fox @ fury

Apple bans geotargeted ads in iPhone apps

2010-02-05T05:02:03Z

If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.

Apple’s stance that geotargeted advertising doesn’t benefit the user is the strongest evidence I’ve seen yet that Google and Apple aren’t on a collision course.

Update: The thing is that every significant ad delivery platform uses location as a targeting signal. Ad networks geotarget off of the requesting IP address if not something with greater granularity. If Apple solely doesn’t want the user to use the Core Location API for this purpose (a position that is still anti-user) then their note is written very badly because, as it’s currently written, it means that using an ad delivery network that happens to use geolocation — even by IP guesstimation — will be returned to the developer until that capability is removed. In many cases thought this is completely out of the developer’s control unless they change ad delivery platforms.

Microsoft response to Dick Brass

2010-02-04T22:37:06Z

Microsoft’s response to Dick Brass (former Microsoft VP) editorial in the NYT:

At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world. For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact.

Translation: ~~“We don’t have to be better. We’re bigger.”~~ “Slow is okay when you’re big.”

Do the iPad’s missing apps point to a multitasking dashboard?

2010-02-03T01:04:11Z

Steve’s iPad keynote felt just a little off. We got what we wanted, but it still felt a little like the iPad was a vehicle full of potential rather than a self-contained package of productivity. This morning I woke up and realized what was missing: The minor apps.

I’m looking forward to the amazing apps that will undoubtably be written in the coming months, but what about the existing apps that the iPhone and iPod Touch ship with? The iPad’s home screen isn’t just sparse because of all the extra real estate. There are six apps that are simply missing!

I’ve made a matrix of the apps that ship with the iPhone 3GS, the iPod Touch, and those shown on Apple’s web site and during last week’s keynote on the iPad:

	3GS	Touch	iPad
Messages	✔
Calendar	✔	✔	✔
Photos	✔	✔	✔
Camera	✔
YouTube	✔	✔	✔
Stocks	✔	✔
Maps	✔	✔	✔
Weather	✔	✔
Voice Memos	✔	✔
Notes	✔	✔	✔
Clock	✔	✔
Calculator	✔	✔
Settings	✔	✔	✔
iTunes Store	✔	✔	✔
App Store	✔	✔	✔
Compass	✔
Phone	✔
Mail	✔	✔	✔
Web	✔	✔	✔
iPod	✔	✔*	✔*
Contacts	✔	✔	✔
iBooks			?
*The Touch splits iPod into two apps: ‘Music’ and ‘Video’. The iPad splits it into ‘iPod’ and ‘Video’

The first thing to notice is that the iBook app is missing from all of the promotional shots on Apple.com. Work on these promotional graphics, especially the video shots, must have started weeks if not months ago, and there’s been some buzz on the web that iBook was a late addition and wasn’t a sure thing, so it makes perfect sense that it didn’t make the deadline for inclusion in the promotional assets for the January unveiling. If you check out TechCrunch’s hands-on video, you’ll see at 1:10 that the iBook app is there, but that there are only eight apps total on the machine. Presumably apps not quite ready for prime time were kept (literally) away from the hands of the press.

Far more interesting though are the simple apps that are missing from the promotional materials: Stocks, Weather, Voice Memo, Clock, and Calculator. With the exception of Voice Memo these are all basic apps that have been staples from the very beginning, and it makes no sense that they wouldn’t be on the iPad, so why are they absent? I see two options, one of which is far, far more interesting than the other.

The apps were left off of promotional materials for aesthetic reasons. (boring)

It’s possible though unlikely that Steve wanted to underscore the simplicity of the device by making the home screen as clean as possible. This makes the device seem less cluttered and showcases the beautiful Richard Misrach photo that Apple spent good money licensing. I say ‘unlikely’ because Apple wants to show off what their device can do, and because if this were the case then these ‘minor apps’ would be on the second page. Only there isn’t a second page. The magnifying glass and the dot at the bottom of the home screen clearly indicate that this is the only page of apps.

These apps are missing from the launchpad because they’re no longer apps. They’re dashboard widgets. (interesting)

As I alluded to earlier, what Stocks, Weather, Voice Memo, Clock, and Calculator have in common is that they’re all simple ‘minor’ apps that wouldn’t know what to do with 1024×768 if you gave it to them. They’re intended for quick reference, for quick ‘in and out’ tasks. In short, they’re multitasking apps. It’s clear that Apple believes this because with the exception of Voice Memo all these apps were OS X dashboard widgets before the iPhone ever existed. I would put forward that they’re going back to their rightful place.

The lack of multi-tasking has been a major criticism of the iPad this past week. A more dedicated device like the iPad suffers when you have to exit your browser, book or Keynote presentation just to bring up a calculator or check the weather (or respond to an iChat, but more on that in a moment). Luckily, this is a problem that Apple solved nearly a decade ago in a rather elegant fashion with the dashboard.

Imagine if the same concept is lifted wholesale and brought to the iPad. Imagine that a five-finger pinch caused the screen to dim and a bevy of widgets flew in to the screen for quick consumption and calculation, and then were dismissed by another five-finger flick? With props to Entourage, ‘Is that something you might be interested in?’

It might not be OS multitasking but it’s user multi-tasking and, unlike running several apps simultaneously, it behaves nicely. OS X dashboard widgets sit quietly when the dashboard’s not up and make their calls and updates quickly when the dashboard is called up. Apps are designed either to be full-screen applications or quick-glance widgets. I’m assuming there’s still some sort of occasional polling or push notification mechanism and user notification system so they can be alerted when there’s an action they need to attend to like an instant message or a countdown timer.

It’s also a strong solution for the problem of iChat. Without SMS on the iPad it’s clear that instant messaging will need to come to the device, but it’s also clear that any practical IM client would have to be able to work nicely simultaneously with the user’s primary task. An iChat dashboard widget would fit the bill nicely.

Sixty days is a long time to try and maintain excitement for an unavailable product, and it’s certain that Apple has a few updates planned between now and the end of March. Will they announce a front-facing camera? Maybe, but I’m more confident about this one. It’s too good to pass up.

Guess the Apple: We have a winner!

2010-02-01T06:49:26Z

Thanks to everyone who entered last week’s ‘Guess the Apple’ contest. I’ve graded all the responses and have your scores ready. All the multiple-choice questions were worth 2 points, and all the feature checkboxes were worth 1 point for correct guesses and minus 1 point for incorrect guesses.

So, without further ado, with 15 points, correctly guessing the product name, the display type, the case material, the weight, and scoring almost perfectly on the feature matrix, our winner is kishba!

Alone in second place with 14 points, narrowly missing any scandal of impropriety, is former Apple evangelist and BMUG co-worker Tim Holmes!

There was a four-way tie for third with Philip, e, bjtitus and amitp all scoring 13 points, and a five-way tie for fourth with Mark Trapp, Andrew, Tao, Nick Baum and ~~Friendfeed’s~~ Brizzly’s own Ben Darnell!

Congratulations Kishba on divining Apple’s secrets better than the rest, and enjoy your $20 iTunes gift card! To everyone else, hang tight for a few months when we’ll start taking bets on what ‘A+ updates‘ are in store for the next iPhone!

Guess the Apple, win $20!

2010-01-26T00:20:35Z

Think you know what Steve Jobs has up his sleeve (literally)? Make your picks in my Guess the Apple poll and take a crack at the fabulous $20 iTunes gift certificate grand prize!

And even though it might reduce your odds, you can spread the word by Tweeting/Facebooking/Friendfeeding or shouting the URL to your friends: http://fury.com/2010applepoll.php

Entries accepted until Wednesday, January 27th ad 8am PST, two hours before the Apple Event begins, but don’t wait. Enter now!

What if the Nexus One isn’t sold by Google?

2009-12-17T23:07:35Z

Special note: This is a pure thought exercise based on news stories and my own speculation.

Conventional wisdom:

Google has build an open-source phone OS based on the intention of expanding their advertising reach into the blossoming mobile markets, as opposed to making money selling hardware.
Google has said they’re not going in to the business of building phones.
The Nexus One, built by HTC, is supposedly going to be sold both with and without contracts next month.

Everyone seems to assume that, because Google gave each of its employees one of these phones as a holiday bonus, Google is going into the business of selling hardware.

My prediction:

The HTC Nexus One is a poster child, driven by Google, of how mobile phone OEMs can create a business selling lower-cost hardware directly to end users without carrier limitations, requirements, contracts and markups.
Given that Google’s primary interest is getting incremental revenue through mobile usage of Google products, they would like the price point to be as low as possible and the adoption as high as possible.
It seems completely reasonable to me that Google negotiated a contract with HTC to co-design and manufacture a huge build of Nexus One phones, then instead of taking the inventory and selling themselves, Google will market the phone and use Google Checkout to connect customers directly with HTC at the Google-negotiated OEM price.

Presto! Google has brought an excellent phone to market at a very attractive price without actually being a hardware vendor themselves. And while the carriers may hate this, it serves as a poster child for how all the other mobile phone OEMs can follow suit and make a bundle by losing the bundling.

2010’s going to be an interesting year in the mobile space…

Update: Then again, the Nexus One trademark was applied for by Google, so that does weaken my theory a bit.

AT&T: Buy our astounding multimedia phones, but please don’t use that pesky multimedia

2009-12-16T21:44:20Z

AT&T has recently complained that their network is congested because 3% of their data plan users are responsible for 40% of their data network traffic, and have indicated that consequently they’ll be raising the rates on that 3%.

Three thoughts:

If you’re moving from a flat rate to a tiered rate in order to make sure the average user doesn’t have to pay for the high-volume user, then a rate increase for high-volume users should be paired with a rate decrease for average users, right? I would bet good money that the bottom 40% of AT&T data plan subscribers account for less than 3% percent of AT&T’s bandwidth. Where’s their savings?

If AT&T actually wanted to recoup losses from that 3% of users (who each, on average, use 21.5 times the amount of traffic as a user in the other 97%) they’d have to charge those users 10-20 times as much for their data plan. That would mean that three out of every hundred AT&T users would need to pay $300-600 per month for data. Clearly these users wouldn’t stand for fees that high, which indicates that the purpose for tiered pricing isn’t recouping costs, but is instead dissuading people from using their data plan ‘excessively’.

As the trend is for more and more interactivity and high-bandwidth applications, the carrier who actively promotes the features of phones with the capability to take advantage of high-bandwidth applications like video while actively dissuading its users from actually using those features once they’re locked in to a contract is a carrier doomed to failure.

The Opposite of Vaporware

2009-12-16T01:50:35Z

One thing that Google and Apple have in common is that, more than most technology companies, they don’t announce things until they’re ready for people to see and touch (and in applicable cases, buy). Sure, there are exceptions to this rule; the iPhone was pre-announced by six months, but by and large both companies try to publicize their products and services more than hawk their strategic visions and timelines.

Despite this unusually forthright product communications strategy, both companies have at times been called out for vaporware when there’s a specific need to announce a planned product months ahead of time, in order to get developer involvement in place in time for product release.

With this in mind, I found it amusing that with the probable imminent release of the Googlephone, Google has managed to achieve the opposite of vaporware: having a finished, demonstrable product in a lot of people’s hands while not announcing it and even trying to downplay its existence as much as possible at the same time as there are tens of thousands of them ‘in the wild’.

Sure, lots of companies have prerelease hardware in the pockets or messenger bags of their employees for field-testing, but these people are under strict orders not to be seen with the device or to let on that it even exists. I can’t recall any product in history that has had so much anticipatory digital ink spilled in its name, yet is released into the wild in numbers far beyond the few dozen guarded units that might normally be expected, without any sort of formal corporate cheerleading or chest pounding, only a reluctant post on a corporate sub-blog admitting that yeah, employees got some stuff that might be related to some stuff that other people might some day be able to get.

It’s corporate-speak for “It ain’t no thang” and it’s the kind of casual tone that draws such a contrast with the typical cockiness of Microsoft or the supreme confidence of Apple.

So yeah, there’ll probably be a Google phone out next month, but not because Google promised it. This is a fresh dose of reality preceding the corporate hype.

Enderle and Gruber on the Magic Mouse

2009-10-23T18:50:00Z

Rob Enderle doesn’t like Apple’s new multi-touch mouse (and John Gruber surprisingly agrees):

“[The Magic Mouse] will likely go down in history as one of the lamest devices yet as they should know, given the iPhone, that touch is connected to the screen and not anything else.”

Enderle must wonder how Apple stays in business at all, what with all those stupid MacBooks and their lame trackpads.

Seriously, I get the problem with trying to tie a proximal touch-pointer device to a distal screen — a touch-based Wacom tablet in absolute mode would pretty much suck.

But that’s not what the Magic Mouse is. It’s just a mouse with a little extra tech to support gestural commands on its surface. Swiping and scrolling are nifty on the iPhone, but that’s not evidence that it sucks when you perform the same gesture as a secondary function of your pointing device, whether it’s a trackpad or a mouse.

The smartphone gap is closing, no matter what Apple says

2009-10-19T23:29:56Z

Apple executive Tim Cook, on today’s earnings call:

“Frankly I think people are trying to catch up with the first iPhone two years ago. We’ve long since moved beyond that.”

I’m not going to get in to how Verizon/Motorola/Google’s new Droid compares to the iPhone because I (like Mr. Cook) haven’t seen one yet, but I do raise an eyebrow at the comment that Apple has long since moved beyond the original iPhone.

Apple’s done a great job at implementing key features like Exchange integration, GPS, and the App store, but the core iPhone experience and hardware product haven’t changed much at all in the last two years. It’s absurd to suggest that Apple has been widening the gap between the iPhone and its competitors.