Toluu : Bits and Buzz

Bits and Buzz

Technology, trends, and opportunities.

iPhone vs Android vs WinMobile: 2-1-1October 17 2008

Now that Google is in, the game is on. As I mentioned in my previous post, software is now ruling the mobile industry. As in the PC world, the big contenders are Apple with iPhone, Google with Android, and Microsoft with Windows Mobile.

But the big questions are: which one is better and which one is going to ultimately win?

While it is hard to objectively answer this question, here is my first attempt to create a simple score card. I have created a “4 Ss Scorecard” that I think is quite representative of the mobile market need.

Openness:

The first property is openness, which represents how easy it is for developers to build and deploy applications and users to download and install them.

From a user point of view all three phones allow users to easily install applications over the air (aka OTA) or via cradle. From a developer angle, Microsoft and Apple have a similar approach that requires developers to buy their development tool (e.g., Visual Studio for Windows Mobile) or their OS (Mac for iPhone application).

Google has a much more open approach; their phone is based on an open platform and language (Linux and Java) and provides free t

Software to Rule the New Mobile MarketOctober 8 2008

The value chain used to be one of the main differences between the mobile and PC markets. The PC industry was driven by software vendors (i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Oracle), while the mobile industry was controlled by the Telcos and device manufacturers. For a long time, the Telcos even had the power to remove features from devices that they felt caused too much competition with their own service offerings. For example, tethering and other features frequently were disabled on early versions of Windows Mobile devices. Interestingly, iPhones 3G, despite its flying pixels, still does not have tethering nor allows it. I am not sure if it is an iPhone limitation or another example of Telcos control.

I think that the main reason why mobile email has taken so long to be widely deployed was the reluctance from the Telcos to enable a competing technology that infringes on their highly profitable text messaging (SMS) and promising rich messaging (MMS) services.

As they successfully accomplished for text messaging and ringtones,

Search Oriented TaggingSeptember 30 2008

Tagging has been a relatively popular, human-driven method for organically categorizing information on the Web. Users are now accustomed to tagging the content that they are publishing or bookmarking.

However, by design, tagging requires users to have some sort of writing privilege, which greatly limits its reach potential. Practically speaking, it means that if a user wants to tag an item on a system (e.g, Youtube, Flickr, or delicious) he or she must have an account on that system and be logged in at the time of the operation.

While this is probably not an issue for major Internet services, it can be a chicken-and-egg issue for new, upcoming services that do not yet have a large enough community to build a meaningful tag cloud. How can a new service maximize its community tag cloud if it doesn’t yet have a community?

Here is where the concept of Search Oriented Tagging comes in. The concept is that users do not tag anymore but just search. The service will extract keywords from the search query and track the user’s interaction with the results. The system will then apply statistical logic to automatically tag the interacted entities.

Although this approach is not intended to be a substitute for traditional tagging, it can also complement tagging mechanisms for large communi

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome HarmonySeptember 23 2008

Google Chrome is only about three weeks old and is already an Internet phenomenon. To sum it up, Google Chrome is all about making web browsing safer, faster, and easier. While some might see a fierce competition between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, I see harmony.

Here is some background to better understand this point of view. There has been a somewhat valid belief stating that the un-typed and interpreted nature of the JavaScript language was a major limitation for building demanding client applications. Consequently, to overcome this challenge, the browser technology providers had the following two options:

Re-invent the language by “upgrading” the JavaScript language to a more a traditional typed and object-oriented language, such as Java or C#, allowing the runtime to just focus on running the code.
Re-invent the runtime by creating novels ways for the JavaScript virtual machine to parse and interpret the JavaScript code, making the language as robust and reliable as more traditional languages.

Conforming to the EcmaScript’s

Seven Design Principles for Enterprise Collaboration 2.0September 16 2008

The two premises of this article are as follows:

Social Networking is the method of connecting and communicating with the purpose of increasing knowledge (of people and of domain).
Collaboration is the method of organizing knowledge and expertise to efficiently accomplish a particular task.

So, Social Networking is about sharing and discovering, and collaboration is about organizing and creating. Although informal, the point of these definitions is to demonstrate the similar but inherently distinctive meanings of collaboration and social networking.

The latest challenge for an enterprise is that social networking has undergone significant innovation cycles, mostly on the consumer side, and collaboration has not kept pace. As a consequence, an enterprise is often tempted to substitute collaboration by social networking, which could lead to an oversized enterprise social network with very little productivity gain, or even a loss, due to the over-communication side effect.

In my opinion, enterprise collaboration is still too unstructured, fragmented, and, I would even say, immature. Most users became accustomed to unnatural and inefficient ways to partner for the most basic task, such as document collaboration. Some collaborative solution providers tend to offers partial results for fear of empowering or promoting their competition. For example, Google has an interest in luring users away f