European organisations are still beleaguered by storage bills as 50% of all cloud storage costs in EMEA go to data access and usage fees rather than capacity, according to the 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index from Wasabi Technologies. Still, EMEA companies see the value of cloud storage services and plan to increase their spend in… Read more »
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More than 400 distinct cloud applications delivered malware in 2022, nearly triple the amount seen in the prior year, according to research conducted by Netskope, a specialist in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). The company’s researchers also found that 30% of all cloud malware downloads in 2022 originated from Microsoft OneDrive. Cloud apps are widely… Read more »
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Customer intelligence company Acxiom has joined the Salesforce AppExchange Genie Collection, empowering brands to better understand their customers, drive personalisation at scale and unlock new opportunities that accelerate business growth. Brands today are expected to know their customers, anticipate their needs, and engage in ways that are personalised, relevant, and contextual. A data-first approach is… Read more »
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Netskope, a specialist in secure access service edge (SASE), has unveiled new research that shows how the prevalence of cloud applications is changing the way threat actors are using phishing attack delivery methods to steal data. The Netskope Cloud and Threat Report: Phishing details trends in phishing delivery methods such as fake login pages and… Read more »
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Nintendo has released a statement in which the company outlined the limited impact Pokémon Go will have on its annual revenues. Following the news, around $6.7 billion was wiped from the company’s market capitalization.
While Pokémon Go has proved to be one of the most successful product launches in recent years, as its release broke numerous records in markets around the world. EE stated it saw 350,000 downloads in the UK even before the app was officially released as users found another means to download it, such as accessing the US app store via a VPN. The success of the app is not under question, though Nintendo has not altered its annual revenue forecasts due to the limited role it has in the app itself.
“Taking the current situation into consideration, the Company is not modifying the consolidated financial forecast for now,” the statement read. “The Company will make a timely disclosure when the Company needs to modify its financial forecasts.”
Niantic Labs is an American company spun out of Google, who license the rights to the game from The Pokémon Company, who in fact own the Pokémon franchise. Nintendo itself owns roughly 32% of the voting rights to The Pokémon Company and therefore only entitled to a modest slice of the revenues from the game itself. Analysts at investment firm Macquarie Group estimate Nintendo will only be entitled to roughly 13% of the revenue generated by the Pokémon Go app.
Although many organizations would have done due diligence surrounding the game, the relationship between Niantic Labs, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, as well as the potential for profit, it would appear the news caught certain individuals off-guard, as a substantial proportion was wiped off Nintendo’s market capitalization.
The announcement was made following the close of the markets on Friday, though this has led to a busy morning following the weekend. 18%, or $6.7 billion, was wiped off the market capitalization of Nintendo, though this could have potentially been worse, as regulations in the Tokyo market prevented a larger drop, as the maximum single day move allowed by the market is 18%. How much the shares would have shrunk if trading had continued will remain unknown, though Nintendo is still showing a net gain of 15% since the launch of Pokémon Go two weeks ago.
“The Pokémon Company is the Company’s affiliated company, accounted for by using the equity method. Because of this accounting scheme, the income reflected on the Company’s consolidated business results is limited.”
While this would appear to have come as a shock to certain investors in the Nintendo business, there is still potential for growth and long-term wins. In-app purchasing in the Japanese market will likely grow over future weeks, and the game has not been launched in two of the worlds other prominent app markets, Korea and China. There could be some big wins in these two markets, though it would be worth noting both have restrictions on the Google Maps product, potentially offering challenges for the way the app operates, and its overall success.
Should the app launch in China and/or Korea, the story is likely to roll on for some time, though how large the ripples will be following Nintendo’s revelation will likely be seen sooner. The success of the Pokémon Go is not under question, though Nintendo’s brief taste of fame following the surge in share price over the last two weeks would appear to be coming to an end.
BCN caught up with Christy Ross, Head of Application and Publishing Services, Technology at the Financial Times, to get some insight into the company’s approach to digital publishing, mobile apps and the cloud.
BCN: From a digital perspective, what is the FT currently focussed on?
Christy Ross: Print has been written off for years now, no pun intended, but we’re still doing very well. However our main interest these days — rather than investing in print product – is in looking at how we can identify and supply other means of content delivery and then to actually make some money from that. Over the past few years we’ve done things to help us to maintain a direct relationship with our subscribers, such as building our own web app rather than place anything on the Apple Store or Play Store.
We have also done a lot around building APIs, so that we can provide distinct feeds of information to businesses, enabling them to come to us and say, ‘we are particualrly interested in these areas of news, or analysis, and will pay you for that’. Of course we’ve also seen mobile take off massively, so probably over 50% of our new subscription revenue comes from mobile, rather than fromm the browser or tablets.
Why is the FT able to be so confident when asking for revenue from its readers?
We’ve been quite lucky. We were one of if not the first UK newspaper to introduce a paywall. A lot has been made of the fact that paywalls ‘don’t work,’ and we’ve seen a number of other daily national papers put them up and pull them back down again, but we are very wedded to ours.
That’s because we are a niche product. If you like, we’re ‘the business world’s second newspaper.’ So in the UK someone will have, say, their Times or the Telegraph (or in the US they’ll have the Washington Post or the New York Times), but then their second newspaper will be the Financial Times. You can’t get our content anywhere else, particularly not the analysis we provide. While we are interested in breaking news and do follow it, our key differetnaitor is analysis and that comment of what is going on in the world and what it means long term. People aree able to use these insights in their business decisions – and people are prepared to pay for that.
Is there anything unique about your current mobile application in itself?
At the end of the day we are a content provider. It’s about getting the content out as quickly as we can, and providing the tools to our editorial users so they can concentrate on writing and not worry so much about layout – we’re doing a lot more about templating, metadata, and making our content much richer, so that, when a reader comes on, the acutal related stories mean something to them, and it’s easier for them to navigate through our considerable archive on the same poeople and companies, and be able to form a much more rounded opinion.
What about internal technical innvoation?
We’ve built our own private cloud, and we’re also heavily investigating and starting to use AWS, so doing a lot out there to support the public cloud. One of our strategy points is that any new applcaition or new functionality that we look to bring online, we have to start by looking on the public cloud to see if we can host and proivide it on that, and there has to be a very good technical reason for not doing it. We’re pushing it much more that way.
We have also borrrowed a concept from Netflix, their Chaos Monkey appraoch, where every now and then we deliberately break parts of our estate to see how resilient applications are, and to see how we can react to some of our applications not being available and what that means to our user base. Just a a couple of weekends ago we completely turned off one of our UK data centres, where we’d put most of our publishing and membership applciations in advance, to see what it did, and also to see whether we could bring up the applications in our other data centres – to see how long it took us and what it meant for things like our recovery time objectives.
Christy Ross will be appearing at Apps World Europe (18- 19 November, Excel, London)