has a special deal on Thing-O-Matics this week – $999 for the kit and $2,000 for the assembled device – one of the first and biggest discounts ever on the entire system. You can check it out here but you’ll have to create an account to pick it up at this price. The sale started yesterday so you have two days left to pull the trigger. Why do you want a 3D printer? Heck if I know, but I think 3D printers are kind of like color printers in 1990. You never really thought you’d own one but they were pretty darn cool and eventually the price will be so low that everyone has one.