lecha

Wait. Why do you have to choose?

What's wrong with the following pattern: 1. build an HTML5 app 2. build a native app that embeds a Web control 3. package the app and HTML5 app together using application cache 4. distribute on AppStore

You get the a) offline support b) monetization c) distribution via AppStore

For the sake of argument, let's assume the analysis is off by two orders of magnitude (i.e. assume half of businesses will earn less than $70K per year).

Can anyone justify an investment in development of an iPad-only productivity software? Do you think a startup can raise capital based on such economics?

My takeaway: Selling AppStore apps/ads isn't THE business model. It should be one of the channels amongst others.

Why not use web base email, connecting via https eg gmail or hushmail?

That makes sense. http://trendly.com/ is their other product.

Anybody care to venture a guess why Twitter would buy them? It is surely not for their business. Is it really only HR acquisition? If not, how could Twitter use their tech?

I tried exporting to epub to read it on an iPad. Both Calibre (calibre-ebook.com) and www.epub2go.com stripped almost all layout information, making the result unattractive and very hard to read.

I ended up buying GoodReader for iPad (0.99c) so I could read the magazine in the form it was intended to look on paper. Recommended.

Thank you and congratulations to the team!

It is amazing how many parallels there are between industrial design and software design. In some way the two disciplines are indistinguishable.

Yet, the software industry culture tends to prefer designers with computer science background/training, rather than "proper" design background.

This headline reads like one for an Onion news story

Those thinking of building something like that should check out http://www.clearcontext.com/pro/ that adds this feature in Outlook.

This is powerful feature, but the demo example doesn't really give justice to it. There needs to be a good reason to use it. Resorting from name to size of the file it not it.

For instance:

- Filtering down to a small subset from a large set of visible items. It makes sense to use this effect in case the selected item's representation is zoomed or displays additional detail. The animation indicates that there's a relation between the selection and the larger set. It also gives a clue original distribution of the selected items within the larger set.

Example: Show all facebook connections groupped by country. Then select those that have a particular interest as a list. The animation would give you a clue about geo-distribution of people having the same interest. This clue is an additional information you could not see by simply showing the selection.

- Reordering (eg. promoting) a small set of items in a large set. The animation shows you how far the item travels when it is promoted.

Example: Display the list of tennis players according to their rank at after a given competition. When the user selects the different competition, the list is reordered. The payers who make big jumps attract more attention.

Strong stuff!

What about attachments? AFAIK attachments weren't part of the initial implementation of email.

Today though, emailing attachments to small groups is mainstream. This is what many people use as THE form of controlled document distribution and collaboration.

Will improving this aspect of email be the next evolution?

Nice.

Consultants and Job Seekers take note: instead of telling people what you can do for them, just start doing it.

This strategy to get hired is quite applicable to other professions.

Anyone has a link to the video recording of this presentation?

Prediction: Dropbox will enter a cloud platform race with a set of APIs in a bid to become a File System of the Web.

Good points, but SQL is 'only' a language, not a protocol. Servers still need to agree how to expose an HTTP API that could take SQL. Ideally such API would be RESTful.

The author focuses on document stores, but the same argument can be made to key/value stores.

It is time for NoSQL community to come up with a standard key/value API. Is anyone working on it?

As one commented said "JDBC came out ~25 years after SQL was created.". By today's standards 2.5 years should be about right time to expect a standard :)

Does this mean we should expect http://com./ http://net./ etc?

This reads like an Onion news story. If only it was...

Promising. Anyone care to summarize query capabilities?

Interesting approach. They have built a UI-less browser plugin that exposes new javascript API to your web app.

That gets me thinking about other possible browser plugins along those lines: - Expose the native filesystem - Fire an event when a USB device is connected - Or when email is received ...

Ah yes, thanks. Kindle slipped my mind. It makes sense now.

Kindle does have a potential to become a walled-garden ecosystem reminiscent to Apple. There's nothing Kindle wants more than to become an iPod of books and will very likely curb the Web experience on Kindle to suit its business needs.

"we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. "

The argument makes a lot of sense, but why is Amazon in this list? It is true that Amazon is in the war for control. But that war is for control of the data center, not for control of the web.

A nice point, but isn't this post a bit hollow? After all, you'd expect someone like Seth Godin to put forward a well-supported argument about a radically new approach (new hammer) and its benefits?

> Support for non-relational databases: Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant, MongoDB, Cassandra, Google Bigtable (AppEngine, #10192), Amazon SimpleDB, CouchDB, etc

Is the intent to create some-kind of common framework that will work with more than one DB? Or to somehow select/prioritize one particular DB and support that?

The biggest gating factor in making Kindle available internationally is having to partner with local wireless operator for connectivity. Availability of country-specific Amazon stores have little to do with it IMHO.

Note that txteagle model is to split revenue with a mobile provider. This means the agreement between txteagle and a telco with a completely different pricing scheme for SMS messages. USSD is another alternative.

From http://txteagle.com/faq.html

"Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) is a common protocol common to all GSM phones that enables services such as checking an airtime balance (dialing 144#) or topping up with an airtime scratch card (141#12345678912#). Because over 95% the Kenyan and Rwandan mobile phone markets are prepaid, subscribers are extremely familiar with USSD applications and, unlike SMS, there is no fee associated with its usage. (In Kenya, this has meant that balance enquiry events occur more often than actual phone calls!) USSD is also sessions based, as opposed to SMS which is store-and-forward, which means there is very little latency with interactive USSD-based services, making it an ideal platform for menu-driven applications such as surveys. In collaboration with MTN Rwanda and Safaricom, we are developing a USSD txteagle service that is scheduled to launch in both countries during the summer of 2009. "

Maybe my reaction was too brief for some, allow me re-phrase:

Web design is a fast-moving field and the topic of credibility and communication of web sites remains key. In this context, I question the 8 year old research as being the best valuable we can get. A lot of work is done in this area and our collective attention is better directed to state of the art.

It would be great to have a more up-to-date version of this research. Unfortunately it isn't on http://www.webcredibility.org/ -- the site referred in the paper.

http://www.useit.com/ is a good resource and they are others.

own management software, using boto (http://code.google.com/p/boto/)