Top Of The Order:
That’s A Lotta Apps: It’s no secret that apps are a Big Deal for Apple.
While Apple doesn’t divulge specific revenue figures for how many apps it sells, we can still get a sense of how well the business is doing. Apple includes App Store sales along with other items in its “Services” revenue, and during Apple’s last business quarter, Apple reported services sales of $5.98 billion, a 19 percent from a year ago, making it the company’s second-largest revenue generator. (No. 1, by a wide margin, remains the iPhone).
And in four years, there could be more than 5 million apps available on the App Store, or double the current number of apps, according to Sensor Tower, a research firm and consultancy that helps app developers get their apps downloaded. Sensor Tower said that games dominate apps on the App Store, and are the largest category of new apps that end up in the online shop.
How big are games? Sensor Tower said that out of more than 48,000 apps that were added to the App Store in May, almost 21,000, or 43 percent, were games. The category with the next-highest number of new apps added? Education, with almost 2,500 new apps.
For historical purposes, think of this: There were just 5,000 apps on the App Store at the end of 2008. That number grew to 1.75 million by the end of 2015. Still…Adding almost 2.5 million more apps in four years is a tall order. But the growth rates expected as apps take on more prominence in consumers’ daily lives suggest that such a number is attainable.
It would certainly make Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook happy, and help the company reach his expectations that services will “be the size of a Fortune 100 company next year.”
Middle Innings: Not to make fun of Silicon Graphics, but, really, when was the last time you really thought about the company that was once one of the kings of the computer server market? (Maybe it was around the last time you thought about Sun Microsystems, another one-time server bigwig that’s been part of Oracle since 2010).
Well, enough investors thought about Silicon Graphics to send the company’s shares up by almost 29 percent Friday, to end the week at $7.69. That’s what happens when you’re a company that gets bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $275 million.
HPE and SGI announced the deal late Thursday, in which HPE said the acquisition would help it strengthen its place in the high-performance computing market. Maybe HPE will use SGI’s technology for high-end data analytics? In which case, maybe it’ll come to some analysis as to why it bought a company that was last viewed as being on the cutting edge of tech back before Facebook was even a dream in Mark Zuckerberg’s mind.
Welcome To The Grotto: Amazon is going to produce a 13-episode docu-series about the history of Playboy and its iconic founder, Hugh Hefner. As the market for original and exclusive programming by online video-streaming companies, few brands evoke an immediate feeling of…excitement? sentimentality?…than Playboy, so it can’t hurt to have that name attached to your program lineup.
It probably won’t hurt Amazon’s production efforts that the company is said to have gotten access to 17,000 hours of unseen video footage and 2,600 of Hef’s personal scrapbooks. And you know those scrapbooks aren’t just full of articles.
Bottom Of The Lineup:
Here’s a look at how some leading Silicon Valley stocks did Friday…
Movin’ On Up: Gains came from InvenSense, Oclaro, Rocket Fuel, Nvidia and NeoPhotonics.
In The Red: Decliners included Genomic Health, Barracuda Networks, Aemetis, ServiceSource International and Impax Laboratories.
The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index rose 0.1 percent to 5,232.
The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped by 0.2 percent to 18,576.
And the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index edged down by 0.1 percent to 2,184.
Quote Of The Day: “You never know the feeling until it hits you.” — American gymnast Simone Biles, after winning the women’s all-around gold medal at the Olympics on Thursday.
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Photo: iPhone 6 smartphones with icons of various apps on their display screens. (Bay Area News Group Archives)
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