LSQHA Blog Reviews

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

Today, about 145 million Internet users in the U.S. use social web applications. In total, all of these users generate close to 500 billion online impressions on each other. According to a new report from Forrester Research , a mere 16% of online consumers generate a grand total of 80% of these peer-to-peer online impressions. Over 60% of all of these impressions come from Facebook. Sponsor Peer Influence Rivals Traditional Media As Forrester's Augie Ray and Josh Bernoff point out in this new report, 500 billion influence impressions about products on social networks, product ratings sites and blogs, comes close to rivaling other mass media outlets. Online ad impressions, for example, numbered around 2 trillion last year. Facebook is the venue for 62% of all of these influence impressions, followed by MySpace (18%), Twitter (10%) and LinkedIn (6%). Ratings and reviews make up 32% of these impressions, discussion forums account for 29%, blog comments for 24% and blog posts for 16%. As Forrester's analysts rightly note, it would be easy to dismiss Twitter, given that it only accounts for 10% of all of these influence impressions. These users, however, tend to be the "connected of the connected," which makes Twitter an ideal place to engage mass influencers. One caveat we would add here, however, is that it is hard to equate a post on Twitter or Facebook with actually impressions. Even though a user can have 1 million followers on Twitter, chances are that only a small number of these followers will actually see this message. It's also not clear how many users actually read blog comments and actively read ratings on sites like Amazon and Newegg. The study's authors acknowledge this in a footnote, but also note that they consider 500 billion impressions to be a conservative estimate. Who Are the Influencers? For marketers, of course, it is important to reach these 16% of mass influencers. Forrester divides these influencers into two groups: mass connectors , who maintain very large social networks, and mass mavens , who don't just maintain a large social network, but also have a strong desire to share their knowledge about a certain subject. On average, mass connectors tend to have a slightly higher household income ($98,100) than mass mavens ($89,000). These connectors are also slightly younger (32 vs. 38) and more likely to use the mobile Internet (55% vs. 46%). Discuss

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500 Billion Impressions: 16% of Users Generate Majority of Brand Impressions on Social Media Sites

Thanks to voice-controlled systems like Ford's Sync , drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road if they want to place a call or switch to the next track on their playlists. Today, Ford announced the next step in the company's roadmap to connect mobile phones and cars. With Sync AppLink, Ford is introducing a new platform that allows developers to offer voice controls for their mobile apps on Sync-enabled cars. At first, AppLink will only work with Android and BlackBerry devices, but the company plans to offer support for Apple's iPhone OS and other smartphone platforms next year. Sponsor The first Sync-enabled applications, which will be available later this year, are Pandora , Stitcher , and Orangatame's OpenBreak Twitter app. Even though Sync is based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford did not announce that it plans to support the upcoming Windows Phone operating system. Drivers will be able to control AppLink-enabled mobile apps through voice commands that will be routed through the Sync system, as well as from buttons on the steering wheel. The first car to feature this new service will be the 2011 Ford Fiesta . Ford plans to offer AppLink on all Sync-equipped cars next year. Existing Sync users will be able to update their car's software at a later point as well. Same Apps - Just Controlled by SYNC From the user's perspective, installing a Sync-enabled app is no different from installing a regular app on their mobile phones. The only difference is that the car will notice when you start a Sync-enabled app and allow you to control the app's function with your voice. This allows Ford to plug right into the existing developer ecosystems and distribution channels for all of these platforms and developers only have to make relatively minor updates to make their apps compatible with Sync. It's important to stress that these applications are running on the user's phone and not on the car's built-in Sync hardware. Sync only passes the voice commands on to the application but doesn't interact with the app beyond this. In Ford's parlance, these are "brought-in" apps, as opposed to "built-in" apps (like Ford's Vehicle Health Report and 911 Assist) or "beamed-in" cloud-based apps that send traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to the car. Sync AppLink for Developers Ford is currently working with a small group of trusted partners and plans to open up the Sync API and software development kit to a broader selection of developers later this year. Ford also announced the launch of a Sync developer community that will give developers a pathway to partner with Ford on Sync-enabled applications. Image credit: Flickr user Jim Trottier Discuss

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Ford Sync Will Soon Let You Control Your Mobile Apps by Voice

Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a recommendation service that will be used on sites around the web. On the day before the F8 developers' conference, independent developer Jesse Stay has posted code found on Facebook's GitHub open source code repository account. Facebook is already very practiced at offering recommendations on-site: its News Feed technology pulls the items out of its Live Feed based on who and what you've shown is most important to you among all your friends and their activities. Facebook knows more about you than probably any other consumer service online, probably more even than Google. Recommendation could in fact become bigger than search, and so this feature could become one of Facebook's biggest moves. Sponsor Stay believes the feature will function like Google SideWiki , the sidebar of running commentary about a page that website owners have no control over but that hasn't really caught on with users, either. Two things you can be sure of: Facebook recommendations will make use of a website visitor's Facebook friend connections and the feature will almost definitely make publishers happier than the uncontrollable Google SideWiki did. recommendations site="abc.com" height="300" width="400" /> should be replaced by an iframe showing recommendations for the abc website (pending checkin on the server side). Recommendation would be huge for Facebook. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it's like pre-emptive search. The language in that code implies to me that the feature will display content recommended to a user because of interest by friends in certain content on the site. Presumably if any of your friends have shared links to the site you're visiting, you'll be encouraged to visit those pages in particular. Perhaps recommendation will go further than that. It's really hard to know, but we'll probably find out tomorrow. That's the question: is this a way for you to recommend content or to have content recommended to you? If it's primarily one, I'm guessing it's the latter. Make no mistake: recommendation could be a huge addition to Facebook's arsenal. Recommendation technologies are something we've covered for years here at ReadWriteWeb . We asked a year ago if Facebook was secretly working on a recommendation technology , though the feature we saw then turned out to be something else. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it's like pre-emptive search. Everyone wants to give their site owners an opportunity to search for the content they want to find, but even better is prompting them with what's effectively personalized search results as soon as they land on a page. Opt-out/opt-in? This essential question of privacy will be put to the test in many ways, as Facebook continues to extend its system of identity across the web. Facebook knows enough about you, your interests, your friends, their interests, their friends and their interests too that it should be able to nail recommendations fairly well. Discuss

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Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites

In the UK, consumers are spending more time with digital and traditional media. According to the second KPMG Media and Entertainment Barometer , the average monthly consumption of traditional media climbed from 11 hours and 40 minutes per month in September 2009 to 12 hours and 13 minutes in March 2010. For digital media, the increase was more dramatic. Consumption of digital media rose from 6 hours 14 minutes to 7 hours 28 minutes per month. At the same time, however, consumers now spend less on digital and traditional media. Even though more newspapers are putting their content behind pay walls, the number of consumers who paid nothing for accessing online news actually increased over the last few months. Sponsor People Spend More Time with Digital Media... With regards to new media, a growing number of consumers now spend time on social media and blogging sites (up from 47% in September 2009 to 50% in March 2010) and watch TV online (up from 19% to 24%). KPMG also found that younger Internet users in the UK between 16 and 24 are more likely to engage with new media. Those Internet users who use social media and play online games also tend to spend more time online than others. ... But Pay Less More Statistics from the KPMG Report The number of people who don't pay for print journals and magazines is also up (19% compared to 12% six months ago) 21% of print newspaper readers paid nothing in March 2010 (most likely due to the availability of free newspapers like the Evening Standard in cities like London) People in the UK spent an average of 29 hours in front of their TV last month. Men are more likely than women to engage in new media activities (83% vs. 75%) When it comes to paying for online content, most consumers in the UK continue to pay nothing (88%), though publishers will be happy to hear that younger Internet users between 16 to 24 are slightly more likely to pay for online content than older users. Today, only 3% of Internet users in the UK pay for an online subscription to digital content and about 7% pay for digital content. The number of Internet users in the UK who paid nothing for digital content actually increased slightly over the last six months. Only about 10% of these users who are currently paying nothing for content indicated that they would be likely to buy a paid subscription to online content in the next 12 months. This, according to KPMG's analysts indicates, that the market for paid subscriptions is "unlikely to grow greatly over the coming 12 months." KPMG also found that the average spend on digital media in the UK fell from £1.99 in September 2009 to £0.98 in March 2010. Some People Simply Prefer Traditional Media This doesn't mean that all consumers prefer to access media content online, however. Only about a quarter of respondents preferred online media over traditional media. Most of these users (89%) cited a preference for "reading something physical" over reading on a computer. About 60% of respondents also noted that they simply prefer the experience of traditional media over consuming digital content. Discuss

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Digital Media Consumption Increases - But Few Are Willing to Pay