A good portion of my foundational thinking about mobile computing comes from meetings that we had with Jeff Hawkins, back in the Palm Computing era.  Mr. Hawkins’ stories about carving a block of wood until it fit in his shirt pocket have stuck with me.  As the story goes, that block became the model for the early Palm Pilots.

That’s exactly the point.  Until we have some kind of implants that connect us directly to the data flow, I want the following things in my device (in order of priority, but these have pretty much all been show stoppers):

• It fits in my pocket — otherwise it won’t be with me enough to be effective.
• As a corollary to the above, it is light enough that I don’t mind packing it pretty much all of the time
• The software that I use runs on it
• It has a high bandwidth connection to the Net
• The UI is accessible for me
• It functionally replaces other things that I carry.  A few years ago my briefcase held a notebook computer, a cell phone, a PDA, a pager and a few kilograms of cords / chargers / cables.
• It lasts through, at least, a full day of normal use without recharging (my iPod touch can’t do this if the 802.11 radio is active)

My dream has always been to have one handheld device for most activities, along with, maybe, a netbook/ultra portable laptop that I could drag along if I planned to do heavy text entry (I’m fine with Graffiti, and I’ve come to quite like the soft keyboard on my iPod Touch).

Finally, getting around to my point, I’ll gladly spend whatever I have to in order to get a device that meets my criteria and runs on a reliable network.  I’m certainly not, however, going to spend several hundred dollars for something that’s inconvenient to carry, no matter how beautiful it is.  Beauty and functionality are useless to me if the device is sitting on my desk when I’m out and need to connect.  At that point, a tablet is about as useful as my first Mac 128K (long since recycled) would be.

As far as I’m concerned, the iPhone 3GS and the Google Nexus One are as close to my ideal device as we have right now.  Perhaps I’m just dense, but I don’t understand why the tablet is the subject of such breathless anticipation.  I’d much rather have Apple devote its considerable engineering talent to making the iPhone even better.  They’re almost there…

The real reason for this post is that I wanted to call your attention to an incredibly compelling essay by Jaron Lanier.  Apparently, the piece is based on an excerpt from his new book:  “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”

Mr. Lanier asserts, quite convincingly, that we’ve taken the wrong direction with the internet (perhaps by extension, apps, open source, etc.?).  I whole heartedly agree with his contention that, rather than sinking to the lowest common denominator of crowd sourcing, we should be encouraging, and significantly rewarding, innovation and creativity.

Personally, other than the random Tweet, I’ve significantly scaled back my participation in the ceaseless chatter because, as Mr. Lanier points out:

“…we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity…”

Later in the essay, he drives the dagger home:

“We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.”

I strongly recommend that you read this thought provoking essay.

I don’t have a ready solution, but I’m certainly working hard in 2010 to refocus on doing work that creates new things, applications and technologies, instead of incessantly adding my two bits to the valueless e-noise.

My thoughts follow along lines similar to the reasoning in John Boyd’s recent post:

“… the smartphone experience is rapidly becoming mass market and main stream and as that trend continues, people will want more choice, more hardware and performance. In short, in early cycles, Apple’s strategy of control is usually going to be superior but as a technology becomes mainstream, it fails.

We’ve seen the model for this in Apple’s early years, where people favored Apple over the PC. People thought Apple was unbeatable but they were eventually driven to the point where people started looking at the cash value on the balance sheet.

Eventually as people became comfortable with the PC World, they didn’t want to be controlled anymore. Even the least savvy technical users wanted more choice in hardware and applications as their comfort level rose.”

I love what Apple has accomplished with the iPhone, just like I loved my first Mac 128k (no hard drive, just the floppy).  However, I’m afraid that the challenge presented by the diverse teams contributing to the Android+hardware ecosystem will simply be overwhelming. 

The aforementioned HTC Passion, based on a 1 GHz Snapdragon, is just the latest example of how fast this juggernaut is moving.  With iPhone OS as a template, and the vast resources working on Android+hdw, the solutions will evolve quickly and will pass the “good enough” mark in very short order.  Given its relative carrier independence, Android+hdw will absolutely present a challenge to the iPhone hegemony.

“This prospective client wasn’t looking to hire TapBots for any development work, they were looking for confirmation that a development firm out of India did the coding on ConvertBot, a popular TapBots application. The client had found Trucid, the supposed coders of ConvertBot, on the Rentacoder.com website, a virtual cork board where companies can hang their business cards. Trucid quoted a sum of $2,400 for an application similar to ConvertBot. The only problem? TapBots designs and writes all of its applications entirely in house.

Curious as to just what was going on, Haddad decided to e-mail Trucid pretending to be interested in their services. In the e-mail, he requested information about the company and a list of examples of its work. It wasn’t long before Haddad received an e-mail back from Trucid’s Chief Marketing Officer explaining who the company was, what it did, and its experience on the iPhone platform. Sure enough, ConvertBot was on the list of the 14 apps the company had supposedly developed. In the correspondence, the CMO reportedly claimed that his company had worked on 14 iPhone applications, the majority of which were coded under nondisclosure agreements. The CMO did say that the company hadn’t signed an NDA for two of their contracted projects: ConvertBot and BillMinder. Those two apps are popular though, and look like jewels in a portfolio. Yet, as it turns out, neither application was touched by Trucid.”

This is sad, but not unexpected.  It reminds me of a story from my days as a rep for Chinese outsourcing companies, which I’ll get to later in this post.  First, I want to highlight the project quote:  $2.4k for something similar to ConvertBot.  Those of us that have been toying with the idea of doing contract app development had better be very frightened by this.  While we can talk all that we want about the quality and the real value of our work, the truth is that the folks at Trucid (no link — I don’t want to reward bad behavior) have set the price.  By the way, I checked on Elance and they’re quoting $15 per hour.  I love developing apps as much as anyone, but $15/hr isn’t much incentive to develop someone else’s stupid idea.

This is a good place to stop reading unless you really want to hear an embarrassing (at least to me) story about one of my past ventures.
 

We had a contract to do sales and marketing for a company founded by a very well known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was originally from China.  In the interest of making this a good story, without getting myself sued, let’s call this company “Phantom.”  Phantom had a beautiful office overlooking the south end of the San Francisco Bay, more than 100 employees working in a new building in the Shanghai Pudong Software Park (with an option on another floor and a commitment to build a whole new building in the park), along with a large operation in Dalian (>400 resources) [at least that was the story that we were given].  When I visited the Phantom Shanghai facility everything was bright and shiny, but there weren’t many people around.  Their president (he was based in their U.S. office) assured me that this was a sign of their tremendous success — almost all of their resources were onsite with clients.  About two weeks into the engagement, the wheels just came off.

Apparently, representatives of a large Japanese consumer electronics company that we were trying to win over were visiting Dalian.  Unfortunately, they decided to make an unannounced visit to the Phantom facility there.  They showed up at the correct address (prominently posted on the web site).  Sadly, the receptionist had never heard of Phantom.  She called the site general manager over.  He had heard of Phantom but told the Japanese visitors that there was no relationship.  The GM was telling the truth.  The people in Dalian were employees of another company that had previously been managed by Phantom’s founder.  He simply listed the facility, and counted the resources, to make Phantom seem more substantial.  There was absolutely no involvement with Phantom.

Shortly after this, the founder decided to shut the company down.  After the dust settled, I cornered the president to demand an explanation.  His only claim was that he had also been duped.  Needless to say, we never made a nickel.  They didn’t even cover the expenses that we incurred.

Counterfeit iPhone in China

I don’t know how I missed this.  Perhaps I’ve been too distracted by the bright and shiny “Droid” object.

According to a recent story in Fast Company,

“China Unicom will be running its own app store independent of Apple’s, so all the apps that western users have come to know and love won’t be available on the iPhone in China.“

That disappointing bit completely escaped me.  I wonder if this explains why we haven’t seen a single sale to China since the launch.  It certainly makes me much less interested in the iPhone roll-out to the Middle Kingdom.

Apparently, in China, it’s NOT “all about the apps.”

Image Credit:  iPhone Clone or Look-alike from China?

What is a string?

---

I am very new to the iPhone SDK. And I hear the word strings alot, but I have no idea what they are. Could some one explain to me what strings are?
Thanks!

Do we see another flashlight app on the horizon?  The best part is that some helpful members actually made an effort to answer the question.  Amazing.

I guess that you have to start somewhere, but…

As we’ve been pondering these imponderables, this “report” from Retrevo caught my attention.  From a business manager’s perspective, the money quote is:

… they [iPhone owners] use their smart phones more for activities like watching videos, checking sports scores, and texting and they even watch more adult material on their iPhones than BlackBerry owners.

That certainly sounds productive!  (I’m listening to Mötley Crüe on my iPod Touch as I write this.)

A cynic reading the Retrevo post might jump to the conclusion that iPhone owners are shallow, arrogant narcissists.  In fact, the post concludes with the following:

… sure paints a picture of a group of smartphone owners that “think different,” and another more down-to-earth, mainstream group of BlackBerry owners.

I was particularly struck by the final chart presented in the post.  Respondents were apparently asked to rank themselves with respect to several “coolness” characteristics.  I think that the self assessment is very telling:

… iPhone owners rated themselves higher as Intellectuals, Extroverts, and Media Buffs than BlackBerry owners

Source: Retrevo Blog: iPhone vs. BlackBerry Owners: Your Phone Tells All

With that in mind, I’m finally ready to get around to making a point.  The carefully crafted iPhone user experience is unparalleled for media consumption and gaming.  It’s in a class by itself.  The thing is, though, that Apple puts up a whole fortress of barriers to developers that want to build real solutions to business problems and make their software available on a range of mobile terminals.  Sure, you can hammer on your app to fit it into the Apple template (and you might even be able to get it approved), but why bother when you have so many more degrees of freedom and device choices with Android / Linux (unfortunately, I don’t know as much about developing for BlackBerry OS 5.0).  Until recently, the answer boiled down to 40M+ iPhones / iPod Touches, against pretty weak alternative hardware.  Perhaps this is starting to change.

• Spend a bunch of VC money
• Get a bunch of attention (remember eyeballs?).  It doesn’t really matter if we build anything useful
• Exit Rich! (some variation on IPO, or sell to someone greedy…)

Of course, this thinking was completely based on the “greater fool” rationale for business decisions.  Personally, I blame MS and their Hotmail acquisition.  If I had a dollar for every time that I heard someone say, “Microsoft paid $50 per subscriber for Hotmail, so we’ll be worth at least $100M!” I would be developing iPhone apps just for fun right now.

Anyway, as a humble Objective-C coder, I don’t think so much about exit strategies anymore.  However, Justin Williams recently made an announcement that, in a way, reminded me of the old days.  It seems that Mr. Williams has found that he no longer enjoys…

…building software for the iPhone because of the bureaucracy and infrastructure that surrounds it. I can build great software for the Mac without the headaches and bullshit of dealing directly with Cupertino and their AppStore.

While it’s certainly too bad that Mr. Williams is thowing in the towel, I’m completely intrigued by his exit strategy.  Apparently, someone else is so enthralled by the pot of gold available in the App Store, that they’ve purchased his apps:

I’m pleased to announce that BitBQ, also known as the corporate entity in front of Mr. Patrick Burleson (@pbur), has acquired both FitnessTrack and Emergency Information from my company Second Gear.

I don’t know Mr. Burleson.  Perhaps he has the Midas touch, but I can’t help thinking about the lessons learned from technology acquisitions during the silly period of 1997-2001.  I wish both Mr. Burleson and Mr. Williams the best of luck, although I suspect that Mr. Williams got the better end of the deal.

History note for those too lucky to remember: MS was reported to have paid roughly US$400M for Hotmail, which had around 8.5M users at the time of the acquisition.  (Source: Wikipedia).

The article is short on real data and long on anecdotes, but that’s OK.  Most of us made our decision to start developing iPhone apps based on anecdotes, right?  One of my favorites is the tale of Steve Demeter.  He made his fortune somewhat indirectly.  He took the proceeds from his app, Trism, and

“… bought Palm’s stock for $1.76 and sold it for $12″

Now, Mr. Demeter doesn’t have to work anymore.  However, I noticed that he has ported Trism to Android.  I’d probably do the same thing, if I had his resources.

Newsweek apparently conducted several interviews with developers, and reports that,

“… they describe an anxiety-wracked marketplace full of bewildering rules, long odds, and little sense of control over one’s success or failure.”

Rather than continuing to quote from the article and agreeing with each line, I’ll just encourage anyone who is considering iPhone app dev, or trying to decide how much time to allocate to the process, to read the article.  Also, follow some of the links.  The various anecdotes weave together into a pretty compelling case that the party is over.

As we’re thinking about this, it’s well worth our time to consider what some real experts, like Mike Ash of NSBlog fame are saying.

The bottom line for me is that, if the studs at the Iconfactory (creators of Twitterific and Ramp Champ) can’t make it work, the rest of us are toast.

“Where is the art?
This is so crass!!! If you developers were the least bit sincere, you’d never dream of putting an ad/link on the screen, let alone in the middle of it!!! So now, there is nothing meditational about this app!!! However, there could be, if you let it just be!!!”

This is transcribed verbatim, including the use of three exclamation points to punctuate each sentence.