Monday, July 14, 2014

Boot up: Tizen dead?, Lytro v phones, Skybox's special sauce

Hilly fleece headband Now we need to find someone with a Surface.

A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Andrew Sheehy is the chief analyst:

The announcement of the first Tizen smartphone on 2nd June 2014 shows that Tizen has now moved up a level - to the second least valuable layer. That's two boxes ticked, but the third box will be a lot harder to tick as it will mean attracting a critical mass of developers: at Apple's WWDC held on June 2nd 2014, Tim Cook stated that there were 9 million registered Apple developers.
Because most developers already write their apps for Android and iOS, a decision to  start developing for Tizen will mean allocating 30% of their development time to a platform that accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of the market. This does not sound like a very interesting business case. Therefore, the only markets where Tizen has a hope of attracting a critical mass of developers are those where Android and iOS have low market shares, and there are very few of those.

Um.. smartwatches?

Except it's more like how the rest of the business shot and (nearly) killed Lytro:

As bold as the vision is, it's not clear the world wants a new camera. Initially, Lytro's debut was met with wide accolades even before the camera came to market. In 2011, during a product demo at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Ng tapped an image to crystalize the details of a woman's face, and an audience of nearly 300 tech entrepreneurs gasped audibly. He won awards for innovation, and raised $50m. Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz joined the board. In October 2011, Lytro began to sell a $399 rectangle camera in bright colors.

No one bought it.

Well, not exactly no one, but sales were disappointing. (Lytro denies sales were below expectations.) Ng had introduced a low-cost point-and-shoot at precisely the moment that many of us decided we didn't really need a camera anymore. Our smartphones would do.

The technology is Blade Runner-ish (if you recall the refocussing scene) but HTC has shown how to do it with two cameras near each other, plus software - much cheaper and built in to the phone.

Neil Shah points out that around 33% of the smartphone business is divvied up between 10 brands, all with nearly equal share. So who's next to rise?

Mary Branscombe:

typing fast moved the keyboard enough to bounce the Surface 2 up and down slightly; too much of that and it can tip right over backward, even on the extra surface. I do type at speed and with some vigour.

I grabbed the lanyard my badge was hanging from and looped it over the keyboard where it connects to the Surface and under the Samsung slab, knotting it firmly at the end. The extra stabilisation held the Surface 2 perfectly in place no matter how hard I was typing, and let it balance at much more extreme angles. Thanks to the magnetic connector, I could leave the lanyard tied onto the base and just unsnap the keyboard when I didn't want the extra support.

The elastic holds the keyboard down for extra stability. Image: Mary Branscombe
I improved on this by replacing the lanyard with an elastic headband I found on sale in a drugstore for 50 cents, in my trademark lime green (there are another two in the packet if the elastic stretches too much). Pull it tight, knot firmly and snug it up against the keyboard where it meets the Surface.

Looking at Skybox - just acquired for $500m by Google - in August 2013:

Forty years after humans first saw pictures of a blue and white marble taken from space, it's remarkable how few new images of Earth we get to lay eyes on. Of the 1,000 or more satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, there are perhaps 100 that send back visual data. Only 12 of those send back high-resolution pictures (defined as an image in which each pixel represents a square meter or less of ground), and only nine of the 12 sell into the commercial space-based imaging market, currently estimated at $2.3 billion a year. Worse still, some 80 percent of that market is controlled by the US government, which maintains priority over all other buyers: If certain government agencies decide they want satellite time for themselves, they can simply demand it. Earlier this year, after the government cut its imaging budget, the market's two biggest companies—DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, which between them operate five of the nine commercial geoimaging satellites—were forced to merge. Due to the paucity of satellites and to the government's claim on their operations, ordering an image of a specific place on Earth can take days, weeks, even months.

Building satellites isn't trivial, but the article implies that Skybox's real secret sauce is in its algorithms; the cameras it uses aren't super-high-tech, but the algorithms used for data processing are. And that's why Google would seek a matchup.

Mozilla plans to bring what it describes as ultra-low-cost smartphones to India in the near future.

The operating system provider on Tuesday said it has partnered with Indian device makers Intex and Spice to enable it to launch the first Firefox OS devices in the country "in the next few months".

A statement from the company suggests the phones will be based on the chipset solution Mozilla has developed with Spreadtrum. In February the two companies announced they were working together to create a chipset that would power smartphones costing less than $25. That ultra-low-cost solution is now available, Mozilla said.

The right market to go for (India is giant, Nokia is fading, and people want something new) but will it be in time to compete with Android/AOSP phones from local and foreign names?

If you build products for a living, there's a lot to learn from iOS 8's iMessage changes — both on the user interface side and on the customer development side.

Gestures and interactions and content expiry, all tied around the way that (younger) users naturally interact. For older, less savvy users, the same interaction still works. This is a study in how to add a layer of swifter interaction to an existing widely-used app without breaking - or even changing - the existing controls or interactions. In that sense, worth considering in detail.

Horace Dediu with a neat metaphor:

So this was the way I saw WWDC 2014. A cement conference cheered by cement enthusiasts but leaving Architectural Digest writers asking what the fuss was all about.

(See also his metaphor of Google and dams.)

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