Computerworld blogger JR Raphael and I realized this at roughly the same time. As I was testing a web-based game for a performance test, Raphael was checking Netflix. Neither of one of us was able to run our respective web apps: Netflix for him and Bastion for me. I wondered what the commonality was and came to the conclusion that both web apps rely on Google’s Native Client (NaCL) technology. This lets native apps run inside a browser with very little performance hit.

I figured NaCL was related as Netflix was originally one of the first NaCL apps for Chrome OS. And the error message when trying to run Bastion? “Native Client not allowed” is all I could get. Both of these apps run fine on the older Chromebooks powered by Intel chips. I did try going into the Chrome OS settings — type “about:flags” in Chrome to see these — and enabled all of the NaCL options, which are off by default. After a restart, Netflix still didn’t work, although I was able to get past the error message on Bastion. Unfortunately, it hangs at the splash screen.

I’ve reached out to Google with my observations to see if they will confirm my thoughts; if I’m right, I’d like to know when this issue will be resolved but it’s would probably be up to each individual web app maker. I’ll update this post with any response.

It appears that ChromeOS on ARM processors does support NaCL, but it’s possible — very likely, even — that the native code for Netflix, Bastion, and perhaps other web apps needs to be recompiled from x86 to ARM before they can run on Google’s newest Chromebook. Is this a major issue? For Netflix users, maybe, but I expect that very few web apps actually rely on NaCL just yet. Still, I’ll be a happier Chromebook owner once this situation is resolved.

Update: I heard back from a Google spokesperson who provided the following statement: “We are working to enable Native Client on the new Samsung Chromebook, and we will be working closely with app vendors to bring their NaCl-based apps over. The apps will automatically update as soon as they’re available.” With a new chip architecture for Google’s Chrome OS platform, there’s bound to be some transitional pain, but it looks like Google is well aware and working on it.

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Now that the newest ChromeBook is boosting my productivity while also allowing for online fun — see why in this video overview — I’m looking forward to the wider range of opportunities offline browser use can bring. While we have connectivity in more places than ever, there are still times when the ability to work offline is needed. And by shutting down a wireless radio, devices can run longer.

Google is making it easer for developers to get their web apps in the new Offline collection. The simple addition of offline_enabled in the app manifest is all it takes. Of course, it’s up to the developer to ensure their app does indeed work offline. Google Docs technically does work offline, but for now it only offers viewing access for documents. The same holds true for Google Calendar: You can see your events, but not make modifications.

That’s set to change soon, however. Last month, when Google introduced the new ChromeBooks and ChromeBox, it said, “Drive will be seamlessly integrated with the File Manager and support offline access with the next release of Chrome OS in six weeks. With Google Docs offline support (rolling out over the next few weeks), you can keep working on your documents even when offline and seamlessly sync back up when you re-connect.”

With the company suggesting at the end of May that offline access was coming to Google Docs in a few weeks, it’s highly likely the feature will roll out later this month at the Google I/O event.

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That, Amell, said is going to be HTML5. And with that in mind, StackMob is announcing a hosted HTML5 solution that will make it easier for developers to build HTML5 and hybrid apps that use HTML5 surrounded by a native app wrapper. StackMob will host the apps and connect them to its existing suite of backend services.

The move expands StackMob’s initial offering beyond backend as a service and allows the company to become a more full fledged platform as a service, which Amell said was always the original vision. He said this is the approach to take as the world gets connected, encompassing a wide array of devices.

“People thought of mobile as just phones and tablets but what we’re trying to say is the market is about network connected devices,” Amell said. “It’s hard enough dealing with iOS and android, but when you start getting into thermostats and TVs, it’s going to be impossible. You need a HTML5 solution and custom code.”

Amell said HTML5 provides the flexibility necessary for developers who are able to build more and more apps using the technology. While some games and other high performance apps will still be built in native code, Amell said most apps will eventually be written in HTML5.

StackMob’s expansion also makes sense in light of where the market is going. Appcelerator, which makes tools to help developers build HTML5 and native apps, just bought Cocoafish, a backend service provider and competitor to StackMob. The combination means Appcelerator will be able to offer developer tools on the front end and a host of backend features in the cloud to connect those apps. StackMob is similarly trying to become a much more robust developer resource. And it may have to if Appcelerator developers, who may have used StackMob’s backend services, now choose Cocoafish because it’s integrated into their developer tools.

But overall, it’s another reminder about the growing opportunities with the explosion of connected devices. Cisco said earlier this month that there will be 50 billion web-connected devices in the world by 2020. That’s going to create a lot of business for companies that can help service and connect these new devices.

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One of the main reasons Soundcloud went HTML5 was of course to support sound sharing on the iPad and other mobile platforms, but the user engagement was definitely a welcome bonus as well. “We see that people are almost twice as likely to play the HTML5 widget when they see it embedded,” the spokesperson told me.

Check out the HTML5 widget in action below:

Soundcloud also added two new features to its HTML5 widget, making it possible to add comments to sounds and “like” them directly within the embedded widget.

Soundcloud announced just few days ago that it now has 10 million registered users as well as 10,000 developers. The Berlin-based startup secured a $50 million funding round earlier this month.

Image courtesy of Flickr user slavik_V.

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“The big thing that has changed… is that just about every media company has an HTML5 player out or on their roadmap,” thePlatform CEO Ian Blaine told me in a phone interview. “I can’t think of a single company that hasn’t adopted HTML5 as part of its mix.”

Blaine says that HTML5 has better cross-device support than other options, especially when you take iOS devices into account. The problem is that, although the HTML5 video tag is widely supported amongst all modern browsers, it’s also rendered differently depending on which browser a viewer is using, and in some cases, on which version of a browser that’s being used. That means that publishers frequently have to put extra effort into setting up HTML5 players to ensure that they work as designed.

It’s that sort of individual browser tweaking that thePlatform hopes to eliminate with video players that will work in any browser. Customers can build players with the thePlatform’s Player Dev Kit and view changes in a real-time preview pane. And once a customer has customized its player, it will work over a number of platforms without any further development necessary. thePlatform’s smart player will automatically detect the device and browser being used and automatically serve up the correct video assets in Flash or HTML5 depending on the viewing environment.

thePlatform’s offering also has one advantage over some other video players, in that it has figured out how to make mid-roll ads work in HTML5, which has proven to be a stumbling block for some publishers. According to Blaine, that meant publishers were either stuck monetizing their content only with pre-rolls — which basically was leaving money on the table — or stitching ads into the videos, which removed the ability to serve up dynamic or targeted video ads, neither of which was an acceptable outcome.

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Developers building HTML5 apps will be able to access AT&T’s API platform to build in support for a range of features. Developers will be able to access APIs for in-app billing and payments, MMS, SMS, location, and mobile-health capabilities through AT&T. Other APIs will be available later this year enabling music, contacts storage, message management, speech and other features. AT&T said it expects 85 percent of all smartphones will have HTML5 browsers by 2016.

AT&T is launching an AppCenter app store on Android phones, so users will have a way to discover HTML5 web apps. The store, which will also support Android apps, will be set up like a “magazine” collection of stories, showing off specific apps and pointing users to different web sites where they can find developers’ wares. This will give developers a way to sell directly to consumers rather than force consumers to delve into crowded app stores.

AT&T’s AppCenter is not a real store that conducts transactions but the initiative is a nice bit of support for HTML5 apps, which are still waiting for their turn in the sun. I talked to AppMobi CTO Sam Abadir in November about the future of HTML5 apps and he was looking forward to the emergence of web app stores that he believes will help accelerate the adoption of HTML5. He told me in November that not just carriers but manufacturers and content companies were looking at launching their own stores.

The introduction of an API platform is also helpful, providing developers with one place to access APIs for their apps. Right now, developers have to often make several business and technology arrangements to access a network’s APIs. But for developers already working on native apps, it’s not clear how many will immediately turn to AT&T for help in building web apps. Still, it’s another sign that while the pendulum is swinging toward native apps right now, we could see HTML5 apps help push the debate back toward browsers in 2012.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo. 

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Flurry said Monday that average smartphone users now spend 94 minutes in apps a day compared to 72 minutes in a mobile web browser. Last summer, Flurry noted the first time app usage eclipsed mobile browsing, with users spending 81 minutes in apps compared to 74 minutes daily on the web. Now, Flurry said app usage is continuing to grow each day, while the use of mobile web browsing has fallen. ComScore  also noted a shift last fall toward mobile apps, finding users are now spending more time in apps over the browser for the first time. For the study, Flurry examined app usage in 140,000 apps running Flurry analytics and compared it to mobile web data usage from comScore and Alexa.

The shift to apps appears to be driven in part by mobile users’ waning interest in accessing Facebook from a browser, Flurry said. It said while the average Facebook user in June last year spent more than 33 minutes on average each day on the website, that number is now below 24 minutes. Traffic to Facebook now appears to be increasingly channeled through mobile apps, including a new Facebook app for the iPad, which launched in October. But with Facebook’s increasing use of HTML5 and web technologies, it’s possible Facebook could also help push the tide back toward web browsing as it looks to enable more developers to build mobile web apps that work through Facebook. And with the overall maturing of HTML5, we should see more interesting web apps emerge that can attempt to pull user attention away from native apps.

Flurry said the growth of mobile app usage appears to be slowing, however. Between Dec. 2010 and June 2011, the time spent in mobile applications grew more than 23 percent, but from June 2011 to December 2011 time spent in apps has grown 15 percent. While the growth in time spent on mobile apps is slowing, users are engaged in more sessions, visiting apps more frequently than in the past, said Flurry.

The jockeying between apps and mobile web browsing will continue into the future. Native apps make more sense for intensive programs that require more use of the hardware. And with native app stores making it so easy to download purpose-driven apps, it’s simple for users to turn to apps to get what they need done. But with HTML5 emerging, there are a lot of native apps that can exist just as easily as web apps. And in fact, many apps are being built now in HTML5 with a native wrapper designed for specific platforms. Forrester recently came out with a report recommending developers and enterprises go with this hybrid approach, which cuts down on costs and helps apps fit a number of platforms. I think native apps will continue to increase their advantage over web browsing until HTML5 grows up some more and we see some solid distribution channels and stores for web apps.

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The hypermedia movement, spearheaded by people like HTML5 developer Mark Boas and the Mozilla Foundation’s Ben Moskowitz, wants to make the remix and curation of audio and video sources as easy as Carvin’s countless retweets. The end goal is that “someone with a laptop in a coffee shop can do a very compelling news report,” Moskowitz told me a few days ago during a phone call with me and Boas.

Text as the ultimate meta-data

The idea behind hypermedia is as simple as it is compelling: More and more media publishers are providing closed captions for video content online – a move that is both prompted by SEO strategy as well as increased pressure to make web video accessible. And in the audio space, radio networks like NPR have long had transcripts of their recordings. Boas and others simply view this text as meta-data that points to specific pieces of a recording.

The Hyperaudio Pad doesn't look like an audio editor at all - and that may be a good thing.

What if there was an application, Boas asked in a blog post earlier this year, that would help compile new videos or audio recordings based on the remix of this kind of meta-data? “Audio authoring tools and video authoring tools can be quite complex,” he argued. Boas’ app on the other hand, which he has been calling Hyperaudio Pad, could look as simple as a text editor. Just copy captions from a few sources into the same document, and the program will automatically compile an audio recording. (Check out a screencast of the Hyperaudio Pad.)

The Hyperaudio Pad is so far not much more than a simple hack, and Boas and his partners in crime don’t even have a website yet, opting instead to discuss their ideas via a Google Group. But the hypermedia idea has been brewing for a while.

Radiolab and Al Jazeera

The Hyperaudio Radiolab experiment is an interesting mashup between audio, text and pictures that is based on Soundcloud's API and the Popcorn.js HTML5 media framework.

Boas started playing with synchronizing text and audio in HTML5 about a year ago. A few months later, he stumbled across a blog post by Henrik Moltke about the use of open web technologies to advance radio, an idea Moltke coined Hyperaudio. The two of them started collaborating, got some support from the Mozilla Foundation, and soon after, they had done some really interesting demos that show how powerful the combination of audio, text and the web can be (make sure to take a look at the demo for WNYC’s Radiolab if you haven’t seen it yet.)

Both Boas and Moltke come from the intersection of audio and HTML, which explains the moniker Hyperaudio. But that doesn’t mean that the Hyperaudio Pad and the ideas behind the technology will be restricted to radio programs only. “This can be applied to video as well as audio,” Boas assured me, and there’s a good chance that we will soon see some of the first hypermedia use cases for online video in action.

Boas was recently picked as one of five fellows for the Knight-Mozilla News Partnership program that pairs technologists with mainstream media newsrooms. Starting in February, he will work with Al Jazeera for a year to advance open source news innovation. “I hope to take the opportunity to develop the Hyperaudio Pad and other hyperaudio techniques and figure out how a newsroom can make use of these technologies, Boas told me, adding: “Specifically with the pad I want to tie into Al Jazeera’s subtitled content that they are building up using Universal Subtitles and build a resource around that for citizen journalists.”

Opening up the black box

The early demos build by Boas and Moltke are visually very compelling, and the idea to give users an easy way to curate audio and audiovisual media online is interesting as well. But the bigger vision for Boas and supporters like Moskowitz and the Mozilla Foundation is to create technologies that foster open media that is accessible to everyone both for consumption as well as creation, just like the web opened up text publishing to everyone by allowing people to easily quote and link.

Moskowitz told me that he views much of what happens now in traditional media organizations as a bit of a black box. Journalists work with very specialized tools on their stories and then spit out the finished product. The hypermedia approach could not just help citizens to curate the resulting stories, but also provide an avenue for media organizations to cooperate with citizen journalists and their audience as a whole. “It’s kind of opening up the black box,” Moskowitz said.

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The latest figures show just how far the industry has come in adopting the H.264 video format as the de facto standard for video encoding. The share of videos encoded in H.264 has risen from just 10 percent in January 2010, to 80 percent less than two years later.

Much of that change can be attributed to the introduction of the iPad and other connected devices, most of which support H.264 hardware acceleration. In May 2010, not long after the initial launch of the iPad, MeFeedia reported that just 26 percent of videos were encoded in H.264.

Wider availability of HTML5-ready files is having an effect on the strategies of other big players in the video delivery market. Adobe, for instance, has announced that it is taking a step back from mobile Flash development. And despite being released with an open-source license last May, Google’s WebM video format has yet to gain any serious traction. MeFeedia reports that less than 2 percent of videos indexed were encoded with the VP8 codec that Google acquired from On2 Technologies.

As even more devices take advantage of H.264 video, we can expect that number to increase even more. Until we see broader adoption of device with hardware acceleration for a competing video format, it’s pretty clear that H.264 has won the codec war — at least in the short term.

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