Future of iPhone Apps against its competition

There was a question raised on this. Here was my answer:

iPhone has an early start in Mobile Apps. Till few months back it had more than 50,000 now the recent number is being floated is 100,000 apps. This is a huge market. The iPhone also enabled individual softwre developers to participate in this money making process. Considering Apple’s strategy of innovation (even at the risk of making previous technology absolute,) I would expect the iPhone would also be addressing usages like Game Console, Home Automation Controller, iReader (books) etc. Google Android would continue to do some catch up game and may have some cool edge. For example, Google recently announced turn-by-turn voice assisted GPS. But iPhone has an advantage, that it is not only a platform, it has hardware from Apple which would keep on adding new technologies to add more fancy software’s. having said that many of the iPhone apps developers may also port their softwares on Android if it takes a momentum. I am more interested in watching google strategist position their mobile OS with Chrome and whether Apple matures iPhone OS into a platform for iTablet like devices or comes up with something else. It would also be interesting to see WebOS from Palm, and a direction from Microsoft CE. You can notice that as long as the opposition it fragmented, iPhone has an edge.

Google Android 2.0 support added in SDK

Android SDK Development’s tech lead Announced Android 2.0 support in SDK

For more details

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/10/announcing-android-20-support-in-sdk.html

 

iPhone Appstore concept needs to be changed for Enterprises

iPhone Apps needs to be pass through Apple’s gate to be approved and made available to iPhone users via App Store. Of course, this way Apple can filter-out bad application, and possibly avoid competing Apps (e.g. Skype for making phone calls from iPhone or Google applications). For consumer, it gives a single window access and most importantly “theoratically” some assurance that their iPhones are not going to be invaded by some virus infected applications. However, this model have some issue in the enterprise domains.

For example, FedEx’s IT department would like to develop an iPhone application for their delivery people. This FedEx app would enable them to navigate to the location and get signature as a proof of delivery.

In this case, why should FedEx’s get its own application be certified from Apple? Why should this application, which is restricted to its employees, be made available through AppStore?

Shouldn’t enterprises be able to roll-out their own applications to themselves or their customers without getting Apple in between?

Google wave over complicated ?

Google wave is supposed to deliver what the communication platform would have been if invented today. It integrates various communication technologies like IM, email, wiki etc and make it available for collobaration. It could be suitable for enterprise development as well as for consumers. However, a first hand experience of O’brien gives a different story. As I read him, it is “for engineers by engineers” and “overly complicated” for a mass appeal.  His article appeared in SJ Mercury news a couple of days back.

At OOW Infosys CEO’s emphasis on IT led innovation

At Oracle Open World today, Mr. S. Gopalkrishnan, CEO and MD of Infosys touched my favourite topic, an IT led innovation. He nicely covered various areas like enterprise’s operational excellence, health care, banking etc. He gave nice examples assuring that this IT led innovation will be essential for enriching life experience of indivduall and profits for businesses as well.

First look at FastFlip .. Flip or Flop?

Google Labs announced FastFlip.

Its interesting. As of now I see that its pulling in content from about 49 different media.

It promises :

Fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and  personalized content.

So.. its a great promise! Does it live upto the expectations?

I see that Google could have done much better. In today’s world of Web2.0, do we just get our content from these established media? Didn’t be cross that much earlier? sometime in last decade? I spend a lot of time getting news from the internet, but most of the time by content is outside these vendors. There are commercial as well as bloggers whom I refer for my information. I am sure that Google will add it further. But I am not sure why it was not added now? is it related to revenue sharing agreement? If it is, too bad! Didn’t Google promise the information Free?

Navigation seems to be fine. Something like Pre and iPhone navigates through history pages. I was expecting something different, with Ajax / Flex kind of rich use experience, I was hoping that when my cursor goes on a content, it gets magnified as well as it pulls in other related content based on my instantaneous interest. Here too, google is still in the world of old UI.

I clicked on email .. it took me to gmail. Though I have gmail, not my all communication is via gmail. Do I really want to sent emails? why not just twitter?

Anyway, as of now I could not see the relevance portion of it. May be google tracking my clicks and my profile ( i hope they would not sell it …though they would already be doing targeted ads to me )… I would have preferred an easy mash up ability to myself. I would like to be a king of my content ..

Anyway, its interesting…but not enough… it could be fast for flipping … but flop to serve my interests and expectations!…

Information Week article related to Google Chrome OS

A nice article:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218501028&cid=nl_IWK_report_html

Some excerpts:

1. “Among the technologies being brought to bear by Google to meld Web apps and PC performance are HTML 5, the WebKit browser engine, the V8 JavaScript engine, and Native Client, Google’s nascent open source technology for running native code (code written for a specific hardware platform) in Web apps.”

2. “Google describes Chrome OS as an extension of the Chrome browser, not vice versa.”

3. Benefits: the benefits of combining desktop CPUs and Web apps. They include “safer” multimedia codecs; real-time audio and video synthesis and physics simulations; local audio/video analysis and recognition; multimedia editors; high-throughput cryptography; and app-specific data compression. Native code has “about two orders of magnitude” more capabilities than JavaScript in a browser

4. Comments from the analyst: “Chrome OS is only half-baked. (Windows Azure is, too.)”  

Applications Of Google Wave

Google Wave (large screen shot) seems to be larger than just describing  as “Communication and Colloaboration”. An article in CIO namely, A New Kind of Mega-Application,  nicely covers it.  According to the author, it has flavours of Facebook News Feeds, Twitter, instance messaging etc. To quote directly, “Wave seems to embrace this streaming interface by using e-mail and messaging as a starting point. In one fluid view, a Wave homepage includes short messages (think: Twitter), communication with large groups (think: Facebook) and basic collaboration tools to engage with the content (think: instant messaging and e-mail).”

However, not everybody agree that this runtime integration of comunications like email, messaging and document sharing would fly immediately.  For example, while agreeing that wave is a neat idea, an author in BusinessInsider says, “Google Tries To Rewrite Email, Won’t Happen Soon” .  As per author, a support from other vendors of email, instance messaging, social networking needs to adopt this to make it more wider and meaningful.

Since Google Wave is open source and it provides extensibility apis, many business opportunity would come up. Innovators may come up with nw collab tools for enterprise market, hosting providers may comeup with Wave hosting, and there could be extensions to existing apps like FaceBook app or etc. A blogger,  Gabor Scelle, nicely presented his thoughts around the business opportunities around Google Wave.

From some established corners, there is a guarded welcome. Cisco says that Wave completes Cisco approach on Unified Communication! Wave validates their vision! It would be interesting to see how Facebook(Social Nw/ Feeds), Twitter(Microblog broadcast) or Microsoft (Outlook), IBM(Lotus Collab Suites etc)/Oracle (Webcenter)responds.

A Quick Glance At Google Waves:

Last month Google demonstrated “Google Waves” at Google IO. It generated a good buzz. Google Wave is an interesting product blending email, instance messaging, and document sharing.  It provides a great extensibility via APIs to enable further contributions and innovation from developers around the world. Google wave allows users to send direct messages to online contacts with real-time replies, share photos or documents, and manage members of the conversation. It offers wiki like functionality enabling shared documents to be edited by any member of the wave. This should spur many new applications in collaboration, collab games and communications in spaces including social networking. Google is probably expecting to ignite iPhone apps or Facebook apps like fire in the world-wide developers community.

Google Wave comes with APIs to write your application in either of the following ways.

1. Extending Waves: You can extend the Google Wave itself to automate some common tasks (referred as robots) o    to provide a new user interaction way (referred as gadgets).
2. Embed: You can embed waves within your apps.

Apis are both in Java and Python. However, the Google waves works with Google App Engine. Its SDK provides a webserver, sandbox and emulates the App Engine Services. Currently Google Waves robots. Currently there is no local sandbox for testing. May be in future it would come up.

Key concepts:

Wave: Wave is like a container for one or more conversations, called as Wavelets, each with multiple participants messaging and sharing with each other.

Wavelet: Wavelet is one of the threads of conversation in a wave. All the members of a wavelet would have equal access to the resources within the wavelet.

Blip: Blip is a message within a conversation. Blip’s content is in a document that is shared and can be edited in collaboration.Img Source (google wave)

Any way here are the sources for any hands-on :

1. http://wave.google.com
2. Wave Developers Guide http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html
3. Wave Robots http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/robots/index.html
4. Gadgets http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/guide.html
5. Embed http://code.google.com/apis/wave/embed/index.html

Some sample gadgets (source Google Wave)

Finally a bad news, the wave sign-up is closed as on 1Jul2009.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/

Hello world!

Welcome to Tech Exploration! Frequently new platforms get launched creating buzz in the developer community. In this blog I would add some evalutions, prototypes and ideas around the new technologies.