Google, Facebook Sued Because Without Some Random Patent No One Would Ever Access A Social Network From A Mobile Phone

from the this-dept.-is-patented dept

Wireless Ink was a company that I remember getting some buzz back in the 2005/2006 timeframe... and then they dropped completely off my radar. Honestly, I had thought they had gone out of business. So I was a bit surprised to see them suddenly pop back up with a patent (of course) and a lawsuit against both Google and Facebook, claiming infringement because both companies allow users to access social networking tools via a mobile phone. Seriously. Does anyone honestly (honestly, really) think that without this patent, no one would have ever figured out how to let people access a social network via a mobile phone? The patent itself (7,599,983) was filed in 2004, but was granted at the end of last year. Wireless Ink (also known as Wink) is claiming that since the patent was filed in 2004, both companies must have known about it, which seems like an odd argument considering how many patents were filed since 2004. Once again, it's hard to see this lawsuit as anything other than an attempt to shakedown more successful companies.

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Skype Deliberately Crippling Functionality of iPhone and WinMo and Verizon Apps?

from the New!-Improved!-Exclusive!-Broken! dept

There's something anti-competitive afoot in the 'VoIP over 3G' space this year. Let me run you through a timeline, and see if you can't spot the dirty pool:

0. Skype has had a highly functional VoIP client for Windows Mobile devices for a few years. It allowed smartphone customers to use most features of Skype over WiFi OR a carrier's cellular data network. It was distributed around the carriers direct to customers of Skype, and was designed for those customers' benefit.
1. March 2009: Skype on iPhone is launched, but is unable to do VoIP over the 3G data channel because AT&T and Apple blocked that functionality. Skype, Google, the FCC, and consumers cried "foul" at AT&T and Apple.
2. Oct. 2009: After considerable FCC and consumer pressure, AT&T relents, and allows VoIP over 3G (and was even publicly applauded by Skype's CEO Josh Silverman). Skype users, naturally, expect an updated Skype version that will leverage 3G data.
3. Jan 16, 2010: Skype releases a new iPhone version which DOESN'T take advantage of the new leeway AT&T (and ostensibly Apple) allow for VoIP over 3G. Skype points fingers, mostly back at Apple.
4. Jan 27, 2010: Apple removes any 3G VoIP restrictions. Now there is nothing holding Skype from doing VoIP over 3G on iPhone.
5. Mid Feb, 2010: At MWC in Barcelona, Verizon and Skype announce a special version of the Skype app that will run on Verizon. While most press outlets rejoice at the "openness" Verizon wireless is finally showing,  it turns out to be a limited, crippled version, which is designed to fit Verizon's agenda, NOT customer wishes. This version can use the 3G data network, but just for chat and 'control', not for voice. It requires a >$10/mo data plan, is not available for phones with Wi-Fi, and 'Skype out' cannot be used to make domestic phone calls. In this deal, it appears that VZW paid Skype for some exclusivity in the USA.
6. Mid-Feb, 2010: Also at MWC, Skype CEO Silverman tells Om Malik that we can expect 3G VoIP on iPhone "Very soon", with no firm commitment.
7. Feb. 26, 2010: Skype completely pulls it's very functional Windows Mobile apps with little explanation, and no suggestion of when they might return. The app, which works fine, just goes away. Why pull the most functional Skype mobile app and leave only crippled versions?

Looking at the timeline above, it's pretty easy to guess what's going on here. Skype has been negotiating with Verizon Wireless for some exclusive deal in the USA. But unlike the relatively good, open Skype deal enjoyed by Hutch "3" subscribers in the UK, the Verizon version is crippled with confusing limitations, complications, conditions. It's clear the Verizon goal is to use Skype to upsell data plans to users who don't yet have one, and to drive or retain Minutes of Use of cellular voice traffic. Skype just sold its US mobile users down the river! Skype still promotes "Skype Mobile" on its US web pages, but if you click on any OS like Android or Blackberry, you'll see the bold headline "Coming Soon: Skype on America's most reliable wireless network." And are basically told to wait for the exclusive product.

The only reason Skype offered for retracting the WinMo app is "because we want to offer our new customers an improved mobile experience – much like the version that has proved so popular on the iPhone..." Wait...Is that the same version that annoyed users because it couldn't do VoIP on 3G? And how does killing a product with no replacement offer an "improved mobile experience"? Seems like more of an absent mobile experience.

Going forward, this also could position Skype well for offering a premium paid version of a fully functional app at a future date, when exclusive deals expire. A freemium model would be less unsavory than the exclusive/crippled structure that we apparently have for now. At least with freemium, the free market can choose to pay or not from any given carrier. With the exclusive/crippled structure, customers have little choice - except the choice to use another VoIP provider who is focused on giving end users what they want.

The result of this exclusive deal is, essentially, to deprive an entire country of the value of a good VoIP service (Skype) on mobile phones, and instead to offer us a crippled version that is designed not to delight any user, but to delight a carrier. How ironic, then, that Skype's Silverman has been at the forefront of the push for more "open" networks:

"Nonetheless, the positive actions of one company are no substitute for a government policy that protects openness and benefits consumers. We're all looking forward to further developments that will let people use Skype on any device, on any network."

or when he said this from a September lobby trip to DC:

 "We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to phone calls delivered over data networks and implement technical measures that degrade the performance of peer-to-peer software distributing lawful content. And as many members of the Internet community and key congressional leaders have noted, there are compelling reasons to be concerned about the future of openness."

Compelling reasons, indeed. It seems that in this case, AT&T actually followed through with their promises to be more "open" while Skype and Verizon have just painted a big "open" sign on the gates of the walled garden. Enter at your own risk.

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This Is What A Patent Thicket Looks Like [Updated]

from the visualization-works dept

A couple weeks ago, we asked if any smartphone could survive the patent thicket. In the last few months there has been a ton of lawsuits (and ITC filings) over smartphones supposedly violating patents. And since that post was written a few more lawsuits were filed as well. It's patent nuclear war breaking out in the smartphone space, and the end result is that we, the public, all suffer. Lots of money is being spent on lawsuits, and that could have gone into better development and giving us more features, better prices and better service.

Of course, while I described this in words, sometimes, as the cliche goes, a picture is worth a lot more. Thanks to Nick Bilton at the NY Times for putting together that picture (see update below) that shows what the patent thicket in the smartphone space looks like:

That's a picture of a patent thicket, and it's a picture of waste that does the exact opposite of promoting innovation.

Update: Unfortunately, it looks like Bilton may have exaggerated a bit. Joe Mullin looks through the details and notices that some of the lawsuits appear totally unrelated to the smartphone space. As he notes, there are plenty of smartphone patent lawsuits to go around, but there's no need to exaggerate them.

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More Random And Arbitrary iPhone App Removals: WiFi Finders Disappear

from the and-now-we're-at-war-with-eurasia dept

For a while the complaints used to be about Apple's totally arbitrary process for choosing which apps get into the iPhone app store, but lately the complaints have been about Apple (again totally arbitrarily) removing apps that were already there. There were all those complaints about the sudden removal of "adult" apps (unless you were someone famous like Playboy, in which case Apple was fine with it), and now there are complaints that Apple suddenly and inexplicably has removed WiFi finders from the app store. While developers feel they need to keep developing for the iPhone given its footprint in the market, moves like this are going to keep pissing off developers quite a bit too. You can do that when you dominate the market, but it can come back to bite you later on.

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Would 2010 Steve Jobs Sue 1996 (Or 1984) Steve Jobs Over Patents?

from the innovation-vs.-litigation dept

One of the things you discover in studying the history of patent use among many companies is that when they're young, they innovate. When they're old, they litigate. That is when they're growing and building cool stuff, they don't worry much about patents, but focus on building the coolest products they can to best serve the market. But when they get older, and entrenched, they don't innovate quite as much, but focus instead on trying to keep competitors out of the market. We highlighted this by showing Microsoft's changing views on patents, from Bill Gates' claim in 1991 that "the industry would be at a complete standstill" if companies had used patents in the PC software space early on, to Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith saying in 1997 that "software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs."

Similarly, a year ago, we highlighted how Apple appeared to be going through a similar shift, quoting Steve Wozniak's claim about how the Apple II was "one of the most successful products of all time," in part because they didn't think about patents or copyright, and shared their ideas freely with everyone -- to Apple's Tim Cook's claims that "We will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we will use every weapon at our disposal."

With Apple now going on the offensive against HTC (and, by proxy, Google's Android), it seems others are noticing not just an overall corporate shift, but the change in viewpoints of Steve Jobs. william points us to a Gizmodo post highlighting how Steve Jobs noted how Apple was "shameless about stealing great ideas." But in the announcement about the HTC lawsuit, he has a different perspective: "competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

Strong words coming from the guy who admits he blatantly copied the graphical user interface he saw at Xerox PARC many years ago. Now, no one's going to claim that Apple and Jobs haven't been incredibly innovative over the past decade (or more). In fact, they've been amazingly innovative. But during that time, the company has mostly focused on continually innovating, rather than going on the offensive over patents. It seems like this new offensive move might be an early warning sign that the company no longer believes it can keep up its innovative pace.

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Apple Goes Offensive On Patents: Sues HTC

from the no-smartphones-at-all dept

Well, well, well. We've discussed recently how it seemed effectively impossible for any smartphone maker to survive the patent gantlet, as there are so many patents held by so many different parties, and they all seem to have recently started suing each other. The latest, sent in by a whole bunch of you (though Phillip was first) is that Apple is suing HTC, again both in the courts and using the ITC loophole. What's interesting here is that, despite Apple playing up the fact that it had over 200 patents on the iPhone, for the most part, it hadn't gone on the offensive with them. The recent patent lawsuits that Apple has been involved in have all been on the defensive side -- which we thought was a smart move for Apple. The fact that it's now going on the offensive on patents is unfortunate. It's usually a sign that a company is worried that it can't keep up with the competition.

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Open WiFi To Become A Liability In The UK Under Digital Economy Bill

from the unintended-consequences dept

Back in January, while in France, I experienced firsthand one of the "unintended consequences" of France rushing forwarding with a "three strikes" law that kicks people off the internet based on accusations (not convictions). Because of that, the idea of open WiFi is now pretty much gone (which, amusingly, was pissing off the very same music execs who were such big fans of the law). It seems that something similar might be happening in the UK, as the folks behind the much maligned Digital Economy Bill have admitted that there will be no exceptions for anyone operating an open WiFi network, even a library or a university. Thus, if a library had an open WiFi network, and it received a few accusations of file sharing, Peter Mandelson could decide to kick them off the internet for as long as he would like.

While it doesn't technically "outlaw" open WiFi, it does put such a big liability on it that it leads to the same result. It effectively makes it so that no one, not even community organizations, will want to offer open WiFi. At a time when the UK government claims it's trying to encourage greater connectivity, it seems pretty silly to put in place a law that could lead to exactly the opposite.

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Man Creates Useful City Parking iPhone App... And City Doesn't Get Upset

from the yes,-dog-bites-man dept

It's really tragic that this even seems like it's worth a post at all, but we've seen so many ridiculous stories of people creating cool and useful apps for their cities or universities -- only to have officials freak out that outsiders are somehow violating intellectual property laws, and only official city/university apps should be allowed. So, when we heard about a guy in Elgin, Illinois who created a simple iPhone app to help people avoid parking tickets, it just felt likely that city officials would be upset about it. But... instead, they actually seem happy about it:

He just start selling his Elgin Parking iPhone application last week, but already city officials are commending him. For a download price of $1.99, it helps people comply with the city's odd/even parking law.

Hopefully, this means that common sense is making a bit of a comeback. I half expected officials to either be upset that he was "making money" by selling an app that helped people avoid parking tickets, or be upset that, with fewer parking tickets to give out, they'd have less revenue -- but it's great to see the city endorsing this sort of thing, where a citizen is free to help make life better for others in the city. And... since people sometimes complain that too many of the stories on Techdirt are negative, it seemed worth a post to give kudos to Elgin for not doing the stupid things that many other cities have done. In this day and age, that's progress.

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Guy Who Makes Simple Caller ID App For Android Forced To Shut Down Due To Patent Threat

from the promoting-the-progress dept

You may recall that, a couple years ago, Apple was sued over its implementation of caller ID technology on the iPhone. Some company claimed to hold a patent on the basic caller ID display technology from 1990. So, when Alimas wrote in to let us know about a guy who created a really simple caller ID app for Android called (simply enough) City Caller ID, who had to shut the project down after getting sued for patent infringement, I thought maybe it was the same patent (though, you would think the 1990 patent should have expired or be close to expiring by now). But, it turns out these are totally different patents on Caller ID technology. The patents are held by a company called Cequint (6,353,664 and 7,200,212) and were granted in 2002 and 2007. Yes, for caller ID functionality. It's a database lookup. How the hell do you patent that? In this case, all the app did was take the phone number of the caller, and do a database lookup to figure out what city the call was coming from:

Seriously, can any patent supporter explain with a straight face how patents like this promote progress? What kind of incentive does a patent create in this case? Can you honestly claim that this kind of monopoly was necessary to "invent" a way to match a phone number to a city?

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iPhone Purity Test Means No Selling Bathing Suits To Women

from the that's-obscene! dept

Lots of folks have been submitting the story of how iPhone developers are reasonably pissed off about Apple's new edict barring "adult-themed applications" in the iPhone app store, though it has continued to allow big brand name adult apps, such as those from Playboy. But what has it banned? Well, don't try selling bathing suits to women. Apparently, that's considered an adult app.

While this is certainly Apple's right to do, this is one of the reasons why, in the long run, Apple's rather arbitrary app store policies are going to backfire. Developers are increasingly getting pissed off, or worried that Apple might suddenly pull the rug out from under them, with little explanation and barely any recourse. That's not an environment that appeals to developers in the long run. Yes, given the size of the iPhone (and soon iPad) market, plenty of development will continue. But in the long run, some of the more innovative and valuable apps will appear on other, more open platforms first, and make those platforms more appealing.

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Calling 911? That'll Be $300

from the hope-it's-a-big-emergency dept

Apparently, the town of Tracy, California (a bit east of the Bay Area) has decided to turn 911 emergency calls into a profit center. Karl Bode points us to the news that the town now wants people to pay $300 for every 911 call. Of course, if you think you might be a frequent 911 caller, they've got a plan for that. For the low, low, low price of just $48 per year, you can call 911 as many times as you want. Yes, that's right folks, there's a special deal for those of you who regularly have emergencies. Make sure to order now!

This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've heard in a while. Does the town really want to discourage people from calling in the event of an emergency? In my life, I think I've called 911 four times -- and three of those were after witnessing car crashes by other people. With this rule in place, I would have much less incentive to call to get the police if I witness something bad happening, whether it's a car crash, or someone getting mugged. 911 is a public service. You shouldn't have to pay for a 911 call.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, there may be more to this story, and the CBS link above might not be that accurate. Another report notes that the $300 will only apply to cases where the fire department needs to respond to medical emergencies. Still seems a bit questionable, but not as bad...

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Can Any Smartphone Survive The Patent Gantlet?

from the perhaps-not... dept

With the news coming out that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has agreed to investigate both RIM and Apple over patent claims brought by Kodak, it makes you wonder if we'll soon be able to have any smartphones at all. As you hopefully know the ITC process is a sneaky loophole used by patent holders to get two totally unrelated shots at putting the same company on trial for infringing on the same patents. There's the regular court process, and then there's the ITC, who can't fine companies, but can issue injunctions barring the import of the products. This process is regularly abused for anti-competitive purposes. Of course, there are other, similar charges that the ITC is reviewing as well, and it begins to make you wonder if any smartphone can actually "survive" this process.

Pretty much all smartphones are made outside of the US, so they can all be barred by the ITC, and with the technology in your average smartphone being covered by hundreds of patents, it's almost certain that every smartphone infringes on a slew of patents. Obviously, it's unlikely that anything will ever result in a full import ban on any particular phone -- the second that happened, the company would just give up and pay a ton of cash to make the complaining company go away -- but it does highlight what a wasteful process this is, and how it's taking good money away from actual innovation in smartphones and having it go towards stunts like this.

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Ubisoft DRM Gets Worse And Worse: Kicks You Out Of Game If You Have A Flakey WiFi Connection

from the lovely dept

Last month, we wrote a bit about Ubisoft's bizarre anti-consumer policy of using DRM on games that requires an internet connection to check in (even if you're just playing locally). But, it gets worse. As a whole bunch of you sent in (but compgeek was first), apparently it doesn't just check once to see if you have an internet connection, but regularly checks, and if you've lost that internet connection, it will boot you out of the game and you'll lose everything that you've done since your last checkpoint or save. This is a serious problem for anyone who has even slightly flakey WiFi or an internet connection that goes down frequently (all too common these days). Ubisoft's history with DRM is filled with similar missteps, and it's really amazing that the company seems to be so oblivious to why treating fans badly is such a bad idea.

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University Of Texas Claims Trademark Over 'Texas'; Wants Useful iPhone App Blocked

from the oh-come-on dept

Trademark law, when used properly, serves an important purpose in making sure that consumers are not made worse off by being tricked into buying lower quality products and services under the belief that they're actually coming from someone else who is trusted. But in the age of the "ownership culture," where too many people have tried to twist trademark law away from its true origins to make it appear to be a quasi-"property right," you get too many cases of people using trademark law to actually make consumers worse off.

Take for example this story, sent in by iamtheky about how the University of Texas is trying to stop some former students from making an incredibly useful iPhone app for UT students, called iTexas, by claiming it infringes on their trademark on Texas.

The makers of the app, Mutual Mobile, have made a bunch of successful iPhone apps, but UT got upset last year when the company introduced the UT Directory, which put a much more useful interface on (you guessed it) the UT staff and student directories. After the University complained, the company felt that perhaps the use of the school's colors made it look like an "official" app, so they agreed to fix that part. When the company launched iTexas, it made sure that it didn't have the school's color scheme or do anything to make it appear as the official app. But it did make the app a lot more useful:

A free download, the app retains the searchable directory but also lists menus from different cafeterias across campus, tallies students' dining-card and Bevo Bucks balances, delivers class schedules, shows campus maps, and more.

This sounds like a great and rather useful app. Exactly the sort of thing that the University should be encouraging, not just because it would help some alumni succeed, but also because UT students would likely find the app quite useful. But, that's not the way UT officials think, apparently:

On Feb. 1, the Mutual team learned that UT had raised another objection to its latest app, specifically to the use of the word "Texas" in the name. "As this name is confusingly similar to the Texas [trademark], UT objects to such use," reads a notice sent to the Apple app store by attorney Wendy Larson. UT's board of regents began trademarking university properties back in 1981. A list of protected trademarks appears on the university Office of Trade mark Licensing Web page; alongside more specific trademarks such as Bevo and Lady Longhorns is, simply, Texas.

Lesson learned: don't try to make life better for UT students without first paying the University.

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WiFi On The School Bus

from the the-wifi-on-the-bus-goes...-data-data-data? dept

WiFi has been showing up on airplanes and trains lately, and in Silicon Valley, it's used on the special shuttle buses that companies like Google and Yahoo use to get employees to work. But what about for high schoolers? The NY Times recently had an article about a high school out in the far reaches of Arizona that has put WiFi on a school bus, and found that the impact is really quite amazing:

Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

"It's made a big difference," said J. J. Johnson, the bus's driver. "Boys aren't hitting each other, girls are busy, and there's not so much jumping around."

What's amusing here is the juxtaposition of this article with recent articles that fret about kids spending too much time online, with worries that they're becoming addicted or wasting time that could be better spent. But, here the article is suggesting exactly the opposite: that not only is more internet access leading to a less rowdy bus ride, but it's helping the students become better students.

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Is The .mobi Madness Finally Over?

from the that-would-be-nice dept

From back when it was first suggested six or so years ago, we were quite skeptical of the need for a "mobile only" top level domain called .mobi. It wasn't difficult to predict that devices would get better and wireless data services would get better, such that there would be no need for a special separate mobile web -- as everything could easily be delivered via the "regular" web. If anything, like many new TLDs, the whole thing just seemed like a cash grab, because companies would feel obligated to pay up to reserve their .mobi domain names before someone else did. And while .mobi tried to position its offering as something much more than a splinter scaled-down internet, most people pretty quickly realized that it served no reasonable purpose. To be honest, I hadn't even heard much at all about .mobi in a couple years, and as more and more people moved onto phones that could handle full webpages -- or, companies set up their own regular websites to automatically scale down for mobile browsers -- the whole concept seemed to have faded away. MobHappy reports that .mobi has been sold off to the company that also owns the rights to the .info domain -- so both can now live together in uselessness. But, best of all, as Carlo explains:

And in case you were wondering, my favorite .mobi site, flowers.mobi -- you remember, the one that was purchased for $200,000 in 2006 and was supposed to be developed into a legit site with "relevant content" -- is still just a parked domain with ads. And it's still not compliant with .mobi's rules for its sites. Big surprise there.

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Incumbents Blocking Broadband Stimulus Efforts Because They Don't Like Competition

from the leave-us-alone dept

Back when the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus plan was announced, we were a bit worried that it was really just a bailout plan for incumbent broadband providers. The focus of the plan was on "shovel ready" projects in an attempt to create jobs, and that generally meant incumbent providers who could hire a lot of people. The last thing the government wanted to do in the middle of a recession was help fund an innovative startup that would disrupt a big employer. But there was one interesting aspect of the stimulus package: it suggested that anyone taking the government money would have to share access to infrastructure -- something that makes a lot of sense, if you're encouraging competition.

But, of course, the incumbents don't want competition at all. They've based their entire business models on the very lack of competition in the marketplace. So, it quickly became clear that they would not only resist taking any of the money, but they would actively seek to block upstarts from taking it as well. And... that's exactly what appears to be happening. lavi d points us to the news that lots of smaller companies are applying for the federal funds, and (surprise, surprise) the incumbents are not applying for the funds at all, but are drafting legislation in various local governments to prevent any upstart competitors from getting those funds. So, not only is it not stimulating the creation of jobs, it's not really providing much more broadband or competition.

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Should The Feds Need A Warrant To Find Out Where Your Mobile Phone Is?

from the seems-reasonable dept

A couple months ago, we wrote about Julian Sanchez's realization (due to odd choices in gov't agencies redacting already publicly available info) that it appeared the government was likely regularly getting location info from mobile phone providers on users, using a much lower standard, without much oversight. In a somewhat related case, a court is now trying to determine if the location info on your mobile phone requires a warrant. The federal government is saying, no, claiming that Americans have no expectation of privacy as to where their phone is (even though that's likely where they are as well).

That seems like a very troubling bit of reasoning -- but no surprise from a federal government, that for years, has been stretching its ability to secretly spy on Americans. Hopefully the court shuts this down, but just the fact that the government would defend such a blatant overreach is troubling enough.

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Five Reasons Not To Get Swept Up In App Madness

from the apps-can-be-copied-too dept

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

One of the things I didn't get a chance to discuss in my recap of Midem was that there was definitely an undercurrent of people thinking that "apps" are the "answer." There were a bunch of app companies there, and they were swamped with interest, and lots of people seem to be looking at Apple's "success" with the iPhone app market as a chance to regain control, and with it, something to charge for directly. While I don't think many people were expecting apps to be "the answer," there was certainly an impression that apps are going to be a big part of the future. As I've made clear in the past, I'm pretty skeptical that this sort of app madness is really sustainable (or all that lucrative). There are a few reasons for this:

1. Very, very, very few apps make very much money. We've been suggesting this for a while, and the numbers seem to support it: there really isn't that much money being made directly on selling apps, even on the iPhone. Sure, lots of apps may be selling in aggregate, but very few individual apps make very much money.
2. Apps are still loss leader/low-margin leaders for hardware makers, and they know it. Sure, Apple wants app developers to be happy, but first and foremost it wants to sell more hardware, which is where it makes its money. And it knows as well as anyone that the more powerful the device is, the more reasons there are to buy the hardware. That means the hardware makers actually have incentive to push the price of apps down (or encourage free apps). This pressure will only get stronger over time.
3. Apps can be copied too. This is the one that seems the most obvious to me, but seems to get very little attention from those who believe totally in the app revolution. Apps are still digital files and they can (and are) copied regularly. Thinking that putting everything into an app is an easy response by itself to unauthorized copying is a bit short-sighted.
4. Future standards will break down some walls. While it won't happen that fast, and probably won't happen in all areas where apps exist, things like HTML 5 will certainly break down the walled gardens found on various app stores. Yes, native apps give a better user experience for now, but web standards will get better and better and allow more to be done via the web, totally bypassing any app gatekeeper (and paywall), just like Google did with Google Voice on the iPhone. We've seen this before. The desktop used to be ruled by client-side apps, and then lots of those apps went (or are in the process of going) web-based.
5. App overload. While there is a group of folks who constantly get new apps, an awful lot of people get a few apps, get themselves comfortable and then never go back to buy another app. There are really only so many apps most people need, and once they have them, there's little reason to keep getting more.

This isn't to say that anyone should be ignoring the app space, or that there's no money to made in apps. It's just that the folks acting like it's going to be "the way" that things are done in the future are going way overboard. It definitely still makes sense to have some sort of app strategy and to play in the space somehow, just not to bet everything on it. And some apps can certainly make money, but a key might be to focus not on selling the app itself, but on using the apps to provide a scarcity. For example, I've heard good things about the new This American Life iPhone app, though it's mainly because of the convenience it provides over alternatives for now. Alternatively, you could see apps that drive people to other scarcities doing quite well. But focusing on just selling apps because that's the next big thing? Might not be the best strategy for most...

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Leaving Your WiFi Open Decreases Your Fourth Amendment Rights To Privacy?

from the wait-a-second... dept

We've had numerous discussions on this site about both the legality and ethics of open WiFi networks. And yet, the issue still comes up now and again -- but who knew it was a Constitutional issue? Thomas O'Toole shares the news of a ruling in Oregon, that suggests a user who left his WiFi open gave up certain 4th Amendment rights to privacy. Though, actually, the details of the case suggest it's not so much the open WiFi that's the issue, but the fact that the guy also left illegal material in shared Limewire and iTunes folders. It was just that police were able to confirm that by connecting to his open WiFi. But the court does make a specific statement on the WiFi issue, noting:

"as a result of the ease and frequency with which people use each others' wireless networks, I conclude that society recognizes a lower expectation of privacy in information broadcast via an unsecured wireless network router than in information transmitted through a hardwired network or password-protected network."

While O'Toole doesn't think there's anything earth shattering about this, I'm not sure I agree. I think, in this case, the guy probably gave up rights to privacy by putting the content in shared folders that were available widely -- but I don't think that just because you're using an open WiFi network you've set yourself a "lower expectation of privacy." I would suspect that most users have no idea that it's less secure, and I wonder why the type of network used should really determine the level of 4th Amendment protections.

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