On the way up to Nebraska my wife and I used my Android smartphone’s built in Google Navigation application to get us from Houston to Omaha. With only a small part of the trip spent without a cellular data connection (middle of nowhere Kansas, to the first parts of Nebraska), we had very little trouble relying on the phone as a GPS device. The only downside was I couldn’t check in on Twitter or Facebook while driving (I know, first world problem).  This feature on my phone also helped us navigate around Omaha once we got in and settled.

While driving, and looking for food at times, we used Road Ninja on my wife’s iPhone to tell us what was coming up at future exits along the interstate. This app is very spiffy, and if you do any kind of traveling by car, you’ll want to have this application on your iPhone. It helped us find food and gas stations at upcoming exits and allowed us to plan stops a little better. As someone who’s done more than a few long road trips, such an app is quite helpful.

Finally, once in Omaha, Nebraska and settled in to our hotel, we ran into the problem everyone does when they’re in a new place, finding a place to eat.  For this problem I simply opened up FourSquare on my phone, pressed the “Food” icon, and we were off to find food at places both new and familiar. For the places we don’t have back home in Texas, we used the FourSquare tips left by other FourSquare users to figure out what places we should try and what places to avoid. So far, we’ve had great success and haven’t been to a new place that we don’t like yet.  FourSquare also helped us find the local mall(s) and movie theaters, again using the tips on FourSquare to tell us what places to avoid.

Again, this is not an exhaustive list, just a few observations from how I used to have to travel to how it can be done today if you have a smartphone. What is interesting is that kids today will not know what it means to have a road atlas in the car with you, having to guess what may or may not be at the next exit, and having to find your way around a new city by trial and error. For them, when they get older, they’ll just plug in their phones and go. Heck, they’ll probably never have to take the phone out of their purse or pocket and it’ll all just happen automatically via bluetooth (or some other wireless technology).

Stop it!

The Kindle Fire is not meant to be an iPad killer. It never was meant to be an iPad killer. And if that’s what you’re looking for in the device, you’re going to be disappointed.  The Kindle Fire was designed from the ground up to be nothing more than a portal into Amazon’s services.  If you can’t understand this basic fact, you will never understand the Kindle’s market. Here’s a hint, it’s not people who want to buy iPads. Sure some people might pick up the Kindle Fire instead of an iPad, but the limited apps and functionality of the tablet will cause those people to buy an iPad eventually anyway.  The Kindle Fire’s market is those that are already tied to Amazon’s services, be it the Kindle books or the Amazon Video.  If someone already has a Amazon Prime membership, then the Kindle Fire is a device they might consider.

The Kindle Fire is meant to be a portal into Amazon’s ebook, video, music, and app store services.  A way for Amazon to pimp their services to a consumer and have them buy more books, video, and music.  It is meant to be a media consumption device, and that’s all. It is not meant to be a working device, in that you do actual work on it like you would on an iPad. The Kindle Fire is for media consumption, and Amazon wants you to buy that media through them.

So please, stop thinking and treating the Kindle Fire as an iPad killer. It’s not.

While this view isn’t completely incorrect, it’s the only truth. What Scoble will constantly say whenever he comes across a new device (say Android tablet, or Nokia’s newest MeeGo device), he’ll say something like “cool device, but no apps so I won’t use it”, which again is his prerogative. But he often ignores one glaring fact. The iPhone became a successful platform without any native apps. When the iPhone first launched you could only do web applications, there was no native development kit to write native apps (outside of Apple). However, even without the native apps, the iPhone became an incredibly popular device. When native iOS applications arrived over a year later, it only further cemented the iPhone’s popularity.

So the iPhone, Scoble’s goto argument, was itself without native applications for the first year of its existence, but it was a good platform (the first of it’s kind actually) and this is why it gained the attention of developers (it’s popularity didn’t hurt either). Yes, now the iPhone has a large number of iOS applications in it’s app store, so do Android phones (yes, I realize Android tablet apps are lacking, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being worked on), and MeeGo will probably do okay as well. While MeeGo probably won’t be as large in market share as iOS or Android, Nokia sells most of its stuff outside the United States where there are a good amount of people who actually buy Nokia products.

Consider another argument of Nokia and the Symbian platform. Nokia and Symbian owned a nice chunk of the mobile phone market, especially outside the United States (this is something people forget about Nokia when they try to discuss its “irrelevance”). In fact up until recently, Nokia had more market share worldwide than Apple or Google’s Android. However the platform became meaningless in a market with iOS and Android. This happened mainly because Nokia was slow to catch Symbian up to what people were loving about iOS and Android and as a result people stopped developing for Symbian devices.

So Robert, apps are important, but what matters is a solid platform to develop those applications on. Android, Windows Phone 7, and MeeGo (iOS too) offer such platforms. Without a platform that is attractive to developers, there will never be any applications for it. MeeGo has the attention of developers. It might not be the ones in Silicon Valley, but they’re not the only developers on the planet. The platform is important, because the platform brings developers who then write the apps.

Yesterday, the internet was on fire over the possible intrusion to LastPass’s servers (please read this as I feel it’s the proper way to handle such a situation).  But I want to point out 2 things, which are mentioned in the article:

1. LastPass is very clear in that they are not 100% sure something was breached
2. They did notice a traffic anomaly that they couldn’t explain

These are very important points that need to be considered when it comes to using LastPass.  But I want to give my thoughts since I actually use the service.

Your Passwords Are Probably Safe

One of the main arguments people give against LastPass is that it puts all your passwords in the cloud on their servers.  While true, that’s not the full story. You can read their website where they explain how it all works, but I’ll give you the gist. Basically when you sign up for last pass, the vault for your passwords is created locally, encrypted, and then uploaded to their servers.  They don’t have a way to unlock it on their end. You have to have your master password to be able to unlock anything around your LastPass vault.

On top of that, LastPass is giving everyone a set of options. A user can do any of the following:

1. Change their master password
2. Not change their master password now, and be reminded to do so later
3. Take the risk and not change their master password

By making people change their passwords, they’re attempting to negate any issue a possible intrusion might cause.  If you have a really strong master password, then you’re probably okay (if your master password is “password” you’re doing it wrong).

Also, I think that LastPass handled this situation really well. They informed their users, and are requiring them to take action, even though all they found was a traffic anomaly, and not an actual breach. They are standing on the side of caution, and since they’re a password vault, that’s exactly what you should want them to do.

What I’m Going to Do (and What You Should Do Too)

I’m going to move to using two factor authentication with my LastPass account.  What this means is that not only will I need my LastPass credentials (email address and password), but also some other way of authenticating myself to access my LastPass password vault.  LastPass offers multiple options for this, and they should be researched to find one that works best for you.

However, other password vaults offer similar functionality.  I know that KeePass offers this, but I’m not sure about 1Password.

If you’re using a password vault, I would recommend moving to using two factor authentication.  I would also recommend doing so for any site that offers the ability to use two factor authentication (Gmail and several banks offer this).  Doing so helps lower the risk of you being compromised.

Password Vaults

Below is a list of password vaults. Please consider using one of these and start using secure passwords (and different passwords on different sites).  Please note that outside of LastPass and KeePass I don’t know too much about the others.

• LastPass
• KeePass
• 1Password
• Password Safe
• RoboForm

Then Google announced yesterday that they were going to tighten the requirements on releasing Android based products. More specifically they were going to enforce the clause in their licensing agreement (the one that allows companies to use the “with Google” tag on their devices like the recently released Motorola Xoom) that the devices must meet certain standards and certain objectives must be met.

I want to look at both of these things in this article, because they kind of go hand in hand.

Open Sourcing Code

If you are not familiar with the term “open source” to simplify things (because trust me that term is a can of worms), it basically means that the source code, or rather the application code for a computer program is available to the public to download, modify, and even re-release, if they adhere to the license under which the code was released.

The base Android operating system is open sourced. If you want, you can follow the instructions and download the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to your computer, modify the code, compile it, and (if brave enough) put it on your device. As newer versions of Android are released on devices, the source code is then placed into the AOSP source code repository. What Google recently announced is that they would be holding back releasing Honeycomb source to the AOSP repository. Lets look at their reasons, and my thoughts on them as well.

But before going further I want to make one thing clear. Google never stated that they would never release the Honeycomb source code. Not once. They just said they weren’t going to release it “rignt now”. There’s a huge difference.

The Code Isn’t Ready for Release

If you’ve followed the Android story, you know that recently Google hired one of the primary user interface (UI) designers from Palm. He was (obviously) tasked with bringing a nicer user experience to Android (something that many people have long complained about). Honeycomb is the first release of this new UI (you could say Android 2.3 was, but really that was nothing more than a new skin, Honeycomb’s UI changes go deep).

When it comes to Honeycomb, the turnaround time on the new tablet version of Android was pretty quick (say around 9 months). And if anyone knows anything about writing code, they probably know that this means the code is hacked together is probably held together with little more than scotch tape. In other words, this isn’t Google’s finest work and so they’re not really wanting to put it out on display to the public just yet.

Also, it was announced (before this announcment, oh how quickly the internet forgets), that much of the user interface changes in Honeycomb would be merged into “Ice Cream” (the next version of the phone OS), and that Google plans to bring all of Android back under a single version again, eliminating the need for two different versions of the OS for different kinds of devices. So when I read this announcement, this was my first thought.

“Of course” I said to myself, “why not wait to release the code when you’re back to a single codebase.”

It makes sense to first clean up the code, and then bring it back in line with the rest of the code so that you can return to a single code base when it’s released.

Non-Tablet Devices

The first Android tablets to hit the market all ran Android 2.2 (ie Frozen Yogurt, aka Froyo). Google advised companies to not do this, stating that Froyo wasn’t designed with tablets in mind. When they made that public statement they also announced that they were in fact working on a version for tablets, and pleaded with manufacturers to hold off on releasing Android based tablets.

Those manufacturers didn’t listen.

So Google is learning from their mistakes. They know they’re going to merge the 2 form factor code bases back into a single code base, they’ve announced as such. They do not want manufacturers putting Honeycomb on phone size devices (the opposite of what was done with the tablets).

This goes back to Google probably wanting to wait until they’re back onto a single code base for all device types before releasing the source code to AOSP.

Google Tightens Their Grip

When Android was first announced, they went to great lengths to push the open source angle. What this open sourcing of Android meant was that manufacturers had a base operating system to build off of. It gave them a fighting edge in the fight against the now (out of the blue) popular Apple iPhone. Really, the iPhone came out and caught every cell phone manufacturer off guard, they didn’t have a plan to compete, Android helped. There was a base OS that they could build on, and many did. Phone makers HTC, Samsung, and Motorola all released devices using Android with their own user interface.

These interfaces (some of them) improve on the user interface of Android. The SenseUI from HTC being fairly popular. But they cause delays when it comes to getting newer versions of Android onto mobile phones because the manufacturers have to make deep modifcations to have the new version of Android work with their third party user interfaces. This in turn leads to what many people have begun calling “fragmentation” and means that there are, at any given moment, a number of different Android versions on phones in the market.

Google also has some language in their license for Android that sets certain requirements for the devices if they want to use the “with Google” branding and install the Google applications suite (Gmail, Android Market, etc). What Google has actually announced is that they will be more strictly enforcing this clause. The end goal, limiting fragmentation. Limiting the number of different versions of Android in the wild at any given moment.

Conclusion

I don’t view either one of these decisions as Google going back on the “Android is open source” mantra. One is just ensuring their best work is in the public repository, and the other is taking just a little more control over the operating system which really just means good things down the road with regards to OS updates and other things related to Android specifically. To me the idea is to bring things more in line to a single way of doing things rather than having a bunch of divergent paths for the Android operating system. The end result being less fragmentation, a single code base, and an overall better experience on Android.

I disagree. What I saw in Google’s new Instant Search is innovation in the search game. While Bing (the only real competitor to Google since it also power’s Yahoo’s search engine) is still trying to catch up on cracking Google’s previous search algorithm and accuracy, Google brought out the next generation of search. In other words, Google pretty much owns the search market, but they didn’t rest on their laurels (Internet Explorer anyone?). Instead Google worked to create something that will now be an expectation of all things search within the next year or so.

The amount of infrastructure, architecture, database design, database programming, and so forth used to create Google Instant Search is a tremendous amount of smarts. This is innovation is a computer science way rather than innovation in “lets solve a customer problem way” and while some would argue its the wrong focus, I’d argue that there is a place for both kinds of innovation in the tech world. Things like the backend for Instant Search are important moves forward in solving the data problems of tomorrow. We’re all sitting on large amounts of data, Facebook, Google, Twitter. There are endless amounts of data there, and sense needs to be made of that data.

So before we start saying that Google isn’t solving a real problem, we need to think a little deeper than just a customer facing level.

My question is, why would you ignore an obvious, growing sector of the mobile market?  Yes, I understand that right now, Apple has the store that has on numerous occasions made people millions for simple applications.  However, that doesn’t mean that the Android Marketplace or Windows Phone 7 Marketplace will not make you any money.

We have developers who are making it a public point to not write applications for non-iPhone devices.  Which to mean, from a business standpoint is a poor decision.  I have no problems with writing the iPhone app first and getting it to market.  People think iPhone when they think mobile app, so I get that you have to have an iPhone app to have mobile exposure.  I understand this, I really do.  But to say, well I see this other mobile OS (Android) is gaining market share, but I’m going to ignore it and only focus on the iPhone.

The only time that people seem to look at mobile application alternatives is when their app gets dumped from the iPhone App Store.  You see it all the time, “Our app was removed for no reason” and while Steve Jobs has recently made it a point to say why most apps are removed, rejected from the store, we all know there are apps that shouldn’t have been rejected (Google Voice App anyone?).  But again, this is the only time that people start looking at alternative avenues for mobile development.  Wouldn’t a smart business plan be to have your app on as many platforms as possible?  I know that I’d want to maximize my revenue streams, but some people seem to be okay with ignoring anything that isn’t the iPhone.

What are your thoughts on this?  I’d really like to hear why some are choosing to ignore Android and Windows Phone 7 for their apps.  Because to me it just seems like poor business.  But hey, I could be wrong.

Yes it’s Fragmentation

In the strictest definition of the word, the Android world is fragmented.  You have a lot of devices all running different versions of the Android OS.  Though Google and the OEMs have worked hard to lower the amount of fragmentation, it’s still there.  If you want your app to cover as many devices as possible, you have to (currently) code for Android 1.6.  With the recent announcement of 2.2, this seems like a poor call.  Newer versions of Android have new functionality that would be beneficial to older phones.  Specifically the ability to save apps onto the microSD card and keep it out of the onboard memory.

There is something to be said about the fact that Android is being developed at a fast rate that it’s hard for manufacturers to keep up.  Not only is the underlying Android OS being developed at a rapid pace, but each manufacturer has it’s own variation of the OS.  HTC has their Sense UI, Motorola has their MotoBLUR technology, and so on.  Due to this, it takes longer for these manufacturers to release the updated OS versions because they have to put their own touches on the new version before they can push it out.  In some cases they’ve decided not to do this.

The other issue is that a lot of the older Android 1.x devices had limited onboard ROM spaces, which makes updating to the newer OS even more complicated.  So while this kind of fragmentation exists and it could be viewed as a bad thing, it’s not always.

No, it’s Not Fragmentation

Why is it not a bad thing?  Because it’s constant improvement of the underlying operating system of the phone.  Sure you might be on an older device that can’t update, but that means that they next Android phone you get is going to be better than the one you currently have.  Before iPhone and Android, such a thing was unheard of.  Mobile phone makers didn’t really worry about updating their mobile OS too much, because they didn’t have too.  Now with Android, their finding that they need to stay bleeding edge to compete because people are starting to understand the game better.

Part of the reason for Android’s fast growth is Google’s understanding that they had to play catch up a little.  I’m not one-sided here, when Android 1.0 came out it paled compared to the recently released iPhone OS 2.0.  But Google didn’t rest and quickly pushed out new versions.  Apple releases their iPhone OS once a year, currently Android is on 2 releases a year.  They surpasses Apple this year (sorry fanboys, but it’s true).  Android has had multitasking from day 1, we have over the air updates, and now over the air syncing.  Also, the latest Android OS ran circles around both the iPad and the iPhone (with javascript no less, so it wasn’t even a native app).  Most of what’s in iPhone OS 4.0 has been in Android for a while (heck even the multi-tasking is done in a similar manner).

One important thing to not overlook (again) is that Google is making manufacturers think about things like future software updates, and companies like HTC and Motorola are starting to get hip to the game of continual updates of the operating system.  They might be slow on the delivery now, but with time we’ll see more releases and less lag.  Before Apple and Android, this was unheard of.  Manufacturers ignored the mobile OS because most people would just buy a new phone.  Google is making manufacturers think about the mobile OS in the same way that Apple made the carriers think about data.  After the iPhone data plans became something of a commodity, you got unlimited data at a set price.  Now equipment makers are going to have think about their devices as something that last longer than that 2 year contract interval.  Sure the geeks are still going to upgrade regularly, but the average joe isn’t going to care (they might not care about OS updates, but if their phone tells them there’s an update to install they’ll probably install it).

Google has said that they will eventually slow down the rate of Android releases in fight to alleviate the fragmentation.  They understand it’s an issue, but they also know they need to keep improving their OS in order to hold the lead they now have over Apple.

The Current State of Things

The image below was posted on the Android Police website back in January (I tried to find a new infographic but was unable to do so).

Click to Enlarge

As you can see, the fragmentation is slowly dissipating.  Many of the older 1.5 phones don’t have enough onboard memory to hold the new 2.x versions of Android.  This is a hardware issue, not a software issue.  Many of the remaining phones have seem recent announcements about upgrades to 2.x versions.  By the end of the year, I predict that we’ll start seeing less phones that are not able to update to newer versions.

Also, there is an active community of Android developers who are working to get the newer versions of the operating system to be loadable on older phones.  Of course this isn’t for the faint of heart and does require some hackery.  But the ability is there.

Things to Consider

The issue of fragmentation is a two sided problem.  It’s not just Google’s rapid development of the Android operating system but the manufacturers struggling to keep up.  Some would argue (rightfully so) that this is where Apple’s success comes from.  They couple their hardware and software so tightly together that they can really hone in on the perfection side of things.  However, this is partially what has caused them to be surpassed by Android in both functionality soon number of available devices.

I’m not going to argue that the iPhone is subpar, it’s not.  The iPhone is a superb device in a many aspects.  Android has some nice devices out as well (see the Nexus One or the HTC EVO).  But Apple isn’t the only game in the market anymore and Android, regardless of it’s fragmentation, is proving to be a good competitor.  And competition is good.  But I feel that we lose site of the advantages of the rapid development cycle, because there are advantages.  Apple fanboys would like us to forget those however (and the Google fanboys would like to forget that Apple really does have a tendency to bring its “A” game).

All in all, the competition is a good thing.  We’ll be seeing things improve on both ends and I truly believe that Android device makers will shorten the lag between new OS announcements and getting the updates to the phones.  They’ll have to if they want to remain competitive.

As I was listening and occasionally watching the Google I/O Keynote for today, where the focus was on Android and the newly announced Google TV, I realized that Google is eventually going to beat Apple when it comes to innovating.   I saw on Twitter where someone said “Apple is getting Microsoft-ed by Google” and there’s a lot of truth in that statement.

Be Open and Push Open

One thing that was repeated over and over at both keynotes for Google I/O was “we’re opening this up to you” or “we’re releasing this as an open source project” and other similar quotes.  Google is all about doing their work in the open, this brings in people that can build things and build upon their work.  You never know what your users will do if you let them and in many cases they will surprise you if given half a chance.  Google’s message has been about being open, allowing more people to work on and build on their work to the betterment of the product.

Apple is the exact opposite.  They tightly lock their software and hardware together to create computing appliances.  They ensure you can only develop a certain way and only develop certain things for their products.  If they don’t like your work, they reject it.  Sometimes they do it without giving you a reason.  This is not always a bad thing though, Apple products have  a tendency to “just work” in a way that other computer companies would love.  But it is widely known that Apple and Google have different ideas on computing and openness.

Moving Things Forward

When Apple TV came out people liked it.  It was the first product to bring downloaded content to a TV screen without a lot of hacking or trial and error.  However as many geeks will tell you, it is severely lacking.  You can’t bring in your own media, and watching stuff that falls outside the iTunes wall is pretty much impossible.

Google announced Google TV which brings the web to your television.  Instead of dumbing down the web for TV, you are given a full internet experience.  Built on the Android platform Google TV can use Android apps, which means that developers can write applications that target Google TV.  Meaning that Google TV is expandable and customizable, all while giving you a nice mixture of the web and TV.  While the initial demo of Google TV doesn’t look overly impressive, I have little doubt that Google will maintain their “release early, update often” methodology on it and in time we’ll see Google TV grow into something awesome.

GoogleTV is the perfect example of how Google is innovating.  They’re working on bringing to the TV what Apple tried to do but in a way that is more open and customizable.  If you look at the most recent Apple product, the iPad, you might notice that it’s basically a larger iPod Touch.  Google TV is what Apple TV wishes it could be and that says a lot about the kind of work Google is doing.

Google Will Beat Apple (Eventually)

I think that long term (in other words, not in the immediate future but probably 7-10 years from now), Google will have replaced Apple as the most innovative tech company.  I realize that I’m saying this as Apple’s own developer conference (WWDC) is weeks away, but Google really brought their A game over the last few days.  Even with the demo failures they showed that they are interested in moving things forward and changing the way we think about technology.  Their dedication to being open, using open standards, and creating new open products is proof in the pudding.  Apple may have it’s fan boys, but I’ll stick with Google.

What Does This Mean

Well mainly it means that someone with deep pockets is backing an open source, royalty free video codec.  Meaning that if that patent pool is going to go after someone, they’ll definitely go where the money is first (in this case Google).  But to assume that Google just opened itself up to patent infringement lawsuits is to not do them justice.  Everyone knows that the people who work at Google are mainly smart individuals and to assume they didn’t do the proper legal due diligence would be to not give them proper credit.

What this means is that there is a good chance that Google could help some of those patents be revoked.  I’m not saying it will happen, I’m just saying that it could.  But in the end, it means that we should finally get answers on exactly what the H.264 patents contain and what can be done in a free, open way.

It’s About Open Standards

The thing here is that while Apple and Steve Jobs can talk about “supporting open standards” and how they give back to that community, but like I said before Steve Jobs is talking about an open web but he’s pushing a codec that could require royalty payments in the future and that’s dangerous.  Google on the other hand is furthering open standards by releasing quality codecs and putting their deep pockets behind them to defend them in court.

The WebM project uses the VP8 video codec (open sourced with the WebM announcement), the Vorbis audio codec (Ogg) which is open source and royalty free, and uses the open source Matroska as the container (what allows both the audio and video files to be in 1 outputted file for easy playing).  When open standards and open source is used to integrate, everyone wins.  Because anyone developing something new has access to the same things as someone who’s larger and has more funding.  In the end it allows the better application to truly win.  And this is what Google is pushing for.

An open web where developers don’t have to potentially pay royalties is a good thing.  Keeping things open and free when it comes to ensuring that everyone has the same thing on the web is important when you’re developing web applications.  Knowing that everyone is going to have the same components, the same codecs, and the same fonts make the web a constant experience regardless of browser choice.

When you connect to a public wireless network, especially one that is unprotected (read unencrypted), anything you send and receive is viewable by anyone with the proper tools and/or software.  This means that anyone, be it a person or an business entity can see what you’re sending across the open network. This is why when you do connect to such networks, it is a good idea to not do anything like connect to your bank or do anything you wouldn’t want others to potentially know about.  It doesn’t mean that someone is definitely watching your data fly across their screen, but you should act like someone is.

As users, it is our responsibility to ensure your data’s protected, not anyone else’s.  We are the one’s that must take the precautions, because once it’s on the network it’s out there for others to see.  You don’t want someone seeing your private conversations over an open wireless network?  Encrypt the conversation, there are plenty of tools that help you to encrypt your data.  There are ways to set up virtual private networks (VPN) at your home so you can connect securely to that and then do what you’d like because it’s all coming through your encrypted connection to your home’s network.  There are tools for encrypting your email (Thunderbird comes with the plugin installed by default).

Again, as user’s it is our responsibility to ensure our data is protected.  So the privacy groups need to stop pointing fingers and instead work on educating the end user about this.  If the privacy groups spent as much time educating as they did finger pointing, people would be more aware of the situation and know what steps they can take to protect their data both at home and abroad.

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.

You’ll notice that Steve Jobs says that all video codecs are covered by patents.  However this is just not true.  Theora is patent free and was designed as such.  The Theora codec is similar to the Vorbis codec for audio in that it is designed and written to be patent & royalty free.  Anyone can implement it and use it without having to pay some governing body.

The thing about H.264 is that, while it might be an open standard (in otherwords anyone can write an implementation based on the published standard) it is not in fact royalty free.  The governing body (MPEG LA) has said that H.264 will remain royalty free for web video through 2015.  This means that come January 1, 2016, they could start asking for cash.  And not everyone is going to be able to pay for the right to use it.

Video Codecs, What are They?

Before I go further I want to spend a few lines talking about video codecs. What a video codec is, is an algorithm for encoding a video signal. Different video codecs exist and serve different purposes. The thing about H.264 is that it allows someone to encode higher quality video at smaller file sizes (which is a very good thing). Apple has adopted H.264 as its video codec of choice, also Blu-Ray uses H.264 as it’s codec for encoding movies to the platform. So H.264 is a really good codec and has been adopted by the those in industries who use video, and understandably so. The idea of any codec is to get the highest possible quality into the smallest file.

The argument for which video codec to use for HTML5 is between H.264 and Theora. Theora is a video encoding codec that is free, open source, and royalty free (no one has to pay to use it or implement it). The argument that Steve Jobs is making is that even though Theora is open source and royalty free, it infringes on patents held by others.

The Issue of Software Patents

Lets get this out of the way.  Patents are, at their core, a good idea.  A company invents something, they patent it.  In return for making the idea public knowledge they get exclusive use of the idea for a pre-determined period of time.  During that time anyone using the invention has to license it from the company that holds the patent.  This is a good thing as it makes ideas public and still allows the company to retain some exclusive use of it.  It shows other people what can be done and to some degree encourages innovation, because if you can see how someone did something it might lead to other ideas.

Software patents however are a horrible idea.  The idea that you can patent a way to do something is a little more confining and limits innovation.  If I need to write an algorithm that takes two numbers and returns to me the largest of the 2 numbers, I might do something like

    int ReturnLargerNumber(int a, int b) {
        if(a > b )
            return a;

        return b;
    }

Now, someone later might come along and do something different but similar (as there aren’t a ton of ways to write this kind of code). If I had a patent on returning a larger number then I could sue anyone who implements it, no matter how similar or different. Keep in mind that this is a really lame example but it should demonstrate the idea that patenting an implementation is a bad idea. This is the heart of the software patent issue. If someone came along and had a better way to return the larger of two numbers, I could sue them thus holding back a better solution to the problem.

This all comes down to the idea that there is more than one way to do something.  What Steve Jobs would like us to believe is that there is no possible way that Theora could achieve the same level of compression and quality as H.264 unless it infringes on the patents involved in H.264, thus doing things exactly the same way.  Again, such a argument is good for his business but doesn’t exactly promote an “open web” that he seems to be so vocal about.

When it comes to writing software there is almost always more than one way to achieve the same goal. You can give 5 programmers the same problem and the same tools to solve it and chances are you’ll get 5 different solutions. You might get a couple that are similar but they’ll still be different. So when while Theora might serve the same purpose as H.264, it doesn’t mean they achieve their goals in the same way.

I feel that I should also note that, in most cases where a company has accused an open source project of infringing on patents, the company making the accusations has been unable to prove so in court. In most cases (read: almost all) the accusing company was making false claims in hopes of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (or FUD).

The Case of Open and Royalty Free

In the end this whole thing comes down to the idea of an open web. Steve Jobs says he wants an open web but then says that he won’t use Theora because of possible patent issues. It would make more sense for him to put some time into ensuring Theora and Vorbis don’t infringe on any patents by releasing patches and pushing their use if he truly wanted an open web.

The H.264 video codec requires a license to use, the same way the Mp3 codec requires a license to use.  While the Theora and Vorbis codecs do not require such licenses, companies like Apple don’t like to use them because they have their hands in other codecs (H.264 or AAC in Apple’s case).  

Apple created WebKit (the rendering engine of the Safari web browser) by forking an existing open source project called KHTML and fixing the issues they saw with it. They then in turn released WebKit as an open source project. Why not do something similar with Theora and Vorbis? He’s already done it once, why not do it again. If he was really about an open web, this would be done already.

It makes sense to look into things that are open sourced and royalty free when it comes to internet standards, because not everyone can pay license fees if they want to be completely compatible. And if we rely on open standards and royalty free codecs, then everyone can enjoy the same (or at least very similar) user experience on the web. As it stands right now, only Safari and Chrome implement H.264 for HTML5. Mozilla implements Theora (open source company is always going to implement an open source solution over a licensed solution). Chrome actually includes support for both.

As long as people disagree on what to implement it is going to give web users an inconsistent experience and to me, that’s the largest part of this problem. The idea of standards is to ensure an consistent experience across implementations and if people can’t agree on what goes into a standard programmers are stuck having to do more work to ensure that consistent experience.

Steve Jobs is a Business Man

To begin with, Steve Jobs is a business man.  A very good one too.  He is the master of the keynote and an expert marketer.  He knows how to announce, release, and talk about his products and competitors.  He’s very articulate and excellent at getting his ideas across.  Because of this, a lot of what he says is taken as fact, and many don’t look at things more deeply than his word and repeat his thoughts.

Steve Jobs is also king of telling people when they need something and when they don’t.  A great example is 3G.  When the first iPhone was released someone asked him about 3G and he said “Edge is good enough, people don’t really need 3G” and then one year later, he announces the iPhone 3G with 3G connectivity.  He’s done this on more than one occasion (just on the iPhone: multi-tasking, flush earphone jack, native application development, etc).  So when Jobs says that we need to move away from Flash, people listen.  The problem is, that when you talk about his little diatribe against Flash, it’s filled with half truths on both Flash and H.264 (and competing video codecs).  You can read one flash developer’s break down of those half truths.

The point here is that Steve Jobs is going to point out things that will only help his business long term.  Flash is destructive to his iPhone app business so he’s blocking it and giving his reasons.  Now granted he is posting his reasons to the public which not every CEO would do.  And he is attacking Flash and fighting for open standards and getting people to talk about and become aware of those standards, so that is a very good thing.

Video on the Web

I agree that Flash has problems that need to be addressed.  But I will also admit that most video on the web is displayed in a flash player.  The reasons for this are mainly due to the need to lock video down and protect the stream.  The current HTML5 video implementation does not have a way for people to protect the video stream, this is why you don’t see companies like Hulu or Netflix utilizing HTML5 for their streaming videos.  Those kinds of things need some form of DRM to prevent the leeching/downloading of the stream.

Also, the issue of H.264 versus Theora when it comes to which video codec to use for online video is filled with lots of nice half truths and misinformation as well (from all sides).  But one main difference is that H.264 is not free as Mr. Jobs would like you to believe.  Also the issue of patents and that Theora infringes on others’ patents is a slippery slope that has yet to be actually proven.  For further reading on the issue of H.264 and Theora I advise reading the following articles:

• Ogg Versus The World: Don’t Fall for Open Source FUD
• I’ Been to Ubuntu: Lead OGG Dev Responds to Job’s Jabs
• Microsoft Fires Back at Critics of its HTML5 Strategy

There’s lots of things some people would like to keep from the public to push their own agendas (on both the Apple/Microsoft and Open Source sides of the argument).  So I would advise becoming educated before simply repeating what’s said by anyone.

Conclusions

I’d like to conclude by saying that I think that getting people to talk about open standards and open technologies is a good thing and for that I think Steve Jobs is doing a great thing.  However, I wish he’d not put so many half truths into his writings about doing so.  By not talking about the whole picture he’s doing more harm than good (for the general public, not his business).  In the end, H.264 will probably win the codec war for HTML5.  I’d rather Theora take the crown, but so many people are scared due to possible patent issues (which again, have yet to be proven).  The patent issues are a different argument which I’ll write about later this week.

I’d be more than happy if we could move away from the requirement of Flash to do video on the web, I’m all for moving to open standards and open protocols to get things done.  So if nothing else, Steve Jobs should be commended for taking the stand to move towards that general direction, even if some of statements aren’t 100% correct.

Here’s the problem. Twitter and Facebook have the status game nailed down. Everyone is using those two services already. The other side of this is that Foursquare is pretty much the goto site for location based “check-ins” with Gowalla not too far behind (at least in user counts). So we have two services in each of the categories that Buzz is looking to service. Basically they’re late to the game and so adoption is going to be slow and painful, and there’s a good chance that Google Buzz will never get too high off the ground as a result.

The nice thing about Google Buzz is that is that it gives me the ability to only go to one place to post both location and status. Sure I can use the FourSquare or Gowalla apps, but if I want to get the most out of both services, I have to check in using both services. If I want to ensure everyone gets my status update I have to ensure it posts to both Twitter and Facebook, which requires some extra work. Buzz gives us that “1 stop shop” for both kinds of services.

Some people are using Buzz in interesting ways, Tim O’Reilly is using it to “host” conversations on ideas originally posted to Twitter. So he’s using as an extension on Twitter. I’m curious as to how Buzz is going play out in the long term. While I don’t think it will kill Twitter, I’m curious to see if it could make a nice play in the location space. Only time is going to tell though and since Google Buzz is still young I think we’ll see plenty come out of it over time.

First off, the United States has some of the best health care (doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc) in the world. People all over the world are told to come here to get their treatments. So when it comes to actual health care, the United States is pretty high up there on the list. Secondly, everyone in this country can be treated for whatever ails them. They can simply go to the emergency room and get treated. The doctors are required, by law, to treat regardless of ability to pay. In fact, in my recent ER experiences (for my son), treatment and payment were handled by two completely different teams at two completely different times.

What Obama is striving for is to ensure that as many Americans have health insurance. The bill eventually will ensure that a large percentage of the currently uninsured will be insured, and the government will help pay for the insurance if someone can’t afford it. So really, what we’re seeing is health insurance reform, not health care reform. I think some of the problem has come from the name the politicians and media have used (“Health Care Reform”) and this has caused lots of confusion.

The main issue I had with many people’s opinions was that they were all targeted at explaining to managers, c-level folks, and others about why craftsmanship was important.  They also focused heavily on how to explain to those people why they should hire someone that is a craftsman over someone that would (in most cases) be cheaper.  I felt this was the wrong approach because it was outward rather than inward in it’s direction.  How can you explain to a manager why hiring a craftsman is important when we personally don’t know what a craftsman is or why being one is important.  I heard very little discussion about what a craftsman is or why you’d want to become one.

So today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what I feel being a craftsman is and how that idea can be applied to the development/creation of software.  And to do that, we have to start at the beginning and define what a craftsman is.

What is a Craftsman

If we look up craftsman in the dictionary, we see something like this

A person who practices a trade or handicraft

So by definition, a craftsman practices a trade.  Our trade is that of software development.  When people think of the word “craftsman” they generally think in terms of woodworking.  A craftsman takes a piece of wood and turns it into something beautiful.  This kind of thing generally takes lots of practice and time.  Time spent messing up, cutting a piece too short, splitting a piece of wood, and so on.  You have to do a lot of things wrong in order to learn how to do them correctly.  Eventually you become a skilled craftsman.  You learn a lot of things to not do.  In generally becoming a craftsman is more about learning what not to do than it is about learning what the right way is.  But the main point here is that the craftsman spends time on his craft.  He works at it daily.  Looking for ways to improve and build a better whatever.  Over time the craft is perfected, at least as much as it can be.

A Software Craftsman

When it comes to software, there are a lot of ways to do things.  You can test, you can design, you can encapsulate, inherit, override, and continuously integrate.  You can spend hours refactoring, changing bits of code until they’re just so tight that on occasion you can’t understand it anymore.  All new software developers start out simply by trying to make the computer do something.  Sometimes it’s just about getting it to show text on a screen.  Eventually they graduate to automating tasks, very functionally (do this, then do that, then to something else) and without very little thought to re-usability.  Then someone shows them how to make methods of common tasks, and then eventually how to break those methods into classes (if their doing object oriented programming).  But it’s a slow process, some of these things can take years to master, many times they learn how to be better from someone else.

The general idea is the same though.  To become a good programmer, you can’t just do it in a nine to five fashion.  You have to practice it at home, spend time working on learning new things, finding those new ways to not do something.  You’re not going to learn everything by doing it at a job day in and day out.  The person learning to build furniture is going to learn how not to make chair by making the chair wrong a few times and so the same goes for someone looking to build software.  They will go through a lot of wrong solutions before they start understanding why the correct one is, in fact, correct.  Sure, someone could tell them, but then they haven’t experienced something for themselves and they don’t understand for themselves why it’s the right way.  They only know it’s the right way because someone told them so.

Driving to be Better

Really it all boils down to a personal choice.  Are you going to work to be better at your trade/craft or are you going to linger and stay in that little space that you are so comfortable in.  Why is software craftsmanship important to you?  Why should your manager care if you don’t?  Why should anyone care if you don’t?  In the end being a craftsman (in anything) isn’t about anything other than being the best you can be at your craft.  If you are developing software then you will strive to create better software regardless of who it’s for.  In the end, you’ll do the things that make you a better craftsman because they are why they make you better.  Not because someone told you to do it that way.  In the end, we all want to be the best at whatever we do.  That to me is the sign of a craftsman.  Someone who as a constant drive to be better at whatever it is they do.

Now, I’m the first to advocate privacy.  I think that you should never enter into something without understanding its impacts on your and information.  That being said, I’m also an avid user of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, and so on.  But I understand the implications on my privacy and look at how it’s handled once I’ve opened an account.  Google Buzz was no different.  They announced that you would automatically follow those you contact most via Gmail, it says so on the Google Buzz page.  So right off the bat, you know what’s going to happen.

That hasn’t stopped some people from having issues though.  Take this example here from the Fugitivus blog (warning: explicit language contained in post).  The person here was using Google Reader, a RSS subscription reader application from Google.  This is the part I want to focus mostly on for my point.

That point is, if you’re using an internet service, do not do something you wouldn’t want potentially shared with the world.  I think we can all agree, the internet is a mostly public forum.  Yes, there are walled services (like Facebook), but things happen, passwords get hacked, and companies make mistakes and privacy is destroyed (even if it’s only temporary).  Yes, one’s Google Reader sharing/notes/whatever should only go to those it’s intended.  But at the same time, caution must be maintained when doing something.  You wouldn’t send a questionable email out, because you never know where it might end up.  So why would you do something on a web application that you didn’t want seen by the public at large?  If you are going to use the internet, you have to accept some breakdown in privacy.  There is no such thing as a “PRIVATE INTERNET”.  My approach to internet privacy is this: “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want seen by the public at large” – that’s it, no more or less.  If I don’t want the public knowing about it or fear that it might eventually see the light of day, well then I just simply don’t do it.

Now, before someone blankets me with a ton of statements about the blog post I linked to, let me note that I believe that the person has every right to be angry with Google, and I agree that Google Buzz needs to address many of its privacy concerns.  There are some issues that definitely need to be ironed out and I think Google will get it all sorted out.  In fact, Google has already announced some changes to Buzz’s privacy controls (it’s not a lot, but it’s a start).  Google released Buzz early and it is still very much a new product, but Google is good about the “release early, release often” (or at least they have been lately) so I think most of the major privacy issues will be resolved.

But let me just reiterate, it’s a public internet.  Even the walled sites eventually have cracks that let data out.  It’s going to happen.  So if your interested in keeping something under wraps, the internet is not the place to discuss it.

2.) Reform Malpractice laws. This can be done in a number of ways like setting a set percentage that lawyers can receive from winning a lawsuit while suing a doctor (in many cases lawyers take 40% area) to a realistic level, setting limits (reasonable) on how much a person could receive from a settlement ( I am in favor of this personally as long as the amount is fair and also if the injury or error causes permanent injury that the responsible party provides to have the costs of the injury for the duration of it.), reduce the timeframe that a patient can sue a doctor for an injury are all possible ways to do this.

3.) Streamline procedures involving medical practices and review them regularly with the heads of hospitals and doctors to ensure that the people doing the work are crafting the procedures.

4.) Enact Chargeback Rules. If you sue a doctor and your case is proven fraudulent or frivolous an award should be given to the doctor for the lost time and damage to his practice from the person accusing him.

5.) As lawyers have a rule that they must do a certain amount of pro bono work a year for people maybe adding in a rule of that nature may be worth looking at as well.

All of these ideas are just smaller pieces to a bigger puzzle but I haven’t read or heard of anyone in the “overhaul” of our health care mention anything close to this. We have spent so much time focusing on how big companies screw us we don’t or haven’t paid attention to how the actual doctor’s get pressured and screwed all the time. If we started with the fundamentals of health care at the bottom and worked up reforms may come in smaller packages but they would be real. Currently as it is we are trying to reform health care by replacing the board of a company not asking or listening to all the workers of that company what could be done to really change things for the better. Well writing about the entirety of the Heal care bill and debate would make a full time job I just wanted to throw in my two cents on it. See you all next time.

First off, people don’t usually buy movies blindly.  They want to see them.  They’ll either see the movie in theaters or they will rent it.  Only after seeing the movie will most people actually buy it, not before.  So to delay new video releases with the idea that it will sell more product is a flawed idea from the get go.  Delaying rental customers from getting new releases will only do two things.  First it will anger your customers and they will stop buying from you (this goes for you too Netflix), and secondly it will cause people to pirate movies.  A lot of people pirate movies so they can see the movie, and if they like it they usually buy it.  I’m not going to argue that others pirate movies for the sake of doing so and in turn do not buy videos, that happens, but those people wouldn’t have bought it anyway.

Then you have people like me, those of us that plan on buying large box sets once a series has finished it’s movie run (Harry Potter anyone?).  I haven’t bought a Harry Potter disc since I bought a Blu-Ray player.  The reason?  Warner Bros. will probably release a nice (read pricey) box set of all 8 movies (the last book will be turned into 2 movies) and I’d rather buy them all on Blu-Ray at once rather than go through the hassle of selling my DVDs for the first 4 movies right now.  I’d rather have a nice box set with all the movies rather than having them scattered among my collection.  The box set looks nicer on a shelf.  So for me it isn’t so much about not buying the movie as it is about only buying it once.  I hate double dipping.  My wife and I are slowly replacing DVDs with Blu-Rays but only on movies we really like and only when we find the Blu-Ray for what we consider to be a good price.

So what will I do now that I can’t get Warner Bros. new releases from Netflix the week (or two) after release?  I have no clue at this point.  But for movies I haven’t seen yet, I can guarantee that I won’t be buying them.  So Warner Bros. please get over yourselves, and pull back on this deal, I promise that long term it’s not going to help your video sales any and is really just going to anger your customers.  Netflix, if you do even 1 more these kinds of deals, I will personally cancel my account and encourage others I know to do the same.

Sure, there’s lots of evidence that it might exist.  Apple themselves filed for a patent for a table like device years ago.  But the problem is, people seem to be dead sure it’s coming out.  Just like they were dead sure at MacWorld last year, and in January 2009 before that.  Ever since the iPhone people have been “predicting” the Apple tablet.  However, since the month has flipped to January there has been tons more coverage on the device.  A device that doesn’t actually exist yet.  There’s been so much coverage that even the Wall Street Journal has written on it, stating dates for both an announcement and shipping.

Apple has a reputation for causing excitement in their products, even those that don’t definitely exist yet.  Like I said, the rumored Apple tablet has been rumored since the introduction of the iPhone.  But there in lies the problem.  It’s a rumor.  Still is.  Until someone can grab a picture of the blasted thing, it is nothing more than a figment of our imagination.  And this is where I find issue.  Sure, sites like Engadget feed on product rumors.  That’s their proverbial bread and butter.  But when the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and other non-blog oriented news outlets start feeding the rumor mill, I take issue.  When I read a blog, it’s a blog.  Regardless if it’s a popular one, there is always the chance that what they’re reporting is based solely on conjecture, rumor, or just word of mouth.  In other words, I expect that it could turn out to be a hoax, misinformation, or something else erroneous (that doesn’t mean that everything these sites discuss lacks proof, evidence, and actual fact).  But when a site like the Wall Street Journal, something that is considered a “reputable” news source,  starts playing along to me it brings it more into reality.  It means that more people will read it, it means more people will think its true.

When you compare the Nexus One hype to the Apple tablet hype the main difference is that the Nexus One exists.  We’ve see it.  Google employees have spoken out about it.  People outside Google have touched it, played with it.  The Apple tablet is still nothing more than a patent application, and some non-Apple photoshopped mockups.  See the difference?

Now, do I think the Apple tablet exists?  Yes, I think somewhere within Apple’s walls, there is a tablet.  There might even be a prototype, and they might have already shipped build plans off to China to have them built.  But, as with anything Apple, nothing is certain until Steve Jobs gets on a stage and says “Hey, here it is” because until then it’s not real.  Apple has pulled entire product announcements before, so it’s always helpful to keep that in mind as we dream of new Apple devices.