Author Archive for Alistair Croll

Will HTML 5 Break Apple’s Stranglehold on Apps?

By Alistair Croll | Wednesday, August 12, 2009 | 9:55 AM PT | 50 comments |

appstore_iconIt’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, the next big standard for the web, will dramatically reduce this control by creating a new generation of web sites that look and feel like they’re iPhone apps.

Limiting what can run on a phone requires some degree of collusion among the device maker (Nokia, HTC), the phone operator (T-Mobile, Canada’s Rogers), and the application store itself. Many other mobile device makers have policies that are similar to, though less obvious than, Apple’s: Android doesn’t support Flash (but it’s coming), for example, and has a special application for YouTube videos; and some carriers block Skype, location functions and streaming TV. The problem becomes much more noticeable when one company, like Apple, is both a platform and a service provider and co-develops features (like Visual Voicemail) with a single carrier.

HTML 5 is poised to change this. It’s rich enough to do all kinds of things within a browser that once required dedicated applications or plug-ins. Continue »

Freemium & The Evolution From a Web App To a Web Platform

By Alistair Croll | Wednesday, July 1, 2009 | 6:03 PM PT | 6 comments |

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. Salesforce.com, for example, started as a replacement for in-house software. Now it’s a software ecosystem complete with a programming language, developer conferences, and a marketplace for third-party developers. That makes Salesforce a lot harder to leave than if it were just a bundle of software features.

Freshbooks, whose SaaS-based billing tool tracks time and expenses and sends invoices to customers via email or post, is at that tipping point. It’s grown to 900,000 subscribers using a mix of free and paid offerings. Now that there are so many users, subscribers often wind up sending bills to one another. So the company made it possible to send those invoices within the system directly, bypassing external email. Today, Freshbooks revealed that 20 percent of its subscribers had adopted this new capability — taking Freshbooks from software tool to SaaS ecosystem. Continue »

Why Email Clients Need to Change

By Alistair Croll | Friday, April 24, 2009 | 5:15 PM PT | 78 comments |

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 order to adapt to their new role as the keeper of myriad transactions across the entire web, they’ll be obsolete. Continue »

7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS

By Alistair Croll | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | 2:00 PM PT | 14 comments |

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 most features won. Feature-itis ruled. But with software as a service, the focus has become whether the tool is good enough on day one and how well it will adapt over time. Indeed, in order to evaluate SaaS, those page-long feature comparisons can be whittled down to just seven critical questions. Continue »

Elastra’s Policy-based Cloud Management: Bring on the Hybrid Clouds!

By Alistair Croll | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | 10:40 AM PT | 2 comments |

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 that combine on-demand capacity with in-house compliance. Continue »

Google App Engine Announces Pricing

By Alistair Croll | Tuesday, February 24, 2009 | 11:00 AM PT | 5 comments |

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 its App Engine cloud platform. That’s welcome news for early adopters of the cloud computing platform, because even if they have to pay, they’ll now have access to the company’s vast computing resources. Continue »

The Inauguration: Most User-generated Content Ever?

By Alistair Croll | Tuesday, January 20, 2009 | 9:07 AM PT | 2 comments |

obamasynthMicrosoft 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 of people with cameras taking a picture at the same time gives Photosynth a lot to work with. I’m going to make an educated guess how much.

There are around 2 million people going to the inauguration (an astonishing 0.6 percent of the entire population). Let’s assume that one-tenth of those people are in eyeshot of the event, having cameras whose pictures are a useful vantage point.

How big will those picture files be? Well, the cameras at the event have a wide range of resolutions (and file sizes), with modern cameras clocking in around 8MBytes. I’m going to assume around 800 KBytes, compressed, which is fairly typical from what I see on Flickr.

That’s 38 Gigabytes of pictures Photosynth could have to chew on if this project gets attention.

Think about it another way: If each person there with a camera takes 50 pictures, some 250 million images — around 18.6 terabytes of data — is going to make its way to Flickr, Picassa, and other cloud storage areas.

In other words, the inauguration may represent the greatest influx of user-generated content onto the Internet, in one day, ever.

Salesforce Service Cloud: Community Management Is Really CRM 2.0

By Alistair Croll | Friday, January 16, 2009 | 12:00 PM PT | 7 comments |

mediumCustomer relationship management giant Salesforce.com just gobsmacked the fledgling community management industry with its launch of a customer support service called Service Cloud. While initially positioned as a tool for customer service, it also tracks interactions with various online communities.

This puts Salesforce on a collision course with community monitoring startups. After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

Continue »

Identi.ca Gets Funding to Make Open-source Twitter Variant

By Alistair Croll | Wednesday, January 14, 2009 | 5:00 PM PT | 15 comments |

Identi.ca’s plans to build an open-source alternative to Twitter got a vote of confidence this week with an investment from the VCs at Montreal Start Up. While the amount of the financing wasn’t disclosed, Montreal Start Up Managing Partner John Stokes said the firm invests between C$150,000 ($120,135) and C$400,000 ($320,329) per deal.

A bigger question is why microblogging companies are getting any investment at all. If Twitter can’t find revenues with the vast majority of market share, why would an open-source version make money? Continue »

Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart to Create Open-source Cloud

By Alistair Croll | Tuesday, January 13, 2009 | 9:01 PM PT | 8 comments |

Joyent today announced it has agreed to acquire Reasonably Smart, a fledgling cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount. While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart’s technology will in fact help Joyent compete with emerging service-centric clouds while retaining an open model that makes developers comfortable.

You might think the deal is just cloud roll-up: Reasonably Smart was a very small startup. David Young, Joyent’s CEO, said the company–whose backers include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel– is in “a strong financial position that supports making strategic acquisitions.” Dig a bit deeper, however, and the deal is more than just a roll-up. Joyent gets an open platform with which to attract developers while preparing the company for the looming threat of Google and Microsoft.

Continue »

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