Content about Business

Monday, April 12, 2010 - 21:59

@War: Apple 3.3.1 to escalate losses for Silicon Valley VCs, Storm Ventures takes biggest hit

UPDATE: While I personally think that Apple has fast become the embodiment of closed. I respect CEOs who take risks. Plenty of CEOs (in fact all the ones I know) would never even think of insulting a past present or future vendor partner. For each CEO I Respect I can think of a moment that they were dead wrong.

Bill Gates said Linux would never be secure because people working for free in their spare time don't do good work. Then came the age where the would could not operate without the security that Linux provides.

Michael Dell once held a press conference where he said "people are going to access the internet on their phones? This little screen? Never."

Steve Jobs said that bloggers were a fad and that they would never be respected the way journalists are. Soon after that, we entered the era of The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton and blogs on almost every site.

I'm accustomed to seeing the big personalities have their dooseys over time. That said, I've never seen this and don't know what to do with it: Monitoring Adobe's Development of the Flash Compiler for iPhone, waiting for them to have spent time and money on getting it to work and work well, then switching the SDK license just before launch costing them time, energy, money and face with the industry. It is demoralizing and asinine at best and shouldn't make any company who depends on Apple's API's feel safe.

It is irresponsible of any API provider not to proactively inform a developer that they would never approve what they were building. It is the antithesis of the 3rd party API experience to have spent millions on a project and be informed by TOS update days before launch that everything you have worked on with your team is never going to reach the market. On top of that, they knew, and deliberately waited for it to be as expensive as possible.

That was not cool. The fiduciary responsibility of an executive or director is to maximize the return on investment for the shareholder by competition for the consumer and the consumer must be allowed to choose the winners. If that behavior is allowed to stand then all we have worked for in Web 2.0 is greatly diminished by the precedent. That you can bait and switch a developer into huge losses by manipulating your TOS.

Apple seems to think it is ok to offer an API, lure as many companies as possible to develop for it, keep one specific developer at arms length until they have spent a fortune, then deny that team their launch, and toss their project in the boneyard. The material efficiency of the entire industry drops when money is wasted. Everyone suffers. A simple email when they knew would have saved heartache and capital loss. This is no way to compete for market share and it undermines Apple's credibility in ways more costly than letting Adobe make slow apps. The developers don't hold press conferences and will never tell Apple that was evil. They will bide their time and hedge their bets.

My own opinion aside, I received an email from the CEO of Appcelerator which, like Phone Gap's assertions from a few weeks ago, explains that they are not the target of 3.3.1 and claims that they will be an exception because they claim to be better developers than Adobe and have more attention to detail.

It's a dark time in the valley when emails like this have to be written. The spirit of the iPhone platform is shifting from announcements like "Great news! Look how cool we are!" to "Great News! We probably won't be in the carnage you just saw!"

Here's the message in it's entirety:

Sid Gabriel:

I wanted to provide everyone an update on the issues related to the iPhone 4.0 Terms of Service. While we have yet to receive any formal word from Apple as it relates to Titanium, this morning, Steve Jobs posted some thoughts on why Apple is banning Flash on the iPhone/iPad. The focus of the article is on making two important arguments: how to ensure a high-quality iPhone experience and the importance of using open technologies. Based on his piece, we have a few followup points as this news relates to Appcelerator Titanium.

- If there was any doubt, Apple's specific target is Adobe Flash.

- At the crux of every one of Jobs' points is a single overriding theme: ensuring application quality. More specifically, Apple wants to make sure that applications written for the iPhone/iPad are developed using all the great features in the iPhone SDK and that they should not be developed using a lowest common denominator approach. We couldn't agree more. Split views, popovers, cover flow views, native table views, native maps, native tab bars… There are over 2,000 methods and properties available to Titanium developers to customize their applications with almost every native Apple UI or feature imaginable. And if something isn't in there that you need, it's easy to extend the platform by building a native Titanium module. This extensible, native architecture is probably the reason you chose Titanium in the first place. One of the most common statements we hear about Titanium is: "You built *that app* in Javascript. Wow!".

- As it relates to adoption of new iPhone capabilities, we rev our product very quickly. In fact, next week, we'll introduce support for iPhone 4.0 application development with Titanium 1.3.0. And we'll continue to add new APIs as Apple finalizes the 4.0 OS. This has always been the case with our stance on updates to the underlying operating systems that we support. In all cases, we are working with Apple APIs under NDA before they're finally available to the public and we'll continue to do that as normal.

- Apple has a clear preference for open technologies, specifically HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Here too, we are in alignment. Titanium developers code in Javascript as executed by the Webkit engine (eg: the kind that Apple prefers in its ToS), and web content can easily be displayed using HTML5 and CSS through a web view. We're big supporters in these technologies and ourselves have contributed to WebKit (Martin Robinson, one of our desktop engineers, is a WebKit committer).

- We've had over 50 applications approved for the App Store over the past 3 weeks under the new terms (which every developer now needs to agree to). Not a single one has been rejected for being built on Titanium. We even updated our own test app, Snapost, after accepting the new terms.

In summary, Apple is targeting Flash (mission accomplished) and Apple wants to push their platform forward by having only high-quality, native applications in the App Store. We couldn't agree more. Native application development with open technologies is in our DNA and our continued vision for Appcelerator.

Sincerely,
Jeff Haynie
CEO

4.1 Million invested in Appcelerator may evaporate if it is no longer able to publish iPhone Apps
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/appcelerator

This was an investment of Larry Augustin and Storm Venttures
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/larry-augustin
http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/storm-ventures

This effects it's Principals: Ben Choi among others.
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ben-choi

This in turn weakens the strategic positioning of Book Renter and Mobile Iron
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/bookrenter-com
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mobileiron

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - 14:28

Please Don't Let The Apple Tablet Be A Big Ass iPhone

UPDATE: Yep, it's a big ass iPod Touch

Apple had a mega-hit, and they may not be able to take their eyes off it and point them back in the place artists know as the well. The place that all human endeavor arises from. What does it all mean? If it's just a bigger iPhone: the days of the innovative Apple may be gone.

This is a good soundtrack for the next paragraph: Open a Panel

It's 4:19am and I'm hoping to get a few hours of sleep in before the day breaks and Apple begins to announce it's much anticipated "new creation". I love Apple. I really love the practice of competing with the ideal. One common focus of inspiring intellectuals, athletes and artists has been to compete only with themselves and by proxy, their ideal vision. Apple appears to have gone astray in that and held not on to their own ideal, but upon the ideal implied by their sales. They may recover today, they may fix their trajectory. If they don't, not much else but a fall from grace could restore that tiny bit of dissatisfaction needed to be truly alive. That hungry, foolish voice within that has nothing to loose and is willing to take big risks to reach an ideal only it can see. The "spark". Without it, Apple is in dangerous territory, and they can't see money.

Here's what we need to see to believe in Apple Corp's future (and none of these are bigger iPhone)

1. An Affordable Media Subscription Model

We need to see a strategy to sustain Apple's media business. That means we need a subscription model for music, television, movies and apps. Not a rental or ownership model: an all you can eat model. Right now Hulu on a $200 netbook with an HDMI port makes my Apple TV look like an expensive and arrogant eunuch. It's not the sign of a winner to cripple their own devices and underperform.

2. A version of OSX for all Intel Core(i3 i5 i7) computers

We must see a real business strategy for reach. iTunes on Windows is not enough. There has been enough movement in the Hackintosh and unlicensed clone market to show traction for an OSX "lite" version for non-Apple hardware. The Apple base must grow to survive and the current strategy of pricing a Quad-Core iMac with a 27" screen below $2k is not enough endurance for the market ahead.

3. An iPod app for Android and iTunes for Linux

Apple must extend it's reach and allow people who have bought media from iTunes to play it on all operating systems and devices. When we purchased our libraries, title by title, many of us saw iTunes for Windows as a stake in the ground from Apple. Saying "You don't have to use a Mac to watch the movie you just bought, or to enjoy the iTunes experience". Now like a buffoon, iTunes is actually propping up Windows. With many users I know spending 90% of their time on Windows on iTunes and Firefox (the other 10% on securing Windows)

So it's a tall list, but strategically sound. If Apple left these three things on the table while they pursued a larger, more (self)gratifying iPhone, then I assert that they can not see the consumer any longer. They have chosen not to put their content on all the slates. They do not support a user experience where consumers are free to listen to the music they paid for in any way they want. Apple will have proven it has lost sight of the basic state of hunger synonymous with life, and can not be trusted to continue to perform.

We need to see the ominous and polarizing wind of war that has come into silicon valley meet a blast of warmth from the heart of innovation and I hope it is Apple, but sell your stock if all you see tomorrow is a whoop-de-do bigger iphone. It may be time.

Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 11:44

SixthSense Tempers Hype With Wonder In The Field of Augmented Reality

I remember a time when the AR news was not about consumer products and was read in little pockets of the internet and amongst "Kit" obsessed übergeeks who strapped cameras to their heads and wore "wearable computers" which, at the time, were backpacks with pcs in them. They wanted to show everyone how cool it was, but your average person, is unwilling to wear a backpack computer with a camera on a bike helmet and walk into a public place anywhere.

In July I met Neogence CEO Robert Rice and had a long chat about the challenges of AR. His big concern, now that Augmented Reality is becoming as much a household term as Virtual Reality once was, is in the danger of hype. AR is the robust and realistic descendant of VR. We have made it a long way from Johnny Mnemonic and VRML, but risky investments and hype-bubble conditions won't speed development of the field. I can't remember his exact words, thankfully Twitter does. Anyone working in AR today who was around to see the unbelievable spending during the much hyped and never realized age of VR generally steers clear of hype and speaks with at tone of harsh realism.

Then there is the man with the colored tape on his fingers. The one who says anyone can make their own device, that immerses them in a gestural user interface, projects a tag cloud of related keywords on the chest of a person it recognizes, turns a wall into a touch interface, can make a normal index card into a tilt video game and costs around $300. He knows because he's wearing his around his neck.

His name is Pranav Mistry, a PhD student at MIT's Media lab, and he wants to make it all open source and free. I checked that claim, and though there's no source code to be found, there are also no
MIT Labs Pending Patent Applications that claim to own his inventions. He may indeed be the best thing that could happen to hype. The real thing. We can only hope that when he publishes his code, the emerging crop of fresh new Augmented Reality developers will take the ball and run with it.

More info on SixthSense here: http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/

As always, there's more than an hour of video related to this post in the masthead above. But I'll start you off with the TED Talk that unveiled the vision:

Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 15:53

TV Everywhere

Time Warner's Chairman Jeff Bewkes has a plan for the future of television. He wants to see TV Everywhere, and he's having an easy time convincing the industry.

Image representing Jeff Bewkes as depicted in ...

In a recent Time Warner interview published on YouTube, Jeff Bewkes describes the need for a new way of looking at TV. The key assertions he makes paint a picture of a model of service that might just make his TV Everywhere easier than piracy, more accessible than Apple's iTunes Store and cheaper than what you currently pay for cable at home.

"Viewers want to watch on demand and they want to watch it on computers"

NBC and Fox launched Hulu.com in late 2007. An experiment in making television shows available online. In 2008 we saw Hulu's traffic rise to rival YouTube. The quality of content was the biggest issue for some, YouTube had delivered short-attention-span entertainment, but was starting to lack luster as more studios enforced their copyrights, removing volumes of traffic generating bootleg content. Youtube began tackling the issue of content curation head on, and added commercial content early this year.

SAN FRANCISCO - JANUARY 15: (L-R) You Tube fo...

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As Hulu continued to grow, Disney joined the partnership in April of this year. There is absolutely no evidence of this, but it bears mentioning that some insiders believe the investment in Hulu was favored by Disney's majority shareholder Steve Jobs because Hulu's choice to remove it's library from Boxee.TV all but halted the wave of AppleTV/Boxee conversions happening at the time. AppleTV owners were "jailbreaking" their AppleTV set top boxes to install Boxee and watch Hulu on their big screens, when Hulu pulled it's content, the AppleTV was saved. The investment in Hulu extended Disney's reach and protects Apple's domain.

By the fall of 2009 the message was loud and clear. People want to watch TV on their computers and don't see much of a distinction between a set top "digital media receiver" and a computer connected to a screen.

"People love television and we should put television online"

Time Warner had many options. At the Atlantic's First Draft of History conference when asked if Time Warner would bid on NBC Jeff Bewkes said "There's no real need or benefit for us to take on the various aspects of NBC" he went on further to mention that big deals hardly ever work, and that Time Warner was focusing on it's core business of creating content. Time Warner is putting it's content online and it looks like Youtube is first in line.

"If you have a network at home, you should be able to watch the content you have paid for anywhere."

This is where the difficult road lies. Creating an authentication system that is able to tell any network who can see what content. This gargantuan task is being championed by Comcast.

With Comcast currently weighing the option of purchasing NBC they have a lot to gain on the antitrust side in stimulating some online services who independently distribute content, but use a universal authentication system provided by Comcast.

It's hard to tell what will happen next. If Time Warner and NBC's content find themselves freely available on Youtube, Hulu and a myriad of other sites supporting a single authentication format, where does that leave everyone else.

What About Hulu, Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, Amazon Live, and those pesky Pirates?

We'll hear from them in a few hours at the GigaOM NewTeeVee Conference in San Francisco where they, along with Time Warner and just about everyone but Apple have gathered to discuss TV Everywhere.

http://events.newteevee.com/live/09/

I believe the key seeing the path ahead clearly lies in knowing who creates the content and how it is licensed. TV Everywhere is certainly an interesting concept. Pay for cable and you can watch whatever is available on cable, anywhere you find it online. Log in once, pay once and view everywhere, that is of course, except on an iPhone an AppleTV or in iTunes.

AUDIT THE FED

@tttv

Returning my iPhone 4s. 2 years of crippling Google's apps made it the North Korea of handsets, closed, isolated & convinced it is superior. — 1 week 2 days ago
Are those speechwriters all full-time? RT @YouTubeTrends Behind The Scenes: Writing the 2012 State of the Union Address http://t.co/7lfPPvh1 — 1 week 3 days ago
The RonPaul Administration returning all "public land" to the states would stop the abuse of public land, not start it: http://t.co/WAK3BmiZ — 2 weeks 10 hours ago
DOJ blames hackers but 1BLN users looking for how to recover their own media is legitimate traffic & will not go away. http://t.co/CBgwpOlR — 2 weeks 2 days ago
@anselm I see, being open, the web includes everyone, congress represents geolocated majorities & both claim to represent the people. uh-oh. — 2 weeks 2 days ago
new word: they say democratizing but really mean "reprivatizing", “@RWW: Why Apple, Why Does it Have to Be Like This?" http://t.co/UWpp6nAB — 2 weeks 3 days ago
@anselm, independent of majority, can resistance to a concept benefit an entity who's nature requires the radical inclusion of all concepts? — 2 weeks 3 days ago
I take it back, page 19 of 366 is riveting. A roiling sea of packets cascading in patterns so irregular they ask: do Internets have strokes? — 2 weeks 3 days ago
Page 19 of 366. A bookish trend, kind of a meme scuttle, fashioned from shared space time metaphor, just barely hopping the language barrier — 2 weeks 3 days ago
@mushon @@Wikipedia I think jurisdiction is geographical, the multilingual are spared the impact of the blackout because they are awesome. — 2 weeks 4 days ago
Thankyou. You are the modern day steward of fact, Earth's Free Press "@jimmy_wales: Good morning, very interesting day ahead!" — 2 weeks 4 days ago
Expect 5 and 3 and not one more thing. — 2 weeks 6 days ago