Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Apple this week is releasing its most affordable iPad to date. The refreshed 9.7-inch iPad, which packs a Retina screen and Apple’s A9 chip in a device that effectively replaces the iPad Air 2, is priced at $329 with 32GB of storage.

The $70 price drop makes the entry-level iPad more competitive, particularly among schools that can now snag the tablet for under $300 at educational pricing. Businesses that are motivated by price and don’t require more advanced features in the iPad Pro will also be giving the iPad another look as a result of these changes, according to Avi Greengart, research director at GlobalData.

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Bijan Sabet is a venture capitalist with a golden touch. His wins are as legendary as the consumer and social tech companies he helped grow into the juggernauts they are today. Spark Capital, the Boston-based firm he cofounded and where he serves as general partner, has invested in more than 100 companies to date, including Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus and Foursquare.

Christopher Michel

SAN FRANCISCO — Google this week made good on its plan to reposition Hangouts for the enterprise by splitting the almost four-year-old service into two separate apps. A video conferencing app, Hangouts Meet and team messaging app Hangouts Chat will serve as the enterprise equivalent to Google’s Allo and Duo apps for consumers.

Meet, which aims to minimize meeting friction by simplifying the entry point for audio and video conferences, is widely available now. Hangouts Chat, which is competing more directly with Slack and Microsoft Teams, is currently in beta in Google’s early adopter program.

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The head of SAP’s developer initiative with Apple has high aspirations for the partnership and the impact it will have on enterprise mobility. “I believe what’s going to happen with the release of the SDK, and the continued innovation and investment, is that we’re going to create a new enterprise iOS developer,” says Rick Knowles, senior vice president and general manager of the Apple partnership at SAP.

“It’s a rare developer that exists, but now we’re going to formalize this role and I believe we’re going to grow a new development community around iOS specifically in the enterprise,” Knowles says.

Apple goes straight to developers via SAP

SAP represents the first of Apple’s enterprise partnerships that bring tools directly to developers. Both companies want to simplify the process for developers to integrate their apps with SAP’s massive backend systems of transactional data. The goal, through the release of an SDK and API library, is to transform the amount of information developers can use and call upon in their apps.

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Google continues to gain share in the education market at Apple’s expense. Chrome OS powers almost six out of 10 computing devices shipped to K-12 schools in the United States last year, according to a new report from research firm Futuresource Consulting.

[ Related: How Google overtook Apple in education ]

A growing number of inexpensive Chromebooks are making their way into U.S. classrooms while iOS — and to a lesser extent MacOS — devices are losing considerable share. Google’s Chrome OS comprised 58 percent of the 12.6 million units shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States last year, up from 50 percent in 2015 and 38 percent in 2014, according to the report.

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Let’s talk about Snap, the business behind Snapchat and those bizarre Spectacles. The company went public today and shares closed for the day 44 percent higher than its pricing at the open. The IPO is the largest ever for a Los Angeles-based company and Snap currently enjoys a market cap almost three times as large as Twitter. (When the market closed today, Snap’s stock was at $24.48 with a market cap of $28.33 billion.)

Where the five-year old company goes from here, however, is unclear. There is widespread lack of confidence in Snap among financial analysts and investors, and the company faces serious challenges. User growth has declined sharply following Facebook’s all-out assault on Snapchat’s core features, which have been cloned to great success on Instagram Stories and more recently on WhatsApp in a new feature called Status.

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Two of the highest ranking members of Facebook’s C-suite this week spoke at a conference where they addressed the fiasco over inaccurate measurements, areas for growth in engagement and advertising, and the outlook for Workplace, its social enterprise product. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO Dave Wehner were interviewed on stage at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telecom conference.

The social giant will be making consistent progress and changes to how things are measured on its apps, according to Sandberg. Accurate measurement is core to Facebook’s value proposition and the company is taking steps to ensure marketers can trust and independently confirm numbers from Facebook, she said.

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Facebook is overhauling its video platform in a bid to outmaneuver its competitors in social media and elevate itself as a premier video destination on large screens. Facebook this month has introduced new video formats, a refined viewing experience in the News Feed and announced plans to release a video app for set-top boxes. The company is also starting to put ads in the middle of live and uploaded video on Facebook and publishers’ sites.

“These changes reflect more seamless integration of video to the Facebook experience which will drive and reinforce user adoption, and as a result open up advertising opportunities,” says Chris Ross, research director, Gartner.

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