Kaiyzen Group

AdMob has the most momentum of any mobile ad provider.  They are staying one step ahead of all players in the game, first with their free mobile analytics service, then with their iPhone services.

I also hear that they are working on getting their iPhone specific ad unit approved as an official industry unit.

AdMob is doing so well that Google is even using their network to hawk their services, peep these photos:

How much longer with AdMob remain an indie play?

I would like to see them go to the likes of Microsoft or AOL but with the Sequoia ties rest assured when it comes to buyout time Google will be at the front of the line.

I really do not like to make my own predictions but with a bunch of activity of late I figured I would throw out a couple thoughts/ideas I have been having:

1) FIM will purchase Pandora sometime within the next 12 months.  Pandora has continued pressure for lack of revenue and high streaming costs and with MySpace Music’s launch their IP is a perfect fit especially once their figure out the syndication issues

2) Amazon will continue to dominate the “cloud space” and pull in some big name enterprise customers with some nice PR around them and pull in Microsoft as a partner to offer their solutions on AWS.

3) Palm will turn heads in the first half of next year with their new devices and platform that will be coming down the pipeline

4) Android will get ~5% smartphone market share by the end of ‘09 and wireless devlepment will continue to be a huge pain in the ass till sometime in 2010

5) On their way to the $1 billion revenue mark Facebook will face some serious pushback with their Facebook ID program and continued efforts to push/pull activity stream info everywhere…, possibly also look for them to become a wrapper for LiveID to help move things along on the unified login front.

The blogosphere has been abuzz the past 24 hours with the much awaited luanch of MySpace music.  This event is quite a momentus occasion for the industry as the majors go all in to embrace the free streaming, social network scene in hopes that ad supported free streams and purchasing of individual sons, ringtones, and other merchandising will help foot the bill.

An overview of the service:

Majors Involved: EMI, Sony BMG, UMG, WMG

Indies Distros Involved: Orchard, ADA, Red, Fontana, Caroline

EMI and most of the indies were late to the game in getting officially involved so they are still in the process of uploading their music for listening.., but its coming as I am typign this.

There are still a couple major business decisions to figure out and some kinks.., two most notables is support for outside the U.S. and allowing users to post their playlists on other sites.., or as the industry would view it, syndication.

It behooves MySpace to get the syndication topic solved right away and follow up with outside U.S. support.

They are also planning on adding ticket and merchandise sales down the road to add some more change in their pockets…, sounds like this will be coming sometime next year.., my guess is around the time the summer concert series is getting into full swing.

Supposedly because of all the majors being involved, and owning around an estimated 40% take in new venture, they have waved the typical 1 cent per stream fee.  This is a HUGE competitive advantage over anyone else streaming music online.., and possibly will be investigated over time as anti-competitive.  Pandora’s recent woes with streaming cost are a perfect example of how big a deal this is.

On the music purchasing side of things they will be selling ringtones through Jamster (sister company), and outsourcing the sales of full songs to Amazon.., watch out iTunes.., I look for Amazon to catch up to Apple in sales volumes pretty quickly over the next 18 months.

Some coverage from some site here:

TechChrunch
Mashable
VentureBeat
GigaOM

Amazon steps things up significantly with their continued web services strategy.., I received this from Amazon via email:

Oracle has officially certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform on which to run
their software.  In addition, AWS has worked with Oracle to enable existing Oracle
Database licenses to be transferred to Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.  This means that for no additional cost, you can use an existing Oracle license to run your database in AWS, saving yourself the cost and effort of managing your own infrastructure while keeping the same database software you are already running.  Oracle has also enabled Amazon S3 as one of the default backup locations for their RMAN service, making it easy for you to protect your data. Check out more details about running Oracle in Amazon EC2, http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/oracle, along with some easy-to-use tools,
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html, that can help you get
started.
 

I dont think this will have a huge impact in the short term but what it does say loud and clear is that Amazon wants the enterprise to use AWS for their experimental and initial development of their projects and that they will continue to stay steps ahead of the competition.

Enterprises that do not have super data sensitive projects should love this between the low cost and ability make use of an existing Oracle license.  A perfect example.., although they didnt use Oracle is the New York Times using AWS to process all of their archives into PDF files and make them searchable.

During Yahoo!’s Hack Day event one of the sessions covered their mobile tools for developers and specifically Blueprint.

Blueprint was born out of Yahoo!’s OneConnect efforts.  For those unfamiliar with OneConnect it is a fantastic mobile app that runs on many evices and has an open framework that third parties can piggy back on and install themselves as widgets on a users OneConnect setup.  Some apps of note are last.fm, ebay, wikipedia, etc.

OneConnect is pretty good, but falls short for those developers that really want to own the user experience and not just sit in as a widget…., this is where Blueprint comes into play.

BluePrint is a huge mobile play for Yahoo!  This is really where they set themselves apart in the mobile space from the rest of the big players.  Where Microsoft and Google are playing mostly on OS side of things to get developers involved, Yahoo! wants to own the dev relationship across all handsets and OS’s.

BluePrint has two main components to it.., one that is pretty ready for primetime.., another that needs some more time to bake going into the end of the year.

The first part that is ready for primetime is the mobile website BluePrint server.  Yahoo! has created a proxy server for rendering content and apps into mobile friendly sites.  When a user requests a mobile page from you, your site passes all of the content and, buttons, menus, etc in the BluePrint XML markup to the Yahoo! proxy.  The proxy then determines which handset is requesting and renders the page accordingly.

This is a pretty handy service for those devers out there whom do not want to get too into mobile development while still providing their users with a nicely designed and functioning mobile view into their property.

The second part of BluePrint.., that I am really excited about, but still needs some baking.., is their BluePrint platform for this client applications.  Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring with the rest of the mobile platform translation libraries to provide a one stop shop for developers to write an app once, and run anywhere.  They plan to support Java, .net, android, Symbian, and iPhone, as well as provide location based interfaces.

This is going to be fantastic for developers if Yahoo! delivers this close to how they presented it.  I have my doubts on the iPhone side of things as I have talked to several diferent vendors that provide platforms for universl app development and they have all had no luck when talking to Apple about opening up the iPhone to them.  We need  someone of Yahoo!’s size to help tip the balance in our favor and make Apple see the light.

Downside to BluePrint.., no planned media support yet, but that might come down the road as many devers would love to gain acess to the camera and any stored media on the device.

More on this in the coming months as Yahoo! opens things up more

I had the pleasure of attending and participating in Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day event held at their corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale here in the Bay Area.

This is the second time that Yahoo! has held an Open Hack…, the first time was almost two years ago in September of ‘06.  Unlike last time I had the pleasure of partaking in the hack…, our project took home a User Interface prize.., more on that in the future.

Hack Day began on Friday morning and ran through till early Sat night the following day.  The first day is setup so you attend sessions on various API and libary overview sessions.  Yahoo! uses this time to introduce some new things, giving a sneak peak for the 48 hrs, then taking it away to let things back some more.

Once again they did a fantastic job hosting the event.  This is probably the 5th tech event I have attended over the last 2 years hosted by Yahoo! and they are among the best.

Upwards of 50 groups hacked away overnight and presented their projects over 90 seconds. Here is the post on the winners:

Hackday Winners

Some more posts on a couple of the cool items that Yahoo! unveiled at the event to come.., stay tuned.

The impending news of the release date of the first Android based handset has writers a buzz.  Come September 23rd we shall have the details on T-Mobile’s HTC Android based G1 device.  The analysts clairvoyents are already projecting around 4% market share of all smartphones for Android sales in Q4.

Lets consider for a moment that the analysts nail nail it this time.., or even underestimate their figures lets look at what things will be like for mobile developers developing their solutions over the next 12 months.

First.., lets look at some of the OS variations that they will be dealing with:

• Windows Mobile 6
• Apple OSX Mobile
• LIMO
• Symbian
• Palm OS
• and now Android
• Homegrown Proprietary (P2K, Sony Ericsson, etc)

Now mix in some languages/frameworks (J2ME, Cocoa/Objective C, C/C++/C#, etc)…, a dash of browsers (Opera, Mobile IE, Mobile Safari, Android/Chrome, S60, Mozilla, etc)…, the result.., you are left with a perfect reason for why excel is needed to manage dev/qa matrices.

For all the talk and hype regarding Android’s release and being open source and how great it is going to be for the marketplace.., no one seems to bring up the fact that developers are now going to have to add one or more rows/columns to those developement and QA matrices.  Not to mention when various carriers make use of Android and its open source nature they will customize it to possibly gain competitive advantage over the other guys.

Google is throwing their hat into the ring with a free open source mobile OS b/c they want their search/maps/mail on the carriers decks…, not to fight for carrier and wireless ecosystem openess.  They are doing nobody a favor except all the Google Fan Boys out there who want to create Open Social and App Engine solutions.

On the bright side we are approaching the era of Javascript, flash, silverlight, etc, on mobiles which will ease the pain of most developers.  What we really need to get to is JS objects and handles for the core compenents of the handset that developers want easy access to:

• GPS/Location info
• Camera
• Address Book

Once these are exposed via a flash and/or JS interface this is when mobile will really take off and become what it deserves to be.., the new sector where we will see some of the next big winners in the software space.

Two things to keep an eye on over the next 12 months besides all the iPhone and Android hype.  One is Yahoo!’s OneConnect and Blueprint movements.., the other is what Palm is getting ready for primetime in ‘09.