Techcrunch is terribly wrong about the IPhone Store Policy

The blogpost over at Techcrunch telling developers to stop complaining about the IPhone App Store is terrible. They argue that you can either accept everything Apple says and develop for the Iphone, or simply move to another platform.

Of course, that is complete rubbish. We're living in an online world where people complain and discuss business practises in every thinkable way. If you're unhappy with a company, you complain, get a reaction, and then decides to stay or leave that company, product or service.

Smart companies appreciates this and have a very active relationship with their community, rendering happier customers and increased revenue.
Apple in particular is a company with a hardcore community where that act as Apple evangelists, and Apple nurture this relationship as much as they can.

When Dan Kimerling suddenly says that developers should stop complaining over the IPhone stores pretty strange application policies, he actually says that Apple is off limit. To me, he sounds like a dinousaur from the Mac/PC-wars of the 80's and 90's. Maybe he's defencive since Microsoft's latest ad campaign is pretty nice, or maybe he just can't cope with the fact that Apple is far from perfect. But it's weird to read this on a blog with a nice history of bringing light to high profile online customer power.

I just don't understand this. Maybe he's just trying to fill his Apple / Iphone quota.

I'm pretty tired of hearing about the IPhone. It has a nice interface and might be a great catalyst for mobile browsing, but I don't need to know every little detail on everything happening with the IPhone. Apple's done a great job promoting the phone, and Apple has created a nice Application store [although it's not that new, at least not here in Europe. I can send an sms and get ringtones, games and applications directly to my phone, and that certainly isn't anything new. The turnover of all the phonerelated sales of games, screensavers and ringtones has been considerable for quite a while now. The new thing is that they actually get early adapters to go to one central site for buying applications, and that they have a nearly perfectly closed developer/sales platform].

I like the IPhone, but as I said, I'm not excited enough to hear about it every single day and hour. I can't wait for the Google phone to enter the market, so that I at least can read about a product from a company that I not only respect (I respect apple), but also like a lot.


And last but not least - I really enjoy techcrunch, I'm reading the blog every day! This is simply my way of giving Techcrunch my feedback to them since I want their business and blog to be even better!

Amazingly inspirational video with Kevin Roberts

This is a truly amazing video with Kevin Roberts that I is very inspirational! Inspiration is important for us in the Internet startup business, so I place the video here for both you and me (I think I'll watch it many times!

Kevin Roberts blog is here and I found the video on the swedish blog Disruptive.

Blogloving - a RSS reader for the masses

Bloglovin (Blogkoll) is an online RSS-reader for the masses. That is, it's functionality seems to be almost the same as Google Reader, but they never mention RSS and focus their marketing on teen girls and young adults.

They have a nice little intro video which I think is great! It shows how effective video can be as a mean of teaching users how to use your service.

And, if you like them, feel free to digg them.

Now I know why I didn't by IPhone - I've been waiting for Android!

Now it's all clear to me - I didn't by an Iphone because I was waiting for the Google Phone. The phone itself seems really fun with GPS, compass, accelerometer, Wifi, 3g and all, but IPhone has almost the same features. But what I really like about the Android is it's openess! Since I'm a developer I've been waiting for the day when I'll be able to program everything around me - lamps, owen, fridge, tv, lock, phone and my car. This is suddenly a little bit closer since I'll be in control over my mobile!
I've done some Java applets for my SonyEricsson, and though it was pretty fun, it is a pretty tightly locked programming environment. With the IPhone it's the same: An extensive SDK but all the fun stuff locked up out of my reach.

The Android platform is all different. Change whatever you want, use camera, other programs, API's as much as you like, it just isn't a closed environment.

I'm no Mac person, and even though I was impressed with the IPhone (primarily for the touch interface and the nice screen), I must say I simply don't like Apple that much. I'm a PC guy, I've enjoyed putting together my own hardware playing around with Windows or Linux. I want to be able to choose freely what hardware to use.
Mac's are good looking and they seem to be great employers, but for some reason they can't reach my inner geek. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo can! I even liked the Seinfeld/Microsoft-commercial.

Now since I'm swedish I'm really hoping for a platform as open as Android for SonyEricsson.

Kaskado - Mobile coupons made easy

Imagine walking into a shop and your mobile beeps. You look at it, and it's a coupon for some clothes matching your personal taste in the same store, and hence increasing the sales of the store.

We're not quite there yet, but the scenario presented above just got a bit closer.
I've tried Kaskado which gives you mobile coupons for real world purchases. It's easy to install the java app (enter your mobile number and follow a link) and I was up and running in no time.

When starting I had to choose my location, and then a couple of offers in my city was presented to me. The interface is good and I might even try one of the offers later today. The number of offers where a tad bit low, only four of them in a city of more than one million (Stockhom), one from a coffee chain having 5+ locations to choose from.

So what does it take to make this service a success? The installation process was easy enough, but I still think it's hard to get the main stream audience to install the application with that few coupons. I guess that can be explained by the fact that the service is pretty new, but that needs to be improved.
I also would like to have it automatically positioning me, so that I get offers only really close to my location. That probably isn't very interesting until they've got far more offers.
It would also be nifty to have it running in the background, maybe as a cell phone provider service to keep the users costs low, and simply signaling me when I'm close to an offer that really interests me.

I don't have any insight in Kaskado's plans, since I just heard of them, but I'd say that a great idea would be to go for the operators and have the service preinstalled or at least having the link as a predefined shortcut. Operators are always looking for ways to get new ways of income as well as advantages over their competitors, so it should be pretty easy to make such a deal.

The future of video is... Animoto!

We've played around with video for a while here at 49lights. We've tried quite a few different video editors for our very simple material and after what I've seen I must say that Animoto is very, very impressive!

What's Animoto?
Animoto is a very simple online tool for creating videos from images. You select which images to use, select (or upload) music and hit "render". Animoto then analyze your media and creates a video. Pretty nifty effects suiting the music are used on your images as well as syncronized to the music. The outcome is a pretty nice video that you easily can download, embed or upload to Youtube.

I'd say that this is what I expect from future video editing. Select videos, images and music and get a nice little video. Add some interview parts or something, clip the things together and you've produced a somewhat "professional" video. It's obvious that tools like this will reduce the gap between professional video and amateur video.

Add some stock video footage to the show and at least news shows will have a couple of hundred thousand competitors. (Large parts of news shows are just expounded views on a Reuters telegram).

What really makes a difference when comparing Animoto to many other online tools for creating video footage or advanced slideshows is that they have extreamly good looking effects on Animoto.

Shoppinggatan - English video

Here's the English video for those who prefer that over Swedish ;)

Shoppinggatan goes Animoto!

Animoto is as you know a great tool for easy video creation that actually looks good.
We just tried it for a short presentation of Shoppinggatan, and here's the result:

I love Chrome but I got it to freeze

I tried Google Chrome today and I must say I love it. A big part of the Google Chrome Comic that we've all read today focused on its stability. However, I got it to freeze. Playing one of my favorite online games, Desktop Tower Defence, it sometimes froze when on keypresses. Keypress, long pause, and the game continued. When I got to the point where it froze for a couple of minutes I killed the process.

So google guys, please fix this so that I can enjoy my favorite online game in my brand new favorite browser! :)