1.12.2010 by Kevin Creighton
Wal-Mart may become to wireless what they are to retail.
...the gist of a rumor coming out of AndroidGuys today that says Sprint is working on a deal with Walmart to install WiMAX cells on all (yes, all) of its locations, a move that would give it a significant boost in national coverage while presumably lowering infrastructure costs significantly.
Wal-Mart revolutionized retail by lowering distribution costs and dramatically improving logistics. Why not do the same with the overpriced and under-serviced wireless industry?
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1.11.2010 by Kevin Creighton
Robert Scoble is partially right: The mobile workspace battle currently isn't between Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platform, it's between platforms that are web and developer friendly and platforms that aren't.
Apple and Google’s devices are all web friendly. They are easy to use to pull up information from the web. But most of the world’s phones aren’t that way. Go to any cell phone store and try pulling up a web browser on them. Google and Apple’s products make it simple. Most of the others make it very hard, and even if you succeed you probably have trouble navigating the web, or are faced with a dinky small screen.
It’s worse than that if you compare app platforms. At CES last week I met an exec at Research In Motion, the folks that make the Blackberry. He bragged to me that they were building their own Twitter and Facebook clients. I didn’t get the bragging and asked him “so I guess you aren’t trying to build a platform, then?” I explained to him that if you build your own apps that signals to your third-party developers that you want them to go away and work on something else because you’re demonstrating that you’re very willing to take the best opportunities away from them.
However, as evidenced by Windows Mobile quick disappearance, the war between web-friendly devices and everyone else will be won by Apple and Google, but who will win the war after that?
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1.06.2010 by Kevin Creighton
Google's running ads for Chrome and the Nexus on it's home page now. Whatever happened to all the crass capitalism popping up only on the results page, and how long will it be before Google.com ends up looking like another AOL?
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1.05.2010 by Kevin Creighton
Dave Winer has an interesting idea:
Technology as a coral reef.
"Scattered throughout tropical seas are coral reefs that started when a ship sank and sea creatures made it their home. Then the predators of those creatures started hanging out, and their predators, all the way up the food chain. Eventually, if the ocean climate was right, a coral reef would appear, much larger than the wrecked ship that started it all."
I like this metaphor because it easily explains the eco-system of applications that spring up around a given product. Windows has many apps out there to keep it secure and stable, the iPod has spawned countless other companies to support it, and the eco-system of Amazon.com ranges from
IMDB to
cloud computing to
affiliate marketing to
warehousing services for everyone.
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