The T word

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The T Word - Cringely on technology

Without Trust you have nothing. Trust is achieved through transparency - something the Banks and Goldman have yet to embrace

(Thin) Air on Mobile

Adobe AIR on the Android Platform (Adobe Featured Blogs)

Google is happy to be partnering with Adobe to bring the full web, great applications, and developer choice to the Android platform. Our engineering teams have been working closely to bring both AIR and Flash Player to Google's mobile operating system and devices.

Ridiculous idea. Imagine designing an app that runs in Adobe Air on the desktop where you have a mouse, keyboard and big screen. Now the same app runs on Android. Good luck using that - Printing anyone?

This is just a PR stunt. Air is to resource heavy for Mobile and Flash while OK on the desktop isn't needed on the small screen.

iAds, iAds, it's off to work I go.

Is Apple Booting iAd's Competition from the iPhone?

Yep. Advertising rely's on metrics - no metrics, no ads. Apple says no metrics for you and you're done.

FaceCash

Will FaceCash, the mobile payment application, kill the credit card? | VentureBeat

Here's the problem - infrastructure. If you have to install it takes forever to get traction. It also introduces the notion of multi-factor authentication by using your face. What's interesting is why do I have to have my bank and social security data on the phone? Where is that data going?

Is Android Evil?

What might be the most closed system in the history of Open Source

VisionMobile: Is Android Evil?

Don’t believe the commercials - dig into these mobile operating systems and you’ll really learn what goes on. It’s all about control, who gets to access what and then who makes money. Neither RIM, Apple, Nokia, Microsoft or Google are charities. Each of them are going for their own lock-in. Customers are being forced to choose a platform when a phone is the most personal decision you can make.

The big 5 don’t want that - they’re grudgingly paying it lip service with HTML5 but only because it’s easy to add search and location tags.

What is Apple thinking?

“Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple’s prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited.”

link: Is Apple Closing Off the iPhone to Rival Ad Networks? | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

This is getting ridiculous. Apple wants to control every single thing. So why develop for the platform if you can't build a sustainable business?

History is doomed to repeat itself. Apple is overreaching here.

It's nuclear war in software

Has Steve Jobs gone mad? - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Apple is simply protecting it's platform against Microsoft, Google and Adobe. Same thing Google is doing with HTML5 (it's all about search).

iAd – Value Extraction Machine vs. Value Generation Engine?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off his rationale for a new ad platform and experience by knocking the competition. “For lack of a more elegant way to say it, we think most of this mobile advertising really sucks,” he said.

Jobs also took a direct dig at Google, noting that behavior in a mobile experience is more oriented to apps than search, so mobile advertising should center around apps and not search. Today, when users click on an ad within an app, “You click on a banner ad it yanks you out of an app, throws you in a browser,” said Jobs. “You may never get back to your ad and never to where you left out. So what’s the result? People don’t click on ads.”

By contrast, “Because the iAd is in the OS itself, we have figured out a way to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of the app with the iAd experience,” said Jobs. iAd holds a user’s place in an app and opens the ad up in an app-like environment that connects to the rest of the services on the iPhone, so users could look directly on a map for nearby stores, watch videos, make a picture their phone’s wallpaper, or buy a promoted app directly.

Couple of things worth noting:

• Apple had to pick apps - they don't have a search strategy (although you know it's coming)
  
• They just crushed the Mobile app/ad marketplace
  

From a business perspective Apple just extracted more value from their platform. They did so at the expense of all those VC backed Mobile ad engines including the $750M dollar purchase of AdMobs by Google. In my estimation they just lowered the value of everything around that is trying to generate value - except one constituent, the Mobile App developer. While they actually did him a favor, they made sure that no one but them is going to build big value off of that platform. (See the latest Apple Developer Agreement - link No love for Adobe)

Fair enough - it's there platform. But what about the rest of the world? Well Mobile is a big place and while it appears that Apple is the center of the universe I believe 5 years from now we'll look back at this whole app thing with mild amusement.

The world will have moved on - they will have transitioned to a Mobile Web environment which allows for a "Value Generation Engine" to be created that scales across ALL devices that connect to the Internet.

In one respect Apple has done all of us a favor - they have now drawn a direct correlation between "Emotion" and "Interactivity" saying in effect that the more personal the ad, the more local the ad, the more relevant the ad the more likely the consumer is to interact with that ad.

Well the good news is that there is already a solution out there for Mobile app and web app developers that leverages Apples idea and applies them to the Internet and all the devices that connect to it.

You can now make the Internet Personal, Local and Mobile - it can now deliver contextually aware ads that are relevant and appealing. It can do all of this without requiring a single programming behavioral change. It's called 5o9EZMobile and you can find it here - link

Apple's iPad Memory Problem

I'm going to start this blog with a disclaimer. I have no axe to grind with Apple. I'm platform agnostic and only care about "the tools" that make things work. I've been in the software business for 20 years now, am the co-inventor of mod_gzip and my latest venture (5o9 Inc) has a solution that runs on 7 platforms and allows you to extend your current web services to mobile with very little effort.

So with that said let's dig in a little to the memory problem. Years and years ago my partner and I were playing around with one of the very early HP mobile computers. I believe it was a Jornada. I remember discussing with Kevin the OS and what it could and couldn't do. Essentially what Microsoft had done was to take their current OS and strip it down to the bare essentials. The only issue with doing this is the somewhat indiscriminate removal of various API's by which programmers build new features.

Now let's fast forward to the introduction of the Blackberry Storm. We build software that runs on the Blackberry. However the Storm caught us out. The Storm introduced a new form factor. A touch screen that enables you to pinch and zoom etc. What we didn't realize at the time was that this was an incredible performance hog. So bad in fact that RIM turned off access to a crucial API that we were using. Having access to the API while the browser was running would bring the machine to a stop. So they temporarily disabled it until you had finished in the browser. Of course it was too late for us. We solved the problem using a different technique but I was again reminded that "pie is never free at the truck stop".

This now brings me to the iPad. I first noticed the issue on Daring Fireball where he talks about his frustration with Safari (scroll down for the comments). You then can click on another link which talks about why Apple may have made the design decisions they have with Mobile Safari.

So here's my premise - Apple have made some design decisions which are going to have ramifications. First of all they took the OSX platform and stripped it down. In typical Apple style less is more. I think in this case they did a little too much pruning. There's a real reason that the iPad doesn't have any ports. It's not because you couldn't put them in - it's because the amount of memory required to run would exceed the 512MB it has onboard. Which brings me to Safari. Think of Safari as a "poor mans multi-tasker" in as much it can open "multiple tabs". There's an incredible amount of rendering going on in each tab. If the page has lots of JavaScript it means that the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is working overtime. Add in a "big screen" compared with the iTouch and all the performance required to drive that and you're going to hit the memory limit immediately.

If Apple could have got 1GB of RAM on that chip it would have shipped with a camera and a USB port. No question. Aesthetics aside the iPad has traded performance and flash graphics for memory. The app that is impacted the most is the browser because of the additional requirements that are placed on the CPU to run not only the GUI interface, but multiple tabs and the rendering necessary for HTML and JavaScript - plus let's not forget the fact that it has to communicate via the TCP/IP subsystem which is talking to WiFi etc.

In short - Apple has the same problem with the iPad that the Blackberry Storm had when it first came out. The Storm's performance was awful - Apple has a bigger chip to use, but as they say in the automobile industry there's no substitute for "cc's" - in this case - Memory. The next rev of this device will have more memory. As soon as it does you can add a port, and the browser will be better behaved.

Widgets little secret.

BlackBerry OS Update: RIM Woos BlackBerry Devs With Java, Web Tools Update - www.enterprisemobiletoday.com

Wow, 20,000 new API's to access via Widgets and good old HTML/JavaScript. Here's what nobody is talking about - Cross Platform Support.

So you sit down to write this cool little widget to tie into your web app. It (the widget) talks to the Operating System via the 20,000 API's and returns data. You can then access that data via an HTML page. Essentially the Widget framework "hosts" the browsers control and you get a browser in a widget window.

Presto you think you're done, you have a cool "web app".

Not so fast!

That widget runs on Blackberry's OS which is not compatible with any other OS. So now you have to port the widget code to the other operating system. Only one problem - they don't support Blackberry's widget framework. And all that HTML/JavaScript you wrote - Oops, doesn't work on any other device.

Bugger, back to square one.

But wait there's more - Blackberry supports the OS and the Widget Framework, but the carrier gets the final say as to what the Widget can access. And guess what? Different carriers have different rules.

Bugger, Bugger.

Now you have to build a QA matrix to support the carriers and their peculiarities. And none of this works on any other platform. Oh Joy - Not!

Looking for a real cross platform solution for your Web app?

Click here

iPad + Keyboard = Laptop

I said it awhile ago. The iPad is a laptop without the keyboard. Well people now want to use it with a keyboard. And we're back to a laptop.

Why resolving Device Capabilitites is so hard

Which browser am I using?

It looks like Safari on a Mac - however I can “trick” (aka spoof) the browser into sending a different “User-Agent” (link) to a web server. I can make the web server “think” that it’s talking to ANY one of the browser versions shown above - 19 of them. In fact there are two missing - Mobile Safari - iPad 3.1.3 and soon to be 4.0.0 How the heck do I (the web app programmer) really figure out exactly what is at the other end of the conversation.

The next killer app

The next "killer app?" - Trust. Trust drives transactions. Customers want control over their "Trust account". 5o9's solution enables that to happen on any device, any screen, anywhere, at any time.

link: Facebook

iPad impressions

It's fast, it's heavy (way too heavy). 2x pixelation is awful. It's not a computer replacement until it cuts the cord with iTunes. (The Cloud) People looking at it in Best Buy and then moving on. It's not as big a deal as the iPhone was. iWork is ok for simple stuff, not going to replace anything. Rev 2.0 will be better.

To me the real issue is the continued dependency on iTunes. Time to move on.

Privacy is NOT dead

What do customers want?

• Convenience
  
• Privacy
  
• Control

ink: Privacy is not dead - Inside Windows Live - The Windows Blog

What's this?

Privacy really is important

Foursquare's Digital Graffiti, a Legally Nerve-Wracking Taste of the Future | Technomix | Fast Company

Worth a read and also worth really thinking about. Welcome to the law of unintended consequences. Privacy is a serious matter.