by Nick Wingfield, Staff Writer, The Wall Street Journal
In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.
In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com.
At a table in Las Vegas, a town fueled by big bets, IBM software chief Steve Mills outlined one he doesn’t want to make: Buying application provider SAP.
If you follow me on the nanoblogs, you may have seen me complaining recently about getting pitched on new Web apps that I find either derivative or confusing. Or both. Now, in any entrepreneurial ecosystem, a big proportion of the ideas that people come up with will be bad, and many of those bad ideas [...]
by Keith Rabois, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, Slide
If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.
The launch of Google’s App Engine, which allows developers to build a Web application and then host it on Google’s existing infrastructure, is a watershed moment in the software development industry. The days of building and hosting your own servers, except for specialized applications, are officially over. This is good news. And App Engine will give everyone, including Amazon, a nice scare, which means that these companies will be forced to take a hard look at what they offer today, and what they need to do to improve it.
by Chris Soghoian, Blogger, Surveill@nce St@te, CNET
Hackers have turned their attention to Facebook’s hundreds of independent applications. The results are not terribly surprising, but do not tell a good tale: App developers don’t seem to know a thing about basic security, and are putting private user information at risk. As a result, malicious hackers are able to access and change what should be private user data managed by the application providers.
It was a good day for Web workers who build applications. On the one hand, Google released their Visualization API, which provides sophisticated ways to display tabular data with relatively little coding. On the other hand, we have the launch of the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service, which allows anyone to use Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and packers to ship physical products to their customers.
Taken together these–and other APIs that are already out there, from Google Charts to Amazon S3 and ECC–are making it increasingly possible to build complex real-world Web applications without supercoders. But there’s a threat, too: the more services you depend on, the more points of failure you have, as demonstrated by last month’s Amazon S3 Outage.
It’s not often I write something completely positive about Apple … but there are exceptions to every rule, as I’m about to prove. As Thursday’s iPhone special event approached, I was looking forward to it, but with some trepidation. As a user who has had third-party applications on his iPhone almost since such a thing was first possible, I had concerns that Apple wouldn’t quite understand how well this system had been working. But now, having read the coverage of Apple’s briefing, I am happy to admit I was completely off-base with my concerns.
by David Gal, Assistant Professor of Management, Northwestern University
Last year, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg suggested that a PC operating system was the inspiration for Facebook’s new “Platform.” With Platform, anyone could write applications for Facebook. Facebook’s in-house applications would get no special treatment, he declared. The analogy to an operating system is appealing. For many years Microsoft’s Windows operating system has benefited from the large number of applications written by outside developers. People buy Windows, not necessarily because it is the best operating system, but because it has the most applications. Like Microsoft, Facebook does not have a monopoly on great ideas nor unlimited bandwidth, and a platform ostensibly allows Facebook to leverage the talents of the entire developer community to its benefit.
VideoEgg has announced that its ad network for Facebook applications–eggnetwork–has pulled in around $1.5 million in ad revenue over the past five months. While the company is touting the news as a “million-dollar payday” for developers, it actually seems like a fairly paltry figure when you consider the companies on eggnetwork’s client list.
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