Category Archives: Apps market

Google makes its first UK acquisition

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According to Good Morning Silicon Valley, Google’s made its first UK acquisition — a visual search startup founded by two Oxford students who developed an Android App that claims to enable you to identify a work of art by snapping it with your phone’s camera. [Grouse: doesn’t work on my T-mobile Pulse — but then nothing involving that wretched device’s camera seems to work. Growl!]

Plink is just four months removed from the public launch of its only product: PlinkArt, an Android app that lets users find out more information about a piece of art just by taking a picture of it. That single app, however, was impressive enough to win the $100,000 top prize in the Education/Reference category in last year’s Android Developer Challenge and it put the company on Google’s shopping list. Plink’s founders, Oxford PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin, will have to get acclimated [acclimatised? – ed.] to the sunshine in Santa Monica, where they’ll join the team working on Google Goggles, the company’s in-house visual search app. Said the founders in a blog post, “The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you.”

New business model: start a company with the aim of being acquired by the Big G. Time was, Microsoft was the desired shopper. How things change.

Why the iPad and iPhone don’t support multi-tasking

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Really useful explanation by Robert Love (an Android developer).

Apple says they do not support multitasking because it is a hamper to stability and a drain on battery life. That clearly isn’t true—the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity. Rumor is that Apple is going to add multitasking in a future OS release. This rumor likely is true. Is Apple somehow going to make background applications not consume any battery? Of course not. These excuses are straw men.

The real reason that the iPad and iPhone do not allow third-party applications to multitask is likely more complex, more technical. Bear with me here. Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file. Limited memory and no swap imply that applications have a small, fixed amount of memory at their disposal. They don’t have the luxury of seemingly-infinite memory, as a modern system with swap has. Memory consumption is thus a critical system constraint. Like most systems, the iPad and iPhone deal with this by killing applications that use too much memory via a mechanism called the out of memory (OOM) killer. Unlike most systems, applications designed for the iPad and iPhone know how much memory they have at their disposal, and are designed to operate within those constraints. This is classic memory management in embedded programming. No swap, fixed memory, you deal.

What would happen if third-party applications could multitask? Some number of applications would be in the background. But each application was written presuming it had access to some fixed amount of memory. Thus, if the background applications consumed too much memory, the operating system would have to kill them. But the user would expect that he or she could switch back to an old application, and it would still be running where it was left. He or she certainly doesn’t expect applications to just die every time a new application is run, losing state and even data.

Simply put, the reason the iPad and iPhone do not support multitasking is because it is hard to allow multitasking in a system with no swap and a limited amount of memory. Apple could enable multitasking—indeed, there is no reason that the devices couldn’t support it right now, with a one or two line code change—but your applications would constantly be killed. That isn’t a very useful feature.

So how is Apple going to enable support for multitasking? Likely similar to how Android allows it…

He then goes on to outline how Android does it via its Bundles concept, which effectively enables apps to be stateless. A really informative post, and a good illustration of why the Web is wonderful.

Computing for couch potatoes (contd.) Or coffee-table computing?

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From Jeff Jarvis.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

That’s what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it’s meant for consumption, we’re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue’s review, that this is our grandma’s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I’ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny’s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.

LATER: Just noticed this comment by Quentin on Jeff’s post:

I don’t know, Jeff… I never expected to do much more than consume with it. I saw it as a better iPod rather than a better laptop. After all, I never worried that the Kindle would turn people into mere consumers of books, rather than authors.

So I have been pleasantly surprised, for example, by how good the onscreen keyboard is, and I can use my bluetooth keyboard if wanted…

I’m more likely to have this with me than I am a laptop, and I’m more likely to create content on it than I am on an iPhone. So I think content creation may increase rather than decrease for me.

Your point about data being locked inside apps is a good one, though needs to be balanced perhaps with, say, the adoption of the open epub format for books, which could result in an increase in the amount of searchable data out there when compared to things like the Kindle…?

Quentin calls it “coffee-table computing” btw. Not a bad metaphor.

iPad=AOL Release 2: computing for couch potatoes

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Revealing post from the Columbia Journalism review about the WSJ and NYT Apps on the iPad. The author finds it “worrisome” (quaint word) that the two papers “think they can partially return to the cloistered existence of the pre-Web days. That’s clearly a mistake.”

Yep!

One big missing feature in the WSJ and NYT iPad apps: You can’t copy text. Take a screen cap[ture] of it all you want, but you can’t get the actual text. That’s a basic function on a computer, and the iPad has a clever cut-and-paste function, but it doesn’t work here.

That would seem to be a conscious decision and not just a missing feature in these quasi-beta apps. If so it will make it hard to blog or email about a story. Of course, it will also make it harder for people to rip off whole stories on splogs, and it could lesson the relevance of aggregators.

Neither paper embeds links in their stories. While nytimes.com links to a U.S. embassy news release in the third paragraph of its Pakistan attack story today, the Times app has no links.

It’s also worth noting that you can’t comment on stories in either the Journal or Times apps.

The absence of these features is not accidental. Forward to the past.

LATER: Gosh! The steam media crowd still don’t get it:

Three days into the Apple iPad’s launch, many magazine customers are embracing the new format for print but howling over what they consider excessive prices for single issues.

“Come on, guys, help us help you,” read one typical customer comment, on Apple’s iTunes store, in response to Popular Science’s iPad app. The app, a digital replica of the monthly magazine, is priced at $4.99 per single issue, the same as the print. “… This is the future of magazines. This is how I want all of my magazines. But I will not pay $5 per issue.”

Magazines are pinning their hopes on the iPad and other, forthcoming tablets and e-readers helping offset a decline in circulation and ad revenue. But as the early feedback shows, they may be paying the price for the industry’s longstanding practice of charging steep discounts for subscriptions. As a result, consumers are well aware of the per-issue discrepancy between subscriptions and single issues.

As one customer of Time magazine’s app ($4.99 single issue) wrote, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re … passing the savings on distribution and raw materials to themselves. I can get 56 issues of the paper version for $20. How am I supposed to feel about this?”

Making matters worse, some customers of magazine apps thought they were downloading a subscription when what they got was a single issue. (To date, magazines that are sold through Apple’s app store are available on a single-copy basis only, although publishers said their titles would be available on a subscription basis in the coming weeks.)

The iPad and the CD-ROM

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Lovely post by Danny O’Brien.

For those of you blessed with senile amnesia or youth, CD-ROMs were the first wave of “interactive media” in the mid-eighties, and the great hope for publishing houses struggling to understand what they might be doing in the 21st century. Companies from Dorling-Kindersley to News Corp threw millions into CD-ROM publishing, with very little ultimate return. They’d do some fancy-schmancy David Bowie joint project, or an incredibly complex animated re-working of their existing bestsellers. Each one won more awards than it sold copies, and eventually those “interactive divisions” were rolled into the “online media” departments, where their designers would get drunk and bitter, until one night they were sacked after uploading 640MB Adobe Director files onto the website front page.

Back then, geeks were unused to other industry sectors barging into our little rustic byte farmyards with their fancy suits and corporate expense accounts, braying triumphantly about digital convergence, and then, seconds later, striding into the business-model threshing machine that thrummed in the corner. We did not know then that there was a queue of people like this, waiting to dance past us into the bloody knives. We watched their cockiness with alarm, not with the disdain that would come later and definitely not with own brand of hubristic Internet rockstar smugness, the smugness that tempts us all to look a bit less closely at ourselves, and a bit more closely at that thresher.

No, back then it was all a bit shocking. We assumed these people knew what they were doing.

This is a very sharp essay. His point is that developing iPad Apps is one thing, but making them into sustainable income-generators is quite another.

I know that publishing companies will be tempted to go for the all-singing, all-dancing iPad application. But what they’re doing that, my suspicion is that what they’re aiming for is a product which exudes credibility, status — an aura of a professional media product. And when you’re spending the kind of money that a professional application requires, solely to improves your status in the world, you’re not selling a product, you’re buying the love of your audience. That may be an investment in credibility, but it’s not an incoming revenue stream.

The goldrush economics of the iPad will hide this for a little while, because everything will be briefly profitable. But to be sustainable, you need to either be producing something that consistently costs you less than it earns, or will produce regular super-hits among a string of drabber products, or just makes you so much money in its first few months that you never need work again. You can’t just make some single wonderful shiny demo product. You need to keep producing them; you need some way of economizing that process. And you need to stop others from making their shiny thing cheaper than, yet interchangeable with, yours. Otherwise you’re just throwing nice fancy gee-gaws into the thresher’s hungry mouth.