The United States of Google?

An article in Business Week by Jeff Jarvis thinks about different ways of running the government in the U.S. He has been to Davos and heard Gore and the Google founders talk about solving the energy challenge and see their different ways of attacking it.

Link

He refers to the book "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky. And in view of this his last comment is:

Google & Co. aren't taking over Washington. They're helping us take over.

7 lessons from Mozilla

Link:
Article in The Open Road.

Two noteworthy lessons - more in the article:

1.
Superior products matter. Apache, Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc. What's the common theme? "All are known for being best-in-class for users." If the code is weak, the project will be weak. Period. Open source is an accelerant: it either makes poor code die faster or great code thrive faster.

6.
Communities are not markets: members are citizens. It's therefore important to treat them like active, valuable participants in open source, not consumers thereof because, as Lilly notes, such citizens "don't just make products better. They make them what they are."

Maybe an example of the first lesson is seen in another article in The Open Road:

Firefox, Google's Chrome speed past IE, Opera

where they tested the speed of the various browser as measured by the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript test.

Deutsche Telekom spawns of cloud company

Deutsche Telekom spawns cloud vendor Zimory

From the page:

Part distribution strategy, part software development strategy (Zimory uses an array of third-party open-source code to build its service), open source is fundamental to Zimory. However, the model's magic is in connecting disparate computing needs and resources, which is a "proprietary" service that only Zimory will be able to manage through its cloud infrastructure. It's a very smart idea.

Even Microsoft agrees. It named Zimory to its select German incubator program.

Google moving to meet enterprise customers

Gmail grows up with offline e-mail access

This is important for enterprise customer so that they can read their email e.g. on a plain. Google now has off-line email as a Beta.

Reading Google's tea leaves

I'm very interested in the things Google do, and I follow them closely. I've written a short piece about this process called "Reading Google's tea leaves." The post both describes some of the things I do to keep track of Google, but I also analyze some recent tea leves indicating that Google is pointing its guns at the telecommunications industry.

A Store is Comming to a Phone Near You!

New term MAS: Mobile Application Store. Interesting article in Vision Mobile.

Here is a list of some of the MAS or efforts that plan to add MAS to their developer offerings:

• Apples iPhone AppStore is up and running with payment through Apple iTunes and developers get 70% cut.
  
• Google has a Market for Android where they now allow payment and promise 70% cut to developers. You choose the Payment Processor. Here is the Developer Distribution Agreement. Articles on Market in Rethink Wireless: Google to let paid-for apps into Andorid Marked, Android Market officially opens
  
• RIM is planning Blackberry Application Storefront to open in March and will use PayPal to process payments. It promises 80% cut for developers.
  
• Microsoft is planning an application store for Windows Mobil called SkyMarket. This is done in conjunction with upgrade to WM 6.
• Palm has created a Software Store that also deliver to Windows Mobile devices.
• O2 in the UK has a store named Litmus with a developer community. At present it seems to be web only but there are (probably) plans for an on-device version.
  
• T-Mobile plans a devPartner Community Store in 2009. At present it is just a developer community.
• Nokia Download! has exited for some time (since 2006) but not taken off... Why is shortly discussed in the article mentioned at the top.
• GetJar is a MAS, and rather successfull, but does not have an on-device store front.
• Handango offers InHand, an on-device storefront which features ratings, recommended and best seller apps. InHand can be freely downloaded from the Handango site and in some cases comes pre-loaded on handsets.
• mPortal offers a white label client-server product that combines an on-device storefront, application provisioning, aggregation of 3rd party application catalogs and integration with operator billing. Also known for having powered Disney Mobile’s on-device portal.
  
• Adobe is working on AppZone - or... Found little on the net and somebody else owns appzone.com...
  

Who is next to announce a store? And maybe I forgot some?

Apple also has MobileMe, that allows smartphone users to back-up, restore, sync and share data. Microsoft is planning something similar called Skybox and an Exchange version called Skyline. What are the others planning? Rethink Wireless on Microsoft to joins software store race. Are there others in the same game?

Google the phone company

I've written a short piece about Google the Phone Company.   Bjørn