With a new year kicking in, it’s time for a new batch of predictions.

Business

One of the easiest predictions to make is that Facebook will go public this year, and it will manage to do so in a very successful IPO. I suspect that this may actually be the high watermark for the current boom cycle as Facebook is the most successful of the companies that were born of the Web 2.0 cycle. In a fashion similar to what happened with the Netscape IPO in 1995, the Facebook IPO may create a small window of opportunity for many other companies to go public.

On the private end of the spectrum, I think we will see the following companies see some form of liquidity event via either acquisition or IPO: Twitter has a strong chance of being acquired by Apple, which will quickly merge the offering into all of its products; Another possibility is that Twitter and Tumblr merge to create a mico-blogging powerhouse spanning both ends of the country. Meanwhile, Foursquare will either IPO or be acquired by Facebook or GroupOn in a share-only deal. Meetup will go public, creating another great story for the New York technology scene.

When it comes to Google, we will see the company continue its integration of Google+ into everything it does, with the biggest impact being the move to migrate all Orkut users to the new service. This will create an outcry in countries like India and Brazil, where Orkut has been popular but will leave many in the American media to wonder what the big deal is as Us customers have mostly left already.

Meanwhile, a lot of the companies that went public in 2011 will meet some strong headwinds as the rigor of the public market make it much more difficult for them to maneuver. Expect some changes at GroupOn and Zynga, with many people questioning their business models and long term viability.

Media

For a couple of years, there’s been a slow ramp up to the integration of the Internet with television. The rise (and to some extent fall) of Netflix, along with the entrance of new players like Hulu and Amazon, have made video distribution on the big screen one of the areas where the Internet and television have already intersected.

However, other areas of interaction have, so far, not been quite as successful. Apple is still treating AppleTV as a hobby, Google has mostly failed so far with GoogleTV, and other players like Roku and Boxee have, to date, been only adopted on the fringe.

In 2012 all that changes as the TV screen takes center stage in a way that a new generation of smart phones arose after the 2007 iPhone announcement. First of all, we will see some increased standardization around how to deliver content to TV screens, with agreements from TV set manufacturers like Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and Vizio agreeing to some level of standardization. Apple will also announce a large screen product it will position in the TV market: The set will have AppleTV’s technology built-in, be accessible over WiFi, and connect directly to the iTunes store as well as integrate with the iPhone and iPad and other Airplay compatible devices. The set will run iOS and will be managed by a remote that runs on iPod touch, iPhones and iPads.

Meanwhile, cable companies will start opening up their platforms with some software development kits allowing to access content on the set top boxes they use. Once the Motorola acquisition is completed, Google will start transitioning the Motorola set-top boxes, which are a large part of the cableTV market, to GoogleTV, increasing the footprint of the service in the marketplace. Along the way, we will also see GoogleTV become more streamlined and less ambitious, focusing on delivering Android apps to the big screen instead of trying to rebuild the whole TV industry.

The concept of cord-cutting will continue to gain support but will not yet jump into the mainstream consciousness. With shows now being available exclusively on the likes of Netflix, we might see some interesting positioning whereas some TV carrier will offer Netflix as a premium service.

Politics

Social media will dominate the political cycle in 2012, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Meetup becoming part of the political operative tool belt. However, traditional electoral models will continue to be disrupted by the rise of distributed networked organizations like Occupy Wall Street, Wikileaks, or Anonymous. Except those players and new ones built on a similar model to have a substantial impact in terms of registering new voters and getting those voters to the polls in elections in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

In the US, the 2012 electoral cycle will see Republicans select Mitt Romney, a candidate most of their electorate is not very excited about, to run against Barack Obama. With the unexpected support of Occupy Wall Street and its splinter organization, Obama will win re-election as issues around economic disparities and job creation continue to be big topics of discussion.

In Europe, expect to see incumbents toppled in many countries: with major elections coming up in France, Spain, Russia, and Finland, it is possible that we will see a major change in political alignments across most of Europe, along with an increase chance of protest in those different countries. In Russia, in particular, we may see the internet play a crucial role in organizing protest if there are questions regarding voting irregularities.

The continuing protests in the middle east region may also lead to substantial changes in governance in several countries including Bahrain, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. During the presidential elections in Iran, we will see increasing clampdowns on internet sites as the government tries to shut any means of communication available to large groups of protesters.

… and of course, the easiest prediction to make is that the media industry will continue to push for more restrictions on the Internet, leading to more activists pushing back.

Technology

2012 is going to be an explosive year for technology.

First of all, we will see HTML5 roaring back, as many companies realize that it is cheaper to build in HTML5 and that the gap between platform specific code and HTML5 is shrinking. The introduction of WebGL, and proper implementation of geolocation and caching within mobile devices will give developers the ability to develop applications in HTML5 that can rival some of the offerings of native code. This is a move that will be resisted by platform makers like Apple and Google as it will loosen their stranglehold on their respective platforms; however, the split side of this is that effort is that some large companies will look to free themselves from said control by creating HTML5 instances of their own products.

On the mobile end, the Microsoft/Nokia will get some real traction with Windows Phone becoming a strong third player in the mobile market. Apple and Android will continue dominating the market with Microsoft still being a distant third. RIM’s position in the market will substantially worsen and will either be sold or go into bankruptcy.

Enterprise cloud strategies will continue to grow, leading to a growing divide between companies that can get efficiencies through the use of cloud computing and companies that are kept by different regulatory frameworks from being able to realize the financial gains offered by such model.

3D will be a hot buzzword, with the introduction of consumer-oriented 3D scanners and 3D printers that will push the idea of scanning and printing your own plastic parts. This will lead to some controversy around the concept of 3D objects piracy popping up in the media, with little actual evidence to back those fears. On the 3D projection end, we will see the rise of designer 3D glasses and the first glasses-free 3D television hitting the market, as we as a few consumer-grade 3D cameras. At the same time, we will see more and more technology to upscale 2D to 3D, in an attempt to develop a larger consumer market for 3D technology.

On the PC end, netbooks will disappear as a category and the hot new trend will be to offer thinbooks that mirror much of what Apple is offering with the Macbook Air product line.  Solid State Drive will aso increasingly become standard on new computers and we will see Apple actually announce they are getting rid of traditional hard-drive in all their product offerings. This will lead to their being able to announce that all their hardware can now run for at least 7 hours on a single charge.

Any which way, we will be revisiting those predictions at the end of the year and see how well (or badly) I did. I wish you, dear reader, a very happy new year and look forward to a continued dialogue in 2012.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 2012 Crystal ball. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Every year, I make a set of predictions as to what the new year is going to bring. At the end of year, I also review how close or far off the mark I’ve come. It is now time to review the 2011 edition of predictions, which I made on the 3rd of January of this year.

Politics

Last year’s leading internet political story was the rise of wikileaks and, as such, my views were impacted by it. Surprisingly, there has not been that many wikileaks-like organizations arising on the internet. This may be due to the fact that there just aren’t that many people leaking information.

The power of wikileaks, however, could not be denied, and my predictions of protests arising out of cablegate were right on the mark. This year, cablegate highlighted some of the abuse of governments in Tunisia and Egypt and some of that evidence was part (but only part) of what led to radical changes in those northern African countries.

On the regulation end, the FCC has indeed gotten more aggressive, with its more visible move being its attempt to block the acquisition of T-mobile by AT&T. However, to my surprise, there hasn’t been that much complaining from either political party about this rejuvenated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the rise of SOPA is clearly in line with the prediction that the entertainment industry will push for more internet regulation.  However, it is relatively easy to predict such thing as it appears the entertainment industry is forever locked into the concept of a more regulated internet. They basically see the internet as competition and would love nothing more than to strangle it to death.

So looking at the political end of the spectrum, I’ll give myself points for good prognostication.

Business

In that category, I decided to stick my neck out on the concept of a public-less IPO and while it was essentially something that happened with Facebook, the concept did not really take off for other companies as they decided to go the public route instead. My expectations were really that IPOs would not come until very late into the year and I was surprised by the likes of LinkedIn, GroupOn, and Zynga managing to get into the market relatively early.

Furthermore, I was pretty much off the mark when it came to NFC. NFC is (and has been) a promising technology but 2011 was not a breakout year for the technology. At this point, only a few select Android models seem to support it and there seems to be little traction from the market around it. While Intel invested in NFC, it may be a technology that grows into usage without having a particular breakout year.

The rise of cord-cutters did happen but not in as large an amount as I suspected. While this is a trend that continue to grow, it is still sitting on the edge and hasn’t gone mainstream yet. However, its a trend I will continue to monitor closely as I suspect this will move to the mainstream in relatively short order.

All and all, my predictions on business were off the mark. Maybe I’ll do better next year.

Technology

Gamification continues to grow but did not really have the big breakout year I expected. While more and more companies are continuing to integrate game-like behavior in their applications and workflows, we are starting to experience a period of consolidation in the space, with bunchball being one of the larger players. This seems to highlight that this space is one where only a couple of major players will arise and smaller players are already running out of steam. The focus around developing gamification models for computer-based applications may be part of the reason for this failing to move forward as the trend is increasingly to more and more applications moving to a mobile-first model.

The scan and shoot revolution I predicted quietly made its ways into the mainstream, with smart phones being the new weapon in every shoppers’ belt this christmas season. It’s one of those quiet revolution that arrived in 2011.

And finally, the big bet I had made on a Microsoft Nokia partnership came in mid-february, when Nokia announced that it would focus all its efforts on developing exclusively for the Microsoft platform.

The internet backlash I was expecting for this year did not come to pass. There may yet be more power in the current positive cycle that has been covering our industry and, as such, it appears that the possibility of a backlash against our industry remains a remote but slim possibility at this time.

So all and all, I’d get a barely pass on the technology side.

Arts and Entertainment

The recent multi-billion contract extensions for NFL broadcast rights are in line with my prediction that big event entertainment is becoming the core focus of the broadcast entertainment world. The continuing effort to support the existing model will increase this trend, giving more and more power to producers of real-time events.

Remixing, and Danish coolness, did not come of age in the past year, however. While groundbreaking on Bjarke Ingels first American project happened in New York, Danes haven’t really moved to the center of popular consciousness. The same is true of remixing: while supercuts are still making their way through youtube but, as a whole, remixing is still not something that has made it into the mainstream.

Maybe I should keep to the margins when it comes to making big predictions around arts and entertainment.

All and all, for this year, my performance at predictions has been average. I will try to do better for the 2012 year.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011 Predictions: The scorecard. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Desktop and the Web as one

Much has been written already about how Microsoft is trying to be all things to all people by offering a single operating system for both tablets and computers. The company announced an operating system that marries a lot of the tablet experience as presented by the likes of the successful iPad, and the many other contenders for the crown currently on the market, with what has more traditionally been known as a windows PC.

Along the way, Microsoft has introduced Metro, a new way to interact with Windows that brings much of the tile-based experience they first unveiled with their Windows Phone 7 operating system. Like them or not, tiles are Microsoft’s attempt at getting a spot at the mobile table and they are now taking this mode of interaction from the phone to tablets and PCs. The Metro UI is probably the single largest change in the way Windows has looked since Microsoft unveiled Windows 1995, an operating system that was a significant user-interface departure from its predecessor.

Lost in the commentary has been the fact that tiles are programmable using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, three core technologies used by millions of developers around the world. With this, Microsoft is basically saying that the languages that power most of the user interfaces for the web should be the languages that power most of the user interfaces for Windows. This is both a radical departure from mainstream thinking (although Palm tried to go down that route with WebOS) and a return to the source for Microsoft.

Looking back, looking forward

In 1997, I had the privilege of being among the people selected as launch partners for Internet Explorer 4. As such, I was able to see the product evolve from idea to release, seeing along the way many false starts and ideas that did not make it into the product. One of the most intriguing idea at the time was that of replacing the UI shell with a web browser one, essentially allowing for HTML  widgets to run directly on a user’s desktop.

I was smitten by the feature and heartbroken when I learned that it would not ship for reason that went beyond the technical. Around the same time, Microsoft was in a major war with Netscape and rumors of an anti-trust lawsuit being launched against the company were swirling. At hand was the idea that Microsoft’s ability to tie the web experience to its near-monopoly on operating systems gave it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

While it is true that Microsoft had the leading position in the operating system, there was little evidence of the success that resulted from it tying other components to it: its web browser offering were poor and had made little headway in the marketplace, where the Netscape browser held a significant lead. So there was little evidence that just tying two products would help lift both. It wasn’t until Microsoft started matching features with other successful browser that their offering started gaining traction.

But none of this mattered in the fall of 1997 and the idea of integrating a user’s desktop with the web was either too ahead of its time or seen as too risky by the legal departments at Microsoft. The net result was that when Internet Explorer 4.0 came out, the feature to connect web and desktop had been reduced to a way to push content to the browser and potentially use it on screensaver, an offering that fell far short of the promise.

Moving forward almost 15 years, Microsoft is no longer seen as a threat on the technology market. The antitrust lawsuit has made the company tentative in its offering, often staying as far away from controversy as it can. The new darlings of the technology world have taken over most of the mindshare that was held by the Redmond giant and only a few faithful follow what the company is about. It is not a significant player in the mobile phone market at this time (this title is split between Apple, with its iPhone line, and Google, with its Android ecosystem) and many see the tablet market as one that is making the personal computer, the very arena where Microsoft is king, irrelevant.

So the house that Bill built had to do something dramatic to regain attention. It had to offer an operating system that would meet today’s users’ needs, an operating system that could compete, in terms of setting the agenda, with the much smaller iOS and OSX produced by Apple.

Along the way, I suspect that somewhere in Redmond, some of the people who had tied the web and the desktop in 1997 started talking about how this could be their time…

… and the result is the Metro UI:

OSX Xeroxing or not?

Many of the Apple zealots have pointed to the Metro UI and the fact that Microsoft can still run a more traditional Windows look in parallel as a showcase of why the company will “fail” in the market. They present this as a example of Microsoft being unable to make the tough decision of separate offerings for separate computing devices. They highlight that Apple is much smarter in its approach because it has decided to create two operating systems: OSX for traditional computers, iOS for everything else.

So I think it’s fair to assume that no one can say that Microsoft is looking to copy Apple here. I think it’s OK to point out that Apple fans have basically said that the idea of marrying a mobile experience with a PC experience is not terribly smart.

That being said, it’s also interesting that Microsoft and Apple seem to be sharing a view of the future. And that view seems to say that smaller, single purpose applications bought from an online store will take over your whole screen, scraping away any piece of the visible interface. For Apple, this is best manifested with the version of OSX they most recently released (Lion) which offers the experience I described above and tries to marry some of what the company has learned from iOS with what has traditionally been seen as their computer operating system.

So the idea of an App store is definitely something where Microsoft is following Apple; the idea of running apps in full screen with no vendor interface is also something where Apple had the lead; the idea of bringing tablet and phone-like behavior to an operating system is something Apple has claimed as its own.

So the only question remaining is really: should we have separate operating systems for separate devices or should we have a single operating system that can be used for multiple devices. For Microsoft, the answer is now the latter; for Apple, the answer to date has been that OSX is for computers and iOS is for everything else. My question to Cupertino might be about how long it will be before they decide that one OS is sufficient for both computers and all other devices.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Windows 8 is Microsoft’s bet on the future. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Google vs. Twitter

With 750 million users, most of Facebook’s time is supposedly spent on pictures and games. In its initial iteration, Google+ does not seem to support those core components of the platform, which may make one wonder if Facebook really is the target. What it does support today, however, is a better version of Twitter, complete with specific status updates. So, in its current iteration, I would venture that the target for Google+ is Twitter.

Which may lead one to wonder why Google is so aggressively going after Twitter. I believe it is doing so because Twitter search may be starting to steal traffic, and potentially revenue from Google search. In a somewhat unsurprising move, Google decided to not renew its revenue agreement to get access to the Twitter stream. I would venture that this is an attempt to kneecap Twitter and ensure it doesn’t become a serious threat when it comes to advertising revenue.

While the company is generally considered as one that tries to do no evil, Google is also keenly aware that its success relies largely on two near monopolies: search and online advertising. With Twitter emerging as the first serious competitor in the space in a long time, rumored to be racking in $60–70 million a year in advertising revenue that could easily be targeted based on tweets, Google is seeing red and acting accordingly against the threat.

Google vs. Facebook

Meanwhile, there is the fight against Facebook. Facebook presents a different problem for Google in that it has taken an increasing share of online users time and put it in their walled garden, away from the web that Google mines for revenue. This trend is largely built on the back of games and photos so Google+ will try to tackle those things next.

While it is clear that, within the code, are hooks that will allow for games to be hosted on the platform, it is unclear whether that strategy can succeed. The main challenge they will encounter is that, as the owners of slide, Google is not just a provider of platform for online gaming but also a major player in the space. As such, some of the smaller players may be worried that the platform could sway in ways that me be less than beneficial to them. Zynga, because it needs to get rid of its current dependency on Facebook will probably hedge by putting some of their games on the platform but it is unclear as to whether other companies might join in.

On the picture end of things, Google is leveraging its Picasa offering, however, it is clear that it could do more by integrating it better in the + platform.  The mobile integration is a nice piece and may actually do collateral damage to a number of mobile photo hosting applications link instagram, for example.

But the picture offering is not enough. A proper merging of YouTube in the offering might give it some extra power by leveraging their strong presence in the video space to offer something that doesn’t yet seem to exist on Facebook.

Google vs. Apple

Apple integrated the new version of iOS with Twitter, basically matching one feature that has existed on many Android phone for a few years. They have yet to integrate with Facebook but I would not be totally surprised if they were to do so in future versions of their device. Android already supports both Facebook and Twitter integration and is supporting Google+ through an added application.

In order for this integration to work, Google will have to integrate Google+ at a much deeper level than it does today. However, with a social network and a mobile offering, Google is in the interesting position of being able to become the social network for mobile devices. On the other hand, the approach they have taken to date leaves much to be desired. By installing two different apps on the device, the experience feels tacked on rather than integrated. The Android team has to do some serious work to really rethink things over and tightly integrate Google+ into the OS, making the experience seamless.

The acquisition game

With a rumored 4–5 million new users in the past couple of weeks, Google is off to a good start with Google+ but still only reaching one percent of the Facebook world. Building on the back of Gmail may be a solid strategic move at this time, as Gmail can get Google to roughly 200 million users. What what about the more than tripling of that number required to get to parity with Facebook? For that, Google is going to have to do a lot of hard work and it’s unclear how they will go about acquiring more accounts going forward.

It may just be that Google will try to require every user of every service they provide to create a Google profile account moving forward. Today, Android users are required to create a gmail (or google apps) account to sync up their device. This represents one acquisition channel that none of the other players in the social media space have and could be one big area for growth.

Another area for potential growth is in the enterprise space: looking at the Google hangout feature, it seems to me that circles could become a useful way to organize a company and get quick online meetings. In fact, it may be more useful as a working tool than as a merely social one.

Still, at this time, it is hard to see a case where Google could topple Facebook. But the history of social networks is riddled with the bodies of players that were once at the top and eventually superseded by new entrants (think Friendster and MySpace) so it is not totally impossible that Facebook could find itself in hot competitive waters.

What about reputation rating systems?

Last but not least is the question around reputation rating systems like Klout or Peerindex. Those companies have built their model on the back of Twitter and Facebook and must urgently adapt to include Google+. With many early adopters spending more time on Gooogle’s property, the reputation rating game has a new entry point that will need to be urgently included in their calculations if they want to continue being relevant. When I first mentioned this, many people replied that those services are just not good enough as is and it seems that they have yet another challenge to deal with if they want to establish themselves as relevant in the future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Some thoughts on Google+. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Definition: What I mean by web

It appears that, as time moves on, many people have different definition of the web. Some look at it as a substitute for the word internet, others look at it as the sites that are sitting at a web address. My definition is a little more technical: to me, the web is a system that serves up HTML, CSS, and Javascript over the HTTP (or HTTPS) protocol.

Under that definition, it means that Facebook or Google cannot be seen as “the web” any more than iphone or android phone apps are.

Definition: What I mean by Open

Open is another tricky word to define.

Some people look to open as interoperable. To those people, an open web only exists when a site or page is accessible by everyone without requiring any kind of extra registration. In those people’s views, sites like Facebook are not open because they require a username and password to access them.

To others, open means that it can be accessed by all. Those people look to country firewalls or bandwidth caps as examples of the kind of restriction that keep the web from open. To some, as long as access to the internet is unfettered, then the internet remains open.

A third camp looks at open as relating to open source, meaning that the underlying code can be viewed and reviewed by anyone who so chooses.

When he created the first web browser, Tim Berners-Lee added one small world-changing (and I’m not using the term lightly here as you will see later) feature: View Source. This item, which allows any web browser user to pull up the HTML source code of any pages on the web. 20 years later, view source is still available in most web browser, still allowing anyone who cares to examine the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code that compose most of the interactions with a website. Some of the best web developers in the world initially learned their craft through this component and it is still one of the best way to learn how web pages are built.

In my view, the last two items are what represents open. Unfettered access AND ability to look at the innards.

Today’s world

Much of the interest around the internet field centers on two factors: social media and mobile access.

In the case of social media, people look to the ability to leverage one’s offline or online connections to augment the value of an application. In that sense, services like Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and Foursquare have created applications that would not be terribly interesting without people and their connection.

In the case of the mobile space, Apple has launched an explosion of access through mobile devices that was then followed by Google, with its Android operating system. When it first introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs asked developers to develop for the web, telling them that it was the best way to interact with the iPhone. However, the next year, he introduced the App Store and asked developers to start looking at developing native applications for devices running what came to be known as iOS.

Google followed suit, pushing developers to develop for their own operating system, Android.

The net result is that a lot of companies have developed applications that are running exclusively on those platforms, bypassing the web altogether.

An open web

Proponents of the open web, however, did not rest on their laurels and introduced html5 and css3, a set of changes to the building blocks of the web that can make it easier to developers richer, more interactive applications. Modern web browsers (ie. those that came out since 2010) tend to have some form of support for those changes.

Because html5 represents an evolution of html, css, and javascript, it goes without saying that the view-source element that Tim Berners-Lee had added to browsers 20 years ago can still be used to see how particular things were implemented.

To date, however, few of the startups that have committed to developing applications for mobile devices have leveraged the power of html5.

Why an open web matters: Education

For a generation, web developers have learned their craft through a tradition of enforced sharing: the open web, through its view-source ability, allowed anyone who wanted to learn how to develop like the masters to study their code and, in some case, mimic it before evolving it in their own way.

This has created a virtuous cycle, where good ideas are evolved and bad ones fall by the wayside. It’s also made it an interesting challenge as the ability to learn from the basic code has also led to people copying the code.

Why an open web matters: Evolved business model

The net result of such copying can be businesses that are basically xerox copies of an original. However, if you believe that the web is only but a component of a solid business offering, then copying of one’s website would not necessarily result in a total copy of a business.

If your business is so sensitive that making a xerox of your website will kill it, it is not yet a viable business. So the web, because it equalizes code forces businesses to improve themselves by building business advantages that are not fully dependent on the code. This is a good thing because it results in more reliant businesses.

Why an open web matters: Accessibility

The open web is generally easier to make accessible to people with disabilities. HTML, in itself, has certain built-in facilities that make it simpler to create sites that can be used by people with disabilities. Text-readers can actually read web-pages and/or interact with some web applications.

Furthermore, today’s web can often be backward compatible, meaning that older generation web browser can still interact with a lot of the content that is published there or deal with experiences that may be a little degraded compared to the latest offering but still working. For example, one can use gmail on a browser from a decade ago. That’s a testament to how endurable an open web can be, that it can be used on devices that stopped being produced BEFORE an application was made.

Why an open web matters: Freedom

Recently, the Financial Times decided to implement a web version of their app, leveraging html5 to bypass restrictions enforced in the Apple app store. The decision was hailed by many as a sign of things to come because it presented a rich offering outside of the traditional Apple ecosystem.

At a recent conference, someone said (and if you remember who it is, please tell as I couldn’t find the exact quote) that developers are essentially captive of the platforms they develop on. As a result, any changes in that platform and a developer could find his/her livelihood or product endangered.

Why an open web matters: Shaping the agenda

But no one owns the open web, as a result, few changes to the underlying platform can endanger web-based products. So it may make business sense, as a hedge against some of the things that could happen on a closed platform, to develop a business that runs on the open web as well as running as an app.

Last but not least, when it comes to freedom, is the ability to help influence the agenda.

If you develop for iOS or Android, most of the decisions as to where the OS is going are being made by either Apple or Google. If you develop for the open web, most of the decisions are being made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Firefox foundation, and Opera. As a result, it’s more likely that one of them will support new features in the open web as a business advantage. With 5 major players, there isn’t one that has a chance of becoming dominant for very long. By comparison, with 2 major players in the mobile market, it is likely that the community doesn’t get as much of a voice in shaping the agenda.

Business decisions vs. intellectual purity

Of course, I hear people dismiss the argument. They might say “But Tristan, if you are so enamored with the open web, why is your company, Keepskor, designing for platforms that are not open?”

It may indeed seem odd that I would tell people the open web matters while at the same time developing on some of the more restraining platform. However, I’d counter that argument with two simple statements:

• First of all, open and closed is not a binary issues. In our case, we will be offering an html5 version of our product to serve in parallel to the Android and iOS client.
• Second, intellectual purity is a fine thing but, as a businessperson, I must make decisions that benefit our business and our shareholders. To go with an open-only product would be to limit the markets we can reach and that’s just short-sighted, from a business standpoint.

At the end of the day, it’s a tough dilema that most companies have to face. I first highlighted it the challenged faced by iOS developers before Keepskor existed and it seems it’s a challenge that still presents itself. The way I look at dealing with this challenge is to develop a web-based version of our tools that provides similar, if not exact, functionality to our iOS and Android clients. To do so is not just a matter of openness, it’s also a decision that makes business sense because it gives us a platform to support all the devices for which we do not offer a client. As such, it maximizes our market exposure at a relatively inexpensive extra cost. And THAT makes total business sense.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Why the Open Web Matters. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Many Questions

The mobile market is basically broken out in a 2 + 2 configuration: Android and iOS are the two contenders you can’t do without, while RIM and Microsoft are the two you might want to keep an eye on. Looking at this through the lens of limited resources, it makes for tough choices. If you only have resources for one platform, which should it be? If you have resources for more than 2, should you also try to reach a third platform (and if yes, which one) or should you pour more investments in the first two?

In order to better make those calls, one must assess the market position of each of the players and place some bets as to where those players will be in 12 months. While interesting from an intellectual challenge, it can be emotionally wrenching from a company standpoint as some of the bets you make today could help turn your company into a winner or loser.

App or web?

Mobile apps seem to be the largest trend here. While many new apps have come up over the last few years, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of mobile web offerings. Curiously, the internet seems to be splintering into javascript-heavy apps running on users’ computers and mobile applications of the same apps running natively on mobile devices.

With HTML5, a lot of the benefits that mobile apps could offer seem to disappear: whether it is access to geo-location capabilities, local caching so the app can run when there is no signal, or even access to hardware capabilities like a camera (something Google is trying to bake into future versions of HTML), there appears to be an increasing array of possibilities that would ensure some parity between web-based offerings and apps-based ones.

However, the web has a few challenges to overcome. For starters, local notification, or the ability to throw some type of alert flag when the application is not running, is not available in web apps. One-click billing is not built-in by default. Access to local hardware devices is also limited. But ultimately, the problem web apps are going to encounter when compare to local apps have nothing to do with technology.

The main value of an iOS or Android app over a web app is largely a marketing issue. To a lot of thought leaders, the web is seen as yesterday’s invention and apps are seen as the current hot trend. To launch a web app in 2011 is seen as similar to trying to launch a CD-based offering in 1995: maybe interesting but probably not, and more likely outdated than up to the latest trend (or to put it in more brutal terms, it would be seen as “dead,” as per the criteria highlighted in Om Malik’s excellent post on the subject.)

Furthermore, the presence of an app in the respective app stores by Apple, Google (and now Amazon) represents marketing channels which cannot be matched in the open web. As restrictive as they are, those channels can represent a substantial advantage for new product offerings. The presence of your apps’ icon on a user’s phone is also another marketing marker that is hard to be matched by web application: yes, it true that bookmarks can be presented alongside applications but few users know how to do that and even fewer actually do make those links.

If an app is launched on a platform like iOS and Android, it gets more publicity than if it launches as a mobile web-based offering. This, by the way, is something I see as a reason for concerns in the long terms as it means that most of the debate is now centering not on a more open world but on one as to which walled garden is better: Apple’s or Google’s?

As a strong supporter for a more open web, I find myself conflicted: on the one hand, I see that getting into those walled gardens is bad for the web as a whole; on the other hand, in order to run a successful business, I have to be in those walled gardens. Almost a year ago, I covered this as Apple is the new China and things have gotten worse since, as Google is following a path similar to Apple. But in the end, one has to be realistic: the only way to influence this debate is to become successful enough that your voice gets amplified: so playing in the walled gardens is imperative for any new mobile company that wants to succeed.

iOS or Android first?

With apps as an obvious first step towards development, the next question in the decision tree is Android vs. iOS. Here, there are confusing signals in the marketplace: on the one hand, one can talk about market size and see that Android is becoming the most used operating system in the mobile world. On the other hand, one can see the fragmentation of the Android market as a developer’s nightmare.

Assuming the fact that most startups have limited resources, one could safely make the bet that a less fragmented market is easier to launch a successful product on and thus developing for iOS first would make the most sense. That is generally the rule that most developers follow and I want to challenge that rule.

According to Apple, there are over 350,000 apps in the app store. By comparison, the Android market has over 100,000 apps. So one can safely say that there are roughly 3 to 4 apps on iOS devices for every app on Android devices. Today, the path of most applications is to establish themselves on the iPhone, get the adulation of the Apple crowd and then move to migrate to Android devices.

This generally means that apps which were successful on the iPhone benefit from a lift when they finally make it to the Android marketplace as Android users are curious to see what all the hubbub was about. This situation has led to a situation whereas both top 10 lists are dominated by apps that first saw the light of day as iOS ones.

But what if one were to apply the amount of effort that goes into crafting a well-received app for iOS into developing a similar app for Android first? What if a company were to decide to prioritize its efforts on developing the best app for Android devices? All things being equal, a great app developed for iOS would have to be better than over 350,000 apps while a similar app being developed for Android would have to be better than 100,000 apps.

When looking at those numbers, combined with the fact that the Android marketplace is exploding, it seems that Android development makes more sense when first getting out the door but there is yet another catch.

Free or Paid?

Paid apps seem to fair better in the Apple world than in the Android world. I don’t know if it is due to the demographic profile of Apple users vs Android users (remember that Apple tends to market itself as a premium brand, probably creating a user community that is more affluent and more free-wheeling with its spending) but the fact of the matter is that if you are marketing a paid app, this is something you have to consider.

So if your monetization model is purely centered o selling apps, you may be better off using Apple’s offering (as long as you can figure out how to build a successful business 99 cents a time.)

On the other hand, few apps with hybrid strategies (social, web, mobile) are offered as paid ones. A few examples like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn all seem to show that app that also work as web-based platforms are generally free (as platforms though, they have created opportunities for others to market paid apps on top of their services). If your app is a social web app, the Android market seems to be a better place in the short run.

The key to this positioning will have to be around your company’s ability to present itself as breaking the mold. By going against the grain, you are likely to suffer the ire of Apple fan-boys but the ensuing controversy may get you marketing views you would not have gotten otherwise.

Danger to Android

Today, Android is indeed a fragmented market. So development for that platform is more complicated than development for iOS, where one only has to worry about 2 phones (iPhone 3GS and 4).

The challenge Google now has is balancing its openness while making it easier for developers to deal with the multitude of changes. Its recent efforts in trying to tighten up regulation of the platform can cut both ways. Developers on the Android platform should keep an eye on the impact of those efforts on carriers and device manufacturers support. If Google tightens the screws too much, it could lose some of the momentum it has built and give companies like Apple and Microsoft a chance to establish leadership in the space.

The second tier

Today, developers have to develop an offering for both the Android and iOS marketplace. Once they’ve done so, the next strategic question is whether to put any effort into RIM, HP (aka. Palm) or Microsoft’s offering.

If I were to follow the points above, logic might dictate that the smaller the platform, the better the way to shine out. However, at the current time, those platform look too small to cater to today. The recent announcement from Nokia may point to Microsoft becoming an emerging platform again but  the actual switch is not due for another couple of years. At that point, the marketplace may look radically different again.

So at the end of day, my recommendation (and what we’re betting on at Keepskor) is Android first, mobile web second, iOS third, and then figure out the next step.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title iOS, Android, and the mobile web. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The post-PC world

Since the early 1980s, the personal computer has been sitting at the core of people’s experience with technology. But several trends have chipped away at that dominance for the last few years, first with the rise of dedicated devices with computer-like attributes (eg. ereaders and MP3 players), then with reintegrated devices that brought several of those features back together in a more portable form factor (smartphones and tablets).

Along that curve, Microsoft and Intel found themselves in an increasingly difficult position, largely trying to hold on to the legacy platforms that sourced the largest portion of their revenues while unsuccessfully trying to find ways to play in the new world.

Along the way, the two companies grew farther apart. In late 2004, I had called for Apple to move to Intel chips, a call that was met with derision by most people at the time because they thought Intel would never do anything that could run counter to Microsoft’s worldview. A couple of years later, Apple and Intel did make the move, creating what was possibly the first wedge in the Wintel cartel.

Last month, Microsoft made an announcement that was probably similar in terms of overall strength, looking to ARM processors as the future, and moving to a space where their reliance on Intel processor was relegated to the back of the bus. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time but one could see that the Wintel alliance had been hobbled and could possibly die off soon (in related news, HP announced this week that it would consider running its webtop OS on PCs).

Meanwhile, it was only a year ago that Intel and Nokia announced a strategic partnership, where they would merge their OS platforms. The intent there, I suspect was for Intel to start pushing its own chips into Nokia devices, allowing them a play they had longed for in the mobile space.

Yesterday’s announcement from Nokia that it would abandon its own OS effort and focus on Windows Phone 7 probably infuriated some people at Nokia.

Why Winkia will work: Developers

Of course, there is a lot of doubts about the partnership. High level partnership have a tendency to fail (in fact, Horace Dediu has shown Microsoft’s particularly bad track record in the mobile space).

But I disagree. Earlier this year, I argued that Microsoft would acquire Nokia for its distribution footprint. At the time, I did not elaborate but here’s how I see things working.

For starters, let’s look at areas of strength and weaknesses. Microsoft still has a large development community used to developing with its toolset and aching to get into the mobile space. With Windows Phone 7, that crowd now can use the same skills, programming languages and development kits they have been used to for years to create for years.

But the challenge that was presented to date was that there were no users of Windows Phone 7. While the operating system has generally been well received by critics, there has been precious few apps developed on top of it to date. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that there isn’t really a built-in public for those apps yet so many developers are waiting on the sidelines. In fact, this is something that people at Microsoft were painfully aware of, as they are now starting to explain to developers that the deal will bring a larger public for their apps. In a recent blog entry, Matt Bencke, Microsoft’s General Manager for Developer and Marketplace in the mobile space, said:

In simplest terms, this alliance can dramatically increase the customer base for Windows Phones, and, by extension, your apps and games. […] For example, Nokia already has strong relationships with operators in more than 190 markets. Nokia also manages an application marketplace that delivers 4 million downloads per day; a channel that will complement the existing Windows Phone Marketplace experience to bring Windows Phone developers and Nokia customers together.

[…]

From a tools and platform perspective, we’re working to make it as easy as possible for developers to take advantage of this new opportunity.

So the message they send here is clear: more people to use your apps and you can use the same tools you know already. This is bound to help create a market where lots of new apps will end up being created in a Windows Phone 7 environment only.

Why Winkia will work: Footprint

So how big is the marketplace we’re talking about? Well, before we enter this arena, let’s make a few key assumptions: growth in the mobile space is largely coming from the smartphone category. In fact, the entry of sub-$100 android phones is basically going to kill the concept of smartphone altogether by just gobbling up the regular phones and pushing the trend to every phone becoming a smartphone. So the game here is for the whole pie instead of a smaller portion.

So how does Nokia do in that space? The Symbian operating system, the one the company is abandoning, was on 37.6 percent of smartphone devices in the last quarter but Nokia overall marketshare in the mobile space was 28.9 percent.

How does it compare to others?  In the OS game, Nokia has a 15.1 percent lead over Android, its next nearer competitor (Apple comes in 4th, behind RIM) and an 11.3 percent lead over Samsung in the overall mobile space.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was nowhere to really be seen, with a mere 4.2 percent of the OS market, coming in above “others” in the OS category.

If the tie-up had happened last quarter, the combined team would hold first place with above 40 percent of the smartphone market, almost double their nearest competitor (Android) and almost triple Apple’s own offerings.

With that large a footprint, any developer will have to think about supporting those devices.

Furthermore, Nokia has a long-established relationship with phone carriers around the world (while I have not checked the data, I would be ready to venture that there isn’t really a phone carrier out there not carrying some Nokia phones). That kind of network will be hard to defeat moving forward.

Why Winkia will work: Patents

When he unveiled the first iPhone, Steve Jobs made it clear that there was going to be a huge legal fight in the mobile space.  During the unveiling, he highlighted that oncoming fight in the following way (emphasis is mine):

We have invented a new technology called multi-touch. It works like magic, you don’t need a stylus, far more accurate than any interface ever shipped, it ignores touches, mutli-finger gestures, and BOY have we patented it!

[…]

We filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them

Apple later sued HTC and Motorola over some of those patents.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has not been shy in suing some companies over patent infringement relating to Google Android. The operating system from Google continues to be challenged in court, the most recent lawsuit coming from Oracle over alleged infringement of Java related patents.

So all and all, the mobile game is one dominated by patent fights. In the lead-up to this week’s announcement, Nokia’s CEO was touting its patent portfolio as something to look at. A story on AllThingsD put it as such (emphasis is mine):

Friday’s investor meeting will also address other aspects of the company, including its services strategy, its plans for its Navteq navigation unit and its plans to leverage its huge patent portfolio.

Between Microsoft’s patents in the mobile space and Nokia’s, I suspect we are soon going to see some lawsuits emerging from the new partnership and going after different aspects of the iPhone and Android devices (though I suspect Google will be the first target, with the iPhone being left for later).

Conclusion

Between Microsoft’s strength in the development community, Nokia’s strength in the hardware and distribution realm, I would venture that we may be seeing the beginning of a major shift in the mobile landscape. Both of the partners are quite strong and I would not be completely surprised if they were to both be able to reverse their fortunes in the mobile space. I also would not be totally surprised if, at some point down the line, Microsoft were to announce that it is taking over Nokia and folding it in. An interesting thing is that the cut in the overall market capitalization of Nokia after the announcement has now left it in a position where Microsoft could buy it in cash if it felt like it.

However, there are still a few things to be ironed out. For starters, Microsoft has just tied its OS to one partner and may have difficulties convincing other players to build mobile phones. Expect Samsung, LG, and HTC to stop investing in Windows Phone 7. So if Nokia fails in regaining some momentum as a result of this partnership, it may take with it Microsoft’s hopes in the mobile space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Winkia rising. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen technology have a major impact on all aspects of our society and I’ve tried to chronicle some of those impacts. This year, I’m starting something new by trying to classify the trends I’m looking at and attach them to the broader categories of interest.

So without further ado, here are some of my predictions for this coming year.

Politics

Wikileaks, the phenomenon

Last year, Wikileaks showed that governments may now have to find new, and more transparent, ways to operate in the age of the internet. However, long-time internet observers may have noticed that the US efforts to shut Wikileaks down seem very similar to the RIAA’s efforts to shut Napster down exactly a decade ago. I suspect that the net impact will be similar, with more Wikileaks-like organizations arising left and right.

Meanwhile, the cablegate scandal will continue to reverberate as more revelations from the cables will lead to details about the inner working of governments around the world. This will eventually lead to internet-organized protests making it into the real world, probably starting first outside the US and eventually making their ways around the globe. The protests outside the US will lead to the toppling of at least one government either in the middle east, Africa or South America.

Internet regulation at a crossroad

This year will be a year marked by several fights over internet legislation. I suspect that the US will see increasing clashes between Republicans and Democrats over the level of control the FCC has the right to assert on the Internet and over how much the government can force companies to maintain a level playing field on internet lines. Along the way, we will see a more aggressive and active FCC, making many heads turn as it starts becoming a stronger enforcer.

In several countries, we will see discussion of regulations trying to patch legislative holes created by the rise of Wikileaks and there may be some renewed attempt to increase the control of government over press organizations as a result of these regulations.

The fight over online piracy will also extend from discussions of music piracy to increasing movies, television, e-books, and e-magazine piracy. This will be the start of a new push by the entertainment industry to regulate the internet further.

Business

The public-less IPO

With last-year’s announcement of large-sized funding rounds by the likes of Groupon and Twitter has shown that there may be a different way for early investors to get some cash out of a company than a sale or Initial Public Offering. I suspect that it’s only a question of time before someone creates a Special Investment Vehicle (SIV) that allows for a private investors to invest in private companies like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, GroupOn, etc… Along with the rise of secondmarket, I believe that 2011 will see large privately-held companies offer stock to investors through means other than a public offering or a sale.

Update: I wasn’t finished writing this entry that Goldman Sachs announced a Special Purpose Vehicle to allow some of its clients to invest in Facebook.

NFC payments come of age

It’s been many years in the making but I suspect that 2011 will finally be the year of touch-payments via Near Field Communication devices (NFC). A few years ago, I was involved in an effort to bring NFC, the little key-fob or specialized payment cards, to the New York taxis. Similar trials have happened in the New York subway system, and in some point of sale systems but, over the last few years, people have often asked me about my key fob payment tag as it appeared I was the first user they witnessed using one.

With NFC chips slated to be put into the next generation of iPhones, Android phones, and Blackberry phones, 2011 may finally be the year when the potential of NFC commerce is enabled.

A dent in ownership

Netflix and Redbox have almost destroyed the concept of owning DVD disks. Pandora has lowered the need to buy music.  Zipcar has made not owning a car possible for a lot of urbanites. The real estate crisis has made owning your own place seem less cool.

All and all, it seems the trend is moving, to a large extent, away from physical ownership of goods and towards either sharing models or outright rentals. We will see this trend continue to grow over the coming year. Some of the things to watch out for are the rise of the cord-cutters, where people replace their cable TV offering with an online only offering because of the a-la-carte pricing nature of online efforts. Another trend to look at is e-book lending with the initial efforts or the Nook and Kindle readers offering sharing capabilities on select titles.

Technology

Gamification

This, in my view, is part of a larger megatrend I highlighted a few weeks ago. I believe that 2011 will mark the beginning of a very large trend in technology to make every application more like a game. Individual user acceptance has ingrained itself in our society and we will now see this phenomenon starting to take place in the enterprise space. Expect much talk of enterprise application developing game-like features this year but real implementations will only see the light of day towards the end of the year at best, with more of the serious implementations happening in 2012.

The mobile revolution continues

The introduction of the iPhone 3 years ago shifted the whole online landscape to mobile devices. Yet, for all the discussion of mobile, it still has been a phenomenon sitting on the edge, as smart-phones were on the more expensive side of the price spectrum. Except all this to change this year, with many Android-based phones being available for free or almost free, putting any feature phone at a substantial disadvantage.

At the same time, get ready for the shoot-and-learn revolution as QR-codes, tagged objects, and smart tools like Google Goggles gain more mainstream acceptance. People will increasingly scan or shoot to learn more about or compare a physical good to information available online.

Last but not least in this is that I suspect Microsoft will make a major move in the space by either acquiring or teaming up with Nokia for its partnership and distribution footprint, making Windows Phone 7 the only OS running on Nokia phones.

Internet Backlash

The internet industry has benefited from a great amount of support over the last 2–3 years. Companies like Facebook, GroupOn, Zynga, and Google have been able to move along with high levels of consumer acceptance. I suspect that this year, we may start seeing more people rethinking some of their web 2.0 choices, disclosing a little less information on Facebook, or becoming more wary of the power of Google. We will also see the rise of digital-free zones, where people agree that the use of mobile devices or computers is not allowed.

We will also see many people questioning the validity of many of those internet companies and bringing up the specter of another financial bubble. Much of this talk will focus around internet companies that are looking to go public towards the end of the year.

As more people get impact by the stress that can be caused by our always-on culture, we might also see the rise of interest in digital down-time, time set aside to go offline and recharge before the next session.

Arts and Entertainment

Big event entertainment

There will be two major trends in fighting the continuing fragmentation of the media landscape. On the one hand, large media companies will continue to flock to the tried-and-true, remaking or making sequels to movies and TV shows that have been successful. Formula-based entertainment will continue to be produced but with an ever-decreasing return on investments.

On the other side of the spectrum is the rise of what I would dub “big event entertainment”, where media companies will attempt to build up their media product as an cultural event. In the US, the launch of the Oprah Women Network will be such an event. Other forms of media will try to build up those events through time-based models, creating sport-like offerings (think American Idol) through all forms of media.

Those efforts are all attempts at keeping the old system of release windows in place so that existing revenue streams are not threatened by the ubiquity of the internet access.

Remixing comes of age

Remixing has been common in music, and video remixing has been a largely underground phenomenon on the internet. 2011 will be a banner year for video remixing as the likes of Pogo will start entering the mainstream. I suspect that mainstream artists will start leveraging some of the same techniques in their efforts, bringing video remixing to the masses this year.

As the 2012 US presidential primaries get underway, we will also see an increasing amount of online remixing of politicians speech, sometimes misrepresenting their positions.

Danish cool

This is kind of my bleeding edge prediction but I believe that 2011 will be a big year for Denmark. Copenhagen-based architect Bjarke Ingels has recently opened a new office in New York. Meanwhile, Noma, a Copenhagen-based restaurant, was recently named as one of the top restaurants in the world. And many cities look to Copenhagen as an example of how to organize large-scale projects for public transportation (one third of the people in Copenhagen ride bicycle to commute).  And Denmark has established itself as a leader in the wind-generation and green technology space. So I think all this will add up to Denmark being seen under a new lens and may even be considered cool in 2011.

We’ll see at the end of the year how well I did on all those predictions. in the meantime, feel free to chime in in the comments or on twitter (use the #tnlpredicts hashtag so I can track things).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 11 Predictions for 2011. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Some people have argued that its death was foretold by the introduction of the iPhone a the iPad but I would say that those were only components in a trend that has been going for a lot longer.

What is ubiquitous computing?

In the late eighties, researchers at the famed Xerox PARC research started thinking about the implication of the computer disappearing. In their views, information from computers would start melding into the surroundings without being thought of as part of a computer. In that sense, they saw the world we now live in 20 years ago.

Think of how you’re reading this. It may be on a computer, a tablet (like the iPad), a e-reader (yes, TNL.net is now on the Kindle), a mobile device (blackberry, android, or iPhone), or a TV. Each of those items provides a screen that can be connected today to access information from the Internet.

The increased numbers of sensors in our world is only furthering this trend. For example, at their most basic level, you have barcode on supplies in the grocery store. Every time these bar codes get scanned, their presence is translated into bites on a machine somewhere, to be tabulated and presented. You don’t generally think of the cash register at your local supermarket as a computer but it is one.

Your telephone (either wired or wireless) also provides tremendous amounts of data about you and what you’re doing. For example, your phone company probably has as good an understanding of your social graph as facebook does since it tracks who you call, how often, and for how long.

In New York, as in a lot of European cities, subway trains now have sensors allowing anyone to see where trains are, and get some estimate as to when they’re coming. Once again, bits of information presented in a computed form on a screen like this (Hat Tip to Second Avenue Saga):

Source: Second Avenue Saga

So information now surrounds us in a number of ways. This means that the computer, as an information device, will lose its prevalence since there are now other ways in which we can access the information.

But how will we interact with it?

Bye Bye Keyboard, Bye Bye Mouse

People in the mobile camp will argue that touch is the way to interact with information. The answer is correct but only partially so. While touch is the most efficient way to interact with a screen you hold (as proven by the iPad, iPhone, and now most smartphones), it is not so good when it comes to screens you are not holding. Steve Jobs, in the introduction of the new Macbook Air, said so himself.

So what is the rest of the world to do in order to interact with those other screens. Some solutions, like the new Android TV, look to interacting with those with new remotes that look like keyboards. They want to bring more of the computer to those other screens. For example, Google TV devices offer a wide range of keyb0ard-like remotes.

This is the wrong answer because the majority of consumers are not interested in that form factor (I am talking from experience here as I have a computer connected to my television with a Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard and it has failed every single person who has come in. I’m the only one who can really get a show started on there.)

However, the right answer comes from a player everyone has all but dismissed: Microsoft.

A resurgent player

It’s been a rough decade for Microsoft. Badly singed by an Antitrust lawsuit, the company has become hesitant and tentative in its approach to the new post-PC world. It has also been saddled with a tough anchor: Windows. The problem Microsoft has is that it continues to hang on to the belief that everything needs to tie up to that platform.

And in doing so, it fails at most of its new efforts.

But there is one division at Microsoft that has somehow managed to avoid that curse: the gaming division. The Xbox has been a success because it hasn’t been saddled with the Windows background. The group threw out that mantle early on and developed a series of machines that were performing well in the environment they were designed for: the living room.

And now, they’ve introduced Kinect, a device that I would call as revolutionary as the iPhone was in the mobile market.

Source: Wikipedia

The revolution comes from the fact that the device introduces a new way to interact with a computer: without any physical devices. Their tagline (“You are the controller”) represents a brand new approach in defining interfaces for devices: whether it is voice or motion, the user is now brought closer inside the computer.

Extent the kinect to the next generation of screen and you now have non-portable computing devices you will interact without having to touch them. Wave your hand in the air and you can manipulate objects in those devices.

The end of the drive

This week, Verizon showed off their  technical prowess by showcasing how they could move files at a 10Gbps. To give you a sense of how fast that is, most computers today only operate at 100Mbps so what Verizon accomplished is roughly 100 times faster than the fastest network most people have experienced. The most advanced computers available on the market tend to top out at 1Gbps: they usually can move files at those speeds on local network but it’s rare to find networks that are connected to the internet at these types of speed. So what Verizon demonstrated is the future, a future where a 2 gigabyte file can be transfered in less than 5 seconds.

A few weeks ago, I told TNL.net readers that we were witnessing the beginning of the end for local storage. However, since then, I’ve come back a bit on that idea: local storage will continue to exist but mostly for caching purpose. In a world where you can move several gigs in a few seconds, it is more efficient to move data to the cloud, where it can be accessed from any device.

The rise of Work Computers

Based on all these trends, there is a more limited need for PCs. While the Personal computer was a great transitional device to the ubiquitous computing world, it is a device which suffers from some limitations.

For starters, there are the input methods. There is a clear reason why Apple didn’t make their devices any smaller than 11 inches and touted the fact that the Airbook had a full size keyboard: our hands don’t get any smaller.  So the keyboard and mouse, as entry device are gated by this fact and will be stuck in that mode for as long as we live.

But most people will not need a keyboard or mouse in the future. Except where text is concerned, the existing computer is getting close to having run its course: writers will keep using them (until the point where voice dictation software is good enough to replace the need for a keyboard) and programmers will continue to use a keyboard as an input device to program. Most every other people will interact with the devices either via direct touch (like the iPad) or via motion (like the Kinect).

Those uses will be primarily for “work” or pro-sumer type of purpose and other people will not have computers at home.

One gating factor: Power

The main challenge for most devices will, however, continue to be how to power them. To date, there has been some improvements in the battery space but those are not moving as fast as the rest of the technology world.

And we’re becoming more demanding of our devices.

For example, most smartphone users complain that their device lasts only a day or so on a full charge. But think of a decade ago. Back then, a device with a 1 Ghz process, 10–20 Gb of disk space, and about 128 Mb of RAM might have worked on a battery charge for about 2 hours. Those were powerful laptop back then but we didn’t seem to expect them to run all day.

Today, there is a lot of work going on around trying to get more out of the batteries we have and companies like Apple have worked on reducing the amount of power a device may ask from a battery: for example, the Macbook Air is a marvel in trying to figure out what to remove in order to ensure the devices squeezes more out of the battery.

Will the work computer disappear?

The last bastion of the computer will be the office. At this time, it is difficult to imagine people gesturing in front of their computers as a way to interact with them. More likely, tilted touch displays will become the new norm in offices (and by tilted, I mean that the screen would be on the desk at an angle of no more than 20–25 degrees). Those types of changes will take some time to make their ways into cubicles and may force business to even rethink the concept of the cubicle. The ones that have already will get a head start on their competitor.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Goodbye PC. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

An abbreviated history of storage

Anyone who has used a computer has found themselves in the same situation: at some point, they have needed to take information off the computer in order to share it on another computer.

In the old days, this was done via diskettes, which were replaced by CDs, and eventually CDs were displaced by recordable DVDs and USB solid-state drives.

In the corporate (or prosumer) market, larger data needs led to the use of ZipDisk, Syquest drives, and eventually file servers.

As household increased their expertise in the tech space, we’ve seen the rise of Network Accessible Storage (NAS) devices for home use (for example, the popular Apple Time Capsule or the WD MyBook series).

Devices vs. Desktops

But over the last few years, the storage landscape has grown more complicated. As more consumers carry smartphones, portable media players, digital cameras, and camcorders, or play digital content downloaded for their televisions, the computer is loosing its dominance on usage of digital media. And, along the way, the computer is no longer the hub of everything digital in the household.

Digital content is now spread across that wide array of devices and will become increasingly untethered from the computer to the point where some household may remain heavy consumer of digital media without even owning a computer.

Meanwhile, in the business world, content sitting on employees’ computers is hard to find and harder to control. Laptops can walk away from a company with crucial company content on their hard drives so there’s an increase push to get users to save their information on centralized servers.

Enters the cloud

However, along with the spread of devices, there has been a growing spread in available bandwidth at higher speed. A decade ago, the majority of internet users were accessing it at speed of about 56kbps. Today, that number has gone up 100-fold and will continue to go up (by some estimate, the 100Mbps mark will be standard by 2020.)

With extra bandwidth to spare, data can now be stored more efficiently on remote servers.

In the consumer space, people are increasingly storing their videos on YouTube or Flickr, their images on Flickr and Facebook, and other files on the likes of Google Docs. Social networks are becoming a large repository of backup data that can be shared with friends or locked away.

And today, some solutions are allowing for such things to happen automatically from the devices to the web. For example, I use Eye.fi cards in most of my cameras, which dynamically upload the content of the camera to the online service(s) of my choice. They also have software based solutions that run on the iPhone and Android devices. Pixelpipe, one of their competitors, is software based only.

In the enterprise space, companies like dropbox, drop.io, and box.net provide solutions that store the files on their servers and allow end-users to access them from any computer or mobile devices.

Creation, Distribution, Consumption

Up until recently, I was pretty opposed to the iPad as a device, seeing it as a consumption only device. Over the last few months, as more tools have become available, we’ve seen a slew of tools allowing people to use the iPad in creative ways. My blind spot was to equal storage with creation and assuming that content was not stored locally, it would be issue from a creation standpoint.

But I was wrong.

In today’s world, content that sits locally is pretty much as good as dead. It is not distributed and thus is not consumed. This epiphany came to me not as a result of using an ipad but while authoring a story for my site. I realized that I was opening up my browser and launching a web app to do so. The same had been true for most of my week and I often can go days without opening a desktop app other than my browser. As a result, I’ve concluded that local storage is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

What is still relevant, though, is the existence of some form of local storage. In the future, local storage will be used primarily to hold content and application on a temporary basis before said content and app return to the cloud. The reason for such an approach is that running application locally will always be more efficient than running them over a network link.

Impact on consumer electronic

Probably more important is the final impact on digital media. The iPod was revolutionary in that it did away with the standard model of distribution for music: CDs are increasingly getting replaced by digital distribution and may continue to exist as a specialized domain (much like there are still some LP record purchasers today.)

The Kindle (and its competitors in the e-reader category) are starting to do the same thing to magazines, newspapers and books.

The iPad takes music, books, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and other video content and runs them through a single device.

The same thing is about to happen to all video content. Today, companies like Netflix shuffle a lot of plastic back and forth so the plastic piece can be played on a specialized device (either a DVD or BluRay player) and then returned. Netflix has seen the writing on the wall and is increasingly trying to push its users (and providers) to move to a plastic-free world by streaming the media directly to the device of their choice. Much like kids today may not really understand the concept of rewinding a video tape, the kids of tomorrow will not understand the idea of putting something into a machine in order to play it.

As streaming distribution becomes more common, attitudes towards the disks will change so that such things are only catering to a much smaller audience.

My five-year-old son looks at DVDs as something you can decorate in art projects, not something you can play. His view is that everything is available on demand either via my computer, smartphone, or our connected TV (Try explaining to a 5-year-old that Wall-E is not available because it’s outside the release window set by the studios). With the advent of Apple TV and Google TV, his experience is about to become more common.

He’s the consumer of tomorrow and his view is that storage is something that happens in the cloud. In his teenage years, he might end up looking at USB drives with the same disdain as we look at videotapes.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The end of local storage. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Refiner: Apple

It’s always been fascinating to see the fight between geeks over the role of Apple as an innovator in the tech field. On one hand, people will argue that Apple pushes the envelope by introducing revolutionary new products; on the other hand, people can point out that what Apple does is just implement a different version of what already existed.

For example, there were MP3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, and tablet computers before the iPad (in the same vein, there has been ways to get the internet on your TV from a variety of devices before the AppleTV). But in each cases, Apple came out with products that changed the public perception of those categories, leaving the mainstream feeling that Apple was introducing revolutionary products.

The truth is a little more complicated: both side of the argument are valid because what Apple does is not so much introduce new product categories as it simplifies them. One could argue that the model of Apple ought to be “innovation through improvements.” Whereas other companies look to throw new technology at a problem, Apple tends to look at solving the problem through reduction: less is more.

An example: Dialing on iPhone and Android phones

An example of this is the iPhone vs. Android discussion. As the owner of both types of devices, I can easily say that the iPhone is a more polished product.

A simple example is how either phones handles the quick dial feature on the phone. When presented with a list of callers you selected, you click on the name of the person and the phone dials. By contrast, on my Samsung Vibrant, a short click on the image of the person brings up a list of actions I can do (call, text message, send a picture, etc…), a short click on the name or start brings up the whole detailed information of the person. A long click brings another set of options. However, I’ve yet to find a single click that will dial the person.

It’s a simple distinction but it is hundreds of such little distinctions that make the iPhone a tighter experience. I know Android fans will tell me that I can customize the phone in a much better way and that is great if you’re a geek like me but, to the general public, such customization is an impediment, not a feature.

Don’t innovate, improve

So the offerings of companies that most look like Apple are not revolutionary in the sense of breaking new grounds but rather are following an ethic of improvement. Their focus is less on brand new features that have never been seen before and more on improving the user experience around a pre-existing approach.

Seen through that lens, Tumblr, Posterous, and Twitter can be seen as an evolution of the blogging models set previously by SixApart, Automattic, and Blogger.

It’s a really important model to follow if you want to reach a mass market and are attacking a marketplace with some established players.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Which company are you: the Refiner. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Distribution Channels: More, more, more

Since the inception of the web, computers have been the best way to access it. Efforts around making the web accessible via mobile phones (WAP, HDML, etc…) or TV (web TV profiles, Microsoft WebTV) largely fell flat due to a combination of lack of bandwidth, lack of processing power on the devices, and costs of production for such device making them unaffordable to the masses.

With the introduction of the iPhone, Apple changed all that (and the subsequent entry of Google, with its Android operating system further validated the space.) For the first time, a new distribution channel for web-based application has become possible on phones.

With the iPad, Apple has struck again, breathing new life in a category (tablet PCs) that was considered dead by most people. And over the next few months, we will see a battle between Apple, Google, Microsoft, LG, and others  as to who will control access to the internet in your living room.

A few years ago, I wrote about what may happen when every signal we receive moved to an IP stack. Those predictions took longer than I expected to become reality but we are now moving to a world where everything is finally going through the Internet. This months, millions of people watched at least one world cup game over the net. As the largest event in the world, this is something that is being experienced by people outside of tech circles. Similarly, the explosion of smart-phones has moved the needle from access to the internet being a geeky thing to such thing becoming the norm.

While I do worry about the app stores (from any of the providers) potentially becoming chock-hold points of access to the internet, I do believe that the explosion of apps that are sitting on the device but getting information from the internet (something I’ve been waiting for a decade to happen) represents a substantial paradigm shift that will reinvigorate internet innovation.

Furthermore, the rise of the cloud and the availability of internet bandwidth at any time and from any place is making the desktop metaphors the computing industry has been used to since the mid-eighties irrelevant and, to some extent, moving the computing world back to where it was prior to the introduction of the PC, with applications running largely on remote servers. This phenomenon has two important impacts: first, it makes it possible for people to rent out applications and infrastructure instead of purchasing them outright, thus lowering costs in the short terms; second, it solidifies control of such applications in the hands of a few large players, making it difficult for new entrants to gain scales in those markets but creating potential acquirers for interesting features.

Tools: HTML5 and CSS3

For almost a decade, web standards were in the doldrums. There were a few pockets of innovation here and there but, for the most part, the internet industry spent the first decade of the 21st century digesting what had been created in the previous decade.

In 2009, HTML and CSS were finally updated, providing a new set of standards that keep up with modern applications. This may seem like an insignificant detail but the lack of new standard impeded the growth of the internet as it led to a browser market that was largely stagnant (with the dominant player of the time, Microsoft, introducing very little innovation in that space) and made it difficult to implement bleeding edge technologies because the browsers couldn’t follow.

The innovation in HTML5 in particular is astounding as HTML moves from being a largely representational language, great for static documents but not so good for interactive applications, and is now becoming a full-fledged programming language, allowing to simplify certain tasks that were, to date, only achievable through the implementation of substantial hacks.

Talent: Maturity in our industry

The internet industry is now over 15 years old. The net result of that is that we, as an industry, have grown substantial amounts of talent that has become increasingly specialized in particular areas. During the last boom, websites were designed with HTML and CSS (and, for the most extreme case, Javascript) but little attention was paid to things like user interaction, machine interaction, APIs, or channel targeting.

With the increased opportunities to target across different platforms and have web applications where the website is only a small part of the overall picture, the level of complexity has arisen and so has the level of sophistication of the experts working on such applications.

The great news is that experts from other fields can now join in and bring some of their expertise, hence enlarging our industry and its overall footprint on the economy.

The other great news is that many people in our industry now have well over a decade of experience, allowing them to have learned from mistakes made in the past and to establish some level of mentorship that didn’t exist in the early days of the industry.

This results in talent being fostered at a more rapid pace and innovation being increased as people can now learn a lot of the basics by following experts (either through blogs, twitter, or other online means or offline approaches like conferences, books, and magazines). Such talent can then turn around, having come up to speed at an accelerated rate, and innovate quickly, sharing their innovation with others at a speed that was not always possible before.

The economy: It sucks and that’s a good thing

From an economic standpoint, the times are also right for a number of reasons.

For starters, the state of the overall economy seems to mirror (or be even worse) than what we were experiencing in the early 1990s.

Let me roll the tape back a little for readers who didn’t experience this: Coming out of college in the early 1990s, the job market was horrible. Even prestigious programs had difficulties placing their students into jobs and the jobs that were offered were low-paying. This created a space for start-ups as there was little to loose financially by going into the internet space: in the worst case scenario, a new graduate may have forgone a chance at getting a job that paid in the low 5 figures for the opportunity to do something interesting and potentially rewarding.

I’d venture that the current unemployment rate is presenting this window again and many people are looking at the risk/reward of a startup in a more favorable light as a result.  I am not saying that all those new startups will succeed (in fact, I suspect that they will fit the normal economic model of a 8 or 9 out of 10 failing) but I am convinced that all this new energy will generate further innovation that can be mined by all.

This explosion of start-up also comes at a good time as the cost of launching a new company has dropped drastically. It used to be that one had to buy servers, memory, bandwidth, etc.. from different providers, creating substantial upfront costs. Today, one can rent that kind of infrastructure in a model that is purely based on the amount of traffic one receives. This means that bad ideas don’t cost quite as much. The net result of this is that, by the time an entrepreneur pitches investors, he or she can have real numbers to highlight the successful growth of his or her company.

Investments

The challenge for investors is that it also means that companies need a lot less in terms of investment (good for founders, not so good for investors as they don’t get as large an equity stake in companies; this also means that exit strategies leave more money to founders). On the flip side, the advantage for investors is that the ideas presented to them can be of higher quality than they were in the past and the startups that do get funding have a reasonable chance at good exits.

Speaking of exits, the investment exits scenario have changed. In the 1990s, the preferred way to return money to investors was to take your company public. The introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002 has made it almost impossible to successfully take a company to the public markets in the United States and many have called for its repeal.

This means that the primary way for an internet company to successfully exit has become through a merger or acquisition. Fortunately, the larger players in the market have been very acquisitive. Today, it is pretty routine to hear that companies have been acquired by Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, or IAC. Players outside the industry have also been taking a little more of an interest, which results in further opportunities for acquisition (for example, companies like Disney and CBS often pick up startups for rich valuation)

Conclusion

All and all, the picture for internet startup creation is great. The last decade presented opportunities but I will go on the record now to say the teens will be a greater era of successful internet companies creation than the beginning of the last decade was.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The best time for start-ups — 5 Reasons. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The closed environment

For years now, I have worried about Apple’s tendency to prefer closed environments to open ones when it came first to its iPod line of products, then its iPhone line, and now it’s iPad one. Each of the product are terrific consumption tools but that’s where they stop and my worry stems from the trend they create, one where Apple is creating an increasingly closed environment, more in line with the type of thinking that permeates the consumer electronics, movie, and telephone industry than the one that exists in the computer world. It seems that whenever Apple enters a new industry, it may have a small impact on that industry but the industry itself has a big impact on Apple.

Of course, one could see this as a natural evolution as the counter-culture 1970s Steve Jobs was booted out of Apple and, after a long exile, came back as Steve Jobs, founder of Pixar and eventually morphed into Steve Jobs, largest Disney shareholder. The net result is that the Apple leader has now learned to turn his company into the new Disney, bringing safe products to the masses in a highly sterilized environment that may not appeal to all.

And a Disneyworld version of computing is OK for most people. Most people love the magic kingdom but, for a portion of the population, Disneyworld is a place you visit, not one you live in. And that’s where conflict arises.

For people who have lived in the mostly free-for-all environment of the computing industry (and its cousin, the anything-goes world of the Internet), the idea of a Disneyified world is as close as you will get to their concept of hell. And those people tend to be the ones that develop applications.

Two Impulses

So developers now find themselves conflicted between two impulses:

• On one hand, Apple is created this Disney-like environment that increases the level of control Apple asserts in many spaces including the music, video, and mobile space.
• On the other hand, this type of environment attracts large crowds who really enjoy the safer experience. As an added bonus, the space actually looks very clean and the interface components are very slick.

The market size issue is one that larger technology companies are starting to grapple with in another arena: China. For example, Google has been trying to figure out the right balance between insisting that China stop censoring internet content and protecting its chances at getting into that market. Many of Google’s competitors, in the meantime, stood on the sideline, arguing that China is too large a market to ignore and that corporations should not get involved into politics, a position that is often at odds with their own actions in the US.

But back to Apple.

Apple vs. Adobe

For those who have not been following what’s happening between Apple and Adobe, here’s what’s happening. Adobe owns Flash, a product that allows for video or more interactive type of content  on the web. Thanks to the Flash technology, distributing video on the internet became a reality because the Flash player ran on most browsers and, thanks to strong marketing by Macromedia (the company that was managing Flash at the time and was acquired by Adobe), the Flash player became ubiquitous on computers.

When Apple first released the iPhone, it presented it as a different type of phone because it offered a browser that gave its users access to “the full Internet,” a statement that highlighted how poorly other mobile phones rendered web pages. This was a major advance  but there were a couple of things that were not included: in order to ensure that the browser ran quickly and reliably on the lower-CPU phones, Apple made a technical decision to remove Java and plugin support from its browser. For the most part, that was OK but many people started complaining that Flash was not included because a large amount of internet video was delivered using the flash player. Apple said, at the time, that its partnership with YouTube should offer with enough video content and that the other groups were pretty much fringe.

Over the years, the discussion continued in tech circles and Adobe, now owners of Flash, decided to reposition it as a tool that would allow for creating interactive content that could run on any platform. It was widely known in development circles that Adobe was working on a version of Flash that would help developers create iPhone applications with the Flash development tools. So Apple upped the stakes by banning its development community from leveraging such tools. Because of the tight control Apple has over what gets on the iPhone and iPad, it essentially killed any chances of using Flash to create programs for those platforms.

As one would expect, Adobe was very unhappy. They had made the ability to create iPhone applications with Flash a key feature of their new offering. So they huffed and puffed enough to get the tech community fired up.

The controversy has now gotten so strong that it got a response from Steve Jobs himself, which resulted in Adobe abandoning their strategy of distribution on Apple devices.

Apple: Standard bearer for openness?

Jobs’ note is interesting in many aspects. On the one hand, he does seem to address many of the issues that have been raised and explain why Apple’s position is the friendly one. On the other, people with enough knowledge of the underlying technologies can see some cracks in the arguments made:

First, there’s “Open”

That Apple would lead with the concept of openness is ironic at its best and deceiving at its worst. While it’s true that Adobe Flash is not open, Apple’s selective list of standards it is supporting reveals some of the politics surrounding web standards. Yes, HTML5 is completely open but the issue of video in HTML5 is a small developer skirmish in which Apple is backing a horse that is not necessarily the most open one.

H.264

It’s interesting that, in the paragraph about openness, Steve Jobs mentions HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript but leaves the issue of video codec for later in his note. That comes in the discussion of “the full web” where he mentions support for H.264.

That name represents a standard that is not an open one. In fact, it’s one that needs to be licensed in order to be used and, while many people use it (as Apple’s note demonstrate), it’s one that could generate royalties for many companies when the agreement to make this standard royalties-free for internet video ends in 2015. And one of the companies that would get some of those royalties is.…

(if you haven’t guessed, you must have skimmed throught the rest of the article)

surprise, it’s Apple Inc., a company that happens to own some proprietary intellectual property that is included in this standard.

And, surprisingly, the best tool for authoring content for the H.264 standard is Quicktime, a piece of software that is distributed by… Apple.

I’m not going to deny that the rest of the arguments (around security, performance, and battery life) may hold value. I’m also not going to claim that Jobs is wrong in saying that the “Touch” experience is not fundamentally different from the experience that Flash was initially created for.

But I am going to go out on a limb and say that this whole fight between Apple and Adobe comes down to a single thread: Who will control video on the web. Jobs is probably not thrilled that Flash has usurped Quicktime as the main contender on the web and is working on changing that.

Reasserting closed systems

While the war between Adobe and Apple is an amusing soap opera, the last reason Jobs gives for not supporting Flash ought to be the most chilling to the development community. I could paraphrase but I wouldn’t do it justice so here’s what he said (emphasis is mine):

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

…

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications.

At first read, an innocuous set of statements but one that has potential implications for the future of computing. If the thinking in Cupertino is that third party development tools are bad, then what about the Mac and non-Apple development tools on OSX? Where would those stand. And, while the introduction of new features are great, what happens if Apple decides to remove old ones? That is question left unanswered by this note and one that may leave the door open for more concerns.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Apple is the new China. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

5. MySpace acquired by News Corp

In the age before the rise of Facebook, MySpace was the new behemoth in the social network space. Earlier players (sixdegrees.com, friendster) had appeared and faded but MySpace seemed to be on a never-ending growth trend. When NewsCorp offered US$580 million for the company in 2005, it looked like an outrageous amount of money and a few people claimed that the founders could have received more money if they had held out.

It is possible that MySpace could have grown into something even bigger but, under NewsCorp’s umbrella, the company seems to have had a hard time keeping up with the competition. The rise and multi-billion dollar valuation of Facebook seems to illustrate what could have been, had MySpace remained independent but, on the other hand, the fall of friendster might also have served as a potential scenario.

Either way, the deal established the concept of social network sites as here to stay.

4. YouTube acquired by Google

It was a deal that brought back many fond memories of the bygone dotcom era: a small company with no revenue and no business plan in place getting acquired for US1.65 billion. Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006, the largest in its history, ended up being an outlier in terms of outsized deals in the Web 2.0 space.

But it did establish consumer-created content, and online videos as two important trend in the internet space. In one felt swoop, the deal put on a spark to the online video space and, while the company has had to contend with issues around illegal videos being posted to its site, forced video content producers to start thinking about online distribution strategies.

That deal can be seen as the grandfather of Hulu, iTunes and Amazon’s video offering, as well as Netflix on demand.

3. Apple and AT&T partnership

Sometimes, a partnership is more important than an acquisition. In the case of this deal, having AT&T, one of the most traditional telco vendors, agree to major concessions in order to get its hand on a coveted new phone was revolutionary: in a world where carriers traditionally decided what software was running on the phone and what sites could be accessed with it, AT&T let Apple make all the design decisions, open up the deck to external developers, under some levels of control, and provide access to any site on the internet.

From the moment the iPhone was announced, it looked like a winner. It helped move more people to GSM-based networks, allowing for more interesting phones to enter the market. The 2007 partnership heralded a new age of competition and innovation in the mobile space, delivering, for the first time, on some of the promises that had been made around that concept for well over a decade. It also forced carrier to rethink their own business models as the heavy loads of traffic generated by the 3rd and 4th generation of the device defied the predicted usage patterns and forced mobile providers to upgrade their network.

2. Time-Warner acquired by AOL

Whether a deal is good depends on the side of the table one sits on. The January 2000 acquisition of Time-Warner by AOL was great for AOL shareholders and turned disastrous for Time-Warner’s. Playing on the fear instilled in media companies by the success of dotcoms left and right, AOL managed to engineer a deal where most of the shares of a merger would go to its shareholders.

Ultimately, the deal became a disaster for all parties involved as the attempt at finding synergies between the two companies found themselves bumping against the cold reality of political warfare and corporate protectionism. With units fighting against each other for most of the decade, the only way to reclaim the piece was to spin-off AOL, 9 years later, for less than 1 percent of the combined value of the two companies in 2000.

If there is a bigger example of destruction of financial value by a deal, I’m not aware of it. Ultimately, the importance of this deal is two-fold: first, it was the last big deal of the dotcom era and can serve as the marker for the end of that era (some might quibble that the stock market didn’t fall apart until about 6 months later but that’s just a detail). The deal also showed that expertise in online and not online are not necessarily compatible. Both require different business models and experts who understand the particulars of each market.

1. Google acquires Applied Semantics

The number one tech deal of the decade is probably going to be a contentious choice as it is also one of the smallest deal on a financial basis. Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003 for a bit over US$100 million, most of it in stock. What did Applied Semantics do? Well, to put it quite simply, it did contextual text-based advertising. The company’s work serves as the base for Google’s AdSense program, which delivers roughly half of Google’s ad revenue. I would argue that, without this acquisition, Google’s advertising reach would not have extended as far as it did and that this acquisition serves as one of the largest drivers of revenue to the company and its key differentiator against other online ad offerings.

Because AdSense has been such a substantial engine of revenue Growth for Google; because it was developed by an outside company most people haven’t heard off; because Google is now one of the most important players in the tech space, dictating and directing trends in our industry;  I would say that this is the single most important tech deal of the decade.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 10 Tech Deals that Defined the Decade — Part 2. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It has a relatively low but highly dedicated audience and is garnering good press both in the blogging community and the mainstream media.

The service is suffering from growth related issues which force it to be down at unexpected times but users put up with it because of its supposed transformational nature.

The service allows people to build things on top of it, offering external parties a greater chance to generate revenue than the company providing the service.

And, establishing further proof that service is going to be important in the future, a lot of mainstream stars are establishing presence quickly, only to slowly abandon those points of presence after a while.

But those stars are no different from most of the service’s users, which tend to abandon it only a month of two after trying it out.

What is that service called?

If you said Twitter, you are clearly reading this in 2009. But, only two years ago, the answer would have been Second Life (something I learned first hand, having been part of the hype around it back then).

of course, I have no doubt that this post will probably receive a high amount of flames because supporters will tell me how Twitter is different. But is it?

The Coral Reef

I’ve always had an affinity for Dave Winer’s Coral Reef analogy. However, even the coral reef analogy seems to eventually break down, leaving people like Winer to think of ways to move out (in a way, Winer fell into the same trap with Twitter as Scoble did with Friendfeed).

The issue here is that a lot of energy gets poured by developers into supporting an ultimately closed system. While artificial coral reefs exists, they are generally part of the larger ocean and tend to be pushed into creation by sinking boats or subway trains. But an important distinction is that the creator of an artificial reef is generally present at the creation but then lets the ecosystem take over and doesn’t try to control anything.

In the tech field, the best analogy for an artificial coral reef would be opening sourcing an important source of code (for example, the apache web server) or making a set of protocols or ideas open to all (eg. HTML or RSS) without requiring that the implementor cede any control to the party which made the code or idea available. Today, you can fok the httpd server if you feel like it or you can adapt parts of HTML or RSS to your heart’s content.

Fauxpenness

But there’s a different set of ecosystems out there that becomes more of a venus flytrap of technology. I would describe this as fauxpenness:

Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t.

It’s the kind of approach that pretends to be open but provides some level of lock-in.

In 2006–2007, we saw that happen with SecondLife, as many developers (myself included) built software code that could run within the SecondLife world but was ultimately stuck there because you could not run it outside that world and/or run SecondLife servers on your own machines.

in 2007–2008, we saw that happen with the F8 Facebook platform, which locks your applications inside of Facebook and, while many developers have pushed to force the company to open up, tends to stay there. In 2007-today, we’re seeing the same thing with Twitter, which allows you to build whatever you want on top of it but doesn’t decentralize their approach, leaving developers potential slaves to the whims of the company. The same is true of the iPhone, which provides unusual access to the phone operating system and allows to develop interesting software on top of it but still keep developers away from being able to access basic things like calendar information via an SDK.

The endless cycle

Interestingly enough, it’s not an unusual phenomenon in the technology world. It works like this:

It happened with SecondLife; it happened with F8; it will happen with Twitter and it will happen with the iPhone at some point. It appears that the natural course of locked API is to get to a point where the developers get so annoyed that they decide to go look somewhere else.

But there’s hope.

Breaking Free of Fauxpenness

Because of the lock-in, it is possible for companies to break free of the cycle. In order to do so, two things need to happen:

• First, the company needs to find a way to establish a business model that does not require lock-in
• Then, the company needs to start removing the lock-in components it offers.

I’m not saying that either of those step is an easy one. In fact, few companies have successfully managed them and, even when they do, the developer community will keep asking for more.

For example, Microsoft’s history is one of establishing initial lock-ins, weeding out the competition and, when its lead is established enough, relaxing the choke-hold it has on the developer community and playing a little nicer until it tries to enter another market. That was the case with Windows; it was the case with Office; and it is the case with IE today.

IBM also took the same approach, initially being a provider of proprietary systems and slowly, over the last 15–20 years, moving to become one of the largest supporters of the open source movement.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Fauxpenness. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

So let’s delve into the list:

Text (SMS Messages)

The main challenge to the “Text” application was due, in large part to the fact that it was initially submitted as “SMS Messages”.

For every application that goes through the rigorous approval process at Apple, the first thing that is done is reviewing whether the functionality of the application is provided by an application that was previously approved. In the case of “SMS and MMS Messages”, the word “Messages” triggered all kinds of alerts as Mail had previously been approved. It was thus decided that any messages could be sent via email.

The developer resubmitted the application after removing MMS functionality, pointing out that this application would not be able to send pictures, thus not replicating mail functionality. The argument failed the appeal and the application was rejected again.

The approval only came when the developer resubmitted the application as “Text” describing it as an application that allowed a user to take notes, as long as he/she didn’t have to cut or paste anything. This was considered OK and the application got to green light.

Calendar

Calendar was another application that had multiple difficulties in getting approved. Initially called “Rendez-Vous” to evoke the French’s aesthetic design sometimes appreciated in certain corners of the Apple world, the application was rejected when it was discovered that Rendez-Vous had once been another Apple trademark.

The developer proceeded to resubmit that application as “Calendar”, figuring that the Microsoft-sounding name might pass some of the constraint of the fascist-like approval board. At that point, the application passed two thousands levels of sign-offs but, as it was about to get its last needed signature for approval, someone pointed out that a calendar could be used to schedule illicit behavior. This led to an immediate rejection.

It is unclear as to how the application was reinstated but the names Schmidt and Bohner appeared to have something to do with it. Our assumption is that those are top secret projects related to devices we have yet to hear about.

Camera and Photos

The Camera and Photos application ended up being submitted as part of the same package. Internal notes point to the fact that they are one and the same.

When first submitted as “iPhoto”, the application was quickly rejected because it reproduced functionality available in the Apple product line and infringed on an Apple trademark.

In order to increase his chances, the developer decided to cut the application in two and offer them as separate ones that would hopefully go to different app-rovers. Little did he know that all applications are treated equally in the world of Apple approvals and denials.

In the case of Camera, the application was initially rejected because it could be used to take pictures of future Apple products. After code was changed to ensure that the iPhone was explode if such pictures were taken, the Application was approved.

Photos was a little trickier. It was thought that “naughty pictures” could be stored using it, which make endanger the fragile nature of some iPod and iPhone customers. But after the developer explained that the limited space available on an iPod or iPhone would primarily be taken by illegally copied music, leaving little space to such naughty content, the application was approved.

YouTube

The primary product of YouTube is to show user generated content. But few people know that the initial YouTube application allowed users to upload videos of their cats to YouTube. Because that “upload” feature was included into the application, it was initially decided that it would endanger AT&T’s network, end the world as we know it, and probably destroy the very fiber of society. As a result, it is only natural that such application would initially be rejected.

Apple’s legal department stepped into the fray to help rescue this application based on the little known legal statute establishing the tattle doctrine. The legal department assumed that if the RIAA or MPAA were to come after them for the amount of illegal content they’ve enabled users to use without controls, they could always point out to YouTube as being even worse, therefore driving the RIAA or MPAA lawyers away for a long period of time (or at least until everyone in the world had bought an iPod and subsequently upgraded to an iPhone.)

Maps

Due to Apple’s close relationship with Google (at least, at the time), Maps was seen as an easy thing to implement. Not only would it demonstrate the greatness of the iPhone but it would also show developers that there were two classes of citizens in the Apple development community: those who have a market capitalization still north of Apple’s and are not named Microsoft, and everybody else. Members of the first class could initially have applications available on the device. Smelly developers (aka everyone else) could develop web applications. This only worked for the first release and eventually, Apple had to relent to offer the App store we’ve all come to know and love, freeing the Apple development from the shackles of… oh nevermind.

So back to the Maps. They were initially rejected because certain towns had names that cannot be repeated in polite conversation. After Austria and Pennsylvania were removed from the maps, the application was approved.

Stocks

This application was considered dangerous to many users as it might lead them to invest in companies other than Apple. Submitting the application, the developer figured that he would default choices to Apple and Google. The choice of Apple helped internal discussion but the application was initially rejected on other grounds, as can be attested by the following rejection letter:

We’ve reviewed your application Stocks. Because the stock market has been on a downward cycle and tends to make our users cry, we have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published on the iPhone.
If you choose to provide additional features that utilize iPhone functionality while tending to the mental well-being of our customers, your application can be reconsidered for reinclusion on the iPhone deck after you resubmit a new binary to us.

After agreeing that the only stocks that can be listed in the application are stocks that go up, the application was approved.

Weather

Sometimes, the weather can get you into trouble. When the developer of this application submitted it, it was assumed that few things could be consider as plain and boring as the weather. The rejection came in less than an hour after the application was submitted. Here’s the text in full, with attributions being removed:

Thank you for submitting weather to the iPhone approval process. We’ve reviewed your application and determined that we cannot include this version of your iPhone application at this time because it contains objectionable content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

The objectionable content referenced in this email is the use of the words “Hot and Wet”. These words tend to appear in many salacious sites on the internet so we suspect that your application would fit into that cesspool. Since the app is already available on any iPhone, please make the necessary changes to the application as soon as possible, and resubmit your binary to us. Thank you

After many emails going back and forth, it was agreed that weather could be hot or humid but never at the same time.

Clock

Apple’s unfortunate history of collusion with terrorist was responsible for the rejection of the clock, because the timer function was felt to look too much like the timer on bombs in many Hollywood movies.

After ticking sound was removed from the application, it was approved.

Calculator

Deep in the heart of every iPod user is someone looking to hide collections of pictures you do not want to see. It has been documented that the iPod and iPhone calculators are really just secret doorways to Sodom and Gomorrah. Unbeknowst to the developer who initially submitted the innocuous (or is it?) calculator, the approver assumed that nothing as boring as a calculator would be included on an iPhone and that, therefore, it must be an application that nefariously hid its true intent. Since such intent was not specified, it could only be bad so the approver rejected the application.

As was the case for Calendar, it is unclear how Calculator ended up approved. Through what appears to be purely coincidences, any witnesses we tried to discuss this with died within seconds of agreeing to talk with us.

Notes

This one was caught into the unfortunate Snafu that allowed Text to be approved. As approvers assumed that Text was a notes taking application, due to the fiendish way in which its developer had managed approval, they just assumed that Notes was providing duplicate functionality and rejected it.

The application developer then resubmitted it, claiming it was a tool for making shopping list. That was enough to get it approved.

Settings

When this application was submitted, the iPod shuffle was a great success. It was thus decided that providing settings was “of limited use to iPod and iPhone users.”

However, when someone pointed out that this could be used to sell users ringtones from the iTunes store (and allow them to change them), it was approved.

iTunes and the App Store

Nah, just kidding on those two. They were always part of the phone and always approved. However, it is interesting to note that iTunes came first, followed by the App Store later. The initial application called “Send more money to Apple” was judged to have to lengthy a name.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Unexpected iPhone apps rejections — Part 2. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Following is the first part of a list of the first 18 applications to have been initially banned on the iPhone, along with relevant information related to the rejections. Those bans were eventually reversed, allowing applications to make their ways into the phone. In this first part, we will look at the big 4: Phone, Mail, Safari, and the iPod (the next entry will examine the other ones).

Phone

It comes as a little known fact that the approval process almost killed phone functionality on the iPhone. The original developers had a hard time getting the application approved, as can be seen in this initial rejection letter:

Thank you for submitting Phone to the iPhone approval process. We’ve reviewed your application and determined that we cannot include this version of your iPhone application at this time because it contains objectionable content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

We have heard that so called “phones” can be used in a number of ways including communicating secrets related to the internal working of large Cupertino-based companies located on Infinite Loop to people outside said companies. Please make the necessary changes to the application as soon as possible, and resubmit your binary to us. Thank you

After many emails going back and forth, it was agreed that any mention of words picked from a still secret list of product names and companies names would result in the phone immediately losing signal and the call being dropped. A secret message would also be sent to an undisclosed location identifying the people involved with that call.

Mail

The second rejected iPhone application was a little more understandable. After all, Apple is known for its simplicity and the fact that the company tends to remove redundant functionality from its devices in order to ensure the best user experience. While little visibility is given into the decision process around defining what what gets approved or banned, TNL.net got hold of internal transcripts of the discussion that led to eventual ban of the Mail application. Here is the abridged version, as we wanted to protect sensitive information:

Reviewer 1: Hey, we’ve got this mail application here, looks like it does (shuffle of paperwork to review what information has been submitted)… uh e-mail.

Reviewer 2: I’ve heard of that. I understand you can contact your friends with that and write them notes.

Reviewer 1: Why would you want to do something like that.

Reviewer 2: (pauses) uh.. well, let’s say you wanted to tell a friend a joke

Reviewer 1: You mean like call them on the phone and tell them a joke, looks like it’s reproducing existing functionality.

Reviewer 2: Hmmmm. Maybe but you could also use it to communicate information to a lot of people in one shot. For example, if you were a Nigerian prince looking for someone to help you move money out of your country…

Reviewer 1: Why wouldn’t you use a phone for that?

Reviewer 2: Well, long distance costs, for starter. And then, it would take a lot of time to call people individually.

Reviewer 1: (looks up list of countries in which the iPhone is slated to be sold) Well, Nigeria doesn’t appear on the list so let’s reject this.

Reviewer 2: Oh, I didn’t realize Nigeria was not on the list. Definitely reject then.

After several phone conversations, three international meetings and sign-off from half of the company, it was agreed that mail should be allowed because pictures of lolcat just don’t seem as good when recounted over the telephone.

Safari

At this point in the iPhone’s development cycle, getting applications approved was still getting tough but Safari, slated to be the third icon on the device also had its own uphill battle. The submission of this application came to established the short-lived record of being denied in under 10 minutes. The denial did not even come by email but was delivered in the form of a message on the developer’s voice mail system:

Reviewer’s Manager: Thank you for submitting Safari, your “web browser” for inclusion on the iPhone. After researching this web thing via our macs, we have come to the conclusion that it is too obscene, offensive, riddled with pornographic and other useless material to warrant use by iPod and iPhone users. Furthermore, we have discovered that some of the content seen there is replicated content that can be bought in the iTunes store and stored on iPods. Should you make changes to the application that would ensure this internet thing is sectioned off, we would be happy to re-review after you submit a binary to us.

In this particular case, Steve Jobs himself intervened, providing a note in an internal memo (and reiterating the point when the device was released):

We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure. And we’ve come up with a very. Sweet. Solution. Let me tell you about it. An innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices… it’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone.  You can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, check email, look up a location on Gmaps… don’t worry about distribution, just put ‘em on an internet server. They’re easy to update, just update it on your server. They’re secure, and they run securely sandboxed on the iPhone. And guess what, there’s no SDK you need! You’ve got everything you need if you can write modern web apps…”

With Steve’s seal of approval, the app was approved.

iPod

The last of the big 4 to be issued such rejection was unsurprisingly the iPod functionality. It has long been rumored that the reason for such rejection was largely due to the head of the iPod division sending out a company-wide voicemail to express his frustration at the inclusion of iPod functionality. However, due to the offensive nature of the language used in that message, few have been willing to provide any information about it. An iPod-compliant file was provided to TNL.net and, after spending several months trying to clean up the language, we are providing the cleanest excerpt we could, blanking out offensive words (reader’s discretion is advised):

iPod division head: Why you #### ##### ##### ##### ######## ######### ###### ####### ####### ######### cannibalize the iPod market #### ###### ############### ####### ###### hurt margins ######## ####### ###### kill the company ####### ####### Steve will hear about this.

While we do not traffic in rumors, some people sayhat, after his meeting with Steve Jobs, the manager was never heard of again.

In the next entry, we will review some of the other applications that felt the sharp edge of the reviewer’s pen, providing even further visibility into the otherwise opaque approach.

Update: Part 2 is now available.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Unexpected iPhone apps rejections — Part 1. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Kindle Lawsuit

In my last entry, I pointed to the case of Justin Gawronski, who was mentioned almost as an aside in the New York Times article about Amazon deleting legally purchased and downloaded content from their users’ Kindle devices. At the time, I suspected that the deletion of annotations could eventually lead to lawsuits:

Beyond the irony of Amazon throwing a book like Nineteen Eighty Four down the memory hole (a large incinerator in that book), Amazon’s action raise troubling questions as to the ability of online providers to remove content they have not created. I leave it to legal scholar to assess whether Amazon could actually be considered to have infringed on the intellectual property rights of people whose annotations were removed along with the books.

Today, news comes out that this student is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Amazon, making this the first legal case to test what a cloud-based provider can and cannot do with legitimately purchased content. The complaint uses language similar to what I talked about:

2. With an uncanny knack for irony, Amazon recently remotely deleted any traces of
certain electronic copies of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” from customers’
Kindles and iPhones, thereby sending these books down Orwell’s so-called “memory hole.”

[…]

16. On or about July 16 and 17, 2009, Amazon withdrew from sale certain e-books,
including George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm.” Amazon then remotely deleted these ebooks
from purchasers’ Kindles and iPhones. In doing so, Amazon not only deleted the e-books,
but also rendered useless any electronic notes and annotations that consumers had made within
these e-books because the notes were no longer tied to the referenced or highlighted text.

While I had initially thought that the content was deleted, it turns out that the annotations are still available on the device, albeit without any context to them, which is what the lawsuit is now testing:

54. Plaintiff Gawronski and the Big Brother Work-Product Subclass suffered
damages because they created content on their Kindles within the purchased content that
Amazon deleted.

Most surprising is that the lawsuit did not look at Amazon’s infringement of its customer’s rights under the first sale doctrine. The first sale doctrine, which has been in place since the beginning of the 20th century, basically states that purchases can transfer a lawfully acquired copy of a copyrighted work without requiring permission from the copyright holder. Many people interpret this to mean that:

the copyright holder’s rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy end once that copy is sold, as long as no additional copies are made. This doctrine is also referred to as the “first sale rule” or “exhaustion rule.”

It could be argued that, by taking the book away from its users, Amazon has controlled the ownership of a particular copy that had already been sold, even though no additional copy was made. It was surprising to not see the lawsuit also incorporating this point as it is probably one of the larger legal infrigements Amazon could be charged with when it comes to that incident.

The Apple Store and iPhone community

Meanwhile, while there are no legal rumblings yet around Apple’s treatment of its development community. With every incident of an app being denied access, it appears that a few more developers decide that, while the platform is exciting to use, developing for the iPhone is not worth the trouble. If it were one case, that could be considered a disgruntled developer; if it were two, that could also be ignored; but with every new incident, it appears another developer or group of developer decides that they’d rather not develop for the platform.

When I was in journalism school, we were told that when there is a high similarity between three different events in a very short time, we ought to pay closer attention as it could be a trend. When that similarity pops over and over again, as in the case of the iPhone development community, it seems like a slow grumble is turning into something more potent.

But of course, one could argue that such grumbles are really nothing to worry about, as long as Apple can continue growing its user base. After all, the company makes more money selling devices that it does from the revenue generated by the app store.

True to some extent but that particular issue starts falling on its face when one considers two important facts:

1. Selling applications through the App Store is probably a more profitable business (as costs associated to the sale, as represented by a percentage of the revenue is probably lower than it would be on hardware).
2. Prominent users are starting to complain loudly.

Of course, none of this is going to single handedly stop the growth of the iPhone but what is increasingly appearing is that Apple is having a potential communication challenge on its hands. A single disgruntled developer or disgruntled user cannot bring the product down but a continuous stream of complaints starts creating the appearance of wrong-doing, potentially undermining the long term success of the offering.

Apple is still thought of by the majority of the people as a cool company (as Google and Microsoft once were), a shinning beacon highlighting the power of innovation and capitalism. As it grows marketshare, what was once considered OK as a way to help the company compete against larger players (the aforementioned Microsoft) is increasingly being considered as arrogant and evil.

What does it all mean?

Of course, at this point, if you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering how this is an example of a new hope. The new hope is arising out of the fact that a largely quiet population is now starting to fight back against the over-reach of large corporations into what level of controls such corporations will be able to excert. In the case of Amazon, the class action has the potential of redefining what a company can and cannot do with a purchase device. Such decision could also establish some precedents as to the use of kill-switches in electronic devices (or invertly, give large corporations more power and legally codify the level of control they have been afforded).

In the public arena, the push-back Apple is encountering from both its developer and early adopter communities could help establish new boundaries as to what is and isn’t accepted in terms of controlling access through online gateways (in the case of Apple, that gateway is the App store but one could argue that the social rules established around the App store could eventually extend to the kind of perception around what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of consumer ISPs blocking internet sites).

With each event, the online community is also establishing some precedent as to what will be considered acceptable in an environment where all data is stored not a user’s machine but on some remote corporate server.

In each of these individual cases, awareness is raised and with every other skirmish, more people become aware of the issues at stake. It is my belief that, as more people become aware, more people will require less corporate control and more individual control. And that gives me hope.

Update: The government is now looking into Apple’s removal of Google Voice related apps from their App store. This is getting interesting.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Cloud Wars — A New Hope. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.