Netflix Blasts Off

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) is unstoppable! It's gaining millions of new subscribers each month (I am one of the 20 million subscribers) who are attracted to the wildly popular $7.99 a month subscription for unlimited streaming of over 20,000 TV shows and Movies. There is no other game in town which can beat this! Amazon.com is poised to offer a similar streaming service (strong rumors), for a flat $79 a year fee that includes Amazon Prime membership. This could sway subscribers to Amazon, or better yet create a healthy choice for consumers which can only expand the market further. Apple is selling movies and TV shows by the drink on iTunes. Would Apple change it's business model and offer a monthly service? This is not feasible, since it will decrease the iTunes sales in the short term, and Apple will need to explain this to the share holders. However, in the long term, Apple would love to have all these subscribers. May be, just may be, Apple will buy out Netflix, or Hulu, an upcoming, worthy challenger. "Hulu Plus, the video subscription plan that charges $8 a month to watch a range of TV shows online, will have 1 million paying customers this year and post annual revenue of more than $200 million, according to Hulu's chief executive Jason Kilar, in a blog post." Hulu still has ways to go; however, it has huge help from Disney, Comcast, NBC, News Corp and Viacom (latest partner).

Take a look at what Whitney Tilson says in his article on Seeking Alpha:
"Of course, any company can goose its margins and profits in the short term by slashing marketing spending, but this usually triggers a fall-off in sales and customers. Yet this didn’t happen to Netflix: in Q4, the number of paid subscribers jumped by 2.4 million to 18.3 million, up 53.5% year over year and 15.2% sequentially, both the highest levels going back more than four years. Subscriber growth isn’t merely high, but it’s accelerating. Such a large gain in subscribers fueled at 34.1% year over year jump in revenues, the highest percentage gain since Q1 07.

This surge in subscribers and revenues is creating a virtuous cycle for Netflix, both in terms of word-of-mouth buzz (which is, of course, the best – and cheapest – form of marketing) and financially."

Customer Survey Comments:

"The most commonly cited explanation by the Netflix customers in our survey for their increasing usage and overall satisfaction is that they appreciate the easy-to-use, widely available service and perceive good value. For a low monthly price – typically $7.99 or $9.99, less than the cost of a single movie ticket and a tiny fraction of their cable bill – they can have unlimited access to nearly 20,000 movies and TV shows. "

"Needs more & better content, but everyone knows that!
I believe we get what we pay for.
Not enough selection and not enough updates. Still great convenience & video quality.
I can watch what I want, when I want, for a price I can afford.
Great value, simple, problem free, no advertising.
Easy to use, good selection, and getting better all the time. It’s the best deal out there, even with the recent price increase.
Streaming itself is great. The library of streamable choices is lacking, especially for movies. Once you get hooked on a TV show Netflix carries, though, the streaming is awesome!
I’m not married to Netflix. I would easily switch to a carrier with the fastest and widest selection of titles. The flip side is I haven’t tried other services because Netflix is easy. I’m not a tech expert and don’t even know what Hulu does.
Good product at good price. Online quality is much better than I expected. Lots of kids content to stream (don’t need the latest). Netflix finds TV shows that I may like but did not know existed and/or would not rent as DVDs. Have gotten rid of the expensive cable bill as a result"

Bottomline:
Netflix is a WOW! product, a great example of business model and product innovation. It's on a hyper growth drive, one which can easily catapult the subscriber base to over 40 million paid subscribers within the next two years! Netflix stock price and today's market valuation is quite conservative. If Netflix were to continue its explosive growth, while keeping the margins intact (or even improving them), Netflix at $400 within the next two years is entirely plausible! Only question : How soon can Netflix offer the top 200 movies of all time in the base subscription? Enjoy the ride...

Check out my WOW! Product Guide, and create Amazing products that WOW! your customers NOW!
Download here

Best Fifty Inventions of 2010 - Top Innovations

Time Magazine announced the 50 best inventions of 2010... And it's one helluva list!

Here's the top 50 inventions & innovations of 2010...

Technology

• iPad
• No surprises here, the Apple iPad is a top Technology pick..."Apple is the first company that designed finger-friendly hardware and software from scratch rather than stuffing a PC into a keyboardless case."
  
• Flipboard
  "The killer iPad app Flipboard ends the chaos by grabbing updates, photos and links from your friends and other interesting people, then reformatting everything in a wonderfully browsable, magazine-like format."
  
• Looxcie
  "Invented by a parent who found himself fumbling with video cameras while trying to record children's parties, Looxcie can capture everything the user sees for up to five hours, hands-free."
  
• Kickstarter
  "Kickstarter as crowdsourced philanthropy — a website where anyone can donate any amount to a project in development, with no money changing hands until a minimum threshold has been met"
  
• Square
  "With the aid of a tiny magnetic card reader that attaches to a smart phone, Square lets anyone process credit cards."
• Sony Alpha A55 Camera
  "Sony's Alpha A55 has an ingenious translucent mirror that stays put. That means you can shoot up to 10 perfectly focused photos a second and record HD video that never goes blurry."
  

Transportation

• Amtrak's Beef-Powered Train
• Google's Driverless Car

"Is it an autoautomobile? An aut2.0mobile? Whatever you call it, Google's new Prius — tricked out with radar sensors, video cameras and a laser range finder — has driven itself 140,000 miles without an unscheduled meeting with a light pole. "

• Martin Jetpack
  "The Martin Jetpack positions itself as the planet's first practical jet pack — as if it were some kind of airborne Swiffer. The Martin Jetpack could take its operator up 8,000 ft. Since it holds only 30 minutes' worth of fuel"
  
• Edison2
  "The car — as aerodynamic as it is anorexic — weighs less than 800 lb., which helps it get 102.5 m.p.g. "
  
• Antro Electric Car
  "The Antro Solo can hold up to three people — a driver and two passengers, one on either side — who pedal to help drive the ultralight car. The rest of the forward motion comes from an electric motor that's partly powered by solar panels."
  
• Electric-Car Charging Stations

"Coulomb Technologies is building a system of automated charging stations in public places that are connected to utilities, so the charge for your charge can be added to your home electricity bill."

• The Straddling Bus
  

"Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment is developing a massive "straddling bus." Cheaper than a subway, the partly solar-powered behemoth will span two lanes and carry up to 1,200 people in a carriage raised 7 ft. above the roadway, thus allowing cars to pass, or be passed, underneath. "

• Road-Embedded Rechargers

"Engineers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology are experimenting with embedding electric strips in roadbeds that magnetically transfer energy to battery-powered vehicles above."

• Terrafugia Transition

"The Terrafugia Transition could redefine the convertible. And door-to-door travel. Designed by a team of MIT aeronautics engineers, including Terrafugia co-founders Carl Dietrich and his wife Anna Mracek Dietrich, the Transition is a street-legal, airworthy, airbag-and-parachute-equipped flying car

• The Plastic-Bottle Boat
  "Plastiki, a 60-ft. catamaran built with 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and a fully recyclable plastic material called Seretex and held together with organic glue made from cashew-nut husks and sugarcane."
  

Health & Medicine

• The Malaria-Proof Mosquito and The Mosquito Laser

"The laser targets the mosquitoes' size and signature wing beat and sends the bugs down in a burst of flame, making their deaths good for public health and, well, kind of cool."

• NeoNurture Incubator
  "NeoNurture incubator employs an underutilized resource (old car parts) to address a critical need: functioning incubators to nurture premature newborns."
  
• eLegs Exoskeleton

"The robotic prosthetic legs use artificial intelligence to "read" the wearer's arm gestures via a set of crutches, simulating a natural human gait. "

• EyeWriter

"Allow people suffering from any kind of neuromuscular syndrome to write and draw by tracking their eye movement and translating it to lines on a screen."

Bioengineering

• First Synthetic Cell

"managed to reconstruct the genome of a bacterium that successfully "booted up," dividing and replicating just like any other bug."

• Lab-Grown Lungs

"researchers have re-created the delicate architecture of a rat lung accurately enough for it to assume 95% of a normal lung's inhaling and exhaling functions. "

• 3-D Bioprinter

"San Diego–based companies Invetech and Organovo have developed what amounts to a dot-matrix printer for human organs."

• Faster-Growing Salmon
  "Splice in a gene from Chinook salmon with DNA from an eellike creature called an ocean pout. AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon can grow twice as fast, making them easier to farm."
  

Green Energy

• Deep Green Underwater Kite

"Minesto calls the technology Deep Green and says it can generate 500 kilowatts of power even in calm waters; the design could increase the market for tidal power by 80%, the company says."

• Body Powered Devices

"Michael McAlpine of Princeton University and colleagues figured out how to turn locomotion into power by embedding piezoelectric crystals into a flexible, biocompatible rubberlike material that, when bent, allows the crystals to produce energy"

• Power-Aware Cord
  "What if you could actually see the electricity flowing into your machines? The Power-Aware Cord embeds wires around a cable that pulse light in relation to how much electricity is being drawn off the grid."
  
• Bloom Box

"Its Bloom Box — about half the size of a shipping container — generates electricity using solid oxide fuel cells, which provide juice by oxidizing a fuel source. "

• The (Almost) Waterless Washing Machine

"U.S. uses more than 330 billion gal. of water on laundry each year, according to the British firm Xeros Ltd. The company is developing a machine that draws cleaning power from reusable, stain-absorbing nylon beads, requiring much less water — as much as 90% less — than a normal washing machine."

Clothing

• BioCouture

"The resulting fabric, which has a vaguely skinlike texture, can be molded and sewn into shirts and coats. Suzanne Lee, a researcher at London's well-regarded Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, has developed a material made by the bacteria that are usually used to turn green tea into the fermented beverage kombucha"

• Spray-On Fabric
  
  "The British company Fabrican has developed a way to bond and liquefy fibers so that textiles can be sprayed out of a can or spray gun straight onto a body or dress form."
  
• The Plastic-Fur Coat
  "Embroidering the plastic fasteners in a herringbone pattern on a leather coat, turning the disposable into a fashion statement: fake fake fur."
  

• Woolfiller
  "Take the special wool and felting needle and poke the needle — which has small hooks along the point — through the wool and your moth-eaten garment.
  

Robots/Software

• The Deceitful Robot

"Georgia Tech's new robot, which uses algorithms to detect conflict and then assess the best method of escaping from it, can create a false trail, send erroneous communications and hide from an enemy. "

• The English-Teaching Robot

"Call it the job terminator. South Korea, which employs some 30,000 foreigners to teach English, has plans for a new addition to its language classrooms: the English-speaking robot."

• Lifeguard Robot

"EMILY, or the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard, is a robotic buoy that can swim through riptides at a speed of up to 24 m.p.h. "

• Sarcasm Detection
  "If a computer using the Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification read that last sentence, it would immediately detect the sarcasm."
  

Military

• Super Super Soaker
  
  "Troops in Afghanistan are using a new "water disrupter" to disable roadside bombs. The clear plastic device is filled with water and a small explosive charge that, when set off, generates a thin blade of water that pulverizes the target. "
  
• Less Dangerous Explosives
  "New IMX-101 explosive — while packing the same punch as TNT — is "more thermally stable," says Philip Samuels, a chemical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center."
  
• The X-51A WaveRider
  "The X-51A WaveRider demonstration project, part of the U.S.'s Prompt Global Strike initiative to attack any spot on the globe within an hour, is a prime example. The WaveRider is hypersonic, traveling 600 miles in 10 minutes."
• X-Flex Blast Protection
  "X-Flex wallpaper won't make your walls aesthetically pleasing, just safe from collapsing from lethal force. This startlingly resilient covering is designed to reinforce buildings against man-made blasts, flying shrapnel and destabilizing natural disasters."
  
• Iron Man Suit
  "An honest-to-goodness Iron Man suit, the XOS 2 allows even its least muscular wearer to lift 200-lb. weights without breaking a sweat and, as seen in demonstration videos that have gone viral, punch through slabs of wood that a person would be at pains to even saw through ordinarily."
  

Miscellaneous

• The Seed Cathedral
  "British pavilion for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is constructed of 60,000 light-funneling fiber-optic rods, each with one or more seeds implanted at its tip. "
• STS-111 Instant Infrastructure
  
  "Lighter-than-air, unmanned flying vehicle made of ripstop nylon that, if test flights are anything to go by, will be able to soar as high as 9,000 ft. for as long as three days"
  
• Better 3-D Glasses
  "3-D glasses reduce the brightness of the image as much as 50%, and if you're nearsighted, you have to put them on over your regular glasses, doubling the nerd quotient."
  
• Responsible Homeowner Reward Program
  "Banks promise to pay borrowers who continue to pay on time a lump sum — typically 10% of their original loan amount — when they sell or refinance their home."
  
• Sugru
  "Looks like Play-Doh, acts like Super Glue. Sugru, a brightly colored silicone rubber, is the brainchild of designer Jane ni Dhulchaointigh, who worked with scientists for five years to develop a material soft enough to mold yet durable enough to fix or "hack" things so they work better."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2029497,00.html#ixzz15815y300

Apple's Innovation Strategy

How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?

Download Apple's Innovation Strategy, and learn how Apple became the #1 innovator through:

• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs Visionary Leadership

Learn more...

The Best 50 Inventions of 2010

Time Magazine announced the 50 best inventions of 2010... And it's one helluva list!

Here's the top 50 inventions & innovations of 2010...

Technology

• iPad
• No surprises here, the Apple iPad is a top Technology pick..."Apple is the first company that designed finger-friendly hardware and software from scratch rather than stuffing a PC into a keyboardless case."
  
• Flipboard
  "The killer iPad app Flipboard ends the chaos by grabbing updates, photos and links from your friends and other interesting people, then reformatting everything in a wonderfully browsable, magazine-like format."
  
• Looxcie
  "Invented by a parent who found himself fumbling with video cameras while trying to record children's parties, Looxcie can capture everything the user sees for up to five hours, hands-free."
  
• Kickstarter
  "Kickstarter as crowdsourced philanthropy — a website where anyone can donate any amount to a project in development, with no money changing hands until a minimum threshold has been met"
  
• Square
  "With the aid of a tiny magnetic card reader that attaches to a smart phone, Square lets anyone process credit cards."
• Sony Alpha A55 Camera
  "Sony's Alpha A55 has an ingenious translucent mirror that stays put. That means you can shoot up to 10 perfectly focused photos a second and record HD video that never goes blurry."
  

Transportation

• Amtrak's Beef-Powered Train
• Google's Driverless Car

"Is it an autoautomobile? An aut2.0mobile? Whatever you call it, Google's new Prius — tricked out with radar sensors, video cameras and a laser range finder — has driven itself 140,000 miles without an unscheduled meeting with a light pole. "

• Martin Jetpack
  "The Martin Jetpack positions itself as the planet's first practical jet pack — as if it were some kind of airborne Swiffer. The Martin Jetpack could take its operator up 8,000 ft. Since it holds only 30 minutes' worth of fuel"
  
• Edison2
  "The car — as aerodynamic as it is anorexic — weighs less than 800 lb., which helps it get 102.5 m.p.g. "
  
• Antro Electric Car
  "The Antro Solo can hold up to three people — a driver and two passengers, one on either side — who pedal to help drive the ultralight car. The rest of the forward motion comes from an electric motor that's partly powered by solar panels."
  
• Electric-Car Charging Stations

"Coulomb Technologies is building a system of automated charging stations in public places that are connected to utilities, so the charge for your charge can be added to your home electricity bill."

• The Straddling Bus
  

"Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment is developing a massive "straddling bus." Cheaper than a subway, the partly solar-powered behemoth will span two lanes and carry up to 1,200 people in a carriage raised 7 ft. above the roadway, thus allowing cars to pass, or be passed, underneath. "

• Road-Embedded Rechargers

"Engineers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology are experimenting with embedding electric strips in roadbeds that magnetically transfer energy to battery-powered vehicles above."

• Terrafugia Transition

"The Terrafugia Transition could redefine the convertible. And door-to-door travel. Designed by a team of MIT aeronautics engineers, including Terrafugia co-founders Carl Dietrich and his wife Anna Mracek Dietrich, the Transition is a street-legal, airworthy, airbag-and-parachute-equipped flying car

• The Plastic-Bottle Boat
  "Plastiki, a 60-ft. catamaran built with 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and a fully recyclable plastic material called Seretex and held together with organic glue made from cashew-nut husks and sugarcane."
  

Health & Medicine

• The Malaria-Proof Mosquito and The Mosquito Laser

"The laser targets the mosquitoes' size and signature wing beat and sends the bugs down in a burst of flame, making their deaths good for public health and, well, kind of cool."

• NeoNurture Incubator
  "NeoNurture incubator employs an underutilized resource (old car parts) to address a critical need: functioning incubators to nurture premature newborns."
  
• eLegs Exoskeleton

"The robotic prosthetic legs use artificial intelligence to "read" the wearer's arm gestures via a set of crutches, simulating a natural human gait. "

• EyeWriter

"Allow people suffering from any kind of neuromuscular syndrome to write and draw by tracking their eye movement and translating it to lines on a screen."

Bioengineering

• First Synthetic Cell

"managed to reconstruct the genome of a bacterium that successfully "booted up," dividing and replicating just like any other bug."

• Lab-Grown Lungs

"researchers have re-created the delicate architecture of a rat lung accurately enough for it to assume 95% of a normal lung's inhaling and exhaling functions. "

• 3-D Bioprinter

"San Diego–based companies Invetech and Organovo have developed what amounts to a dot-matrix printer for human organs."

• Faster-Growing Salmon
  "Splice in a gene from Chinook salmon with DNA from an eellike creature called an ocean pout. AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon can grow twice as fast, making them easier to farm."
  

Green Energy

• Deep Green Underwater Kite

"Minesto calls the technology Deep Green and says it can generate 500 kilowatts of power even in calm waters; the design could increase the market for tidal power by 80%, the company says."

• Body Powered Devices

"Michael McAlpine of Princeton University and colleagues figured out how to turn locomotion into power by embedding piezoelectric crystals into a flexible, biocompatible rubberlike material that, when bent, allows the crystals to produce energy"

• Power-Aware Cord
  "What if you could actually see the electricity flowing into your machines? The Power-Aware Cord embeds wires around a cable that pulse light in relation to how much electricity is being drawn off the grid."
  
• Bloom Box

"Its Bloom Box — about half the size of a shipping container — generates electricity using solid oxide fuel cells, which provide juice by oxidizing a fuel source. "

• The (Almost) Waterless Washing Machine

"U.S. uses more than 330 billion gal. of water on laundry each year, according to the British firm Xeros Ltd. The company is developing a machine that draws cleaning power from reusable, stain-absorbing nylon beads, requiring much less water — as much as 90% less — than a normal washing machine."

Clothing

• BioCouture

"The resulting fabric, which has a vaguely skinlike texture, can be molded and sewn into shirts and coats. Suzanne Lee, a researcher at London's well-regarded Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, has developed a material made by the bacteria that are usually used to turn green tea into the fermented beverage kombucha"

• Spray-On Fabric
  
  "The British company Fabrican has developed a way to bond and liquefy fibers so that textiles can be sprayed out of a can or spray gun straight onto a body or dress form."
  
• The Plastic-Fur Coat
  "Embroidering the plastic fasteners in a herringbone pattern on a leather coat, turning the disposable into a fashion statement: fake fake fur."
  

• Woolfiller
  "Take the special wool and felting needle and poke the needle — which has small hooks along the point — through the wool and your moth-eaten garment.
  

Robots/Software

• The Deceitful Robot

"Georgia Tech's new robot, which uses algorithms to detect conflict and then assess the best method of escaping from it, can create a false trail, send erroneous communications and hide from an enemy. "

• The English-Teaching Robot

"Call it the job terminator. South Korea, which employs some 30,000 foreigners to teach English, has plans for a new addition to its language classrooms: the English-speaking robot."

• Lifeguard Robot

"EMILY, or the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard, is a robotic buoy that can swim through riptides at a speed of up to 24 m.p.h. "

• Sarcasm Detection
  "If a computer using the Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification read that last sentence, it would immediately detect the sarcasm."
  

Military

• Super Super Soaker
  
  "Troops in Afghanistan are using a new "water disrupter" to disable roadside bombs. The clear plastic device is filled with water and a small explosive charge that, when set off, generates a thin blade of water that pulverizes the target. "
  
• Less Dangerous Explosives
  "New IMX-101 explosive — while packing the same punch as TNT — is "more thermally stable," says Philip Samuels, a chemical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center."
  
• The X-51A WaveRider
  "The X-51A WaveRider demonstration project, part of the U.S.'s Prompt Global Strike initiative to attack any spot on the globe within an hour, is a prime example. The WaveRider is hypersonic, traveling 600 miles in 10 minutes."
• X-Flex Blast Protection
  "X-Flex wallpaper won't make your walls aesthetically pleasing, just safe from collapsing from lethal force. This startlingly resilient covering is designed to reinforce buildings against man-made blasts, flying shrapnel and destabilizing natural disasters."
  
• Iron Man Suit
  "An honest-to-goodness Iron Man suit, the XOS 2 allows even its least muscular wearer to lift 200-lb. weights without breaking a sweat and, as seen in demonstration videos that have gone viral, punch through slabs of wood that a person would be at pains to even saw through ordinarily."
  

Miscellaneous

• The Seed Cathedral
  "British pavilion for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is constructed of 60,000 light-funneling fiber-optic rods, each with one or more seeds implanted at its tip. "
• STS-111 Instant Infrastructure
  
  "Lighter-than-air, unmanned flying vehicle made of ripstop nylon that, if test flights are anything to go by, will be able to soar as high as 9,000 ft. for as long as three days"
  
• Better 3-D Glasses
  "3-D glasses reduce the brightness of the image as much as 50%, and if you're nearsighted, you have to put them on over your regular glasses, doubling the nerd quotient."
  
• Responsible Homeowner Reward Program
  "Banks promise to pay borrowers who continue to pay on time a lump sum — typically 10% of their original loan amount — when they sell or refinance their home."
  
• Sugru
  "Looks like Play-Doh, acts like Super Glue. Sugru, a brightly colored silicone rubber, is the brainchild of designer Jane ni Dhulchaointigh, who worked with scientists for five years to develop a material soft enough to mold yet durable enough to fix or "hack" things so they work better."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2029497,00.html#ixzz15815y300

Apple's Innovation Strategy

How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?


Download Apple's Innovation Strategy, and learn how Apple became the #1 innovator through:

• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs Visionary Leadership

Learn more...