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HP buying Palm made some waves, but it’s got nothing on the other big tech deals we’ve spotted on the horizon: More »
Humor – Recreation – Magazines and E-zines – Analysis and Opinion – Columnists
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Hey, Mac users. There’s a new kid on the block and his name is Instinctiv. The app does what iTunes doesn’t and that’s syncing with Windows Mobile as well as a bunch of other mobile platforms. In addition, Instinctiv features mood-based smart shuffling, smart search, and extensive library management tools that allow you to fetch cover art and play 50+ audio formats. If you’re intrigued, head over to the Instinctiv web site and grab yourself a copy. It’s compatible with Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6).
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The latest indication that Apple is trying to strong-arm publishers to adopt HTML5 and H.264 came today, as Steve Jobs reportedly claimed by email that a patent pool was being assembled to “go after” Ogg Theora and other open source codecs. That news comes just a few weeks before Google is expected to release its VP8 codec as open source, and could come as a big blow to the search giant’s plans to offer an alternative to H.264.
The whole thing began today after Hugo Roy, an intern at the Free Software Foundation Europe, published an open letter to Steve Jobs. In that letter he responded to Apple CEO’s “Thoughts On Flash,” in which Jobs wrote that the future of web video would be driven by HTML5 and H.264. Roy argued against Apple’s adoption of H.264 because the codec is not open, but covered by patents and licensed by MPEG LA.
Well Jobs wrote back, warning that open source codecs like Ogg Theora may soon be taken to court for infringing on others’ patents:
“All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.”
The email comes as a fight is brewing between major players over the future of web video. For Apple, that future is driven by HTML5 and H.264 encoding, in contrast to Adobe, which is pushing its proprietary Flash player for video playback. However, while most browser makers agree with HTML5 support, not everyone is fully on board with H.264 encoding.
Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s IE9 and Google’s Chrome all support H.264 encoding for HTML5 video, but the Firefox and Opera web browsers refuse to get behind it, due to potential licensing issues. Even though H.264 licensing body MPEG LA announced in February that it was extending its royalty-free licensing for web video using H.264 through 2016, that was little consolation for Mozilla and others that are committed to supporting open standards.
Google was hoping to stem that divide by making VP8 open source and thus providing a high-quality and open alternative to existing codecs. Google’s plans to open-source the codec have been widely expected ever since it announced plans to acquire On2 in August 2009, and speculation intensified after the deal closed.
But without Apple and Microsoft on board, Google may have a tough time getting VP8 adopted by media publishers. And now that Apple’s CEO has confirmed plans for patent infringement suits against Ogg Theora and other open source codecs, Google may have even more issues to deal with.
Related content on GigaOM Pro: What Does the Future Hold For Browsers? (subscription required)
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Well, hello! We knew it was coming, but it looks like an official Twitter app is now available in the Android Marketplace. It’s free and looks fantastic: More »
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To anyone who’s ever written a line of code, pre-canned/auto-generated apps are the scourge of the App Store world. For anyone who just wants to be able to say “Me? There’s an app for that! LOL!” without having to dedicate their lives to waging war against semi-colons and pouring through documentation, however, they’re a god send.
Love’em or hate’em, Nokia has just embraced’em. They’ve just launched a new tool, Ovi App Wizard, purposed with turning any feed (be it RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or what have you) into an Ovi Store App in around 10 minutes.
The process seems pretty simple: Name it, pick a few RSS feeds, choose the colors, and then set up the distribution options. If you’re looking to cash in, you’ve got two choices: toss in a pre-fabbed ad system and take a cut of the revenue, or — if you’re feeling ambitious about your work — you can pick a price. Hit the publish button, and about 24 hours later, blammo – you’re famous. Well, not famous. But you have an Ovi Store App. That’s almost the same thing, right?
It’s always a good thing when an App Store operator makes their outlet more accessible — but this really just seems like a ploy to boost their number of apps through quantity-over-quality. If 10,000 people make an application out of their Twitter feed, that’s 10,000 new apps Nokia can boast about – but how many of those will actually see more than a handful of downloads? Is an app really an app if the only person who downloads it is your Mom?
There’s a reason Apple is banning these sorts of apps.
Check out Ovi App Wizard here.
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The iPad 3G is the iPad I’ve been waiting for. It’s got two things the regular iPad doesn’t: 3G internet from AT&T and assisted GPS. The results we got from testing might surprise you, I think. More »
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Plenty of people have been having fun with some comments that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s made in a BBC interview about the company’s competitive position vis-à-vis Google. The notoriously outspoken Bartz, who took over as CEO from co-founder Jerry Yang in 2009, told the British news service that Google was going to have “a problem” if it didn’t diversify its business, and that it was going to have to find a way to do “a lot more than search.” Mike Arrington at TechCrunch suggested that Bartz must have been smoking something in order to come to this conclusion, while Kara Swisher at All Things Digital said that the Yahoo CEO was “trash talking” its larger rival.
Let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to make fun of Yahoo — in fact, in some ways, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. For at least the last several years, it has been a perennial also-ran in virtually every category that matters online, whether it’s social networking or search or keyword advertising or content. After trying and failing to beat (or even match) Google at its own game, Yahoo was finally forced to accept a deal with Microsoft, which was also failing to have much success on its own. The two companies are now propping each other up and trying to do together what they couldn’t do separately, but are still so far from setting the industry on fire they might as well be in a different game.
But you know what? Carol Bartz, who has gained a reputation for calling a spade a shovel, also happens to be right. Yes, Yahoo is sucking wind in most departments, as most people writing about her comments have pointed out, and so the company is hardly in a position to tell Google what to do — especially when Google reported revenue growth of 23 percent in the last quarter, something Yahoo would kill to do. But she is still right: After years of trying to broaden its business, Google is still 99.9 percent search (OK, 95 percent).
Obviously, that business is doing just fine, and Google is expanding it through acquisitions such as AdMob, which does mobile advertising. And the company continues to come closer to generating meaningful revenues from YouTube and other properties. But the reality is that virtually all the company’s revenues still come from search-related keyword advertising. That may be a great business right now, but what if it stops being so great? What if social search and social advertising becomes a bigger threat to that business, as Liz argued in a recent GigaOM Pro report (sub req’d)?
Some analysts are becoming concerned about Google’s lack of ability to broaden its business even a tiny bit. After the latest earnings report, Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth dropped his price target for the stock to $650, citing a lack of growth momentum beyond search and advertising. “A significant revenue driver beyond core search has not materialized and it’s becoming tougher for the company to beat numbers,” Anmuth said in a research note.
Chris Baggini, an investment manager with Aberdeen Asset Management, also wants to start seeing some other revenue sources. “Google continues to gain share, but I’d be very disappointed if four years from now they were not getting revenue from other sources,” he said. And the way the company has rolled out new products such as Buzz and Wave and the Chrome OS, without any clear model for how they are going to contribute to the business, has some concerned as well. “Google has the problem of too much money and not enough control over what to do with it,” Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group, said recently. “As a result, they are building complexity at an alarming rate, and that complexity should eventually choke them, much as it did Microsoft.”
Is Google in danger of imploding — or even slowing down substantially — any time soon? Hardly. But that doesn’t mean Carol Bartz is wrong, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be blinded to that just because her company isn’t doing very well.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Yodel Anecdotal
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Now that the iPad 3G is on sale—complete with a GPS chip inside—you might want to mount it in your car. But nobody yet makes a good car solution. Scosche is gonna try—but there are issues. More »
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Locations identified within the 10 or 20 meters possible by GPS today are far too inaccurate — we need to know where we are we are right down to the millimeter! That was the gauntlet thrown down by Michael Liebhold, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, speaking at a GigaOM Pro Bunker Session on location at the GigaOM office this week. With millimeter accuracy, augmented reality — digital information overlaid on a real-time view of the world — will actually become possible. “Right now we have all this toy AR,” said Liebhold. “This is useless.”
So how do we get to millimeter accuracy? To find out, we followed up with Liebhold for a video interview. He said the most promising technique is to build model of the world using photographs, some of them geo-coded automatically, and the rest of them mapped using an understanding of where they are by comparing them to other images. So a photograph of vacationers in front of the Golden Gate bridge could be pinpointed in position using the precise angle of the orange arches in the background. Google Goggles is embarking on this very project, building a point cloud reference database using publicly available images like the ones from Flickr, said Liebhold, referencing remarks made by a member of the Goggles team at the recent Where 2.0 conference. (As is Microsoft, with its Photosynth product.)
The Google project is scary, said Liebhold. Scary because of the privacy implications, I asked? No, he said, because if Google wants to do this, it will, and it will be hard to compete. Everyone wanting to use the most accurate location data will have to depend on Google.
Liebhold did mention one promising startup effort in the space: Earthmine out of Berkeley, Calif., is building a set of street-view images captured in 3-D with every pixel geo-coded. (See our interview with them from a couple years back.)
Intrigued as to how soon millimeter accuracy might happen and what it could enable? Here’s the video:
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Report: Mobile Augmented Reality Today and Tomorrow
Image courtesy of Flickr user jmlawlor
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