Seattle-based Treemo Labs has created an iOS app maker called Appafolio that requires no code in the app-building process, will show up to 10 screens of data or imagery, and caches the app content so the app will work even when an Internet connection isn’t available.

The company wants to become an app resource for business users and marketing professionals who want to create brochure-like apps that likely won’t pass muster in the App Store. Appafolio is free, though there will be a premium model that offers more bells and whistles.

There’s also a simple Appafolio pass phrase that app makers can use as a URL and share with anybody, directing iPhone and iPad users directly to their app instead of to an app store or marketplace. The link won’t, however, work on a Web browser.

Treemo co-founder and CEO Brent Brookler pointed to camera company Contour as an example. Contour used Appafolio to show off its new line of cameras a few weeks ago at the Consumer Electronics Show — where the cellular service and Wi-Fi connectivity is notoriously bad. The company used an iPad as a kind of marketing brochure at its booth, and since the content of the app could be downloaded and cached in advance, there were no issues swiping through the Contour app and viewing all of the data available.

Of course, the number of companies that help people make apps is as large as the day is long — and some them also offer no-code builds. There’s also AppMkr, AppIncubator, AppWhirl from App.co, AppVoyage and EachScape, which just nabbed $3 million in Series A funding, to name just a handful.

While the Appafolio product is geared toward business clients, the app maker doesn’t allow users to import things like PDF or PowerPoint files. So, for an offline deck, the non-iPad-owning business user might still turn to other software applications to create slides or brochures.

And while Brookler sees getting an Android app going as an important step to market Appafolio to the masses, for now the app is iOS-only.

Brookler says the app isn’t just for business users; a casual user might want to create an app for a wedding, for example. But that sort of app is also unlikely to pass App Store muster, so Appafolio makes it easier for those users to become developers for a day.

Seattle-based Treemo Labs launched in 2005 and has mainly created apps for media properties, including CBS News, “60 Minutes” and “Survivor,” as well as music video apps.

So well, in fact, that the tablet market is often characterized as being a two-horse race between the tricked-out Amazon e-reader and Apple’s iPad.

But when it comes down to the numbers, the two companies couldn’t be more different, like comparing Apples to oranges.

Tomorrow, Amazon is expected to report a giant fourth quarter, but it’s guaranteed not to look anything like Apple’s monstrous results reported last week for the same period.

Here’s one data point: For the holiday period, Apple’s gross margin was an impressive 44.7 percent, up from 38.5 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, analysts are estimating that Amazon’s operating margin will fall to 1.3 percent from 3.6 percent last year.

The specifications of the two tablets can be compared side by side, but a completely different vocabulary is needed to speak intelligently about the two businesses. Simply put, Apple is a hardware maker and Amazon is a retailer.

One has very high margins and the other doesn’t, resulting in two drastically different financial outcomes today. But over time, the idea is for that to change.

Rather than making money from hardware sales, Amazon’s approach to the Fire is to generate incremental sales from other goods and services on the device. Some analysts feel that, over time, that play can create a reliable and recurring revenue stream – and ultimately higher margins.

Tomorrow, Amazon is expected to report sales of $18.3 billion in the fourth quarter, up more than 40 percent from the same period in 2010, according to FactSet Research. Q4 earnings are expected to fall notably to 17 cents a share from 91 cents a year ago.

While revenue growth is impressive, the company’s profitability is being weighed down by losses from the $199 Kindle (which is not quite a break-even proposition), the construction of more warehouses across the globe (17 were added in 2011 for a total of 69) and other investments in infrastructure, like its cloud-computing services and media services, like video, music and e-books.

In contrast, Apple has a rich markup on its iDevices and doesn’t have much of the same overhead as Amazon.

Still, the number of consumers Amazon touches in just one quarter is staggering, and it continues to take share from brick and mortar retailers.

As J.P. Morgan analyst Douglas Anmuth points out in a report, e-commerce grew about 15 percent in Q4 in the U.S. due to strong holiday sales, but he expects Amazon’s growth rate to more than double that to 47 percent year over year.

Anmuth is also bullish that while the fourth quarter could represent a “low point for margins,” Amazon could start seeing an uptick in margin as soon as the first quarter, now that a number of services and some key infrastructure are set in place.

However, don’t expect much insight tomorrow into the company’s long-range plans. The Seattle-based company is typically short on details during its earnings release and call.

If it follows standard protocol, it could provide an update on warehouses being built next year, number of employees and other infrastructure investments, but will likely dodge answers about how many Kindles it shipped during the quarter, or how much Kindle Fire owners are purchasing on the devices.

For now, we’ll have to settle for analyst estimates.

On Sunday evening, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan raised his estimate for fourth-quarter Fire sales to six million units from five million.

While only on the market for a limited time, that’s still a lot less than Apple, which sold 15.43 million iPads, up 111 percent year over year.

Amazon’s stock dropped 1.65 percent, or $3.22, today to close at $192.15 a share.

A start-up called Tilera today unveiled a chip it calls the TILE-Gx. Essentially, it’s a super-chip with 36 cores which — so the company claims — beats a traditional Intel server chip on the key metric of performance per watt.

For those who don’t keep score in the arcane world of semiconductors, I’ll revisit some of the basics of the above paragraph. We all know that Intel and its one main rival, Advanced Micro Devices, sell chips for servers. Those chips, and those that go into PCs, are generally known as x86 chips, a name derived from the instruction set they share.

On the other hand, there are ARM chips, which are a different breed, and exist in a very different ecosystem. Scores of companies make ARM-based chips for all kinds of different uses, and they license the basics of the designs from ARM, the company, which last year did $636 million in revenue.

ARM chips show up in phones and tablets from the likes of Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia, but not so much in PCs and servers. ARM is even the basis for Apple’s A4 and A5 chips. At CES last year, Microsoft said it would create a version of Windows 8 that will support ARM chips. And a company called Calxeda (which I initially got mixed up with Tilera) is aiming to bring ARM cores to chips running in servers.

Tilera, based in San Jose, Calif., is backed by investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Walden International, Columbia Capital and VentureTech Alliance; plus a trio of strategic investors, Quanta Computer, NTT Finance and Broadcom. Its new chip is based around an entirely new architecture developed by Tilera’s CTO Anant Agarwal, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It forgoes both the traditional x86 and ARM architectures. Aimed squarely at servers, its intention is to get the same work done that a traditional Intel server chip does, while using less power to do it.

That’s not a trivial benefit, especially in data center environments where servers are bunched together and pushed to the performance limit. The biggest operational expense in running them is going to be power. So it’s on this point that server vendors and chip vendors obsess over saving a watt here and there — over the machine’s useful lifetime, the costs will add up considerably.

How it does this is what makes it interesting. Essentially, the cores on the chip do something that an Intel chip can’t do: They communicate among themselves. The way I understand it — and I admit I’m simplifying it greatly — the cores on an x86 chip rely on a single communications channel, called the Bus, to communicate. The Tilera architecture allows each core to communicate directly with the other cores, thus eliminating the need for the Bus and cutting back on the need for power.

The top-end chip — there are two versions — has 36 cores. A core is essentially the main computing engine on a chip. If you’re reading this on a PC, chances are the chip inside it has two cores, maybe four. It used to be that chips had only one core, until it became logical to put two or more on a single chip. I’ve always compared multicore chips to roommates folding laundry together. When there’s a big pile of laundry to be folded, one person can certainly do it, but two or four get it done faster and with less effort. Multicore chips basically prove the old adage that many hands make for fast work.

There’s an obvious appeal to a chip like this, but there are a lot of strikes against it. First, much of the server ecosystem is pretty well entrenched. Companies run what applications they already have, and are usually loath to mess with their computing environments much. Changing the architecture of the CPU chip inside the servers is about as major a decision as a CIO may ever make, and one they don’t make lightly. First they’ll have to test it and run it for awhile, and then see how it interacts with other systems. It’s not the sort of decision that happens just overnight. Also, a new architecture brings with it a lot of software compatibility questions that will give many IT departments pause.

Meanwhile, Intel, which sells chips that go into most of the world’s mainstream servers, will continue to push its power consumption down. At the same time, it’s been trying like crazy to use its Atom line of chips to mount an attack on ARM’s territory and win business from phone and tablet vendors. That effort is just now seeing its first early successes. If there’s a great long-term story in chips that bears watching, the grappling between Intel and the ever-expanding universe of ARM vendors is certainly it.

Correction: I initially thought the Tilera chip was based on the ARM architecture. I’ve revised the story to correct that.

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

Oh, just look here, via this cool infographic from MBAOnline:

This year, even the big case makers took a pass on the show.

Although attendance is projected to be up slightly, to 25,000 people, the show floor didn’t reflect the surge of popularity around Apple’s products — a surge that has led to a significant rise in Apple gear at the Consumer Electronics Show. Macworld organizer IDG World Expo wouldn’t say how much square footage it had sold this year, saying only that there were about 300 exhibitors.

The biggest name on the floor was Hewlett-Packard, whose large booth was at the entrance to the exhibit hall at Moscone West in San Francisco.

From there, the big names were few and far between. Of course, Apple wasn’t there. Nor was Adobe, or Microsoft. Also missing were big accessory makers like Belkin, Speck and Griffin.

In their place was an odd collection of start-ups looking for attention.

Several of the booths showcased former Kickstarter projects hoping for new business partners. Olloclip was there, pitching their add-on iPhone lenses, while iKeyboard was there to show a physical keyboard that attaches to the face of the iPad to give the touchscreen a tactile response. Another booth was pitching an interesting docking station called LandingZone, designed specifically for the MacBook Air.

There were still lots of iPhone and iPad cases, of course, even if fewer than at CES or Macworlds of years past. One interesting product line featured eco-friendly, made-in-the-U.S. phone cases that are also compostable, for when Apple comes out with a new model and you need to switch.

One of the other vendors that caught my eye was VanGogh Imaging, which was using four Kinect sensors to capture 3-D images and create a visual model. While creating a virtual Mini-Me, company CEO Ken Lee explained how VanGogh hopes that cellphones and tablets can be used to capture, render and display the models.

“We’re here to look for partners,” Lee said.

But my favorite was the booth for a gadget insurer called Worth Ave. Group. The company had created a cellphone twist on the classic Whac-A-Mole arcade game, allowing convention-goers an opportunity to pound out their smartphone frustrations.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/a-quick-spin-around-mini-macworld-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-raises-barely-a-ripple-in-the-tablet-wave/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-raises-barely-a-ripple-in-the-tablet-wave/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:22:00 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=168007 Some disappointing numbers in Motorola Mobility’s latest earnings report: A loss of $80 million on revenue of $3.4 billion, and mobile device shipments of 10.5 million versus 11.3 million a year ago. Still, few were as grim as these: 200,000 tablets shipped in the fourth quarter and just 1 million shipped for all of 2011. In other words, it took MoMo a full year to ship 1/15th the number of iPads Apple sold in its most recent quarter.

And this is the company that Google has decided to spend $12.5 billion on.

Of course, Motorola Mobility has always known it had its work cut out for it on the tablet front. As Christy Wyatt, VP and general manager for mobile devices, told AllThingsD’s Ina Fried last month, “I think tablets have come a long, long way. Adoption of Android tablets in the broad consumer sense, and especially with enterprise users, is still something we would like to focus on for the next year. A lot of that has to do with the application ecosystem, making sure we have the applications that we need. [Google's] Ice Cream Sandwich [Android update] goes a long way to unify the developer communities across screens.”

And why will people pick Motorola out of the legion of Android contenders? “At the end of the day, there are certain brands that consumers trust,” said Wyatt. “People tend to go to the Motorola brand where they are looking for a brand that they trust for reliability, for quality.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-raises-barely-a-ripple-in-the-tablet-wave/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/most-people-would-be-disturbed-if-they-saw-where-their-iphone-comes-from/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/most-people-would-be-disturbed-if-they-saw-where-their-iphone-comes-from/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:50:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=167809 This according to a former Apple executive who tells the New York Times that the working conditions at the company’s overseas manufacturing partners are still sorely lacking. And while there have been improvements since Apple began auditing factories, there’s a lot more that can be done. Said another former Apple exec, “We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/most-people-would-be-disturbed-if-they-saw-where-their-iphone-comes-from/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/autodesk-is-all-smiles-with-its-mac-software-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/autodesk-is-all-smiles-with-its-mac-software-business/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:24:56 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=167715 Since Apple reported such monstrously successful earnings earlier this week, the whole wide world has been parsing the company’s numbers and slapping their heads at the size of the iPhone and iPad sales, and what it all means for everyone else.

But Apple is still a consumer-focused personal computer company, and one trend I like to revisit is how Apple continues to grow its presence in business and professional settings.

Here’s a pretty good indicator: If you’re in the business of designing things like machines or buildings, there’s a chance you’re using software from Autodesk. Its latest mechanical design software, called Inventor Fusion, is used by mechanical engineers to design cars and planes and factory assembly lines. It’s heavy-duty software that’s currently available on Windows. A new trial version for the Mac has just recently come out is coming out soon.

While engineering software like this tended to be run on beefed-up Windows workstations during the last decade, the Mac has started to make serious inroads among engineers and designers, especially the younger ones, says Autodesk product manager Kevin Schneider. “The younger generation of engineers has grown up with computing expectations that are completely different,” he says. They used Macs at school, probably learned to edit photos and video in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, so when they start using CAD and other software, naturally, they want it running on a Mac, too.

Autodesk makes four applications available on Apple’s App Store, and the results are pretty stunning. Those applications — Autocad LT, Autocad WS, Motion FX and Sketchbook Pro — have clocked up 2.2 million downloads via the App Store. That’s a lot for any software, and it’s a heck of a lot when you consider that these applications don’t come for free. Sketchbook Pro goes for $59.99; Autocad LT costs $899.99.

The number is even more impressive when you consider that Autodesk apps account for about 2 percent of total downloads on the App Store. Late last year, Apple announced that its store had broken the 100-million-download mark, generating 100,000 downloads a day, and making it the biggest software download site in the world.

It’s just another indication that the Mac is still making inroads against Windows in the workplace. A new Forrester Research survey of 3,350 IT decision makers finds that 46 percent of all firms in North America and Europe issued Macs to their employees in 2011; that figure was up by more than half since 2009.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/autodesk-is-all-smiles-with-its-mac-software-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120125/track-changes-on-an-ipad/ http://allthingsd.com/20120125/track-changes-on-an-ipad/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:02:59 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=167601 Q:

You recently reviewed an iPad app that lets you use Microsoft Office programs on an iPad. But does this support the “Track Changes” feature of Office, which I cannot find on any of the office-type apps I’ve tried on the iPad?

A:

Yes, it does. And tracked changes are synchronized with your PC or Mac.

As I noted in the review, the new app, called OnLive Desktop, gives you the complete Windows version of Office on an iPad, via the cloud. So all features in the Windows version, including the tracking of changes, are available.

Q:

I am a new Mac user and would like to become a Quicken user. I read your February 2010 critique of Mac Quicken. Is there a new and improved version of Mac Quicken?

A:

Intuit, the maker of the stripped-down Quicken Essentials for Mac I reviewed then, has improved the product. But more important, the company now says its last full version of Quicken for the Mac, called Quicken 2007, will soon be revised so that it runs with Lion, the latest version of the Macintosh operating system.

There was outrage from Mac Quicken users when Intuit earlier had declined to rewrite the full version to work with Lion.

Q:

Could you please tell me which smartphone today is a must if my last phone was the iPhone 4? Your review of the iPhone 4S indicated it wasn’t a “must” upgrade for iPhone 4 owners.

A:

Changing to a different phone would only be a “must” for you if you were unhappy with your iPhone, or wanted one of a couple of key features only available on competing phones.

One would be a larger screen. The iPhone screen is 3.5 inches, but some newer Android phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, now have giant screens as large as 4.65 inches. Personally, I find that too large for comfort, but you might not.

Another important feature is LTE wireless capability. A number of Android phones, such as the Motorola Droid RAZR, support LTE, a fourth-generation wireless technology that is much, much faster at data downloads than 3G, though it also tends to use up your battery faster. No iPhone yet supports LTE.

Write to Walt at mossberg@wsj.com

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