Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

This is really as far as it goes. Google Gears, or now Gears, as it de-branded, makes your browser in conjunction with a web site, into an offline application, or simply an application with local components. Because it started out by simply giving your offline access to GMail or Google Reader, and now the folks behind Wordpress have announced that Wordpress 2.6 will have Gears integrated to speed up the Admin Interface. Matt actually adds a few points here, among others linking to the Performance Page on the Yahoo! Developer Network saying that something like 85% of the performance is in the frontend, meaning it is felt performance. This brings him on to Google Gears and how local servers will make CDNs obsolete.

While I do believe that there is a lot of power in Google Gears, I am not seeing yet where they will make CDNs obsolete. There is lots of stuff I do not cache or cannot cache in the browser. Above that, I know of at least one person that will scream up when you mention something like Google Gears or AIR. The thing is that these are systems that give Web Apps very deep access into your system and we just don’t have the mindset yet to really secure web applications. A simple link sent to you, might result in something loading in some un-secure AIR or Gears app and destroy your computer. This is a risk we have to deal with somehow, but I am pretty sure that is on the mind of the Google engineers and the others that are working on Gears.

I do fully believe Matt though that the line between servers and application is shifting in that you will less and less worry about your server infrastructure. I had a longer talk about this with the CEO from Globalways, who are running a Xen virtualisation Platform.

But back to Gears, Techcrunch has a lot more interesting points, e.g. that Gears was implemented by MySpace for their messsaging.

Today Gears supports a whole host of new features, some that it has in common with the other next generation web API efforts from Microsoft and Adobe while others are a result of their own innovation. Function calls available to developers include background processes (no more hourglass), client-side image manipulation, location-awareness, better file uploading and a local database inside the browser.

It’s really getting interesting here in that you might want to give your users the option to simply download Gears and use it and suddenly can write a lot more powerful web applications, with less servers. Looking forward to trying out the new Wordpress to see how it works with Gears.

More and more people are starting to talk about one little startup: DropBox. Just as an example, in June the German Netzwertig gave it rave reviews and made many people ask for an invite. One of the shortest praises came from Simon Waldman:

Online storage that just works, they say…and you know what, they’re right. Beg to get on their beta list.

I have to admit, that it is one of the few applications that are still running on my Macbook all the time. Simon does have some very good additional tips in that post, like Evernote and extra small Moleskins, but more on that later. Now on DropBox. I already wrote about it here and have now been playing with it for some time. So long actually that I was still in the beta group that got a 10GB storage box

The application is remarkably easy to use and running seemlessly in the background, simply telling you whether it is in sync with your ownline storage or not. It also has versioning and a restore feature. I just restored a folder with 68 images because I am going to friends today and might want to check out those pics there. I have to admit that I ma not yet sure how they pay for all of this because it means you have unlimited storage when you are clever. e.g. upload 1GB movie, delete, upload another, delete, restore the old one, … you will never go above 1GB but have endless movies in there. Of course they can limit the time of the backups but still. It is a wonderful feature though and makes the entire system a lot more interesting.

Above that they have some special folders, like Photos, which will give you a gallery for all folders below that. Upload fotos in there and very easily share via a hidden folder similar to how Picasa does it. Not sure if I am totally happy with that but hey, it’s survivable and it’s your choice if you want to share fotos like that. I really do presume though that a large part of the people out there will start using DropBox to keep their PCs in Sync, and with more people using it, DropBox should install the option to find out who else is on DropBox through an address book sync, allowing me to easily share stuff with people already on there.

The bad side is just that you will otherwise need to invite somebody, who will have to install the app, and that makes it cumbersome. But if you are already using it for yourself for some time, … then it gets interesting. This is where DropBox is moving. I am using it for a long time now, and if you want an invite, I have a few left.

What a day. First Nokia bought Plazes (Congrats!) and now they offer to buy the remaining 52% of Symbian and have launched the Symbian Foundation, which will drive the open sourcing of Symbian over the next 2 years. Of course the Symbian Foundation has wide adoption, same as the Open Handset Alliance around Android, but we might want to dig a bit deeper to see if this is a lost cause by Nokia as Google will simply win with Android, or not.

First to start of with one thing. Nokia sells as many phones in a few days as Apple has sold iPhones in total. So there is a bit of a market power there. Of course, Apple might be able to scale down, and Android might be nice, but there is power behind the Symbian Foundation, real power.

Another question is who is now building mobile phones. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Lg, Ericsson, Motorola … all members of Symbian and many of them missing from Google’s Alliance. One also has to say that these companies have real relations to carriers and real experience to get phones through testing with the FCC and others.

Also, Google lists China Mobile as part of the Open Handset Alliance, but they seem to have problems getting chinese working on Android, and Chinese does work on Symbian obviously, and with Open Sourcing the platform, there are no longer any real licensing fees and China Mobile might have an easier access route with Symbian to get their own Smartphones.

So yes, Nokia needs to build up their developer relations work to get some serious buzz around new apps for Symbian, but this is something that can be done because it is a really good base. I still want an iPhone but I will keep my N95 and I will likely get a Nokia phone again in the future. It’s just that I want back to T-Mobile anyway (reception at Base sucks some times) and the iPhone is nice indeed. It has the buzz factor at the moment. Android is too far away. And possibly Nokia will have some really compelling items out at the end of the year. And hey, just imagine them adding Plazes to a few of their phones. Give it a month and there will be more Plazes installations on phones than iPhones out there. So long Loopt. Nice to have met you.

It has happened again, my “To Blog” bookmark folder has reached a size that is too big, so I need to clear some of it out, at least the smaller bits.

twittearth is a wonderful tool to leave running on your desktop and it seems an OS X screensaver is coming. By then I hope to hear about it again, because it would be a cool screensaver to use.

Want to have the photo application that will appear on MobileMe from Apple for yourself? Check out SproutCore, which is what it was based on it seems. I have to admit I still like Flickr, and the second part Funambol, could be the syncing part and push email service. I did try it shortly and I am not sold, as I am not fully sold on MobileMe. I like GMail because it is different and with IMAP I am close to push email. Contacts are synced with the Mac and then Phone and always with me, and calendar items are synced with Google Calender, … I am not sure what else I need.

Tried out Fluid already? Really nice. Create a browser for Gmail and one for Twitter, … and so on. When one crashes the rest stay up. you can also create a menu extra out of the browser. So if you create one for m.twitter.com and make it a menu extra you have your own little twitter app. Very cool.

There is a very good discussion on the future of social media right here. I do fully believe in the openness part, and it is actually the only way all the social part will really work, or at least the business models, but that means that execution counts and that is something that the big guys are really scared about. They also want a bit part of the pie and not a small part of a bigger pie, which is stupid and not how the internet works. But who am I to tell them.

Is Etsy the next eBay? Really old, and no, I don’t think so, but it is interesting to think about and there are some valid points. Congrats of course to DaWanda in germany for having picked the space and gone through hard times to get there.

The really important part in the above article though is this:

We may be witnessing the historical high water mark of giant companies in developed economies. In 1955, Fortune 500 companies generated 1/3 of GDP in America. In 2000 that had risen to 2/3. If you prefer %, from 33% to 66%. Hidden in those numbers are the countless family farms that could not withstand the onslaught of Agribusiness and the Mom & Pop shops that closed when Wall Mart came to town.

Imagine a world where the Fortune 500 share of GDP went back to 1/3 and small businesses got back the 1/3 they lost in the last 50 years.

THIS is something I truely believe in. The devide will get bigger. The Fortune 500 will get bigger and there will be a lot more smaller ones and the middle will thin out. There is still something called economies of scale but they changed a bit. This article on Re-Localization is another one that rocks. This is exactly the space we are attacking with Ormigo in that stuff if becoming more local, services are becoming more important, the the local/service/self-employed/SMBs need a system to really use online efficiently. We are learning a great deal through our customers and users each and every day, which makes this market very rewarding, as complex as it is.

Google has some new APIs for Translation. Just check out this bit for a bookmarklet. Check out the new Google Translate. Also Kayak is starting with some interesting APIs to their services.

To finish this off, check out “No Internet. Anywhere.” from Southpark.

Scoble posts about Kyte.tv on Techcrunch and how Kyte.tv will kill Qik and others in the live video streaming arena. I have been testing the new Kyte.tv S60 app on my Nokia N95 for some time, and it is very powerful.  I am not yet sure if I want all those features within on applications but it does lend itself to not only quickly sending a video onto kyte.tv but rather as a full channel management application, something Robert needs for his work. I am watching Kyte closely, as one of the video start-ups to watch.

Their winning items are the good channel systems with a feedback loop (they had video responses way before seesmic was here if I remember correctly) and their mobile focus, because that is where this video stuff is going. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but you will mostly post video from your phone, simply because there are now already more phone cameras than digital cameras out there and there are way less video cameras than digital cameras and all mobile phone cameras are moving to be able to record video.

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

Anyway, I do believe Kyte.tv will rule them all and will be one of the big video players to watch in the next 10 years. They have the backing, they have the right focus, and they are developing the right tools. They are just a service that provides a service. They are not focussing on becoming a destination, because the destination is always the player, and the TV of the future is distributed and re-aggregated. There will not be one controlling system.