HP bought Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion in a bid to revive its moribund mobile business. The move hinged on a successful integration of webOS, Palm’s next generation operating system that had already been deployed in the Palm Pre and Pixi. After integrating Palm, HP finally moved forward with webOS, launching the TouchPad tablet last year before beating a hasty exit in the webOS hardware space. The webOS unit dangled in the wind as new CEO Meg Whitman debated the future of webOS before ultimately deciding to open source it.

Rubinstein, who helped develop the iPod at Apple, originally came to Palm and shepherded the development of webOS, ultimately replacing Ed Colligan as CEO just days after the launch of the Palm Pre in 2009. The acquisition by HP gave many hope that webOS would finally get the necessary resources to compete against iOS and Android. But the platform never gained enough adoption from consumers and developers.

Now with many of the Palm team already headed for the door, it was just a matter of time for Rubinstein to follow. In an interview with the Verge, he said that after Palm’s acquisition, he told HP that he would stay on for 12 to 24 months and was already prepared to move out of his role following the launch of the TouchPad. He said he was now on a much needed break and was proud of his work on webOS, which he said could still be appealing to companies in search of their own operating system.

What we accomplished in four and half years has been amazing. And I don’t think people understand that — what we did accomplish during that time frame was amazing. You know, webOS got its early start about six months before I got to Palm. They were just getting going. It wasn’t what webOS is today. It was something different. We evolved it along the way, but it was an enormous amount of work for a large group of people for many, many years… Of course. I put blood, sweat, and tears into this thing. And look, I think it had tremendous potential, if people put some real effort into it, I think you will see a resurgence of devices at some point.

Rubinstein said he doesn’t know what he will do next though it will likely be in mobile. It’s not uncommon for CEOs of acquired companies to leave after some time fulfilling contractual agreements, but I’m guessing Rubinstein hoped his big project would be in a different place by the time he departed.

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What Apple does and doesn’t do

For a clue into how Apple approaches the video market, you need look no further than how it’s dealt with every other part of the media ecosystem to date: It creates good user experiences across an ecosystem of great products that publishers can sell their content on.

It introduced the iPod and iTunes and allowed the music industry to sell their songs on the platform, and it took a cut. It introduced the iPhone and the App Store and allowed developers to create games, utilities, productivity tools and the like, and it took a cut. It introduced the Apple TV for the Hollywood studios and TV networks to rent and sell their movies and shows to consumers, and it took a cut. It introduced the iPad, iBooks and the Newstand and allowed book and magazine publishers to sell digital versions of their titles to consumers, and it took a cut.

You notice a trend here? Product, platform, revenue share. That model has been extremely profitable for Apple, in part because it’s had to bear little risk to collect whatever revenues and profits come from its partners’ content sales. What Apple does not do is pay upfront to have the luxury of carrying content and then shouldering all the risk while attempting to create a sustainable new business model for its partners.

The economics of the situation

But let’s talk about the actual economics of subscription pay TV. Time Warner Cable announced in its earnings Thursday that it paid somewhere around $25 a month per subscriber in content costs last quarter. Think Apple could do better? It can’t. Any new entrant to the pay TV market acquiring content licenses does so at rates higher than what others have previously negotiated. This was true when the satellite TV companies entered the business, it was true when Verizon and AT&T began offering IPTV services, and it will be true for anyone that attempts to create a virtual cable company.

Starting costs for Apple — or anyone else for that matter — to build a subscription TV service will be in the mid-$30s at the very least. Which means it’s not going to roll out a $25 or $30 subscription service or undercut your local cable company on price anytime soon.

You know how every quarter analysts dissect however many billions of dollars Microsoft has lost in its Internet services business? That would be Apple TV’s media business, quarter after quarter, if it decided to go down this road. Sure, Apple has a lot of money. And sure, Apple could bear those costs. But why would it? What’s the actual benefit for Apple or its investors?

The misplaced dream of a la carte

“But what if I don’t want all of the channels? That’s where Apple could really disrupt things!” It’s a familiar refrain to hope and wish and pray that someone like Apple will be able to do what others have failed at so far, and negotiate a la carte pricing for individual networks. That sure sounds good, and I’m sure consumers would love it! That is, until they saw the price tags associated with each of the networks that they would want to buy.

Even if Apple were able to convince Disney, for instance, to separate ABC, the Disney networks and ESPN’s sports networks from the bundle, it would be just like breaking up any other bundle: the cost to sell each network separately would be egregiously expensive. Prohibitively so.

As a consumer, would you pay $5 just for ABC? Another $5 each for CBS, NBC and Fox? $15 or $20 for ESPN? $25 for HBO? It’s not like these guys are just going to give those channels away at a small premium over what they get from cable. If they’re going to break the subscription bundle, they’re going to want to get paid to do it. In that world, how many channels do you think you could buy before the cost became more than what you already pay for a cable subscription each month?

The actual market opportunity

Put all that aside, though, and the truth of the matter is that streaming video is still a relatively niche market. How many people are out there who actually have an interest in a streaming TV service? In theory, the addressable market is every broadband household that also pays for cable service. But take a look at the number of Apple TVs that are out there (just 4.2 million) or the connect rate on smart TVs today, and you see that very few people are actually taking advantage of broadband-delivered video. That could change with the introduction of the mythical iTV, but it seems pretty tiny today.

Sure, Apple created the modern smartphone market with the iPhone or the tablet market with the iPad. But it’s not into creating new services. And it seems unlikely that Apple would introduce a new service like this, especially one that is likely to be risky, unprofitable and targeting a market segment that doesn’t yet exist.

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So the question is, What plans does Apple have for the cloud? Given recent history one can easily assume that the company would build more cloud apps that enhance existing services, like iTunes Match and Photostream. But those are small potatoes. The real opportunity for Apple is to offer a series of network services for its developers and millions of iPhone and iPad and Mac owners: network services such as storage, location data, voice command and control, notifications, and messaging.

• Storage. ICloud is already a place to access your photos, songs and contacts remotely from any iOS device or OS X Lion machine. But what about making your desktop files and apps available everywhere too? Take the way Apple is going with its MacBook Air, a huge hit for the company. A logical next step to make even thinner and lighter machines with very little room for storage is to make a cloud-centric MacBook. Imagine opening up your laptop that has little local storage and being able to access any of your documents you have saved, anywhere you are. We know Apple has been sniffing around this area: Steve Jobs offered to acquire Dropbox several years ago, telling its founder, Drew Houston, that it was really “a feature, not a product.” So a cloud-based storage service that perhaps developers could use for their own apps? Doesn’t sound too far out there.
• Location. Apple bought mapping companies PlaceBase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. We also know the company is hiring for mapping-related positions. That sparked speculation that Apple is indeed building its own location-based service. It has some location services in action already, like Find My iPhone and Find My Friends. An interesting step would be if Apple opened up such a service as an API to its developers.
• Voice control. Siri is still in beta, which means it is not even a finished product. What will Apple do with it in years to come? A good bet is it will integrate it into more Apple devices. The future of device interfaces is more nontraditional methods of control, like voice and gestures. In other words, Siri is not an anomaly or a cute, little experiment: It’s the future. A good place to look for clues about how Apple might implement more voice control services is a patent filing Apple made, showing its interest in putting Siri in everything from Macs to cars.

It is true that Apple is not a company that has historically had great success with web-based services. Embracing networked services and the cloud means Apple inherently understands that even hardware companies that extract gazillions of dollars in profit right now can’t go another decade without this. In a way, Apple also has no choice but to pursue this. If it wants to continue to build the post-PC dream, it has to have iCloud and other connected services that connect all of its apps, services and devices.

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On Friday, IHS iSuppli is the latest to weigh in. The firm says that while Apple came in first place in the last calendar quarter of 2011 in smartphone sales with 37 million, Samsung actually took the crown of world’s largest smartphone vendor of the year with 95 million shipped. (That’s not “sold,” so this is not a great way to compare, as we’ve previously discussed, but it’s what we’ve got.) Apple sold 93 million iPhones during the year.

IHS iSuppli is basing its Samsung numbers on information gathered when the company announced its quarterly earnings earlier Friday. I asked iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam how he arrived at the number and he said he was basing it off the “approximately 30 percent growth” figure that Samsung publicly announced. He interpreted that as “under 30 percent but over 27 percent.”

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So much is possible with the digital tools we have today: Google provides information from billions of sources instantly; Facebook lets us stay in touch with friends around the globe; and Twitter allows anyone to broadcast their thoughts wherever they are. But with all this freedom comes a tradeoff, as Twitter’s censorship news reinforced for many this week. In each case, we are essentially at the mercy of the company whose network we are using (and being used by). If Google doesn’t like your name, it can block you; if Facebook doesn’t like your status, it can delete it; and if Twitter gets a takedown request for your message, it will disappear. Our freedom of speech relies on these new information gatekeepers.

On Thursday, Twitter announced it now has the ability to censor individual tweets within certain countries. Although the company made a point of stressing it will only do this in extreme cases, where it is required to do so by law — in Germany, for example, where promoting Nazi principles is a crime — the news produced a wave of criticism from users and Twitter critics about how the information network was “committing social suicide” and caving in to dictators and authoritarian governments. Although Twitter said it would be as transparent as possible, and it appears to be possible to work around the blocking of tweets, the impact of the news was still negative for many.

#TwitterCensorship. Dear Twitter, I face so much censorship in Sudan as a journalist, you were my free and safe space. I'm grieving now.—
ريم ايس كريم (@ReemShawkat) January 27, 2012

Some wondered whether the move was connected to the investment by Saudi billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, while others have been muttering conspiracy theories about Twitter censoring the #Occupy hashtag from its trending topics (which the company has repeatedly denied doing). For every balanced perspective from an observer like Jillian York at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who argued that the policy was positive, there is a rant from someone about how Twitter has failed to uphold its promise as a bastion of free speech. Even high-profile Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei said ”if Twitter starts censoring, I’ll stop tweeting.”

Trust is the currency in our relationship with networks

Google has been riding the slippery slope of user trust recently as well, after criticism that its new personalized search features are an attempt to use its market power to promote its own Google+ social network — something that not only irritated competitors like Twitter and Facebook, but made some (including me) question whether the search giant had turned its back on the promise it made to users in 2004 to provide objective search results. The outcry over the changes then spilled over onto Google’s new privacy policy, which drew fire from privacy advocates and users despite the fact that little had changed.

The common thread in both of these incidents is trust, and the perception on the part of some users — and government regulators as well, in Google’s case — that Google and Twitter are both losing some of what made them unique. In Google’s case, an objectivity or purity in its results, and in Twitter’s case, a sense of freedom and openness (rightly or wrongly) about the network and users’ ability to publish whatever and wherever they wish. Twitter’s changes seemed especially disappointing to some because of how powerful that freedom was during the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt and elsewhere.

Facebook may not have touched off any storms this week on the trust front, but it is an old hand at disappointing users, whether it’s by changing privacy settings without telling them, tracking users even when they aren’t logged in or removing content in what some allege is an attempt at censorship of certain topics. Google and Facebook have also irritated users by requiring the use of real names, which critics argue benefits the companies and their attempts to serve advertisers more than it does users.

Principles are important, but these are businesses too

These are businesses with corporate interests, not triumphant defenders of free speech — and they each provide the bulk of their services for free, and make money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers. General counsel Alex Macgillivray says Twitter is committed to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and the company says it would never use its new powers to block tweets during an event like the Arab Spring, or prevent dissidents in Iran or China from using it to further their cause. But how do we know this for sure? We don’t.

The standard response when someone criticizes Google’s privacy policy or Twitter’s new tactics or Facebook’s changes is “Don’t use them.” But what’s the alternative? Google isn’t just a search engine, but a giant email provider, and has a host of other services people need to do their jobs. Facebook and Twitter are tools that hundreds of millions of people use daily to connect and share with their friends and family — which is why “open source” alternatives such as Diaspora and Identi.ca have failed to gain much traction.

Dave Winer and other open-network advocates have repeatedly made the point that relying on a single corporation, or even several of them, for access to such important tools of communication is a huge risk. But what choice do we have? We either have to try harder to find more open alternatives, or we have to trust that Google and Twitter and Facebook are looking out for our best interests — and when they don’t, we have to make it clear that they are failing, and hold them to account.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jennifer Moo and Richard Engel, NBC

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The Turing Fellows Program last summer placed 19 college interns out of 750 applicants at New York startups including Tumblr, Foursquare and others. Now, the paid internship program is expanding, and will place around 25 to 30 engineering, mathematics or computer science students at startups this summer. The application process, which quietly began earlier this month closes on Feb. 6.

The program is organized by Canaan Partners with help from FirstMark Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, First Round Capital and the Columbia Business School. This year’s crop of startups include Etsy, Second Market, BuzzFeed, Blip and many others. Other supporting partners include Amazon, SV Angel, New York TechStars, Silicon Valley Bank, and Esther Dyson, along with the New York City Economic Development Corp. and the New York City Investment Fund.

Warren Lee, general partner at Canaan Partners, told me New York is increasingly seeing more startups who are pulling in a lot of funding. The startups involved in the program have collectively raised half a billion dollars. But it’s a struggle to get talent, especially with so many companies popping up here. Startups taking part will be offering paid internships to the students, who will also get a $5,000 fellowship prize at the end of the program. Last year, 95 percent of the startups offered jobs to their interns, said Lee.

“I think this year startups realize it’s so competitive to get engineers and developers, even getting some help for the summer time, that’s something worth spending money on,” Lee said.

He said the program tried to pick a diverse group of startups that spanned advertising, mobile, e-commerce and financial technology to give students different opportunities. This year, he said the students will also get more educational and academic programming, including talks from influential entrepreneurs and investors.

So far, applications are 25 percent ahead of where they were at this point last year, when less than 3 percent of applicants were ultimately selected. The finalists will be flown in for interviews in late February, with final selections made a week later. Unlike last year, Lee said the startups will also get information on the semifinalists, giving them leads on talent who may be interested in moving to New York.

The program highlights the ongoing efforts by the New York tech community to address one of the biggest challenges it faces in becoming a tech hub that can compete with Silicon Valley. The city has traditionally had a shallower pool of engineers, and many of the existing workers were deployed in the financial sector. But the city is accelerating plans to attract tech talent through a number of initiatives, including a new applied science engineering campus that will be built by Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. NextJump and Nasdaq sponsored the Silicon Alley 500 last year, a job fair bringing together more than 500 top engineering students together with 50 local companies. And hackNY has also been helping place students with startups.

If New York wants to rival Silicon Valley, something Mayor Michael Bloomberg has publicly stated, it’s going to have to become more of a hotbed for tech talent. That’s the end game, making New York seem like as natural a destination as Silicon Valley for smart engineers and developers. One internship won’t solve the problem, but raising the visibility of New York on college campuses can have some much bigger effects, including building a bigger talent pipeline for the city.

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Here’s how it works:

Is this project the most practical way to read a $24.95 limited edition book? Nope, but it may be the coolest one I’ve seen since Esquire‘s augmented reality magazine cover in 2009.

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A recent report at InformationWeek details the story of Level 3 Communications, which recently equipped its entire sales workforce with iPads loaded with apps that provide access to pricing information; presentation creation; and display, corporate email, customer records and inventory checks. The iPad proved more than up to the task of supplementing and mostly replacing laptops.

InformationWeek goes into much more detail about what the iPads meant for Level 3, but the advantages for salespeople on the ground can be boiled down to three main categories:

1. Instant on. The iPad’s ability to instantly wake from sleep and pick up right where a user left off exceed that of even the fastest SSD-equipped notebooks, and it only sips power in tiny amounts in order to provide that functionality. That, combined with its superior portability, makes it the perfect tool for doing “quick checks between meetings, at an airport, or in a taxi,” InformationWeek says. With a laptop, five minutes in a taxi might not seem like enough time to make powering up worth your while; with the iPad, that’s a nonissue.

2. Connectivity. The iPad (at least the 3G models) provides always-on cellular network access, as long as you are within coverage range. Some laptops can offer that, but the process is still often more complicated than just tapping the wake button and being ready to surf, email or chat. But it’s not just cellular radios that make the iPad great for sales; built-in GPS positioning means salespeople can get locally relevant information, like clients or potential clients in the immediate area, in only a few short steps via task-specific software.

3. On-device demo. A laptop is an ineffective replacement for a catalog, and presenting a slide show on one is awkward. Using an iPad as a presentation tool, on the other hand, is natural. The tablet is easily passed around, can be read like a magazine, and can also output to external displays with less hassle and fewer steps than a laptop. And apps like OnLive Desktop and Iongrid make it even easier for iPads to sub in for notebooks capable of running desktop presentation tools.

Level 3 isn’t the only company to realize the value of iPads in the hands of a sales force. Sears, of all companies, announced in October it would begin rolling out iPads in 450 stores that same month, and TUAW noted at the time that Lowes and Pacific Sun were also expanding iOS deployments.

InformationWeek thinks 2012 will be a breakout year in terms of actual iPad deployments, just as 2011 saw a huge uptick in pilot programs. If that indeed comes to pass, we should see Apple easily beat the 40.7 million iPads it sold in 2011.

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From the article:

And building new capacity isn’t cheap. Everyone — not just the first-class passengers — ends up paying for it. So prepare for higher cellphone bills. And in the meantime? Prepare to sit and wait. That call to Grandma might not get through until the congestion clears.

Other alternatives might be less palatable, especially to anyone who wants immediate downloading gratification. We could stay off the grid or utilize fewer data-intensive functions. Or we could put some traffic cops on the beat to regulate our data demands and limit the traffic snarls and bottlenecks.

But if you think Siri is somehow responsible for the data overload, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Siri is the first generation of interfaces that will make it seamless and easy for us to surf the web from anywhere, and on any device or vehicle. So the author’s problem is one that’s only going to get bigger. Thankfully, it has a solution — one which he seems to ignore.

Paul Farhi, the author of the piece, makes a couple of errors (or maybe omissions is kinder) that are worth pointing out to the policy wonks in D.C., especially as they contemplate bills that would gut the FCC’s ability to make spectrum policy in the U.S. for the sake politics. Onto the problems:

Siri as data hog

Siri, the natural language processing service Apple introduced on the iPhone 4S, doesn’t consume the data Farhi says it does in his article when he says, “Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.” Siri consumes very little data in sending your voice back to the servers to figure out what you want the phone to do, but what it does is make it that much easier to surf the web. Farhi seems to understand this, but his first characterization is blatantly false. Siri isn’t guzzling data; she’s making it easier for us to do so. We’re the guzzlers.

The airwaves as highways

The second problem with the article is more complicated. Farhi uses the popular highways analogy for how we send cellular traffic and explains that building out more infrastructure takes time. (One reason is because it takes about 10 years on average to get spectrum into the hands of carriers thanks to the politics associated with spectrum auctions.) But what he misses, and what is crucial to his point, is that there is more than one set of wireless highways. There are multiple types of licensed airwaves that are used for everything from satellite radio to cellular, and there are unlicensed airwaves where data is currently sent using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and soon, WiGig.

When we’re talking over the air, there’s not one single highway to get us from Point A to Point B; there are multiple spectrum bands, technologies and costs associated with them. In this age, using wireless is like engaging in multimodal commuting. You use cellular to drive to the train station and the high-speed rails of Wi-Fi fly downtown. Meanwhile, you’re sharing those rails and highways with thousands of other commuters in neighboring airwaves that are the equivalent of bikers, skateboarders etc.

We can keep Siri and still call grandma. Here’s how:

That’s where Farhi missed a big opportunity to tell D.C. that instead of focusing on cars and the single highway, it should look around at all the other technologies out there. Stop listening to the carriers, who actually do have spectrum they can deploy if they want to work a little harder and spend a little more, and start thinking about how Wi-Fi or white spaces broadband (Super Wi-Fi) can play a role in taking congestion off over the air data networks.

Passing a spectrum bill that allows for more unlicensed airwaves would be a start, as would leaving the FCC to deal with the highly technical issues surrounding spectrum auctions. Pushing the FCC to investigate special access fees would also help, as it might lower the rate of bringing a fiber pipe out to areas so ISPs can support large-scale Wi-Fi or white spaces networks. But first, we have to understand how the wireless and cellular networks work, so we can propose viable solutions instead of blaming applications that make our lives better for congesting our network.

Since many of those solutions will require action (or inaction) from Congress and the FCC, the Washington Post missed a golden opportunity to educate its readers about possible solutions and push the debate forward with mobile operators about using Wi-Fi more strategically, making it possible for rural areas to use unlicensed airwaves to create broad coverage areas without paying an arm and leg for a gigabyte and helping Congress understand how the industry actually works.

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Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in the device dissection is section 5.2, which contains the phone’s memory, CPU, rear camera and LTE radio. Why? Because there has been recent discussion about why Android phones have larger screens than the iPhone.

I’ve long said it’s because a larger screen has the potential to provide a better overall experience, provided the display resolution is high. It’s easier to read and type on a larger screen and also is better for watching video, a smartphone activity that’s on the rise.

In contrast, Apple blogger John Gruber recently suggested Android screens are growing in size in order to accommodate the LTE radio chips. Following the chip and baseband industry, I simply didn’t agree at the time of Gruber’s statement, and a look at Samsung’s Galaxy Note tends to back me up; an LTE radio and supporting antenna could certainly fit in a smaller device if desired. In fact, it’s already been done in the Samsung Galaxy Attain for MetroPCS: a 3.5-inch Android phone with LTE radio.

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The idea of creating copycat businesses is almost universally derided, whether it’s a small company ripping off a larger one — for example ,when design sales site Fab.com this week called out German clone Bamarang — or a big business lifting ideas from smaller rivals, such as when Zynga found itself hauled over the coals for creating its own version of the indy game Tiny Tower.

It’s obvious why clones are so disliked. After all, for an industry that prides itself on novelty and invention, copycats seem to display two cardinal sins: a lack of ambition and imagination.

Yet despite this apparent consensus, copying the ideas of others remains a very successful business — particularly in Europe. In the old world, barely a week goes by without a new company arriving that appears to copy a foreign rival. In fact, Berlin-based Rocket Internet has made so many millions by cloning the likes of eBay, Groupon and Zappos, that its founders, the three Samwer brothers, have become synonymous with copycatting.

But however people feel about cloned companies, they continue to exist. So what can businesses do to beat them?

Think global, not local

German entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs has experienced life on both sides of the aisle. As the founder of professional social network Xing, he faced accusations of copying LinkedIn, but today, his startup accelerator HackFWD focuses on investing in innovative European technology businesses.

He thinks copycats are inevitable.

“Yes, all successful products will be copied,” he says. “Since it is so easy to copy the front end, it’s logical to copy. And unfortunately it is a working business model.”

The answer, he thinks, is to dream big. Clones often spring up in international markets where the progenitor company is unwilling or unable to deliver. This means there’s one simple answer to the copycat dilemma.

“Immediately think and act global,” says Hinrichs. That can be tough, however, and requires funding that may be hard to come by. “Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, many U.S. companies don’t get enough public cash to manage to scale globally in the beginning. They only overcome this burden with massive A and B rounds.”

A more common option is to partner with or acquire clones. Obviously, this is something that goes against many entrepreneurs’ gut instinct: After all, if cloning is seen as a form of blackmail, then acquisition means a company has effectively paid ransom. But on a practical level, paying to take a clone out of the game can be worthwhile if the strategic cost of competing directly is too high.

Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, says this is important because acting too late or too indecisively can sometimes let the copycat gain the upper hand.

“Look at Ali Baba. It started in China as an imitation of Yahoo,” he says. “Now it’s in a position to buy the company it was imitating.”

‘Innovation is a sacred cow’

Shenkar’s views on cloned businesses don’t stop there. The author of Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge says copying isn’t just inevitable; it’s everywhere already, even if we pretend otherwise.

“The stigma about copying is strong in the Western world,” he says. “We talk about innovation all the time; people are bombarded with it. There’s a disbelief when you say ‘let’s take a contrarian perspective for a moment’… Executives get personally insulted if you suggest they have imitated somebody else.”

According to Shenkar, we are culturally programmed to forget that ideas are rarely unique, and radical new business models few and far between.

“It’s especially challenging in the technology industry, because all of it builds on innovation — innovation is even more of a sacred cow than in other businesses… People are happy to believe that supermarkets will imitate each other, but god forbid if the same happens in our prized high tech industry.”

History is written by the victors, making it easy to forget there were social networks before Facebook, search engines before Google and discount sales websites long before Groupon was ever a twinkle in Andrew Mason’s eye. Would Google’s Android work the way it does if it hadn’t been for the iPhone? And would Apple have made the Mac if it wasn’t for Xerox PARC?

As Steven Johnson argued eloquently in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, groundbreaking innovation is rarely groundbreaking, and it’s rarely innovative. Instead, it’s the product of a time and place and context.

The stack of ideas

Perhaps the most essential way to beat clones, then, is to realize that ideas are far less valuable than execution. This shouldn’t be an alien concept to technology businesses; after all, engineers are used to standing on each others’ shoulders and using the same software stack but competing on implementation. So why not stretch that way of thinking through to the stack of ideas?

This is where Germany’s Samwer brothers are not ignorant, but cunning: Their speciality is the rapid execution of businesses that require some sort of physical infrastructure. They could build a clone of eBay in Germany because eBay wasn’t bothered, and they used that expertise to execute copies of Zappos, Groupon, Airbnb and others. To Shenkar, this makes them very smart indeed — because they copy what they need and compete where they can: that is where they are innovative.

Perhaps, he says, if we spent less time complaining about copycats and more time outperforming them, we might all be better off.

“Most fundamental innovations in our history — from the wheel to the compass to writing systems — have only been invented once, maybe twice,” he says. “It’s not only arrogant but dumb to think that only one company or one country can innovate.”

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KeepRecipes is starting out small. It has signed deals to distribute the contents of five cookbooks from two publishers, Gooseberry Patch’s 101 Recipes and Harvard Common Press’ Not Your Mother’s cookbook series. The site is also hosting individual recipes from seven famous chefs and authors, including Masaharu Morimoto of Iron Chef fame and New York Times food columnist and cookbook writer Mark Bittman, giving the portal’s members access to 1,000 different dishes, priced at 99 cents each. But CEO and founder Phil Michaelson said he is hoping he can build off that small core of cuisine, proving to publishers that there is money to be made distributing their cookbooks online and convincing consumers that some online recipes are worth paying for.

The comparison to iTunes isn’t just a gimmick. It is uncanny how closely KeepRecipes is following Apple’s music distribution model, all the way down to direct integration with the iPhone. The recipes are bought and stored through KeepRecipes’ online portal, where they can be sorted and searched, organized into collections — recipe playlists, if you will — and shared with up to five friends in the KeepRecipes community. A mobile app allows members to access their collections through the iPhone.

What’s more, those paid recipes become part of the members’ overall digital recipe collection within the portal. Michaelson said KeepRecipes is trying to do away with the concept of the digital cookbook as just another e-book, trapped in between electronic covers. Instead, the portal aims to help its members build a comprehensive digital cooking library — a task I can tell you from experience is almost impossible to do — by bringing in recipes from multiple sources.

“We want to provide a place where you can keep all of your recipes in one spot, whether it’s your family recipe, a web recipe or premium content,” Michaelson said.

Recipes found online can be grabbed through KeepRecipes’ bookmarklet or by entering its URL through the website. You can enter your own recipes manually, and you can “keep” any nonpaid recipe in your friends’ collections. Just as customers can annotate, comment and add pictures to their own recipes, they can do the same for the ones they have paid for.

The remaining obstacle to building a complete digital cooking library is integrating the thousands of recipes that sit bound on our bookshelves. But Michaelson is working on that problem as well. KeepRecipes is working with its publishers to allow members to download the digital contents of their physical books for a fee of $5 per cookbook.

If you read my post earlier this month on why digital recipes need to emulate digital music, this idea might sound eerily familiar. I thought I was being pretty creative at the time, but it turns out Michaelson and his developers have been developing that concept since KeepRecipes’ inception. Michaelson has already found solutions for problems that I merely posed, such as how to deal with digital rights management and controlling distribution.

In fact, KeepRecipes seems to have all the tools in place to make a comprehensive online recipe library possible. What it lacks is scale. That is understandable, considering KeepRecipes only launched in August, has only 10,000 members — of which about 15 percent are active — and is still in its early stages of funding. For a company of that size to have attracted the attention of even small publishing houses is impressive.

Michaelson said he has found cookbook publishers are eager to go online, but many of them see the inherent limitations of the e-book format, which is why they are working with KeepRecipes. Publishers are also concerned that once they make their cookbooks more digitally accessible, their recipes will escape into the wilds of Internet, where they won’t be able to charge for them. “They are very intrigued by the idea of a social portal and sharing on Facebook and Twitter,” Michaelson said. “But they’re also fearful of a total loss of control.”

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Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents was in attendance at the court’s announcement of the ruling on Friday and said that Judge Andreas Voss didn’t specify any particular reason for the decision. The first ruling against Samsung last week also didn’t include a reason. Mueller said at that time that the reasons could either be that Apple had been found not to infringe the patent or that Samsung’s rights in exerting the patent had been deemed exhausted, which would result in Apple’s being granted a license by default. The same reasons could also be applied to Friday’s ruling.

For Samsung, this is definitely a setback, but it isn’t the end of the road; the company still has three other 3G/UMTS patents at issue in separate complaints filed with the Mannheim court. As long as the reasons behind the dismissals of these two lawsuits aren’t somehow related to all the patents in question, it could still claim a victory on one or more of those remaining.

Samsung could also still appeal the decision, and given that it, like Apple, posted record earnings for its most recently completed quarter, there is no financial barrier preventing it from doing so. With two companies at the top of their game slugging it out in the legal arena, there is little incentive for either to stop.

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Uberpaper founder Dmitry Shapiro

“In a world full of algorithms, we can get a skewed sense of the world when it comes to news,” Shapiro, the tech executive known for founding Veoh and most recently for serving as the CTO of MySpace Music, said in a phone conversation Thursday. “News is an extremely important part of how we experience the world around us. If news has been overly processed by personalization algorithms that essentially pander to us, we can start to believe that the world is a certain way, when it really isn’t that way at all.”

News that’s purposefully impersonal

That problem is exactly what Shapiro’s latest project Uberpaper was built to combat. Uberpaper, which launched to the public this week, pulls all the news from Yahoo News’ API and presents it in a way that manages to be both clean and image-rich: Imagine Flipboard meets Pinterest, but all in a liquid user interface design that works in any web browser. The only social elements to the site come in the form of a simple “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” button that users are meant to use to show how well-reported or relevant a story was, as well as the ability to comment.

Users can choose to view Uberpaper in 10 different languages, and sort the news according to topics such as World, US, Business, Technology, Sports, Politics, and so on — just like an old fashioned newspaper. In fact, the experience of finding out what’s happening in the world by reading a traditional physical paper is a big thing Uberpaper is trying to replicate. Shapiro put it this way:

“With technology, I think we threw the baby out with bathwater when it came to newspapers. Online news sites today show their content very much like search does — it’s kind of database-y, and formatted in a very linear way. We wanted to bring back the aesthetic of a newspaper, and the serendipity that comes with scanning the news that way.”

Uberpaper screenshot (click to enlarge)

Keeping social in its place

However, Shapiro is quick to point out that he is personally a big fan of social media sites, telling me, “I love Facebook and Twitter, and I’m on those sites all day long. They’re wonderful places to share news, and I don’t think Uberpaper is competitive in any way to them.” Rather, he says, Uberpaper is meant to be a place where people can find fresh news to ultimately go back and share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter — to bring something new to the table, rather than re-sharing stuff that’s already been discovered.

For now, Uberpaper only pulls in news through Yahoo News’ API, which was chosen because it has a very broad base of news sources and topics. More news sources will be folded into Uberpaper in the future, but the expansion process will be very well-considered, Shapiro said. “We’re going to be really cautious as we add additionally sources. We very much want to make sure that we’re not slanting the news in partisan ways, or toward any kind of topic, really — it should be broad and generic.”

Uberpaper was built by the same team led by Shapiro that built Anybeat, the social network that encourages people to use pseudonyms that launched this past autumn. Anybeat, which has $1 million in funding, is still in operation, but right now it and Uberpaper are being run as separate products. Uberpaper doesn’t make any revenue right now, but down the line advertising could be brought in to run alongside the news.

A long shot that’s worth taking

In all, I think Uberpaper is great: Simple, straightforward, and clean, while perpetually brimming with new content. It’s certainly coming out in a tough space — many people already feel like they have more than enough sources of news — but I could see Uberpaper becoming a much-frequented bookmark for news junkies. And in my opinion, any service that’s aiming to put an end to the echo chamber is fighting the good fight.

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Stephan Pastis

Like many of society’s pop culture fixtures, the comic strip is a product of the last century’s dominant medium for information and entertainment, the daily newspaper. But as with most everything associated with the newspaper business, the comic strip finds itself struggling against the harsh reality of ever smaller page real estate, papers shutting down, and generational shifts towards other forms of entertainment.

And while there’s no doubt that comics continue today as a vibrant medium on the web where new voices such as those behind Penny Arcade and The Oatmeal thrive with millions of readers, a glance at the comic strip page in any major metropolitan newspaper gives the impression that papers themselves have given up on new voices that could attract new generation of readers, often times running strips in which the creator no longer is the driving force behind the strip or, in some cases, may have died years ago.

So what does all this mean for the newspaper comic strip artist?  To find out, I thought I’d ask Stephan Pastis, creator of perhaps the last big comic syndicate success story, Pearls Before Swine. Pastis launched his comic strip 10 years ago after a career as a lawyer, and today Pearls Before Swine runs in 650 newspapers worldwide, an impressive number given how fast and far newspaper circulation has been falling.  Pastis recently also became somewhat of a pioneer in the comic strip syndicate world, as he became the first syndicate-based comic strip artist to release a dedicated iPad app with interactive elements wrapped around the strip itself, an app called Only the Pearls.

Below I have some of the highlights from our conversation, but you can also listen to my entire conversation with Stephan in the Soundcloud player below by clicking the big orange button, or download it here to take with you and listen to on your mobile device.

Stephan Pastis & Michael Wolf – GigaOM Podcast Jan 2012 by GigaOM

The decline of newspapers and the future of the comic strip

For someone who makes his living in the daily paper, Pastis admits that the decline of the paper is something he and others in his business think about every day as they look to the future. He said that everyone in the newspaper business is looking for the magic formula, how to stay relevant. What gives him hope, however, is that he thinks people always need news.

“Regardless of what platform they find themselves on, someone has to provide them with their local news, and in theory comics would be a part of that.”

The iPad app

Stephan Pastis Character on Pearls

According to Pastis, an iPad app wasn’t a nice to have, but a necessity. Since approximately 1 in 5 books purchased today are electronic, Pastis knew he was missing an opportunity. He had amassed 18 collections of his comic strip in print, but he didn’t have an e-book.

He also knew that going into this, he wanted to take advantage of the medium, and that’s why he decided to make an enhanced e-book app complete with audio and video interviews, animated strips, as well as interactive components.  He said with print, he had models set for him by artists he had admired, such as Scott Adams (Dilbert) and Gary Larsen (The Far Side), where they would add commentary about the strips below the strips themselves. With apps, his heroes hadn’t gone there before him, so he used the principle that guides him in his strip.

“I used the guide that I use when I do the comic strip, [which] is what would I like to see? What I would like to see is video, audio, animation… a few surprises. I want to be fully immersed in it, don’t just want to turn pages or see just strips I’ve seen before.”

The Oatmeal as a model for the future

The Oatmeal

I asked Pastis about some of the newer artists who are seeing success on the web, like Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal fame, and if these new artists gave him hope. He said that when he’s asked about getting into the business, he points to The Oatmeal and others like Cyanide and Happiness.  He wasn’t sure how you could monetize the audience, but felt good content on the social web would bring the audience. He also said, as a syndicate strip artist who beat the odds, he can see both sides.

“For people that have made it in syndication, sometimes they look at the internet as something that has diluted their fame. They’ve done something very few people can do… The flip side is you can be in your bedroom and have a an audience of a million people with no gatekeeper, and that’s very appealing.”

The power (and danger) of the social web for an artist

He also had some interesting thoughts on connecting with his audience through the social web. He said that nowadays, audiences can sense an intermediary, the voice of “PR”, and things like Twitter and blogs have created the expectation that the artist is going to be the voice they hear.  If you are a wallflower, according to Pastis, this world does not benefit you.

He also said that social media presents a danger to the artist. Artists have, traditionally, created best “in a vacuum,” hearing only their own instinct, and hearing instant feedback through social media could threaten that.

“At the end of the day you are expected to lead. You cannot be whipsawed back and forth by how your audience feels. Ironically, if you follow what they tell you, they won’t like you soon enough. “

I also talked to Stephan about the future of the comic strip three panel convention, about his penchant for making fun of others strips and much more, so I’d encourage you to take a listen above or download the podcast conversation here.

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Motorola shipped only 5.3 million smartphones and 200,000 tablets in the fourth quarter. In comparison, Apple shipped 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads in the same period.

Total device shipments were 10.5 million for the quarter, while for the year, the total was 42.5 million, including 18.7 million smartphones and 1 million tablets. Like other Android smartphone makers not named Samsung, Motorola continues to feel the pressure of a very crowded and competitive market.

As Om wrote earlier this month, the market is fracturing between two smartphone giants – Apple and Samsung — making it harder for any vendor without a distinguishing operating system to catch up. Nokia is hoping it can become just that challenger by embracing the upstart Windows Phone OS. Its Lumina Lumia Windows device sales were about 1 million for the fourth quarter, but the company has only begun to ramp its new smartphone line.

Despite a five-percent boost in device revenues, Motorola posted a loss of $80 million, which the vendor attributed to reorganization and write-off costs in advance of its acquisition by Google. Whether Google plans to use its considerably resources to revive the ailing vendor or plans to simply reap its patent portfolio is still an open question. Regardless, Motorola said it expects the $12.5 billion deal to close early this year.

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