it is very unlike Google to buy Super Bowl Ads, but that’s exactly what they did today. The Ad is very Google like in creativity.
February 7, 2010
HTML5 vs Flash
There seems to be a growing support for HTML5 as an alternative rich media platform to Adobe’s (almost) ubiquitous Flash. Google and Apple are leading this support. Apple’s new iPad doesn’t support Flash.
Jeremy Allaire, one of the people that helped create the Flash platform has a fantastic post on this topic.
I’m also often asked “Will HTML5 Video replace Flash Video?”. Posited as a winner-take-all, absolute, the answer is clearly no. But like the nuance of HTML5 vs. Flash on the Web, there is also a very nuanced and complex evolving landscape in the video format world.
On the PC/Web, video has gained enormous momentum as a fundamental media type for all content on the Web. This has largely been driven by the adoption of Flash Video, which has approximately 75% market-share for online video. For most web and content app developers, this is fine, it is a great run-time and offers an excellent user experience and Adobe has done a very good job keeping the platform contemporary with the most demanding needs of video delivery and quality.
It is the rapid emergence of hand-held devices, however, that is bringing this issue to the forefront. With massive growth in hand-held web browsing from smartphones, iTouch devices and the pending iPad product, this has raised a deeper issue for media publishers who are eager to have their content be accessible to end-users. In particular, it is the show-down between Apple, Google and Adobe over who can control video formats on these devices that is creating challenges. Again, this is not about “what is the right technical solution”, it is about the political economy of who controls the formats that in turn lead to owning downstream audience and monetization opportunities.
The basic idea behind HTML5 video is that there would be a common video format that could be placed and rendered into any compatible web browser, conceptually replacing the need for the Flash run-time to render video in browsers. But there are enormous challenges with this, some political, some technical and some based on audience behavior.
First, right now, there is a lack of common approach among browser makers on what format to use for the HTML video object. This lack of agreement represents a proxy for broader political battles. Apple promotes MPEG-4/H.264, which it uses for it’s device platforms. Microsoft promotes VC-1, it’s own standard video codec. Google has yet to fully weigh-in on what format to support, which leads me to speculate that they will soon introduce a new format, based on On2 VP8, but under a broad open source license to the format and technology. Firefox, with 24% share of the browser market, proposes to use the open source Ogg Vorbis codec.
Second, but related, is the raw reality of browser adoption and churn cycles, and the fact that online video publishers will only adopt standards that have extremely broad adoption. Until penetration rates consistently reach 80%, it will be hard for publishers to switch and adopt a single, new solution. It is more likely that HTML5 Video adoption will reach that critical mass on hand-held devices before it does on the PC/Web.
Third, and equally important, is the more practical issue of the massive industry-wide ecosystem support for Flash Video. From advertising formats, to business logic for the interaction of video with ads and analytics, hundreds of 3rd party technology companies who have built solutions around online video that are built on Flash, not to mention high quality design and authoring tools that sit at the center of a large labor market for Flash design and development; all of this creates inertia for Flash and a relatively high industry-wide switching cost.
But stepping back and looking at this specifically in the context of hand-held computing, where Apple is politically motivated to block the Flash runtime, it is apparent video publishers will be driven to build and operate solutions that leverage HTML5 Video on mobile and iPad browsing environments.
I think competition is always healthy as long as it doesn’t lead to too much fragmentation. HTML5, if it works well and gains wide adoption, will benefit everyone.
February 6, 2010
iPad on Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose interviews Wal Mossberg, David Carr and Mike Arrington.
February 5, 2010
Paypal supsends personal money transactions to India
Techcrunch reports:
PayPal isn’t working properly in India. eBay’s electronic payment juggernaut appears to be blocking personal transactions to or from accounts of India-based users. It is reversing personal transactions; transactions involving businesses are still allowed.
A reader checked in with us yesterday to let us know PayPal notified him that the company had stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India (full e-mail can be found below).
This does not appear to be an isolated incident: see here, here and here for more reports, although we gather commercial payment transactions are unaffected at this point.
Surge in fraud transactions to India? This is not good.
Carriers wary over India’s 3G auction
Indian Government will be licensing 3G spectrum in an auction. Indian Telcos are approaching this with fear and caution.
Delhi - Be careful what you wish for. When India announced plans to auction off licenses for superfast 3G phone service, the country’s mobile-phone companies cheered. It was August 2007, and their stocks were at all-time highs as more than 8 million new customers signed up every month. 3G, these companies thought, would surely make them richer, faster.
Now, after four delays, the auctions are likely to take place in coming months, perhaps as soon as March. The reaction of India’s mobile carriers? More fear than cheer. While the government still hopes to collect a total of $5.5 billion for four national and 22 regional licenses, a price war has driven calling rates to well under 1 cent per minute, slowing the industry’s profit growth and denting stock prices. Carriers will need cash to bid on spectrum, and building a nationwide network will cost each as much as $4 billion. “Operators need to be realistic and not overbid,” says Naveen Mishra, an analyst at researcher IDC.
The 3G track record doesn’t inspire confidence. In Europe, overbidding nearly bankrupted many operators. India’s state-owned BSNL, which the government allowed to launch 3G a year ago, now offers service in 300 cities, has just 700,000 customers, and has cut tariffs at least twice. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment, but its record doesn’t encourage rivals. “Now we have to spend billions of dollars on a network that 2% of the country will use?” grumbles a senior finance official at Bharti Airtel, the country’s leading carrier, with 116 million customers. “It’s not like everybody in a village is carrying a BlackBerry (RIMM),” adds the executive, who asked not to be named because Airtel’s official policy is that it’s eager to offer 3G to the Indian masses.
It will be great to have competition and innovation in 3G services available in India.
February 2, 2010
Unspoken truth about SMS
Email is free. But SMS is not. Both are bits of data transmitted over a network. Both cost almost nothing to the networks. But then why is SMS so expensive? Greed of the carriers, that’s why. US has one of the highest SMS tariffs in the world. No wonder it is not as widely used as some other parts of the world.
SMS is a total rip off says Sam Diaz.
Everyone knows that movie popcorn is one of the biggest ripoffs, right? I mean, really, how much does it cost to pop enough popcorn to fill that $6 tub? It turns out that movie popcorn carries a 600 percent markup.
Ouch. And yet it’s not the biggest ripoff out there, according to a report by CNNMoney.com. The biggest ripoff, by far, with a 6,500 percent markup, is… the text message.
Text messages themselves, according to experts, are just tiny blips of data being transferred to and from mobile devices and don”t even cost the carriers a full penny to process. Computer scientist Srinivasan Keshav, who testified on the matter in Washington last summer, is quoted in the post as saying that it’s actually closer to about one-third of a cent to deliver.
I don’t like regulations and government interfrence. But this is one area of exception where I would like to see some govenment action. If the SMS costs come down we will see tremendous innovation in its use for personal and business communications. You see a lot of innovation in SMS in places like India. I would love to see that happen in the US too.
Google Voice allows SMS to multiple recipients
One of the useful things in Google voice is the free SMS functionality. Now it allows you to send SMS to mulitple people at once.
Until now, sending a text message to multiple recipients required copying and pasting the message for each recipient.
To make this a bit easier, we just launched the ability to send a single SMS message to multiple recipients. Just click on the SMS button at the top of your Google Voice inbox, enter names or numbers (separated by commas) in the “To” field, write your message and click send.
Replies from each recipient will be threaded into separate conversations, so you can keep track of them in your Google Voice inbox. To prevent spam, we’ve set a maximum of five recipients per message.
Hmm, what took them so long?
January 27, 2010
Apple announces iPad
Steve Jobs unvelied apple’s much anticipated tablet computer - the Apple iPad.
After nearly a decade of rumors and speculation, Apple’s finally unveiled the iPad. It’s a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it’s running a custom 1GHz Apple “A4″ chip developed by the P.A. Semi team, with a 10-hour battery life and a month of standby. It’ll come in 16, 32, and 64GB sizes, and it’s got the expected connectivity: very little. There’s a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and optional 3G, as well as an accelerometer and a compass. There’s also a keyboard dock, which connects underneath in the portrait orientation, support for up to 1024×768 VGA out and 480p composite out through new dock adapter cables, and a camera attachment kit that lets you import photos from your camera over USB or directly through an SD reader. The device is managed by iTunes, just like the iPhone — you sync everything over to your Mac. As expected, it can run iPhone apps — either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen — but developers can also target the new screen size using the updated iPhone OS SDK, which is available today. The 3G version runs on AT&T and comes with new data plans: 250MB for $14.99 and an unlimited plan for $29.99 a month contract-free. Activations are handled on the iPad, so you can activate and cancel whenever you want. Every iPad is unlocked and comes with a GSM “micro-SIM,” so you can use it abroad, but there aren’t any international deals in place right now — Steve says they’ll be back “this summer” with news on that front.
It starts at $499 for 16GB, 32GB for $599, and $699 64GB. Adding 3G costs a $130 per model, so the most expensive model (64GB / 3G) is $829. The WiFi-only model will ship in 60 days, and the 3G models will come in 90.
There is one interesting thing in Steve Job’s announcement today. He sees apple as the worl’d leading mobile device company in the world. It is quite telling. The future of computing and internet will be centered around mobile. Steve Jobs wants apple to rule that future.
All the hype aside, I look forward to seeing the innovation this new device brings to the mobile apps area.
January 14, 2010
Power of SMS Reach
Haiti donations via SMS race past $5M mark.
Our company offers Alerts360, a powerful SMS platform that any organization can use to create and manage such campaigns.
One of the reasons text messaging is so popular is because it’s so simple. Anyone with just about any kind of mobile device can do it. And that’s why it was ingenious when the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the disastrous situation in Haiti following a major earthquake. So far, that program has raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, someone from the U.S. State Department confirmed
today.
As of the last update, the number stands at $5.2 million. Of that, more than half have apparently come from AT&T users ($2.63 million), the company told us today. If you’re still interested, simply text HAITI to the number 90999. A $10 charge will be attached to your next cellphone bill.
Travel Break
I am currently traveling for the next two weeks, so postings would be sporadic.