Image via CrunchBaseI hope HTML5 is the biggest thing coming out of the impending Facebook conference. Facebook Messages was not the Gmail killer it was touted to be. And maybe Facebook's HTML5 push might be yet another whimper, but I hope not.
HTML5 done right could turn Facebook into a platform, it could get an operating system like reach. It already has a huge audience.
But then it is not just Facebook, the entire industry is moving full speed towards HTML5, not just Facebook. Adobe too. And pretty much everyone else. Apple. Google.
When the internet became mainstream every company wanted a website. Today every tech company wants HTML5.
Image via WikipediaI am not at all surprised that Adobe is getting into HTML5. It never was Flash versus HTML5 for Adobe, even when Steve Jobs suggested it was so.
The idea that you have to create one app for the iPhone and another for Android and a third one for Blackberry, and another for a Windows phone, not to say for the iPad, that is just weird.
New York Times: Hulu Is Said to Be Ready for an I.P.O.: Hulu, the rapidly growing hub for online television and movies ..... the company currently makes little in the way of profit..... plans to add a $9.99-a-month subscription service soon alongside its core advertising-supported business ....rival video-streaming services like Netflix .... its three-year history .... Hulu aimed to be a counterweight to YouTube and other free video sites..... Demand Media, a publisher of articles and video based on search engine inquiries .... features content from most major TV networks .... Hulu’s powerful content providers have pushed the company to offer a more traditional subscription model, concerned that its ad-supported business is not generating enough revenue
There is something to be said of subscription models, but having to rely on them too much tells me there has not been as much innovation with business models as there has been with technology.
Hulu has attempted to be an answer to the wild west that is YouTube. Although there has been some convergence as YouTube has done a much better job lately of the platform being able to respect copyright, and letting content creators make some money.
Video use will only grow online. And hopefully business innovation will happen. But mind boggling business innovation has not happened yet. We are still in the early stages.
In The News
New York Times: Dell To Buy Data Storage Company For $1.15 Billion: 3Par
Telegraph: Adobe Chief Shantanu Narayen Believes He Doesn't Need Apple Or The iPad: Apple, the $223bn (£143bn) big-hitter that is the world's second largest company ..... Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen began his career at Apple ...... . It's the future of mobile that's at stake here ..... Adobe has cemented its role as a partner to other technology groups in recent years, working with 19 of the world's 20 top mobile phone handset companies, including Motorola, HTC, RIM, Hewlett-Packard WebOS and Google, to bring Flash Player to their mobile devices. ..... Some 23 of the top 25 European companies, as measured by Forbes magazine, use Adobe products, as do 23 of the top 25 global banks and all the top 10 European banking groups. ..... nothing to do with technology and everything to do with business models .... We're mission-critical to the companies we work with." ..... Adobe Systems was this year ranked in the InterBrand survey as one of the top 100 brands in the world for the first time. ..... He grew up in Hyderabad, India ..... he began his career at Apple, then worked as a director of desktop and collaboration products for Silicon Graphics, before co-founding Pictra, a company that pioneered the idea of digital photo-sharing over the internet. ..... his mission is to make Adobe critical to the products of all digital content providers, as technologies converge in the next stage of the internet. Steve Jobs wants that as well, of course. Watching this duo fight it out promises to be fascinating.
Boy Genius Report: Motorola DROID Pro, World Edition And Tablet All Found In Verizon Wireless Systems:Verizon Wireless is gearing up to launch a barrage of Android handsets and devices
VentureBeat: An Atom Bomb Aimed At Intel: Smooth-Stone Raises $48M For Low-Power ARM Server Chips: which consume small amounts of power....data center computers, where energy use has become the biggest expense..... “Our goal is to completely remove power consumption as an issue for the data center. Imagine that change for companies with a large presence on the Internet”
TechCrunch: VCs And Super Angels: The War For The Entrepreneur: Publicly everyone gets along just great...... the disruptive force of a new breed of angel investors ..... Pick the wrong investor and you’ve closed the door on others...... Until very recently there was an established pecking order with venture capitalists. ...... the rise of the cheap startup. ..... Often there’s no need to go past an angel round of funding until it’s time to decide between selling and doing a big marketing push. ..... These angels are fast and nimble and they are hanging out with the entrepreneurs at events, incubators, etc. They are in the fray, while many of the old VCs remain above it all, waiting for the entrepreneurs to come to them, hat in hand. ...... Y Combinator, which has spawned some 200 plus startups in just a few years, could be considered the king of this ecosystem ...... McClure has a $30 million fund. Dixon has a $50 million fund. .... it’s easier for a good idea to attract the cash it needs
TechCrunch: Wireless Is Not Different. You Can’t Be Half-Open:the future of the Internet, the wireless Internet....There is no such thing as being half-open (it’s like being half-pregnant)..... The broad principles should be the same: whenever possible, all bits should be treated equally ..... Google’s and Verizon’s proposed rules ... would prohibit broadband providers on the wired Internet (like DSL, cable, and fiber) from discriminating against any kind of “lawful” Internet content or application over another. They also would prohibit wired broadband providers from taking payments to deliver Internet traffic from one Website faster than anyone else’s. ...... One man’s prioritization is another man’s discrimination.....Net neutrality does not mean that everybody gets to download an unlimited amount of BitTorrent movies onto their cell phones. It simply means that all bits are treated equally, even when they are blocked.
GigaOm: Foursquare’s Future Slowly Takes Shape:Foursquare wants more folks to use its application-programming interface (API), and thus build an ecosystem around Foursquare’s data..... bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of advertising. ...... if there is a possibility of retail outlets, such as J.Crew, using Foursquare as a beacon for flash sales. ...... 21st century equivalent of loyalty rewards .... Adding a reward to checking-in turns the somewhat frivolous activity into something more valuable. ..... a growing number of startups that are trying to reinvent what is essentially the coupons business ..... Everyone from Yahoo to Google has viewed local advertising (long the preserve of newspapers and yellow pages) with lustful eyes, with little or no success. ..... By marrying geo-location to behavior targeting and adding commerce on top, one can finally start to see some answers
Fortune: Google's Motives For Abandoning Net Neutrality: Google underestimated the public's desire for true net neutrality over both wireless and wired services ..... Google's PR department, from people I've spoken to, seem to have been taken aback by the reactions. ..... Google has products in development that are going to need even more support, from all carriers. ..... AT&T (T), T-Mobile and Verizon's next generation networks are LTE, which doesn't carry voice separately like traditional 3G networks. The carriers are going to have to use data in the same way that Vonage or Skype currently do, over IP. Packet prioritization is a must in this case. ...... Google will soon be its own ISP as well. ...... So when Google's interests were only in data centers, it was completely beneficial to be net neutral. Now that Google is moving out of the data center into your house with devices and OSes and even wires, the priorities are realigned. It would be realistic to expect their stance on net neutrality to realign as well.
.... we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer ......Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. ....... Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests. ...... why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. ...... Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system. ....... Apple has many proprietary products too. ..... Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. ...... Flash is the number one reason Macs crash....... Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. ..... Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices. ....... Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. ...... the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short..... Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
The Adobe Flash Player runtime was actually originally created as a technology for tablets with touch interfaces ..... For new content developed specifically with touch in mind, Flash Player 10.1 will provide a complete set of multitouch and gesture APIs. ...... Seventy-five percent of all video on the web is viewed via Flash Player, including videos encoded in the most popular codecs such as H.264 and VP6. ...... H.264 is a video codec (which requires a player), while Flash Player is a complete multimedia runtime that can play back H.264, among other codecs. ....... Flash Player 10.1 will include support for hardware-accelerated video playback across devices from mobile to desktop environments. ....... since Flash Player runs across platforms, all of the optimizations made for mobile will also benefit content on desktops, laptops, netbooks, and tablets when they run Flash Player. ........ The Symantec Global Internet Threat Report for 2009 found that Flash Player had the second lowest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed (which included both web plug-ins and browsers). This is significant when you consider that Flash Player is among the most widely distributed and used pieces of software in the world. ....... Flash Player is part of a rich ecosystem of both open and proprietary technologies. ..... The core engine of Flash Player (AVM+) is open source and was donated to the Mozilla Foundation, where it is actively maintained. The file formats supported by Flash Player, SWF and FLV/F4V, as well as the RTMP and AMF protocols are freely available and openly published. Anyone can use the specifications without requiring permission from Adobe. Third parties can and do build audio, video, and data services that compete with those from Adobe. ....... Flex, the primary application framework for the Adobe Flash Platform, is also open source and is actively maintained and developed by Adobe and the community.
Image via CrunchBaseI hope HTML5 is the biggest thing coming out of the impending Facebook conference. Facebook Messages was not the Gmail killer it was touted to be. And maybe Facebook's HTML5 push might be yet another whimper, but I hope not. 
