For all of those who demonize Apple as closed, remember this and WebKit. The code is available under an Apache license.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder.  Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files.  A description of a ‘magic cookie’ for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.

As an NY Islander’s fan I’ll always remember legendary NY sportcaster Bill Mazer saying “7:11, lucky numbers for the good guys”, in a sports special about the Islanders winning their first Stanley Cup over the Philadelphia Flyers on an overtime goal by Bobby Nystrom (assists by Lorne Henning and Wayne Merrick).  But on to the new from the week of July 11th, 2011.

1. Aliph, the company behind the Jawbone noise cancelling Bluetooth headsets, just raised $70M. I love their products. I just got my second Jawbone, the new Era, last week. Maybe they’ll invest all that money in making better earbuds.
2. Citrix buys Cloud.com to enhance the virtualization giant’s cloud infrastructure offering. Cloud.com is already a major player in the market and has a very high-profile client in Zynga. CloudAve’s Krishnan Subramanian provides great analysis of the impact of the deal on Citrix’s business and their competitors.
3. Google beats Wall Street EPS estimates by almost $1 and shares are up.
4. The concerns around Google’s use of Java in Android seem to keep escalating, especially with Oracle asking for Google CEO Larry Page to testify and Judge Alsup’s recent notice which references ‘willful infringement’ and could result in treble damages. If you’re interested in this story, you’ve got to be reading Mueller’s blog.
5. Tom Friedman writes that you need to be thinking like a tech startup when looking for a job in today’s market.
6. Building great applications is important, but it’s wasted effort if they can’t be deployed easily. F5’s Lori MacVittie introduces the application deployment lifecycle and says the enterprise needs to focus more effort on improving the application deployment process.
7. Is Microsoft moving to a single OS unifying the desktop, phone, gaming and home media platforms? Apparently those were the hints dropped at last week’s Worldwide Partner Conference. But I don’t quite buy it unless Microsoft moves to a lighter weight Chrome-y style OS.  And it’s harder to comprehend under a Ballmer-led Microsoft. Time will tell.
8. Citrix isn’t the only virtualization technology provider working on enhancing their cloud infrastructure play, as VMWare introduces its Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite.
9. With all the hype around Google+, that just adds to the complexity of managing social profiles and across tools in the enterprise. Enter OpenSocial 2.0.
10. On Friday July 15, the ITC handed down an initial determination in Apple’s favor saying that HTC’s Android products infringed 2 Apple patents. If this determination is upheld, it can have a major impact on not just HTC, but other Android licensees. Fantastic analysis by Florian Mueller.

Apple’s announcements at WWDC are easy to get excited about, but be sure to check out the pieces by James Kobielus on big data and Florian Mueller on the latest in the Oracle-Google battle over Java.

1. The event of the week was Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and Steve Jobs’ keynote.   The major announcements were iCloud, iOS5 and Mac OSX Lion. I would say that only those that felt a new iPhone announcement was required (i.e. Henry Blodget) were disappointed.
2. eBay keeps up their eCommerce acquisition spree, this time buying Magneto, an open source eCommerce platform and rolling it into a newly formed X.Commerce unit along with GSI Commerce (the deal just closed) and other pieces. eBay originally bought PayPal to reduce purchase friction, but now has built a broad eCommerce and Payments platform that is driving most of the growth and about 40% of the revenues for the company.
3. Choice Hotels rolled out a new cloud-based PMS system which could help induce hoteliers to switch flags. The cloud based offering eliminates OpEx costs and dramatically lowers implementation costs. The system is being used by 4,000 hotels worldwide.
4. I don’t know anyone who seems to know more about databases than Forrester’s James Kobielus. So listen to him when he says that Hadoop is the future of enterprise data warehouses. But fear not: “All of your investments in pre-Hadoop EDWs, data marts, data hubs, operational data stores, and the like are reasonably safe from obsolescence”. That’s comforting J.
5. Brilliant analysis by Florian Mueller on Oracle’s case against Google with respect to Java and Android. I’ve written about this before and it looked more like posturing then. Google’s own admission that they rejected a license offer from Sun and willfully went forward is pretty damning. This looks like real trouble.
6. Some feel the GDSs are “evil” and are limiting innovation in the travel sector, while others see that the GDS still plays a vital role in travel distribution and deliver a higher average yield while offering a completely variable distribution cost. Who doesn’t like healthy debate…or a cookie.
7. TIMN’s Nilay Patel writes that phone numbers are “…a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers”, yet provides some hope for the future.
8. JavaScript has made an amazing evolution from niche technology to a foundational element of the modern web.
9. Room77 closed an oversubscribed Series B round of $10.5M led by General Catalyst Partners. The financing will go toward expanding the company’s core search technology and its global index of hotel rooms.
10. Fusion-io builds more momentum for technology IPOs and investments with a successful IPO and a $2B valuation. Fusion-io, the Utah-based startup that uses flash memory to make ordinary servers run faster, technology plays an integral role in the recent mega-datacenters built by Facebook and Apple. Incidentally, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is Fusion-io’s Chief Scientist.

That was the title of my latest post in Tnooz.  

For all the buzz around NFC and Google Wallet, I don’t think that it’s a real game changer in the near-term.  Why you may ask?

1. Google Wallet isn’t the only game in town. PayPal, Apple, Square (backed by Visa) and others are in the game and are well ahead at this juncture.
2. The wrong use case? The NFC-based technology fits better for Point-of-Sale retail situations than it does for how  much of travel is purchased. There may be other uses for NFC in travel, but I’m not sure how well payment fits.
3. It’s the Infrastructure, stupid. Getting NFC chips in phones is the easy part. Getting NFC-capable readers at the point of sale is another story entirely.
4. Devices need to reach critical mass. Google launched a Wallet system that today works on only 1 phone on 1 network in 1 country.  And it’s the smallest network of the Big 3-1/2.  Ironically Google might only succeed only if Apple, Microsoft and others are successful too.
5. The Court System. It seems as if it can’t be a travel related story if the courts aren’t involved in some way anymore. Rest assured they are as PayPal sued Google only hours after the Wallet announcement dropped.

But maybe my perspective is skewed as I’m not a huge believer in NFC (a 10 year old technology) as a game changer. Please read the full article and please add your thoughts in the comments?

OK, I thought this post went up a few days ago, but it was saved as a draft. Sorry for the delay:

1. Linkedin had an amazing IPO, going out at $45 and seeing the stock price more than double in the first day of trading. That’s a market valuation of over $9 billion…with a “B”.
2. Is Android gaining market share because of carriers? It seems so. And it makes sense. Android’s “openness” gives the carriers the ability to “customize” the phones with pre-loaded (often carrier-branded) apps, and more importantly, get a piece of the transaction pie through direct to carrier billing, whereas all iPhone billing goes through iTunes.
3. Most of the analysis of the smartphone market is focused on the platform battle between Apple and Google. But check out this analysis of handset vendors by Horace Dediu. For all the success that Android handsets are having in the aggregate, Apple is leading in terms of revenue share and absolutely killing it from a profit share perspective with more than half of all handset profits.
4. Expedia keeps evolving its Asian strategy increasing its investment in eLong, the largest Chinese OTA to 56%. Tencent also invested $84M in eLong for a 16% stake with the potential to market the service to its 674M active users.
5. The one thing that Google wants but can’t have is access to Facebook’s data.  And now Microsoft’s got it.  Definitely feels like an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind a deal. The question is how deeply Bing will integrate the data into their search results.  Even so will anyone care? Will it be the proverbial “tree in the forest”? Bing’s latest TV ads make me think they may have a winner.
6. Many companies look to analysts like Gartner and Forrester for advice on how to improve their businesses. So here’s a guest’s-eye view of The Fontainbleu’s new mobile app from Forrester eCommerce analyst Julie Ask.  Seems like there’s still work to do.
7. LTE looks like it is going to be the standard for 4G networks (sorry Clear). But unlike GSM it may be very hard to take your LTE phone around the world as there are no fewer than EIGHT “core spectrum bands”. And it looks like spectrum fragmentation is not going away anytime soon, so read this great article discussing the implications of the problem and other reflections from the recent LTE World Summit.
8. The check-in was a novelty when it started, but I gave up on it a while ago as the odds of being the mayor to earn a reward was low. But Starwood may have revived the check in, crediting Starpoints to guests who check in at Starwood properties.
9. Well at least it’s not NFL lockout news, but the American court system is still hard at work. This time, the DOJ is investigating potential anticompetitive practices by the GDSs.
10. Many people get excited about the promise of NFC for mobile payments. I was involved with RFID and NFC a decade ago and am, let’s just say “skeptical”. I think this article does a great job of describing why the recent buzz may be just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

1. Farelogix is on a roll as they add Delta to their client roster and giving it a clean sweep of all the major NorthAmerican carriers (Air Canada, American Airlines, United/Continental and US Airways).  However, while utilizing a “direct connect” technology, Delta is taking a kinder and gentler approach to airline distribution.
2. The travel distributions wars have hit a whole new level as US Airways files an Anti-Trust suit against Sabre. The heart of the filing is to remove the exclusivity provisions that binds airlines to a single GDS and provide extraordinary market power to the GDS over the airlines.
3. Intel blew past analyst estimates and delivered record earnings. The numbers seemed to show a very healthy PC market, but some have questioned whether there was some channel stuffing of a sort going on. But in any case, Intel does need to make some progress in the mobile space.
4. This is one of the most interesting pieces of analysis I’ve seen in a while. While most people are concerned with the relative share of Android v. iOS, for all of Android’s market success, it’s had almost no direct effect on Google’s stock price, whereas Apple’s fortunes correlate to the iPhone’s success.
5. If Michael Krigsman believes these numbers, it’s good enough for me. But what they say are shocking. It’s frightening that the expectations of 3-out-of-4 IT executives is that their projects will fail before they even start. The reasons all make sense, but that’s part of why we at Ness feel that it’s important to take a product-development approach to all software initiatives.
6. Apple usually exceeds earnings expectations, but this is getting ridiculous – Apple beat Wall Street consensus estimates by more than $1B in revenues and $1.00 EPS for the quarter.  And that was over estimates that were 5% – 10% higher than Apple guidance. TC’s Erick Schonfeld points out that MacBooks, iPhones and China are driving Apple’s performance. The first two are not surprising, but the numbers out of China indicate are pretty amazing.
7. American Airlines put forward disappointing earnings and apparently had an interesting earnings call.  Apparently Wall Street isn’t buying, feeling that no matter all the talk about distribution, there are some fundamental challenges such as high labor costs that can’t be overcome.
8. Concur keeps making moves. The latest is a strategic marketing agreement & $40M investment in Cleartrip, India’s largest online travel agency.
9. Is there a Moore’s Law for solar energy? I certainly hope so. It’s not travel, it’s not software, but it’s definitely worth reading.
10. eBay buys Where.com as they hope to drive more mobile transactions through PayPal.

Over the weekend well-known VC/blogger Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures reiterated his call for companies to shift to a Android-first development stance over iOS. This was instigated by some new stats from Comscore on OS marketshare.

There was a predictable response from the pro-Apple camp. Frankly there are arguments to be made from either side, but most of the valid arguments get lost in the religious fervor that seems to pervade the debate.

But I found a post from Instapaper founder, Marco Arment, that I felt was instructive in contemplating what platform to prioritize. Marco was nice enough to share statistics regarding the OS & device share of Instapaper iPhone users. He started tracking this information so that he could better understand his customers better and know when he could start dropping support of older OS verisons (NB: good best practice to follow). He wrote the post because felt it would be useful info for other developers…exactly the reason I’m sharing it.

And one thing I like about stats is that it’s pretty hard to spin them and therefore they help facilitate a more objective analysis.

OS fragmentation is important because it has a major impact in how long you need to support code and also what restrictions you have on bringing new features to market. Happily mobile devices are far more current than desktops and laptops (says a guy who’s writing this on a PC that’s running Windows XP). But it’s not an insignificant issue.

Marco’s stats show that iPhone and iPad users are very good at upgrading their devices to the latest OS. While his stats are only for his users, they’re in-line with numbers from Bump, so I would say that they’re pretty reliable as a benchmark for you to use.

As you can see almost 6 out of 10 are on the very latest version of iOS, more than 9 out of 10 are on 4.2 and virtually all are on iOS 4.0 or higher. The numbers are similar for the iPad.

Now contrast that with the latest official stats from Android (4/1/11) where 63% of users are on Froyo release (Android 2.2) while only 2.5% are on a version of Gingerbread (2.3) with only Motorola’s XOOM tablet on Honeycomb (3.0). That leaves a full one-third of Android users on Android 2.1 and prior. Now while 2.1 and 2.2 don’t sound like a big difference version-number-wise, the functionality and performance of the two versions are very different indeed.  Froyo brought the much-heralded Adobe Flash compatibility (albeit most Froyo devices today don’t have CPUs to support hardware acceleration in 10.2).

Further many of the Android handsets are hampered from being upgraded to new OS versions by the handset makers who have implemented custom UI mechanisms. So the lag for keeping the Android OS current will always be pretty significant as the only way many Android owners can upgrade their OS is to buy a new phone — meaning it could be a 1-2 year drag as many wait for the contracts to end.

So, just a little more food for thought as you prioritize your mobile development resources. Don’t just think about market share, think about the implications for your development team too.

Sorry for the delay, but busy traveling to Berlin for ITB. Le’ts start of with a little bit of irony.

1. In a very interesting turn of events, Kayak is going to power flight meta-search for Bing Travel…to help counter Google’s push into the travel sector with their acquisition of ITA Software…which powers Kayak’s meta-search engine. #irony.
2. More strong growth at Salesforce.com, yet profits are puny. So to change the story, at the DEMO conference SFDC VP, Platform and Marketing George Hu talks up the potential of Chatter, their social collaboration platform. But I love this comment: “what is keeping him up at nights is the education of this massive sales force. As the company has grown from a single application (Salesforce Automation) to a CRM platform, collaboration through social enterprise, and Data-as-a-Service, it has become increasingly difficult to train each new employee to manage their products.” Have they thought of using their own product? #evenmoreirony
3. Well little furry critters need a place to sleep too!  So Hipmunk gets into hotel search. I cover this of course because of the cute logo, but also because I know that it irks some ‘prominent’ travel bloggers that a SV startup gets so much press for what they feel is so little.  While I love the ‘agony’ filter on air search and the associated UI, I don’t think that Hipmunk’s ‘ecstasy’ filter for hotels works as well.
4. For those of you who think that Apple may one day actually adopt Flash…not a chance. Dead on.
5. Super-rich, but want to make sure you can get the best deal on your private jet? FlyRuby aims to be the Kayak of private air travel. Now this is a product I wish I had enough cash to use…just once. Flying on a private jet is right up there with going on a seaplane (with or without pickup by Herve Villachez).
6. This looks like an interesting company, but I’m not sure if it’s a necessary company. What do you think? Is this a problem for you or anyone you know?
7. For those developing for the cloud, here’s a new Cloud IDE, called Cloud9 that you might want to check out. The Cloud9 development platform for JavaScript incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP.
8. Apple introduced the iPad 2 to some fanfare, tracking pretty much with predictions leading up to the announcement. Some felt that the newest iPad wasn’t groundbreaking enough, but to my eye, it surpassed the recently announced Motorola XOOM and still-not-shipping RIM PlayBook and HP TouchPad in the spec wars (which Apple does not really play; and really we’re not putting that much emphasis on an SD card slot are we?) — all while hitting a lower entry price point.  And to those that groused that it was evolutionary, not revolutionary…chill out? As DF’s John Gruber noted, Apple has released 3 products that changed the mobile device landscape (iPod, iPhone and iPad) in the past decade while the combined forces of all other players have delivered none. ‘Nuff said.
9. How the specialist tour and activities market works is a mystery to most and terribly complex to orchestrate…and that’s just the way Alex Bainbridge of TourCMS likes it. But out of the goodness of his heart he tries to create a map of sorts of how the sector lays out. This comes on the heels of a report on the sector released by PhoCusWright.
10. Hotel meta-search is heating up with both Google and Pegasus Solutions announcing new products. Pegasus’ solution enables participating hotels to participate more fully in meta-search sites like Kayak.com. Pegasus, along with Trust International and others is providing the data supporting Google’s Hotel Price Ads solution,  which seems a little less meta-searchy and a little more advertisy (typical Google), but does display availability and pricing by dates input by the customer.

Hope everyone had a happy Valentine’s Day!

1. Concur held its annual Fusion conference. COO Raj Singh laid out “4 Big Areas of Growth” (mobile, social, cloud and platform) in his keynote. The clarified the plans to integrate TripIt, hitting on the first two. But the cool stuff I think is in the new Concur Connect Platform that opens up new APIs for companies to extend off of the core Concur product. Today most people are thinking just of getting more value from the travel data (not a small thing), but I bet once people start mucking around, we’ll see some cool stuff that will strengthen Concur’s position in the market.
2. Maxroam, the mobile company out to disrupt mobile cell roaming. The company provides the world’s first free mobile phone roaming service allowing users to passengers to receive free mobile calls and SMS messages when they travel abroad.  Its first significant deal is to market the service through Ryanair’s channel, a natural fit marketing-wise with Ryanair whose mission is to reduce the cost of travel. Wonder if it will work in typical RyanAir fashion – roaming is free, but there will be a charge to hear what the other person is saying
3. HomeAway got $25M from Google in the fall, but they’re looking for an even bigger payday, plotting a $300 IPO, according to Bloomberg.
4. There’s a lot of concern about mobile payments and security, and rightly so. So I suggest that you read this piece (and related ones), which excepts a report by O’Reilly/PayPal report entitled “ePayments: Emerging Platforms, Embracing Mobile and Confronting Identity“. Good stuff. Better yet, download the full report.
5. RIM launches a Blackberry ‘travel app’, but let’s not over-react here. They didn’t “beat” Apple to anything. This appears to be mostly a re-skinning of the Worldmate app which has been available on the iPhone for about a year and a half. Plus it does not approach the scope of the rumored iTravel app, which may never make it beyond Patently Apple reports.
6. Vivek Wadhwa joins the chorus of those who dislike the current state of search technology. But what he describes what he wants from his “New Google”, sounds an awful lot like Siri, bought by Apple last year.
7. I love SlideShare. I think it’s a great way to share information…and now it’s getting better as the company launches a new web-based meeting service called ZipCast. Even better, it’s built on HTML5.
8. Orbitz reported Q4 earnings and the numbers are not good. The main culprit seems to be less traffic from Kayak.com (which is under arbitration), but there was also an affect from the loss of American Airlines inventory.
9. PhoCusWright just released a report on the tours and activities sector that’s got a lot of good data in it. But Rezgo’s Stephen Joyce puts it all in context for you. For a sector that most people don’t think about, it looks like a pretty interesting (i.e. there’s a lot of money in it and it’s very complicated). Certainly there’s a massive opportunity for the taking if someone could help make it a more orderly marketplace.
10. While there was a plethora of reactions at Apple’s new subscription policy, Google introduced One Pass that seems to satisfy many of the complaints against Apple (lower commission, sharing of some subscriber data). But does that mean Google will be successful? Not so fast says GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram.

Lots of mobile platform announcements this week and that’s even before the Mobile World Congress kicked off. But some big travel industry news too, leading off with…

1. ITA Software renewed its agreement with Orbitz thorugh 2015. This is the first contract that was renewed since the announced acquisition by Google.  This should definitely help clear the way for DOJ approval.
2. Nokia chooses Microsoft for future smartphone OS platform in a move that wasn’t all that surprising.  Well except maybe to this ex-Nokia guy who is more bitter than 4-day old coffee grinds. Some may argue that Nokia should have licensed Android as WP7 has a teeney-tiney market share, but could Nokia have competed on an even field with HTC, Samsung and Motorola selling a modestly different version of the same phone?  At least being one of the few with a WP7 phone gives them a chance to appear different in the marketplace. Scoble agrees. Then again, what HP unveiled the other day makes this an even more difficult task.  Either way, the markets didn’t react well to the news.
3. Many people, including myself, have been advocating for HTML5 and promoting the mobile web over apps. But TechCrunch’s MG Seigler points out that while it all sounds nice, apps are still where the action is.
4. HP re-launches the WebOS platform it got when it bought Palm. All of the elements that make WebOS a delight (I do own an original Palm Pre) are there and improved upon. The only problem is that WebOS has almost no apps to speak of (see previous item). Getting developer mindshare is going to be a problem. And while they brought on a high-powered guy to take on the challenge, it might only be enough to leapfrog RIM. But that’s a pretty low bar. BTW, in retrospect, I think my first take on the HP/Palm acquisition was pretty on target.
5. Traditional web search is increasingly important and feels more and more like a system to be gamed – fairly or not. Here’s an interesting article in the NY Times that delves into the ‘black hat’ shenanigans that JC Penny used to dominate search. Fair tactics? No. But great results as Penny had one of its best recent quarters. The most interesting question about what happened is posed on the last page of the article: “Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers?”
6. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber looks into his crystal ball and sees what Apple will do next in response to the recent announcements from Google, HP, Microsoft and RIM.
7. Cloud provider Rackspace bought Anso Labs, one of the key figures behind the open source PaaS project known as OpenStack, also championed by Rackspace. Many rushed to wonder whether Rackspace will dominate the OpenStack community the way some complain Oracle and IBM have done with Java. Personally I don’t think so. I think Rackspace sees this as a way to maintain leadership in the cloud space and create mindshare with developers.  I believe OpenStack could be a really valuable platform for those looking to move to the cloud, especially those that may deploy on different IaaS providers across multiple geographies.
8. Mary Meeker who was the stat queen while at Morgan Stanley keeps the info flowing at Kleiner, Perkins. Check out her latest presentation.
9. After much pomp and circumstance, Amadeus finally sells Opodo to private equity firms AXA and Permira in a deal valued at €450M.
10. Google touts their new WebM CODEC as the open source future of web video…until MPEG-LA questions whether WebM is based on patents they control. It’s telling that thus far Google hasn’t agreed to indemnify others who use the WebM codec. As an old Vorlon friend of mine used to say: “And so it begins”.