April 14, 2016
Battery life has been a long standing issue for Wearable Technology, and despite steady improvements in technology it remains a large topic of conversation among wearable consumers today. Of the 18,609 consumer reviews for wearable devices we collected in March 2016, more than 11% mentioned battery life. There is slightly more positive feedback than negative, but complaints of quickly draining battery persist.
April 13, 2016
Cisco led mindshare in Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) market discussion last week. While the company historically competes with VMware in the SDN space, CRN reported that partners working with both vendors “are now deploying Cisco and VMware’s SDN side-by-side and finding them more complementary than competitive.” This eliminates the “either-or decision between Cisco and VMware,” and creates opportunities to solve even more complex challenges. This announcement made a big impact on market discussion, accounting for nearly 25 percent of SDN and NFV Twitter conversation last Thursday.
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April 12, 2016
Smartphones make everything easier. A smartphone puts all your pictures, music, social media accounts, emails, and even credit cards right in the palm of your hand. With all this convenient digitalization, though, consumers do not discuss “payments” as much as other use cases. Based on over 75,000 smartphone consumer reviews collected from January 2016, consumers mention using a Smartphone for financial transactions in less than one percent of reviews. This small amount of discussion was led by buzz from Samsung Pay featured in Samsung’s newest models.
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April 11, 2016
A lot has changed since Steve Jobs publicly denounced the need for a stylus in his introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Namely, Apple released a stylus. While our fingers remain attached to us, and are therefore far less likely than a stylus to be lost or broken, Apple announced a stylus as an accessory for their business focused iPad Pro in their September 2015 keynote. The inclusion of a stylus with an Apple product clearly deviated from the company’s early messaging, but a stylus provides increased accuracy, needed for the advanced functions of the iPad Pro.
Since the release, iPad Pro consumers have been happy with the device, reporting higher delight for Apple’s iPad Pro than Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4. Analysis of recent consumer reviews about the stylus used with each tablet shows that consumers are also more satisfied with the Apple Pencil than the Surface Pen. The bars of the funnel below display the percentage of iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4 feedback in which consumers mentions of Stylus, Apple Pencil, and Surface Pen. Red is negative sentiment; blue is positive, and gray is neutral. While Microsoft consumers mention the stylus at a higher rate than Apple users, consumers report far more disappointment with the Surface Pro 4, with the majority of negative feedback mentioning broken tips and poor responsiveness. Apple’s branding is also stronger, as Apple users refer to the devices as an “Apple Pencil” more often than a generic “stylus,” while Microsoft users use “stylus” over “Surface Pen.”
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April 7, 2016
Nest recently announced that they would shutdown the service that keeps Revolv Hubs running, leaving consumers with a device as useless as a container of hummus. Revolv is owned by Nest and shut down their service so they could pour all their “energy into Works with Nest.” Nest also owns Dropcam, a smart security camera company.
Shortly after Nest acquired Dropcam, the company launched the Nest Cam smart security camera as an improvement to the Dropcam Pro. While consumers reported higher delight for Dropcam cameras when the Nest Cam was launched in June 2015, consumers have been losing interest and delight as Nest Cam users are becoming happier and more prevalent. Dropcam users are being transitioned to the Nest App, but given Nest’s recent announcement about shutting down Revolv, we can’t help but wonder if Dropcam users should also be worried about their Nest owned devices becoming bricks.
Trajectory in the chart below shows delight over time, size of bubbles represent review volume per week.
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