It’s no secret that the iPhone App Store is a walled garden. Mobile platform developers like Apple have several ways to control what can run on their devices: Prohibit plug-ins like Flash, cripple the Java they run, or simply limit the installation process. But HTML 5,… Read More »
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When a web application gets popular enough, features matter less and the underlying ecosystem matters more. There’s a tipping point at which network effects outstrip software features. When that happens, users get the benefits of additional functionality — and the risk of new kinds of lock-in.… Read More »
With every birthday reminder, bill confirmation, new friend, direct message, password recovery, and mailing list, the content of our inboxes becomes less and less a means of communication and more and more a record of all we do online. But if inboxes don’t fundamentally change in… Read More »
Back in the desktop software era, magazines ran software reviews in which the side-by-side comparisons of features took up an entire page. Buyers used these reviews to shortlist vendors, trying to anticipate which features they’d need over the next five years. Typically, the software with the… Read More »
Elastra today unveiled an updated cloud strategy that aims to tackle one of the biggest challenges of cloud computing: How to move applications smoothly between in-house infrastructure and clouds like Amazon’s EC2. If the strategy works, it could pave the way for so-called “hybrid clouds,” those… Read More »
When Google first released App Engine as a “Preview Release” last April, developers had relatively little computing power. Only a few apps got Google’s permission to grow beyond the free computing quotas, including BuddyPoke, Lingospot, Mentalfloss and Giftag.com. Now, the company’s going to start charging for… Read More »
Microsoft is hoping people will use Photosynth to document the inauguration. In partnership with CNN, they’re asking people to upload 1-3 pictures, no more than 10MB each, and email them. The result will be a three-dimensional record of the event. That’s a lot of data. Having millions… Read More »
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