It’s now been about 6 weeks since Apple bought Lala and I’ve spent some time reflecting on the acquisition. When I first heard the news, it sounded like a good fit. After-all, Lala is essentially a web-based version iTunes and has some great technology powering it. It makes sense that Apple would want to buy the next best thing and get some great engineers in the process. However, I didn’t think at the time that Apple’s strategy would become so clear, so soon. Apple’s acquisitions usually take years to come to fruition. Not this time though. TechCrunch recently reported that Apple is planning on transforming iTunes into a cloud-based iTunes.com service, and Lala’s technology is the quickest way to do that. (“Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical“).

Seeing the immediate impact Lala’s technology can have, I began to think about who else was in the bidding war for Lala? Most reports say there were multiple companies interested, so you have to assume the a few of the typical parties were involved; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, & MySpace. Only a couple of those companies stand out as a great fit, Amazon & MySpace. Right now MySpace has too many problems to deal with, so that leaves just one likely suitor… Amazon.

Amazon’s entry into the digital music download space has been game-changing. Prior to Amazon.com/mp3, music lovers had no where to go to purchase non-DRM’d MP3s. We were stuck in the world of buying CDs to rip, buying DRM’d tracks from iTunes, or of course… pirating music. When Amazon came into the market in 2008, their impact was immediately felt as prices began to drop and DRM began to die. This opened the floodgates to other services who also began selling non-DRM’d MP3s, and music streaming became a sustainable business model. Without Amazon’s entry, I suspect little would have changed over the past 2 years. Having competition for Apple is vitally important to the evolution of the media industry. Apple is an amazingly innovative company, but like most companies, they grow content & less innovative without anyone breathing down their back.

As painless as Amazon has tried to make the downloading process when you purchase tracks from their MP3 store, it is still not as smooth and elegant as iTunes. To add insult to injury, once the download is complete, Amazon’s user experience is then transfered over to iTunes (for most users) where the user must import the purchased files to begin listening. Amazon clearly needs to do something about this. Transferring a customer into your rival’s product at the end of the transaction process is a giant flaw in product design. They need to provide their customers a way to stay in an Amazon environment throughout the Purchase->Download->Listen->Manage cycle. This is where their acquisition of Lala would have been perfect.

Had Amazon bought Lala, they would have obtained the engineering team that is hands-down the best at building a web-based media manager. After integrating Amazon MP3 with Lala, they could then integrate the Amazon Video & Kindle management interfaces into the Lala-based manager. Beyond music, video, and books, Amazon could then begin to expand into other areas, perhaps buy a company like Roku and make their streaming video experience end-to-end Amazon as well. We could have had a real competitor to iTunes. Sadly though, Amazon dropped the ball with Lala, especially since the acquisition only cost Apple $17 million. That’s nothing for a company that just spent over a billion dollars to purchase Zappos.

We’re clearly approaching a time where our music devices are going to have constant wireless broadband connections. You won’t have to worry about locally storing music, it can all be hosted in the cloud and streamed to you on demand. This isn’t a brand new concept, but the timing is right for it to finally become mainstream. If Apple is successful in transforming iTunes into iTunes.com, unchallenged, they will likely be able to declare “game over” with music delivery in the US.

Hopefully Amazon sees the writing on the wall and steps up their game to provide a challenge. Is Spotify our only hope?

amazon, apple, lala

Loic Lemuer (CEO of Seesmic) recently announced at Microsoft’s Developer Conference that he’ll be releasing a new version of Seesmic that supports plugins. This is huge for developers, as well as users.

Up until now the Twitter developer ecosystem has been very closed. Sure the Twitter APIs are as open as possible, but all the clients out there are largely closed platforms. There are a few exceptions, including Spaz and Tweenky (my client) which are open-source. It is great to have a starting point (aside from raw libraries) that gives developers a place to start with when building a Twitter application. With Seesmic Desktop invading Windows with a programmable version that you can write plugins for, this is a huge step that hopefully will push other developers/companies towards the same model.

When I launched Tweenky about 18 months ago, I hadn’t event thought about making it programmable, but pretty quickly afterwards I realized the potential it could have if it were programmable, and so I began a rewrite, and coded it in 99% JavaScript with two plugins out of the box, Twitter and Identi.ca. I had plans for other plugins (Facebook), but the problem with developing a platform, and not just an application, is that it takes a loooot of time. For one guy working in his spare time, it just wasn’t going to be possible to abstract out a platform and develop a community around it. So, I started with another rewrite and only focused support for Twitter. I still think it was the right move given the limited amount of time I can spend developing it.

What I’m really waiting for is an easy way for Twitter developers to monetize their applications. We’ve all seen what the Apple has accomplished with the App Store and the ecosystem they created overnight. While most iPhone developers have made very little, others have won the lottery and struck it rich. While Twitter (the company) has been very supportive of the developer community, they should really look at giving it a push and figuring out a way to monetarily reward Twitter developers. Nothing gets developers going like a big, fat, diamond crusted carrot dangling in front of their noses. Afterall, Twitter wouldn’t be Twitter if it weren’t for the developers. The various clients are what made the service usable for the hard-core Twitter users that create most of the valuable content.

P.S. You can still view the programmable version at beta.tweenky.com.

seesmic, twitter

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb had an interesting post today recapping an interview with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt at last week’s Gartner Symposium. In a short, 6 minute segment out of the full 45 minute interview (video below), Schmidt hinted at what the future of the internet will bring.

Via RWW: Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

It’s hard to argue with any of those, really. The one I’m looking forward to most of all is the convergence of media platforms as the lines between TV, Radio, and Web become more and more blurry. As those lines become blurred, more innovation will occur between the gaps and the old-time revenue models based mostly on distribution begin to fall apart.

No tags

If you can’t wait to get your hands on Chrome for OSX, go download a Chromium nightly build, unzip, and copy to your Applications folder.

At first glance, it doesn’t appear much different from Safari, which isn’t too surprising since they’re both based off the the same layout engine (WebKit). The real differences are just going to come in the skin (which is pretty similar) and the JavaScript engine (Chromium = V8, Safari = Nitro, formerly “Squirrelfish”).

No tags

I’m involved with organizing two upcoming events in the Kansas City area for web developer/designers.

PreDevCamp – Kansas City

This is an event we just announced today that will be a “bootcamp” for developing on Palm’s new Mojo SDK platform, which is the development toolkit for the upcoming Palm Pre phone.

Website: PreDevCamp – Kansas City.

StartupWeekend – Kansas City

StartupWeekends are events that have been occuring nationwide for the past couple years, and it is Kansas City’s first  chance to host one.  These events typically take place over a weekend, starting Friday afternoon, and ending Sunday evening.  During this event, teams of developers, designers, project managers, marketing peeps, etc… will break off into teams and at the weekend the goal is to have a company up & running with a prototype product built to demo to potential investors.

Website: http://kansascity.startupweekend.com/

Palm Pre, PreDevCamp, StartupWeekend

Blogging is something that comes in waves for me, and once I get out of the habit, it is tough to get back into it.  I enjoy it, but sometimes there’s just so much going on that it completely escapes me.  The last few months have been one of those periods.  So let’s start from the top…

I’ve been working on a new project recently.  Tweenky is a micro blogging client I am developing that is mostly used with Twitter, but also supports Identi.ca, and hopefully more micro-blogging services soon.  The concept behind it was the lack of any good web clients out there for Twitter, and especially ones that brought back the “track” feature that Twitter took away from us a few weeks back.  It’s still very much a work in progress and I just have to find the time to work on some of the new features and further improve stability.  I’m having a blast with pushing the boundaries of JavaScript and what it should/shouldn’t be used for.  So, if you are a Twitter user, go check it out, and if it is still requiring an invite code, use “derekville”.

So I just returned from a convention out in Santa Clara called Zendcon.  As a web developer, my primary language of choice is PHP, and Zend is the company puts most of the work into the PHP project, so this was kind of their little yearly shindig.  It was 4 days of 1-2 hour training sessions on all topics related to PHP and web development.  I saw some presentations from engineers and developers from companies such as IBM, Google, Mozilla, Digg, Yahoo, and tons more.  I met a ton of really interesting people too and had a great time at Yahoo HQ for Hackday ‘08.  (note to self: Don’t wear “Hackday ‘08″ shirt to airport, it leads to hacker questioning from TSA agents)

Vacation #1 was on the front & back end of the Zendcon trip as I had a few days before & after the conference to play around in San Francisco.  It’s such a cool city and I had a blast driving around in the Pontiac G6 convertible I rented for the week.  I’ve never had so much fun driving a car!

Vacation #2 is coming up next month with Katye & I flying up to Seattle where we’ll also head up to Vancouver & Victoria.  I haven’t been to Seattle in about 10 years, so I’m really excited as I love that city.  Everyone I’ve talked to raves about Vancouver too, so I’m pretty excited about my first trip north of the border.

If you are a web developer in the Kansas City area, you need to check out two emerging groups.  The first being DotNext, a group in the KC area that gets together every month or so to give sessions on anything web development related.  Last month was a series of presentations of Amazon Web Services.  This month is going to be on various database related technologies. The second group is Cowtown Computer Congress who is setting up a hacker space in North Kansas City.  For those not too familiar with what a “hacker space” is (myself included), it is a place for technologists to get together to work on  various hardware & software projects, share costs on equipment, and actually socialize (something most geeks never do much of).  So should be an awesome place to convene when it officially opens in the next couple months.

And finally, a new podcast from some rather influential people in the web development world has launched that I’d like to mention.  Open Web Podcast was created by Google engineer Dion Almaer (of the Ajaxian podcast as well), Alex Russell of Dojo, and John Resig of Mozilla/jQuery.  So if you are into web standards and JavaScript, definitely check it out.

Finally, I recently discovered the FX show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.  Hilarious!  Check out all the episodes on Hulu.

ccckc, dotnext, Javascript, openweb podcast, tweenky, zendcon

Day #1 of Reddit going open source, and they are already fighting with their developers. C’mon guys, you clearly don’t understand what is being requested, so ask for clarification instead of being so stubborn. We understand you are busy getting this project off the ground, but you need to understand that you can’t fight with your own developers, especially this early in the game. If you can’t manage that, they why did you open source it in the first place?

reddit

Sorry for the Sprint emphasis early on, they are a local company that is always a center of  attention around here.

Sprint, as a brand, is pretty much dead. I can’t believe how badly Gary Forsee crippled that company. They purchased Nextel for $35 billion just three years ago, destroyed its network and fractured its customer base, and are now trying to sell it for a measly $5 billion while the FCC says it must relocate to a different spectrum, likely costing billions. Meanwhile, their landline services have since been spun-off as Embarq, and this latest move to offload its future 4G operation to Clearwire is an indication that the end is near.

So now they’ll turn around and sell Nextel, crippling that poor brand even more and leaving it as a shell of what it once was. At that point, all “Sprint” will have left is a backbone ISP operation, a dying wireless brand that will likely be sold to T-Mobile, investments in all of the spin-offs, and an arena that still doesn’t have an NBA team. (Humor for the KC readers)

Goodbye “Sprint”, I’m not sure what you’ll be in 5 years. 100+ year old companies don’t just dissapear into thin air, but I don’t think you’ll be very recognizable. Again, I’m talking about “Sprint” the brand.  Sprint the stock ticker is a great investment right now as I’ve been preaching the last couple months.  If you do still have your wireless voice services, I’m sure it will be under a commodity / white label brand until the current technology dies and eventually you’ll sell your shares in all your spin-offs to pay off the debt you racked up.

But, having said that, I think the move makes perfect sense and is a well played strategy. Sprint & Clearwire’s WiMAX project has great potential, but they have no money to fund it since Clearwire is only 4 years old and Sprint is $20 billion in debt, so they absolutely needed to join forces. Along with the new merger, they will also get an influx of much needed cash from Comcast, Intel, Time Warner, & Google, who are throwing in a $3.2 Billion investment.

So, the landscape is now set for The Great Wireless Broadband War of 2008-2014 (can I trademark that?)

Side A
A) Sprint – Owns a large chunk of the back-end of the internet
B) Google – Owns a large chunk of the front-end of the internet
C) Comcast & Time Warner – Owns cable television & residential internet in the US
D) Intel – Owns the processors that will power everything
E) Skype – Assuming Google buys it

Side B
A) AT&T vs Verizon – Dominant telcos in US who are launching their own 4G network sometime next decade.
B) British Telecom – Dominant telco in UK
C) NTT – Dominant telco in Japan
D) Deutsch Telecom – Dominant telco in Germany
E) Unnamed Skype Killer they are rumored to be working on to run on their closed networks.

So who will win? That’s a tough one, but here are some suggested investments; CLWR, S, GOOG, & INTC. Openness wins in the digital world.

No tags

Link to article on The Wall Street Journal: Sprint Mulls Separating Nextel Unit

Considering how many customers they’ve lost due to outages since the merger, it’s clear that move was the worst idea in Sprint’s history.

So, their stock is up ~75% from where it was since I told you to buy it a few weeks back. Hopefully you listened to me. If not, it’s still not too late, Deutsche Telekom is looking to buy them which would give it quite a boost.

Best scenario would be for Sprint to dump Nextel somehow, in turn making themselves more attractive for a Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile purchase, then merge the two and become the #1 US cell carrier. Whose network the customers go to doesn’t matter, T-Mobile’s more compatible GSM would be preferable though. Sure, you won’t have any offerings to compete with AT&T and Verizon’s wired internet and cable TV offerings (FiOS & uVerse), but who cares, you’ll have a great headstart over them in the wireless broadband market, which is obviously where the future is. Finally, embed Sprint Xohm chips in everything from laptops to VoIP phones to toasters, and print money uncontested. But most importantly, differentiate the labels, market the voice service as T-Mobile and the data as Sprint/Xohm because both are used for very different purposes.

Glass half empty says Sprint is fucked. Glass half full says the worst is over, your current model sucks, so time to move on to something new & innovative.

No tags

So I had my ‘Mahalo moment’ yesterday, but, is it what Jason & Mahalo expect?

For those looking for a good place to get an idea of what Mahalo is good at, here are some pages to get you started that I stumbled across or others suggested.  Please add some more links to pages in the comments to help people, like myself, who were completely clueless at what Mahalo was good at or useful for.Good Mahalo links

• Social Media
• How to Write a Resume
• Auschwitz
• Phantom of the Opera
• Maya Angelou

In conclusion. I think Mahalo, in it’s current form, has a purpose and an audience, and that happens to not be the tech-savvy crowd who is serviced very well by Google right now. In time, I think Mahalo will have the content tech-savvy users will want, but, will they provide an intelligent mechanism to get to it? Hopefully. Google & Wikipedia need some competition.

mahalo

The journey continues…

So, I think I have a pretty good idea of what Mahalo can/can’t do at this point and I have a theory as to why the ‘TechCrunch 100,000′ (as Jason calls us) have such a problem with the site.  That’s a post for later though.

mahalo

After railing on his site enough, I promised Jason Calacanis I’d take a fair look at his latest startup (Mahalo.com) and say something nice about it, well… once I was actually about to find something.  So here’s the first video of my experience hunting around Mahalo.com for a “positive” and not just looking at it as polluting the internet with more spam.

As you can see, the hunt will continue for yet another day.  By the end of the week, I’m determined to at least find something.

P.S. This is my first experience using Viddler and wow… Much nicer than YouTube.  YouTube certainly has its purpose on the internet and I think there is room for both.

mahalo viddler

A little over a month ago I sent out a tweet that essentially said mahalo.com was worthless, had no value, and looked like “content throw up.” Well, as you can probably tell, I’ve never really seen the value in Mahalo.com and I’m sure this isn’t what Jason Calacanis (Mahalo’s CEO) wants to hear considering he expects Mahalo.com to have 30%-50% of web searches within 5 years.

So today I read a post at seobook.com about how, according to Google’s definition of spam sites, Mahalo.com should be classified as search engine spam.

Final Notes on Spam When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

So that led me to think about comparing this Mahalo page on “Best computer speakers” to this average spam scraper result page on “Best computer speakers.” (FYI, the latter of which that pollutes the internet and gets blocked from search engines) What’s the difference? Not a whole lot. Neither page gives me the information I’m looking for, but they both link to the information I want.  Both use affiliate links to generate revenue for themselves, and neither contains much, if any, original content.

On the upside for the scraper site, it actually provides links to 20 different sites that can help me find the best computer speakers, and I can use my own judgement to determine the best one and click it.  On the flipside, Mahalo only provides affiliate links to Amazon and 4 other review sites, which further distances me from my goal of finding a variety of sources to buy my new speakers.  And based off my shopping experience over the last 10 years, I really like PriceGrabber, which the spam site has a link to, but Mahalo doesn’t.

This is obviously a multi-year endevour for Calacanis and Mahalo appears to be far from ready for primetime.  I’m really interested to see what Calacanis will have his army of undervalued & volunteer scrapers do over the next couple years to keep themselves in the game, and especially from being blocked by the search engines they are competing with.

Hey Jason, just because you are paying people to create your pages instead of having automated scripts create them, doesn’t make it anymore valuable to the user.  What really makes pages valuable is a majority of original content and not just providing links to the original content.

calacanis, Google, mahalo, search engine, spam

Due to Yahoo Buzz, this TechCrunch article appeared on the Yahoo.com homepage, and wow… 1000+ comments later it’s almost as if mom & dad went away for the weekend and the kids trashed the house.  Talk about some of the most clueless commenters ever.

TechCrunch did a follow-up that analyzes Buzz’s impact two weeks in.  Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million users from the site in those two weeks and have given pretty much every site it links to record traffic.  TechCrunch, a highly trafficked Tech news site could hardly stay up.

It’ll be interesting to see the implications of Buzz and how many servers it can melt.

No tags

About 18 months ago I wrote a blog post, iPod Killer… Found.  In that post, I

analyzed what would finally kill the iPod, and the requirements I said needed to exist on this mythical device was:

• Media player
• Good quality video camera
• Large amount of storage space
• Doubles as a cell-phone
• Easy access to a store to get new media (free and purchase)
• Always-on broadband internet access
• Allows access to media sharing services like Flickr and YouTube
• Exchange integration with “Push” email
• Access to GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts
• Has to be “cool” and easy to use

And my prediction for who it would be?  Microsoft + Yahoo.  Oh man was I wrong. C’mon, Microsoft had the most feature rich mobile OS at the time, they had to be the top contender, right?  Not even close.  Windows Mobile is pretty much exactly the same as it was back then, and they really missed the boat.  I didn’t even figure Google into the equation, and they stand a much better chance to beat out Microsoft with Android.

Well, it looks like the iPod has finally been replaced by its cousin, the iPhone.  I just finished watching the Apple SDK announcement presentation and it’s very clear that it is going to be a revolutionary platform for mobile devices.  Don’t believe that?  Venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins will disagree with you too.

It’s just a reminder that you have to innovate to stay on top.  Nice work Apple.

apple, Google, ipod, Microsoft, Yahoo

After Google lost out last week in it’s bid for a stake in FaceBook, it’s pretty apparent one of the reasons Facebook chose Microsoft instead was that Google is about to unleash a true contender to the stranglehold Facebook has on the social networking world.  Later this week Google will announce the OpenSocial API, it’s initiative to break down the walls of social networks exclusivity and open the data up for anyone to use.  I can’t comment to too much on how specifically it will work since the details have not emerged, but it’s pretty apparent that the social networking world will now be MySpace, Facebook, and everyone else, with “everyone else” being part of OpenSocial.

Facebook meanwhile is planning on launching it’s own competitor for Google’s AdSense with an upcoming announcement regarding its SocialAds network.  SocialAds will work by a cookie Facebook drops in your browser that follows you from site to site, and when you come across a SocialAds supported site, the (encrypted?) data is then sent to Facebook which in turn delivers an ad based on your profile.  Interesting concept, but I’m not sure how useful basic profile information will be in tailoring ads towards things I’d like to buy.

The next year should be fun as both companies, with egos like none other, try to out-do the other.

No tags

Just when girlfriends thought it couldn’t get worse than seeing their boyfriends playing Halo for 8 hours straight wearing their Halo 3 collector’s edition helmet, comes the latest uber-gamer toy, the FPS Vest.

“The gaming peripheral will consist of eight zones, all of which will be able to direct appropriate force to accurately simulate a plethora of sensations, including bullet fire, explosions, punches and even finger taps.”

Now you can strap on your vest, throw on your helmet, and soon enough you won’t have to worry about your girlfriend bitching at you to take out the trash considering she’ll run far far away when you bring this home.

No tags

• AP Link: IBM Aims to Patent Profiting Off Patents

Now I don’t speak legalease and their patent application is like a foreign language, but if they just tried to patent making money off patents, then we need patent reform, now!  Holy crap.  This is especially ironic since they pledged last year to not seek business method patents anymore.  Suuuuuure.

No tags

As innovative as I think that company is sometimes, HOLY FREAKING CRAP can they be retarded at other times! It looks like Amazon.com was just awarded a patent for “including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.” Since when can you patent obvious stuff? YOU CAN’T PATENT mod_rewrite!  Hey Amazon, look at the search string in the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness

From the patent’s “Summary of Invention”

For example, a user wishing to search for “San Francisco Hotels” may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system. The system may also support the use of Boolean operators and/or other types of operators within the search strings.

You’ve got to be kidding me. If the user is smart enough to know to type their search term in the URL, wouldn’t that qualify as an obvious act? And don’t even get me started on prior art. How funny is this, the Wikipedia entry for “Prior art” at the address of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art goes back to July of 2004, prior to the patent even being filed!

Tonight’s project for me will be to write a patent application for ‘a method of using a permanent liquid stain (example: ink) on a contrasting color canvas to be used in permanently recording combinations of alphabetical and numeric characters.’  The publishing industry will be mine!!!

Can we please overhaul the patent system now? Pretty please?

No tags

I just came across this article

AT&T unsure about bidding in 700MHz auction (InfoWorld)

“Company CEO indicates that FCC’s open-access rules for the valuable spectrum could hinder the development of a profitable business model.”

Essentially what you are saying is there is some prime, beachfront real-estate up for auction, which everyone is lining up to bid for, and you think the rules and the price make it such that a profitable business model cannot be made? Ok, there are two scenarios…

• a) AT&T is right, and the open-access rule for the 700 mhz spectrum make it such that no business can make money at it. In this scenario, everyone else is wrong, including Google who has proven to be more than capable at creating ‘thinking out of the box’ business models, and AT&T is right.
• b) AT&T is lazy & uncreative and as a company doesn’t have the talent or capacity to think of a business model around owning prime real-estate.

Given the fact that AT&T’s stock price is sitting at $41 and Google’s stock price is at $644, I’ll let you decide which scenario is more likely.

No tags