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Android Ported to iPhone

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Hacker Planetbeing has apparently ported the Android to the iPhone. The Android OS is, in this video, apparently running successfully on the Apple phone. Planetbeing has offered the Android-to-iPhone " pre-built images and sources " as a torrent download For the time being, it looks like the porting only works on first-generation iPhones. Sponsor "It should be pretty simple to port forward to the iPhone 3G," says Planetbeing. "The 3GS will take more work. Hopefully with all this groundwork laid out, we can make Android a real alternative or supplement for iPhone users." As Alexander Vaughn points out on AppAdvice , "Just like you can do Bootcamp on your Mac to access PC apps, you'll be able to go on Android to try all these apps that don't exist, or were not allowed on the iPhone." Discuss

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Android Ported to iPhone

Weekly Wrap-up: Deleting FB Apps, Open Web vs. FB Connect, Adobe Gives up on Apple, And More…

cgseo — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:00:00 +0000

It took Sarah Perez's post How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) a little more than 24 hours to become to the top-viewed post of this week. In a week filled with Facebook news, it certainly hit a nerve. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about how the Internet of Things can be an Internet of Cows, new tools to visualize the real-time Web, and how augmented reality developers can win $5,000. Read on for more. Sponsor Story of the Week: Delete Those Facebook Apps How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) This is What a Tweet Looks Like XAuth: The Open Web Fires a Shot Against Facebook Connect Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil? Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 1: Design & Development More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com . Mobile Web Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 3: Emerging Markets Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week Top 10 YouTube Videos About Flash Mobs More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Budding AR Developer? Put Your Creativity to Use and Win $5,000 Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Internet of Things Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again As Cattle Rustling Increases, So Does the Need for RFID More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web PostRank Launches New Tools to Visualize the Real-Time Web YouTube Streams IPL Cricket Live In U.S. More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The Art of the Email Pitch Tips for Networking (Beyond Just "Social Networking") Got an Exit Strategy? Lessons From Foursquare and Yahoo ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. The Largest Cloud in the World is Owned By A Criminal Network Google's Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5 Google's Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrap-up: Deleting FB Apps, Open Web vs. FB Connect, Adobe Gives up on Apple, And More...

Weekend Reading: Mobile Marketing, by Cindy Krum

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:00:00 +0000

One of our favorite new trends here at ReadWriteWeb is the quickly growing field of mobile technology and how we can take more of the Web along with us when we leave our computers. Because of the expanding popularity of smartphones and mobile data use, startups these days need to develop plans for marketing their brand on mobile devices at very early stages of their development. Cindy Krum, CEO of Rank-Mobile , a consulting firm focused on mobile marketing and SEO, is the author of this week's featured read, Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are . Sponsor With chapters on mobile advertising, mobile web development and search engine optimization, Krum's informative book is a great resource for first time entrepreneurs looking to take advantage of the mobile platform. There is also an entire chapter to the iPhone, a testament to the device's influence on the mobile Web space. "The iPhone has brought mobile Web access and mobile search to the masses," writes Krum. "The iPhone represents only 8% of the mobile handsets but roughly 75% of the mobile search, and iPhones now account for one out of every 333 Web hits worldwide. The desire for Web access and Web search was always there - it was just being slowed by the bad user experience that other mobile phones provided." "The desire for Web access and Web search was always there - it was just being slowed by the bad user experience that other mobile phones provided." - Cindy Krum Krum also includes case studies from prominent businesses which have used mobile platforms to market their products. These include Nike , Nationwide Insurance , Land Rover , Visa , Corona Beer and CNN . I was disappointed to not find any mention of the efforts being made by numerous companies to use augmented reality for mobile marketing, but the book does include the use of quick response (QR) codes . Various types of bar codes and QR codes are described, as well as case studies of companies that put the technology to practical use. The book itself even joins in the QR fun by including a ScanLife EZ Code on the back cover. ScanLife is a mobile application and short code provider that allows companies to market specifically to camera phones. Users take a picture of the code using a ScanLife app and can be redirected to various forms of mobile content. The strange thing about the book's implementation of the ScanLife code is that it failed to include any mobile-specific content. After scanning the code with the ScanLife app on my iPhone, Safari launched and took me to the book's homepage. Yes, Safari on the iPhone is a fully capable web browser, but it would have made more sense to create a website optimized for the iPhone's smaller screen. A similar code I found while on a recent trip to Las Vegas took me to a special mobile promotion page with a video and special hotel rates. The lesson to be learned here, and from other forms of mobile marketing, is that the content used should be native to the devices it is being viewed on. Simply adding a link to your normal webpage on a mobile device is not making the best use of the technology. The marketing the hotel used in the above example was a much better implementation because it provided me with exclusive content that was also optimized for viewing on a smaller screen. It isn't enough to market to mobile phones; companies must be sure to make the content unique and native. Much more can be learned from the book and from the advice provided straight from the CEO of a company in the trenches of mobile marketing. Research shows that smartphones could become used more than personal computers in just a few short years, so getting ahead on mobile marketing strategies is an important step for any early-stage company. If you want to learn more about mobile trends, be sure to register for our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California. Photo by Flickr user William Hook . Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education and Que Publishing . Discuss

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Weekend Reading: Mobile Marketing, by Cindy Krum

Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:20:49 +0000

While services like Gowalla and Foursquare still haven't become household names outside of the early adopter market yet, the technology behind these apps is now solidly mainstream. According to a new survey by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), about two thirds of iPhone owners now user location services at least once a week. Taking all cell phone users into account, 22% of adults between 25 and 34 use location services at least once a week, mostly to locate nearby points of interests, shops and services. Sponsor Focus: Location-Based Apps and Advertising The survey also asked users how likely they are to take action on location-based advertising on their mobile devices. According to the MMA, about half of those users who noticed ads in location-based apps took some action. On the other hand, only about 37% of respondents who noticed ads while sending or receiving text messages took any action based on these commercial messages. For those we noticed ads while browsing the web, this number was only 28% (which still seems rather high to us). Given that most people use location-based apps when they are already looking for a certain store or product, it makes sense that these users are more likely to respond to ads than people who are just browsing the web. Are Users Really Willing to Let Apps Track Them Passively in Return for Discounts? "Consumers are interested in allowing their phone to automatically share their location in exchange for perks, such as free use of mobile applications and mobile coupons." Interestingly, the MMA survey also notes that "consumers are interested in allowing their phone to automatically share their location in exchange for perks, such as free use of mobile applications and mobile coupons." While mobile coupons and other perks are definitely interesting to consumers, passive location services that track consumers in return for discounts have never really been tested in the wild. These services may sound good on paper, but the privacy implications of using these apps are hard to neglect and it remains to be seen if users are actually willing to give up their privacy in return for a 10% discount at Crate and Barrel. Chances are that we will see more of these passive tracking services once the iPhone 4 operating system arrives later this year. The current generation of the iPhone's operating system doesn't allow apps to run in the background and track your location, but this will be possible in the next version of the iPhone OS. Discuss

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Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week

Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 3: Emerging Markets

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:00:00 +0000

In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , we're outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In this the final instalment, we look at three markets for mobile which promise to be hugely valuable: commerce , cloud computing and health . As a reminder, in Part 1 we covered design and development issues and in Part 2 we looked at trending mobile apps such as geo-location and AR. We'll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , a 1-day event we're running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That's the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you'll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now . Sponsor Commerce As more and more consumers use smart phones, how can businesses utilize this channel? That's one question we will analyze at the RWW Mobile Summit. Consider these statistics: nearly one quarter of the mobile web, according to a recent report from mobile search engine Taptu , is made up of shopping and services . Taptu surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for touch-screen browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu's "shopping and services" category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites. According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company's index, followed by sites in the "photo and design" category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%. Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010: - Part 1: Design & Development - Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps In a recent report , Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker Meeker claimed that mobile will revolutionize e-commerce. She cited location-based services, push notifications, transparent pricing, and instant mobile delivery as four potential areas where this will occur. Mobile advertising is also a growing segment. In November, Google acquired AdMob , a mobile display ad serving platform, for $750 million. In January Apple acquired Quattro , a relatively unknown mobile advertising network, for an estimated $275 million. Later in January, Opera bought AdMarvel . In April, Apple announced an advertising platform called iAd . Cloud Computing According to a recent study from Juniper Research , the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014. The market was just over $400 million this past year, says Juniper, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise. Explained ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez in February, "there are already a few well-known mobile cloud apps out there including Google's Gmail and Google Voice for iPhone. When launched via iPhone homescreen shortcuts, these apps perform just like any other app on the iPhone, but all of their processing power comes from the cloud." Health Mobile health applications will play a large and important role in shaping the future of the health care system, wrote Mike Kirkwood at the mHealth initiative conference in February. He wrote that mobile and wireless health applications "directly impact the individual's health and have the promise of ensuring that when a patient leaves a doctor visit, they don't become "lost" in the system. It allows consumers to be engaged with health and wellness in their daily lives and connect back to their health care provider." It's not just from within the health system where mobile services will change health care, it's also in the applications that consumers are downloading to their smart phones. In February I surveyed the latest health and fitness apps on the iPhone platform . For example, an iPhone app called Diamedic allows diabetics to record their blood sugar levels and insulin doses. Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010: - Part 1: Design & Development - Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps We'd love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . See our announcement post for more details. If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss

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Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 3: Emerging Markets

Is Apple Booting iAd’s Competition from the iPhone?

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:15:23 +0000

At the most recent Apple keynote , Steve Jobs announced Apple's upcoming advertising platform called iAd . Included as a part of the OS 4.0 update, the mobile operating system upgrade due out for iPhone this summer and iPad later this fall, the iAd system aims, in its very Apple-ly way, to make mobile advertisements "delightful," meaning ads worth clicking on, engaging with and viewing. What Jobs didn't mention, though, is how Apple plans to give iAd its head start: by kicking out the competing analytics and advertising platforms now thriving in nearly every iPhone app today. Or so it seems. Sponsor Developer Reports App Store Rejection Due to Analytics Inclusion Last week, technology news blog VentureBeat caught wind of a story where Apple had rejected an iPhone application because it, according to the email sent to the developer, "is not appropriate for applications to gather user analytics." Not appropriate, you may ask? Since when? Apparently since Apple released their updated iPhone Developer Agreement. Alongside the SDK 4 beta , made available shortly after the announcement in early April, the developer contract was updated, too. Specifically, the clause in question, section 3.3.9, reads, in part (more here ): Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple's prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited. To date, the changes detailed in this clause have been overshadowed by the one preceding it - in Section 3.3.1, Apple banned the use of cross-compiler tools for building iPhone applications, like the one Adobe was just about to ship , for example. But in the long run, it's Section 3.3.9 that may have more impact on the industry as a whole. "FEAR" You may have not heard too much about this change because no one actually knows what's going on thanks to Apple's par-for-the-course policy of refusing to clarify its meaning. Plus, the companies who may be the most heavily affected by an analytics ban - services like Flurry , MediaLets , Motally , Localytics , and SimpleGeo , to name a few - don't want to talk about it. On record that is. But after a dozen or so phone calls and emails, we're starting to see a picture forming and it can be summed up in one word: FEAR . "Nobody wants to be the canary in the coal mine," one source told us, referring to the radio silence we're getting from these companies when you would have otherwise expected to hear outcry, or perhaps even anti-competitive claims. Some companies, off-record, say they are afraid to complain . If they do, they could be the next to be banned. Another source reported that a number of their company's clients weren't submitting updates to the iTunes Application Store because they were worried that the updates, with the analytics included of course, would be rejected. Instead, the clients are leaving their older applications in place since it doesn't appear that Apple is going back through all the current apps and booting out those that already include analytics within them. "Maybe the older apps are grandfathered in?" they wondered aloud. The fact that no one knows, not even the big name, big box retailer that sits at the top of the latter's client list, is a testament to how Apple likes to do business. Here's the agreement, read it and sign it...and that's the extent of the communication. As to those who did manage to get someone from Apple to talk about it? The answer was simply: "read the agreement." But if Apple holds true to what's written there, it sounds like it could spell doom for mobile analytics and ad firms, especially the small-time players beloved by independent developers. iAd, Anti-Competitive? What no one will say - again, on record, that is - is that the changes have a whiff of anti-competitive behavior to them. The issue at hand: Apple is preparing to launch iAd, an advertising platform based on the newly-acquired Quattro Wireless, a second choice for Apple after the Admob deal fell through. "We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn't want us to have them," Steve Jobs said during the April keynote. "So we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we're babes in the woods." Some say that the added language to section 3.3.9 is a direct shot at AdMob in the same way that the changes in 3.3.1 were a shot at Adobe. That is, instead of allowing Google to get its mobile advertisements onto the iPhone, Apple can keep them out via the new analytics/ad ban. Whether or not that's the case is certainly up for debate. But considering that the Google/AdMob deal is still being researched by U.S. antitrust enforcers, regulators aware of the issue. Word has it that Google even pointed it out to the FTC, just in case. Continue Reading: Next page, "A Second Opinion" A Second Opinion: Privacy Concerns Others, however, say these changes aren't really about analytics, ads and anti-competitive behavior as much as they are about privacy concerns. In speaking with Alan Chapell, chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association Privacy Committee and whose firm advises companies on privacy and data strategy, the changes to Apple's agreement have to do more with consumer privacy than anything else. With language that refers to "geo-location" and targeted advertising, a good bit of Section 3.3.9 is about how location-based applications should behave. With the rise of location-based services especially and location-based social tools like Loopt, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, privacy is at the forefront of everyone's minds these days. ( Including ours ). There are no standards for location based data yet, Chapell explains. No rules about how such data should be used, retained, shared and so on. In addition, Apple is under heavy pressure from regulators to protect the privacy of its customers. And if the third-party analytics providers do something which comprises that privacy, it will be Apple that gets in trouble. "This debate is about privacy and innovation," Chapell notes, "and finding a balance between the two." Unfortunately, even if Apple chooses never to enforce the new rules, explains Chapell, the changes will have an indirect impact on innovation in this area. The next round of ad networks, analytics providers and other in-app data-sharing tools will be less likely to be funded. Not Just Funding at Risk... These changes won't just affect the funding of services like those noted above, though, they could affect how services are developed for the iPhone. Take for example, Xtify , a location-triggered geo-messaging system now available for Android ( previous coverage ).

Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:00:00 +0000

In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , we're outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In Part 1 we explored 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Now in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location , Internet of Things , Augmented Reality , and mobile social networking . We'll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , a 1-day event we're running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That's the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you'll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now . Sponsor Geo-location Services In January, RWW Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that the era of Location-as-Platform has arrived . Using leading location mobile service Foursquare as an example, Marshall wrote that "the mobile location 'check-in' is fast becoming the hot new status message type online." He added that "it was only a matter of time until 'where you are' became a platform to build added value on top of just like 'who you know' has on social networking sites like Facebook." 'Where you are' is the new 'who you know'! The use cases for location data include showing nearby restaurants and ratings, mobile advertising, local news, events, and Wikipedia data about local buildings. That's impressive enough, but imagine the possibilities when you add data from sensors . As I wrote in January, one use case that should become reality soon is receiving a real-time update of traffic conditions via sensors embedded in the road. What else can we do using location as a platform? We'll discuss this in-depth at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . Internet of Things As well as sensor applications, there are other emerging applications for mobile that intersect with the Internet of Things trend. They include barcode scanning, using your phone as an RFID tag and reader, and using your phone as a proximity sensor. As we explained in January , as well as your mobile phone reading and acting on sensor data from real world objects, the phone may also be used as a sensor itself. For example the iPhone has a built-in accelerometer, which is basically a motion detector. This is used for game control and also for re-sizing your iPhone display from portrait to landscape. The iPhone also has a microphone (which can be used as a noise sensor), a proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor. Barcode scanning and its applications is a fast growing market in the mobile world. The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for "Quick Response"), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets. There are many emerging opportunities to utilize sensor and RFID data, which again we will explore at the Mobile Summit on 7 May. Augmented Reality Augmented Reality has been one of the hottest trends in mobile for about a year now. ReadWriteWeb even created an extensive report about AR and its market and development opportunities. We think that AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more this year. In our report, we profiled key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. In a recent post, Chris Cameron (the author of our AR report) noted that practical application is the golden ticket of Augmented Reality . As an example he pointed to the junaio iPhone application, which competes with Layar and Wikitude in the AR browser space. junaio recently announced that its formed a partnership with BART, San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system, to bring live train data to the app. junaio takes advantage of the API provided by BART to not only place locations of nearby stations in a user's field of vision, but also estimate arrival time of trains at each station and display that live in real-time using AR. Mobile Social Networking A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez concluded that "the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC." The study found that during the 2.7 hours per day that people in the U.S. spend on the mobile web, 45% are posting comments on social networking sites, 43% are connecting with friends on social networking sites, 40% are sharing content with others and 38% are sharing photos. Sarah commented that it's no surprise to find that the rise of the mobile phone corresponds with the rise in Facebook's popularity, because "it has become a do-anywhere activity that captures people's attention whenever they have free time, instead of an activity that requires people make time for it." Sarah concluded that mobile social networking is an easier activity to participate in now that it's been unchained from the PC. This of course has big implications for entrepreneurs and application developers, which we will explore at the RWW Mobile Summit. In Part 3 of this series outlining 10 big trends in Mobile in 2010, we will look at Mobile Business trends. We'd love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . See our announcement post for more details. If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss

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Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:06:49 +0000

Adobe is officially giving up on Apple. Or rather, Apple gave up on Adobe and Adobe is just now admitting it. In any event, the news is that Adobe's "Packager for iPhone," the bundled tool in Flash Professional that lets Flash developers leverage their existing skills to produce iPhone apps, shall be no more. The toolkit will still ship with Creative Suite 5 as planned, but no future development or investment is planned in this area - or so says Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Adobe's Flash platform, in a blog post on Tuesday. Sponsor Farewell, iPhone The announcement highlights the escalating tensions between the two companies, initially kicked off by Apple's decision to not allow Flash on their mobile devices, a line up which includes iPhone, iPod Touch and now, the iPad. More recently, Apple made changes to their software development kit license, the agreement developers sign prior to building mobile applications for Apple, that again seemed like a shot at Adobe more so than anyone else. It stated that developers could no longer use cross-platform compilers to develop for iPhone. They had to develop using native code. ("Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.." it reads.) That change effectively killed Adobe's plans for its Flash-to-iPhone packager, a tool which would have allowed Flash developers to port their creations to Apple's platform. But is Adobe worried? Not really. In fact, they sound more angry than concerned. Especially if you read employee rants like Lee Brimelow's, an Adobe platform evangelist, who titled his diatribe* " Apple Slaps Developers in the Face ." *not officially endorsed by the company But even Chambers can't resist the opportunity to berate Apple as he makes the announcement on his blog. He writes, "..as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason." To some extent, he's right. Apple has also added language to the agreement that appears to ban non-Apple ad and analytics frameworks from the iPhone. (More on this later). Hello, Android But instead of continuing to take potshots at the Cupertino company, Adobe employees - in general - may be better off highlighting Adobe's plans for other platforms. Chambers gets to this himself, but slowly. Six or so paragraphs into the post, he hits on what may be the more important news: Adobe's new "BFF" is Google. "Android-based phones have been doing well," he says, and it's the understatement of the year. The truth is, the platform is growing like crazy. Only months ago, we were reporting the market share doubling for Android , plus how Android's Marketplace is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing app stores around and, more recently, the insane levels of growth in new Android apps with over 9,000 added in March alone. Chambers notes that Adobe is now working with Google to bring Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 Android-based devices. The company plans to have Flash 10.1 ready for Android (and Palm and RIM) by the end of the first half of 2010. That's only months away. Discuss

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Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android

Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:15:00 +0000

We've entered an era where the cost of sensors, processors and transmitters are so low that it's fast becoming cost effective to put them inside everything, even the clothes we wear. Even our own toothbrush may soon sense and communicate socially about where it is and how it's being used in space and time. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling has coined the term " spime ", to describe objects that can be "tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object." David Orban, the creator of the iPhone app WideNoise , also offers WideSpime , which helps developers build mass data collection services for real-time data management in a way that maintains the autonomy of both the data and the object generating the data. Sponsor In our most recent Internet of Things post Objects Aren't Social , Orban comments that objects " ...are going to form their own independent social networks, which are going to be fundamentally incompatible with human communication." These new machine networks will be so redundant and reliable that we will be freed from most of our machine-operating duties. We will get to be human again. We will soon see cars that don't rear end each other because onboard sensors won't allow it. Or how about a vacuum cleaner that knows about a mess your cat made and cleans it up before you even notice your machine-network's admin message about it. Also, consider an Internet of Things home that tracks your habits so well it knows which rooms to heat and light because it knows what you'll be doing on that particular day. Orban's dream is that thousands of years of human subservience to machines will end because we will teach our machines how to not only take care of themselves, but how to take care of us as well. But what if someone wanted to manipulate these systems for an unethical advantage? Or even worse, what if these manipulations were built into these new machine networks at the earliest stages? On Sunday night, ReadWriteWeb reported on a presentation by Tim O'Rielly regarding the future Internet of Things. In his presentation he said, "You see increasingly the giants of the Internet are trading for their own account - they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that; we have to work for openess in that web." That's why Orban stresses the importance of autonomous machine networks, which are built on open-sourced standards. Another open-source Internet of Things project we're excited about is Pachube ( pronounced patch-bay ). What WideSpime and Pachube share in common are real-time global maps, which present data generation in a fair and open way. Because these projects aspire to a high level of transparency and user adaptability, we may have a chance to achieve Orban's dream of all us machine operators getting a chance to be human again. Free To be Human Video Free To be Human PowerPoint David Orban - Free to be human View more presentations from Mobile Monday Amsterdam . Discuss

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Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again

Google Snaps Up Agnilux, Whatever That Is

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Google has purchased Agnilux, a chip startup run by Apple refugees. After P.A. Semi was bought by Apple in 2008 for $278 million, several of the prime movers of that company, including Amarjit Gill, Executive VP of Sales and Business Development, along with several Apple employees, jumped ship and started Agnilux. A former Tivo executive also joined the company. P.A. Semi produces the chips that run the iPhone and iPad. Speculation has surrounded the theoretical Apple intel that might come with the company, the entertainment media background of some of its executives and the extraordinary secrecy of Agnilux. Sponsor Despite investigation by the New York Times , very little information is available on the company. In February, NYT talked about the company's website. That website no longer exists. When it did it had little information. "Hop over to the Agnilux Web site and you're told very little about the company beyond the location of its offices and the derivation of the company's name. Agni is Sanskrit for fire and Lux is the Latin for light." An anonymous source told the Times he thought the company was producing a server. Prior to accepting the Google deal, Agnilux held conversations with Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments. It's uncertain whether they spoke with VCs or other investors. Discuss

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Google Snaps Up Agnilux, Whatever That Is