The new Path? The one that won a Crunchie last night for great design? It’s not done in HTML 5.
This morning I saw something new coming soon from Storify. Not done in HTML 5.
This morning I visited Foodspotting, which just shipped hot new apps on iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Not done in HTML 5.

More and more I’m hearing that designers and developers are ignoring HTML 5, especially for the high end of apps.

Why?

Well, Path’s founders told me it just isn’t possible to build a great user interface, the way they did it in HTML 5.

Storify’s founder told me it isn’t possible to build smooth drag-and-drop elements.

Foodspotting’s founder told me it isn’t possible to make things smoothly zoom and collapse or scroll in HTML 5.

Is this the beginning of pushback from San Francisco’s best app builders? I think so.

In any case, check out the new Foodspotting:

Lots of people think Facebook is overvalued, at about $100 billion (it just released their S1, announcing its IPO).

But in talking with developers, like I did with Foodspotting’s founder, Alexa Andrzejewski, and in reading the S1 I see that Facebook has left most of the potential revenue on the table.

That makes me think that the folks crying “overvalued” are nuts.

Check that interview out, Foodspotting is one of the hottest San Francisco startups, aimed at people who are looking for better places to eat. Here it is from just this morning:

See, Mark Zuckerberg is sandbagging us. He hasn’t focused on revenue. Here’s what he means:

1. He has hundreds of millions of “MAU’s” (Monthly Active Users) who are using mobile. Facebook has not made a dime off of those so far. That won’t continue for long.

2. Open Graph is only one way. Companies like Foodspotting push information INTO Facebook, but they don’t get value out. Developers, like Foodspotting, tell me they are hearing rumblings that Facebook is developing a new kind of advertising. One that looks sort of like Ad Sense, but that push ads out to Open Graph partners. Spotify, for instance, has pushed five billion songs INTO Facebook. Imagine when Facebook pushes ads OUT to Spotify!

Add these two things together and I can see Facebook getting 10x the revenues that they are today. Possibly within 24 months. That would be extraordinary growth, and that growth will translate into huge stock growth over the next few years.

This is Zuckerberg’s brilliance. He has always played investors like a fiddle. Remember when he got Microsoft to invest while not giving up much equity? This is the same thing he’s doing to investors now. He’s going to take all of our money for not much equity and then he’s going to pour on growth and watch things go nuts.

Watch his 28% stake in Facebook to grow from around $25 billion to $100 billion or more by 2015.

Oh, and we haven’t even talked about China. Zuckerberg learned Chinese over the past 18 months. You think he’s not interested in blowing open that market somehow?

OK, I’ve been talking with hundreds of geeks from around the world this year at three conferences, CES, DLD, and World Economic Forum. I’m seeing a trend that is worth talking about.

What is it? We’re seeing the end of one of the most disruptive ages in human history. I believe that we’re seeing a pause in the disruption. More on that a little later.

Just think about all the changes humans have been asked to adopt in the past eight years. Most of us, back then, didn’t carry mobile computers in our pockets. If we did use tablets, like I did, they were expensive, slow, low resolution devices that could only last about two hours. We had no idea what a mobile app was, and if we did, because we were on Nokia phones, like I was, they were hard to discover, download, and use. Now both Android and iOS each have more than 400,000 apps (iOS has 500,000).

Back in 2003 the mainstream was just understanding blogging. Heck, +TechCrunch didn’t start until 2005.

I remember back then that Tim O’Reilly popularized the term “Web 2.0.” He and I spoke at the first Google Zeitgeist conference and I remember sitting next to him and he was pushing the Web 2.0 term with folks online.

Barcamp started in this age.

Twitter was born in this age. So was Zynga. LinkedIn. And Facebook.

Eight years ago Google was the only one who I knew that had these monster huge datacenters around the world with hundreds of thousands of servers. Now these seem commonplace.

We’ve seen extraordinary shifts in how we communicate, protest, and work together.

Yammer, Jive, Salesforce Chatter, didn’t exist back then.

Amazon was only a retail store back then. The really disruptive stuff came out in the past eight years from them.

Xbox was just starting to get noticed back then but even while I worked there in 2003 to 2006 they had no clue just how disruptive Xbox Kinect would be.

Heck, back then most of us didn’t have an HDTV.

If you look back at the last eight years we saw disruption in how we live, play, and work together it was really extraordinary.

But this is the first January when I haven’t been blown away by something new in quite a few years. There wasn’t a new iPhone. There wasn’t a Kinect. There wasn’t dozens of new iPhone apps that are mind blowing (I’ve only seen one, Highlight, and it’s not mindblowing, just executed well). Here’s a video where I get a look:

Does this seem mindblowing? Nope, not really, but it will be hot at SXSW so it might lead to something else, it just doesn’t seem like other pre-SXSW times where we saw Twitter and Foursquare gain traction in February and March.

It’s pretty clear that while we’re still seeing plenty of new things, and new companies, the tech industry threw an extraordinary amount of disruption at the world. So, it’s time to take a breather. This year we won’t see a wild new innovation spread like wildfire, but, rather, we’ll just see more people adopt the disruptions of the past eight years.

Think we’re there yet? Sorry, out of all the attendees at the World Economic Forum, only about 30% are on Twitter. San Francisco might have been at that point in 2009, but many many people around the world, including leaders, still aren’t using the disruptive technologies that the rest of us are already getting bored with.

It’s time to shave the edges off of all those apps (tomorrow Foodspotting will demonstrate the trend I’m seeing to do just that) and execute and build businesses that have real customers and real business models.

We have a lot of work to do!

That’s a way to say that tomorrow’s IPO of Facebook is the closing of an extraordinary chapter in our history. Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg and the thousands of people working at Facebook but congratulations to ALL of us who have adopted social media/networks/technologies in the past eight years. We’ve made this disruptive chapter happen and I don’t mind it at all if we take a year off shipping huge new disruptive technologies and just get down to the business of using all of these new things.

Here’s a test: out of the 500,000+ apps that are in the iPhone app store how many have you used? I’m supposedly a “heavy” early adopter and I’ve only tried around 600. Our ability to keep up with the pace of change in this industry is being stretched to the limit. We need a year just to breathe and get used to swimming in this new disruptive world.

Now we need to make all this stuff work.

That’s one reason why I’m changing focus at +Rackspace Hosting to focusing on small teams who are using all these new disruptive technologies to have a huge impact in the world. Don’t know what New Relic are? Loggly? Node.js? Echo? Janrain? These are the things that have me excited now because they help small teams do things for millions of people. Here’s one of our early shows, with Janrain, which is helping lots of companies outsource its user management.

If there’s disruption in 2012: that’s it. These new small companies are helping lots of other companies scale their engineering efforts.

At SXSW we’ll be explaining more about what we’re doing in this regard, but you can see a hint on Rackspace’s Small Teams, Big Impact site.

Do you know of a company that is helping small teams have a huge impact on the world? Let me know!

Oh, and it’s also time to get back to blogging. I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s blog lately and am seeing a reason to blog again instead of just using my Google+ account, which is where I’m spending 90% of my time lately.

Today Sarah Lacy, formerly of Techcrunch, announced she was starting a new media company and has gotten funded, to the tune of $2.5-million by a variety of big names in investing.

This is just what the tech industry needs. Why? Because big companies are too focused on profits to properly cover the startup world.

Here’s why.

1. Most stories about startups don’t get many hits. At least not when compared to stuff about Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. There’s a reason for that that’s built into the system. If you write about Microsoft, for instance, its 90,000 employees hear about it on internal email newsletters and blogs. You’ll get thousands of hits almost instantly just because of that. Then they’ll push blogs that are pro that company out to other places like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I see this happening all the time. Those hits are easy money for blogs that rely on page-view advertising, like Techcrunch does. Startups don’t have that “multi-thousand-hit” ability, so get lesser attention from the big companies than they should.

2. Startups tend to be understood better by people who’ve been in startups. I’m getting a bit rusty at this myself. Working at a big company you start to forget what it’s like to have to do everything yourself. I remember walking into one startup and seeing the CEO on the floor building an airconditioner to keep his team cool. It’s why, even though Rackspace built me a studio at its new office in San Francisco, I still go and visit quite a few startups. It’s something very few journalists do, but I know Sarah Lacy does.

3. The industry needs a global perspective. I was talking with the CEO of Geekli.st, Reuben Katz, the other day. That interview is here so you can listen. As you listen you’ll hear something: innovation is happening outside of Silicon Valley. Sarah knows this deeply. She wrote a book on it and has done the hard work of visiting far off places. Many other journalists think that they have seen this trend by going to big conferences at LeWeb, but that’s just not true. It’s hard to know this without having done the hard work, er, flying the miles.

4. The way startups get better conversion is via video. This is something I understand deeply, but so does Sarah. She’s been on the inside of video divisions of Yahoo and AOL and I’m sure she’ll be doing a bunch of videos. More videos of startups is a good thing for the entire industry. Too many blogs don’t understand the power of video, or don’t have the funding to do the travel that this requires (I’m heading to Europe on Friday, for instance, and it isn’t cheap).

5. There is no way one person, or one media company, can cover all the startups anymore. Y Combinator alone is going to graduate another 60 startups. Think about it. I can only do about two videos a day. That means I’d have to focus on Y Combinator for more than an entire month to cover all of its startups. That means that many of its startups don’t get covered, or covered well.

Now, you might think this is bad for me. No, it’s not. As startup liasion officer at Rackspace I love that I’ll see even more coverage of startups in the future. This is good for everyone in the industry that serves startups. Some changes that we’ve already started making, though, because we knew there would be more competition in startup news space: we’ve decided to move away from building43.com and toward a new “Small Teams, Big Impact” set of videos. Yes, we have a website, that will grow to be more interactive in the future, but we’ll be putting more of our videos up on social networks. If you’ve noticed, I haven’t been as active here lately as I once was. Why? Because Google+ became a lot more interesting to me due to the engagement I was getting there, the audience growth (more than 210,000 followers there already). Even Facebook, in the past few months, has seen huge audience growth for me, from about 13,000 followers in August to more than 100,000 today. The action is clearly on social networks, and that’s where I’m putting my time and efforts.

That said, there’s something I’ve noticed that the startup blogs haven’t really caught onto yet. That is there’s technologies here now that are helping small teams having a HUGE impact on the world. For instance, at Universal Studios there are two engineers who are building all their web properties and are getting a HUGE amount of scale from technologies like JanRain and Echo. More on that soon, as we get more of our videos up on our Small Teams, Big Impact, site.

Also, at SXSW we’ll have a celebration of companies like this that help small teams have a big impact on the world. If you know of one, can you let me know by filling in this form? Thanks!

Anyway, that’s getting me off the point of this post, my first of 2012, which is to say “congrats Sarah.” Can’t wait to see what you do.

I’ve also added PandoDaily’s Twitter account to my tech news brand Twitter list, which includes all the tech news brands I know of (493 to date).

PHOTOCREDIT: I shot this image of Sarah while she worked on Techcrunch TV.

This weekend we’ll be in Yosemite with Google+ photographers, including Thomas Hawk, Trey Ratcliff Karen Hutton Scott Jarvie Peter Adams shirley lo and Kimberly Shoemaker. All trying to make a better image than the ones that come up in searches for Yosemite on Google+.

So, to prepare, I went on a photowalk around Half Moon Bay with a new kind of camera: Lytro’s lightfield camera. Lytro’s director of photography, Eric Cheng, gave me a late Christmas present: he let me be one of the first people in the world to actually use one in the wild. Yesterday we walked around and I made 278 images. He shot a bunch too (he’s one of the world’s best underwater photographers, by the way, and has videos of sharks eating GoPro cameras, crazy!). Unfortunately Eric didn’t let me share the actual images online, since this is still a pre-production unit and doesn’t have the final software or viewer yet, but we did shoot a video where you can see some of the results.

I have already purchased a Lytro with my own money, so you know I’m interested in this new camera, that lets you do things like refocus images after you shoot (it does more, too, which we discuss in the video).

So, how was it?

Both disappointing and enthralling.

But first, this is NOT a review. It’s just an early look at a product that hasn’t yet shipped (they expect to ship them sometime in Q1, 2012, so by April 1, although first units might start shipping in February). The software isn’t done, and Eric showed me a few things that they are working on for the future.

You’ll have to wait for an official “review” of the final camera.

So, why was it disappointing?

Well, if you just want the ultimately sharpest photo, this isn’t a camera for you (it won’t do 22 megapixel photos like my Canon 5D MKII will, and the images are generally good enough for on-screen use but if you want to blow them up to wall sized images, this isn’t a camera for you).
If you like having a huge choice of lenses, this isn’t a camera for you.
If you want to shoot action sports, this isn’t a camera for you.
If you want to see through the viewfinder to choose your own focus point, this isn’t a camera for you.
If you want the best low-light performance, then this isn’t a camera for you.

But why is it enthralling?

It let me see the world in a new way. I no longer needed to worry about focus. In fact, I quickly learned that there’s a kind of photo that only works on the Lytro: one where you can get very close to the subject and just shoot, without any worry about where the focus is.

Plus, coming sometime after the camera ships you can turn each image into a 3D image. I saw some examples from Eric’s computer on my 65-inch Vizio 3D TV and they rocked.

Some other reactions.

1. Shooting is actually pretty comfortable and fun. In the video you’ll see Eric shooting with it.
2. The shutter reacts pretty quickly. I was able to capture some shots of golfers in mid swing. That said, top shutter speed is 250th of a second, so this won’t freeze most sports action. Water that I shot out of a fountain was slightly blurred because of the slow shutter.
3. Exposure was usually pretty good, although on some subjects, highlights were overblown. Eric says that they are still tweaking the settings in the camera, so these will probably improve.
4. The viewfinder was frustrating to use in bright sunlight. In fact, most of the time I just shot without seeing the image. That isn’t as big a deal as it might seem, though, because you don’t need to focus, just need to properly compose the image. Eric says that they are working on making the viewfinder brighter.
5. In low light images got a big grainy for my tastes, but still worked.
6. To get the “refocusable effect” you need to pick images where the camera is extremely close to one subject while another subject is in the distant background. This takes a little bit of playing around to optimize for, but I got some good examples, including one where I stuck the camera four inches away from a window frame and shot outside.
7. The camera gets a lot of reactions. At one point the bartender at the Ritz grabbed ours and said “I read about this in Wired” and started shooting with it. The fact that he could pick it up and figure out the controls quickly tells me it is well designed.
8. There are improvements coming that I can’t talk about.
9. Some images have light-field artifacts. This happens when it can’t build the 3D model properly that it relies on, like when there’s motion blur. These aren’t going to be noticed by most people who view your images on Facebook but we were blowing the images up on my 65-inch TV.

Is this camera worth buying?

For me and other early adopters who want to own a piece of the future, absolutely 100% yes.
For my wife? She’ll probably keep using her iPhone’s cameras.

I can’t wait to get mine for real. The technology behind this is mind blowing.

Oh, Charlie. Charlie Kindel, that is. He used to work at Microsoft. He still has Microsoft in his blood as he tries to explain why Windows Phone 7 hasn’t taken off.

I thought about posting this over on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter, but I like the way MG Siegler is treating it. All the stupid stuff goes on the blog and all the important stuff goes on YouTube, Tumblr, or Google+. Heh.

MG mailed Charlie’s post back with a “way too late” headline and pointed out that apps do matter.

It’s worse than that. Sorry Charlie.

I had dozens of people here for several events this weekend. Phones came up in nearly every conversation. Not a single person brought up Windows Phone 7.

While watching TV I was reminded again of why: it’s all about apps. Yeah, Charlie, all that other stuff matters a bit. You know, what Carriers decide to push and all that. But only if the customers are willing to go along with the push.

See, I used to work retail and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t unload crappy products on consumers. They generally are smarter than that.

One thing I learned working the counter at several Silicon Valley consumer electronics stores is that there’s only one thing people really care about when it comes to buying things:

Not looking stupid.

Now, let’s look at the ads on TV right now. There’s all sorts of people saying to get their app, including the local TV news departments. Do they talk about Android? Yes, of course. iOS? Of course! Windows Phone 7? Hell no. RIM/Blackberry? I haven’t heard that in an app advertisement in, well, forever.

So, when a consumer goes into a carrier store to buy a new phone, what is going on in the back of her/his head?

Android=safe.
iOS/iPhone=safe.
Everything else=not safe.

Why? Because all you had to do was come to my Christmas parties to see why. Everything around you showed that having an Android or an iPhone was “safe.”

When I go around interviewing startups I hear over and over that they are staying away from anything that isn’t Android or iOS based.

That means that any product not based on iOS or Android isn’t “safe.”

End of discussion. Until RIM or Microsoft changes that belief among app developers in a demonstrable way Microsoft will continue to struggle.

And don’t tell me that Nokia is gonna be able to change this in the developing world. Anyone who is on Twitter now can watch this search:

https://twitter.com/#!/search/apps

Go ahead. Put that search into a good Twitter client. Every second or two a new Tweet gets made. Now watch how many of them talk about anything but iOS or Android devices: nearly none.

I watch this search every day on StreamBoard on my iPad.

It shows why Charlie is so wrong: apps do matter and matter big time and TODAY matter more than carriers. UPDATE: Charlie claims he didn’t say apps don’t matter. Just that they don’t matter for his discussion. I disagree. Here’s why: Carriers are no longer hungry for a competitor to iPhones the way they were back in 2009. So, the “lever” to the market will NOT be carriers. But Android and iOS DO have a “lever” called developers and apps.

That will not change in 2012, no matter how much Microsofties (or ex-Microsofties) wish to hide from that problem.