The Blog of an African NERD

Steve Ballmer Demos the Zune HD: Looks exhausted and defeated

Remember the once bubbly and super energetic Steve Ballmer. This picture tells a completely different story. Even not knowing the context of this Photo, the man just looks old, tired, exhausted and defeated. Think about it

Microsoft Search - Fail

Windows Mobile - Fail

Internet Explorer - Fail

Vista - Fail

Media Center - Fail

Zune - Double Fail

You get the sense that the failure of pretty much everything coming from Redmond has started to take it's toll. Poor man.

With the Pre syncing with iTunes, the Palm Apple battle is now getting really interesting

The Palm Apple battle just gets better every day. Common belief a few months ago was that Palm was headed for a legal show down with Apple, particularly after Timothy Cook’s statements at Apple’s earnings call. Palm immediately shot back with “We got patents too”. So are these patents saving Palm from being sued by Apple and even giving them the courage to sync with iTunes apparently without Permission? Make no mistake, this is one gutsy move because for one, Palm knows third party developers like us can fill this niche for them and thus they don’t have to deal with the headache of Apple’s anger. Even worse is Apple intentionally breaking the functionality. I personally have been a victim of this. It is very possible Palm holds patents for the ringer switch, threaded sms and many more features you see on the iPhone. Thus any legal attack by Apple can be countered by an even bigger attack by Palm that can put the iPhone in jeopardy and cause Apple more headache. So, right now it seems as though Palm is holding Apple at Patent ransom. 

Apple definitely wants to protect iPhone features like multi touch. Word is that they essentially punked Google to not implement multi touch on the G1. However, Apple’s beef with Palm goes way deeper than intellectual property. If you have no knowledge of Steve Jobs and Jon Rubinstein's relationship, you can sum it up in the following movie theatrical release. 

In Silicon Valley, there was no Lieutenant Steve Jobs trusted more than Jonathan Rubinstein. He personally gave Ruby the green light to build the iPod.  A complex 15 year relationship forged by epic disagreements, shouting matches, risky technical gambles; all in the drive to build the best computers and gadgets in the world. They made history together and in 2006 the trusted lieutenant nobly retired. Or so we thought!

Now branded as a traitor, the iPod legend is helping lead the arch-enemy, using everything he learnt from Apple and in the process getting other key lieutenants to defect. It’s a story of trust, betrayals, backdating stock scandals, jealousy and revenge. This is the mother of all Smartphone wars!  This movies is not yet rated

Any smart book publisher should just go ahead and sign a deal for Jon Rubenstein’s memoir. His tell all book will probably be one for the ages.

This is great stuff

qTweeter is here. iPhone Twittering will never be the same.

I have been involved in a lot of cool apps for Smartphones, particularly in the glorious days of the Treo.  But this one tops it all.  qTweeter is simply the coolest thing I have been a part of to date with regards to Smartphone apps. Big shout out to everyone that contributed to this project and worked extra hard to get it out. Check it out at http://www.qtweeter.com 

iPhones and iPods Banned at Gates' Home

According to Melinda Gates in a recent Vogue interview

"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids."

Oh Please Bill Gates!! if you want your family members not to use the iPhone, build a better one. Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 are so outdated that it is borderline irresponsible for any father to put his family members through the pain of using them.

Loving the smack talk by Roger McNamee.

This actually is refreshing to see and is nothing new From Roger McNamee. Forget all the politically correct bs statements. If you think your phone kicks butt, say so. Heck, he and his buddies have put about $425 million of their money to get the phone made. Keep it up Roger!!

Palm Nova and 3rd party apps

Based on chatter and a few people I have spoken to, I think the new Palm OS with regards to third party apps will pick up where Apple left off with web apps. While everyone slammed Apple for initially introducing web apps as the primary mode of 3rd party apps on Mobile devices, the idea has a lot of merit, but Apple botched this idea badly. I think Palm will show the full potential and actually do it the right way.

There are 4 reasons why web apps make sense as 3rd party apps for Palm.
1. Web tools are now sophisticated enough to create apps that match and exceed anything you can do on most native apps. You might think that is a bold statement but really it's not. If the new Palm OS supports the flash player then you can do pretty much anything, including 3D.
2. Relying on Web tools, Palm can go from 0 to a bazillion developers immediately without having to have their own platform. There are already well over a million bona fide Flash developers out there, so if the OS supports Flash and all the other web standards, then you automatically have all those developers with no learning curve, no sdk, with apps ready from day 0.
3. They can provide the necessary hooks to make these apps completely robust. I think this is where Palm can shine, by providing all the necessary apis that allow web apps to communicate with the core of the device’s OS. If you noticed in the first ever presentation of Apple’s web apps for the iPhone, they demonstrated how a web app can access the device's local contact database. This held promise that they would give developers more access( gps info, phone apis, etc ), but it seemed Apple just got consumed by the whole native app movement that they stopped working on this. Palm will exploit this too the fullest. They will also do things like caching and offline mode to further make web apps run more efficiently.
4. The Apple app store proves that web apps are very viable. I estimate that  80% of the apps in the app store should not be native apps. They should be web apps if Apple had just provided additional apis for web apps. All those $.99 apps can all be web apps. Another good example of this is how ESPN and Facebook have approached the iPhone. Facebook, which originally was a web app, has jumped on the native app bandwagon. Well, that app is absolutely not necessary as a native app if Facebook had the right apis. On the other hand, ESPN has stuck with the web version for its website/App, they could have easily created a native app, but even with no Flash, they have used other web tools to create a robust site/app.

It's all on the line

For those of us that have stood by Palm with hopes of revival and even held on to our Palm Stocks that are now pretty much worthless, Jan 8, 2009 will seal our fate. How ironic is it that in Vegas, Ed, Ruby and Co. will be putting all the chips on the table. While am no Ed Werder, some unnamed sources tell me Nova won't disappoint, so the question now is: How FANTASTIC is it?

Jungle Disk is off the chains

This is some amazing stuff. I have been looking for a real time online storage and backup solution for a while but never really found anything that seemed great till I tried Jungle Disk. We are currently working on a huge social app that will run on Facebook and thus we began looking as Amazon Web Services( S3, EC2 etc) to host and scale what we think will be a massively popular app. Doing research on S3 was when I found Jungle Disk ,which backs up all your data constantly to your S3 storage. This thing works super sweet.
Their client side backup and monitoring app is just so well done that you will have total confidence within minutes of using this thing. You name it, auto backup, logs, complete reports, its all there. They even throw in a network drive that lets you access all your backed up files like you do in Windows Explorer.

Am really surprised Amazon let this company slip by and be purchased by Rackspace. Amazon could have purchased Jungle Disk and be reaping tremendous revenue by selling this as a yearly subscription.

LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu Nike ad

Am really loving this ad. However it is what happened after watching the ad that bugged me out a bit. I knew I had heard the music from somewhere, which immediately brought be back to the song “Blueprint 2” by Jay-Z. I was quite curious who the original composer was as it was apparent this was a sampled beat, which lead me to Wikipedia, which then led me to Amazon.com mp3 store to purchase the original composition among others. All this within 5 mins after the commercial was played, synced to the iPhone and ready for listening while cruising down the highway. It is really amazing how everything thing is coming together in the digital age.