Here it is! Our (belated) post about this year’s WWDC adventure. It was a high profile event and Apple did not disappoint.
We hear from various sources that the FTC may be preparing a challenge to Google’s acquisition of AdMob. Like many in the industry, we believe this would be a serious mistake. There are much better places for the agency to focus its attention.
As an independent development shop with apps on several platforms, we’ve been tapped by the FTC to provide expert witness testimony on the matter. We’ve spent several weeks giving testimony, helping the FTC understand mobile technology and the mobile advertising space as a whole. It is apparent to us from these discussions that the FTC is not in a good position to understand - let alone regulate - the mobile ad market.
It sounds like science fiction - but as mobile devices make more and more computing power available on the go, cyberspace and physical space are beginning to intersect in some very interesting ways. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the trend toward Augmented Reality. AR aims to make the entire world digitally interactive - and this opens up some fascinating possibilities.
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 for the State of Oregon using portable devices, 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 get them to 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.
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.
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?
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 Java Store - recently announced on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. The Java Store 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.
Ars Technica has an interesting report on iPhone market share. According to Net Applications, which boasts data from “160 million visitors per month”, the iPhone now makes up almost 2/3 of the mobile browser market. This number may be a bit skewed, but given that Google’s Android app store is only about 5% as large as the iPhone’s, it’s definitely in the ballpark.
Naysayers have been predicting the decline of the iPhone for quite a while, but Apple is still making steady gains - even with the buzz surrounding the G2. With the amazing new features of iPhone OS 3.0 unveiled today, I wonder what these numbers will look like in the near future? Just two more weeks until CTIA 2009 and the HTC Magic…
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