Juixe Techknow

Philosopher George Santayana said that “those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.” Steve jobs who lived through the Personal Computer Revolution is set to repeat Apple’s fortunes in the Smart Phone Revolution. With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Apple took the lead in a novel mobile device segment, the Smart Phone. Prior to 2007, there had been a number of business class phones that at best emulated the desktop user experience in a hand held device but non had the traction to change the cell phone landscape. By 2007, the cell phone technology had dramatically changed that Steve Jobs was able to pack more computing power in an iPhone that ever before and he revolutionized the mobile user experience with touch screens. Apple later took another significant evolutionary step in what we consider a smart phone platform when the iPhone SDK was released to developers and the iTunes app store was made available to consumers. With years ahead it’s nearest cell phone competitor such as Nokia, Motorola, or Microsoft, and key patents under their name, and thousands of apps in their online app store, most pundits would have thought that Apple’s market share would in smart phones would be firmly cemented.

If the iPhone ecosystem were a country, it would probably be a little like China with a strong authoritative central government, some limited free enterprise, and tight censorship. Apple has a tendency to dictate what the customer wants, for example, the common Apple mouse still has one button while a typical windows will have on average 3 buttons and a mouse wheel. Apple has never been an open platform. Apple’s close platform has always been it’s Achille’s heal but also core to how Apple designs it’s products. With the release of the first Macintosh, the first commercially successful personal computer, Apple develop a technical and marketing lead to it’s rival computer makers. With the help of IBM, an open architecture was developed that over time was standardized to the de facto personal computer, this architecture developed over time to the modern desktop which might include a Intel chip, Microsoft Windows OS, and other off the shelf components. A closed platform will always little footing to compete with an open one, especially when hundreds of vendors provided alternatives to fit every possible need and price. Overtime Apple’s market share dwindled to single digits. But even with a very narrow market share, Apple has learned to be profitable, it knows it can charge a premium for beautifully designed products that simply work more often than they are infected with viruses or fatal crashes.

Even being an active participant of the Personal Computer Revolution, and having a front row seat as Apple’s close platform lost market share, Steve Jobs is using the same closed platform playbook with the iPhone and iPad product lines. This time, instead of IBM, Google is leading the charge with an open alternative to Apple’s iPhone. Google’s Android has been picked up by a large number of phone makers. There is a wide variety of Android phones in the market aimed a different consumers as opposed to the two models (iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4) of iPhone currently available from Apple. Google claims that at least 200,000 Android phones are activated a day. It is clear that history will repeat itself, and Android will eat Apple’s lunch, or at least take it’s market dominance. With market share comes developer’s mind share.

Apple has been previously before lit the fuse the set off a technological revolution. It first did it with the Macintosh which sparked the Personal Computer revolution and it has done it again with the iPhone with the smart phone industry. In both situations, Apple held a lead over it’s competitors but gave way because of it’s closed platform. In having a tight and stringent control over the iPhone, Steve Jobs has conceded market share to the Android platform.

It’s really hard to find really great iPad apps from the hundreds of thousands of apps available from the Apple iTunes appstore. I’ve bought a few apps that I’ve later regretted. In this post I’ll list the top five iPad apps, other than Twitter apps, that I love using on the iPad. I’m always looking for new apps to try out, if you have any suggestions, please feel free to list them in the comments sections.

Autodesk SketchBook Pro – My go to app for drawing a quick sketch for an idea, logo, or design is the Autodesk SketchBook Pro. It’s easy to use, has a nice selection of different brushes and patterns. One of my favorite features is the mirror, drawing one a line will produce a mirrored image of that line. I also like that the produced images can easily be exported at a high resolution. SketchBook Pro also supports multiple layers. There are few features I would like to add to this app. I’ve used images generated from this app in my Tumblr on many occasions.

Penultimate – Another favorite sketch app is Penultimate. This sketch app is a lot simpler and easier to use. Penultimate only has three pen widths and six colors to choose so I used this for rough sketches for ideas. The look of Penultimate feels like a Molskine notepad. Penultimate allows you to have multiple notebooks, each for a different project. You can export a page as an image or a notebook as a PDF document.

Amazon Kindle – I’ve had a Kindle since it was originally released and I have a lot of notes, highlights, and bookmarks for the Kindle ebooks that I’ve read. Even though I have a Kindle, the most common way I read Kindle books is through my iPad via the Kindle for iPad application.

Adobe PS Express – The Adobe PS Express is my favorite app when it comes to cropping pictures on the iPad. PS Express comes with a few commonly used photo manipulations such as cropping, straightening, rotating, and flipping images. It also has a predefined set of borders and filters to apply on your photos or image files.

Strip Design – Strip Design is a very simple iPhone and iPad app that allows you to create comic strip like panels. You can create a strip of one, two, three, or four panels. In each panel you can drop a different image. You can also add thought balloons and different stickers such as crazy looking mustaches or action effects.

Dragon Dictation – Dragon Dictation helps to transcribe to text what you say. This is really useful to record a thought and have it transcribed to text quickly. Dragon has good recognition, at least it has worked for me. I used Dragon Dictation when I want to jot down a idea quickly, then I emailed me the dictated text for final editing.

Hard core techies have been able to stream online content to their televisions for years! Even as far back as 4-5 years ago you could have streamed content through XBox and manage it through Media Center. I know some several folks that are using a general purpose Mac Mini connected to a TV to streamline video podcasts and movies purchased on iTunes. The smart TV will be big in the next several years, especially since all the major technology players are heavily investing in it. Google recently announce Google TV, Yahoo! has been working for years on enhancing television viewing experience with TV widgets.

You can find internet ready connected televisions from your favorite brands at retailers like Costco and content delivery companies are partnering with anyone they can to provide on demand streaming of video content. Netflix is going through a metamorphosis process where it knowns it’s business of sending out DVDs in little red envelopes is starting to shrink ad it has partnered up with console maker Nintendo and Microsoft to provide movies and shoes on demand.

Apple wants to do to the movie and television business what it did to music, control it from top to bottom. Apple came to dominate the online music sale by a two prong approach, through iTunes music store and iPod music player. To move into a delivering movies and television shows online it needs to develop a similar approach. Apple needs both the online retail side and the television set-top box. With a mix of hardware and software, Apple can lock down to platform and lock out out players like it has in App Store/iPhone mobile environment and the iTunes/iPod music space. If Apple can get into your living room by making the easiest possible device that can stream music and movies and apps to your television it can push a lot of product.

Apple has a track record of making seamless products in terms of industrial design and user experience. This is their strength, and compared to other products in the market Apple TV will be a more attractive choice, especially for those that don’t want to read forums all day to make things work together. The only forceable set back is that people are really interested in another set-top box! Most households already have a game console, cable box, blu-ray player, and what not connected to their television set. The future of Apple TV is to make the television with the necessary hardware and software built in to connect with with it’s iTunes store. Apple has plenty of experience making hardware, it currently makes a beautiful 27-inch iMac. I could see Apple easily adding a 32-inch and 40-inch to their product line. Apple won’t just make another television, it won’t be a Vizio. I could see an Apple branded television set, maybe an iMac HDTV, with built in app support, touch enabled, online streaming, and more.

The future of the Apple TV is not as a set-top box, it’s the as a iMac HDTV! In addition to touch, it would need a new revolutionary user interface, per se gesture base a la Minority Report. This is why I’m getting an Apple TV, not because of what I can do now, but what it will be in a few years out.

Blippy is a site that allows you to automatically share the purchases you’ve made and the products you’ve bought with friends and followers. The way Blippy can detect products and services bought is by monitoring the transactions made on a given credit card. Blippy has been around for a while and many of the questions concerning privacy and security have already been asked. Blippy is just the next logical conclusion of all the information we make public on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. With some common sense, extra precautions, and the correct privacy settings, people feel more and more comfortable posting about the products they purchase, the locations they visit, and their private lives including relationship status and political views. Blippy is one of few companies in the social commerce web space and it complements with the strategy at Amazon that I think Amazon should make an offer of no less $100 million dollars to purchase Blippy before it gets snagged up by a competitor. The social commerce space has just been validated by Apple Ping. Apple Ping complements Apple iTunes by being a social commerce community around music and possibly other entertainment media such as movies and books. Similarly, Blippy can complement Amazon by being a social commerce engine for the products sold by the online retailer giant. Blippy also compliments the large amount of product reviews Amazon has amassed and can easily be turned on for all the users accounts at Amazon with little effort, because essentially every Amazon user has already entered one or more credit card.

More and more companies will have niche social applications around their core business, right now news networks to car companies and everything between are using social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but they will soon ask for more and more control over users data than these sites provide. Instead of being a Twitter or Facebook client to post likes and status updates, large ecommerce sites will develop their own social niche sites around their core competencies, like Apple Ping. Just like Apple has released Ping as a social engine for discovering new music, Amazon needs a similar product to compliment it’s online retail business and it’s social media strategy. The social graph provided by Blippy augments well around the data Amazon already has, such as previous purchases, reviews, and the information to generate recommendations. All things being equal, Blippy adds more value to Amazon which sells product than to Facebook that which impressions.

I’m not an insider, investor, or friends with anyone at Blippy or Amazon, but I just feel that these two businesses compliment each other very well and can take social networking to the next level into social ecommerce. When ecommerce goes social and viral it will mark the beginning of ecommerce 2.0.

When it comes to Apple you have two camps, the fanatical Apple fanboys and the Apple haters. The divide in between these two camps is wider than the digital divide and when it comes to real points both sides usually get them wrong. Since Apple announced iTunes 10 and its social commerce component Ping, I’ve seen this debate flare up again with new FUD and fodder. The first misconception between Apple fanboys and haters alike is that Ping is another social networking site. Ping is very much social, but it is not a networking or a site. Ping is a social commerce component integrated into iTunes via the iTunes desktop application and the iOS iTunes app available for the iPhone and iPad. Ping is a game changer, just like the Apple App Store was before that, and the iTunes before that, and the iPod before that. Ping is a game changer and tech pundits and press are trying to make it out with old rules from previous games/products, that’s their first fallacy. It is clear that one will use Ping to contact an old high school buddy or stalk an ex, like they would on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Ping is all about social commerce, not social networking.

Unlike Facebook, that is forced to make money by extorting advertiser to buy ads to their own Facebook Pages, or forcing application developers in using their Facebook currency that is as worthless as a $10 billion Zimbabwe bill, Apple Ping is not about connecting you to friends and family and it sure doesn’t care about your social graph, it care about your consumption graph. Ping won’t compete for users with other social networking sites at the same level that Facebook does with Google Buzz or MySpace. For the most part, social networking sites like Facebook aim to be nothing more than a time sink, and they have grown in large part by social games oblige users to poke and send virtual lasagna to each other. Ping complements the users iTunes experience when they are already on iTunes looking for new music. This is evidently clear especially when you look at how social networking sites like Facebook uses numbers to describe their growth. Facebook describes their growth by counting the number of users that were active in a given month and trying to track the average number of hours a user is on Facebook. Apple tracks its growth by the number of products it has sold. Facebook is designed to simply waste peoples time and have them click on clicks, and Apple designs products that appeal to users.

I want to be clear about the following fact, especially since it is what most Apple haters get wrong. Apple does not need to be the marker leader to make the most money!!! Even though Apple has seen a growth in its market share in laptops, for example, it still has a small slice. But with double digit margins, it means it can sell less product and still make more money than commoditized competitors like Dell or HP. Apple has played this card well before, for example it is choosing a similar approach in the mobile space. It would rather have a small market share, and simply have a better profit margin and more control over its products. Unlike Facebook, Ping doesn’t need market share to be profitable. For example, Facebook requires millions of impressions to make a buck or two on ads.

In its current release, Ping reminds me a lot more to the first generation iPod than the iPod Touch. Currently, Ping feels clunky, is sparely populated, doesn’t have enough bands listed, has a ton of spam, doesn’t support music or apps, etc. At this stage, Ping is still lacking many features to make it comparable to what we expect from a social networking site. For example, when it was released numbers where not formatted with a comma for values larger than a thousand. This issue was fixed within a day of release. I would also like more personalization of my profile page, the ability to add my homepage URL, my other social networking sites, etc. Basically Ping needs a lot more polish, but I’ve heard that Steve Jobs has done that once or twice before for a new revolutionary product line.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If developers think that QA is going to find all their design problems, they are doing it wrong.
• Code wants to be dynamic.
• Unlike what it sounds like, Extreme Programming isn’t a spectator sport where you jump off a ramp with your favorite IDE.
• The web needs an open standard API for user badges and achievements.
• Social network sites should adopt a open standard API for user badges and achievements!
• The user interface made me do it!
• Show me the money, show me the data.
• Technology will date you, as in it will give away your age, like if your used a floppy vs a thumb drive vs neural memory implant..
• I’m sure Hallmark has a card for that, to show our appreciation to the QAs in our lives.
• The meek shall inherit the earth, the geek shall inherit an earth simulation on some social virtual game running on the cloud.
• Can you debug dreams?
• Men are digital, women are analog.
• Refactor yourself!
• Trust No Technology

Team Leadership

• Good things come to those that make them happen.
• Cut out the 20% from Pareto’s Principle from your process.
• Follow your dreams and you will be your own leader!
• Our attitude affects the outcome of our experiences and that is reflected in our perspective which influences our attitude.
• Fear is a virus of the mind!
• Some people are proud instead of productive.
• Sometimes we need to accept and move forward before we can understand.
• One persons Epic Fail is another’s FTW!
• If you don’t remember when you took a vacation last, you need a vacation!
• There are somethings that we are just not going to understand, but that we need to accept.
• If better is not easier and cheaper then it’s not.
• Just because something is better (function) doesn’t mean it’s better (form).
• You have to feed, exercise, and train your creativity before you can make it work for you.

Product Placement

• GIA: Google Intelligence Agency. FBI: FaceBook of Investigations.
• Is Facebook too big to fail or just big enough to get regulated?
• And then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be multi-touch.”
• Cost Plus World Market should really rename itself to 3rd World Market since they mostly sell trinkets from under developed world.
• CVS has the widest and weirdest selection, they sell everything from hard liquor to underwear. It’s basically my party supply store.
• Someone should invent foursquare for fictional places, I would like to check I the Star Wars Cantina.
• I wish iTunes could organize songs by mood in addition to genre and album.

Overheard

• OH: Awww, that gansta cute.
• OH: Travel is my drug of choice, I rather go on a real trip than a hallucinogenic trip.
• OH: I woke up so tired from that dream because I was running in it.
• OH: It’s very hard sometimes to think on your own.
• OH: when you are a parent and are dealing with your kids, you have to be the bigger person.
• OH: I’m sorry for whatever I did in your dream that made you upset, trust me that is not typical of my behavior in other people’s dreams.
• OH: It’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s that you didn’t do anything spectacular.

Quotes

• Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. – Anonymous
• Everyone specializes in their own area of weakness. – Rothbard’s Law
• Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. – Wirth’s Law
• It is not how much you make that counts, but how much money you keep. – Robert Kiyosaki
• All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you. – Prince
• Hope. Deleted – Emotionless Wine Bucket #futurama
• There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. – Roger Staubach
• Control the music industry? Check. Control the publishing industry? Check. Control-alt-delete? Never. – @ceoSteveJobs
• I bet if they had Yelp in 1850, nobody would have taken the Oregon Trail. – @badbanana
• People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. – Jeffrey Gitomer
• Welcome, to the real world. – Morpheus
• I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. – HAL
• Would you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict? – John Waters