Paul Lopez Unwired

Last week HTC launched their latest Android device, dubbed the Hero. In addition to supporting multi-touch Flash Player 10 content, the Hero has a new UI layer called "HTC Sense." Among other things, it allows the use of widgets to bring information up the UI stack, like Twitter or other applications. It has similar behavior to the Palm Pre in this respect, allowing more end user customization. From a business perspective, it is strategically valuable to separate the user experience from the underlying operating system. That way, HTC can choose to change out Android for Windows Mobile and HTC Sense will still look the same. However this begins the fragmentation of open source code that could disrupt a fledgling ecosystem. For one thing, users would need to wait for HTC and the carrier to release updates. Google Android has made strides last year at the expense of the more prolific mobile OS, J2ME. Both Windows Mobile and J2ME variants suffer from a high degree of code fragmentation. J2ME is slowly dying and MIDP3 is way too late to make an impact. Apple got it right because they control the device and the OS, not to mention making app discovery and payment seamless and carrier independent. Developers will still need to maintain multiple versions of popular applications for Smartphones. We need a stable Android in order to achieve break-through market traction and avoid the developer frustration experienced with J2ME.

The Apache Hadoop Core is an open source platform enabling developers to write and run applications across clusters of commodity computers and process vast amounts of data. As a primary investor and developer of Hadoop, today Yahoo released their own tested distribution of the code that powers their search engines, ad systems and webmail services. There is a growing move toward design patterns that leverage the parallelism inherent in distributed systems such as Hadoop and Google's MapReduce. Applications can be developed on single servers then deployed on massively distributed cloud infrastructure without knowing the details of such distribution. Once these applications are deployed they can act as their own service provider to other systems. Indeed we see that scenario with Amazon's EC2 (with native Hadoop support), IBM's Blue Cloud Initiative and Google today. This type of database is not a relational engine like Oracle or SQL Server. Hadoop enables large scale data mining for useful applications such as fraud detection and rich media indexing. I think this release is significant because it allows developers to take advantage of all the work put in to improve Hadoop over the years. Yahoo's change log file has over 8,400 lines and contains a wealth of knowledge gained by real production experience. Can Yahoo gain cloud credibility by giving it away? I think so; it gives everyone a living benchmark.

Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens, the creators of Google Maps, trotted out a first look at their latest development, Google Wave, at the I/O developer conference last week. The audience gave them a pass on a few mishaps, but overall the new application was quite impressive.  Wave introduces new concepts in communication by thinking of conversations as container objects where you can drag and drop people, threads, links, documents, images and even robots that enable the content to instantly appear on connected clients over the Internet. Wave is written entirely in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT "Gwit"). The developer codes in Java and the tool converts to HTML5 & Ajax automatically. For developers, Wave stores updates to UI state in the local XML of your gadget. Then Google transmits that state over the network where the other instance of your gadget updates in real-time. Google estimates only 5% of the code needs to be adapted for mobile device browsers; most of which involve just a layout change. Wave removes the structure found in email replies by creating a hub of conversation trees where users can chime in at any level, playback what they've missed and leave replies for others to see. There is even support for Twitter using Twave to merge wave posts to and from the popular micro-blogging platform. My main concern is the amount of network traffic generated by hundreds or thousands of users in a real-time, collaborative web application. Another open issue is federated identity; Google requires users to have an account to access any of their applications. OpenSocial gadgets will be supported natively in Wave and I expect to see more consolidation in the social web authentication space this year. No wonder Google was quiet about Twitter acquisition rumors, they've got bigger ideas.

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing is the #1 spectator sport in the United States holding 17 of the top 20 attended sporting events. Studies have shown an extraordinary awareness of corporate sponsors in the sport in terms of consumer accuracy and recall. According to a Madison University study, 51% of the fans agreed that, when they buy a NASCAR sponsors' product, they are contributing to the sport. And more importantly, 47% of fans agreed that they like a sponsor's brand more because it sponsors NASCAR. I think the same thing can happen with the iPhone. Mobile advertisers are writing inexpensive iPhone applications that attract more user interaction than static display ads do. According to Greystripe, users interact with an iPhone ad nearly 14% of the time versus an online banner ad that garners less than 1% interaction. That's an order of magnitude difference. With over 20 million iPhone users; the audience reach has achieved critical mass. AdMob claims over 78 billion global impressions served and the iPhone OS holds over 50% of that total. There is a cool NASCAR Live iPhone application available but I think there is a bigger opportunity. New event marketing sponsorships that bring in consumer experience with big dollar brands via their iPhone device could help fund development and mobile industry growth for the entire category.

Warren East, CEO of ARM Holdings says there will be over 10 ARM-based Netbooks on the market by year end. That puts a lot of pressure on Microsoft to port Windows to the ARM processor, or does it? Here's the dilemma. If Microsoft ports to the ARM, Intel could optimize x86 CPUs like Atom for Linux (and Android). Even though Microsoft has embedded versions of Windows for kiosks & cash registers, it's not clear to me the ARM processor could handle a scaled down version of Windows. Not to mention how it would perform against a lightweight Linux ARM implementation. Intel wins either way. Apple's not playing this game; they've segmented the processor platform of the Intel MacBooks from the iPhone. They will most likely develop their own MPU/GPU combo chip as I've discussed here before. Microsoft should stay the course and stick with Intel. 

The ingredient digital ink for Kindle, E Ink, is working with Plastic Logic to develop a reading tablet to display books, newspapers and magazines. Many content owners in the industry view Amazon's middle-man role as unfavorable in that they set the pricing and the layout of content for the Kindle. Since the early 2000's, firms producing the reflective layers of the nanostructured films of titanium dioxide that create the solid white background have come down the learning curve. This process improves reflectivity and contrast while eliminating the need for backlighting. Innovations in bistable voltage have optimized power management. Newer displays, for example, can operate on very low voltage that only charges when the image is updating. Amazon commercialized this type of technology in high volume with the Kindle. Publishers complain that the Kindle doesn't allow for advertising and it is a poor substitute for the feel of pages - they would. Warren Buffet said recently he would not buy any Newspaper publishing company "at any price" because of the business model erosion. I see potential consumer confusion with the proliferation of these devices, especially if the industry takes different directions from Amazon, Apple, Sony, Gannett, NY Times and other publishers struggling to re-invent themselves. 

I recently did a Google Search on my name to find out what comes up. There is a Paul Lopez Airshows that comes up at the top of the list. This Paul Lopez is a nationally known stunt pilot and his airshow videos are widely available on the internet. His desire to fly at a young age prompted him to donate washing planes in return for flying lessons. He spent his entire life doing stunts in airplanes, like the MX2 shown here. I like airshows and Dallas usually hosts airshows quite frequently. I was saddened however to find out that he recently lost his life in a tragic airshow accident in Florida. The internet allows us to search out anything we can think of and I am often surprised what we discover along the way.

A WSJ article highlights recent discussions between Verizon and Microsoft to develop a new touch-screen multi-media device "in an ambitious effort to challenge Apple's iPhone." With Apple recently reaching over 1 billion application downloads, the bar is quite high for RIM, Google, Palm and Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Google prefer to stay out of the hardware design altogether. That makes sense because they are software companies. However, Apple has better control over the harmony between device and software. They recently hired AMD/ATI's CTO, Bob Drebin. A new CPU/graphics processor could be in the works under Drebin's direction utilizing talent Apple acquired from PA Semiconductor. Apple OpenCL is a specification that enables a single chip to do both graphics and computing. In chip-speak, it allows GPUs and multi-core CPUs to handle tasks like physical awareness & video rendering on a single die. Verizon seems set on retaining control by launching their own download store for a variety of applications and devices. I don't see them being too eager to introduce the device reported to be bigger than an iPOD and smaller than a laptop because it will have native WiFi & VoIP capability. Verizon is keeping their options open but they seem to be increasing subscribers fine without the iPhone ... for now.

When Facebook Connect launched last year, there was much criticism that still lingers today. Providing the status.get API method is not enough, they still keep everything in a locked box. A Wall Street Journal article says Facebook will be announcing new developer access to photos and videos, but I believe it will be something more. What we may see is access to the crown jewels of Facebook - Feeds and Shared Items. This would allow users to access their Facebook services from potentially a different site altogether - quite a risky idea. Twitter has taken a different approach from the beginning by opening core features to developers without requiring a customized programming language like Facebook FMBL or Facebook Connect. Most observers agree that Connect doesn't necessarily generate new users but increases the level of engagement with your existing ones. The value of opening up "Shared" is that Facebook enforces network location whereas Twitter does not. You could filter stories based on geographic location more accurately because "Dallas, TX" and "DFW" mean the same thing on Facebook but not on Twitter. We need to see how they open up Feed. The default privacy settings are too restrictive to be useful to developers unless it is set to "Everyone." This is a critical time for Facebook and its 200 million members; they could become just another service connection hub by accident.

With all the focus recently on social media and cloud computing, some might have missed recent developments in the next generation wireless network, LTE. Verizon announced at CTIA their new development center and one thing I find interesting is the fact that the operating system choices will have to collapse for 4G. Developers are still forced to choose between Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone, Qualcomm Brew and Symbian. Maybe what's needed is a mobile hyper-visor of sorts that will run managed code on any device, more on that later. The other thing that will trip us up will be the change in the economics of mobility revenue and profit opportunity. I believe LTE will require operators to abandon flat-rate, monthly unlimited data plans altogether - including wired. Time Warner and other MSOs got some backlash this year with their experimentation of metered broadband. Real-world bandwidth is nowhere near theoretical peaks (I expect users will get 10-20Mbps download links for LTE vs. the 100 Mbps advertised). Busy websites and network congestion happen. Spectrum is a shared and non-deterministic media. Combine this with operator backhaul capacity, device receiver power and cell configuration diversity and you have an industry marching to data caps, bandwidth restrictions and questionable service guarantees. Think about this easy example: when you are able to download data faster, you download more thereby triggering increased usage and reaching your data cap more quickly. Stacey Higginbotham had an excellent example of the difference in downloading HD video in a metered world where you thought you were saving money by not driving to Blockbuster!