This is the difference between consumers and geeks. What’s on the outside actually matters more than what’s on the inside. People want a new iPhone because they want their friends and neighbors to see that they have the NEW iPhone. We in a consumer society love giving our friends and neighbors the middle finger every time we get new stuff, because it signals that we are successful and on the leading edge. But when the new thing looks just like the old thing, it takes away that path to satisfaction.

So, of course people are disappointed that Apple only gave us an iPhone 4S, even though by nearly every technical measure it is a major upgrade. Even if the same phone had been called the iPhone 5, there would have been a similar amount of disappointment. On the other hand, had Apple released a technically inferior device that looked slightly different, and called it the iPhone 4S, you probably would have had more excitement and positive press. It would not be the iPhone 5, but at least people would know you have the new one just by looking at it.

But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.

Now, I don’t know much about the specific patents involved in the latest multi-billion-dollar Nortel patent acquisition, but if they were so bogus why was Google willing to bid $3 billion-plus for them? Anyone with a pair of eyes can look at Android and tell that it has borrowed a number ideas pioneered by Apple, RIM, and Microsoft in the smartphone space. The operating system has been documented as having directly ripped off code from Sun without authorization. If they have bravado enough to do that, then you can be darn sure that they are playing cowboy with the patented technology of their competitors.

Says Drummond:

A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.

Google espouses a culture of “openness” — they’ll give away their product for free to consumers and manufacturers, out of the goodness of their hearts. But everything they say about being open and free is just brand positioning mumbo-jumbo. Google is a public company, and as such is obligated to pursue profit and shareholder return above all else.

Google has a different measure of success than the other competitors in the mobile phone market. They don’t have to make money on operating system sales, like Microsoft, or device sales like Apple, Nokia and RIM.  Google’s profits come from search advertising, where it has monopoly-scale market share. And although Android is given away for “free,” its default search engine (and e-mail provider, and calendaring system, and contact list), are powered by Google’s other ad-supported online services. All of their profits from Android are built on the backs of the real innovators whose ideas were openly stolen and the hardware manufacturers and wireless carriers who bring Android devices to market.

The last I checked, using monopoly profits from one industry to gain dominant market share in another by giving a product away for free is a clear example of unfair competition. And Google is the one crying foul!?

That brings us back to you, Crunchgear. Today you waxed poetic, at great length, regarding the word “app,” not to mention “tissue,” eventually landing with this decidedly indecisive conclusion:

There are numerous examples of trademarks becoming common words: Lego, Frisbee, Tazer. But these are nonsense words. They don’t refer to what they do. Apple seems to be attempting to do just this. It’s not clear whether Apple’s trademark is lawful, right, both, or neither. It’s a very nuanced issue. My personal opinion would be that “App Store” was generic to begin with but only had a sort of frosting of originality on it. But it’s a distinction of exceeding niceness, and a little argument might sway me the other direction.

I’d like to posit a completely different theory from what I’ve been reading all over the web today. What if it has nothing to do with whether or not the term “App Store” is too generic to be trademarked? What if Apple has an even more ambitious plan for that particular brand than what we’ve seen so far? Once upon a time, when Mac OS X was in the development stages called “Rhapsody,” there was a thing called the Yellow Box. This was the application compatibility layer that ran modern applications on top of the UNIX underpinnings of the operating system. Here’s a quote from a 1997 CNet article:

Ricardo Gonzalez, product marketing manager for Rhapsody, said Apple will ship a version of Rhapsody for use on Intel-based systems to developers a few weeks after the PowerPC version, as well as yet another iteration of Rhapsody called “yellow box for Windows.” [...] Applications written for yellow box and used on Windows 95 and Windows NT will look and operate like Windows applications, while “Rhapsody for PC” on Intel processors will look like the Rhapsody/Mac OS hybrid.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/Apple-shows-off-Rhapsody-OS/2100-1001_3-203615.html#ixzz1FPpF2aVJ

You read that right, Apple originally had plans to allow Mac applications to run on Windows (see embedded video below). They may have been 15 years ahead of their time. What is stopping Apple today from dusting off the Yellow Box for Windows, releasing an update to their Xcode developer tools, and opening up their own Windows App Store?

Now that the Mac is back on stable ground, the iOS is a rocking success, and the company is the envy of any other in the technology industry, it strikes me that Apple could be set to take the software marketplace by storm. A Windows App Store would ensure years, if not decades, of future Mac-compatible software development, and would net Apple a tidy 30% cut of any application sold. They’ve done it with the cross-platform iTunes, what’s stopping them from repeating that success with a Windows App Store?

Well, if one report is true, it turns out there was no mass government testing on birds, nor were the animals’ deaths caused by lightning or poison. According to something called the Bennington Vale Evening Transcript, the dead birds were a result of a failed stunt to promote the upcoming remake of Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1963 classic, The Birds. Trust me, we’re still thinking this is a weak attempt at mimicking an Onion story.

You know you are getting good reporting when your source is prefaced with the words “something called.” Well, Agency Spy, even a cursory look at some of the other headlines on the Bennington Vale Evening Transcript would lead a more astute reporter to understand that, indeed, it was a weak attempt at mimicking an Onion story. Here are some other recent headlines from the blog.

• Horrifying Indiana Earthquake Spurs Mellencamp Divorce
• North Pole Offices Flooded with Angry Letters from Children Who Wanted Two Front Teeth but Received Wii Gaming Consoles
• Government Orders Facebook Shutdown After Mark Zuckerberg Named Time’s Person of the Year

I mean, come on guys. Maybe you were thrown off by the complete lack of humor or originality in the fake headlines, but did you really think you’d scooped the New York Times with this one? For your trouble, feel free to grab a Dumb Blog Award on your way out.

Image courtesy Associated Press

Instead, you should be looking at the total growth of mobile browsing. Android’s recent success is contributing greatly to that, certainly, but it’s not necessarily at the expense of other mobile operating systems. It’s because Android is attracting new mobile web users who didn’t have a smartphone before–just like the iPhone started to do 3 years ago. I think if you looked at a stacked area chart, you’d see a strong upward trajectory for all three major mobile platforms, with Android’s wedge growing steadily bigger over the last 6 months.

Here is an example using data from one undisclosed consumer website. iOS traffic has more than doubled, +108%, in the last 6 months; Android has more than tripled, +218%. So Android has a larger share of the pie, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to classify that as “taking share from every corner of the market.”

Setting a high bar for its debut in the advertising business, Apple Inc. aims to charge close to $1 million for ads on its mobile devices this year and perhaps even more to be among the first, ad executives say. Apple is hitting the road to showcase its new mobile-device advertising capability, dubbed iAd, and has indicated it could charge as much as $10 million to be part of a handful of marketers at the launch, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That is a pretty high price of entry. I’ve never heard of a campaign minimum over say $100k, especially for a completely untested format and medium. But what does that translate to on a CPM?

Apple is planning to charge advertisers a penny each time a consumer sees a banner ad, ad executives say. When a user taps on the banner and the ad pops up, Apple will charge $2.

So, $0.01 per impression translates, in the language of anyone actually familiar with advertising costs, to a $10 cost-per-thousand (CPM) for the banner and what amounts to a $2 cost-per-click (CPC). Usually the CPM and CPC models exist as an either/or proposition, and it sure sounds from this report like Apple is planning to charge for the impression AND the click. That’s a big change from the usual ad pricing model, but is it a deal breaker? Let’s say 1 in 1,000 users click on the ad to expand it (typical for online advertising); that would increase the cost to a $12 CPM. Still pretty reasonable pricing, all things considered.

If, however, Apple’s iAds see dramatically higher interaction, along the lines of the highest-performing rich media formats online, an advertiser could see as many as 1 in 10 users expanding those ads. At a cost of $2 per expansion, plus the cost of the banner impressions, that’s an astronomical $210 effective CPM, putting this type of ad at the peak of mass media, well above the cost of a full page ad in, say, The Wall Street Journal, one of the most premium-priced advertising vehicles on the planet. If that’s truly the case, the WSJ may not be as dumb as I thought… but Apple might be.

Along comes your savior, the JooJoo pad. It looks exactly like an iPad, except, gasp, it runs Flash! And as soon as you get your hands on it for a breathless review, you point out:

But what about Flash? This is supposed to be the big differentiator, right? The iPad killer! In an interesting move, Fusion Garage coupled the Atom processor with NVIDIA’s Ion graphics to aid in playing full screen Flash video (or for doing… something). Unfortunately, the software just isn’t there yet. Currently the device is running Flash 10.1 beta 1, and won’t have hardware-accelerated Flash video for a good while now (the timing is partly reliant on Adobe support, and is labelled as a “work in progress” by JooJoo). That means some regular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow.

Shocker! It turns out that Flash is a huge processor and memory hog, and just runs like utter crap on this new wave of high-efficiency mobile devices. Do you think, just maybe, that there is a reason Apple has been so reluctant to add Flash to their mobile devices? And that, just maybe, it’s because the Flash experience completely sucks on these things, and not so much that they are the orchestrators of a vast conspiracy to deny your viewing of Pointroll and expandable banner ads on the go? Yeah, your blog is dumb.

From our friends across the pond, news comes that The Times and Sunday Times newspaper will begin charging for access to their websites this summer. Users will pay £1 for one-day access and £2 for a week’s subscription. They will also create separate web entities for The Times and the Sunday Times; previously both were on a single website.

At the same time, the company (News International,  owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) will block its content from Nexis. This decision follows on the heels of discussion last fall of blocking Google as well. So, let me get this straight: Murdoch wants to block all of his content from search engines so nobody can find it, and then charge the few remaining people who manage to stumble upon it when they get there?

Seems like a giant step backwards. I’m pretty sure it’s been proven, time and TIME again, that paywalls do more damage to the audience size of a web publication than they add in terms of revenue benefit. Murdoch is trying desperately to cling to an outdated business model, and will seemingly stop at nothing short of running his 100-year-old-plus company into the ground.

Source: BBC News, Guardian

Top level domain names (TLDs) have previously been the exclusive realm of ICANN, the non-profit organization which maintains and regulates the internet’s addressing system. TLDs more familiar to the rest of us include .com, .net, .org, and .edu. In the last year, ICANN has announced plans to open up the creation of TLDs to a broader number of registrars in order to expand the number of available domain names. Anyone who has tried to come up with an original .com domain name in recent years knows how hard it can be.

About a year ago, the company I work for, SUPERVALU, was approached with this idea. We chose to take a wait-and-see approach rather than diving into the million-dollar proposition it would be to register a new TLD. (It’s a far cry more than the $6.95 GoDaddy charges for a .com domain name!) We are fortunate enough to own the .com domain names for all of our trademarks, and, let’s be honest, we’re really living in a .com world. The “dot-com” is as much a part of the web as the “@” sign is to e-mail. However, as we move into a future where more and more people arrive at a website from a Google search or a Facebook link than ever type in the URL directly, perhaps it makes sense to make sure at least larger companies stake a claim in the TLD space.

Google has been struggling to find its own place in the realm of social media, with a series of flops in Orkut, Wave, and most recently the P.R. disaster that is Google Buzz. It seems Google’s engineering culture just doesn’t get the idea of “social”, and with Facebook and Twitter nipping at its heels the web giant has made some notable stumbles.

Is this a one-day fluke, or is there finally a new king of the hill after years of dominance by Google?