The CEO Game

Milestone for iTunes: 10 billion songs sold in less than seven years.

Apple had launched the iTunes Music Store for the first time in the US in April of 2003. By the end of that year, Apple had sold more than 25 million songs. Three years later, on February 2006, business was still a booming and sales reached one billion. Now, seven years since iTunes’ debut, another achievement was reached: 10 billion songs sold. Amazingly and even more, if you recall that it was only a while ago Apple was celebrating crossing the five billion songs sold barrier. On February 24, 2010, just a couple of days ago, Apple’s song download counter hit the mark, something it has been counting down to for the last two weeks.

iTunes

The tenth billion song was sold on February 24, as aforementioned, which happens to be Steve Jobs, Apple’s well famous CEO’s birthday. The 10 billionth song, “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash, was downloaded by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia. As the winner on Apple’s 10 Billion Songs Countdown contest, Louie will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, which can buy some 7000 of the hottest songs, or 14,500-20,000 songs on sale. Simply, Plenty. The card can also be used to buy iPhone apps from the app store.

The iTunes online music store is considered one of the “saviors” of the music industry: it revolutionized the entire industry and the way we consume music. Moreover, it has been the first online store which reached such widespread sales and thus, made all label companies shift their activities to the Internet. The sales increased rapidly and constantly and on the last quarter, Apple made a hefty profit of 520$ million from songs sold.

“This has been the birth of legal downloading,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, when it was first launched in 2003. “We are going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it. We aren’t going to sue it. We’re not going to ignore it. We’re going to compete with it. With iTunes you are supporting artists. You’re not stealing. It’s good karma”. Clearly, it is good karma. Especially for Apple which has used the store to become America’s number one music vendor in a short time.

To celebrate the milestone, Apple published the all-time bestsellers in the store’s history. Leading in the top of the list, is the song, “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, that also take the third place with “Boom Boom Pow”. Between them, in the second place you can find “Poker Face” by the provocative Lady Gaga. In the fourth place, “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz and in the fifth place “Viva la Vida” by the British band of Coldplay.

But, It isn’t Apple’s only milestone lately. Just a month ago, the app store (Apple’s online application store) passed three billion downloads, a huge feat, particularly when you consider that the app store is younger than iTunes.

In conclusion, that’s billions in revenue that iTunes has generated for the entire music industry, but also billions that Apple has done for itself and while competitors came up, none even reached Apple’s dominance. Well “Guess Things Happen That Way” indeed.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Apple Lunched today its new flag product – The iPad a tablet pc which will cost starting from 499$.

Apple had to put an end to the rumors and speculations when it announced its new tablet PC. During an event that took place in San Francisco, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs had announced the release of the new product- the iPad.

iPad- Apple's new tablet PC

The new product, which is mainly focused around network services, includes a 10 inch screen and it’s based on the iPhone operation system iPhoneOS. The iPad is 1.25 cm thick and weights 700 grams. The iPad works on Apple’s CPU the A4 with approximately 1 GHz CPU power. The iPad also has a Bluetooth capability and apple had declared that it can last as long as 10 hours on its batteries. The iPad screen is of course a multi touch screen.

Job has declared that the iPad is a part of a new generation of products between the Laptops and Smartphones. What about notebooks? Jobs said that notebooks are nothing but weak and cheap laptops.

Apples had declared that the iPad will support all the iPhone and iPod applications as well as having original application of its own. One of the major goals of the iPad is to act as an electronic reader (similar to Amazon Kindle). In the event itself Jobs announce that Apple had already signed deals with 5 of the world’s largest book publishers.

Also during that event Jobs had announced that Apple had sold its 250 million iPod few weeks ago and had more than 250 million visitors, in its 284 stores, in the last quarter.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

Since the invention of the iPhone, the smartphone trend has exhibited continuously exponential growth. Many new developments have created a new market to explore.

A lot of iPhone buyers use only a small and trivial part of its functionality, not realizing the full potential of their mobile friend.

iPhone Applications, the hottest trend of the mobile world, let everyone (with Mac and technical approach) to develop their mobile dream, from every corner of the world. The talented ones can also make money out of it.

But this article is not about just any iPhone apps. It is about those applications that may save you time and money!

Here are 5 tips for managing money with your iPhone:

• Convert Currencies
  Check the up-to-date exchange rate of any desired currency, and get a close look at your stocks.

  Applications such as Currency Converter Pro enable you to check 220 exchange rates, including silver and gold, and to convert between them.

• Manage your budget
  In order to stay on top of your budget planning and implementation, you may need a tool to help you plan and act appropriately.
  

  iPhone - Budget Application

  Budget is an application for managing your personal budget. It enables you to receive some basic information, such as graphs of your expenses, reminders relevant to your plans (such as when you need to pay your monthly rent), retrieved data and sets the time period for you budget plan.
  You may synchronize the data over several iPhones, for more than one person managing their households (husband and wife, partners etc.).

  Another budget management application is Day Bank, which allows you to synchronize the iPhone application with software on your computer.

• Save SMS and phone calls
  The fact that you’re with your mobile phone doesn’t necessarily means that you need to make your phone calls through the device.
  Fring is an application that combines all your contacts in the instant massages networks (Google Talk, ICQ, MSN messanger etc.), allowing you to chat with them and even have a voice conversation (VOIP) through Wifi.
  Fring users can speak free with one another. Skype is also enabled by the SkypeOUT rates.
• Keep updated in the stock market
  Keeping track of stocks is something you can do with the application Stocks, which comes with the iPhone. You can get information about stocks and receive relevant updates, including detailed graphs and a list of securities.

  Stock information for experts is provided with the application Bloomberg, built by the financial information agency, Bloomberg. The

  

  iPhone - Bloomberg application

  application is far more detailed than ‘Stocks’ and allows you to keep updated with the world’s markets, complete with news and estimations.

• Tip calculator
  Have you ever wondered how much money you should leave for the waiter? Tipulator, an iPhone application that easily calculates the tip everyone in the table need to pay, does it for you. You simply enter the amount to pay, the tip percentage desire and the number of people dinning.

This is only a few of the enormous pool of iPhone applications that can save you time and money.

I believe that in the future the mobile revolution will manage our wallet very, very closely. Smartphones are already helping us manage our budget and advise us for smart saving. Of course, until the CEO Game becomes an iPhone app, in order to play what will surely be the most fun and realistic business simulation ever, you’re going to have to sit down at a computer. It’ll be worth it, we promise.

Nimrod.

The CEO Game.

Today I’m not going to talk about for or against open source, nor I’m not going to discuss the ups and downs of free software since many have done so before. Today I would like you to think global or in other words I would like you to view things universally:

The Open Source Leaders

Suppose for just a moment that every Application, Operation System (Windows, Unix and etc), Computer-Game, etc’ internals were free to view, manipulate and redistribute. Can you imagine where could we have been today?

Imagine Microsoft and Apple joining forces and working together.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all doing their best to improve our search experience.

Do we really prefer the choice instead of knowing we’re using the best application out there?

Do we really believe that competition is the better way for the human race?

Why wouldn’t the big companies go on and open their source code? Well the answer for that is quite simple and obvious, the reason is Money (and allot of it). It seems inevitable as long as money is at stake and obliviously there’s no big money if any in open source. On the other hand take a look at the change our world experiences thanks to free software, and the free information sharing through the Internet.

Today’s world where more and more sophisticated applications find their way over to the cloud, it seems absurd charging money from users, take Google docs for example. Google docs became a reasonable substitute for Microsoft office and in this case money isn’t made by selling the software to the end user.

So way isn’t it code free? Sure there’s a rich API but why Google didn’t took the next required step and publish its source code?

It’s seems to me that we as society have this boundary which forbids us from thinking as a whole and viewing ourselves as a single unit trying to push our limits by joining forces, All for the same cause. Imagine where could have we been today if we started working together for a change.

Looking ahead it seems the future of open source seems bright:

Sites like http://www.codeplex.com/ and http://www.codeproject.com/ are adding new content on a daily basis and Linux base operation system seems to finds their way into more and more large organization (such as the German and Belgium governments).

We at the CEO game understand that a competitive world is inevitable but we also believe in clarity, wisdom of the crowds, fast learning and sharing. All of which are part of thinking open source.

I opened with a statement that I won’t be talking in favour or against open source but I’m sure you can guess on which side I’m.

Roi.

The CEO Game.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing a friend’s blog. This friend had been working for the last few years as a software developer and team leader. He had been enjoying a great salary, a good job, he bought the car he always wanted and he had just moved away from his house, but something was missing. He decided that although life was going good for him, it wasn’t enough. He wanted to be special, and to reach the top while he is still young. Two weeks ago, he posted a video by Guy Kawasaki, the author of the book “The Art of Start”, and previously the technological evangelist of a small company called “Apple”. When Guy first started working at Apple, he had no background in technology to speak of, and even less in computers. What he did have is passion, and that is what helped him to reach the top. In this video, Guy describes the key points any new start up should take note of. Suffice to say that we at the CEO game were greatly affected by this speech, and we hope it will help inspire you as well.

Ailon

The CEO Game.