The early years

In 1976, 21 year old Steve Jobs convinced computer Engineer Steve Woz Wizniak to quit his job, and together in Job’s Cupertino,  CA home they began work on an inexpensive, simple to use computer. Unlike IBM and other industrial PC makers, Jobs and Wizniak wanted to focus on the consumer PC segment.

The Apple I was released on April First and sold for $666.00 at the local electronics store. Within a few short years, Apple would revolutionize the computing world.

Apple II, released a year later in 1977, improved several aspects of the original model as well as offering features to make it more attractive to non-computer users. It was this model and its subsequent iterations that turned the garage hacks into millionaires.

80′s and 90′s

Fast forward to the 1984 Super bowl and a Ridley Scott directed commercial for the company. The advertisement depicted George Orwell’s 1984 dystopian with IBM as big brother and Apple as the female heroine. The PR spread like wildfire, and it established a motif that would run through Apple’s marketing through to their present day battles with Microsoft.

The late 80s and early 90s saw the company take on new investors and a board of directors. Struggling to form an identity, and losing Steve Jobs for several years, saw the company lose its profitability for a time.

By August 15, 1998, things began to change. Apple released their iMac and its success exorcised the demons of the failed Apple Portable and the Newton PDA.

A company for the New Millennium

The new millennium saw Apple’s redesigned operation system make its first release. Mac OS X harnessed the power of UNIX while offering a more streamlined, user friendly GUI. Paired with iMac the company returned to profitability.

Later that year the first iPod portable digital audio player was released, marking a landmark for the company. The phenomenal success of the iPod laid the foundations for future products including the Apple iPhone, MacBook and Apple iPad.

Key Products in Apple Today

While the Apple II and Macintosh computers played an important role in the history of Apple, the iPod, Iphone and Ipad, along with their software platform itunes, represent the key products for Apple in the modern marketplace.

In June 2010 the iPhone 4 broke records with over 600 000 registered preorders. Furthermore, the company claims to have sold 18.6 million iPhones in the first three months of 2011, as the companies stock continues to rise.

With some 46,600 employees worldwide, a significant rise from 32,000 in 2008, Apple continues to boost its profile in the U.S. and abroad. Apple’s second fiscal quarter earnings, which came out in April 2011, posted revenues of $24.67 billion with a net of $5.99 billion. By way of comparison, Microsoft’s net income was only 5.23 billion. Truly, one can understand why consumers and investors alike are so fond of the company which has revolutionized technology in several meaningful ways.

About the author: Matt Fuller writes about various technologies ranging from free dating sites, social networking, free online dating and social platforms including dating websites and chat room and virtual technology.

Today I began reading Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.  Supposedly I was going to read it for an hour (as the title clearly states!) but I found myself immersed in it for about 2 hours.  The book is packed with useful terms, acronyms, companies, examples, best practices.  All of this in just the first 49 pages.  Just to name a few:  customer driven innovation (CDI), Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, WebSideStory, Clicktracks, comScore, packet sniffers, etc.  A lot of food for thought for future posts here at idaconcpts.com.

Originally I wanted to discuss about Kaushik’s trinity, whose objective is actionable insights and metrics, but I got caught with Microsoft adCenter Labs.

I had no idea about the existence of this lab, so it is quite sensible to explain what it is all about (in their own words):

Microsoft adCenter Labs is an applied research group dedicated to researching and incubating new digital advertising technologies. Formed in 2006, Microsoft adCenter Labs combines the talents of more than 120 top researchers and engineers, all dedicated to developing cutting-edge ways for consumers and advertisers to connect. Our researchers work across a broad range of technology areas, including keyword and content technologies, audience intelligence, ad selection and relevance, social networking, and video and interactive media. The algorithms developed by our team operate in the engines of Microsoft adCenter products such as Paid Search, Content Ads, and Behavioral Targeting. We are also committed to investing in developing online advertising products that will shape the future of advertising through more relevant and meaningful ads across online video, television and mobile devices.

Here you can find plenty of free little tools that (if correct) would provide great insight into the field of web analytics.  Just as Kaushik recommends, this website is “perfectly suited for 1) learning lots and lots and lots about search engine keyword behavior and long-term trends 2) understanding the demographic profiles for your (or your competitor’s) website visitors.”

Learning lots indeed!  Today I had to continue to network to learn more about the needs of organizing large collections of photographs.  I cannot go into much details but I can tell you that gender distribution is a major factor in my analysis. One particular question that I have is what are the differences between male and female Mac (or Apple!) users, and how does their experience relate to their use of Flickr.   Let’s use the Keyword Forecast tool from Microsoft adCenter Labs to find some insights into this question.

According to Microsoft, “This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords. Enter keywords separated by semi-colons and click the submit button.”

So, I used the terms:  Apple: Flickr; Mac.  Originally I was going to just use Apple or Mac but after finding the results I found that there important differences about the keywords Apple and Mac.

From the graph above, it becomes clear that before March 2007, the keyword Apple had a much higher trend than the keyword Mac, something happened in March 2007 that turned the tables around for the relationship between these two keywords.  I would have to look into that and a useful tool for that would be Google Trends.

But let’s continue to use this tool for now.

Wow! According to this graph, it appears that for the period 04/2006 – 06/2007, the keyword Apple is associated mostly with females and the keyword Mac is associated mostly with males.  This is a key finding for marketers trying to reach a particular gender of Mac (or Apple!) users.  It appears that talking about Mac to a female audience of Powerbook users is not such a good idea!  Earlier we discussed that Flickr.com is very related to Divinecaroline.com, so this would be an important to consider if Flickr is trying to reach female Apple users at the latter website.  The keyword Flickr has almost neutral association with either women or men so the tipping point would be the use of Apple or Mac.

Lastly, the Keyword Search tool offers an age distribution bar graph.

From the graph above, my main observations would be that 50+ old keyword users prefer the keyword Apple over Mac, and that 25-34 old keyword user prefer Mac over Apple.  All other age distributions seem quite normal.

Conclusion:  vive le diference! Gender is highly important for SEO for Mac related web analytics projects!

What do you think?