Deathwatch - ReadWrite

Cheating DeathWatch: ARM Holdings Holds Out

Cormac Foster — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 05:00:00 -0800

The ReadWrite DeathWatch is known for serving up plenty of doom, gloom and grumpiness. But for the Holiday Season, we're taking a slightly different tack - highlighting companies and technologies that Cheated Death. Companies that might have died, but didn't.

At the plate this week is ARM Holdings, a company that was never going to go out of business, but very well might have settled for a comfortable position in a single market. Instead, it built on the low-power processing that gave it dominion over all things mobile, and now it's poised to attack Intel on the chip giant's own turf.

Where ARM Was

From its founding in 1990, Advanced RISC Machines (later changed to ARM Holdings) was a different kind of processor company. Unlike fellow chip designers IBM and Intel, ARM didn't actually manufacture or sell the chips it created. Instead, like (pre-Nexus) Google and (pre-Surface, pre-XBox) Microsoft, ARM licensed its designs and its relationships with foundries to semiconductor companies. It even

Where ARM Is Now

ARM technology powers more than 90% of cell phones and 80% of digital cameras. It has a less-dominant but still substantial position in embedded devices, such as toasters, TVs, pacemakers and everything else in the Internet Of Things.

And then there are the tablets. The iPad uses an ARM chip. So do the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Kindle Fire and the Google Nexus. Even Microsoft hedged its bets with the Surface RT, the lower-cost, lower-power sibling to the Intel-based Surface Pro. Theres a war going on, and ARM is selling everyone guns. If a device doesn't have a keyboard, there's probably an ARM design inside.

New Platforms

It's good to be king, but where do you go once you've cornered a market? You find another market. Instead of resting on its laurels and waiting for its lead to erode, ARM has spent the last year recruiting allies that bring the fight to Intel's doorstep.

While the Surface RT got less-than-glowing reviews, Microsoft's tentative support could eventually lead to more head-to-head competition for Windows devices.

There's also been talk of a shift toward ARM-based Macs, though you shouldn't hold your breath. Consumer Macs and Windows PCs are both on the long-term horizon, particularly in the ultraportable market, but power-gulping Intel chips still outperform ARM by a wide margin, and performance is still important for many computing applications. Surprisingly, then, the far more likely near-term expansion for ARM is in the datacenter.

March Of The Wimps

According to a Gartner report, energy accounts for 12% of all datacenter expenditures, and that percentage is growing. Huge arrays of low-power, cooler-running chips are a natural fit, and ARM's minions are rushing to own the microserver market. Samsung has licensed ARM's 64-bit server chip designs for a 2014 release, and struggling AMD is pinning much of its recovery hopes to ARM-based Opteron chips the same year.

Can ARM Stay On Top?

Intel sees the opportunity in mobile and embedded devices, and it haven't conceded anything. It continues to push its low-voltage Atom processors toward those markets, and its 14nm Airmont chip (also scheduled for a 2014 launch) could be very competitive. Intel also claims to be focused on the microserver market, though that may be causing some internal conflict.

One way or another, ARM will likely lose at least some of its mobile and tablet market share to Intel. The question is where. An Apple move on the iPad or iPhone would be surprising, as would a Samsung defection on anything running Android. Intel's immediate fortunes in the space are probably tied to Microsoft, as always.

Meanwhile, any losses ARM suffers to Intel in its core markets should be more than offset by the overall rising tide and ARM's potential to attack Intel's core strengths.

To see more ReadWrite DeathWatches, check out the ReadWrite DeathWatch Series, which collects them all, the most recent first.

ReadWrite DeathWatch: Real Estate Multiple Listing Services

Cormac Foster — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 04:30:00 -0800

At one point, Multiple Listing Services was innovative technology designed to help buyers find homes. Today, though, its only getting in the way. With more users finding homes on national search sites, arcane rules and local focus have made MLSes as relevant as the binders they replaced.

The Basics

For more than 100 years, real estate brokers have worked together to help sell listings. In the pre-digital days, brokers kept "listing books" full of their local board's available properties, which allowed each broker to promote a wider range of homes than he or she represented individually. The result was faster-moving inventory for the entire board, and everyone won. The service was (and still is) opt-in: brokers choose which listings to cross-promote. But results down't lie, and the vast majority of properties wound up in the book.

Eventually, the listing book gave way to a brokers-only digital database, which improved performance and accuracy. When the Web came along, real estate boards acknowledged the necessity of a consumer interface, providing plug-in solutions that let users search its inventory, or licensing third-party software vendors to provide similar services. Brokers who want to develop something fancier can request direct data feeds (often at substantial cost), subject to the board's restrictions.

Technology disruption in real estate is a very volatile topic, so let's be clear about what this article is not saying. We're not saying the Internet will eliminate the need for agents. It's already changed the way they do their jobs, but houses aren't cars, so an expert voice will always be important.

The Problem

For a very long time, even after the MLS went digital, brokers were gatekeepers to an area's listing data. Seeing available inventory meant taking a trip to the local real estate office, which guided the buyer through every phase of the search and purchase. The Internet has changed that. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 88% of home buyers (and 94% of buyers age 25 to 44) used the Internet during their home search, typically long before contacting an agent.

That same NAR survey revealed that more than a third of Realtors received no business whatsoever from their personal websites. The reason for the discrepancy? Homebuyers are bypassing MLS-sanctioned broker sites for online marketplaces with more inventory and a broader customer experience.

1. Searches Are Bigger Than Boards

The real estate industry is local. Real estate searches, however, are not. MLS coverage areas often overlap. It's not unusual for a broker to participate in three or more boards, each with its own MLS, its own custom data fields, its own naming conventions and its own restrictions on how data can be searched and displayed. In many cases, the boards may even restrict "commingling" of their listings with listings from other boards, creating a logistical nightmare for brokers trying to list as much inventory as possible on a website.

A broker whose territory bridges the Pennsylvania/New Jersey border explained his frustration with board-specific data restrictions. "I have customers who come to me and say it's impossible to search through all of the area properties on my website, and I can't blame them. They don't care about which [real estate] boards are where. They just want to see everything within 20 miles of work, so they bounce from my site, do a search on Trulia, and if I'm lucky, they come back to me with questions. If I'm not, I lose the lead."

2. The Industry Has Moved On

National and regional search portals like Trulia, Zillow, and even Craigslist offer a wider range of inventory than brokers' MLS-specific search widgets. Typically, they can get away with this because their listings aren't part of the MLS system. Trulia, for example, actively recruits direct listings from agents, building its own national database of searchable properties that cuts through local boards' red tape. Syndication services like ListHub and Point2 allow brokers to push their listings to dozens of portals with a single click. More progressive MLSes are partnering with these and other, similar services to help brokers promote their listings and maintain data integrity. Other have blocked syndication deals, but determined brokers are pushing listings on their own.

Does listing aggregation introduce the potential for errors and fraud? Absolutely.

In January, a prominent San Diego real estate firm (video above) rather famously pulled its listings from sites like Trulia for exactly that reason. Trulia itself found evidence that 21.3% of direct submissions had an error in listing status or price.

Clearly, there's an advantage to MLS oversight, but the cat is out of the bag, and the numbers are striking. In the US, Trulia, Zillow, and Realtor.com account for 8 times as many visitors as all of the major real estate franchisors combined. Consumers seem willing to put up with inconsistency if it helps them find a house on their terms. Brokers seem to agree. For all the rumbling about unfair treatment by listing aggregators, actual defections like the one in San Diego are extremely rare. The public wants broad, easy searches. Despite their best intentions, most MLSes are getting in the way.

The Prognosis

Third-party aggregators aren't going anywhere, and the trend toward listing decentralization will continue. In January, four national franchisors entered a partnership with ListHub to try to deliver a national real estate search to end users in the face of a NAR ban on direct data feeds from MLSes. Expect to see more of this sort of maneuvering as everyone tries to create national portals.

At the same time, we'll likely see more consolidation into mega-MLSes like California's CARETS, which encompasses more than 50 boards. By migrating boards to a common technology platform and (hopefully) encouraging them to adopt similar rules, larger MLSes should make independent sites more useful, help secure deals with aggregators that actually protect data integrity, and make homes easier to buy and sell.

Can This Technology Be Saved?

The local real estate board will no doubt continue to exist, but the MLS as we've known it is already on its way out, just like the three-ring binders that came before it. The best shot MLSes have at remaining relevant is acknowledging that change is inevitable, and doing what they can to keep that change safe for their clients. If they embrace the world of syndication, consolidate where it makes sense, and position themselves as guardians of data accuracy in a distributed world, they can remain an important part of the industry and even improve it. If not, well, it's not clear anyone will miss them.

Previous ReadWrite Technology Deathwatches

Feature Phones: No change

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC): No change

In-House Data Centers: No change

Point-and-Shoot Cameras: No change

Video Game Consoles: The utility of bundles apps like Netflix and Vudu seems to be slipping. An NPD Study showed that one in five consumers who view streaming video on their TVs do so without a peripheral device.

Blu-Ray: The same NPD study reveals that "online video is maturing” as users migrate to watching streaming media on their TVs.

QR Codes: It's been a mixed bag. While Bank of America is testing QR codes for mobile payments (good news for the technology), a security researcher demonstrated how a malicious QR code could be used to wipe a Samsung smartphone.

Company Deathwatches

For an update on ReadWrite's baker's dozen of company Deathwatches, check out our updated ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch Update: The Unlucky 13.

Building implosion image courtesy of Shutterstock.

ReadWrite DeathWatch: Feature Phones

Cormac Foster — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 05:30:00 -0700

If it's not a smartphone, it's dumb. Despite current global dominance, basic "feature phones" will give up the ghost in just a few years.

The Basics

After the Blackberry and then the iPhone created the "smartphone" category, we needed to call the rest of our cellphones something, and "dumbphones" sounded, well, dumb. Thus was born the "feature phone."

While some initially viewed feature phones as an in-between category describing something more than a basic mobile device and less than a full-powered smartphone, the term has generally come to represent everything south of the portable computer-as-cellphone Apple/Android/Windows/Blackberry kinds of devices that get all the media attention. There's still some disagreement, but for the sake of this post, we're talking about anything "non-smart."

In the U.S., we most frequently associate feature phones with cheap prepaid plans and stubborn parents who refuse to upgrade, but in the majority of the world, low-tech (and low priced) remains king. According to Gartner, more than 63% of mobile devices sold in the second quarter of 2012 were feature phones.

Cost is the main reason, followed by durability. In countries without massive carrier subsidies of handsets, both advantages are magnified. And feature phones are also generally better at being, well, phones. If you spend a lot of time actually talking, aclamshell phone feels a lot more natural than squishing a Galaxy Note II up to your cheek.

They're cheap, they're durable, and they work. So why are they on the Deathwatch?

For starters, they've peaked. Feature phones are quickly losing ground to their cleverer cousins. According to that Gartner report, while overall mobile phone device sales were actually down in Q2, smartphone sales jumped 42.7%. While smartphones currently account for only 21% of handsets in the Middle East and Africa, they're on pace to break 50% in just two2 years. In Southeast Asia, smartphones are currently outsold 3-to-1, but sales are growing at 78% per year.

The Problem

Durable, cheap phones that don't use expensive data don't add up to a very good business. The last thing anyone on the sell side wants is users who talk on their cellphones – and do little else.

Feature phones leave little room beyond ringtones and text messaging for up-sells. Without apps and zippy interfaces for accessing them, theres little differentiation, no long-term platform lock-in and almost no carrier value. That's why Motorola recently joined Sony in winding down feature phone production. (In the short term, that helps Nokia, which is seeing modest growth in feature phone sales, but even it knows the money's in Windows.)

It's not all a supply issue. There's also legitimate demand for smartphones. In the developing world, mobile networks are often the most reliable form of Internet access, and having a phone that can take advantage of those networks is often critical. In the U.S. and Europe, the spread of social networks is helping drive smartphone adoption. And with the cheapest 4G prepaid phones dropping below $100, there's little reason to settle for an old-fashioned burner.

The Prognosis

Mass adoption of smartphones continues to drive down component costs, making feature phones even less attractive. By 2020 - eve

n sooner in richer areas - you'll be hard pressed to find them on the street. Within a few years, the TracFone racks at Wal-Mart will be full of low-end and mid-range Android smartphones.