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Facebook App Developer: Apple Doesn’t Trust Us

Liam Cassidy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:00:20 +0000

Have you been checking the App Store on your iPhone for that lovely little red badge that signals available updates? I have. I want the Facebook app update that might – finally – prompt me to want to use Facebook regularly. Y’know, like the kids these days do.

Not quite two weeks ago Joe Hewitt, the developer of Facebook’s iPhone application, submitted the latest version for review. The timeline here matters; in Apple’s published answers to the FCC’s questions, they assert that the average turnaround for an application – from initial submission to publication – is 14 days (assuming the app is not rejected due to technical problems or a violation of the Terms and Conditions of the App Store).

If we hit the 14 day mark and there’s no sign of the new Facebook app in the store – and no blog article, tweet or Facebook update from Hewitt on the app’s status – tech pundits everywhere will gleefully rub Apple’s metaphorical nose in it. With all the recent drama surrounding Google Voice’s App Store refusal, the world’s tech press is watching how Apple’s approval process even more closely than it was before.

Hewitt Speaks Out

Hewitt expressed his own unhappiness with Apple’s submission/approval policies in his blog yesterday. His article “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” provides eye-opening insight into the frustration he (and presumably thousands of other developers) feels with the current state of affairs;

“I have only one major complaint with the App Store, and I can state it quite simply: the review process needs to be eliminated completely.

Does that sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well, it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now.”

Hewitt addresses Apple’s claim that the submission/review process is a necessary step in quality assurance – that is, testing apps for bugs and other nasty software maladies that, if left unchanged, might ruin the user’s iPhone experience;

“Any bug that Apple finds after their two week delay would have been found by users on day one, and fixed on day two. I’d rather have a bug in the wild for one day than have an app in the review queue for two weeks.

…let’s face it, the real things they are looking for are not bugs, but violations of the terms of service. This is all about lawyers, not quality, and it shows that the model of Apple’s justice system is guilty until proven innocent. They don’t trust us, and I resent that, because the vast majority of us are trustworthy.”

This is a powerful indictment of Apple’s submission and review policies, coming from the developer of the platform’s biggest social networking application. It’s succinct, clear, intelligently composed and cohesive. Hewitt manages to do in just a few hundred words what some very high-profile tech pundits have labored to express using many hundreds more. And I hope the press takes notice, because this is as good as it gets.

Affects All Fish, Big and Small

So far, it seems, developers have not had a particularly strong voice in this chorus. When I interviewed Hwee-Boon Yar for my article on SimplyTweet, he expressed dissatisfaction with Apple, referring to the approval process as ‘broken’, adding;

“Approvals are unpredictable and payment is hard to track… I have waited weeks, sometimes only to have an update rejected; I worked out a fix, then had it rejected again. Each re-submission puts you at the back of the queue again.”

Hwee-Boon is just one of thousands of talented, ambitious developers who have endured endless frustration with the current procedures. But while SimplyTweet is enjoying its place amongst the better-known Twitter apps, it’s no Facebook. Having Joe Hewitt’s opinions aired publicly might work wonders for communicating a more personal, human and high-profile side to the story.

Apple’s broken approval process doesn’t exist in a vacuum where it affects only applications from the big players like Google and Facebook, but it doesn’t hurt to have the developers behind those big apps add their voices to the rising chorus of disappointment. Is Apple listening? I’m sure the FCC is…

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Oracle's Ellison Rethinks Clouds as Economy Tumbles

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:55:50 +0000

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is rethinking his earlier disdain for software as a service and all things cloud, according to a report today in The Wall Street Journal. Maybe a dismal economy and a drop in Oracle sales are forcing him to change his position. The Journal quotes comments made on Oracle’s earnings call yesterday, when Ellison was asked by analysts if the software company would embrace cloud computing. First off, software as a service isn’t cloud computing, but perhaps I’m being too picky here. Anyhow, Ellison said Oracle would be getting “a little bit” into cloud computing, according to the Journal.

But is this really a far cry from Ellison’s early mocking of cloud computing as being driven by whims of fashion? Ellison said he sees a gap in the market between true software as a service and providing on-demand software that’s hosted inside a customer’s own data center. That sounds like software as an appliance rather than anything on demand — and it’s something Oracle already offers through a partnership with Hewlett-Packard that puts its database software on a specialty server that customers pop into their own data centers. Oracle may also be selling some of its Fusion middleware products on demand, or as Ellison said, they could be “on-demand ready.” This is not a very convincing change in position for Oracle.

However, Oracle is buying Sun, and Sun had a true cloud computing strategy that involved building out infrastructure as a service for compute and storage. Maybe once that deal closes, we’ll see if Oracle wants to take cloud computing all the way up the stack.

Image courtesy of Oracle

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Oracle Buys Virtual Iron to Beef Up its Virtualization Software

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:30:01 +0000

Oracle today said it would buy Virtual Iron, a startup that has built a suite of virtualization software based on the Xen hypervisor. Terms of the deal were undisclosed, but Virtual Iron has raised more than $65 million in venture capital. The company’s products compete against VMWare, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. But it’s odd that Oracle, with its own Xen-based hypervisor, and as the soon-to-be owner of Sun’s xVM virtualization products (which also include a Xen-based hypervisor), felt the need for a third virtualization product. Is it cobbling all of these different hypervisors and software together for a full-on assualt on the virtualization market?

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Terracotta Doesn't Want to Kill Your Database, Just Maim It

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:10:33 +0000

I ran across Terracotta Inc. a few months ago while looking at database companies, and was impressed by the potential of its eponymously named open source software, which can make web applications scale faster and more cheaply than they do when information is stored in a database. Instead the software from Terracotta, which was formed in 2003 and has raised $29 million from Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs, takes information and writes it to a shared cluster of memory.

That makes the data available for quick access without the need for the arduous and time-consuming processes of structuring it for a database, storing it there and retrieving it later. It’s not appropriate for information such as sales records and other data that either fits well in a table or needs to be accessible for a long period of time. And it only works in Java.

If you think of data as clothing, a database is like a closet, where you can hang and store items in an orderly fashion — knowing they will be left in the same place you hung them. Terracotta is like a dresser drawer where you put your clothes that need to be grabbed on the fly — like a pair of socks. The data is still there, but it’s a lot faster to toss your socks in a drawer than to take the time to hang them on hangers. In a web application with lots of data coming in, it turns out drawers work just fine.

This may be bad news for Oracle, which makes money convincing customers they need more closets (it does have Coherence, a similar product). However, companies from Adobe, that uses Terracotta for its ConnectNow web conferencing service, to startup Gnip, which uses it to deliver a variety of personal tweets, emails and other messages, have decided that they need sock drawers.

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Clouds Looming for Software Server Vendors

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:00:47 +0000

As cloud computing moves beyond startups and attracts enterprise users, major software vendors are being forced to reckon with a new challenge to their current pricing models. Much like the emergence of software as a service has caused many large software vendors to evaluate existing licensing models that charge a set price for each software package copy running on a machine, the emergence of cloud computing is pressuring top server software vendors Microsoft, Oracle and IBM to adopt a subscription-style type of pricing.

The issue is similar to the battle that raged years ago when corporate customers started buying servers with multiple processors. Prior to that, vendors sold software on a per-core basis, so a customer who paid $20,000 for a copy of Microsoft’s software for a single-core machine was hit with a $40,000 licensing cost when he upgraded to dual-core servers. With virtualized servers, where several virtual machines can exist on one server, such math becomes more complex, and can lead to even higher prices.

As Microsoft, Oracle and IBM adapt to the cloud business model, they’re likely to see their software licensing revenue drop. How they will manage this is part of a new report out from research firm TechAlpha that looks at how virtualization will affect industries ranging from software to storage. George Gilbert, co-founder and principal at TechAlpha, says Microsoft has been fairly advanced about its licensing efforts in the cloud, while Oracle seems to be lagging.

“The new principles of pricing with the ultimate destination of software in the cloud requires two things: capacity on demand, and something that’s divorced from the physical infrastructure,” says Gilbert. “The idea that you install software on a box and it lives there for the useful life of the server is increasingly less relevant.”

This won’t just apply to public cloud providers such as Amazon. Enterprises will undoubtedly build their own clouds of virtualized computing power, in turn making the shift more painful for vendors such as Oracle, which currently has a limited offering on public clouds. Gilbert estimates that about half of Oracle’s licensing revenue could be affected by this shift to subscription-based licensing.

The solution seems to be divorcing certain software products from the hardware, and charging for it either on a per-instance basis as part of a computing cycle or based on a percentage of use for a specific amount of time. Because a customer can add capacity by moving a software product on a virtual machine to a bigger server for a temporary spike in demand, customers will demand the ability to pay for increments of both time and capacity. As customers measure their consumption, they can adjust their subscription each quarter.

As customers purchase less software up front, the move toward a subscription model will lead to a shift in the way vendors recognize revenue. The costs of building the software will stay the same, but the amount of time it takes to recoup that investment may stretch out longer. It may also cut revenue.

Gilbert points out that most corporate customers buy servers in anticipation of growth, rather than based on what they need today. Because software licenses are tied to those physical servers, customers are also buying more software than they need up front. With cloud computing enabled by virtualization, customers may spend less on both. It looks like in addition to open source, shrinking IT budgets and competition from software-as-a-service companies, the big software vendors will also have to keep an eye on those looming clouds.

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Carbon Copy Cloner Makes Creating Bootable Backups Easy

Charles Moore — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:00:23 +0000

One of the things I loved about the old Mac OS Classic was that to create a bootable disk, all you had to do was make a folder named System Folder, drag in System and Finder files and an Appearance Folder, then drag your bare-bones System Folder to a disk — hard drive, Zip, floppy, CD-R, etc — and voila! you were in business. Usually one would add a few more items like Control Panels and Extensions folders, Preferences and Fonts folders, but it was a simple, quick and not-too-dirty way to make bootable disks.

Alas, you can’t do that with OS X and its thousands of tiny, usually invisible files, but the next best thing is disk cloning, which is to make a copy of an existing bootable volume on another disk or drive. This is excellent for backups, but has the added advantage of allowing you to create bootable disks without going through the hassle of running an OS X installer program.

There are several software utilities available that can clone drives, but it’s hard to go wrong with Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner, which is offered as uncrippled shareware, with donations suggested if you like the software and decide to continue using it once you’ve checked it out.

Backups Too

Besides drive cloning, Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to do backups and drive synchronization. supporting any HFS+ formatted partition or hard drive (excluding volumes used for Time Machine) as well as FireWire and USB hard drives, including iPods. Note that not all FireWire hard drives are bootable with Mac OS X, and while it is sometimes possible for Intel-based Macs to boot from USB hard drives, it’s not a sure thing.

Note also that for bootability you must format the FireWire drive with the appropriate partition map using Apple’s Disk Utility or other formatting software. The Disk Utility formatting selection sheet (Options button) is self-explanatory.

You can read more about formatting issues and my using CCC to create a bootable clone of my main hard drive to a SimpleTech Duo Pro Hard Drive here.

CCC’s marquee function is cloning one hard drive volume to another, copying every single file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. Aside from the obvious comprehensive backup you get, if it’s done to a bootable volume you can, say, send your computer in for repairs while continuing to boot and use your standard work configuration until you get your computer back, then just clone the FireWire drive’s updated content back to your internal drive.

Using CCC for Backup and Synchronization

CCC can also be used as a backup utility. When you select a source volume, CCC displays the contents of that volume (including normally hidden items). Uncheck items that you don’t want to back up, select a target volume, and press the clone button. CCC also is smart enough to scan the source and target volumes for files to be copied, and only copy only files that have changed. You can also schedule automated backups.

Another advantage of CCC backups is that rather than using proprietary archival methods, CCC backs up your data to an ordinary filesystem that you can browse in the Finder. To restore your backup data, just select your backup medium as the source drive and the backup destination as your new target volume, and let CCC do its stuff.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3 also supports cloning to disk images, which you can use to restore content to a physical hard drive and produce a bootable, exact clone of the original.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3 requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later. Version 2.3 is still available for Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3 users.

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Something Nice to Start The Day: BooRah

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:43:15 +0000

BooRah, a semantic vertical search engine founded by former MetroFi employees, has indexed 100,000 blogs and over 100 review sites to create a nice restaurant review and search service for a variety of U.S. cities. Today, the Mountain View, Calif., company launched a partnership with online reservation agent BookingAngel that will allow folks to make online reservations with any California restaurant through the BooRah site.

There’s a lot to like about this startup — namely that it already has revenue from signing ad partnerships with 20 local newspapers — but also because Co-founder and CTO Nagaraju Bandaru wants to give back to the community.

He’s not talking about building houses in New Orleans, though. He’s giving back to the technical community through open sourcing some of BooRah’s entity mapping code, which analyzes semantic relationships on web sites and determines what type of business operates that site. As he explains, “We do a lot of stuff on MySQL that before would have cost us millions in Oracle databases, and $50,000 a year in fees, but we can now start a company for much less.”

So in a few months he plans to open source that code for other startups to use. Other than making me feel all warm and fuzzy about entrepreneurs sticking together, such efforts will only hasten technological innovation for end users. Even if BooRah doesn’t make it (although, given Bandaru’s efforts so far to get both advertisers on board and provide a premium service for restaurateurs, I think it has a good chance), its technology could enable another startup to quickly get up and running with a different use for that code.

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Rollbase Wants to Make Programmers Obsolete

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:06:07 +0000

Platform-as-a-service provider Rollbase launched today, marketing its offerings as web-based software geared toward small- and medium-sized businesses. While the PaaS terminology conjures up images of Rollbase competing with something like Force.com or Bungee Labs, Rollbase is gunning for the same users as Coghead.

Rollbase allows business users to upload their data to its servers (which are hosted by OpSource) and then “build” applications to make that data useful. The process of building basically consists of dragging and dropping forms and tools on the page, but tech-savvy users can also add their own code for more customization.

What’s amazing to me is the rapid evolution from hosted applications such as Salesforce.com and hosted computing services such as Amazon.com’s Cloud Computing and S3 to hosted development environments such as Bungee Labs. And now here comes services such as those of Rollbase and Coghead, which obviate the need for programmers altogether. At least in smaller offices and internal business units. I don’t see Oracle or SAP giving up the ghost anytime soon.

Much like easy blogging tools have allowed anyone to be a publisher, I’ll be curious to see how tools like Rollbase and Coghead change the business of building code. It may no longer be enough to deliver software as a service, it may have to be infinitely customizable as well.

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Oracle Finally Gets BEA

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:01:41 +0000

Turns out Oracle really wanted BEA Systems after all, enough to pay a 24 percent premium over Tuesday’s closing price for BEA shares. The database giant said today it would pay $19.38 a share in cash, which values the deal at $8.5 billion including the $1.3 billion in cash BEA already has on hand.

BEA (BEAS) and Oracle (ORCL) got into an intense game of chicken back in October, starting with a $17-per-share offer from Oracle. BEA scoffed at the price, asking instead for $21 per share. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he wouldn’t offer more for the middleware provider, and Oracle walked away.

But the reality of software consolidation and pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn appears to have pushed BEA back to the negotiating table. And Oracle’s offer was…well, the only one out there. BEA shareholders seem happy, though: At last check, shares of BEA were up more than 19%, at $18.56; shares of Oracle had added 8 cents to change hands for $21.39.

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Microsoft Searches for Fast Growth With $1.2B Deal

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:30:38 +0000

Microsoft is bolstering its enterprise search with an offer to buy Norway’s Fast Search & Transfer ASA in a cash deal valued at 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.2 billion). The deal is aimed at increasing functionality in Microsoft’s business software, as well as acting as a beachhead for Redmond in the enterprise search market, where IBM, Oracle and even consumer search giant Google already have products.

The board of directors and shareholders representing 37 percent of Fast have already accepted the offer, which represents a 42 percent premium to Fast’s share price before the deal was announced. The transaction is expected to close by June.

Microsoft (MSFT) has a corporate search function as part of its Office SharePoint Server, but neither it nor other enterprise software vendors have a market-leading product for storing and finding internal documents and information on a corporate network.

With much of that information housed on Microsoft products, a tight integration between Microsoft’s products and Fast might be a competitive advantage that keeps Google’s enterprise search forever on the outside. Of course, if Microsoft integrates the products too well, it may yet again raise the ire of regulators.

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