Posts from IPad

HBO Go

Yesterday as I was getting off a plane, I saw this tweet on my phone and replied to it:

Jason probably tweeted that news at me because of the HBO No Go post from last August in which I expressed my exasperation that I could not airplay the HBO Go content from my iPad to my TV via  AppleTV. So that nuttiness has been addressed by HBO. Nicely done HBO.

But there's more to ask of them. It would be nice if the HBO Go app came pre-installed on connected devices like AppleTV, Roku, Boxee. It would also be nice if HBO Go supported AllShare so Samsung users could have the same thing that Apple users have.

HBO’s Eric Kessler said yesterday at an AllThingsD event that "Our long-term goal for Go is to be on all devices and all platforms." That is exactly right. That's what Netflix has done for years now and that is what HBO needs to do.

Slowly but surely HBO is evolving to being more like Netflix and that's a good thing for its subscribers. Now if we could only subscribe without having to go through a cable company. But we've already talked about that this month and I don't expect that to happen so quickly for all the reasons we discussed in the comments to that post.

#mobile#Television

A Changing Tablet Market?

I saw this in a story I was reading this morning about mobile reading habits:

A year ago, the iPad accounted for 81% of tablets in circulation. That has fallen to 52%, with Android-based tablets grabbing a 48% share of the market. Amazon’s Kindle Fire accounts for far and away the largest slice of those: half of the Android tablets in use are Kindle Fires, and they represent 21% of the overall tablet market.

If that's true, that is a big deal. Our family has moved from iPads to Nexus 7s in our home but I didn't think the rest of the world had moved to Android tablets too.

I am curious if others are surprised by this. I honestly had no idea that Android had made such a big move in tablets. I realize Kindle Fire is hardly Android. More like a third tablet OS. So it's really like iPad 52%, Android 27%, Kindle Fire 21%. But even so, this is a big deal and I am surprised.

#mobile

HBO No Go

I put the awesome HBO GO app on the family's iPad yesterday and tried to Airplay into our family room TV. I got audio on the TV but not video. I thought I was doing something wrong. So I rebooted everything and tried again. Same thing.

So I did a web search on the topic to see what was going on. Turns out HBO GO has disabled the video on Airplay but not the audio. That's right. They disabled the video but include an Airplay button in the app.

What kind of decision is that? If you don't want folks Airplaying the video from the iPad to the TV, don't put an Airplay button in your app. I can't imagine who would want to airplay the audio but not the video. That's messed up.

In truth, the whole thing is messed up. HBO GO requires a cable account to use the service. I have a cable set top box connected to the TV I tried to Airplay to. I just prefer the navigation on the HBO GO app and its way easier to use than the set top box. Allowing me to Airplay HBO GO from my iPad to my TV isn't going to make me cancel my cable subscription because I can't get HBO GO without one.

So they break the product instead. It's nuts. But I see big media doing this kind of thing all the time. And I just don't get it.

#mobile#Television

Android Fragmentation

Android is fragmented and geting more so. This is a challenge for those that develop on it for sure and has been often cited as a big negative for the Android ecosystem. But it also a big plus.

I have a Kindle Fire on my bedstand. I use it primarily to read on in bed having moved to a Nexus 7 as my primary tablet device. The Kindle Fire uses Android as its OS and then puts a Kindle shell on top which makes it look and feel like something other than an Android. But almost every app that I have on my Nexus 7 is also on my Kindle Fire. The reality is that if you build for Android, you are also building for Kindle Fire.

When Amazon launches a phone, it would be my expectation that the experience will be a lot like Kindle Fire. Meaning it will be running Android with a Amazon designed shell on top.

And then there is Facebook. I have to believe that Facebook will build a phone in the same way. Start with Android and then put its own wrapper and apps on top. If that happens, I would imagine I would be able to run all my favorite Android apps on the Facebook phone.

So imagine a world in which three of the top four consumer tech companies have phones running Android. Does that sound like a fragmented world for Android? Yes. Does that sound like a recipe for having a massive number of Android devices out there to build to? Yes.

In my view, we are in a two OS world for mobile and I think we are going to stay there. I think Apple will own the high end with the best and most integrated experience. And I think Android and its many variants will own the rest of the market. I think everyone else is playing for crumbs in terms of market share and would be better off joining the Android variant parade.

What does this mean for developers? It means build for iOS and Android and ignore everything else. And I think it increasingly means you have to be on both iOS and Android as soon as you can. I have advocated for building for Android first and iOS second. I think that strategy will start making more and more sense for apps that aren't looking to be paid.

Fragmentation cuts both ways. It's bad and it's good. Long term, I think it is a big plus for Android.

#mobile

Brewster

Twenty years into the personal technology revolution and we are still using address books that work pretty much like physical address books. It makes no sense. The mobile address book should be hyperconnected to our digital life, informed by it, and responsive to it.

I remember back in early 2011, Steve Greenwood walked into our old offices on the 14th floor and told us that he intended to build that hyperconnected mobile address book. He showed us a spreadsheet he had been personally using for the past five or so years to manage all of his relationships. I had never seen anything like it. He was obsessed with relationships and managing them. That's what we are always looking for, someone who just can't sleep because they want to fix something that isn't working in their world and have been trying for a long time to fix it.

Steve had built a prototype that ran on the web and the vision was all there. An address book that knows what you are doing, where you are, who you are most engaged with at any time, and is search and context driven as opposed to a directory of names and addresses.

But Steve knew that he had to launch this as a mobile app that will eventually replace your current address book and he knew he had a lot of hard technical problems to solve in order to do it right and do it at scale. So he asked us for the seed capital to build a team and build that product. We said yes.

Today, Steve and the amazing team he put together are launching Brewster, initially as an iOS app. If you have an iPhone, you can download it from the iOS app store and check it out. The NY Times has a good post on Brewster today.

Here's how Brewster works. You download the app. You connect it to google apps, facebook, twitter, foursquare, linkedin, and soon a bunch more services. Brewster builds you a new address book that runs on your phone and also in the cloud.

This new address book is smart because it knows a lot more things about your relationships than you have ever entered into your address book and it is adapting in real-time to all of this data. It knows who you probably want to talk to right now and it also knows who you are losing touch with and displays all of this data in a feed. Your Brewster address book is also de-duped and hot linked to all the social activities you want to do from calling, texting, facebooking, or whatever.

This is an address book that can handle a search query like "knicks game" or "sushi tonight" or "band of horses concert". We are always querying our brain with questions like that. Now we can ask our address books those kinds of questions.

I have really enjoyed being involved with this project over the past year. It fits neatly into many themes I have been writing about and thinking about for years. But mostly I am excited to finally see this product out in the market where folks can use it and experience Steve's vision of how an address book should work in the mobile social world we live in.

#mobile#VC & Technology#Web/Tech

My New Nexus 7"

I still think of a 7" as a vinyl record for EPs and singles.

But 7" is going to start to mean someting else as I believe it is an ideal form factor for tablets.

I moved from a Kindle to an iPad for reading a couple years ago. I wrote about that at the time and explained that I preferred the backlighting and the ability to uses maps and wikipedia and such to jump out of the book and drill down on something in the book that sparks my curiosity.

Then the Kindle Fire came along and I immediately grabbed one of them. I've been reading on a Kindle Fire since it came out. I love it for reading books. But it is not a true Android tablet. It is really a Kindle with some extra stuff like a browser and some apps.

Some friends at Google sent me a Nexus 7" last week. I set it up yesterday and I've been using it for about 24 hours. So these are preliminary thoughts on it.

There is something very comforting about logging into a device with my Android/Google credentials and getting all my apps downloaded to it automatically. There is also something very comforting about getting a clean build of the most recent version of Android on a device. The Nexus 7" provides both of those comforts right out of the box.

I put a bunch of my favorite apps on the home screen:

Nexus home screen

If you look at the bottom of the home screen you'll see a yellow icon next to the Chrome browser. That is Bria, a SIP client that I have been using on my android phone. With Bria, the Nexus 7" can be a phone and I used it yesterday to make a few calls. It works great but if I really wanted to use this device as a phone, I'd want a bluetooth headphone because a 7" tablet is not ideal for talking into.

The three apps that I use a lot that aren't on my Nexus 7" home screen are Instagram, Tumblr and Kik. Instagram and Tumblr are not available on the Nexus 7". I hope these companies fix that because I would use these two apps a lot on this device to follow folks on Instagram and Tumblr. Kik only works on one device at a time so if I put it on the Nexus 7", it would stop working on my phone. So it's not on my tablet.

But the main thing I use the Nexus 7" for is reading, primarily on the Kindle app.

Nexus kindle

Reading on the Kindle App on the Nexus 7" is a lot like reading on the Kindle Fire. But the Kindle Android app is not quite as responsive as the Kindle Fire. I find that I have to be a bit more assertive with my swipes for the next page. That might be a transition thing or it could be annoying. I don't know yet. I think the features are slightly different too. But I haven't noticed anything super different between the two reading experiences.

The bottom line is that I think the 7" tablet is a great form factor and I prefer it to the iPad for a bunch of reasons. It is more mobile. It is lighter and more comfortable being held in one hand. And I like the amount of a page that is rendered on the 7" screen. It allows me to read more quickly.

The good news for iPad/iOS fans is that Apple is apparently going to come out with a 7" iPad soon. So you don't have to go Android to get the 7" experience. But if you want to try Android or you want to try a 7" experience right now, you might give the Nexus 7" a try. It's available for pre-order for $199. I don't know when it will broadly available but I suspect soon.

#Books#mobile

Laptop vs Mobile

I took a two day trip Thursday and Friday of this past week. When packing for the trip I debated about bringing my laptop (an 11" macbook air) with me. In the end, I decided to bring it.

I didn't use the laptop on the trip except to write yesterday's blog post. I do a lot of cutting and pasting of links, quotes, etc when I blog and I find that it is still pretty inconvenient to do that on a mobile.

But other than that, I used my android phone for everything else over the course of two days and I was fairly productive.

My friend Bijan wrote a similar post recently about his new iPad3. I have not been able to wrap my head around using an iPad outside my home and office. I don't travel with it the way many do.

But regardless of whether its an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android, it is clear that many of us are starting to leave our laptops home when we travel and rely entirely on mobile devices.

It would be interesting to think about the things that are still inconvenient to do on mobile (like long form blogging) and figure out if there were ways to make it more convenient to do that on a mobile device. It seems like there could be some interesting startup opportunities in solving these remaining hurdles to ditching the laptop entirely.

#mobile#Web/Tech

Textbook Cases

I read something today that I wish I had written. So I am going to cross post it. This post comes from Noah Millman and it is about the lame textbook thing that Apple launched recently. With that intro, I'll shut up and let you read Noah. The original post is here. If anyone knows how to reach Noah, I'd like to email him and tell him how much I liked his post.

——————————————————————————————————–

I see that Steve Sailer and Matt Yglesias are both wondering why Apple’s iPad textbook initiative is so lame. Sailer wonders why Apple isn’t exploiting the interactive possibilities of the tablet to make textbooks much more effective. Yglesias wonders why Apple (or the Gates Foundation) don’t just give textbooks away for free, and thereby both increase the appeal of the tablet and reduce costs to hard-pressed school districts.

The answer is: Apple is a big company, and the Gates Foundation is a huge philanthropy. Large institutions are not the places to turn to, generally, for disruptive innovations.

Apple has no reason to go head-t0-head with textbook publishers, any more than it has any reason for going head-to-head with music labels or book publishers. It’s a much sounder business strategy for Apple to coopt these complementary businesses and make them dependent on Apple. Which is precisely the strategy that Apple has pursued.

The Gates Foundation is a somewhat more complicated story. In their case, I’d say the complementary relationship is between the foundation and the foundation’s clients – and their clients are education reformers, not education professionals. Simply giving textbooks away for free would upset an incumbent that the reformers are not particularly targeting, and would not put in place any structure for the creation of new textbooks. And incubating new products really is beyond the scope of what the foundation does.

Within the world of regular public school education, educational professionals have distinctly limited ability to express any kind of preferences – and the Bush-era education reforms have reduced this scope even further. The target market for textbook publishers is the politicians who set the curriculum for the nation’s largest school systems where that curriculum is set statewide: California and Texas. It matters very little what an individual teacher in Houston or Oakland wants or needs – or thinks their students need.

If you want to see disruptive change in the textbook market, then, you’d need to identify both a potential supplier of the product with no stake in propitiating the incumbents, and a buyer of the product for whom the product solves a problem.

My suspicion is that your best bet would be to have the supplier and the purchaser be, in some sense, the same entity. And I can think of two parts of the educational landscape where that situation might obtain: the KIPP network of high-performing charter schools and the home-schooling movement.

KIPP has the advantage of having a centralized structure and access to funding to implement a strategy. They already create their own curricula. Creating their own textbooks would be the logical next step. If the educational advantages Sailer sees as the potential in tablet-based study really exist, KIPP – which is already very data-driven in its approach to education – would be ideally placed to realize them. Similarly, if the cost advantages exist – initially, reduced spending on textbooks; over the longer term, reduced spending on teachers, as highly interactive tablets made it possible to stretch teachers over larger groups of students – KIPP actually has the incentive to realize these as well. One downside might be that KIPP would have an incentive to retain intellectual property in anything they created – but if it was successful, it would probably spur other charter networks to respond, and the smaller networks would be well-advised to work together rather than independently, simply for reasons of scale, and therefore to do something more open-sourced.

The home schooling movement, by contrast, has no access to funding nor any decision-making structure – but it has the advantage of having a much larger network of individuals potentially capable of committing resources to the project. One could imagine a Wikipedia-style process of textbook creation, where hundreds of thousands of home-schooling moms and dads donate a small portion of the time they already spend on teaching their kids to producing or editing material for the virtual textbooks they all use. You would, of course, need some kind of central structure to handle the programming – but even much of this could be relatively decentralized once the essential framework was in place.

Working either through the charter movement or the home schooling movement would enable a tablet textbook project to start small, yield immediate returns to participants, and scale easily, while largely ignoring the interests of incumbent institutions. And it wouldn’t require the sponsorship of an Apple or a Gates Foundation. Working through the regular public school system, which would certainly require some kind of megadollar sponsorship, would start big, would have to coopt the interests of incumbent institutions, and would make it difficult to impossible to actually yield quick returns to the most important participants: the teachers and students in the classroom. Which, unfortunately, has been the fate of all too many big-think reform proposals for the regular public schools. Much more sensible to build something in more natural laboratories for innovation, and then figure out how to “port” an already proven solution to the regular system.

#hacking education

Cheap Will Be Smart. Expensive Will Be Dumb.

I wrote about this a while back but I've been refining and sharpening my thinking on the question of which devices will be smart and which devices will be dumb. It's an important question because it gets to what platforms developers should build on.

I believe that cheap devices will be smart and expensive devices will be dumb. Here's why:

Technology is moving very fast these days. Look at the latest iPhone 4s. It has Siri in it. Look at the latest Android Galaxy S II. It has NFC and Bluetooth 3.0 in it. And these phones will be leapfrogged in 12-18 months with something even more amazing. Furthermore, these devices have open marketplaces for apps and APIs and SDKs that allow those app developers to bring new experiences to these devices every day.

Contrast that with cars, boats, refridgerators, air conditioners, TVs, and other devices which we are led to believe will become "smart" in the coming years. These devices are usually owned for somewhere between 3 years and 10 years by most consumers. The upgrade cycle for these devices is too long to allow most consumers to experience the kind of smarts on these devices that they are experiencing on their cheapest devices with shorter upgrade cycles.

And that's why technologies like airplay, DLNA, and similar approaches are so important. When smart and cheap devices can take control of expensive and dumb devices, we will see the dumb devices become smart.

When I got the SoundCloud app on my iPad and I airplayed into my sonos, it was one of those "I get it" moments. Every time I get into my car these days, I want to airplay into my car audio system. The idea of connecting via an aux jack seems so nuts.

I don't expect the makers of expensive devices to accept this idea quickly. It goes against the grain. How can my expensive device be dumb when one of those cheap devices is so smart? But I'm certain that this is the way the market will play out over time.

Bridge technologies will play an important role for a while. As will Apple's licensing strategy for airplay. Airplay could become a standard if it is broadly and cheaply licensed. Otherwise, we will see other technologies in this market. We may anyway because there are other issues that matter, like the ability to connect over a cellular data connection instead of a wifi connection, latency, and a number of other important features.

Regardless of timing and the technologies that get us there, I have no doubt that the way we will make our expensive devices smart will be via our cheap devices. That's how I am viewing the market opportunity these days. It's a very crisp and clear vision. And that's a good thing when you are trying to peer into the future.

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#Web/Tech

Feature Friday: Sync To Mobile

It's getting colder in NYC. Instead of walking home yesterday evening, I ducked into the Union Square subway station. I pulled out my android phone, launched the Rdio app, and looked through my collection for music to listen to. There is no wifi in the Union Square subway station, but that wasn't a problem. Because I have sync'd much of my Rdio collection to my mobile phone. I put on Keep Shelly In Athens and headed home.

The knock against streaming media services is "what happens when you don't have internet access?" It's a good question. But fortunately most of the streaming music services have "sync to mobile" enabled. When you add a song or album to your collection in Rdio (my favorite of the streaming music services), you simply check the "sync to mobile" option and your phone will pull that down onto your phone for offline listening. I have my Rdio app set to only sync to mobile when it is on a wifi connection, but you can set it to sync to mobile anytime it has an internet connection.

Someday we'll have wifi in the Union Square subway station. We've got it on the L train from 6th avenue to 8th avenue now. The list of places you don't have internet is getting smaller by the day. But until the day when we have internet everywhere, sync to mobile is a killer feature for streaming services. And that is why it is the feature of the day today.

#Web/Tech