Why won’t the iPad have Adobe Flash technology? Anup Murarka director of technology strategy and partner development for the Adobe Flash platform and Aaron Filner, group product manager of Flash platform, focusing on AIR, answer some of the reasons why Steve Jobs doesn’t put Adobe Flash onto the iPad in one of the videos I filmed yesterday when I visited Adobe’s offices in San Francisco. Things like:
1. It will chew up battery.
2. It will crash or be buggy.
3. It doesn’t work with touch interfaces.
4. It won’t perform well enough.
They take on each of these complaints about Adobe Flash and explain what has changed with the Flash 10.1 player.
My thoughts? I’m buying an iPad anyway (we’re even having a party at the Palo Alto store all night on the evening of April 2nd) and I have iPhones. My life would be better if Flash shipped on iPad, but it doesn’t look like that will happen. So, developers are going to be forced to build two versions of their web pages if they care about reaching me as a customer and one of those versions will need to have no Flash or Silverlight (Apple is also resisting including Microsoft’s Silverlight platform).
But Adobe is doing a pretty good job of keeping Flash developers’ skills relevant. You can build apps for iPhones or iPads in Flash and compile them using some new tools that Adobe has been showing off and will ship before July. Even Adobe’s own Photoshop app on the iPhone was built in Flash and compiled using these new tools. That’s a compelling story.
I have to admit, though, that I will be checking out other competitive devices from Google and others. I already have a Droid, which will use the new Flash 10.1 player just fine and I expect I’ll check out the new HP tablet and, especially, ones that will come with the Google Chrome OS later this year. Those, I expect, will support Flash and that could be a big deal in future device decisions.
How about you? Will you decide not to buy Apple products just because they won’t run Flash in Web pages?
Other companies like Yammer, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, and others have actually been doing the harder foundational work here of trying to convince us all to bring socially collaborative services into our workplaces. Yesterday I sat down with Yammer’s CEO, David Sacks, and talked about the industry and what Yammer is doing (Yammer was first to bring microblogging streams inside corporate firewalls and won TechCrunch 50 two years ago because of that).
I’ve been going around this enterprise world trying to understand it. I recently visited SocialCast and talked with CEO Tim Young about how he sees this revolution taking shape (and how he views Salesforce’s entry into it). In the interview you’ll hear Tim tout his advantages: that SocialCast is runable both on its servers, but can also be run on your own servers inside your firewall, or on your own infrastructure. Enterprises in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and banking will want to do this and won’t go with the Google or Salesforce model of “run it on our servers, they are safe, promise.”
I also talked last week with SocialText’s founder, Ross Mayfield. SocialText was the first company into this new “Enterprise 2.0″ space and they just shipped a new version that has a much broader range of applications than SocialCast or Salesforce has (spreadsheets and wikis, to name two) that are integrated deeply into its socially collaborative streams. Companies that want a complete set of applications should look at SocialText.
But, now, don’t miss what Google did last night (it turned on the Google Apps Marketplace). It’s big. But even more exciting and potentially revolutionary was the Gmail integrated contextual apps extensions. These let developers integrate all sorts of enterprise data right into Gmail. You can see where Google will go next, right? An enterprise version of Buzz with these widgets integrated into Buzz messages. Salesforce is actually ahead in integrating its partners’ data right into its feeds with Chatter, but it’s clear that window will close pretty quickly as Google keeps building its Enterprise Reef (my term for all the various projects that Google is stitching together). If you are interested in the enterprise space, I’d definitely watch the video presentations from last night. Salesforce has a few million users, Google has 25 million users, so you can see the relative strength of Google’s moves. Salesforce must articulate a strategy of how it will both partner with, and differentiate from, Google’s reef.
After the presentations last night I talked with executives from Zoho, Atlassian, and other companies. They agree with Benioff that a revolution at work is underway. They are seeing sizeable sales and adoption into enterprises as we all change how we work from a file-based and email-based system of working to a socially-collaborative feed way of working.
This is also why the most important panel at SXSW will be the Activity Streams panel. All of these companies need to adopt standards-based stream formats so that they can easily interoperate with each other and all the data sources that will need to shove data and reports into our work streams of the future. I’ll be there and will report more on Saturday as I understand more about the state of the art.
Are you feeling this revolution yet? Are you changing how you work with others? Or are you still only using email and Microsoft Sharepoint to collaborate with your coworkers? If you are, beware, your work life is about to change big time.
If you work at a company like Jive, SocialCast, SocialText, or Salesforce, what do you think? Are Marc Benioff’s moves important?
If you’ve been reading Techcrunch or Techmeme lately you know just how in love tech bloggers are with location-based services like Foursquare. Just yesterday Facebook announced its intention to check in on this hot market.
Even the major players, like Gowalla, know that they must innovate to stay relevant. Gowalla’s CEO, Josh Williams, told me yesterday in a video interview that everyone knows that the check-in gesture will be a commodity pretty quickly, if it isn’t already (even Yelp added the “check in” gesture).
Gowalla and Foursquare this morning checked in new iPhone apps, both of which make the experience of using these services a lot nicer. You can see Josh showing me Gowalla’s new iPhone app in the video here.
Why do these matter? Because of three reasons:
1. By letting the world know your location you can enable a new kind of search. Yelp will show you restaurants near you. Foursquare will show you tips near you. Gowalla will show you tours, or trips near you.
2. Several of these let you play various games, like collecting badges, or just collecting cool locations. You can show your friends all the places you checked in on your European vacation, for instance.
3. A rolodex of your friends organized by location is very powerful. I use this all the time to setup meetings near me with new execs I want to meet.
Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t the only ones trying to thrive in this space, though. Brightkite, Loopt, Whrrl, Lunch.com, and others are releasing new versions this week and are trying to find communities that will love them.
But for me the real fight this week is between Foursquare and Gowalla. I’m using both and neither has come out with a set of features that make me totally want to use one over the other.
The longer term fight (IE, between now and June) is whether any of these will be able to defend themselves against Facebook and Google.
Google’s Buzz should give some of these startups some hope. Before Buzz came out I expected it to be much more competitive with Twitter and Facebook. After it arrived we realized that Google isn’t as smart in the social arena and I thought they might be.
Already Foursquare’s co-founder is saying that Facebook is losing its “real friendness” when compared to these newer services and he does have a point, but it seems it’s way too early to poke the bear. Ask Mark Andreessen how that works out (he made Mozilla seem far more important than it actually turned out to be and woke up the Microsoft bear which proceeded to chase Mozilla off of its lawn).
Anyway, this space is white hot and the next week will decide which team or teams will get to do battle with Facebook and Google in the real test for this space.
Can this area get any hotter? Will something surprising that none of us are expecting come out at SXSW?
One thing I like is just how articulate Josh Williams of Gowalla is on this space. Anyone interested should definitely watch this video.
No, no, I’m not talking about going to the Diggnation party and downing a couple of drinks. This year there’s some geekier ways to augment your reality while you walk from panel to panel or event to party.
Here’s a few.
1. Win $1,000 by using SXSW version of the Junaio augmented reality app. The game is called ScavengAR and you can get details on the game here. Sorry, only for iPhone 3GS users. If you see me at the Rackspace Revolution party on Monday night (I’ll be working the door so should be easy to find) I’ll be wearing one of the T-shirts that can help you win this game (and the augmented reality stuff it does on my shirt is pretty mind-blowing. ).
2. Get the SXSW QR code app. There will be a ton of QR codes at SXSW, including on everyone’s badges. If you have a QR code app on your phone you’ll be able to easily exchange information without having to collect old-style business cards.
3. Use Gowalla, MyTown, and Foursquare and watch out for other location-based games that will do something fun at SXSW. Foursquare just announced their SXSW badges and I’m meeting with Gowalla’s co-founder later today to get the skinny on what they are doing. Foursquare is releasing a new iPhone app tomorrow, which has a much better design and new features. Gowalla is expected to do a lot too, and has a huge party at SXSW that’s already sold out. Are you not sure which one is best for you? Check out the shootout I put up on Google Buzz that got hundreds of comments.
4. Plan out your SXSW fun with Plancast (a new kind of event planner). They have a whole page dedicated to SXSW and most of my geeky friends are using Plancast to find events.
5. Prepare for wireless troubles. I talk about some of the preparations that AT&T is saying they’ve made to get ready for SXSW over on Google Buzz, but we still expect troubles so some of this stuff might not work at all. I’m carrying a Droid that will be on Verizon. At CES that served me well. Unfortunately not everyone has the luxury of being able to afford two devices. AT&T says they’ll have a bunch of wifi access points throughout downtown, though, which should help reduce the load on their cell towers.
6. Get some Stickybits and hand them out like business cards and stick them to all your friends’ computers like I will be. Hah. What are these? Little stickers with a barcode that you can put information into. Or, turn into a forum. Techcrunch explains.
I’m sure I’m missing a ton of apps that we could use to augment our realities, so please leave your favorite apps that you recommend other SXSW attendees to use in the comments here and I’ll probably write another post later in the week.
Oh, and the news? The ScavengAR app is built on top of the new Junaio 2.0 platform that’s the first Augmented Reality app that is designed to be used indoors where GPS might not work properly. That makes it great for using it at parties, or at museums. They are also shipping two new channels, one for BART (Bay Area transit, will show you station locations and estimated arrival times) and one for Eventful, which will show you event data from Eventful, which is a comprehensive calendar of local events. You can download Junaio 2.0 now from the app store (the video for ScavangAR shows you how) and there will be more details on 2.0 on Junaio’s website by the end of the day.
The technology that lies underneath the services we use every day is complex and changing quickly. Technologies like Hadoop, MapReduce, are changing how developers and architects build these services. As I was talking with Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera (a company that builds technology to help developers deal with these larger-than terabyte databases) I realized that by learning about the technology underneath these services I was better able to understand why these services can’t give me some of the features I want.
Anyway, he talks me through some of the changes in the database world and explains the technology and terms that lay underneath. Good primer for people who want to have a better tech literacy of the terms and technology underneath big data services like Twitter and Facebook.
Do you agree with me that we need a new tech literacy? That we should be teaching this stuff in high school so kids can get at least some understanding of where technology is and where it is going? Tons of startups hiring thousands of people have already started up in San Francisco area using these technologies and they will only get more important and people who understand how to develop on them will only become more in demand. But how many people outside of the development world know what Hadoop is? Not enough.
I’ve been traveling around the world studying how startups get formed. Yesterday I visited Bootup Labs in Vancouver. Last week I was at Startup Riot in Atlanta and while at the Olympics I’ve been hanging out with Saeed Amidi. He was recently profiled in Business Week and is CEO of Plug and Play, an incubator in Silicon Valley (he invests in, and rents to, more than 280 startups in Silicon Valley and now owns the building where Google and PayPal, among others, started up). I’ve been at YCombinator and Techstars events recently. I’ve visited London, and Paris in the last year to meet startups there. In April I’ll be visiting Israel again to study startups there in more detail.
There are some common trends.
1. Most everyone outside of the valley complains that they can’t get access to enough capital.
2. Most everyone outside of the valley complains that they can’t get access to enough PR.
3. Most everyone outside of the valley complains that their best startups get dragged to Silicon Valley once they get big and need more talent (Flickr, for instance, moved from Vancouver to Silicon Valley when it sold out to Yahoo — they sold in part because they needed help dealing with scaling issues, I’ve heard that story over and over from other companies and communities, too, like Atlassian who moved to the valley from Australia).
4. Most everyone outside of the valley complains that they don’t have the business infrastructure that they need to succeed. Mark Zuckerberg told me he moved Facebook to the Valley to have access to mentors, lawyers, PR people, and other people a fast-growing tech company needs.
5. Most everyone outside of the valley complains about lack of entrepreneurial culture. In Europe, for instance, failure is stigmatized. In other places there just isn’t the kind of culture that values wacky weird ideas. Go to a local coffee shop in your neighborhood, for instance, and ask people what Foursquare is. I guarantee you that in most Silicon Valley coffee shops you’ll find someone. Not so in most other places in the world.
But you already know these problems, among others. So, what’s changing? A lot.
1. The infrastructure needed to start up a tech company is now decentralized. You can use cloud servers from Rackspace, where I work, or Amazon or other companies. That infrastructure didn’t exist five years ago and before then if you wanted to start a web company you would need to build your own data center. Not every community has datacenters, but today everyone has access to the same cloud hosting services.
2. PR is being decentralized. Thanks to blogs, Skype, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook you can get onto TechCrunch no matter where in the world you are.
3. Costs are coming way down. Associated with first point. No longer do you need hundreds of thousands of dollars in servers to start up, you just need a few hundred bucks on a credit card to buy cloud servers.
4. A ton of startup accelerators/incubators have formed in past few years. I’ve listed a few on this post. They provide money, offices, mentoring, and other services you need like legal help.
5. Tech talent is growing around the world. Silicon Valley used to have a lock on geeks. That no longer is true as many universities around the world have educated tons of computer scientists and engineers.
6. Tax advantages. In Vancouver government officials told me this week that they are seeing a widening corporate tax rate gap. They expect that in 2012 their rate will be 25% while USA’s rate will be 40%. Other countries, like Ireland, have even lower rates. Plus, tons of countries want to help form tech zones. In Vancouver Bootup Labs officials told me they are working on getting some R&D subsidies from the Canadian government, (I’ve heard similar things from other countries, which can help even more businesses startup around the world).
7. Lower costs of living. In San Francisco it’s expensive to buy housing and health care needs to be purchased at sometimes great costs to families. Not so in many other communities around the world.
Even Silicon Valley folks are seeing these trends and are looking to capitalize on them. Saeed told me he’s looking to build Plug-and-play facilities in many communities in the world. I’m seeing other incubators/accelerators like YCombinator and TechStars do the same, spreading outside of their original communities to get deal flow from startups around the world.
I expect over the next few years these trends to speed up. I’m looking forward to it.
Robert Scoble is an employee of Rackspace, which can help you with all your hosting needs. He is chief troublemaker in the building43 community of Internet fanatics. You can reach Robert via his cell phone at +1-425-205-1921 or email at scobleizer@gmail.com.
