This seemed to be one of the more interesting weeks I’ve seen in quite a while. Yahoo makes a big move in Big Data, Google+ launches, Homeaway IPO’s and much more. Good stuff, take a read through.

1. They’re dancing in the streets of Austin…well that isn’t so out of the ordinary on Sixth Street. But after a successful HomeAway IPO, with a $2.2B valuation, they’re dancing down on First Street too. Amazingly, while some thought HomeAway’s offering was overvalued, shared soared almost 50%, raising the valuation to over $3B. Perhaps lost in the news is the announcement that the VRMA/Pegasus switch concept is dead which should only brighten HomeAway’s outlook.
2. Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li says that Google+ could offer great utility if you’re a Gmail/Android user, but that it increases the amount of trust that you have to have in Google. But in an AllThingsD interview with Google’s Vic Gundrota and Bradley Horowitz, it seems as if Google+ is still in the “science project” phase as the purpose of the limited launch is to get customer feedback before a big launch.
3. Mobile payment startup Square raises a $100M Series C round and now has a valuation of $1 Billion.
4. Microsoft officially launches Office365, the subscription-based cloud version of the vaunted Office suite. It should be an interesting transition for the folks in Redmond, particularly from a revenue perspective. I do wonder how enterprise adoption will unfold, but unfortunately it looks like Office365 is basically unusable on mobile devices, so that will slow adoption dramatically.
5. HP is looking for a hardware partner for WebOS in the Microsoft/Nokia vein.
6. Yahoo! launched Hortonworks, a spinoff with the sole focus on developing and commercializing the Hadoop technology originally developed in the company. Hortonworks is a joint venture between Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. This made big news at the Hadoop summit…and may be the first thing Yahoo! has done right in a while…but folks like CloudEra and MapR are making plenty of headway as well.
7. Another software leader born in the cloud commits to HTML5. First it was Facebook, not it’s Salesfore.com who has a big footprint within the enterprise. Just another example of how companies who are not bogged down by the baggage of the past 30 years can move faster to adopt new tech…which helps attract more customers. However, WindowsXP and IE 7 & 8 still hold back the pace of adoption of HTML5 in the enterprise.
8. It’s one thing when a company is no longer the darling of the media. It’s another when customers start to flee for alternatives. But can anything be salvaged when the employees plainly state they’ve lost confidence in the direction of the company? That seems the situation at Research in Motion. Worse yet, the tepid response from RIM seems to indicate they don’t yet believe there is a problem in the first place.
9. Everyone always wants to get the most of their employees, but the focus is often on “productivity”. How about tapping your employees “cognitive surplus”. Not familiar with the term? Check out this really interesting article and learn. Well worth the read.
10. A consortium of tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and RIM won the bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio.  That group looks like the epitome of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

There are times I wonder whether this post is still of value to people, but then I ran into Amadeus’ Debbie Iannaci at the ACTE conference last week and she says she reads it, so for now it stays. But I’d love to hear from others too.

1. ZipCar had a very successful IPO, as the stock soared more than 50% over the initial offering price of $18/share. This bodes well for other travel IPOs such as HomeAway or Kayak. But Henry  Blodget says while the IPO was great for people who were in at the initial offering, Goldman & JP Morgan actually screwed the company by significantly under-pricing the offering to the tune of $5oM.
2. American Airlines who have already pushed their chips into the middle of the table in the Direct Connect poker tournament have now thrown their gold watch and car keys into the pot by bringing an anti-trust suit against Travelport and Orbitz. I’m not going to editorialize , but could you see Hasbro suing Wal-Mart if the latter didn’t want to sell the former’s products? The way this story has evolved it feels so reminiscent of the NFL lockout I wonder if DeMaurice Smith is moonlighting for AA now that he’s reduced his NFLPA salary to $0.68.
3. The long-awaited BlackBerry PlayBook debuted to less than stellar reviews. Many do seem to show a light at the end of the tunnel for RIM, but seem to underscore the fact that the device is not quite ready for primetime and was launched out of fear of losing the tablet market entirely. The other odd thing is the concept of the BlackBerry Bridge. It seems to be a kluge acknowledging the lack of native email and calendar apps. But it’s also being seen as a means to provide the security that attracted so many enterprise customers in the first place. But if that’s the case, why not build the capability into the device? Again, most likely because the PlayBook was rushed to market. Perhaps RIM needs to heed the words of Orson Welles from when he was hawking Paul Masson.
4. Phil Wainwright fires another missive at the Private Cloud folk, who writes “…an enterprise that builds a private cloud will spend more, achieve less and increase its risk exposure…” The best part about the piece is that his point of view is informed by two top enterprise cloud architects who built private clouds.  A really good read.
5. A minor PR blunder for Sabre as they tried to spin the AA/Expedia deal in which Expedia agreed to establish a direct connect with AA using GDS technology. Chris Kroeger, SVP of marketing for Sabre went perhaps a step too far as he claimed that Sabre has direct connects with “hundreds of other airlines globally”. Of course the type of direct connect that AA and Sabre are talking about are not the same. Positioning the GDS as an aggregation technology that can enable efficient comparison shopping is a good idea, but on the DC characterization I don’t like when people try to obfuscate or confuse the facts.
6. There has been a lot of talk about the potential of NFC in the travel sector and retail in general. But it seems that it remains over-hyped if only 1 in 5 smartphones will have NFC…by 2014.
7. Perhaps it was tepid sales of the Motorola XOOM or just reading the writing on the wall, but the changes that Adobe announced to enhance support for HTML5 and a new release of Flash Builder 4.5 are a step in the right direction to keep one of the most important digital design technology leaders relevant. And this should bring a sigh of relief to those with significant investments in Flash.
8. I knew that Priceline (and many of the larger OTAs) owe a lot of their earnings to hotel bookings, but the recent analysis at Forbes – showing that only 2% of PCLN’s stock value comes from airfare – was still a little surprising, especially after the fanfare of their hookup with American Airlines.
9. Congratulations to SilverRail Technologies for another $5M funding round, bringing their total just shy of $15M.
10. Surprisingly, Cisco killed the Flip camera less than two years after they bought it for $590M. The move was surprising in many ways as it was the top selling camcorder and was profitable as a standalone unit. Michael Wolf examines the other options that Cisco had.

Lots of tablet/mobile news to kick things off:

1. RIM is struggling to maintain relevancy and apparently co-CEO Jim Balsille’s comments during their earnings call on did not inspire much confidence that they can turn the tide as the stock slid 13%. Matt Drance sums up the reason for the poor response to the earnings call well: “RIM has two CEOs and three COOs. Why is anyone expecting straight answers from a company that can’t even decide who’s in charge?”
2. Samsung launched its new tablet lineup at CTIA, adding an 8.9” consumer version and a 10.1” business oriented tablet to the existing 7” form factor. Both are priced near the iPad2 entry point ($469 and $499) respectively, which is good. What I don’t understand is why launch two new form factors with a $30 spread? From a manufacturing standpoint I don’t see how this advantages Samsung in any way. From a consumer standpoint I can’t see who wouldn’t pony up an additional $30 to get an 11% larger screen and some additional software capabilities (even if you’d never use them). On the whole it is a good step forward for Samsung – the tablets have the new Android Honeycomb OS, benefit from the strong Samsung consumer brand and the pricing is now in the right ballpark. But while maybe this would make me consider the Galaxy over the Motorola XOOM, is there anything here that gives a buyer reason to choose it over an iPad…or the threatened/upcoming introductions of the HP TouchPad or RIM PlayBook? I’m not sold….literally or figuratively.
3. Larry Dignan says that the next big tablet battleground will be in the enterprise.  It’s a good article. If only someone had thought of this before…could anyone have been so prescient?
4. It’s easy to say that companies should leverage the social graph, but it’s another thing to do it. I thought this article on how Foursquare took up the challenge to create a recommendation engine was pretty interesting to read. I’m sure it only scratches the surface, but it gives an inkling of what’s involved.
5. I’ve said before that travel companies are sitting on a boatload of data, but like many industries, have a hard time turning that into actionable information. Thought this was a good article on how BI/decision science could alter hotel revenue management strategies in the future.
6. Rail is a sector that doesn’t get a lot of play in the media except for when President Obama called for an investment in high-speed rail in his SOTU…and of course the predictable calls from the GOP to stop all subsidies to Amtrak. But Kevin May wrote a really good piece on how the rail market is evolving and how companies like Amadeus, Travelport and PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit winner, SilverRail Technologies are increasing their efforts in the sector.
7. Great summary of the state of online travel flash sales. What’s really interesting is the demographics of those visiting these sites.
8. How open is open? Well it seems the definitions are shifting a bit to suit the organizations purpose (shocker) as Google says it won’t release Honeycomb to developers just yet according to this report from BusinessWeek. Timing aside, my bigger beef with Google’s interpretation of “open” is the fact that while they release the code to carriers and device manufacturers to be mucked about with after the fact, they don’t actually allow anyone outside of Google to contribute to the codebase as its being developed. But perhaps I’m picking nits. On a related note, OpenAXIS is adding “membership” to the definition of open.
9. Speaking of definitions, it seems multi-tenancy is still kinda murky to some. This should remind you that it’s still important to understand your software providers’ architecture.
10. SITA breaks ATPCOs monopoly on airline fare in the US and Canada. It should be interesting to see what innovations SITA brings to the space and how ATPCO responds.

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”.

A very interesting week indeed. In particular a lot of news out of Salesforce.com and TripAdvisor.

1. Salesforce.com had their Dreamforce event last week and there was no shortage of news. IDC #staranalyst Michael Fauscette summarizes the show, but I wanted to highlight 3 announcements of note:
   • Salesforce Chatter goes Freemium. Perhaps one of the most important announcements from DreamForce. For those of you who don’t know about Chatter, it’s Salesforce.com’s social collaboration platform that can play a key role both in social CRM and service and support initiatives. The freemium offering should result in more companies testing the social enterprise waters with a number of them turning into paying customers for SFDC.
   • Salesforce introduces a new XaaS – Database as a Service, named database.com.  There are other emerging players in this space, but the interesting part of database.com is that it can be leveraged by a multitude of Cloud and mobile platforms (AWS, Azure, AppEngine, iOS or Android). If you want to learn more, Anshu Sharma, the guy behind Salesforce.com Force.com strategy explains the “Why, How and What”.
   • One of the biggest challenges that the Force.com platform faced was not technical, but one of winning the hearts and minds of developers. Initially companies could only develop apps on the Force.com platform using their proprietary, Java-esque APEX language. Then earlier this year they launched support for Java with VMWare’s SpringSource team. Now they are trying to hit the developer G-spot with their acquisition of Heroku for $212M which brings over 100,000 Ruby developers into the Force.com fold.
2. They say the NFL is a copy-cat league — that when one team is successful against another by using a certain strategy, you can be sure to see those elements in future opponents’ game plan.  Well it looks like the approach applies in tech too. After seeing how Facebook fared by protecting its content from Google’s search engines, TripAdvisor has blocked its reviews from Google Places. Tnooz broke the story first.  In a companion piece, Expedia believes Trip Advisor Media can be a Billion Dollar business. Well maybe that explains the Google Places deal a little better.
3. First let me say that if you’re concerned about security in the Cloud, or in general, and you’re not reading Christopher Hoff’s blog, start now. In his most recent post he makes an important point that security is a shared responsibility between the Cloud (IaaS/PaaS) provider and the company who’s developing the app. There are no magic beans for security and you can’t abdicate responsibility to your provider.
4. Google unveils the Nexus S, full of Gingerbread-y goodness that goes well with the holiday season. Sure would have been a lot more interesting if it weren’t tied to T-Mobile. Nice way to one-up the iPhone…take your marquis product to a worse carrier L
5. I always like to highlight good news when I can. And this is certainly good news, not just for the $1.8B raised by tech start ups in Q3, but because it’s the continuation of trend. And that’s good news for everyone.
6. Travel Tripper makes a case for an Open Source Hotel Industry Switch. An interesting post, but I had a couple of questions: 1) What’s in it for Pegasus to want to donate the code? And 2) Is there a large enough ecosystem of developers who would actively contribute to maintaining and enhancing the switch?
7. What’s wrong with RIM’s Blackberry business? Many answers, but excellent analysis in this piece. It’s worth reading, not just for the insight about RIM, but because the concepts behind the analysis – how to spot trends that your platform is dying – is extremely valuable to every business person, regardless of the sector you’re in. Must read.
8. Another blow to frictionless commerce. BA is now charging a fee for booking flights via travel agents while using a credit card. This now mirrors the practice when booking on BA.com. I wonder if Karl Rove is behind the move as the fee only applies to the two lowest classes of service (World Traveller and World Traveller Plus), so rich people get a pass. Beyond being a regressive tax, it’s hypocritical as the intent was to recoup fees imposed by credit card companies. But given that these fees are typically a percentage of the charge, the policy makes little sense. I guess they’d prefer it if I walked up to a counter with a sack of money.
9. Google finally announces the long-awaited ChromeOS. While the reviews of the CR-48 prototype device have been less than stellar, the OS itself seems to have arrived to great acclaim. GigaOM breaks down the announcement.
10. Very interesting back story on what happens when a flight gets cancelled.

When you combine these two headlines: Bank of America and Citigroup Consider Ditching BlackBerry for iPhone and Dell to Offer Its Employees Venue Pros Instead of BlackBerrys, things are starting to look awful bad for the Waterloo, Ontario based (get the play on words in the headline now?) smartphone maker.

I mean seriously we already knew about how the iPhone and Android have been eating away at RIM’s once-dominant position in the corporate world, and now by most reports, Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 platform seems to have legs and seems to be pretty easy to develop for. The sledding is getting tougher. But that’s not the worst part.

Time and again the Blackberry’s keyboard and Microsoft Exchange integration and security have been listed as the top features. But in a gesture and app world, the keyboard is losing its relevancy. And if companies like BofA and Citi — banks for God’s sake! Who’s more conservative than that! — can get comfy with the iPhone’s Exchange integration and security, you can expect to see the momentum for enterprise adoption of iPhone and Android pick up and Blackberry sales nosedive.

It seems like it will be a long, cold winter in the Great White North.

Happy Halloween everyone.  Of course the most important event from last week was Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity/Rally to Keep Fear Alive. HuffPo provides responses from the “media”.

In other news…

1. Appropriate given that we’re at the height of the election season and have just recapped the Rally to Restore Sanity, another organization twists the word “fair” to protect their own interests in the status quo and to block a competitor’s progress (most political orgs insert “freedom”, “life” or “for a better America” just as disingenuously).  Hey, I don’t trust Google as far as I can throw them, but I really don’t see this as anything more than posturing in hopes of getting a concession.  Coverage with different persectives from The Wall Street Journal, Tnooz and TechCrunch.
2. Speaking of Google, they keep adding to their travel portfolio…this time indirectly with a reported $25M investment in Homeaway…at a stunning $1.4B valuation, the web’s largest vacation rental site.
3. While social technologies playing an increasing role in travel companies operations – and in just about every other sector too – it’s probably hard to find two companies that are approaching the integration of social the same way, both technologically and organizationally. Enterprise 2.0 guru Dion Hinchcliffe looks at who should be in charge from an organizational perspective. Should be considered required reading.
4. Vertical integration at work: the leader in online sales of tours and attractions, Viator buys OurExplorer, a Sydney, Australia based company that provides resources for discovering such activities. Ray Ozzie’s long and winding goodbye…or as some may refer to it “Here’s everything that I wish I did or would have liked to have done were I to have stayed around” letter.
5. RedMonk’s Michael Cote recaps the Adobe MAX conference and provides his usual sharp analysis. The most important takeaway is that it seems that Adobe has finally seen the light that they need to focus on web development tools and HTML5 and that Flash is to be treated as a feature rather than the platform. But time will tell whether their actions match their words.
6. Adobe tries to regain control over mobile device UI by launching Adobe AIR 2.5 for Windows Phone 7, Android and the RIM PlayBook. RIM made the biggest bet on AIR by essentially ceding future of the development platform for the device to Adobe – you want to build an app, you’ve got to build it in AIR. The technology is slick, but if for one reason or another Adobe slows down their investments in the technology, RIM has not given themselves – or their developer partners –  many backup options.
7. Adobe isn’t the only one who’s abandoning proprietary UI platforms in favor of HTML5. At This year’s Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft announced a shift in their strategy for Silverlight, the Flash-like runtime UI environment.  Seems like Apple has won the day.
8. PayPal grabs the lead on micropayments from Google again and announced a partnership with Facebook…invoking the ‘enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend’ strategy.
9. HTML5 wasn’t the only thing discussed at Microsoft’s PDC 2010. In fact it wasn’t even the most important thing (many will argue it was Kinect for Xbox). Altimeter Group’s Ray Wang breaks it down.
10. What’s one of the gates to cloud adoption? Not being able to differentate between “moving to and “building for” the Cloud.

There’s going to be a lot of analysis to come, but here’s my first reactions to the news that HP will buy Palm for $1.2B.

For one, I’m glad that Palm is going to survive.  The WebOS received a lot of acclaim as a technology, yet it never took off.  The PDK they release just a few months ago has helped make WebOS a great platform for developers.  But Palm never had the resources to put behind the company and the developer community to really allow Palm to compete on a relatively level playing field.  That changes today.

And let me talk more about how HP will supercharge WebOS’ position in the minds of the developer.  The most important part of this new pairing is HP’s position within the enterprise.  HP will now make a big push to make their new WebOS-based devices (phones and tablets, count on it) in the hands of the enterprise user.  This will encourage developers to embrace the WebOS and start porting apps to it in force in order to reach the enterprise.  This is very bad news in my mind for RIM and Microsoft who finally thought they had something with their new Windows Phone 7 OS to be launched at the end of year.  As they say, timing is everything.

OK, time for a quick take on how this impacts the other players in the industry:

Limited impact:

• Apple: Probably not that much of an impact.  Apple never really targeted the enterprise buyer, although is first in the hearts of many professionals who work in the enterprise.  They have a very loyal, fanatical following and there’s no way that this announcement creates even a blip on the radar.
• Google: Pretty similar story to Apple, although without the fanatical following (except perhaps in the developer community).  Google is still well positioned and also will be greatly unaffected.

Ooh, are they screwed:

• RIM: Even with the impending release of the Blackberry OS 6, they are in for the fight of their life. I truly believe the future of the company may be in doubt for the first time. RIM has lived on the enterprise and has been the defacto standard for many companies. But again I come back to HP’s power in the enterprise and this does not bode well.
• Dell: Their entry into the market is now still-born.  ‘nuf fsaid.
• Microsoft: All of a sudden the fact that the end-of-year release of the new Windows Phone7 OS is a gigantic problem.  HP was not only a large partner for Microsoft from an OS perspective, they’re going to be going gangbusters on marketing an excellent OS and product before the first new Windows Phone sees the light of day (unless its left in a bar by accident).  This impacts not just Microsoft’s phone strategy, but their plans of introducing Windows7 tablets into the market.  Remember that CES announcement of the HP Slate powered by Windows7? No more.
• Nokia: Are they even in the smartphone business anymore? MeeGo is effectively dead and perhaps Nokia becomes a Europe/EMEA-only player.  Good luck with margins in the African sub-continent.

One last thought.  This might also  be good news for Adobe.  Flash 10.1 mobile is scheduled to be supported by Palm’s WebOS,  so this will be another beachhead for them against Apple.
So what do you think the impact will be? Did I miss anything? Please add your thoughts in the comments.

Today I read a good post by CrispWireless CTO, Xavier Facon, entitled “Apps Call, but will your phone answer? Maybe not.” The post was a response to an MSNBC CES article bemoaning the fact that many apps exist on certain platforms, but not others.  This of course is not news.  Apple’s iPhone had 100,000, Google’s Android 20,000 and Palm’s WebOS just over a 1,000 (please make more, I like my Pre and do have app envy).  The fragmentation of the mobile industry across different operating systems and different hardware systems is well documented and is the bane of many software developers and testers across the world.

The crux of Facon’s post seems to provide tacit support a more standards-based approach coalescing around HTML5, but also acknowledging that the industry is not close to supporting a single standard and therefore they try to solve the quandary by re-writing the app across different platforms. At least Crisp seems to focus on keeping the functionality, something that many companies don’t do.  This is an important decision by Crisp because it helps maintain not just common functionality across devices, but also promotes a common design and better usability as users move from one device to another.

But I want to get back to the standards issue.  As much as software engineering teams across the globe would like to have a standard “write once, run anywhere” approach as they’ve been used to with modern languages like Java, I don’t think there is any likelihood of  this happening in the short to medium term.  It’s really not all that dissimilar to creating desktop apps for Mac v. PC, it’s just that there are more options in the mobile world.  The hardware platform providers like Apple, RIM, Google, Nokia and Palm each have different OS’ that they think create differentiation for their platform and provide better performance/user experience.   If you want to take advantage of the full capabilities of the device, you have to write for the platform.  And the reason behind it all is usability.

While using a standard language like HTML5 may make it easier to program across platforms, but it doesn’t allow you to take advantage of the specific capabilities that the OS and hardware allow for.   Plus you have to design for the form factor.  Mobile apps — perhaps I should  say “good mobile apps” — look vastly different from the content on the web.  They’re designed for action more so than information.  For fingers, not mice.  For use by broader segment of the population who may be less tech savvy.  I mean can you even imagine using an iPhone or Palm Pre without multi-touch and gestures?  Look how that changed the entire experience and drove usage through the roof.  In a recent PhoCusWright report Mobile: The Next Platform for Travel, they demonstrate the difference in presentation and usability between a standard web site, a mobile transcoded site and an app.   Now there are many WAP-enabled sites that run in a browser and provide something in-between the transcoded site and an app, but anyone that’s used a WAP site still prefers and app to get the same information.  Usability is what it’s all about.  The App strategy wins over a WAP strategy.

Google wants HTML5 because it wants a web-oriented portable computing device to better leverage the web apps that is the core of its business. Android is more of a strategy to extend it’s platform rather than to create a new one that is optimized for mobile.

Additionally, an app strategy rather than just a mobile web strategy provides a performance advantage. A downloaded app only needs to get refreshed data over the network rather than reloading the entire page each time.  It’s true that 3G and 4G networks are improving (if you have coverage; no apologies to AT&T coming. As tiresome as the Verizon ads have become, Luke Wilson is seriously annoying), performance is extremely important.  Abandon rates on the web are high for a 3 second delay.  Most people would kill for a 3 second delay on their mobile applications.
So while it may be a pain to code for multiple platforms, it’s the only way to go.

What’s your take?  Agree? Disagree?