SnapSync is our attempt at creating the camera of the future. The camera of the future allows you to take photos and have those photos float up to the cloud without your intervention. The camera of the future always shows you every photo you have ever taken.

On Android, SnapSync runs in the background, moving your photos up to the service as you shoot them. On iOS, due to limitations in what Apple allows, SnapSync requires you to run it to synchronize your roll. Hopefully that will change in the future.

We also have a SnapSync desktop client. That client creates a SnapSync directory on your computer that mirrors your mobile roll. When you shoot on your phone, the photos show up in your SnapSync directory. If you put a photo in your directory, it moves to your phone.

You can add multiple devices to your SnapSync account. For example, you can shoot with and Android phone and have those photos show up on your iPad.

SnapSync is free and is in beta today. It does not integrate with Phanfare yet, but that may change in the future depending on what users tell us they want.

You can signup for free at SnapSync.com. You will also be able to download and create an account from the Android and iOS apps when the latest version of those hit the respective app stores. Until then, start on the web and then download the mobile apps.

As always, tell us what you think of SnapSync.

When we visited the national parks in the late 70s, the Instamatic pretty much became my camera. By 5th grade, I was shooting with a Vivitar camera that took 110 cartridges. I did not like the image quality that camera produced with its small little negatives and moved back to using the Instamatic after a while.

I found an old Kodak Brownie deep in my dad’s closet somewhere around 6th grade and was surprised to find out it had some film in it. I believe we had the model F. I used the rest of the film and developed it and got some awesome old family photos from the earlier shots. It was probably my dad’s camera from his childhood. The images on the camera were about eight years old.

I did not own an SLR until high school at Stuyvesant, when I purchased the Pentax K-1000. I shot pretty much exclusively Kodak film, using Tri-X black and white for every day use and Kodachrome slide film on vacation. I tried to get into Fuji Velvia but never could quite do it. I still have boxes and boxes of Kodak carousels filled with photos. And yes, I own a slide projector.

My junior year I became photo editor of my high school newspaper, the Spectator. That gave me the needed excuse to carry a camera every day to school. I also had a darkroom at home and spent many, many hours developing and printing images. Finally senior year I upgraded to a Nikon FG. It was 1985.

I took the ferry every day from Staten Island to Manhattan. The commute was about two hours each way. That provided me with ample photographic opportunities. I was never comfortable taking photos of strangers (street photography), so most of my photos outside of friends were of landscapes.

At Dartmouth I got a part time job shooting sorority formals. My main take-away from that experience is that photos of sorority sisters together without their dates sold a lot better than those with the dates in them.

When I went to Stanford for graduate school in 1989, I took fewer photos initially. But then Kodak started returning CDs of scanned images from film, allowing me to create a website. One of the first every digital photos of me was this one, taken with a Kodak digital camera that Jerry Yang had.

Once I sold my first company in 2000, I bought the camera system of my dreams including a film-based EOS 1v and a bunch of really big Canon lenses. But by then, digital was mainstream and I spent most of my time shooting with a Canon D30 that I bought around the same time. By 2002 I sold my Canon 1v, having probably shot less than 500 photos with it.

In graduate school Mark Heinrich and I used to maintain our own websites of photos so it seemed natural to us that everyone else would want to too. I also worried about losing my digital photos. Hence, Phanfare was born, a combination of archive and presentation system. We started working on Phanfare in early 2003, before facebook was born.

Phanfare reflected my relationship with photography. I had always taken images for myself and to share with a small group of friends and family. I had never considered photography to be art. I think the art comes in the story telling, editing, and compilation of images. Sure a few news photos are incredibly emotional, but still it feels that the photographer witnessed the moment; he did not create it.

I pretty much knew Kodak was going to zero in 2000. I shorted the stock that year, but eventually removed the short because I was afraid they might have some short term success (they didn’t).

As I look back, I ask what Kodak could have done differently. The obvious answer is that they could have become facebook, which is the largest photosharing site in the world. But we all know that was never going to happen. It was not in Kodak’s DNA. Kodak was always about the photos and the photographic technology, not about the people. And Facebook is about the people. The photos are just collateral to help those people tell stories to each other.

Maybe Kodak could have become Canon. Kodak invented the digital camera. Had they plowed all their energy into learning how to do beautiful industrial design, I think that was fully possible. Of course, Canon might have its own troubles in the future with smartphones taking over in the point and shoot space. But they are much healthier today than Kodak.

I just got back from a big trip tot the Galapagos Islands. After slogging it out eight years with Phanfare, trying to create a sustainable service that is both high quality and customer centric, there are days when I don’t really feel like taking photos at all. I took the big camera to the Galapagos because it seemed like too much of an opportunity to not take it. But I also took a little Canon S95 and was perfectly content to shoot with it much of the time.

Of the 1284 photos and videos we took last week, this was probably one of my favorites. My son is developing the photography bug. Happy new year to all.

I am a Verizon customer and typically only carry Verizon phones. I used ATT for three or so years when that was the only way to get an iPhone in the US, but returned to Verizon when I could. Verizon is not perfect and it’s expensive, but they offer by far the best service in the US. Being on Verizon limits me to their Android handsets.

Friends and family who are verizon customers often ask me what phone they should get to replace their aging handset. Short answer today: none. Wait. There are better options coming.

I carried the Samsung Droid Charge for about six weeks before passing it on to someone else at the company. The LTE network was fast, but the phone itself was dog slow. It was slow enough that I had to train myself to pause after taking actions or I would take the same action twice.

Speed was the number one problem on the Charge. People look at me funny when I say that because it’s an LTE phone and we all know that LTE is fast. Yes, LTE is fast, and if you enjoy running speedtest.net on the phone all day to confirm the speed of your local 4G network, then this phone is for you. But if you are hoping to do more than that, say, maybe, read email or browse the web, then you will be disappointed.

Battery life is the second issue on the Charge. It won’t last a day on medium usage. It’s a 3pm phone. That’s a non-starter when I am traveling.

People also rave about the contrast, saturation and viewing angle of the OLED display on the Charge. Yes, those things are all there, but what they forget to mention is the terrible color accuracy and overblown reds that detract from looking at photos on the device.

The weight of the Charge is manageable. Officially it’s 5.0 oz. By contrast, the iPhone 4.8 oz. The size of the phone is significantly larger than the iPhone and not completely comfortable in the hand. It’s hard to reach for some of the bottom buttons. But overall, the Charge has pretty good ergonomics.

Other nice features: you can take a screenshot with the Charge (samsung addition); there is a pretty nice dock that turns the phone into a bedside alarm clock and charges a second battery (which you will need). Samsung puts controls for wifi and bluetooth in the notification bar.

I downloaded and paid for a clean copy of the Android 2.3 keyboard because the 2.2 keyboard that Samsung ships is not great and the phone has not yet been updated to 2.3.

The Droid Bionic I have only had for a few days. It’s heavier than the Charge, coming in at 5.6 oz. The screen has better color rendition, although you can see some pixelation. Viewing angle is inferior.

But the big news with the Bionic is that the phone itself is fast, more than fast enough that I don’t think about the speed.

Moto’s customization of the Android UI is not attractive to me and the phones ships with lot’s of crapware. You can’t remove the crapware unless you root the phone, which I have not done. I downloaded Go Launcher to change the home screen. That made me marginally happier. Battery life is still under review by me but my guess is that it will be a 5pm phone.

The phone feels less plasticy in the hand than the Charge, but the ergonomics are no better and possibly worse with a power button that is on the top left.

Neither of these phones are anywhere near as polished as the iPhone 4 in terms of the physical hardware. We also are running iOS 5 on our iPhones (we are developers) and although we can’t review or talk about any specific features until Apple releases that, Apple is working through the list of shortcomings of the iPhone versus Android that I outlined about one year go.

So as a Verizon customer right now, my recommendation would be to wait. If you love iOS and the iPhone, then the rumors say the iPhone 5 is imminent. If you are a lover of the Robot then wait for the rumored Nexus Prime. I don’t think LTE is worth the sacrifice in battery life, weight and size that it requires today. The rumor is that Apple is not putting LTE into the iPhone 5 and given the battery life, size and weight of the first generation of LTE phones, I think that was a smart decision on their part.

Finally, some will be asking Android vs iOS? What’s better? My feeling is that Apple has the better product. The main deficiency today is the lack of turn by turn navigation, which you can solve by buying a third party GPS app for the iPhone (I bought the TomTom app, which works adequately if not brilliantly;traffic is an added yearly subscription; TomTom customer support, if you have the misfortune to contact them, is HORRIBLE).

Android is also very strong if you are a Google Apps user. The integration with Google Apps makes it an attractive option for those users. If you are a Google apps user on the iPhone, make sure you configure your account as an Exchange account against m.google.com versus setting your account up as a Gmail account. You will get contact synchronization that way.

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new version of the Phanfare Android app that adds album browsing to the mix of features. You can view your albums and browse through photos and videos and play musical slideshows.

The Phanfare Android app also adds a sharing feature to the default photo gallery on Android so that you can push photos and videos to Phanfare.

Please let us know what you think in the comments and let us know if you have any problems. Unlike iOS, Android is fairly fragmented so it’s hard to do a perfect job checking the app on every conceivable device.

On the Phanfare Roku channel, you can browse your photos and play Phanfare musical slideshows.

You don’t need to have a Phanfare account to add the Phanfare Roku channel. Any Phanfare site can be added, provided you know any needed site passwords. Hence, you can setup the Phanfare Roku channel on a friend or family member’s Roku box.

Roku is not the only way to display your Phanfare collection on your living room TV. You can also use Apple TV along with the Phanfare app running on an iOS device.

Displaying a Phanfare photo and video collection on a living room TV always ranks highly in our customer surveys and we are happy to be able to provide another conduit.

Have a Roku box? Let us know what you think of the new Phanfare channel.

The Phanfare Android App will allow you to upload photos and videos directly to your Phanfare account from your Android smartphone.

We took a different design approach with our Android App versus our iOS App. Because Android allows tighter integration, we were able to extend the sharing feature built directly into the Android Gallery App to include Phanfare as a destination.

We plan to continue to improve the Phanfare Android App. This first version is just an uploader. We plan to add viewing and controlling of your Phanfare account and eventually will bring the App to parity with the Phanfare iOS App.

Because Android has no review process and we can fix problems much more responsively, you can expect more frequent updates and a little more risk taking on our part in terms of the stability of any given release and potential bugs, especially early on.

Thanks for your patience with us on Android. We heard loud and clear from our customers that it was time to give the green robot some love after focusing exclusively on iOS for nearly three years on the mobile side.

We would love to hear your feedback both in the comments and directly in reviews in the Android Market store.

Here is how it works. You need an Apple TV attached to your TV. Purchase the fbTV app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad for $0.99. Using the app, you can browse your Facebook photos and the Facebook photos of all your friends and start musical slideshows on your TV.

You choose the music from the built in music collection on your iPod. The photos appear on the TV and the music comes directly from the TV, all via Air Play.

The app also makes a great little photo viewer for your Facebook photos, even if you don’t have an Apple TV device. It’s a universal app, so you can buy it once and it works on all your iOS devices.

The social links sends the viewer to a particular album, not a particular photo.

All Phanfare security measures stay in place. Hence, if you allow tweeting of your password-protected Phanfare site, you might frustrate anonymous users who click on the link and are then asked for your site password.

Here is how you enable tweeting and liking of your albums (Screenshot for Premium and Pro only, but all accounts have access to the feature).

The solution: Feed Mom, a new service from Phanfare that will automatically email your Mom daily with the photos you upload to Facebook. It can also email the photos you are tagged into, with a small delay to let you remove any photos mom should not see.

Feed Mom is free for one email address. You can buy additional email addresses for as little as $0.50 each.

Feed Mom is not really designed for the core Phanfare subscriber, who tends to do his sharing with Mom directly through Phanfare, but instead for all the folks out there who use only Facebook for sharing photos.

Give it a try and tell us what you think.

The difference is that the $29/year version does not retain fullsize originals. We have spoken to many customers since we raised our prices last June who tell us that they love Phanfare hosting, but they don’t need us to be a backup of originals.

Good design is about keeping a product as simple as possible while still fulfilling the vision. When we set out to design this new level of service, we thought about what was essentially needed to allow our customers to beautifully tell their story through photos and videos.

To that end, we have removed cnames, album sections, dropbox and multiple subsites. While all these features are cool (and remain in Phanfare Premium and Pro), they complicate the product. We want the $29/year version to be drop dead simple for our customers to use and enjoy. We want to lower the cognitive load of being being a Phanfare customer.

To the eye, the new $29 Phanfare level of service looks nearly the same on the web as the $99 Premium and $199 pro version. The difference is that we don’t store your originals. Also, video is standard def versus HD, but the reality is that many viewers don’t have sufficient bandwidth to stream HD video over the web anyway.

However, we do store your images and videos at Amazon S3, ultra reliable online storage. And although we don’t retain originals, we keep high resolution images that should display well on the web.

We hope you like this new more affordable version of Phanfare. It should make the Phanfare experience accessible to a wider audience.

A note to our existing customers: we did not build a path to downgrade from Phanfare premium to this new $29/year level of service. It’s not a trivial to build. The downgrade would involve removing your originals and removing some features from your account. Let us know if you want to downgrade to the new $29 version. If enough people want it, we will build the conduit.

Proofing layout is something we had back in 2006 but subsequently removed. The goal is to provide a view that is useful for the client of a professional photographer to specify which images she likes. The view always shows thumbs in their original aspect ratio.

We improved Proofing layout relative to its functionality in 2006. You can now choose three different sizes of thumbnail and you can choose to have the camera filename displayed under the thumbnail. In addition we now have a watermarking feature that makes this view even more useful.

The Collage layout uses technology we originally used to display a collage of your friends and family’s photos during the Phanfare 2.0 days, when we added a bunch of facebook-like social networking to Phanfare. The social networking is now all gone. If you are looking for social networking, you will find it in the facebook aisle.

The collage is dynamic and looks different each time. That means that if you don’t like, just refresh it. But it also means you can’t really plan exactly how it looks. That’s ok with me. One of the aspects of Phanfare that I have always personally liked is that we do a good job of showing your content in attractive ways with a minimum of effort on the part of the author.

Here is what the collage looks like.

Journal layout is a style that I have liked all the way back to 1993 when Phillip Greenspun used it in his Travels with Samantha series. Yeah, that dates me a bit.

Journal layout really is a blogging style, but you get all the Phanfare goodness along with your travelblog. You get our slideshows, ability to download fullsize originals and merchandise integration.

The new Filmstrip Layout optimizes your viewing experience to see big photos. That is what it is best at.

We changed the Hybrid layout in this release. We redesigned the layout to avoid having a menu on the right. This significantly improves the display size of images on laptops where you are space constrained. Instead the functionality previously in the right menu pops up over the image. Historically, we have optionally offered this type of display in the past but removed the feature at one point. Now it’s the only way of showing your images in Hybrid layout. We think it’s superior.

Hybrid layout now also offers the option of non-square thumbs. Personally, that’s not my taste, but there are those who prefer it.

iPad Support

All our new layouts have been optimized to display on the iPad. This may be quick to write but it was not quick to do. Many of our layouts include a large number of images simultaneously on the web page, sometimes even dynamically brought in. The iPad is memory constrained and we had to go back and really optimize the dynamic presentation layer to be stingy with memory usage.

Slideshow Support on iOS

We created a slideshow experience for the iPad and iPhone that runs without Flash. Again, looks easy (hey, the slideshow works again!) but was actually a rewrite of our existing Flash-based slideshow. The slideshow supports photos, sections and music but does not yet support video.

You can get to the slideshow from an iPhone. On the iPhone we have a mobile-optimized version of your site. That version has a smallish link to the HTML 5 slideshow. The slideshow displays very well on the iPhone 4, which has twice the memory of the shipping iPad.

Android devices show the Flash slideshow (with videos).

New Table of Contents Layout

We previously had two table of contents layouts: Large Thumbs and Hardcover Book (Phanfare Classic). We added new layout called “Full Width Thumbnails” that looks like large thumbs but does not have any featured images.

The release notes also reveal a few other small features.

This is a big release and we hope you like it. Let us know in the comments or join the Phanfare discussion on facebook.

One fear I had was that the TomTom app would require good cell service to be useful. After all, ATT can be spotty and Hawaii is a challenging cell environment with volcanos that tower thousands of feet above the shore. The TomTom app works even when there is no cell service. The entire US map set is downloaded on the device (over a GB).

But cell service does make the app better. The best and easiest way to set a destination is to search near your current location with Google from within the app. That part will only work when you have cell service. You can still enter an address or find common points of interest with no cell service, but Google makes searching much easier. In fact, searching with Google is so much more functional than entering addresses or POIs using a Garmin that often when operating the Garmin, we obtained addresses from our smart phone anyway. Integration makes sense.

The app works even when the phone is sleeping or when you are using a different app and the TomTom app has been thrown to the background. This is important for battery life, since you can sleep the display. We have a car power cord that we use when navigating though.

Since we lack a dashboard or windshield mount for the iPhone 4, we are more dependent on the voice prompts, which are excellent. To be fair, since I am here with the family, we have a dedicated navigator in the passenger seat, which makes seeing the GPS as the driver less important.

My biggest gripe with the TomTom app is that there is no way that I know of to tell it to stop navigating. Hence, you have to go back to the home screen, double tap the home button to bring up the iPhone task manager, and explicitly kill the app when you are at your destination. Otherwise, the TomTom app keeps giving you directions even when the phone is back in your pocket!

Accuracy of the GPS is adequate enough that the TomTom rarely reroutes due to confusion over which road we are on. These spurious rerouting events might be due to map mistakes or GPS errors. My Garmin Nuvi seems to reroute with the same frequency.

I also have a Verizon Droid X with me and sometimes run the navigation systems side by side to see differences (don’t worry, I am not driving when doing this). The Droid X does require cell service to navigate, at least to get the initial map set over the air. But since the Verizon service is better and CDMA carries further, we did not find a single place within Maui or the Big Island where there was no Verizon service. Even at 13,000 feet on the top of Haleakala, where the iPhone 4 reported “No Service” the Droid X showed service. Hence, on Verizon, the built in over-the-air-assisted navigation may be good enough. And with Android, turn-by-turn navigation is built in, no extra app purchase required (expect Apple to address this within 12 months).

I am very pleased with the overall performance of the iPhone 4 as a GPS device. With the TomTom app I no longer need my Nuvi and with the Geocaching app, I no longer need my Garmin GPS Map 60 CSX (although still use it for longer hikes).

If you are an iPhone user and travel a lot, the TomTom app is a good value (although at $49, it is one of the most expensive apps out there) and will assure that you are never without turn by turn navigation. And you get to lighten your bag by leaving home the dedicated GPS.

When you transfer photos from Phanfare to Facebook, the face tags are retained. On the Facebook side, the photos are tagged with the Facebook profile of the person in the photo so that Facebook’s very efficient system of notifying a person when he or she appears in a photo works as usual.

So why bother doing people tagging when Facebook already offers it? We view Facebook as being a great way to share photos and videos with your extended network. We don’t think we can do that part better.

We view Phanfare as your organizer in the sky for all your photos and videos. As such, you need good tools to organize your collection and face tagging is a terrific one.

Once your collection is on Phanfare, in full-resolution glory, we want to give you ways to use it however you please on the net. And unlike Facebook, Phanfare stores the original photos and considers you to still be the owner of your own data. Facebook, because it’s ad-supported, takes greater liberties with your data and has a terms of service that grants them a perpetual license to anything you upload.

At Phanfare, you are an owner, much like owning your blog. At Facebook, you are a renter.

Personally, I store all my photos and videos on Phanfare. I share most published albums with close friend and family (the only people who might possibly have an interest that matches my prolific production of media). Every once in a while I push some photos to Facebook to keep my larger network up to date on what’s new in our family’s life. And now when I transfer the photos, they are properly people-tagged!

The iPad does not yet run iOS 4.x. That is coming in November according to Apple. We have already tested the features on the iOS 4 beta on an IPad. Works great.

Using a camera connection kit you can import photos and videos to your iPad, bulk import them into Phanfare and then organize right from your iPad. In the background the fullsize original images and videos are synched to the Phanfare service. Imagine being on vacation with nothing but your iPad and being able to dump your SD camera to your iPad and then back up and publish your photos through Phanfare while on the go.

This new iOS release has some other features that we think you will really like:

• Secure mode. To make any changes to your account, your password is required. I call this Kid Mode. You can hand your phone or iPad to your kid and not worry about them deleting or editing your photos.
• Multiple songs per slideshow. Add more than one song to a slideshow. This has long been supported within Phanfare but not from the iOS app.
• Tap & hold to move a photo within an album on the iPad.
• Better laid out controls in full-screen image detail mode. You can swipe through your photos and hide and unhide photos directly from the full-screen mode.
• Transfer to flickr and facebook from iPad. This feature has been in the iPhone version for a while.

Let us know what you think of the new version of the app. We think it gets you one step closer to being able to primarily manage your photo and video collection from your mobile device.

We now properly detect and warn you when you are trying to upload photos or videos that are already uploaded. This is nice little feature. It means that when an upload fails or you need to restart it, you can just select everything again and we will sort out what remains to be uploaded.

Uploading was also made more robust. We detect a variety of errors and automatically retry. Overall, the uploading experience should be better.

Duplicate detection is implemented for the Flash (MyComputer) and Java uploader.

We also enhanced the slideshow music uploader for the Phanfare web organizer. It allows sorting and searching your current collection. Before, you needed to tediously scroll through the whole list to find stuff.

We now support music collections that are not on you main drive. This was a long-standing annoyance.

Aside from those features, we fixed a variety of other nits and bugs.

That’s at least four times the world-wide average for smartphone adoption and points to Phanfare customers generally being better educated and having higher household incomes than the average consumer.

We asked Phanfare customers to tell us what type of smartphone they carry. The iPhone was more popular than the RIM Blackberry and Android devices combined, with 49% of Phanfare customers reporting they carry an iPhone. This does not even include the number of Phanfare customers who carry non-cellular iOS devices like the iPod Touch, or the iPad, which we excluded in our definition above.

Android and RIM Blackberry were tied at 20%. Palm WebOS (Pre) had a dismal 3%. Symbian barely registered at 1%, probably showing the US bias in our customer base.

Note that Windows Mobile is stuck in other. Windows Mobile deserves its own category but they have so little mindshare in our heads that when we created the survey, we forgot to add them as a named category!

Our intuition has been that the Phanfare demographic was the exact group of people who buy and like Apple’s high end products. This data would seem to confirm that, with the caveat that our bias toward supporting iOS might cause some self-selection in terms of who our customers are.

The iPhone is more than twice as popular as Android or RIM with the iPhone only available through AT&T in the US. Imagine what the statistics would be if there was a Verizon iPhone.

All this month, we are doubling that offer to 40%. Hence, if you refer a friend to Phanfare Premium, the friend gets a discount of $39.60 off their first year subscription of $99 and you get $39.60 in Phanfare credit.

If you refer a friend to Phanfare Pro, the friend gets $79.60 off their first year subscription of $199 and you get $79.60 in Phanfare credit.

There is no limit to how much credit you can earn.

The fine print: Your friend must sign-up for our free trial in September 2010. To give you the credit, your friend must enter your email or your special referral code at signup or payment.

If you are a Phanfare customer, you special referral code is shown here.

With our new search, you can quickly get a filtered list of albums, sections, and images that contain search terms. It’s full text search. We search all the Phanfare metadata including image captions, image filenames, album descriptions, and section descriptions. As we add metadata, we will include it.

The new search functionality is right at the top of your web organizer. It looks like this:

The Phanfare PC client and the Phanfare iPhone client also benefit from the fast search.

Fast search involves background periodic indexing of your account. Hence, it takes a little while before content you add in any given session will appear in search. The exception to that rule is the PC client, which does a local search backed up by a serviced-based search.

Phanfare web abums also benefit from fast search. The search box is in the top right hand corner under the little magnifying glass of each Phanfare site. We never emphasized it previously because frankly it was too slow to be useful on large accounts. No longer. Now it’s very speedy.

Also, it’s important to mention that our search does not return results across Phanfare accounts. With Phanfare, you have a private collection and a personal website. Each Phanfare site has its own search, and each Phanfare library has its own search.

Android was accepted by incumbents precisely because the carriers and handset manufacturers were afraid of Apple’s momentum. Motorola, Samsung, and LG needed to figure out how they were going to respond to the iPhone. Google offered their Android OS for free and offered ad-split revenue to carriers and the deal was done. But it was a deal with the devil because the Android handset manufacturers as a group are not making much money. Apple took their profits.

What Google needs right now is for Apple (or someone else) to innovate in TV. Then, maybe, the incumbents will be receptive to Google’s advances. Apple is working on such innovation with their rumored new iTV box, which will provide an application platform that will likely run existing iOS apps. Nevertheless, as Tim Cook has said, Apple believes all these efforts might be marginal until the technology is integrated into the TV set itself, something he claims Apple does not want to do (until the day they do it).

Traditional disruption, described in the Innovator’s Dilemma, is about a cheaper technology sneaking up on incumbent players who are focused on serving their best customers – customers who find the performance of the cheaper new technology to be unacceptable. As time progresses, the new technology matures to the point where it performs acceptably for the mass market, and the market moves to the disrupter.

TV is ripe to be disrupted. It’s expensive for consumers. But you have to remember that you can’t make TV better. According to Nielsen, Americans already watch more than 35 hours per week of it. Watching HD TV over FIOS with a Tivo on a 52 inch Samsung LCD TV is near nirvana. You can only make TV cheaper.

It’s not likely that Apple will disrupt TV by making it cheaper. As the premium provider, they nearly always focus on making things better, not cheaper. Apple did not disrupt cell phones in the traditional sense by making them cheaper. What they did is introduce such a compelling innovation from a user experience standpoint that the least price sensitive, most profitable part of the market moved to the new technology. And then Google’s Android offered a low-cost good-enough alternative to feature phones that offered similar benefits. That’s par for the course in the technology world. What is unique about the iPhone story is just how fast the market is transitioning to smart phones and how rapidly all the profits moved to the early leader in that technology.

Long story short, Google is not going to have much luck with Google TV unless they can offer TV for less for consumers. I think Boxee has the better approach there. That’s traditional disruption. Boxee is a mediocre experience at best today compared to FIOS attached to a Tivo with an HDTV, but it’s free.

Cablevision’s best customers are not asking for low-def TV with fewer channels, constantly shifting line-ups and mediocre picture quality. And even if Cablevision sees the Boxee threat, they don’t want to give up their rich subscription revenue business to answer it. But each year Boxee will get better. And if Joe sixpack walks into a Best Buy and is told that the Boxee integrated Vizio TV in the corner does not require a cable subscription and will save him $1200/year, he will likely take the offer even if that TV offers a slightly worse experience. And that will be the end of the TV franchise as we know it.