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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.

The new Leopard menu-search field under the Help menu is a great way to search your Safari history. Just click on help and start typing in the field. A list of menu items will show up. Don't worry that it doesn't seem to make sense, just use the arrow keys to move down, and you'll see the history menu appear with each of the matching items.
via Twitter

Once Apple has set up iTunes as a software store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, there is no reason they shouldn't leverage that functionality and presence to become the dominant software reseller for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

iTunes has got to be the most inappropriately named application on the planet. Sure, you can play music, but it also synchronizes your photos, sends contacts to your phone and iPod, synchronizes your calendar with different services, let you buy games for your iPod, and now; will let you buy applications for your iPhone and iPod Touch. it is this last feature which particularly interests me.

IPhone applications will only be available via the iTunes store, to which the only interface is the iTunes application. All applications have to be approved by Apple, and all applications are digitally signed. This means that when you install an application on your iPhone, you know that it hasn't been modified from time the application developer first gave it to Apple. That's a very nice feature from a security standpoint, and one that is also available to programs written for the Mac OS Leopard operating system.

When Apple started selling music, the record companies didn't take them seriously, and never really saw what was coming. As a result, they lost control of the market for their music, and Apple gained the ability to become the number two music reseller in the United States. The only reason that Apple wasn't able to do this to the movie industry as well, is that the movie industry had been forewarned, and limited Apple's access to their content.

When I look at everything that Apple has to do in order to become a software reseller for the iPhone; I wonder whether they're really going to restrict their software to just the iPhone. The hard work in selling software for the iPhone has nothing to do with the iPhone itself. Apple has to set up marketing, digital signing, software evaluation, developer tools, download servers, software upgrade mechanisms, alpha and beta test processes, policies for handling sales and variable pricing, and all the other features that are expected of an online software store. After having gone to all this trouble, why is Apple going to stop with just selling software for the iPhone? Why not use the same software store to sell software for the Mac? For that matter, Windows Vista, also has digital signing support. Given the vast numbers of computers, both Windows and Macintosh, that have iTunes on them, Apple automatically has a huge distribution mechanism for software, and a pre-installed application for marketing, advertising and downloading that software. On top of that, because of the digital signing, Apple can advertise the software is being safer to download than the software that is downloaded off of other download sites.

If I worked at Kagi, Digital River, or one of the other companies that currently handle software sales and distribution (but not marketing), for independent software developers, I would start looking in my rearview mirror. Because iTunes is coming up fast, and has pulled out to pass.

(As a side note, this article was written using MacSpeech Dictate after only five minutes of training. It has worked extremely well, and I'll be writing a review shortly.)

I really like VisualHub's progress dialog. No "99% done" for 20 minutes. Instead: "Looks like I lied. It will be done when it's done."


Seriously, it may be funny, but at least it's telling the truth. A progress bar that spends 90% of its time in the last 1% is of no use to anyone. It not only doesn't tell me what's going on, it makes me worry that something may have gone wrong. Amusing or not, this is a better approach.

New Patentable Idea - A Way to Invalidate Vague Patents Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

There’s not much love in legal circles for the so-called “business method” patent, an exclusive intellectual property right over a novel way of doing business. Critics of such patents – think Amazon “One Click” or Priceline’s “name your own price” patents – argue that they clog up the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, lead to excessive litigation and have little connection to real, physical invention.
…
Now the patent law community is closely watching one case in particular and speculating that federal judges could invalidate business method patents sometime this year. The case, generally known as re Bilski, involves a method for managing the risk of bad weather to crops by making hedged trades in the commodities markets. The twelve judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have agreed to hear the case en banc, or in a single joint session in May, and have suggested that they might reconsider the ruling on State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc., which helped to inaugurate the age of business method patents a decade ago.

If you think legal circles don't have much love for "business method" patents, try bringing them up in software development circles. Far too many of these are things which anyone, sitting down to deal with a particular problem, would immediately come up with. We can hope that the Bilski case may change things, but I wouldn't anticipate anything earth shattering. As the article points out, the very concept of "business patent" is pretty vague; it's hard to ban something you can't define. Like porn, it's one of those "I know it when I see it" things.

However, if you'd like to help put an end to nuisance patents, there are a number of organizations you can support. Here are a few:

• End Software Patents: End Software Patents
• EFF: Patent Busting Project
• Peer to Patent, Community Patent Review
  
• Patent Troll Tracker
  

Related articles:

• Lawmakers gear up for patent system overhaul | Tech News on ZDNet
• Patent reform--or else | Tech News on ZDNet
  
• PUBPAT > How to Find Prior Art
  
• Prior art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
• Patent Business Methods (USPTO)
  

My Del.icio.us links on patents:

Meebo and Adium developers give their reactions to Open AIM 2.0. Link

The initial reaction seems to be that the provided libraries come with restrictions which make them unsuitable for use in most open source clients (like Adium) that use libpurple—a GPL'd multi-client IM library. However, the documentation of the Oscar protocol may open the door to new implementations, and those in turn might finally be able to support audio and video chat. That would certainly be good news for users, as the lack of a video and/or audio solution is the one thing that leaves people torn between using default solutions like iChat and AIM as opposed to multi-platform solutions.

Here's the WidgetBox version of my blog. Link

WidgetBox (pointer thanks to Jeremiah Owyang via twitter) is a service which lets you create Flash-based widgets from blogs and other sources. It then lets you publish those to a variety of social networks. The publishing portion needs some work—they don't do a very good job of guiding you through the process. With Orkut, for instance, they simply provide a link and don't tell you what to do with it or where to put it. The widgets themselves are quite pretty (I've included the TechnoSocial widget below, in an odd bit of recursion). However, I wish people didn't use Flash when they don't have to, although it does seem to be the least common denominator for cross (social) network widgets.

If you're a heavy user of twitter, you know how overwellming it can be. Twitterrific is a great (Mac) program, but sometimes all those tweets in that one little window are bit too much. For a while I've been using a script which grabs all the unread tweets in Twitterrific and brings up a browser window with them. Yes, this seems a bit silly—why not just go to the twitter site? The main reason is that this window contains just the tweets I haven't read. But also, I have more control over how they are displayed. If people actually find it useful, I'll see if I can't provide template support so that it's easy to customize how your tweets display. Let me know in the comments.

The second tool is more recent. There's been a lot of buzz about Pownce lately, and people have been facing that far too frequent question of "how do I manage postings on multiple social networks. There are some applications that can handle both, but they aren't Twitterrific… So I wrote this little application which monitors Twitterrific and every time it sees a post that you have made, it resends it to Pounce. Since this was a quick-and-dirty application, it doesn't actually do the hard work itself. For that it uses MoodBlast. So if you want to use this one, you'll need to download MoodBlast as well. (That has some added advantages, which I describe in more detail on the software page.)

So if either of those sound interesting, you can check them out here, on the TechnoSocial software web site.