Vyrotek|Bridging the gap between code and wealth

http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/07/if-you-work-for.html

The phone itself is a great device. But the company behind the phone makes me very upset. Apple seems to enjoy making things very difficult for developers. First, you can only write applications using a Mac and now they basically don’t let you share anything about developing on the iPhone.

The only reason Apple can even do such things is because they are the only players in the game right now. Google, wake up and jump in already.

According to CNBC and The Wall Street Journal it seems that Google is delaying the release of it’s Android platform which could push the release of handsets back a few quarters. This isn’t good news for the developers and companies actively developing applications for the platform. Especially with the release of the new iPhone.

What I probably liked most about the article wasn’t even android related. Instead, they question Google’s various revenue generating strategies.

Still, if this is a technical issue, it speaks to Google’s deeper issues of creating new revenue streams in-house, rather than going out and acquiring the technology instead. Google still hasn’t come up with a way to make money from YouTube; the company has had enormous difficulty breaking out of its search-advertising-only model; DoubleClick gets them into display advertising but Google had to spend billions to buy it, rather than developing the technology on its own.

Android puts Google into arguably the most dynamic sector in tech, but it seems like the company is having difficulties, either with its potential customers, or with the software itself.

I also would like to point out this comment that made me laugh from the WSJ article.

But some developers say it is easier to work with Apple’s programming tools than Google’s because of the familiarity with the company’s Macintosh operating system. As a result, a wide range of software companies have been scrambling to build new iPhone applications.

Obviously people familiar with the Macintosh operating system are going to find making apps for the iPhone easier. But what about the fact that there are a LOT MORE java developers who work on Windows or Linux than those familiar with the Mac platform? FACT: C# > Java > Objective C

Yahoo - Wireless Social Networking To Generate $2.5 Trillion By 2020

Two people forwarded this article to me yesterday saying this is where we should create a startup. But, as most of you know I’m not really a fan of social networking. Dont worry though this article isn’t another rant about that…

A recent study pridicts that wireless social networking is going to boom and generate $2.5 Trillion by 2020. With a headline like that you could be convinced that wireless social networking is THE market to enter RIGHT NOW! Well, wait just one minute. First, they are projecting the market to be that big in 12 years. Can anyone REALLY predict what mobile devices and the internet are going to look like that far into the future?! Where were we 12 years ago in technology?

Of course, you could argue that even a small slice of that market early on could be profitable now and even more so in the future. But I have one question… is this article assuming that someone has invented a good way to make money of social networking besides ads? If not, then wouldn’t you think you should be getting into mobile online advertising instead? I also think the fact that sites like YouTube and Facebook have yet to earn a profit should be somewhat of a warning to those thinking that social networking is an easy cashcow.

In conclusion I want to state that I’m not saying this is a market everyone should avoid. I just think that things grew and boomed so fast in the world of social networking that no one really knows how it is goign to evolve or how we’re really going to turn a profit. With users expecting everything to be free and with the majority of social networking users being young adults without a single dollar to spend, I would need to see a better business model before I get even a little bit excited about this market.

After reading this newsweek article titled The iPhone ‘Secret’ I couldn’t help laugh at how addicted people are to whatever scraps Steve Jobs throws at them. Don’t get me wrong, I am excited for Android to be released and maybe even curious to see what the new iphone will look like too. But, you wont find me tracking down Mac cargo ships and reviewing Steve’s airfare costs anytime soon. Come on, isn’t that a bit ridiculous? Is learning a few bits of information a day or two ahead of its release really going to make a huge difference? No, probably not. It might be a great product, but it doesnt need to be stalked like a celebrity… its just a phone folks.

Does anyone really think that Apple can sell 10 million iphones by the end of this year? Are you going to buy one? As a developer, the reasons I wont buy one are that you can only develop apps for it on a Mac and that you must distribute it through the apple store. Those are some pretty heavy restrictions.

Come on Android, save us already!

http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/i-have-this-graph-up-on-my-screen-all.html

So now twitter wants to be all transparent with their problems… I dont think they really had much choice though. It seems they have been having problems all week long. But only now do they share that they really have no idea whats going on.

Honestly, a 4th quarter Neumont student could recreate a better performing twitter… you guys should make one.

And just to clarify, I might seem a bit odd that I dislike twitter so much yet I blog about it so much. I explained my reasoning to a friend a few nights ago… First, whenever twitter breaks its all over the blogs I read, ugh. Second, Twitter is so broke and such a simple service that I cant help wanting to slap someone and fix it myself.

Twitter, I’m available! Dont yell at me when I replace ALL your code with Asp.net MVC and SqlServer2k5 and I do it in a weekend.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about creating a distributed twitter network because of how often Twitter seems to go down. Some people say it will solve the problem because it eliminates the single point of failure. But, who is going to want to host such a thing for free?! If you start distributing your data then you start depending on those endpoints on being online. So what’s the solution? Think about this…

Isnt twitter just restricted email? 

Twitter is just a blob of text you send (spam) to people. The ONLY reason its 140 characters is because thats what most SMS systems allow you to send and receive per message. When you write a new ‘tweet’ it becomes available to all your friends instantly. Then one day it hit me, isnt twitter just restricted email?! Writing a tweet is no different than me spamming my friends with an email. The more I thought about a distributed twitter the more I realized that people basically wanted SMTP for twitter messages. But why reinvent it for twitter? Why not use it!? It solves more problems than you might think.

SMTP saves the day?

Everyone knows how to setup an email account and the majority of email services offer a way to access your email (POP3) using third party software. Say I were to create an email account: twitter@vyrotek.com and I registered it at some new twitter kind of site called… AnotherTwitter (sure why not). I give this new site the username/password so that it can access the emails in this account.

Now, whenever I feel like the world really wants to know what I’m doing I basically send an email to myself! I write an email to twitter@vyrotek.com and now there’s an email sitting in there. Now this is where the new site does its magic. You have basically a public inbox! Going to AnotherTwitter.com/Vyrotek would access the emails in this inbox and display them just like twitter does. Of course the whole friend following thing could be slapped on top of this easily and when someone views my timeline the system would just request all the ‘tweet’ emails from everyone’s inbox of those people that I am currently following.

Benefits

• No central database storing all the tweets.
  • Any email service becomes your own database of tweets - Gmail, Hotmail, etc
• No single point of failure - If one email service goes down, it wont affect anyone else.
• Tweets can now have file attachments.
• People can use any email application to send new tweets.
  • Most mobile phones already support email

Possible Gotcha’s

One issue is that the email account you setup for these twitter messages might need to be kept a secret. This is because if someone discovered the email they could ’spam’ it and now they posting tweets as if they were you. This could be addressed in a couple of ways - From Address filtering or requiring a password/key on every post are just two I thought of.

Interesing Side-Effects and Ideas

- The ability for multiple people to use the same account could be considered a feature! A group of friends could all contribute to the same account.

- Or, if someone named Bob were to email twitter@vyrotek.com then maybe the system would detect those as ‘private tweets’ directed to just Vyrotek. If this were the case then you could share this email account with others and even if they didnt know what twitter was they are technically using it! (from Vyrotek’s perspective).

- What if people wanted to use their existing email accounts but not have everything broadcasted as a tweet? They could as long as there was some sort of ‘keyword’ in the subject line that AnotherTwitter could detect. This would be configured in the site to be whatever the user chooses.

- Groups could also be formed based on what email domain you are using. For example, you could easily find all students from Neumont if students used their @student.neumont.edu email accounts.

I know I went a bit random on the ideas but I just typed them as they popped into my head. I want to know what you guys think. I’m really tempted to play around with this idea and make some sort of prototype.

 CNet News has reported that Twitter has recently signed for $15-$20 Million in VC funding…

“A source familiar with the negotiations tells me that Twitter signed a term sheet for “either $15 million or $20 million” last week. We’re still trying to find out who is in, but the word is that it’s largely an inside round of funding with one outsider setting the price.”

I am amazed at how companies with no business model in sight can get so much attention and so much funding while other companies that offer a real service are finding it difficult to get funded. Obviously some people think that just having a lot of people using your services makes it valuable. My guess is that Twitter will end up like YouTube. Some company will end up buying them and that company will have to take a hit and pay for whatever it costs to keep it online until they figure out some business model.

I hope you twitter fans like webpages 80% covered in Ads as well as Ads in your twitter feeds.

In other news, I have yet to figure out why people use Twitter.

Today I had the opportunity to attend the Utah CodeCamp and I learned quite a few new things. The main reason I wanted to go was to listen to Mark from Medicity give his presentation on the new Asp.net MVC Framework. He probably gave one of the best presentation there today. I made sure it was clear at work that I had high expectations, so maybe that helped?

So what’s the big deal about the new MVC Framework? Oh it’s only the best thing to happen to Asp.net ever! I never really played with classic Asp much but I’m told it has some similarities and you might feel like things are moving backwards, but it really is for the best. If you’re familiar with how JSP (yuck) works with the MVC pattern then a lot of the new things will feel very familiar.

The biggest shock to me was how they have basically eliminated the page life cycle and the traditional postback. Until now, in Asp whenever you wanted to fire some click event the client posted back to the aspx, recreated the entire page again firing off the pageload and all the other junk and THEN invoked the click event. That has always bugged me! It is such waste of time to recreate an instance of a page that you’re probably going to throw away anyway.  That’s because the majority of the time you direct the user to different page when they invoke some event. Now, your buttons invoke specific ‘actions’ on your controller and the controller decides what data to pull from the model and what view to use.

I’m not going to go into much more detail now but I’ll try share any new findings in future posts. Until then, check out Scott Gu’s blog for more info!

Thanks Mark for an awesome presentation!

“How much is an idea worth? Many normal people assume that ideas are valuable, and that if only they could think of one, they might be able to sell it for millions of dollars, like the Pet Rock. On the other hand, many engineers, VCs, and successful entrepreneurs claim that ideas are worthless.”Idea * Judgment * Ability * Determination * Luck = $$$

I just recently started reading Paul Buchheit’s blog and thought i would share this great post on the value of Ideas. Since you all know how obsessed I am with coming up the next big thing you can see why I would find this interesting. I better get moving because I dont have much time if I plan on retiring by 26!

Check it out - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/03/ideas-vs-judgment-and-execution_9197.html

My favorite blog put up a great article on Mobile web trends today. They have some great resources available and it gives a good perspective on where things are moving with the mobile web. The startups to watch was the most interesting to me, I’m definitely going to check out those sites…

The What’s Next section was also very interesting. But there’s one issue that I keep thinking about that will probably slow down development on applications that actually use some of those fancy technologies. I’m talking about hardware that the phone has but that the browser cant use! GPS, sensoring, biometics, image recognition, etc… most of these things will require the user to download and install an application to use the actual hardware on the device. I’m really curious to see how things develop. I own a phone with GPS built in and I wish there was a way to build a webapp that could access the user’s location (with permission of course).

Maybe its just me, but I sort of avoid downloading and installing things on my phone. And as a developer I would rather spend my time developing web applications that can be used by many different types of phones without having to make special releases for every make and model that exists.

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