2011 is here! And …

Jan 03 2011

But first of all, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

2010 was a very interesting year.

We saw Apple launch the iPad, which quickly showed the world what the tablet PC experience should be like, and consequently sent Microsoft back to the drawing board.

We also witnessed Google’s Android evolve into a very good competitor to the Apple iPhone and consequently take market share away from smartphone stalwart RIM/Blackberry, sending it into a downward spiral from which it will probably not recover.

So it looks like 2011 continue to be interesting (or should I say “exciting”?).

The tablet wars will spin up fully in 2011, with Apple (and iOS) on one hand, and Google’s Android on the other. There will be other players like RIM, Ubuntu and Microsoft, but they will remain bit players, at least initially.

An “alternative PC operating system” war will brew with more vigor in the background. Google Chrome OS will finally ship on systems that you can buy at the store. Alternatives will be Intel/Nokia’s MeeGo and the various flavors of Linux (Ubuntu, Jolicloud).

Hopefully, we will also get better clarity in how Google will position Chrome OS, particularly vis à vis Android. Google is not infallible, as we have seen with Google TV here and here. So some of the big questions of 2011 will be (a) whether a cloud computing device powered by Chrome OS makes sense and (b) whether Google will continue to support two operating systems.

Social media will continue to be HUGE. On Dec 29th 2010, Hitwise reported that in the US, Facebook beat Google as the most visited site in 2010. This can mean many things. For example, Bing may be grabbing market share or eyeballs from Google, resulting in fewer visits to google.com. But we cannot deny the fact that Facebook will be incredibly influential in 2011.

This year will also be critical for Facebook’s competitor (I am tempted to use the word “former”), MySpace. The latter was the 7th most visited US website in 2010, but it may lay off up to 50% of its staff.

So there we go: my first blog for 2011. Again, wishing y’all a Happy New Year!

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Chrome OS is here.. almost

Dec 14 2010

I wrote a blog on Dec 2nd wondering what happened to Chrome OS. Lo and behold, on Dec 7th, Google held a special event (live feed from Sean Hollister of Engadget) where Chrome OS was revealed, along with details of a pre-production/production-level, limited-edition Chrome OS netbook, the Cr-48.

The mass market version of a Chrome OS system would ship only mid-2011 from Acer and Samsung.

The folks at “The Register” got their hands one of the units and came out with a review.

Chrome OS also has its detractors

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, thinks that not having your own data on your own property is akin to losing your legal rights to your data. The example he gives is that in the US, the police require a search warrant to get access your property, but don’t necessarily need to when trying to get to your data on some one else’s property e.g. Google’s servers. In some ways, Stallman is right:  look at the amount of influence members of the US government has over corporations when it comes to WikiLeaks. This means that corporations running cloud services can block access to your own data if you offend the wrong people.

The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, thinks that Chrome OS will be “killed next year” or “merged” with Android. In this case, I think Buchheit is basically channeling the confusion surrounding the positioning of Chrome OS with respect to Google’s other operating systems, Android. The announcement on Dec 7th and the delivery of the Cr-48 onto users’ hands have not dispelled that confusion.

Part of this comes from our mental association linking larger, physical devices with larger, more full-function software. In contrast, Google is targeting a full-function operating system (Android) at physically smaller, mobile devices while leaving Chrome OS, a browser-only-single-application operating system, to power physically larger and presumably more powerful devices like netbooks.

Perhaps we will get more clarity when the mass market Chrome OS devices are released next year. At the least, their price points will give an indication of how Google is positioning them.

In a previous article, I have postulated that perhaps the ideal device for Chrome OS will be a very low cost, full Internet experience tablet; basically, an iPad without the complexity of on-device applications and with support for Adobe Flash.

I still think that this is the ideal scenario. At the least, Google should created an embedded version of Chrome OS for use in devices like printers etc. For example, I just bought an HP D110a printer. This printer represents a whole new generation of smart, Internet-savvy devices that can connect to the Internet and even download firmware upgrades for themselves. One key promise of the D110a is that you can access “applications” on the Internet and print content without using a computer. The promise fails on the D110a because it has a tiny screen, resulting in a very poor user interface. With a more complex operating system like Chrome OS integrated with the D110a, the user will have a more complete Internet experience, and hence a higher tendency to print content directly from the printer (which obviously would drive the sale of printer cartridges…). HP has said that they will be leveraging webOS for this end in the future. I think Google should also explore that possibility.

Finally, Brad Pitt-lookalike and founder and CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, is confused about the Chrome app store. An app store of websites is not a new concept. When Splashtop 2.0 was launched earlier this year and shipped with Lenovo on their netbooks, one feature was an app catalog that contained a list of popular websites. Users used this to customize their Splashtop experience by making their favorite websites more easily available on the operating system launchbar.

What is new with the Chrome app store is the availability of web sites that have integrated with the various Google APIs. Some of the web pages of these web sites are then still available even when the Chrome OS device is offline i.e. not connected to the Internet.

This, in my opinion, is a very important factor for the success of Chrome OS, if Google continues targeting it as the sole operating system on devices like netbooks and notebooks. Without an offline capability, Chrome OS devices will have zero value (other than as paperweight) in markets where Internet access is either intermittent or costly. This applies to most of the third world and much of the developed world.

In the mean time, some folks have installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a Cr-48 and you can see the video with the link below

Ubuntu on the Cr-48.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Splashtop Inc (formerly DeviceVM, Inc), which developed the Splashtop product.

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WikiLeaks – The one fallout no one is talking about

Dec 03 2010

The big news of the week is “cablegate” aka the thousands of confidential US diplomatic documents that are being made public by WikiLeaks.

While the contents of the leaked cables range from the bizarre (Gaddafi’s blonde companion) to evidence of illegal behavior (spying on UN officials), the outcome of all this is that diplomacy will go on as before. There is no alternative to diplomacy. Even war, after all, is diplomacy by other means…

The impact of the leak on the culture and values of Western democratic societies will be more serious.

Western politicians of all stripes have called various actions on Julian Assange (WikiLeaks’ founder), ranging from hunting him down like Osama Bin Laden to assassination by drone.

What ever happened to Western concepts of judicial due process and the assumption of innocence?

While politicians can be forgiven for acting like politicians, after all, they have their constituents to answer to (in theory at least; in practice, US politicians answer to their campaign donors), the actions of companies like Amazon and EveryDNS are more worrisome.

When WikiLeaks came under intense denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, the website was moved to Amazon’s EC2 hosting service. On Wednesday, Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, citing pressure from US Senator Joe Lieberman.

On Friday, EveryDNS.net took down the wikileaks.org domain name, citing WikiLeaks’ violation of EveryDNS’s acceptable use policy.

Another company, Tableau Software, bowing to pressure from Senator Lieberman, “removed from the Internet visualisations of the US Embassy cables”.

This is all very worrisome because it shows how it easy it is shut down a website. All you need is a little bit of political pressure. And all this is achieved without judicial review and due process.

Is that what Western freedoms and liberties have come to? What happened to freedom of speech?

The problem is not whether what WikiLeaks did was legal or acceptable. There are processes in the system for dealing with cases like these, including a potential grand jury indictment against Julian Assange.

Resorting to what is essentially censorship is absolutely not the way to deal with WikiLeaks.

Believe me when I say I know what censorship is. The general perception is that China started the art of Internet censorship with its “great firewall”.

The reality is that in 1996, as the Internet became popular in Singapore (a country that has NOTHING to do with China), the government there started considering ways to control what its citizens had access to on the Internet. The primary target was online pornography but free and unfettered political expression was also a concern. As a start, all private Internet traffic had to pass through government-controlled proxy servers. Unapproved websites were blocked. At some point, the government considered requiring local website owners to register with the government, in the same way that printed media publishers had to obtain government licenses. I don’t know if this was ever put into practice because I had left Singapore by then.

I know this because I organized a petition drive to oppose the Singapore government’s move to censor and control the Internet. There have even been articles written about that petition.

What I see happening to WikiLeaks is more of the same: attempts at control and censorship. And it is scary. When politicians call the shots, who is next? After all, as the maxim goes: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (members of the Irgun/Haganah who later became Israeli leaders and Nelson Mandela/ANC come to mind). If your website upsets a politician or political party, will it be shutdown through direct and indirect political pressure? If that happens and you lack the technical skills of the WikiLeaks crew, what is your recourse?

The fact is that Western countries don’t need this. The system in place is robust enough to handle WikiLeaks, Al Qaeda terrorism and more. After all, this same system survived a 44-year cold war with the Soviet Union with most of our freedoms intact.

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Whither Chrome OS?

Dec 02 2010

It was widely reported (or rumored) back in August (see my “Much ado about Chrome OS” blog) that Google would be shipping a Chrome OS notebook or tablet by Black Friday (aka November 26th 2010).

Well, that day has come and gone and there’s still no sign of Chrome OS shipping.

It looks like, based on this report by Engadget, that Chrome OS systems will be generally available in 2011, but that units will be available  this year for internal use à la Nexus One.

My earlier blog also suggested that perhaps Chrome OS would be positioned as a tablet OS for low cost, always-connected Internet devices whereas a richer OS like Android would make more sense for feature-rich devices. However, Eric Schmidt, at Web 2.0, made it clear that Chrome OS would be for devices with keyboards while Android would primarily be for touch (tell that to my T-Mobile G2).

Unfortunately, that clarification still doesn’t tell me why one would buy a Chrome OS device over an Android one. Google has some work to do to differentiate and position its two operating systems.

In the mean time, Jolicloud has beaten Google to the punch by launching the Jolibook, a netbook running the Jolicloud OS (based on Ubuntu). It is currently available only in the UK.

I have tried out Jolicloud version 1.0 and find it easy to use, but nothing spectacular. It has a very good integration with cloud storage services like Dropbox and Zumodrive. This allows you to share data between the Jolibook and your regular PC, making the former a great companion device.

Jolibook also includes a number of social features including a tie-in with Facebook log-in and its own social network that allows you to find out what other Jolicloud users are doing e.g. which are the popular applications etc. This secondary social network creates some level of stickiness: when you have invested some time/effort into setting this up, you will be less likely to switch to another environment.

My former employer, DeviceVM (now called Splashtop Inc), has also jumped into the fray, but in the reverse direction: whereas you are able to buy notebooks from HP, Dell, Sony and others, with Splashtop already installed, you were previously not able to download a version of Splashtop and install it on a system that you already have. To remedy that, Splashtop OS is now available for download, in beta form, from the Splashtop Inc website. In a “one up” to Google, Splashtop comes with Bing (thanks to moi) as the default Internet search engine.

At the end of the day, the big question is how these non-Windows operating systems will change the way we use computers or the Internet. With Splashtop, DeviceVM was successful in changing boot time expectations: Windows 7 boots much faster than Vista, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that the new MacBook Airs had this new feature called “Instant-On”, and there is a bunch of new technology (described here) to allow super fast “boot” with Linux. DeviceVM was also the first to realize that users really want to use the Internet most of the time and had a product to cater to that expectation.

The next step will be a change in user behavior aided by all this new technology and the increasingly social nature of the Internet. 2011 is definitely going to be an interesting year.

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