With the Internet-crushing hoopla surrounding the release of Apple’s widely anticipated iPad, not much attention has been paid to the exciting additions Apple has made to the iPhone OS to support it. Here we’ll explore some of these changes and discuss what they mean to publishers and application developers alike.
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When we were approached by the Oregon Research Institute to build a classroom survey system using portable devices for the State of Oregon, we immediately thought of the iPhone. The slick interface and ease of use seemed like a natural way to encourage kids to interact with the device and complete the surveys. The per unit cost for the iPhone was a bit too high - so we settled on the iPod Touch instead. The devices are functionally similar and both run Apple’s iPhone OS.
The notion of the iPod as a classroom tool is rapidly gaining traction. Unsurprisingly, Apple encourages educators to make use of their technology - and a number of prominent educators are actively discussing the pros and cons of classroom use. A recent issue of the “ezine” iLearn addressed many of these issues in some detail.
Recently I attended the “Changing the Odds” conference put on by the Harlem Children’s Zone and PolicyLink.org. The HCZ has a storied history of helping youth with evidence-based harm reduction techniques. It has seen such success that it is currently being used as a model by the Obama Administration.
I was invited as a member of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium where I hold Concentric Sky’s seat on the steering board. The PNRC is an NIH funded consortium with a mandate to extend the mission of the HCZ to communities around the US. Concentric Sky is the PNRC’s primary technology partner.
Our friends at Google contacted us last week to invite us into the AdSense for Mobile beta program. AdSense is one of those subtle technologies from which Google derives most of its revenue. I’ve always been curious about its inner workings, so I signed us up right away.
After some discussion, we settled on Astronomy Picture of the Day for iPhone as the best candidate for the program. Google is looking for high traffic applications from which it can derive usage metrics before going live with the new system. APOD for iPhone generates millions of screen views from around the world, with the majority coming from North America.
We recently launched Michael Moore’s new online community at MichaelMoore.com - just in time for the opening of his new film - “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
The website is designed from the ground up with a social media focus, integrating Facebook, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 technologies. The audience is quite large - the site is in the top 10,000 websites in the United States by traffic and receives millions of hits. The social media footprint is also sizable - 313,289 Twitter followers, 131,253 Facebook Fans and numerous integration points with distributed social networks.
The term “Web 2.0″ returns nearly 100 million search results on Google. But what is it really? Can you look at something and say definitively that it is Web 2.0? And does it matter? In this post we explore these questions in some detail - but to properly frame the discussion, we must start with a related question. What was Web 1.0?
Google Wave was born out of the notion that while email and instant messaging work well, they were both created a long time ago. As the lead developer puts it - “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.” Indeed it is.
Nearly everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web these days, but imagine if you could tie those together with a wiki - and then add real-time playback functionality, on-the-fly language translation and drag-and-drop file sharing. Google Wave does all this and a lot more.
Not surprisingly, there are several ways to answer this question. One way to think of the size of the Internet is to count its users. China recently announced that they have reached 298 million users - a number just shy of the entire population of the United States. Using this same methodology to count all Internet users, we can estimate that there are about 1.6 billion Internet users - or put another way, about 24% of the world’s population.
We attended Google I/O this year and were pleasantly surprised to see that it’s fast becoming a playground for innovation and a place for serious collaboration among developers. I attended a number of interesting sessions, and of course the Android lightning talks. I left the conference this year very excited about some of Google’s initiatives, particularly Google Wave.
JavaOne is happening this week. One of the primary highlights is the JavaStore - recently announced on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. The JavaStore is the largest developer-to-consumer software distribution channel to date and shows great potential. It is a powerful entry into the market and could be a game changer in both the desktop and mobile spaces.
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