A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.
Tomorrow’s crisis today: Apple’s critics haven’t yet realized that the iPhone App Store has fueled millions in software development efforts to produce content exclusively tied to the company’s proprietary Cocoa Touch mobile platform.
TiVo this morning announced a multi-part deal with Best Buy that includes the development of a special version of the TiVo player that would include specialized content–oh, okay, advertising–from the electronics retailer.
One online retailer to rule them all.
Amazon.com could be responsible for close to a third of all U.S. e-commerce transactions, RBC Capital analyst Stephen Ju asserted in a research note this morning. Ju notes that Amazon’s reported revenues consist of a mix of gross revenues from its own businesses plus net third-party commissions.
After six months of negotiation, Samsung has withdrawn its bid to acquire SanDisk at $26 a share. Samsung CEO Yoon Woon Lee expressed his “disappointment” and cited multiple reasons why the deal wouldn’t work–including a surprise announcement by SanDisk of a quarter-billion dollar operating loss. SanDisk, for its part, replied that it never got a reply to a letter rejecting Samsung’s bid as too low at $26 a share. All sound familiar?
The biggest news of the week–well, besides the governor-erect (hat tip to the New York Post)–was not AOL’s purchase of Bebo or Yahoo’s embrace of the semantic Web (about which I remain skeptical) or certainly Lacygate. No, the biggest, most game-changing news went by without a great deal of notice, and that was Google’s announcement of a free ad-serving platform.
There are a couple of announcements Tuesday that point to a major technological battle: the race to become the platform for mobile applications. This is happening at two levels. There are mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple’s mobile version of OS X and Google’s forthcoming Android. And there are environments that live above the operating system that are meant to allow applications to run on multiple operating systems. Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet. For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.
If you’re a Web developer or recent computer-science graduate, these are most certainly the best of times. With the groundbreaking launch of Facebook Platform last year, and the subsequent emergence of multiple new [open] social platforms this year–MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster, Ning, Meebo, LinkedIn, etc.–we are experiencing a Geek Renaissance the likes of which the software community has never before seen.
MySpace is launching its developer platform tomorrow and is going to great lengths to highlight the ways it’s different from the Facebook Platform. That’s ironic, given that the dominant reaction to the Facebook Platform, from users at least if not the press, is that it’s made the site too much like MySpace.
I had heard there was a 5k friend limit on Facebook. I just didn’t take it to heart. Until I reached 5k and tried to add 5001, at which point FB reminded of the limit. It was a weird moment, but actually one that I have come to respect and appreciate. Facebook went from being a way to broadcast information to 5k people–probably 4k of which I didn’t know or even have a business link to–to a platform I either had to take seriously or walk away from.
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