The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Fly or Die: The HP Touchsmart All-In-One PC And The Businessweek iPad App
- iPhone 4 About To Be Flickr’s Top Camera. Point & Shoots? Pretty Much The Opposite.
- 18 Hardcore Months In The Making, Glitch Is Ready To Roll
- From the Teclosion 2011 Spring Event In Tokyo: 15 Demos From Japanese Startups
- Jack Dorsey Is A Real Man, For A Good Cause
- Voxy Now Uses Your Location To Help You Learn Language
- Square’s Disruptive Payment Service About To Get A Huge Retail Boost From Apple
- Mobli Aims To Give Mobile Photo/Video Sharing A Little Celebrity Flair
- The Real Reason Mike McCue Needs $50 Million: Google Is Building A Flipboard Killer
- TechCrunch Interview: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski
- Gillmor Gang 4.16.11 (TCTV)
- What App Developers Want: Letters To Steve Jobs And Larry Page
- Behind The Scenes At The New York Tech Meetup (TCTV)
| Fly or Die: The HP Touchsmart All-In-One PC And The Businessweek iPad App Posted: 17 Apr 2011 07:46 AM PDT It’s big screen week on Fly or Die. This week, John Biggs and I take a look at the HP Touchsmart All-in-One PC, a 14-inch Toshiba portable monitor, and the new Businessweek iPad app. As usual, a surprise guest joins us to defend his company’s product decisions.
HP has been trying to bring touch computing to desktop PCs with its Touchsmart line. The problem has always been that raising your hands to manipulate a touchscreen in front of you from a sitting position is unnatural, uncomfortable, and tiring. To address this issue, the new all-in-one Touchsmart reclines so that you can go from regular keyboard mode to surface computing mode. It is an improvement from past efforts, but to me it’s a mistake to have a device with dual modes. You are going to pick one—keyboard/mouse or touch—and ignore the other. Does everything really need to be a touchscreen? The Toshiba portable monitor also seems clunky. For a standalone monitor that you plug into your computer via USB, it is lighter than any standard monitor. But in the age of tablets, it is really competing against fully functioning computers wit touchscreens that are slightly smaller. It’s a niche product at best. Finally, we have the Businessweek iPad app, which I reviewed earlier in the week. It brings the print magazine to the ipad with a $2.99 a month iTunes subscription. I think it could have been so much more. Even Biggs agrees.        
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| iPhone 4 About To Be Flickr’s Top Camera. Point & Shoots? Pretty Much The Opposite. Posted: 17 Apr 2011 12:44 AM PDT
What’s the most popular camera used in terms of pictures taken that are uploaded to Flickr? Right now, it’s the Nikon D90. But in about a month or so, it will be Apple’s iPhone 4. What’s amazing is that D90 is nearly three years old. The iPhone 4 is not even a year old. Just look at a the chart above. The rise has been spectacular. But it’s hardly the first time an iPhone has risen this quickly. Back in 2009, the iPhone overtook the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi as the most popular camera on Flickr. The difference is that at the time, Flickr was counting all the iPhone models together. That meant the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and the iPhone 3GS were all clumped together to overtake the Canon model. Now they’re split up, and the iPhone 4 alone is still going to be the most popular camera on Flickr in under a year. It’s pretty remarkable, really. It also speaks to just how badly Flickr has dropped the ball with regard to mobile. We’ve previously delved into this topic when recounting a former Yahoo employee talking about how Flickr should have built a service like Instagram, but simply couldn’t due to bureaucracy. Flickr has long had the data to show that smartphone cameras were starting to dominate the market, but they really didn’t do anything about it. The chart below is even more interesting. The “popular” point & shoot camera are all tanking, quickly. You’d think there would be one that is still doing well, but when compared to the high end (SLR) market and the smartphone market, they’re in a total nosedive. This will only get worse. As we’ve also previously written, the point & shoots have also totally dropped the ball with regard to the social photo revolution — they’ve committed seppuku.
Six months ago, the data looked bad for point & shoots. Now it looks downright frightening. If the trend continues (and it’s actually speeding up), the point & shoot is finished. Flickr’s data obviously isn’t absolute. But they do have a wide range of users who are interested in photography uploading to their site. And the main disclaimers they give about their data is that smartphone data may actually be under-represented. So yes, it’s not looking good for point & shoots. And if you were to lump all the iPhone models together, they would be so far ahead of every other camera that the graph would look absurd. This is the state of photography right now. And it’s going to continue in this direction. While Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of market share, none of their individual phone models are doing particularly well from a photo-taking perspective. It’s hard to say why this is — lack of a good Flickr Android app, or just because there are so many different model? But with the iPhone 5 now not likely launching until the fall, the iPhone 4 will have plenty of time to sit on the crown and expand upon it. Flickr, meanwhile, will have plenty of time to contemplate what they missed out on in the mobile photo revolution happening on their own charts. And the point & shoots will have plenty of time to bleed. (As an interesting sidenote: note how Apple is actually the least popular of the camera brands on Flickr. Is it because they only have four models? Or is Flickr’s data just wrong? Also worth noting: the iPad 2 is not doing well as a camera in terms of Flickr pictures. No surprise there — it’s simply not good for still image capture.)
       
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| 18 Hardcore Months In The Making, Glitch Is Ready To Roll Posted: 16 Apr 2011 07:27 PM PDT
Over a year ago, I sat down with Tiny Speck (the company behind Glitch) co-founder Stewart Butterfield to go over some of the aspects behind the game. A few days ago, we caught up again to go over how far they’ve come leading up to the beta. “We’ve been going hardcore for the last 18 months,” Butterfield says of the Tiny Speck team. “But only in the last four months have things gotten much clearer,” he continues. While they initially expected to launch in beta late last year, it has taken a bit longer than anticipated. But now he feels they’re ready to roll, undoubtedly helped by a big new influx of funding and a lot of new employees (they’re up to 22 now — minus former design lead Daniel Burka who moved on, but remains involved, Butterfield notes). For the past six months, they’ve been testing Glitch with a select group of users for about a day every week. At most, there have been about 250 people at any given time testing it out. But with the beta, Butterfield expects to ramp that number up to 1,000 quickly. And the virtual world will be open about half of the time. He expects the beta period to last anywhere from eight to fourteen weeks and over that time, they’ll let in the “tens of thousands” of users who have signed up to get early access (we have some cut-the-line invites below). They’ll be using a RockMelt-style invite system in which users are given invites and can easily see which of their friends want one. In terms of the technology they’ve built to power the game, Butterfield seems most proud of the fact that they’ve brought a web-oriented approach towards software development to the game. He walked me through a bit of the backend to show me just how easy it is to tweak elements of the game on the fly, and to add new things. A series of drop-down menus and pre-set data inputs makes this all possible. And it will allow Glitch to deploy in minutes what it has traditionally taken MMOs days or weeks to get out to their community. It will also allow for designers to push changes without having to bug the engineers.
The game itself is running on Amazon’s EC2 system. Butterfield notes that the biggest issue with that is the inter-sever traffic, but he says his team has engineered around many of those issues. They plan to stay on EC2 indefinitely partially due to what Butterfield learned with his previous startup, Flickr. “As a team we previously had to deal with storage requirements. If that can be someone else's problem entirely, it's better,” he says. (He does acknowledge that at some point, assuming they grow quickly, it will make economic sense to have their own servers.) The game itself is built entirely in Flash, which Butterfield notes can be a pain at times. But to get the polished look-and-feel that Glitch has, HTML5 simply is nowhere close where it needs to be, he says. “Maybe a couple years from now, but not now,” he says. One of the most interesting aspects of Glitch is that they’ll have an API from day one that third-party developers can use to expand upon the game. In fact, some already are. Developers will be able to access Glitch characters that users create and do things such as modify them outside of the game, Butterfield says. Eventually, this API is going to lead Glitch’s mobile approach as well. Because of the reliance on Flash, a mobile version of the game is unlikely anytime soon, but developers can come up with mini-games using the API, he notes. Butterfield says they’ll likely commission outside developers to do cool things on mobile devices and split revenues with them. So where are the revenues going to come from? Glitch’s model is to be free for everyone, but they’ll have a subscription layer for the more hardcore players. These subscribers will have access to special features such as different character accessories. There will also be in-game purchase options. Using a system Tiny Speck has built, users will be able to buy credits for something like 5.5 cents to 7.5 cents each. These can be used to buy power-ups and do things like teleportation to other areas in the game. Butterfield is quick to say though that they don’t want to make it easy for players to simply buy success. PayPal payments should also be an option down the road. And eventually, Butterfield expects Facebook Credits to be a big part — Facebook still has to open these for use outside of their in-app ecosystem. One thing that has surprised Butterfield so far is that while males make up the vast majority of the early testers, it’s females that are the most active players. This may speak well to the game’s appeal to a wide-range of players, as some of the most popular online games have similar ratios. Again, while Glitch will launch in beta in a few days, there will still be a gradual roll-out to begin with. However, we’ve convinced them to give us 111 invites to cut the access line and get in front. So click this link and enter your email addresses quickly. Update: And the invites are gone — in under 10 minutes, apparently there’s a lot of interest in this game.
       
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| From the Teclosion 2011 Spring Event In Tokyo: 15 Demos From Japanese Startups Posted: 16 Apr 2011 07:26 PM PDT
Here are thumbnail sketches of all the services that were shown at the event's so-called “Startup Battle”.
Teclosion Spring 2011: The Winner and Four Runners-up
Here’s a “MoSo’d” Charlie Sheen video pulled from YouTube: Teclosion Spring 2011: The Best Of The RestHere are the nine services that didn’t make the cut at the event:
Teclosion’s website can be found here (it’s in English).        
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| Jack Dorsey Is A Real Man, For A Good Cause Posted: 16 Apr 2011 05:31 PM PDT  DNA, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s foundation for sex trafficking awareness, has launched its social media campaign this week, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls.” If you get past the absurdity of their ads (and they are absurd on so many levels) and visit the DNA Facebook page you’ll encounter some shocking statistics about the prostitution industry. For example, over 12 million people are currently sex slaves around the world and the average age of entry into sex slavery is 13 years old. Moore and Kutcher’s solution? Raise awareness and take action, like reporting any suspicious ads you see on Craigslist or Backpage. In order to spread the word, the actress and actor/angel investor have leveraged their Hollywood connections to get Justin Timberlake, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Jamie Foxx and even "Old Spice Guy" Isaiah Mustafa to make these silly silly videos. Notable personalities like media cyclone Arianna Huffington have also added their visages to the mix (she’s at the end of Kutcher’s video). Where Dorsey comes is in that DNA has actually partnered with tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft in order to come up with ways to reduce the 76% of sex trade transactions that take place online. Microsoft for example is working on something called Photo DNA, which identifies and tags pornographic images, allowing service providers to remove all their replications simultaneously. The initiative also includes a Facebook campaign which allows users to have their picture added to the gallery of “Real Men” and “Women Who Prefer Real Men,” as well as take part in the video. I really wish they would rig it so Eva Langoria would say my name though, just like they did with Dorsey. I’d love to hear her try to pronounce “Tsotsis.” Kutcher is an investor in Flipboard, Blekko, Path and Zaarly among other other things.        
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| Voxy Now Uses Your Location To Help You Learn Language Posted: 16 Apr 2011 03:48 PM PDT TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Voxy, a service that lets you learn a language “from life” has just updated its iPhone app in the App Store, with one pretty disruptive difference; Voxy’s ESL app Aprende inglés now uses your location to help you learn a language, presenting you with the related vocabulary, as well things you hear and things you say if you’re at a destination like a restaurant, for example. The app uses the SimpleGeo platform to bring users context-based lessons for about 150 points of interest including barbershops, dentist’s offices, banks, grocery stores and more. Each lesson is built so a user can complete it in three minutes, so as not to detract from the actual experience of being in a restaurant or grocery store. “We’re getting closer to being able to simulate an immersive experience where the learning is done in the flow of daily life,” says founder Paul Gollash. Voxy monetizes by a subscription model, at $2 a month for users that want added premium services like the ability to get lessons via SMS. The service currently has 100k registered users (75k active users) and is ranked #1 in the App Store’s Education category for over 8 countries. In Spain the app is #3 in overall apps. Right now Voxy is only available for Spanish speakers that want to learn English but Gollash plans on expanding to other languages soon, with a version for English speakers who want to learn Spanish now in private beta. An Android app should also be available in the coming weeks.
       
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| Square’s Disruptive Payment Service About To Get A Huge Retail Boost From Apple Posted: 16 Apr 2011 02:39 PM PDT
Square offers both an iPhone/iPod Touch and an iPad app which allows merchants to process and manage credit card transactions with a handy little credit card swiping device that plugs into the headset/microphone jack. Apple has shown some love for Square lately, so it’s not entirely surprising that the payments startup has forged a deeper relationship with the Cupertino-based company. Most recently, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showcased Square's technology at the debut of Apple’s iPad 2. But to be featured on Apple’s online store and in its brick and mortar operations is a big deal. This is Square’s first large-scale in-store retail promotion and it landed a huge fish. Millions of consumers visit Apple’s retail outlets each day, and this will certainly translate into more sales and exposure for Square. The device will be only payments product featured in the store, and while display location may vary by store, we hear that Square will be included in the store area where main consumer-oriented accessories are displayed. Apple and Square will also be partnering to host educational seminars at the stores, where consumers can learn how to use the device. Square’s device is selling at the store for $9.95 but users get a $10 square credit when they sign up for an account and the apps are free. It’s important to note that when sign up for Square on its website, the device is free, and the company only charges merchants 2.75 percent per transaction. You can also purchase the device in black or white (previously the Square devices were only sold in White). Clearly Square is taking a bit of a bath on the device sales here. Apple is probably taking some sort of cut from the transaction, and Square is giving merchants a $10 credit, so effectively, the company isn’t really making any money. In fact, it appears that Square could be losing money on this. But an endorsement and placement from Apple could boost sales and usage for the payments device so perhaps all will even out in the end. Also, Apple managing distribution and shipping of Square devices means that the startup will be able to give users access to quicker and more efficient delivery operations. Interestingly, Apple doesn’t use Square in its stores for transactions but perhaps this could change as Square gains more traction and expand with international support. Square, which was co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, has been on a roll of late. The startup just raised $27.5 million in new funding, and is gaining a lot of a lot of buzz, most recently debuting a fairly large billboard in Times Square and announcing that it is processing $1 million in payments per day. Square also announced that it dropped the $0.15 per transaction charge for businesses using the mobile payments service. COO Keith Rabois told us in January that the startup is expected to process $40 million in transactions in Q1 of 2011 and is currently signing up 100,000 merchants per month. That’s compared to 30,000 monthly signups last Fall. I think there’s no doubt that with its latest deal, those numbers should multiply pretty quickly.        
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| Mobli Aims To Give Mobile Photo/Video Sharing A Little Celebrity Flair Posted: 16 Apr 2011 02:30 PM PDT
Mobli is an Israeli startup that is preparing to enter the space in a few weeks with an iPhone app and website, followed shortly thereafter by Android and BlackBerry apps. “Smartphones are gradually replacing video and digital cameras,” Gil Eyal, Mobli’s VP of Strategy tells us. But we already knew that, a lot of people do. How can they differentiate themselves? Mobli’s plan is to be faster than the other players out there and to give you the most options for sharing. “By the time you take a video, within seconds, you’ve already uploaded it,” Eyal says. That’s smart, speed is one of the key factors for Instagram’s success (and they don’t do video). In terms of options, Eyal notes that content can be shared broadly or narrowly. They’re using the Twitter follow model, but you can also share things privately. They’re also playing up the Color-like aspect of it. That is, you easily create channels for groups to easily share pictures into. For example, if a bunch of people are at a wedding, everyone can share their pictures into a single album on the fly. And all pictures/videos are geotagged (and can be optionally tagged to a Foursquare venue) to further narrow collections. And these collections can be as broad as big news happening in foreign countries. All that’s great. But again, the space is already crowded, they need a hook. Right now, the thing Eyal kept pointing me to was how active actor Lukas Haas is on Mobli. Haas is best known for his work in films like Inception and Brick — or if you want to go back to when he was a kid, Witness. More importantly, he’s bringing some other celebrity action to the site as well. Here’s Paris Hilton. Here’s Tobey Maguire. Here’s J-Lo, Kim Kardashian, and Fergie. To take advantage of this type of usage, Mobli has created a “paparazzi” channel just for celebrity spotting. That could certainly be a hook if it becomes active enough. Though there they face competition from services like JustSpotted and even Instagram which counts Snoop Dogg as an active user. Mobli has raised $1.6 million over two rounds in the past year. Investors include Morrix Holdings and Mobili co-founder Moshe Hogeg. And while they won’t confirm it, I have the sneaking suspicion that Haas may be an investor as well. The company currently has 13 employees working out of Israel, but they’re also setting up a New York office right now. Again, look for Mobli to launch in the coming weeks.
       
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| The Real Reason Mike McCue Needs $50 Million: Google Is Building A Flipboard Killer Posted: 16 Apr 2011 12:00 PM PDT
When news came out the other day that Flipboard just raised another $50 million at a $200 million valuation for its iPad news reading app, I gave CEO Mike McCue a hard time on Twitter and here on TechCrunch. Does an iPad app startup really need $50 million, or is this yet another sign of a bubble? McCue responded on Twitter, but yesterday we spoke by phone and he went into great detail about why exactly he thinks he needs $50 million. He came up with the number a few months ago. It’s what he calculates he needs to get to cashflow positive, or at least pretty close (more on that below). Raising money is distraction, and his preference was to raise it all at once. But towards the end of our conversation, he also mentioned another concern which was a factor in taking as much money as he can right now. “I see a lot of competition down the pike,” he says. Rumors have been reaching him that there is a team of engineers at Google who are “saying they are building a Flipboard killer.” He adds quickly, ” I have no idea what it is,” but hearing about “this desire to kill us” is unsettling and it does add “a little concern about the unknown.” Could this product have anything to do with the magazine-like Google Fast Flip? It is kind of clunky now, but something like that could be developed into a slick, HTML5 browser-based flip interface for news reading on tablets. Or maybe it’s a completely different project—an app for Android tablets. Or maybe it’s nothing. Setting aside the need to fend off both real and potential competitors flooding into the market, McCue has his own internal logic for why he raised so much money. “We want to build a large business here that has the ability to get into the billions of dollars in revenue,” he says. And to get there he needs to reach tens of millions of consumers and sign up 100 to 150 publishers from 17 today. I asked him if he plans on building his own ad salesforce, and at this point that is not the plan. He wants to keep partnering with publishers and let them sell their own ads. wants to hire engineers, and bring his employee count up from 32 to 50 or 60. At about $200,000 per employee (including salaries, benefits and other expenses), plus the network costs to support as many as 40 million Flipboard readers, his operating costs could easily get to $20 million a year. Here is what McCue told me in his own words: —————– Q: Why do you need $50 million? McCue: We want to build a large business here that has the ability to get into the billions of dollars in revenue. What is the revenue model? You could charge for the app, charge for subscriptions, or you could do advertising. We decided the only way you could get to a multi-billion dollar business is through advertising. So given that, to build an advertising business, you've got to have a lot of scale. You've got to build a consumer brand, acquire tens of millions of users, and work with a lot of publishers to get there. You have to be international, and on multiple platforms. It is a big undertaking. Q: What does the $50 million get you? McCue: The next milestone is to be cashflow positive. I feel like I can get to cashflow positive with about 50 to 60 people. So our plan is to hire another 18 to 28 people, we have 32 now, then hover there and build out an advertising business with publishers. The bulk of those people will be engineers. Publishers will sell their own ads. . . . Assuming we can build an audience with a really good product, then we need about 100 to 150 publishing partners to build a really big business. We have 17 now. Q: Flipboard is the No. 2 free iPad app right now. Can anyone else catch you? McCue: I see a lot of competition down the pike. There’s talk that some people at Google are saying they are building a Flipboard killer, and I've heard those rumors. What I felt was a better approach was to build the best product no matter what the competition does. But this desire to kill us—a bunch of folks there have decided to build this product, I have no idea what it is—raises a little concern about the unknown. Anytime a company like that [might go after you], it certainly is the kind of thing I give a lot of thought to. Update: Another source says he too has heard about the Flipboard Killer project at Google. From what he can gather, it is a team of less than ten Googlers from the Boston/Cambridge area. Publishers who have seen demos like it so far, but its future is uncertain in the product reorg going on right now at Google. In other words the Flipboard Killer might itself get killed before it ever sees the light of day.        
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| TechCrunch Interview: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Posted: 16 Apr 2011 10:56 AM PDT Earlier this week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski took the stage at the Computer History Museum in San Jose, CA for a special Commonwealth Club event moderated by Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large of Fortune. Their conversation touched on a range of issues related to the FCC, including net neutrality and AT&T’s pending acquisition of T-Mobile (which, unsurprisingly, Genachowski couldn’t comment on). Another big theme involved wireless spectrum — Genachowski says the current spectrum allotted to devices like tablets and mobile phones isn’t going to be able to keep up with rising demand. Which is why the FCC is hoping to launch incentive-based auctions to efficiently reassign spectrum (but it will need Congress’s support to do it). Immediately following the event Genachowski took some time to speak with us (he says he’s a big fan of TechCrunch). Check out the video above for our interview with him, in which we discuss why the FCC’s net neutrality rules are more lenient with regard to wireless than they are for wired Internet connections. We also briefly touch on that FCC inquiry into Apple’s rejection of Google Voice back in the summer of 2009 (I ask him how he responded to Apple’s “pondering”). Also be sure to watch our interview last month with Senator Al Franken, in which we discuss net neutrality.        
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| Posted: 16 Apr 2011 10:00 AM PDT The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, JP Rangaswami, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — waxed prophetically in the social garden. Crowley has been the focus of some media attention about a slowdown in checkins, but he seemed more excited about his market position than worried. With good reason, as the Gang explained in a dissection of hyperlocal and personal data harvesting. Rangaswami sees the various outputs of these social tools as providing nuanced clues into the nature of what will get viral at Scoble scale, while Crowley demurred about the view of Foursquare as a media property only to describe just such a nextgen service. As we debated what media is becoming, the consensus emerged of a social landscape where each and varied signals provide a valuable composite sense of where we are and are going next.        
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| What App Developers Want: Letters To Steve Jobs And Larry Page Posted: 16 Apr 2011 10:00 AM PDT
Most users probably don’t appreciate that while both platforms have come a long way from their inglorious beginnings, both still have some painful, glaring flaws from a developer’s perspective. I should know: within the last six months I’ve been paid to write Android, Blackberry, iPhone, and iPad apps. I’ve also released my own pet-project travel app on both the App Store and Android Market, so I’m all too familiar with those headaches too. Why should you care? Because these are (often) the main reasons why your apps suck, or crash, or both.
A Letter To Steve Jobs and Scott ForstallSteve Jobs (and Scott Forstall) Dear Steve, Please give us garbage collection. Please please please give us garbage collection. I know it isn’t sexy, or shiny, or bezelled. I know users can’t see any difference (except when apps crash, or take twice as long to develop as they should.) But while almost everything else about the iOS SDK—the editor, the libraries, Objective-C itself—is pretty wonderful, its memory management is straight out of the 1980s. As a compatriot recently said with horror, when he first looked at iOS development, “Wait a minute, what decade is this?” It’s like driving a Ferrari with brakes built by Lada. Memory management, for the uninitiated, refers to how a device shares its limited physical memory among its apps’ virtually unlimited desires. Every modern development environment has an automatic service—a “garbage collector”—which does most of this scutwork. You can still get into memory trouble, believe me, but at least you don’t have to painstakingly allocate and release every block of memory you might want to use beyond the current moment, lest you introduce a bug that is often devilishly difficult to find and fix. …Unless you’re writing an iOS app. Still. After all these years. W. T. F.!? Some claim that garbage collection is for the weak, but not Apple: OS X has had it for years. Others say it doesn’t work on mobile devices with limited resources. Or at least they did until Android and WebOS emerged; both have been garbage collected from day one. It’s a bit like the multitasking argument. Reasonable people, in 2009: “Why doesn’t the iPhone multitask, like Android?” Apple fanboys: “Because multitasking is bad, and evil!” Apple, in 2010: “Here’s iOS 4.0, with multitasking!” Apple fanboys: “We have always been at war with Oceania loved multitasking!” Of course, purists would point out that iOS doesn’t actually have real multitasking, like Android. Dear Steve, Please give us real multitasking, like Android. Dear Steve, Please make it possible to develop iOS apps on something other than a Mac. Not for me; I am very happy with my shiny new MacBook Pro. For you. Because three billion people in the developing world will be buying smartphones over the next decade; they’ll want apps relevant to their culture and lifestyle, ie built by people from their culture and lifestyle; and if you’re a developer in a poor-but-emerging market, would you rather spend $200 to start writing Android apps, or $1000 to start developing for iOS? Exactly. I’ve been saying this for years, Steve, but you haven’t been listening. Which is a shame, because I’d like for your (mostly) slick and elegant OS/SDK to succeed in the rest of the world, too. That said, I do have my doubts about your general hegemonic approach. Dear Steve, I’m actually not going to complain about the App Store. Sure, it takes five days to release an app instead of Android’s five minutes, but that’s due to a philosophical difference which I can respect. (Though it’d be nice if you could cut it down to one day.) But could you please open up the parts of your system that are locked down so tightly that developers can barely touch them at all? Bluetooth, for instance. It’s nice that you let it be used under controlled circumstances for games. But how about letting us use it to send data to other devices? Which, you know, was kind of its whole idea in the first place? Thanks in advance, Jon. PS I’d really settle for just the garbage collection.
A Letter To Larry Page And Andy RubinLarry Page (and Andy Rubin) Dear Larry, We need to talk. Don’t get me wrong. On the whole I like Android even more than iOS. True, we have to write your apps in Java, not my favorite language. Yes, some of the tools (eg the debugger) are awfully crude compared to the slick, seamless environment that Apple gives us. I can live with those quirks, though, and otherwise it’s mostly a developer’s dream: powerful, flexible and open(ish). But we need to talk about fragmentation. Device fragmentation is bad enough. The layout system you’ve built so that one Android app can work seamlessly on devices with different screen sizes and configurations is clever – but it’s painful. Android UI implementation has become a kind of messy and complex voodoo. That’s why very few Android apps are as slick as their iPhone counterparts. It’s hard to make art out of Lego bricks that never quite seem to fit together seamlessly. And this is apparently about to get even worse, if it’s true that Android 3.1 is meant for smartphones and tablets and televisions. So, Dear Larry, Please make it much easier to make attractive and responsive Android apps. Yes, it’s possible today, if you jump through a hundred hoops; but could you maybe cut that number down to ten? …That’s a minor complaint compared to the real fragmentation problem, though. By which I mean the operating system. By which I mean the carriers. When Apple releases a new OS, it’s immediately available for every Apple device that can support it. Why can’t Android work like that? Because carriers get in the way. They load devices with irritating, useless cruft, replace vital infrastructure with their own inferior versions (eg crippled Bluetooth stacks) and take forever to update their devices with new OSes. Why do carriers do this? Because, like the Taliban, they hate our freedom. As a result, according to your own Platform Versions chart, 33% of Android devices are still running Android 2.1 (which came out fifteen months ago) or earlier; so we developers are still reluctant to write apps that take advantage of the new features in Android 2.2, never mind 2.3 or 3.1. That isn’t good for us, and it isn’t good for you. Dear Larry, Please set your people free. Thanks in advance, Jon. PS You totally should have gone with that unlocked $99 Nexus One plan. Image credit: Niccolò Caranti, Flickr        
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| Behind The Scenes At The New York Tech Meetup (TCTV) Posted: 16 Apr 2011 07:42 AM PDT Since launching in 2004, the New York Tech Meetup has mushroomed to more than 17,000 members, making it the largest MeetUp in the world. Once a month the community pours into the Skirball Center on NYU's campus to network and watch nascent companies demo their products. Companies who've taken center stage in the past include Tumblr and Foursquare. Paid tickets are quickly snapped up and the organization recently hired its first Managing Director, Jessica Lawrence to handle growth. I attended the April 6th MeetUp with approximately 800 other spectators, one of which was Craigslist Founder, Craig Newmark. His presences was a highlight for one of the presenters of Lemonade Stand, a company that helps facilitate the online buying and selling of items in a community. Other emerging companies on stage included MeeGenius, Brainscape, Ex.fm, AskLocal, Addieu, Corkboard.me, ImUp4, MessageParty, Runens, Readability, and Atavist. TechCrunch has covered some of these before. We hope the video above rather gives you a taste of what happens when the world's largest MeetUp meets, and introduce you to some of the folks who help make it all happen. Take a look and tell us if you want to see more videos like this one in the future.        
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