Are you an American?

This is why you never bet against Americans and the reason I came here 25 years ago. If this doesn't put a smile on your face and bring a tear to your eye, I don't know what will.

Wow!

Born Again American

No Infrastructure required to make the Web personal

I came across this post today - Needed - Infrastructure to make the Web personal (link).

I never forget years ago I was at PC Forum listening to a speaker from AT&T. He said "if you have to install infrastructure it will cost more than you think and take longer than you think".

I remember this, this morning as I read about how Infrastructure was required to make the web personal. I disagree - what we should be doing is taking the existing infrastructure and making it smarter. The alternative would be extremely risky and could take forever (well a long time).

What's fascinating about the web is that it works. It's simple, and it's forgiving (it ignores things it can't understand). Also when it was designed they actually thought about how you could make it better.

If you click on this link it will take you to RFC 2616 which is basically the Internet Bible.

Right at the very beginning it states...

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods, error codes and headers [47]. A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred.

Pay close attention to the bold, italic, underline callout (Mine). It says that you can extend the protocol. It's already got the answers built in for you.

Let's pick one - the headers. Headers are pieces of data. What if... you used those headers to send new meta data up to a web server. That data would items like Who I am, What Device I'm using and Where I am. With that real time data the Web service could personalize the Web for Me.

No infrastructure is required to make the Web personal, it's already built in, sitting there right in front of you. No one's using it to do the job - well one company is. (link)

Apple ads vs. Google ads

Coming on the heels of Apple's latest endeavor into the mobile ad space, Apple has posted a note to all iPhone OS developers telling them their apps will be rejected if they include location aware advertising and don't use Core Location for any other functionality on the app. If the app uses Core Location to find weather, restaurants, ATMs, etc, Apple will let the app through the App Store even if Admob is connected to location services. Many developers rely on Admob to make revenue on free applications, and Admob uses the user's location in order to provide ads.

This move by Apple seems to indicate that they have plans for this space, most likely related to their purchase of Quattro and their plans to integrate the company's advertising system into the iPhone SDK. Google's Admob getting tossed is just a bonus.

From 9-5

Apple and Google sitting in a tree... It's on now!

Symbian vs. Android

This confirms what we've seen...

Similar as it may sound to Android’s promise, there are major differences, says Williams.

“About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”

Yep. Android is NOT as Open as it would appear. We found API's that had disappeared into a proprietary class and were suddenly unavailable. As much as you may dislike Windows Mobile it's much more developer friendly - Just like Symbian.

Symbian Operating System, Now Open Source and Free

Apparently Hitler doesn't like the iPad