November 2, 2009
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While the smartphone world is just coming down from its Android 2.0 high, Google is apparently already testing Android 2.1. Android fanboy site AndroidAndMe has reported that its analytics show 23 visits from Android 2.1 devices visits over the past few weeks. (AndroidAndMe's analytics graph, below.)
The new Android version, which may go by the nickname Flan, will face stiff competition from the forthcoming iPhone OS 3.2, which some have speculated will include deeper push integration, Google Voice or Latitude support, 720p video out, and mobile iChat. It will also go up against Blackberry's new Storm 2 touch OS, the interface of which is said to be greatly improved since RIM ditched the "clickable" screen of the original Storm.
Google's last Android update, dubbed Donut, added universal search, multi-touch gestures, text-to-speech, and navigation, and it premiered with the Motorola Droid.
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November 2, 2009
02:18 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
Ever since social media data started growing like bathroom flora, there have been aggregation tools to make managing your stuff easier. Some are limited in scope; FriendFeed, for example, pulls together just a few services, but does it well. Other services are more ambitious; Fuser is a kind of centralized inbox for all your email accounts and social networking tools, and Flock is an entire browser meant to integrate much of the same stuff. In the last few years, I've set up these three and more, dialed them in, and promptly forgotten about them. These kinds of tools usually work alright, but the user experience often ends up being too unwieldy to keep me on board.
Then I started using Chi.mp, which takes aggregation a step further: Not only does it collect all your social media junk on one site, it also provides you with an outward-facing Web site that you can manage with varying levels of privacy. But while Chi.mp may be the best concept of the lot, it lacks some of the technical depth of Fuser, which can aggregate Exchange email as well as Gmail, and the variety of Flock, which lets you integrate Flickr as well as Picasa. Alas, Chi.mp is another account I've left to wither in the wind.
Now there's another contender: Pip.io, seen above. The Web-based service calls itself a "social OS," but that's a little fatuous; it's an aggregator and mass-publishing platform like the rest of them, but with a much more sophisticated API that allows for third-party apps. One example is the Netflix app, which crams the entire Netflix experience (even "Watch Instantly") inside your Pip.io account.
But building a platform does not automatically bring apps--or users, for that matter. Pip.io's interface is one of the best of the lot, and it's more robust than anything I've used, except maybe Fuser, which is so robust it's almost impossible for Firefox to load without crashing. But there are few available apps so far, and the ones that are available are the things I almost never use from my desktop; in my world, Netflix, Facebook, and Twitter live mostly on my iPhone or Android phone.
Here's the real problem: I hesitate to invite any of my friends to use Pip.io, or any aggregator, since I can't make a convincing argument that they're inherently better than using each service (Facebook, Twitter, and so on) by itself. At some point, if you want to dive deep in most of those services, you're going to have to go back to the original site; you can't browse friends of friends in Pip.io, for example, so you have to go back to Facebook.com. What's the point of ever leaving? (Below, Pip.io summoning my Twitter feed.)
The evangelism problem is a very real one for mass-social tools. Without "friends" on Pip.io, some of the site's central features (like the "rooms" area, where you can chat privately with groups of friends) go unused. And without that kind of dynamic content, there's no reason that a user should come back.
If you use an aggregator or mass-publishing tool and feel strongly about it, please let us know in the comments.
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November 2, 2009
12:09 pm | 0 recommendations | 3 comments
At Apple's all-night iPhone launch party in Beijing, there were none of the day-long lines seen in New York, London, or Paris. According to the Financial Times, the Chinese iteration of the iPhone, which went on sale on October 30, has stirred the interest of only 11.7 of Chinese cell phone users, according to one survey.
The device is poised for relatively flat sales in the world's largest mobile market thanks to its hefty pricetag: between $880 and $1,170 USD, depending on the model, in a nation where $3,000 is the mean annual salary. China Unicom, Apple's partner there and the country's second-largest cell carrier, has chosen not to subsidize the handset as much as companies like O2 in Europe and AT&T in the U.S. Buyers will also be discouraged to find that due to a regulatory snafu, the Chinese iPhone has no WiFi.
So-called "gray market" iPhones abound, brought from Hong Kong and other adjacent countries at about half the price, further reducing the iPhone's potential buyer base. ShanghaiDaily reports that China Unicom has a sales goal of only 5 million iPhones in a nation of over 700 million cell-phone users.
Further hurting the iPhone's appeal in China is its closed-source approach to software. China Unicom will be running its own app store independent of Apple's, so all the apps that western users have come to know and love won't be available on the iPhone in China. Furthermore, as GigaOm notes, Chinese buyers are more likely to respond to open-source solutions that are more easily hacked to obviate government censorship.
Should Android gain traction in the East, it might help funnel much-needed development dollars into the platform. Right now, most smartphone development is focussed on the iPhone OS, which boasts about 70 million users, and only secondarily on iPhone. Since localizing for language has become easy--many iPhone developers have had bi-lingual users offer translations for free--American and European developers might bring more enthusiasm to Android development if it catches on in China, banking on a big Chinese audience for a payoff.
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November 2, 2009
09:22 am | 0 recommendations | 6 comments
While Layar pushes forward with augmented reality apps and Nokia finds ways to embed AR cameras in our clothing, the rest of us wait breathlessly for a world in which our maps and data are overlaid on what we see, a world in which our smartphone serves as our all-knowing eye.
Or, frankly, we don't.
Augmented reality has been the stuff of R&D labs for years, but it's still a technology without mainstream enthusiasm. For people excited about AR, this should be disconcerting. Non-techies have embraced plenty of new tools virally--everything from cell-phone cameras to digital music to IMAP email. But few of the "normal" smartphone users I talk to can get excited about augmented reality. Sure, they're not thinking five years ahead, as we're told tech visionaries do. But augmented reality isn't five years away anymore. With 4G networks popping up everywhere and phone hardware improving at warp speed, AR is in its last trimester. And few people seem to care. (Layar for Android, below.)
Esquire seems to have proven the point. Its augmented reality issue features pages that come to life when you hold the magazine up to a webcam. I thought this was pretty cool, until I showed an industrial designer friend of mine. "You have to read the magazine like that?" he asked as I held my issue in front of my laptop. Yeah, I guess you do.
Talk to the people doing AR research, and they seem to think that the awkwardness of using AR--holding your phone up in front of you; holding your Esquire in front of your computer--will work itself out. But they may be underestimating the power of human habit. We have been ingesting information the old fashioned way for hundreds of years: by looking at a static image and using our brains, not our smartphone cameras, to meld it with reality. Maps, newspapers, books, computers--they're very different "technologies," but they all work essentially the same way: our brains provide the milieu. AR wants to derail that relationship. That's going to be a tough sell.
Even some the people who should be most excited about AR aren't. I've been working on a book about iPhone design and programming, and in the course of my research I've run into several iPhone developers who just don't see how AR stands to improve anyone's user experience.
Jonathan Wegener is the mind behind Exit Strategy NYC, an app that helps New Yorkers navigate the ins and outs of the subways system by showing all the exits, entrances and transfer junctures. You'd think map-app makers like him would be most excited about AR. But Wegener doesn't intend to ever involve augmented reality in his app's roadmap. "It's a total fad," he says of AR. "Looking at a tiny screen to show you overlaid information about the world around you is a really awkward and a broken user experience."
How many of us agree without even knowing it? Surely lots of people have the Yelp app for iPhone, which has a pseudo-AR mode. But how many of us actually use it that new mode to find a restaurant? Sure, we try it once, or pull it out to show friends, but that's about it; once the newness wears off, we're back to using Yelp the same old way.
"I think consumers will get tired of AR, and it will not really catch on," says Wegener. "But I think businesses will keep trying," he says. He compares AR to CueCat, the at-home USB bar-code reader that was supposed to change how we search for information on products. Neat, sure. But in the end, the old way of searching won out.
AR isn't bound to fail--that's not what I'm arguing. Iteration after iteration will be pushed on consumers until the technology finds its niche. Some have suggested that technicians will use it to see exploded technical diagrams, for instance. But if you're expecting apps like Layar to drastically change the way you live your everyday life, well, that's just not reality.
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October 30, 2009
02:07 pm | 0 recommendations | 8 comments
Three imbeciles who exploited stolen Facebook accounts to send spam were fined $711 million in damages on Thursday, payable to Facebook.
Sanford Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian, and Scott Shaw allegedly stole login credentials for Facebook accounts and used them to propagate a spam and phishing scheme that paid them for their referrals. The three will also face criminal charges (for criminal contempt) and jail time.
Facebook was less than sanguine about the big pay-off, acknowledging that the sum will probably get knocked down upon appeal. But they seem optimistic that the criminal charges will help deter future miscreants: "... [I]n addition to the judgment, [Wallace] now faces possible jail time. This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers," the Facebook blog reports.
This is not the first time Wallace will owe a social network; in 2008 he was found guilty of spamming MySpace, and was ordered to pay $230 million.
[Via InfoWorld]
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October 30, 2009
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Books: Nowhere is there a more poignant battle between small businesses and their corporate competition. While music, movies, and TV were long-ago digitized by the forces that be, books are the laggard medium, making for a fight that seems downright anthropological.
A few weeks ago we reported that some big-box stores were aggressively outdoing each other on hardcover price cuts. But since Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Target began selling hardcovers as loss-leaders, smaller bookshops have tried to take advantage by buying their book-stock from those retailers at below-cost prices.
Big-box retailers have caught on, according to Publishers Weekly, and are now putting limits on how many bargain-priced books you can buy at once. (Wal-Mart is limiting to two, Amazon three, and Target five. For an indie bookseller, five's plenty!) The American Booksellers Association has also sent a letter to the Department of Justice calling the price war anticompetitive and "predatory," but nothing has come of the legally-impotent complaint.
The books in question are 10 predicted bestsellers, to be released this fall.
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October 30, 2009
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For many office workers, landlines are a redundant nuisance: one more voicemail account to check, one more thing to ring during a clandestine nap. But most office buildings wreak havoc on cell reception. New intra-office phone antennas, working as a cloud to smartly route traffic, might finally solve the problem, rendering landlines at long last unnecessary.
A company called SpiderCloud is about to introduce distributed antenna systems for small businesses, according to The Wall Street Journal. Enterprise-level customers have had access to these things for a while, but never before have they been as cheap and as easy for smaller businesses to get.
SpiderCloud's system sets up a series of WiFi/cellular access points across an office, tying them into a company's servers to route all the phone traffic through the Internet. The approach is similar with femtocells, little micro-antennas that some mobile phone companies are starting to lease to customers who live in poor-coverage areas.
The Journal says the main advantage to the SpiderCloud system is that it's smart enough not to route intra-office calls outside the building. If one employee calls another, the traffic stays within the SpiderCloud system; only excess phone traffic is externalized for routing. SpiderCloud is venture-backed with $36 million in the bank.
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October 30, 2009
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Despite cutting back on spending, big corporations actually expanded their R&D budgets by 5.7% in 2008, reports The New York Times. It's only half as much as the increase in 2007, but it hints that research spending is one of the last things on the corporate chopping block and that the economic slowdown might not stymie innovation as much as conventional wisdom suggests. (Below, Dell has been charging forward on super-thin laptop designs like the Adamo.)
The Booz & Company study, which surveyed 1,000 of the country's biggest corporations, also found that 70% of those companies intended to keep growing their R&D budgets in 2009. Calling innovation spending "an arms race," Booz researchers noted that while some sectors (namely automotive) spent conservatively, tech sector companies went for broke. "Eight of the top 10 R&D spenders in the software and Internet sector, the study said, increased their spending," NYTimes.com reports. (Below, patents are also on the rise. The Times says this is common at the tail end of slow/no growth periods, noting that innovation seems to occur independent of the business cycle.)
Capital investment in technology is also rising. USA Today reports that after six down quarters, corporate spending on computers and software went up in the third quarter. Consumers seem to be spendier too; Microsoft is reporting higher-than-predicted pre-orders for Windows 7 and Bloomberg says the company is "more bullish" on the PC market than just last quarter. Analysts are waiting for Cisco to return its most recent results next week, looking for signs that corporate demand for tech products is indeed growing.
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October 29, 2009
03:40 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
Last month we reported that a new cable channel called Epix was going to try to steal thunder from heavyweights like HBO and Showtime by also offering all their movies online at EpixHD.com. The channel, which is being offered first on Verizon FiOS, is available for order now, and has also opened its Netflix-style movie Web site to the public for the next 72 hours so that non-Verizon folks can check out the service.
Better yet, FastCompany.com readers can get free access for the next 30 days by following Epix on Twitter. (Check out the end of this post for details.)
Verizon hasn't yet announced how much they'll charge to add Epix to a FiOS subscription, which will appear in HD as channel 895. But they'll have a powerful offering in the Epix site, which will hang onto all the Epix movies for anytime viewing. Right now, the library hovers at around 150 films; within a year, says Head of Digital Media Emil Rensing, that number will balloon to 3,000.
"We're not being bold and saying that we'll totally change movie watching online," he says, "but the focus is about choice." Rensing says that it's not enough to be able to watch live on cable or record on Tivo. Customers want to have all those movies they pay for monthly available at their computers, and eventually, their mobile phones. ("We're working on mobile solutions," says Rensing, who predicts that Verizon Wireless will add Epix to their V-Cast mobile TV channel.)
As far as online movie sites go, Epix will be among the best. It eschews Silverlight (ahem, Netflix) for Flash video, and offers six auto-adjusting levels of compression for varying Internet speeds. Like Apple's iTunes LP offerings, the Web version of Epix will even have some extra movie junk--behind the scenes clips and studio stills--that the cable channel doesn't.
Invite demos for EpixHD.com can be found here, and last through this weekend. Epix will also give 30-day VIP codes via DM to the first 200 readers who follow @epixHD on Twitter AND who tweet "@epixhd Experience Epix #fastcompany."
Once you've used EpixHD, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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October 29, 2009
01:05 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
Facebook wants you doing more stuff on Facebook. Earlier this week, users saw themselves Yenta'd back into stale relationships by Facebook's long-lost-friend algorithm. Now the site is trying to lure you deeper into its apps and games, neither of which have been quite the pinnacle of technological achievement that they rightfully should be.
The new platform improvements smack of the iTunes App Store improvements Apple has been steadily rolling out as the store scales. Facebook will make apps more centrally located in the site's layout; your apps will now live in the left nav bar, tempting you to waste time playing Facebook Scrabble instead of... wasting time on Facebook by some other method. The social network is also readying its user profiles to handle more apps by allowing users to "bookmark" their favorite ones.
Most importantly, it's adding two new dashboards--one for games, one for other apps--to your Facebook homepage. And those dashboards will show you which apps your friends are using. Much like Apple's "push" iPhone notifications, which help iPhoners play games with each other by zapping high-score challenges back and forth, the games dashboard on Facebook will notify you when, for example, it's your move in a chess game.
Lastly, apps will be given the power to issue email notifications, exercise more discretion over spam, and provide more granular privacy control. Check out the full explanation over at the Facebook blog.
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