June 2008 Archives

Well, okay, he's getting close…

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose Donesbury

"Take the Middle East seriously, because that's the center of - that's the place where people get so despondent and despair that they're willing to come and take lives of U.S. citizens."
-- George W. Bush, asked on Al Arabiya TV what advice he would give the next president

You mean like, maybe policy of supporting dictatorships and monarchies, and squelching even semi-democracies, might possibly have something to do with terrorism?

I brought this up a while back when Apple first announced the store, but now that analysts are estimating possible revenues of $1+ billion in 2009, I think it's worth repeating.

Apple's App Store could emerge as $1.2B business by 2009 AppleInsider

Investment bank Piper Jaffray is urging investors who typically focus only on Apple's hardware announcements to also pay attention to the company's iPhone software strategy, particularly its upcoming App Store, which could balloon into a $1 billion market by next year.

Once you've gone to the trouble of setting up all the infrastructure necessary to sell, deliver and update applications—why stop with just the iPhone? You've done the hard work, everything else is just incremental costs. The Macintosh is the obvious next step, but there's no reason not to provide Windows applications as well. The market potential dwarfs that of just iPhone software.

The initial folks who stand to lose are places like Kagi and Digital River, who currently provide payment and (in some cases) delivery services for small software vendors. But they don't provide marketing, automatic updates, signed applications, and FairPlay copy protection. Apple is going to roll right over them; but they won't stop there.

See The iTunes Trojan Horse: Selling Applications for more thoughts on where Apple might go.

Flickr as brilliant to limit their videos to 90 seconds. They aren't videos, they are moving pictures; which is perfect for the way people use Flickr.

Here's a wonderful experiment in using moving pictures to do something that people have done with still pictures for ages. Take a series of (moving) pictures and merge them together into a panorama or collage. The result is fascinating, and far more useful than I would have thought. I've often used movie-mode in my camera to create panoramas, but if you have a scene which already has lots of movement, that's like viewing the world through peephole. This, on the other hand, gives you the full breadth of a panorama, with the movement of a video. I'm definitely going to give it a try.

Let's hear for for having three relatively independent branches of government. It's far from perfect, but the odds of all three making the same mistakes at the same time are thankfully low.