1. Apple is number 1 music seller globally and has sold 8.5billion songs through itunes

2. iPhone appstore now has 75,000 apps with 1.8 billion downloads (excluding updates which would make it much more)

3. 30m iphones sold, 75m OSX (mac operating system) active users, 50m+ iphone/touch OS users (including over 20m ipod touch), 220m ipods sold, 73.8% US ipod market share, over 50% of new ipod owners are first timers.

4. 5,200 developers from 54 countries at recent conference

5. iTunes9 is out, it is free and includes hundreds of improvements

6. iPhoneOS3.1 is out, it is free and includes hundreds of improvements

7. OSX snow leopard (next version) is out, it is nearly free and includes hundreds of improvements

8. 300% growth in 2 years of max OSX active users means it took 4-5 years to get from 0 to 25m users and only 2 years to hit 75m

9. 100m accounts with credit cards now on itunes can buy music, movies, apps, ringtones (now up to 30,000) and more

10. New products are almost all better, faster, lighter, bigger screens, bigger capacity, and cheaper… e.g. in mac range, ipod nano (now with video recording), ipod touch, macbooks, appletv, iphone, imac.

And some more for the strategic differentiators category (as if the first 10 were not enough)

11. Deeper relationships with content creators (e.g. music, video) s a result of market share and the better margins they deliver means they now have unique content from tier one names e.g. Norah Jones teaching you music instruments; exclusive The Doors videos; new digital ‘LP’ artwork exclusive album features from Dave Mathews; and itunes extras for movies e.g. Wall-E’s movie rogue robots

12. They are repositioning ipod touch as a full computer in your pocket the ‘Great Pocket Computer’ with wifi, syncing, cloud services, integrated stores, unprecedented proprietary appstore offerings and continuous capacity improvements.

13. Apple are on the cusp of being word leader in handheld gaming according to business week and are highlighting negative differentiators of other entertainment alternatives from nintendo, sony and microsoft through aspects such as cost, appstore, buying experience, timeliness and more. They are also getting exclusive content here e.g. for the 10m users of tap tap revenge launching new categories of games such as ‘Rythm Rythm’ also from Tapulous that combine music skills with a new type of driving. Combine this with sensational multi-player, multi-media extensions and the game software developers are going into a feeding frenzy on the apple iphone/ipod touch platforms

Apple is winning. Apple is winning in more categories and daylight is second. They are doing it by delivering a better customer experience, better value (in terms of price and their customer’s time efficiency) and because even work is … fun.

As the Black Eyed Peas say with the new DJ mixes in Rythm Rythm … I like that boom boom sound. Keep up the great work apple.

Comscore played it down though saying they were behind their commercial equivalents which is true.

Satisfaction with Government Web sites Lags Commercial Leaders

RESTON, VA, September 8, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released an overview of the government site category, which revealed that more than 81 million Americans visited government sites in July, representing 42 percent of the U.S. Internet audience.

The Department of Commerce (which includes substantial traffic at Weather.gov and the site for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.gov) ranked as the most visited federal government Web entity in July with 7.1 million visitors, followed by Web sites for the Department of Education (ED.gov) with 7 million visitors, the National Institute of Health (NIH.gov) with 6.9 million visitors, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS.gov) with 4.2 million visitors and the Social Security Administration (SSA.gov) with 3.3 million visitors. CARS.gov, which did not even exist one year ago, garnered nearly 2.1 million visitors due to the summertime “Cash for Clunkers” incentive. WhiteHouse.gov was up 88 percent versus year ago to 1.1 million visitors, as Americans exhibited an interest in the policies and initiatives of newly elected President Barack Obama. Both branches of the legislature also showed impressive gains, with the Senate.gov up 93 percent and House.gov up 73 percent, most likely due to the current debate over healthcare reform.

This post tries to summarise all the links from post-event activities as well as the Cooper Sydney contributions. Feel free to add more in comments for our comprehensive wrap up which will be a few days or more away.

Cooper’s presentation yesterday at NSW Sphere (check #nswsphere on twitter and also #gov2au) went pretty well. Feedback was good, strong and frankly went for ages, it is still coming in.

Before the event a practice run was recorded on screenflow (try it – Mac software for putting full screen experience with video and sound and lots of effects. The presentation at NSW Sphere by Peter J Cooper (@pc0 on twitter) from Cooper Sydney titled … Government2.0: What the Government should and should not do is using the same material from his presentation yesterday at Parliament House Macquarie Street Sydney.

While Peter Cooper was on stage, during the panel that included James Dellow (@chieftech) from HeadShift, the Premier of NSW Nathan Rees (@premierofnsw) dropped in to make an announcement encouraging Gov2.0 adoption. Photos from Paul Hempsall (@roguemm) have been posted on flickr and are pretty comprehensive from the NSW Sphere whole day event.

Crikey had a tongue in cheek coverage by Stilgherrian as well that is worth a read too called NSW Gets It’s Geek On that focuses on the announcement about Apps4NSW.

Apps4NSW is a contest the premier is supporting with $100,000 cash to encourage developers to put some time into Gov2.0 apps. The Gov2.0 term is probably old hat but we seem to be stuck with it for now.

You can read the ongoing coverage of pc0′s presentation at #nswsphere on twitter as well as the followup discussions.

The day started with this video on the progress made in Gov2au in recent years which is short and not bad at all.

A big thankyou to Penny Sharpe MLC, Pia Waugh, Cathy Brown and Senator Kate Lundy for leading this wonderful Gov2.0 NSW Sphere initiative. The live coverage form the event was available live from Penny Sharpe’s website.

The photos from flickr by #nswsphere are available too.

The same day, the venerable TechCruch launched a blog article about Gov2.0 as a platform that sparked a bit of debate about Government facilitated social graphs.

Also on the 4th September 2009 was a blog post from James Purser suggesting useful tools. Not much original here but important to reiterate and get critical mass around the ones that work.

Streaming and wifi was sponsored by MOB (many many thanks) and I am sure breakdowns of individual presentations too. We will do a more complete wrap another time once the videos and all photos are available as well as track progress on various items. MOB have also kindly archived the tweets from the day on their site here.

BadKoala blog (@mjohnson, @badkoala) has a partial wrap on the event here.

We will do a more comprehensive wrap up soon. Thanks again all. Feel free to add meaningful links etc as comments…

Round three in the increasingly exciting Gov2au world is on tomorrow. I am first non-politician speaking (despite harbouring a few political aspirations myself at times) after Senator Kate Lundy at NSW Sphere tomorrow in Sydney.

The agenda and live coverage is available here during the day. It is a full day with a very extensive and interesting agenda with tight time slots per speaker.

If you can’t make it to the main event at NSW Parliament House in Macquarie Street Sydney or to the screening of USNow prior then join us online. Thanks to sponsors MOB and zumio.

This event NSW Sphere is hot on the heels of the first one called Public Sphere in canberra.

Soon after the first one, there was also the federal government announcement of the establishment of a Gov2au taskforce.

Watch this space for the feedback on tomorow’s event which is expecting 150 attendees plus probably over 1,000 online.

As well, there are plans for another one in Queensland and possible Sydney already.

Roll on the revolution, now we just need to make sure no one is left behind and the good stuff that is created is widely available and easily found.

The grand-daddy of listing services US based craigslist.com is a sort of a market but doesn’t offer all the features some of these new players offer. Others do though but are struggling to get features sufficient to overwhelm grand-pa’s huge liquidity. That said, simplicity and liquidity are usually the keys provided reputation management ensures appropriate content limits or other rapid response mechanisms ensure listing quality within appropriate time limits.

The new ones in Australia are dominated by service central who until recently had 6-7 times the traffic of their competitor such led by service seeking and followed by who can do and new startup with promise utool.

Should be interesting because new deals mean service seeking is now half the size of service central and the gap is closing fast.

I may well be wrong, and I hope I am, but the very recent market upturn is probably temporary so we need to all think about long term recession or worse depression.

Interestingly, those people that take control of their business finances using online software are more optimistic. This is probably also true for personal finances I suspect. It may just be that they are naturally proactive, forward thinking people but I suspect being informed and up to date helps with control of today and hence preparation for tomorrow.

You can see the full survey results too.

Market for SaaS is forecast to reach $US8b in 2009 up from $US6.6b last year.

It is also expected to double to $US16b by 2013.

Hot areas are –
- horizontals with common processes among distributed virtual workforce teams and web 2.0 initiatives.
- office suites and digital content creation
- enterprise resource planning and supply chain management
- human capital management and procurement
- customer relationship management (now at 18%!)

Key drivers were -
- rapid deployment
- rapid return on investment
- less upfront capital
- decreased reliance on limited implementation resources
- greater competition
- increased focus by mega vendors giving legitimacy to the space

Secondary benefits of a SaaS strategy were –
- backups outsourced
- updates and maintenance outsourced
- resourcing and operations outsourced

Should be good for Saasu and the SaaS Ecosystem.

Thanks to Gartner Research and The Rust Report. Quality reporting as usual.

This article was originally published by Marcus Padley in his ‘The Insider’ Column. I have taken the liberty of reordering the points but otherwise is is unchanged. Thanks Marcus, a quality read as usual. I have added notes in brackets only.

Tough lessons, sometimes brutal, always true. If you do want to be a commercial success, these will certainly help. Then again after reading this you may not be willing to pay the price.

1. Patience is not a virtue – it is a waste of bloody time. Time is the most valuable of commodities and you will fail without it. No one got rich working 9 to 5 and respecting weekends. You can’t build a business 9 to 5. It takes total immersion. Every activity becomes a time-versus-money equation.

2. There is no substitute for making mistakes. Mistakes compress learning. [Some people say you should try to get other people, like your first few employers, to pay for your mistakes, but beware if you make too many you may never have any more employers]

3. Education is paramount. The more you learn the more the lights come on and the more you realise how many other lights are off. Knowing opens doors. And knowing what you don’t know is as important as knowing what you do.

4. You can not do everything yourself. Lucky then that the most valuable and available capital in the whole world is human capital, employees. The willingness of highly capable and educated people to work for a certain rather than variable sum is the most exploitable, available and cheap investment you will ever make. Invest in the markets and you concern yourself with returns of zero to 20 percent per annum and possibly even a loss. Invest in people and your return can be hundreds of per cent. There is simply no better return on capital “employed”.

{Beware governments who create too many barriers to businesses employing and deploying human capital, a poor balance will ultimately destroy the quality of life it was intended to protect.]

5. There is education and there is qualification. Set out in pursuit of a qualification and you will deliver yourself to the corporate sector for exploitation. Set out for an education and you will develop beyond that. To take it to the extreme: Why do exams? You already have everything you need.

[Qualifications are valuable mans of benchmarking but take care to see beyond them when identifying talent for your business].

6. Starting with nothing is good. Who is the better competitor – someone fat and comfortable or someone lean and hungry, someone driven, focused, bold and prepared to take risks?

7. Debt is king. You’ll never [?] make big money without it. Do not be afraid of debt. Liabilities drive you too the most herculean of efforts. [Debt can be of course be non-monetary obligations, moral and otherwise].

8. Think beyond the square. Set an unachievable goal. Shoot for the stars and hit the moon. Pictures of Porsches on the ridge. All that sort of stuff. [Start a movement not a business some commentators would say. The key is make your motivation and goal as large as possible and only limited by your imagination.]

9. Growing a business organically will only ever achieve incremental returns. Take the big steps and the little steps will look after themselves [?]. there is more money made is a room [e.g. investment bank trading room] in an hour than is made in a factory every day.

10. Your business [model] has to be scaleable. You cannot make exponential money without exponential growth. A pop star making an album is a scaleable business and why pop stars are rich. After 100 years in the game Morgan cars are still in the same factory and have a waiting list. They don’t sell cars they ration them The business is not scaleable.

Easy isn’t it? So, do you still want to be rich?

Share your secrets with others by commenting below.