Apple iOS, Google Android or Microsoft Windows?

At some point most of us would like to be a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs or Larry Page - Famous and rich and a part of our history. So do I.

Therefore I decided, it is time to do something which makes me rich and unforgettable. I decided to build an app.

The question is what the desired platform should be.

Let us start with a mobile app for Android OS. The SDK is free to download. There is a one-time $25 fee for registering to distribute apps on the Market:
http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113468&topic=15866
This seems to be right I can (with almost no costs) get an app into the android market. But I can't sell an app over $200 at Android market place.

Min and max prices of android apps:
AUD: 0.99 AUD - 200 AUD
CAD: 0.99 CAD - 210 CAD
CHF: 0.99 CHF - 200 CHF
DKK: 6 DKK - 1200 DKK
EUR: 0.50 EUR - 100 EUR
GBP: 0.50 GBP - 100 GBP
HKD: 7 HKD - 1500 HKD
JPY: 99 JPY - 20000 JPY
KRW: 999 KRW - 220000 KRW
NOK: 6 NOK - 1200 NOK
NZD: 0.99 NZD - 280 NZD
SEK: 7 SEK - 1500 SEK
SGD: 0.99 SGD - 270 SGD
USD: $0.99 - $200

If I want to use google cloud to develop my app, because I don't want to buy hardware for testing and developing, then the costs go up.




But of course I would save a lot of money for hardware and resources. But using the full service costs $500 and more a month.
Developing apps on Google App Engine takes one-fourth to one-tenth of the resources and one-fourth of the time compared to building something ourselves.”
Gary Koelling, Director of Emerging Platforms, Best Buy

Pricing seems alright but the big issue is the big chaos of different OS versions and devices available on the market. Google is not regulating very strong their OS distribution and is not telling the vendors what hardware to use. To develop an android app which should reach 90% of Android users must be tested on over 200 android devices. Ouch. There is no chance to build a professional enterprise app because the max sell price is too low and the testing to expensive.

May 2011:
Android activations swelling to over 100 million worldwide (112 countries) on 215 carriers and 36 manufacturers with 310 different Android devices


Developing an Android app might not cost a lot for licenses nor does Google take a lot for having an app in their store, but I am not willing to hire 20 testers to to test my app nor do I want to develop years to get my app running on all android devices.

Quote Netflix:
Because the platform has evolved so rapidly, there are some significant challenges associated with developing a streaming video application for this ecosystem. One of these challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones. In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback. We are aggressively qualifying phones and look forward to expanding the list of phones on which the Netflix app will be supported.

Maybe I should try Apple.
As we know there are only a handful devices we need to support and would still reach 100 million users. The iOS is running only on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Each of them have only a few versions in hardware and not many iOS in the market. 84% of iOS users are already on iOS 4.
The iPod touch has same screen size as the iPhone. These all sounds reasonable for me for developing an app. I can easily afford to by from each one device and would not spend more than $1,000 (phone contract not included). Apple allows to sell apps over $200. I have seen a few for $999 (there are 20). However the store is so full that it is almost not possible to create an app which not somebody else already did.
Total Apps Approved for US App Store: 589,391
Total Active Apps (currently available for download): 471,319
Total Inactive Apps (no longer available for download): 118,072
Number of Active Publishers in the US App Store: 106,423


Getting access to developer tools is inexpensive as well between $99 and $299 a year.



But there are some issues.
Apple has very strict guidelines how to develop an app. An app can be denied because the developer does not follow the guidelines.
An other issue is, that Apple will take 30% of each sale of an app. This can be very cost intensive. I was thinking about an enterprise app, which I want to sell 40,000 times for $23.99. This is $287,780 for Apple just because I use their app store. Yes I get maybe free promotion and the user does know where to go to find my app, but this a lot of money. I could build an app outside of the app store and publish it only for my enterprise clients, which Apple allows, but I might still pay 30% when Apple find out that I sold the app outside of the store. Apple allows corporations to develop apps which are not the app store, but only for internal use and not for sale of the app.
And then Apple is heavily promoting the iPad and iPhone as a game computer and not as business computer.



I don't want to get rich and make Steve Jobs richer.


As alternative I could develop software for Windows. There are of course many different hardwares to consider, but if I build a web based app with .Net then I could concentrate on 4 browsers (IE, Chrome, Google and Safari) to get most of the users a working app.



The investment would be $11.899 for Visual Studio ultimate with MSDN which gives a lot of developing tools 78 Microsoft products like office etc and $3,500 worth of Microsoft Azure cloud.





This is a lot of money for a startup, but cheaper than Apple in the long run, if I sell more than $35k a year in software.

Interesting is that the same package cost in Germany almost the double $20,900)





This is as much as two Fiat Panda cars.




The last alternative would be the amazon app store.
The Amazon marketplace has considerably less competition than Android store or the Apple app store, I actually might have better results there.
Just make sure that if you agree to be the Free App of the Day, you completely understand what you’re getting yourself into.

Anyway, Amazon has gone ahead and sweetened the deal just a bit: beginning September 2011, anyone who submits an app to the Amazon App Store store will get a free chunk of change to check out the Amazon Web Services suite (amazon cloud).

But apparently Apple isn’t the only company running an App Store with a penchant for secrecy.

In a blog post in August, mobile developer Shifty Jelly has publicly called out Amazon for covertly offering the company featured placement on its unofficial Android Appstore as the ‘free app of the day’. This is a well-known promotion that Amazon has openly talked about, but there’s a twist: instead of paying developers 20% of the app’s List Price, which is what it had previously promised, Amazon is asking them to take a 0% rev share.
People were very clearly told that even if Amazon decided to make an app free, developers would still be making 20% of their list price. In other words, they’d still make money. But not anymore as seen above. This means my $23.99 app which might have downloaded on the free day 20,000 times would cost me not 80% of my potential revenue but all.

I learned that developing an app is more than just being a developer. It is important to choose the right platform.

During my research I learned something really interesting. For PCs, everybody is talking about software. But for mobile devices and OS any kind, we only talk about app. I wonder what is the different between software and application.

After all I decided not to build an app to be as famous as Steve Jobs and that I am going to brew my beer and to sell it to restaurants by delivering it with one of my two new Fiat Panda.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Target relaunched website - what a disaster

Target did relaunch last week their website. Target did everything than a good job and will eventually lose a lot of money and customers. Target is one of the biggest competitor to Walmart, but with the new website they did lose the race.
Target worked two years to build the new website, mostly to move away from Amazon who did Target's online operation. Target was trying to make it simpler and easier fro their customers, but this did not work out.

Then



Now:



This week when they launched the new website Target.com, I was lucky enough to have an order lost on along with 10,000 other people. Here are some of the comments on their page… no one likes the new site. Their problems are effecting returns, purchases, quantity of available merchandise, account history, registries and coupons. Pretty lame - if you haven’t checked it out, hurt your eyes and go to www.target.com .
Amanda Johnson
Your website changes are terrible. I can't access my registry at all >.< Major FAIL.

Mel White
Wondering when you intend to have the website working properly so I can actually do my baby registry? Dosn't work at the store either...

Katie Bean
your new website is terrible! it looks bad and is NOT user friendly!
Ayumi Tomioka
totally, completely, extremely dissatisfied and upset with target new website
Valerie Manke
Your new website is horrible, it doesn't add discounts and it is harder to shop it on a tablet device! What is up with it?
Abbie Rae Menning
So I, as well as many others posting on here, am SO frustrated with the new website and the fact that my wedding shower is a week away and the registry stuff is crap now. And I find it really disappointing to see that Target has stopped responding to peoples posts, or when they do, they tell you to call some number, even though they know you will be on hold for hours. Customer satisfaction is being sucked down to almost non existent, all because a website was launched prematurely.
Nicky Dove
your new webite is the most horrible thing ever!!!!
Shandra Adkison Dean
What is going on with the coupons??? It says the link is no longer available when trying to print them... I'm trying to head out to the store to get some stuff & our Target doesn't have it to where you can print the coupons there! Please get this fixed FAST!!!
Lauren Bell
Please fix the new web structure. It's hard to navigate and it is not working. I can't log into my baby registry and when it says to go to Target Help page, it says that's down.
Alicia VanSloten Barnard
Are you having problems with the coupons on your web page. They aren't printing. =(
Mark Webster
you website suck balls, too much going on keeps freezing, i go to anyother web sit and it is just fine...fix the crap
Xiomy Juarez
why is your new website super slow!?
Candace Knight Milliron
Is there a problem with your couponing page on the website? I keep trying to print two coupons, and I get error messages that the page is no longer available. Thanks!

Talley Spain Williford
Trying so hard to be patient with your new website, but considering I placed an order and it shipped 8 days ago and I cannot search for the order on your website, through the phone system, nor can it by found by your customer service reps I am losing confidence. I never received a tracking number, so I can't track it through the shipper website. I still cannot access any previous orders in addition to this most recent one. Your "contact us" section of the website will not allow any messages to be sent b/c I need to enter "valid questions or comments." My baby registry is inaccessible and this has been going on for like a week now? When will you guys have this straight?

From WSJ.com:
Two years in the making, Target.com's new platform is easier to shop, has faster checkout and more closely resembles the store shopping experience, Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel said in an interview.
Target built the site and will handle all related operations. For the past decade, Target outsourced nearly all of its online operations to Amazon.com Inc. The Seattle online retailing giant provided software to run the Target.com website and hosted the sale of Target goods directly through Amazon.com. In addition, Amazon ran the call center and most of the warehouse operations for Target, shipped the products to customers and handled customer service.
When the new website launches, Target will no longer sell its wares on Amazon, a Target spokeswoman said.

Target has room to grow. It is only the 22nd largest Internet retailer in the U.S., with $1.33 billion in sales last year, according to trade publication Internet Retailer. In contrast, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ranks as the sixth largest Internet retailer with an estimated $4.4 billion in sales. Amazon is No.1, notching $12.95 billion in sales last year.




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Location:N Westshore Blvd,Tampa,United States

Some more small Lion issues

My wife's hard drive is nearly full as I wrote in an earlier blog. Therefore I decided to move her music into iCloud.
But for some reason I could not access iCloud through Lion. I could however through Safari.
ICloud will cost by the way money, when you need more than 5 GB and it is not cheap.
The first 5 GB of storage on the service are free. An additional 10 GB will cost $20, 20 GB will cost $40 and 5 0GB will retail for $100. It’s more expensive than Amazon Cloud Drive, which gives 20 GB of space for $20 and lets users store an unlimited amount of music for free.

I decided to move her music to an external hard drive in our network, because iCloud was right now no option (even if I have a developer account and iCloud beta should work). Having the data external accessible over wifi makes this a private cloud. This is cool.

But I did something really bad, I copied the music and changed the music folder in iTunes to new location. However the library still recognized the songs in original folder. I renamed the original folder, I moved the folder to another local location. Nothing helped, when opening iTunes the app recognized the old folder regardless of name or location.
I then renamed the library XML file to .old and reopened iTunes. This worked but of course no songs in iTunes and then I imported the songs to iTunes. The whole process took two hours and a unhappy wife. Doing this did a lot what I did want to avoid. She lost all her ratings and her playlists. The correct approach would have been to use Apple instructions, but I did bing for it when I was too late.
At least we have now for her a private cloud which is much cheaper than $50 a year for Apple's iCloud.

Apple's recommendation:

1. Open iTunes.
2.From the iTunes menu, choose Preferences.
3. Click the Advanced button in the Preferences window.
4. Click the Change button in the iTunes Media folder location pane.
5. In the Change Media Folder Location window that appears, navigate to the location where you would like your new iTunes Media folder to be created.
Note: By default, your iTunes Media folder is a folder named "iTunes Media" in ~/Music/iTunes/ where the tilde "~" represents your home directory.
6. Click the New Folder button in the Change Media Folder Location window.
In the New Folder window that appears, enter the name of the new iTunes Media folder.
7. Click Create.
8. Click Choose in the Change Media Folder Location window.
9. Click OK in the Advanced window.
10. From the File menu, choose Library and then Organize Library if using iTunes 9 or later. If you're using iTunes 7 or iTunes 8 for Mac, choose File > Library and then Consolidate Library.
11. In the Organize Library (or Consolidate Library) window, select Consolidate files.
12. Click OK. Important: This action copies all of your music and media files to the new location. There must be enough hard disk space available to copy all of your music and media files.
13. After the folder has been copied, locate your original iTunes Media folder, and drag it to the Trash. Important: Don't remove the iTunes Library files that may be in the same location as the iTunes Media folder. For more information about the iTunes Library files, see this article.
14. Quit iTunes and then open iTunes once more.
If you receive the alert "The folder containing "iTunes Library" cannot be found, and is required. Please choose or create a new iTunes library," you most likely moved the iTunes Library files. If this is the case, move them out of the Trash and back to where they were.
If you can open and close iTunes without encountering the above alert, empty the Trash.

After all was done I deleted the old local music folder and emptied trash however the computer still believed there is only 1GB space left. I almost got crazy and then remembered that my backup hard drive on my iMac showed (since I moved to Lion) that all backup files are together 16 Terra Byte, but my hard drive is really only 3 TB.
When I rebooted the iMac the folder size was shown correct as 1.4 Terra byte. I rebooted my wife's computer and got a message that the hard drive is almost full. The reboot took 3 minutes but then all was fine, we had again 39 GB available. Which was weird because we deleted only 29 GB.

Playing around with Lion, it seems that Lion is building up a lot of virtual memory to keep track on open apps and documents etc. I might be mistaken, but when I played around I could actually see the disc space going down, but maybe it is just a display issue (maybe this is the reason that Apple did hide the folder and file sizes in Lion). However when rebooting Lion most of the memory is coming back even if Lion is rebooting your computer with all apps ope as you had when you rebooted.

I binged around and did not find any related issues in the internet, yet. But I have the issue on two computers that I believe there is some truth in my discovery.

My iMac had 500GB free memory which did went down to 400GB but stayed steady there. A reboot did give me the 500GB back. Again I don't know if it is only a display issue. Same with my wife notebook. Disc space seemed to be full and we got even a warning but we did not see any performance issues which we should have when the disc space is so low.

Anyway I will keep an eye on it. I love Lion but somehow I don't have full trust in this OS so far.

This is again an example that Apple is not ready for not computer savvy users (which I guess I now belong too, because I did not know how to do the iTunes thing right).

I am sure Apple's Genuis bars will be very busy the next few months.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple walled Garden - a different view

here is another view to walled Garden.

People might believe that a wallet garden as a app store monopoly will not work, because regardless what Apple will try, they need the consumer and at the end a consumer can drive a lot. Consumers did not like Netflix’s price change and Netflix did feel it.
If Apple tries to keep the boundaries too close then the innovation will suffer.
Right now it helps Apple to keep the playfield closed to keep a lot of spam, virus etc out. And Apple did need to build the walled garden, because without this, the iPad would not have succeeded, as we can see with android tablets or before with netbooks which don’t have any success yet or are already dead.

We see more and more hacker attacks, this costs companies a lot of money and the consumer will lose faith. Recent examples are Sony or some Credit Card companies, which got hacked, in the last view months. Sony even could not get their system for months running - the online gamers were all, but happy.
With the ipad, users can very easy install thousands of software with a click. Apple need to keep the system very tied, that the user experience does not suffer otherwise the iPad would have been no success.

Apple is moving completely to Internet install, which we can see with the missing SuperDrive in the new products. And therefore no chance to use a DVD to install, but Apple is progressive and drives many times new ways to do things. They started to leave the floppy out of the computer and later the CD. Then they started to make phones without keyboard. All the time people were questioning, but now it is common not to have floppy or phones without keyboard.

Apple tries with the ipad the xbox principle - Easy to use, great design and innovative and extreme good pricing.

The MacBook Air is a different story. It is much faster than the ipad and a little bigger, kind of mobile but higher in price and still not scalable to not to interfere with the MacBook Pro and to keep the MacBook Pro in game. Maybe they learned with iphone and ipod. The ipod is almost dead, because of the iphone.

A big advantage is the Apple app store which other companies are now trying and actually Microsoft had it with Windows Vista before even Apple started with the app store, but nobody had such a good payment model for developers that Apple has now a big advantage. If we compare it with the Google app store, then we can see that most of the android downloads a free and revenue is much less than with Apple. One reason is, that Google does not control enough the store and the OS distribution. Developers have much harder to develop apps for Androids because testing will take forever. And the quality of apps are so bad (because nobody controls the app submission that users don't want to pay for the apps at google because the quality might be bad.
There used to be Digital River for buying apps online, before we had mobile app stores, but is was a mess and not easy to find apps. Apple reinvented software distribution and they did it really good.
I think Apple found the right riming. We are ready for centralized apps. Consumers knew this from Facebook or even from SalesForce, both have a big app platform.

I don’t think that Apple really wants to get rich with software or with financial companies because it is not their core business. Apple uses software to support their services and hardware. But even if so, if the money is too much, then the developers will go away. And if they go away Apple needs and will change their methodology. Again, it does not matter how big Apple get, at the end the developers and consumer will regulate the power of Apple.

I think the fight is on between Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all want to have the consumer and mid size companies and offer a 360 degree service - Microsoft with Office 365, Google with Google docs and apps etc.

Microsoft developed with Windows 365 and Windows 7 a great office pack, Google is totally concentrating on advertisement, Amazon on e-commerce and Apple will take the usability ticket. All of them are similar and totally different and therefore all of them will coexist.

However the big loser might be the Mainframe companies (metapher) like Oracle, IBM, SAP, HP etc. They might concentrate too much on the large cooperation till they figure out it is over, and that even the large companies moved to smaller data centers etc in clusters.

I believe Microsoft will move more and more into large companies and Apple will take the small and midsize market. Google will dominate in young start ups which eventual will grow very big.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Amazon to release tablet in September or October - danger for Apple?

Rumors are out that Amazon is going to introduce a color tablet based on Android In fall this year. Will it be successful?




(Image copied from Wired.com)

Apple introduced their tablet (iPad first generation) April 2010. Since then many tablets have come on the market with more or less no success.

According to a market research, Apple's iPad accounted for 89 percent of worldwide tablet traffic on the Internet in May, easily besting Android-based tablets and other slates.

Apple has sold 25 million iPads since the tablet's launch in spring 2010. Moreover, iPad held 87 percent market share in 2010, according to research firm IDC. Another research firm, Gartner, said it believes the iPad will own 68.7 percent of the market in 2011. Android devices, on the other hand, will only have 19.9 percent share this year, the firm said.

Why did so far none of the competition pick up on Apple? In my opinion there are many reasons, but mostly because the OS is too limited (like the playboook from RIM, which can only do mail with a Blackberry) or because the hardware is not as light as good and has shorter battery life (like Galaxy and Zoom). Plus none of the tablets are cheaper than the iPad. Another important factor is the amount of applications and the quality of applications. There are already 5,000 apps for Android tablets but the quality of many apps is not good because google does not control the applications.

The consumers are ready for another tablet which can compete with the iPad, not because the iPad is bad or the price is too high, but because we don't like to have only one real choice.

Amazon has a great chance to be the second winner in the tablet market. Which is an irony because Amazon is not a leading hardware company. But Amazon has something nobody besides Apple has. Amazon has a good app store and does control all submitted apps. It has less restrictions than Apple but more than Google.
And Amazon is like Apple a retailer and does know how service and support works which Google is just not good in.

Amazon is the biggest online retailer and has a big customer base, therefor they can and will market their apps in their store better than Google. As a amazon app developer i get frequently emails from Amazon with tips and helps to support me or to market my app.



There are a lot of complains from developers that Google does not support them . The latest example is Lodsys patent infringement claim. Apple is taking the fight but Google leaves it to the developers.

Amazon will and can do it better than Google, and can build a fast thin tablet with long battery life. Even if the kindle is not a tablet, Amazon still learned in the last few years a lot about tablet devices and integrated services.

Amazon has not only the retail experience but as well music service, video and ebook experience. A tablet could combine hardware with all these services.

If anybody can really compete with Apple on the Android market then it is Amazon. Pretty sure in 2013 we will have 50 or 80 different tablets but only two will share 70% of the market. All others will have together 30%. One of the two is Apple and the second one could be Amazon.

Microsoft can still catch up but yet we need to see a windows tablet or some success with windows phones. Microsoft missed the idea that the OS is not the most important part, it is the services around the OS. Windows got only so big because there was more services and apps available then for Apple computers.

Same happens right now with Apple iOS, regardless if the iOS is great or not, there are so many apps and services available that it would not make much sense for the user to buy something which would limit them.

But as I wrote, we never just like one choice, and I believe Amazon could win big against all other tablet manufactures.

Now here comes a thesis which is maybe totally crazy. Amazon will grow to the biggest Android market place that in 4 years most of the people won't remember who originally did develop Android.
Or do you remember which Linux was the first and who Linus Tovald is?

Stay tuned and keep your eyes open for a new Amazon device.

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Location:Anacortes, Skagit, Washington

Want to know when the best time is to buy?

Before we had Internet we went to a small store and did let us explain from the sales person why and which product we should buy. Many times we took their advice, but we drove to the next super store outside of town to buy exactly the item we want some few $$ cheaper than in the small local store.

Then came the Internet. We still went to the local store to get as much as possible info, and then we went online to buy our new stereo. We might have used Amazon or pricegrabber to find the best price.










These websites do a good job to compare prices but they have two problems. First they use feeds they get from the retailers which means many times the prices are not really valid anymore and they don't help us to predict when the best time is to buy.

This changed now with decide.com










Decide.com is not relying on 3rd party feeds. Their system is crawling all the rimes certain retailers to ensure to get the latest price.

Few of the founders were former owner or employees of farecast.com which got bought from Microsoft in 2008. Farecast was a travel side which did predict changes in flight costs. Farecast claims according to a third-party audit of their predictive technology, they are about 75% accurate and on average, customers will save over $50 on a typical round-trip transaction.

The same prediction software is used with decide.com. Decide works right now only with TV, computers and cameras.
Decide tells you if the price will fall (with a confidence level), if a new model is coming out and when a new model is expected.

The main product page shows the lowest price and will link to the company which had the lowest price. If multiple companies have the same price then it takes the first one in alphabetic order.

Clicking on "Prices" will bring the browser to the lower part of the website where you can see 5 compares at the same time. Really nice is, that the grid shows taxes and shipping costs as separate columns.









Decide is a great tool. But you can't buy products at decide.com. You will be redirected to the reseller of your choice. In one case the item I was looking for was out of stock and decide.com was not aware of it.

The website is nicely done for iPad, I would like to see an iPad app but do not really miss it, because the website is ok. However I don't like all these popups when navigating to vendors product page. With iPad it gets annoying because you don't have tabs (not yet). It has a complete Facebook and twitter integration which can only help.

Overall it is a great concept but it needs more categories. Phones and tablets would be perfect for decide.com











These people seem to be big Apple fans, when I searched for blackberry or galaxy tab, I got info back that neither phone or tablet category exist and guess, the I,ages shown wad the iPhone and iPad. However in their search seems not macmall.com included which many times cheaper than anybody.

Another kickback is the low amount of products.
There are only 85 notebooks, 268 televisions and 68 cameras in the system, but on the other hand why more per category?

Decide.com has a great future, if they can offer more categories where products are changing price all the time. However it is a little different than booking flights. I electronic the price goes usually down and seldom up. Flights are more tailored round seasons and depend on the gas price a lot.

But still it is good to see when we should not buy a product because a newer model comes out. Because then we can either buy the new model or pay less for old model.

Cars would be a good example as well, I am so tired to talk to car sales people that I would love to find the best price online and then just go to the dealer to finalize the deal.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

WWDC keynote - a big attack against Facebook, Google and Microsoft

Today was Apple's yearly keynote and bedside what we already knew what will come some was unexpected. Steve Jobs lost more weight (I feel so sorry for him). He looked at least 10 pounds lighter than the last time.




Apple did clearly make the point that they are Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon together and better. The attack wen to all of them.

The keynote was about Lion OS, iOS and iCloud. Exactly as we heard before.
But here a few interesting points. Steve talked many times about PC when talking about Macs. In the past everybody referred to Windows computers as PCs and Apple computers to Mac. In the keynote he talked many times about PC, because Apple is now so big that it is not just anymore a small company for desktops and notebooks. There are now over 55 million Macs on the market. Which makes Apple third biggest PC manufacture.
Lion will have over 200 new features, the most i liked is mission control.




A great feature to find and navigate through all your open apps and windows. Lion will be much closer in look and feel to iOS and supports better multi gestures. However in the demos we could see that it was not easy to use. But it is a step closer touch notebooks and touch screen desktops. Lion will be only available over the app store as download for just $29.95. This is great. And I only need to buy it once and can install it on all my Macs.

iOS:
iOS 5 will have over 250 new features and 1500 new APIs great for developers and users.



Apple sold over 25 million iPads in 14 months but more impressive is the total amount of iOS users: 200 million.
One of the new features in iOS is a better safari with tab browsing, twitter is build info the OS, there is a new overhauled mail program and finally a new way of notification. No disturbing alert boxes any more. Last but not least the game center gets more social aspects which has already today 50 million users, almost twice as big as Xbox live (Hello Microsoft).



The new iOS is an attack against Facebook and other social networks. iOS is now second biggest social platform. To make iOS a social platform users will be able to send and receive messages via iMessages through all iOS devices over 3G or Wifi regardless if it is a phone, a music player or an iPad.
Apple will even offer this features to Macs and PCs. Who needs in the future Facebook. The two big things in Facebook are games and status updates. All this will be soon possible through iOS devices and apple social platform. Apple even allows with iOS 5 to buy one app one time and to be installed on all iOS or Mac devices the user owns. I might need to ask Apple if I get my money back for pages and keynote which I bought multiple times.
The best part, iOS makes your phone cable free, we will be able to sync over the air, which will help to get more buyers because they don't need to have a
PC or Mac to sync or activate their device.
And if you think to buy a new camera, think again. iPhone is already number one device in uploading photos to flickr. Now it gets easier. The camera can be accessed through home screen and the sound button can be used as shutter. Hopefully this will speed the app. Today starting the photo app will take sometimes 10 seconds. To long to make an action shot.

The last part in the keynote was iCloud. First of all, I love it, because I will save $149 a year not using mobile.me anymore (family account). Today I got an email that my mobile.me will be free till it goes out of business (June 2012).



With iCloud all my calendars, mails and contacts will be synced to all my devices instantly. I hope it will work, because with mobile.me it did not go well and I had all the times sync issues and at the end some calendar entries 20 times repeated or contacts 10 times in my contact list. Even Steve said that mobile.me was far from good.
But iCloud has much more. Free documents sharing between your devices and friends (mo need for dropbox anymore). It works from the beginning with pages, keynote and numbers, however the API will e available for developers to put other documents types into the cloud directly out of the apps. Google doc sounds very familiar but Apple makes it easier no upload necessary all can go directly through the apps.
ICloud is up to 5GB free (Photo streaming and mail does not count, they a free anyway) this a pretty good deal. Yeah finally I don't need to email images I made with my iPhone to my iPad that I can use them in my blog. They are just synced to all devices if I wish. Up to 1,000 photos on iO
S and unlimited on PC and Mac. Photos will stay 30 days in the iCloud enough time to sync the photos.

And of course Steve had to say it. "one more thing".
ICloud does not only put your documents, photos and calendar in the cloud, it allows you to put your songs there as well. But instead of uploading the songs, iTunes will have your music you bought in iTunes automatically in the cloud and will be available on all your devices.



But what was the one more thing? Exactly what I was wondering in my older blogs. As an example I have collected over the last 20 years over 20,000 songs and I bought only 100 in iTunes. For only $24.95 a year, I can have all my songs in the cloud. It does not matter if I have 5,000 or 200,000. If I want, ITunes can scan my library and will make all my songs available in the cloud. I only need to upload the songs Apple does not have. They say they have over 18 million songs, and they


believe most of our songs will be already in iCloud. This means syncing an iTunes library takes the most a few hours not weeks like with amazon or google.



Both services require that we need to upload our songs to their cloud because they don't have yet agreements with the big labels.


Over all the keynote was interesting and when reading between the lines we could read that Apple is going away from Software company. Apple is a platform which delivers the OS, the hardware and the service.

So far all major changes did work out for Apple. Ping, Apple TV and mobile.me maybe not, but this new redefining of Apple might work very well.

I guess Steve sees it like Jack Welch once said. It is harder to stay number one than to get to number one, therefore we should always redefine our competition when we are number one to be not anymore number one.

Steve looked sicker than ever and had problems to walk, I hope he sill be soon better. Regardless if I like him as a person or not (I even don't know him), he deserves to be healthy and he did something with Apple which nobody had thought about 15 years ago.



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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

iCloud what the hack is this?

Apple purchased the domain iCloud for $4.5m And French site Consomac.fr did some digging into the latest developer preview build of OS X Lion and found something interesting. Buried in the code are references to a service named called “Castle”. Given the context of one of the mentions — “upgrade from MobileMe to Castle” — this led most to assume that the name referred to Apple’s upcoming cloud service overhaul. We can now confirm that to be the case.

And It’s no secret that Apple is building a large data center in North Carolina. Various aspects of the building process have been discussed in the local, national and tech news. The facility has even been detailed in aerial photographs.




Tech reviews.net writes that there is lots of talk about iCloud, which is said to be Apple’s new cloud service. People have already speculated that it would be better than the cloud services from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Industry insiders argue that Apple couldn’t possibly set up a cloud for corporate clients because it lacks the know-how for such.

They say that Apple is bad at security, networking, and software. These are the important components of a cloud service. For years Apple had to fix network related bugs with their products and systems. As for security, hackers stay away from Apple desktops not because they are impregnable but they are not worth getting into. But a cloud database would be a different story, where thousands of personal data could be stolen.
Steve Jobs must also develop new software to run in his iCloud. Apple could build the hardware for the cloud service but it lacks developers to create the software to run in it. Apple doesn’t have a large enough developer base like Microsoft and doesn’t want to work with third party developers. The App Store business model might work with the consumers but it would be frown upon by cloud developers.
That means Apple would have to depend on its small pool of software developers for the job. These are the same group who can’t program an alarm clock to handle DST.
According to rumors, Apple is set to unveil the iCloud in its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco next month. While loyal Apple supporters see this as another imminent win for the company, industry experts fear that Apple would be set for major failure.

But here is my take.
Apple will start the cloud different than Google, Amazon or Microsoft. The first step is to have all their apple computer users to use the cloud. First they start with music, photos and documents. When the consumer is savvy with this, the apps will be moved into the cloud. For this Apple does not need to develop applications. In matter of fact Apple has already their email, calendar and contacts in the cloud through mobile.me.
The next step is to offer iworks and iLife in the cloud, which Apple has enough developer to transform these apps into cloud service. The Apple product architecture makes it much easier to get them into the cloud. Apple has a big advantage against Google and Microsoft, they know online payment better than them. Pretty sure they come up with an usage on the go easy payment. Amazon has as well online payment deep knowledge but no real software for users. When this is done, Apple will try to attack the business world. But even if they don't, millions of consumers are producing for Apple enough revenue. Too many times did we speculate that Apple is not ready for business and this is true, but only because they did not need to attack businesses. The iPhone is already extremely common in companies and slowly but strong replacing blackberries. The iPad has no competition yet and established in many companies. All these devices will take advantage of the iCloud.
We will see Apple in the business world but we have to wait till Apple decides to attack the enterprises and then it will be big. ICloud and Castle will be the necessary bridges.


Apple is looking for database architects with noSQL experience which is a good indicator that Apple is working hard on a cloud. So if you want to work in the future for one of the top 5 cloud companies (which will be) then apply for this job.


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Location:E Sheridan Rd,Salt Lake City,United States

What makes Apple so successful?

The Apple stock constantly grew since July 2008.





Why is July 2008 such an important month? Apple released on July 11th their iPhone app store. Before, consumers were only able to put short cuts of web pages on their phone but no 3rd party apps. All this changed on the 11th.

I did blog a while ago that I used to be an Atari user in the 80es but switched to Windows, when I went to university. One of the biggest reason that I chose Windows instead of Apple, was the ability to access software.

In the early 90es and even till now, there was much more software available for Windows than for Apple PCs. And everybody I knew at the university had used programs like Word for DOS which was not available for Apple.

Apple had the better interface but if you are not a designer or in desktop publishing then there was no reason to spend more money on something which was not compatible with other systems.

However I was amazed when I came 1990 to the US and saw many schools using Apple. I guess Apple missed to take advantage out of this.

Point is, that not always matters how good a device looks or how perfect the quality is. It matters who has the best Eco System. It was Microsoft in the 80es till end of 2009 and in PCs it is still Microsoft.

Apple's first big hit on the market was the iPod. The iPod is a digital music player but Apple was not the first company to sell a digital music player. In 1998, Compaq introduced the first hard drive-based digital audio player. The player had an initial capacity of 4.8 GB, with an advertised capacity of 1,200 songs. Two years later, the upgraded 6 GB NOMAD Jukebox became available.

The iPod was released in 2001 but did not have significant market share till Apple released the iTunes Store (introduced 29 April 2003) an online media store run by Apple and accessed through iTunes. Till then there were 100 of different music players but nobody did offer a software to store and to buy music for their music players.





Apple got only so successful with the iPod, because of the iTunes Store. There were other nicer players on the market, but they could not access iTunes store.

Apple did a great job to build relationships and contract with music industry when everybody was using Napster instead of buying music. Apple could offer songs for $0.99 which nobody was able to. At a time where a music CD was between $9 and $20.
Consumers could suddenly buy single songs instead of a CD with 15 songs.
Windows tried later on to compete by introducing Zune but had not such good deals with the music Industry. And if you don't offer enough music to buy, then you you are out of luck.

The iPad got introduced in April 2010 when everybody said there is no market for a super sized iPhone. But the analytics were wrong, the market was there and Apple sold within weeks millions of iPads. The most successful factor for the iPad was the App Store.

Over two years, the app store for the iPhone grew to over 250.000 applications. This was the perfect time to introduce the iPad. Starting with a phone is much easier, because we all had already cell phones and most of us did not like the UI. Apple just needed to make it better and was the first who allowed to have web pages short cuts on the phone, this was new. Other phones offers already a lot of apps to download but they were not easy to find or in a centralized system. Apple had no apps but short cut of web pages were at this time almost better, especially the iPhone had a full web browser not just a mobile limited version.
If Apple had first introduced the iPad, it would have failed because of missing apps for the iPad. Steve Jobs said once he had first the idea for the iPad, but he was smart enough to wait.

The iPad had from the beginning 250k apps (not native ipad apps). They did run in iPhone mode but consumer is able to double the size with one click. In my opinion, this was the reason why iPad has the same screen ratio like the iPhone and not wide screen. Today are over 40.000 native iPad apps in the app store and 100.000 apps which can run on iPad and iPhone in full screen size.



Google is a smart company and understood fast that Apple has something going. Google came out with Android, their version of Apple iOS. Google Android phones have, after less than 2 years, the highest market share on smartphones and over 100k applications.
But Google made an important mistake. They offer their Android as free open source which results in many different Android versions and many different devices.

Apple was again smarter, by having only a few devices with a few different hard ware and only two screen sizes. There are basically only the iPod touch, the iPhone and the iPad. A heaven for developers. It is much easier or develop for one type of device than for 100 different devices. As a result apps for Apple are usually better looking and higher in quality with less crashes. Google is like Microsoft for mobile. The second mistake google did was to have an app store with no control. It is sad but true an android user does need already and anti virus software.

Google tried to fix their OS concept with the tablet market by being more tied. But the hardware companies are still not yet taking any bigger share on the market from Apple. And the reason is so simple. There are only a few apps for Android tablets. Developers are not yet jumping on Android tablet development. They are frustrated and busy with Android phones.
Google would have more developers if they would not have copied the idea from Apple to run apps in full screen modus only. I believe if an app would run like apps on PC in windows instead in full screen it would be easier for the developer. They could develop for one size if it fit or not. And give the user the ability to resize if they want.
Of course another hurdle is to develop against many different hardware. It will take at least another 6 months till we see thousands of Android software for tablets and then Google has a big chance again. But till then Apple might have opened another market which we did not know exist.

Apple did again a smart move. They bought almost the whole market on touch screens and memory. The high volume allows Apple to sell the iPads to a descent price, which so far the big competition can't really undercut.

Next infrastructure step will be cloud. Apple will build an easy to use cloud Eco system which will drive more users to Apple.

I see only one company, right now, which could get close to Apple. And this company is Amazon. Amazon has a good infrastructure and Eco system as well, but the hardware is missing. Amazon has the kindle, a great ebook reader and maybe is even the market leader in ebooks, but Apple proofed with the iPad, that people don't like dedicated devices. A device should do multiple things not just be an ebook reader. Amazon must (if they want to compete with Apple) come with their own mobile device. The Beauty is that it can even be running on Android. If Amazon is able to convince developers to build software for Amazon devices then the cards will be different.

But till then, Apple will keep going up.


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Cloud not perfect yet - Amazon's cloud world stopped for hours

Thursday night I switched my Apple TV on to watch Monk through Netflix. But instead of watching Monk I got a message that Netflix is not available at the moment. The reason for this was that the Amazon could was down.
Therefore my world broke down.


The problems, which began early Thursday morning and had not been completely repaired by the end of the day, affected sites including Quora.com, Reddit.com, GroupMe.com and Scvngr.com and Netflix.com which all posted messages to their visitors about the issue. Most of the sites were inaccessible for hours, and others were only partly operational.

The Web companies use Amazon’s cloud-based service to serve their Web sites, applications and files. Amazon’s customers include start-ups like the social networking site Foursquare but also big companies like Pfizer and Nasdaq.

Amazon, which is a leader in this business, lets these companies rent space on its servers and take advantage of its big data centers and computing power. But that gives the companies little control if the servers fail.

Everybody is talking to go into the cloud, but the Amazon failure is a clear example that cloud is not ready yet. In understand that many companies are in one time down, but the difference with cloud is, that if the cloud is down then hundreds of companies are down. Do we want to trust our business to be in the cloud? Imagine you use a CRM and your server our network goes down. Your team will try everything to get it running again. If your CRM is in the cloud and the cloud goes down, then you have to rely on the cloud owner to get it back running. You can imagine if your own system is down many employees would call the IT department to complain, which does slow the process down just because of the mental stress.
Imagine something like Amazon goes down, how many people will call and put stress on amazon? The engineers will feel it and make it harder for them to get it running. Granted they have more engineers working on such issue than your company might have, but they report to Amazon and not you.

I am friend of the cloud but when we go in the cloud, we should always think twice how critical a meltdown would be for company. And for really important applications we should have a distributed cloud cluster. Using Amazon and Microsoft Azure as an example as a fallback. When one is down the other can take over. It is a little more complex to set up and think through the architecture but helps to stay online.

Unfortunately this makes the cloud more expensive which is already not cheap.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple, Google or Amazon? I think Microsoft

Google is trying hard with fighting on many fronts which helped Amazon to build something like the underdog empire. Both Amazon and Google are under the top 5 could companies. But Google is so busy with fighting against Microsoft, Apple and Facebook that they totally forgot about Amazon.
Amazon took the chance and did start to offer video streaming, then an android app store and lately the amazon files, document and music cloud.
All three services are based on two things amazon is very good in. Cloud computing and e-commerce.
Google is good in cloud but awful in e-commerce. Apple is good in e-commerce but has yet to get known as a cloud company.

Google is of course big enough to be the GE of the Internet but it is a dangerous and difficult way to get there. This can be only accomplished with a strong leadership and clear defined departments.

Amazon on the other hand had an amazing year behind with a 40% growth and does the right things. Sitting calm in their chair, monitoring want is going on in the world and take two different worlds and make the best of both. Example the Amazon app store:
Google failed to have a store which is in good control and therefore allowed to have a lot of apps floating around which are beyond of good and even harmful for your mobile device. And then the store itself is and was horrible to find apps.

Amazon decided to have their own developer base and to be in charge for approving applications. Similar to Apple but not so strict as Apple.

Another example is the music cloud:
Google is talking since years to build something like this, but Amazon did it without any fanfare before.

Amazon might soon have their own mobile devices (besides the kindle) and if they offer their own OS then Amazon could be a big player in mobile.



The whole world is now following Amazon, since they released in a really short period of time three services.

This is mow the best time for Microsoft. Microsoft could let Apple, Amazon and Google fight (and of course RIM as an active audience) and slowly without noise build their own little mobile empire.

The chances are good for Microsoft. Apple has surly the best looking devices and an awesome User Experience. But their OS is only available on Apple products. Which could be a problem for enterprises. As a company you have to get many times 3 different proposals, but with Apple all three proposal would be very similar, because retailers don't have a lot of margin and choices.

Google Android is free but there are too many versions on the market (which Google wants to change) and no MS office product available. IT does not want to support multiple versions of OS neither use a device which has not a good office integration.

RIM might be a good choice for companies but their products are just not keeping up, even if RIM will soon offer their OS with ability to run Amdroid apps.

Amazon knows cloud but has no OS nor hardware for businesses.

But Microsoft could be the winner. They just signed a contract with Nokia, number 1 phone manufacture. And MS is already in most companies present with their office products. In the next three years notebooks will be replaced by smart phones or tablets. MS needs to catch up otherwise there office products will be past.

But because office is big in companies the chance is good for MS to be number two mobile OS in 2015. Microsoft is with Azure (like Amazon and Google) one of the biggest cloud companies and with office 360 there products are available in the cloud like google documents, just more sophisticated.

And then is the knowledge MS could build over the last 25 years. The knowledge to build an OS which manufactures can use for their devices and still keep the OS the same.

As hard it sounds for Google, but at the end MS can win over Google in mobile market if Google does fast understand how to offer a solid OS with good service and support for manufactures and consumers.

But till either Google does grow up or MS runs the mobile and cloud world, till then i will watch Amazon.

BTW
Everybody is seeing Amazon a big competition for Apple. Somehow I believe they don't compete but they complete each other. Amazon is even not trying. Their movie streaming is not working on Apple mobile Safari, neither the music cloud. If they would want to compete, they would try harder.

We consumers are building active or inactive our own infrastructure and once in one it is hard to switch. If you did build all around iTunes and iOS then moving to something else is too painful.

Amazon is trying to get the "homeless" and disorientated android world. Android might be a good platform but nobody did try to get order into the chaos till Amazon came. They are more a competition to Google right now than to Apple.

If you use Apple, yo stay with Apple. If you believe in Android, then there is now somebody who understands you both, user and developer.


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Amazon gets it's own phone - not yet

The Android police reported the arrival of an android phone at Amazon.
It seems to be an April fool but it sounds very real, especially that Amazon really will go soon into the hardware market to be a bigger competitor for Apple. Actually people would have believed the story f the there were no solar panel on the phone.

The story was so good that I read it in several blogs and news as a real thing.


Amazon’s been making waves in the Android blogosphere recently with such new products as the Appstore and the Cloud Player, but it looks like they’re not done yet; in fact, they’re only just starting. According to the same source who tipped us about the Appstore a few months back, the company will be launching the Blaze, which looks to be a smartphone of pretty high caliber, come August – and in a sentence, there’s a lot to look forward to.
Up to now, Amazon’s forays into Android territory have been purely software-related. With the Blaze, however, the company is adding formidable (and seriously lust-worthy) hardware to the mix – have a look at the phone’s spec sheet:
4.3-inch Mirasol display
1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8660 processor
512MB of RAM
32GB of internal storage
8GB microSD card included
1.3MP front-facing camera
5MP rear camera
MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) port for both microUSB and microHDMI
DLNA connectivity
Possible NFC chip – we haven’t been able to confirm this, but given recent rumors, it’s a strong possibility
Bluetooth 2.1/3.0
GSM/HSPA+ on AT&T and possibly a Verizon variant, but we’re not sure yet
9.25mm thick
120g weight
1700mAh Lithium Ion battery
Solar panel on battery cover (hope you get a lot of sun in your area)
It’s not just figures, however; if you’re not convinced of that, even the briefest of glances at the following product images should be enough to change your mind:










As you can probably tell from the images above, Amazon has really gone all-out on the Blaze’s design – a significant departure from previous products. It’s all very streamlined, with a black matte visage and an aluminum battery cover that reportedly "feels just right when held against your face, situated in your pocket, or placed in your hand."
But form hasn’t triumphed over function; quite the contrary, as Amazon has made good use of the Blaze’s rather large footprint. Unlike most other manufacturers, Amazon hasn’t abandoned non-touchscreen navigation – the Blaze will feature a roomy D-pad as well as two pairs of previous-/next-page buttons that should come as a welcome addition to avid readers.
We’re told the smartphone’s rear 5MP camera isn’t anything to write home about, though video chat quality with the 1.3MP front-facing imager is apparently quite impressive. What’s really mind-blowing, though, is what lies below the cameras – on the front, a 4.3-inch Mirasol display; on the rear, a solar panel. While solar panels on phones past were ugly copper strips, the Blaze’s is made of an entirely new material that is – or at least appears to be – as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional when it comes to charging your phone.
As for the Mirasol screen, our tipster said that while it’s not exactly the crispest or brightest mobile display he’s seen, it is unique in its own right. For example, Mirasol doesn’t require any sort of backlighting to display text/images, meaning that it is extremely energy efficient. Additionally, performance in direct sunlight is outstanding, and even tree-huggers have something to rave about – Mirasol significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
But as intriguing as the Blaze’s hardware may be, software is also involved to some degree – the handset will serve as the debut device for Blaze UI, Amazon’s answer to the HTC Senses and Motorola MOTOBLURs of the world. The version our tipster played with was strictly beta firmware and therefore full of bugs, crashes, and barely functional software. Nonetheless, we were pleasantly surprised by what our source did manage to see – for example, one of Blaze UI’s highlights will be its excellent integration with Amazon services. Everything, from documents on your Cloud Drive to products you’ve recently purchased from Amazon.com, is accessible from the Blaze in one form or another – in fact, Amazon accounts are said to be as key to the Blaze’s user experience as Google accounts are to a regular Android phone.
Amazon also plans to spice up Gingerbread’s (already appealing) user interface with Blaze UI – page turning animations, for example, are visible throughout the user interface, and the whole operating system now has a more orange look about it. Finally, we have some good news for those of you concerned about fragmentation: Amazon plans to be much more expeditious with software updates than competing manufacturers, and as you’ve seen so far with the latest product unveilings, they can move quite fast.
Excited? Don’t hold your breath – while Amazon engineers are working around the clock to get the device out ASAP, it isn’t expected to go on sale until August. On the upside, we’re hearing that its price tag will be "highly competitive." Expect to see a press release and more official details later this month; in the meantime, a leaked product page and a gallery of Blaze-related images lie below:

Jaroslav Stekl is a tech enthusiast whose favorite gadgets almost always happen to be the latest Android devices. When he's not writing for Android Police, he's probably hiking, camping, canoeing, or coding.

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Amazon’s app store - Apple does not like it

Apple is suing Amazon for its app store name. The Amazon app store is a great deal for Android users, finally a store to find easier apps. The best thing is that Amazon offers every day a paid app free. At the moment it is Angry Birds Rio.

Amazon is starting with 3800 apps for now, but the big difference to Google’s app store is that Amazon is testing all apps before they go into the store. Apple sees Amazon as a threat, which they are right.

Amazon has like Apple a lot of experience in micro payments, and even more experience with e-commerce. Amazon offers video streaming, music downloads and now apps for Androids. Soon Amazon might bring their mobile device or will offer the Kindle with Android OS.

Fighting for the app store name is just a small step but a clear identification that Apple sees Amazon as a big competition. The biggest advantage of Amazon is their cloud knowledge. They have such a advantage as one of the biggest cloud providers.

Apple knows that most of the things we own today will go into the cloud. In a few year we will not have any more big hard drives to store music and video or documents. We will store most of the not too critical data in the cloud and here is Amazon the clear leader against Apple. Google is good in cloud too, but they are concentrated to offer everything as open source which is too much destructing to be really a global player in the future. They might offer the platforms but other companies like Amazon will actually utilize it to grow their user base.

Example the app store: Google uses an open source system therefore Amazon is allowed to sell Androids apps. But the big difference is that Amazon will decide the price of the app and not just the developer and each app will be screened. The screening is missing at the Google app store, therefore a lot of apps with bad user experience or harmful for your device. Amazon goes into the apple direction, however they are only verifying that the apps are working or don’t have malware (but developers get as well 70% of revenue like Apple model). Apple goes a step further and decides if an app is not within their moral.

We all should watch out Amazon (as I wrote in an earlier post), they are clearly coming strong to the mobile market. The idea is great, take the best out of both worlds (Google and Apple) and build your own system.

The Amazon store works very well, it has categories to click through or you can search for apps. The recommendation system works perfect. I looked for First person shooter. There was no Android app for this but it offered me Xbox version of such game. And then Amazon is really good to know you and your taste and offers good software selection. Amazon was always good in this and is good with it with the app store.

Amazon has as well some exclusive apps like Angry Bird Rio for Android. You are only able to get it on Amazon. And for now as special even free, later for $0.99

But of course there are some small not perfect things like “Date first available at Amazon” and Release date.

Technology News app shows at Amazon that it was available at Amazon September 9, 2010. However the store was not open in September 2010
.

I am pretty sure that soon somebody will build an android app for Amazon apps to search for like AppShopper for the iPhone.

I only could find around 40 tablet apps and unfortunately the app store does not allow yet surfing by tablet or smart phone. I am pretty sure it will come as soon more tablet apps are available.

Nice feature would be as well to search by Android version. Not every phone does support latest Android. The description page for the apps is a little poor, it is too much same look and feel like for books.

There can be some improvements. I heard rumors that Amazon will install an Android render machine that users are able to test the games on the website before downloading and buying, this would be a great addition.

Amazon offers live streaming

Amazon is now offering free live movie streaming for their prime members. Amazon has right now over 5,000 movies for streaming, with a better selection than netflix for movies.

Prime members pay $79 per year, the cheapest Netflix account (for streaming only) is $96 a year.
But Amazon does not offer free rent, the average rent is $2.99. However Prime offers free shipping and some extra bonuses. Ifyou are buying at least once a month at amazon, then prime is a very good selection alone for the free shipping.

Amazon known as the big competition for eBay takes now on Netflix. Many internet connected TVs or set up boxes are working with Amazon streaming, unfortunatelly not yet the Apple TV, but rumors are talking about a September release. Amazon with one of the biggest cloud service has a faster streaming than Netflix which is nice.

People can stream these movies and shows on PCs and Macs, or through about 200 different Internet-connected TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players.




Netflix's service also can be streaming through many of the same devices as well as the top-selling video game consoles, mobile phones and Apple Inc.'s popular iPad tablet computer.



Most of the movies and TV shows that Prime members can stream for free are at least several years old. Amazon has a broader catalog of about 90,000 movies and television shows that people can either rent or buy, often on the same day they become available for sale on DVD. That means Amazon customers who want to watch more recent movies and TV shows will have to pay extra to rent or buy those titles.



Netflix's streaming library also leans heavily on older material, although the company has been spending more to obtain the right to show some more movies closer to their DVD release dates. Netflix's DVD library offers more than 100,000 titles, including recently released movie
Amazon plans to add to the collection of movies and shows Prime members can watch for free, Janes said. He declined to be more specific.

This week Amazon as well announzed an Android app strore and is waiving the $99 developer member fee.
With all these changes, we should monitor Amazon more, they are certainly a key player not only Apple and Google.  It is interesting how Google and Apple are fighting in public and Amazon slowly increases their service.

The big advantage of amazon is their cloud service and their deep knowledge in eCommerce and payments.

Google e-book store finally live

Google launched their e-book store a few days ago and is claiming they have over 3 million titles in their store.

The store is available here http://books.google.com. Google is offering ebook readers for Many devices, like Androids, iPhone, iPad and PCs.
I downloaded the iPad app and started to test it against the Apple iBook application.
You need to have an account with google. If you have an gmail account, then you are ready to go. Just login with your gmail account. The app will open Safari if you want to search or buy a book. IBook keeps the user all the time in the application. The nice part with google is, that it does not matter which device you use it always remember the last page you were reading and all your book are on all devices always available. Google books are in the cloud. I did search for "social marketing". With google I got over 340 results back and three as free. The website has a nice feature to display only free books. With iBook i got only 52 results and not free book. Both companies are offering a shortcut to NYT Bestsellers.






Clicking on a book will bring a product page with description, ratings and related books.




I was hoping to see as well some social aspects but they are missing.
Google offers like ibook samples. You have to be logged into the website even if you come directly from your iPad app.
The iPad app is ok. As soon i bought a book on the website, it showed up in my iPad application.
Google has some nice features in the iPad app. It let's the user flip the pages like iBook, but it is not so smooth.




I needed a while to figure out how it works. You need to place your finger very close to the edge otherwise it will not start to flip.
Really cool is the magnifier when you put two fingers on the screen.





Google books has some other interesting features, you can read a book in scanned format or flowing text. You can switch from day to night. Night will make the background black and text white. You can switch 3-D Page turn off, choose from 7 fonts types and you can change font size when you are in the flowing text modus.








But there is no feature to mark text (you search but not mark), you can't tweet parts from the text neither.
The landing page of the app is showing all books you ordered.

Google is saying it is open, but it is not more open than amazon. In fact you can read kindle books on more device than google books.
Google books (like Kindle books) are protected by a digital rights management copy-protection scheme. As a result, the copyrighted books in Google's bookstore can't be shared, resold, or read on any device that doesn't play nice with Google's DRM. The copy-protection system that Google has chosen, Adobe's Content Server 4, works across lots of different e-book readers. You can read a Google e-book on the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, Apple's iOS devices (the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), any Android device, and any Javascript-enabled Web browser (which means Macs, Windows and Linux PCs, BlackBerrys, Windows Phone, and many more).
The prices at google are similar like Amazon or Apple, sometimes a few dimes less. Google has the most e- books, but only because of the 2 million copyright free scanned books. Amazon has only 650,000 copyright free books, but 200,000 more copyright protected books.
Most of the books at google are the same as at amazon, both signed same deals with the big publishers.

Overall google is another ebook platform, which means i have now four different apps to read books. I always look first in Apple iBook if I don't find the book i go to amazon or B&N.

The iPad app is better than kindle app and could be better than iBooks if the app would not open safari when I want to search or buy a book and if I could highlight text in the books.

A good start but why another ebook app and another store which does not offer better selection of paid books than the others.

Google eBooks offers a large selection of ebooks. We carry over 3 million titles in every imaginable category.

Paid and Free eBooks
We have partnered with publishers and authors to make hundreds of thousands of ebooks available for purchase. These include new releases and bestsellers; new titles are being added to Google eBooks everyday. To see our latest arrivals, simply view our "New Arrivals" shelf. In addition, we offer nearly 3 million free ebooks from the public domain. You can browse some of our most popular free classics in the store using our "Free Classics" shelf. You can also shop directly at the Google eBookstore to browse our entire collection of ebooks.

File Format
Google eBooks are stored in the cloud, so if you plan to read on the web using your computer, tablet, or on your phone, there is no file to download and you can read ebooks directly within the browser or application. If you plan to read using an eReader, you should learn more about the available ePub and PDF file formats, and how to transfer Google eBook files onto your eReader. A small number of ebooks may not be enabled for download to your eReader due to limits set by the publisher; those ebooks will display an alert message ("No download files included") before you purchase or get the ebook.

Page Quality
Some ebooks are offered with flowing text or original scanned pages, or both. Google eBooks with flowing text allow for better control over your reading experience, such as the ability to easily adjust the font size, line spacing and paragraph alignment. Other ebooks with original scanned pages contain text that does not adjust to the different screen sizes of your reading devices. Many Google eBooks offer both flowing text and scanned pages options, and you can easily switch between the two formats within your reader settings. Any ebook that only comes with scanned pages will display an alert message ("Better for larger screens") before you purchase or get the ebook.

Copyright and Digital Rights
Many Google eBooks are protected under copyright law, and our publisher and author partners require us to protect them against unauthorized copying and abuse. These protections come in the form of digital rights management (DRM) and control your usage of your ebooks, such as the option to download ebooks as ePub and PDF files. These protections are specified by the publisher and Google is required to implement them. Some Google eBooks are completely free of digital rights management - they are either free public domain books, or the rightsholder has chosen to provide its readers full access to the content. In these cases you will be able to download DRM free ePubs or PDFs. For all other Google eBooks, we will implement rights management as required by publishers. Additionally, some publishers will limit the number of mobile readers that can download a specific book at a time, and will limit the number of concurrent reading sessions allowed for their content. Learn more about our user policy, and how to use multiple devices to read.
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