Tech Trends on Hi from Dwipal

The Native-App economy and its future

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:39:00 +0000

Since the launch of iPhone, everyone has been trying to replicate the App Store model that Apple created. Every operator, OEM and even independent companies are trying to create their own app stores and native app platforms.

The app store/native app model is inherently a walled garden model. This is analogous to AOL in the early days of the internet. AOL was the first one to truly bring internet to the ‘masses’. Internet was very young at the time, and was difficult to use. AOL, by controlling the ecosystem and adding restrictions so that everything works well within it, was able to drive adoption for the internet.

In 1999, DoCoMo launched iMode in Japan and did what AOL did - but to mobile devices. All of a sudden, people could open emails, look up stock prices, check the weather and even read magazines all from their phone. iMode was extremely popular and put Japan way ahead of the world in mobile use. Following DoCoMo, other Japanese operators also created their own ‘private ecosystems’ and achieved considerable success.

The common theme between all of them is that they created a very strong value proposition by productizing new, difficult to use technology.

However, as time went on, these walled gardens became barriers and hampered innovation in the space.

The technology matured and people wanted ‘more’ out of it. They started to created services that ran independently, and the ‘walls’ started to crumble.

It also got difficult for publishers to time to build services and innovate on business models that weren’t a part of this ‘walled garden’. Slowly but surely, things started moving to the ‘open internet’ and even though the initial experience was not as good as the walled garden, both consumers and publishers embraced it.

I believe that the Native Apps fall under the same category. With the launch of iPhone, smartphones finally became powerful enough to be able to do things that ‘common people’ would want. However, because the technology was still developing, the only way to create a great experience was to go ’native’ and build a proprietary app. Apple was able to use this to their advantage and create the app store.

With HTML5 developing at an amazing speed, more and more people will start to see the clear advantages of building on an open platform. Its a massive waste of effort having to write native apps on different mobile operating systems that run on hardware of pretty much the same capability.

There are already companies that have started to work in this space, allowing users to get the best of both worlds. The technology is still young, but extremely promising, and a couple of years down the line, the notion of ‘you must build your app for 5 different platforms’ will be a thing of the past, just like AOL. There will still be some native apps, like we have them on desktop/laptop but they will be extremely specialized.

App stores - as a way to discover ‘apps’ might always stay on but ’native’ as a platform should start counting its days. Until then, its the age of the ’native app’.

Photo credit: http://sethmurphy.com/node/8

Where is my digital magazine?

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 05:38:00 +0000

With the millions of new blog posts, news articles, tweets and updates posted daily, getting to the content we want in real time is easier than ever. The only caveat: we need to know what we want.

Traditionally, we have relied on the major publishers and distributors to feed us the content in the form of newspapers, magazines, journals, books, etc. The publishers would decide what content would ‘sell’, and will then ‘productize’ it so people can get access to it.

This model worked really well for over a century. However, there was one big inefficiency with this model: The content creator didn’t really get much in terms of control or revenue. In fact, for most cases, less than 15% of the revenue of a book goes to the author. The publishers and distributors were able to pull this off because they basically controlled the supply chain.

Now, with the power of the ‘internets’, anybody can create a piece of content and make it accessible to users in the same way as a big publisher does. So there are a million new pieces of content created every day, ready to be consumed.Of all the awesomeness of this new model, one thing that is terribly broken is the part where publishers curate the content to make sure that it is of a certain quality before it reaches the users.

In the publishing industry, there are people dedicated to reviewing thousands of articles, book ideas and other content before something gets published. Because of the limited space available in physical media, they have to be quite picky what gets included and what doesn’t.

I think that there is a massive opportunity right now to do this with online content. I have been relying on my social graph to get interesting content daily, but its still too much content and too little variety. What is needed is for someone to create a special ‘magazine’ on the internet that is both personalized for my taste, but also contains enough variety so that I can ‘stumble’ across interesting topics.

I highly doubt that something like this can be completely crowd sourced. It will have to be a hybrid between a person collecting interesting content along with stuff that is popular. There is a dire need of a ‘human touch’ here - a curator for online content.

Unless someone does this right, it is going to be difficult to justify its value. However, the time is ripe for someone to create a ‘Facebook of Content’.. a place where everyone goes to get the latest news customized for their taste, but also containing enough variety :).

Till this happens, back to twitter + facebook + google news + google reader + timesofindia.

Dwipal

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincentgallegos/4562911007/

Almost Switched to Tumblr..

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 19:44:00 +0000

…but decided to stick with Blogger.

Tumblr blogs are definitely better looking, and the interface is cleaner, but its an absolute pain to customize or add anything external. You can’t change the theme once you have added simple things like facebook buttons, and it has no comments!