Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre looks at the explosion in mash-up mobile technology and services and how different platforms are competing in this space. Great article. Read here »
Insights from a Windows developer on how the iPad and future devices of this class are threatening the Windows market. Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, looks at three points:
Speed. Similar to #1, I can check my email, look at my various RSS feeds and scan my schedule in less than 30 seconds. On a Windows based PC, I’d still be waiting for Outlook to get done doing its thing or dealing with some Windows update that came in during the night that rebooted my machine
If you’re on the train and want to check your email on a laptop, by the time you unload it, boot it up or wait for it to come out of sleep, open your email program etc half the train ride is over. You can do that on the iPad in a few seconds.
By Peter Petrovski
Mobile advertising is the latest battleground in the war between Apple and Google - and make no mistake it is war. The companies are fighting toe to toe, feature to feature, in this post-Microsoft era of personal computing.
Google, the undisputed king of internet advertising, receives a large chunk of their revenue from Search through Adwords/Adsense campaigns - and no doubt they built Android to extend this reach to the mobile space. However, it was Apple that took the early lead in Mobile, introducing their iAd platform at the iPhone OS 4.0 event last month.
iAd is a mobile advertising platform that allows third party developers to directly embed ads into their apps, all while keeping you within the app and not booting you out to the web. This platform and service was the direct result of Apple purchasing Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising firm, and they will be using their salesforce and business model to sell ads - essentially making Apple an advertising publisher.
Mobile is a more personal and engaging advertising space than any other, and Apple demonstrated some very engaging rich media ad formats at their OS 4.0 event - interactive HTML 5 micro-sites, full-screen streaming video and super roll-outs. In Apple’s words, far more emotive and interactive than anything that has been delivered across the internet or mobile before.
This is another example where Apple is controlling the user experience, raising the quality of advertising by making them an entertainment experience and keeping the user within the app - all while shutting out third party advertisers such as Admob (in which the iPhone is the top device on their network) from gaining access to the same data Apple can.
HTML5 Watch is a new blog I made last night. My goal is to collect examples of creative, innovative, and unexpected use of emerging web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. It’s an itch I need scratched for myself, and something I expect others will find useful too.
The Web is such that you can learn a buttload just by looking at other people’s work. This is how I got into HTML back in ‘98, CSS in ‘99, and pretty much everything else since. Don’t forget that when you’re dissecting webpages, WebKit’s Web Inspector is an invaluable tool.
You can (and should!) also submit your own examples to the blog (the link is right at the top.) The question to answer is, “what can I learn from this code?”
It’s been a little over six weeks since the iPad was released. That is not a whole lot of time for app developers to put together amazing apps for the platform; I predicted that we’d have to wait for those until this summer. Still, some apps available on day one (or soon after) impressed me….
