Droid Does

I have viscerally stayed away from the iPhone, for all the shaking of the culture that it has done.You could argue this Third World guy simply could not afford it, and that is why. I have admired it but I have not taken the step. My tech startup is to do with the IC - Internet Computer - vision. A key part of it is a laptop like device that competes with both the PC and the smartphone to become the center of gravity in computing. So not going for the iPhone has been to eat one's own dog food, even if that dog food has only existed

Image via CrunchBase

so far in vision. But a browser-centric life and work style can feel like you are already living it. And if you spend as much time online as I do, when you get offline, you want to be offline. I am not much of a phone person as is. I have preferred digital communication: email, blog, Twitter, Facebook. Even digital phones carry analog baggage. Recently I have found a great use for my prepaid mobile phone. I tweet from my phone once in a while these days. You report on the world when out and about. You get a phone because you need a number for others to have.

But Droid has me excited. Android promises to deliver the smartphone for the masses. Steve Jobs is an icon, and I admire him a lot, but my democratic impulse takes me to the likes of Dell. Go where the masses are.

The iPhone has been a smaller desktop. The Android phones promise to be about web applications. Finally we are about to have smartphones for the masses. And that is not coming from the company that built the computer "for the rest of us."

Image via CrunchBase

A Big Week For The Mobile Web
And this past week was a big one for the mobile web. We got three big things we've needed badly:
1) A real competitor to the iPhone - the Droid
2) A scalable business model for mobile apps - in app transactions in free apps
3) A standard for broadcasting video (and audio) to mobile devices

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