The big news this week for developers was the revelation that the new keeper of the Java flame, Oracle, is getting into bed with IBM on the OpenJDK project. The blogosphere was buzzing with the news, but a few posts stood out, reminding me to make sure I follow these guys.
Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Systems and Linux in IBM's Software Group, posted a widely quoted commentary on the partnership on his blog. This is where the news broke that IBM would be "shifting its development effort from the Apache Project Harmony to OpenJDK." Sutor is an IBMer, but his blog is thoughtful and worth reading. He also maintains a great list of other bloggers under "People and Places."
Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, also blogged about the announcement. Reinhold handled Oracle's side of the story, but also offered his own predictions and expectations about who'll be doing what. Reinhold's blog is worth following for the news he provides, but also for the feedback he gets. Good conversations that include some questions and comments from the likes of another favorite blogger, Simon Phipps, and a bunch of first-string Java jocks
Danny Coward also blogged about the news. Coward was the chief architect of Sun Microsystems' client software -- that's Java SE, Java ME, and JavaFX. He also serves on the Executive Committee for the Java Community Process. This post on The Aquarium site, seems light and breezy because of its style, but it's full of hard data and links to hard data. He's an Oxford-trained number theorist, so that's not surprising.
Finally, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation and a savvy Java-space watcher, commented on the news on his "Life at Eclipse" blog. "All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform, enhances the business value of Java, and offers the hope of an increased pace of innovation," he wrote in part. Definitely a blogger to follow for his own observations, but also because he links so often to other interesting sources. For example, in this post he points to comments from Redmond analyst James Governor and The ServerSide's Joseph Ottinger as examples of the conventional wisdom that there is a fork in Java's future, which the Big O/Big Blue agreement challenges.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 15, 20100 comments
Google treated a group of reporters to lunch last Friday in its San Francisco offices (sushi and pizza -- yum!), and we got to meet some happy users of the App Engine and chat with the Google team behind it.
Google's App Engine is a suite of the tools and services for building and scaling Web apps on the company's infrastructure. Applications developed using the App Engine Software Development Kit (SDK) can be uploaded and hosted by Google, and those apps can then utilize Google's bandwidth and computing power. That's a big selling point, Google argues, given Big G's vast, road-tested infrastructure, which is also hosting its own apps.
The App Engine went GA in May 2008, after lots of tire kicking by 10,000 invitation-only beta users. At first, the only runtime environment was Python, but the company soon added a Java runtime and a bunch of other goodies to appeal to a range of developers. A new Business version was unveiled last month, and this week the company released the App Engine SDK 1.3.8 with new admin tools and performance enhancements.
Among the vendors at the meeting was Fred Cheng, founder of San Francisco-based startup Simperium, who demoed his company's Simplenote app. Think of this app as a simpler Evernote, emphasizing the ability to keep text-based notes, lists, etc., and access them from a desktop, a tablet, a mobile device or the Web.
Simplenote was developed a year ago as an iPhone app written in Python. When user feedback led the company to consider expanding the scope of the app to other devices, it used App Engine to create a low-cost, scalable backend. Simplenote started the year with 10,000 users, Cheng said, but now claims nearly 200,000 users today.
"We chose App Engine because we didn't want to worry about system administration or scaling," Cheng said. "We heard at one point that Demi Moore tweeted about us, and she has more than three million followers. That day was a crazy day, but we never worried about the servers going down."
Another App Engine user, Dan Murray, co-founder and managing director of WebFilings, demoed his Los Alto, California/Ames, Iowa-based company's cloud-based financial reporting solution. WebFilings looks to be first to market with an app that streamlines the cumbersome, manual process that companies currently go through to draft and file Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) reports.
"With every platform, you run into issues," Murray said. "That's just inevitable. But every single time we had an issue, the Google people were on it within a matter of minutes."
Also attending was Tihomir Bajic, a software developer at Rypple, a Toronto/San Francisco-based startup with an enterprise social networking application, a Twitter-like feedback generator for companies. Rypple used the Google Web Tools (GWT) to build the app's front end, but then hosted it on the Rackspace cloud. They also used Google analytics and Google AdWords in the application.
"For GWT there's an existing community of developers," Bajic said, "outside and inside the company, who are very active and contribute back the code and share what they learn with one another."
Rypple used the App Engine for prototyping, Bajic said, but went initially with Rackspace to allay security fears of some customers. But he said that his company is "closely monitoring" developments, and expects Google to resolve these concerns, soon.
I'm one of the few reporters I know who actually likes product demos (or admits it, anyway), and I thought each of these apps were pretty cool in their own way. But I'm not in the minority when it comes to speculating on exactly what Google, a search company that makes money on advertising, has been up to with App Engine. None of us speculators has come closer to the mark in my opinion than Gartner analyst Yefim Natis. I talked with him almost exactly a year ago about the App Engine and how Google is using it.
"Google is an ambitious vendor," he told me. "They have Android, which is going to compete with Windows sooner or later, and they know that the operating system is only the bottom of the stack. They want to be able eventually to compete with the whole stack for the mass market customers…. I don't think they're aiming at large enterprises. They are aiming at small and medium businesses, at least in the beginning. I don't think they are investing in the kinds of things high-end enterprises care about…. But they understand that they need to get into the layers above the operating system, and just offering applications is not enough for their ambitions. In order to be a complete solution provider, they have to do more. So, to have an application platform as a service is actually critical."
He added: "The platform is where the commitments are made, and Google knows this. They are building not for on-premises. That's not their world. They are building it for the cloud. But they have a lot to learn. Being an enterprise player takes a lot of time to learn."
But Kevin Gibbs, the originator of the App Engine project, technical lead, and all around vision guy, sees a different motive behind Google's efforts to build a developer ecosystem: "Our goal is to help developers to make the Web better," Gibbs told us. "I'm excited to hear about a developer who uses any tool we offer. App Engine is a great product, but it can't do everything yet. I don't know if it ever will. But if any part of what Google is doing is helping the developers, then we're winning, we're moving the Web forward, we're making the experience of the Internet better."
Posted by John K. Waters on October 15, 20101 comments
Microsoft has been lobbing water balloons at Google's Android mobile operating system for months now, but on Friday the Redmond software maker tossed a Molotov cocktail in the form of a lawsuit alleging infringement of nine of its patents by Motorola's Android-based smartphones. Microsoft filed in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
In a statement posted to Microsoft's News Center Page, Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing. wrote: "The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola's Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing e-mail, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power."
Microsoft is seeking triple damages, compensatory damages and court costs, along with a permanent injunction against Google.
Al Hilwa, Program Director in the Applications Development Software group at International Data Corporation (IDC), shot me an e-mail as soon as the news broke. He has a pragmatic view of Microsoft's action.
"Patents are the way of tech today," he wrote, "whether we like it or not. Companies regularly engage in licensing discussions and deals with their partners and competitors, who are often the same. These lawsuits come up when there is a breakdown in the discussions. Android was a great gift to the industry, but lawsuits like this are beginning to throw doubts on its provenance. Microsoft is, of course, launching Windows Phone 7, for which it charges handset makers some dollars. The lawsuits around Android make the point that device licenses for the technology stack may be viewed as inexpensive when measured against the legal fees that might be incurred."
Florian Mueller, the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign and author of the FOSS (free and open source) Patents blog isn't so sanguine.
"These patent suits brought forward by industry giants with massive patent portfolios unmatched by Google are dark clouds over Android," he wrote in an e-mail. "Google must now act constructively and try to work out amicable arrangements with those right holders. Otherwise I'm afraid that third-party application developers investing their money, creativity and hard work in the Android platform will be harmed because of an irresponsible approach to intellectual property in a market in which patents have always played an essential role. Android phone vendors and other parties will also be affected, but application developers are the ones I'm most concerned about in all of this."
Microsoft just announced its Windows Phone 7 operating system (due for public unveiling on October 11), so I guess I'm not surprised about the timing of the lawsuit. Maybe it's just business, but the company has been making noises for years about 235 patents it claims are being infringed by Linux vendors (Android is based on the Linux kernel). Why strike now?
"We have a responsibility to our customers, partners and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year in bringing innovative software products and services to market," Gutierrez added in his blog. "Motorola needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its Android smartphones.”
Microsoft isn't alone, of course, in claiming Android patent violations: Oracle is suing Google over Java patents the company alleges are violated in the Android OS. And Apple sued phone maker HTC earlier this year for infringing on more than 20 patents in the Android OS. (HTC sued back, claiming five infringements.) And this weekend, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal that HTC is paying a license fee for its use of Android, and that other phone makers will end up doing the same.
Microsoft is currently in fourth place in the U.S. market for smartphone OSes, according to comScore, behind RIM, Apple, and Google.
If I had only 12 percent of the market for what is rapidly becoming the dominant computing platform, I guess I might throw an elbow, too. Companies certainly have a right and obligation to protect their intellectual property. But this suit could do some real damage to developers who have invested their time to develop their Android chops. Consider this: A recently published survey of nearly 2,400 app developers around the world conducted jointly by IDC and Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of an open source application development platform called Titanium. According to the survey, 72 percent of developers say Android "is best positioned to power a large number and variety of connected devices in the future," compared with 25 percent for Apple's iOS. In the survey, 59 percent of developers favored Android's long-term outlook, vs. 35 percent for iOS. This gap has grown by 10 points since a similar survey was conducted in June.
It'll be interesting to see what the next survey reveals.
Here's a list of the patents Microsoft is claiming were infringed:
- Patents No. 5,579,517 and 5,758,352: "Common name space for long and short filenames."
- Patent No. 6,621,746, which is related to the flash memory management techniques.
- Patent No. 6,826,762: "Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer."
- Patent No. 6,909,910: "Method and system for managing changes to a contact database."
- Patent no 7,644,376: "Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes."
- Patent No. 5,664,133: "Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior."
- Patent No. 6,578,054: "Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information."
- Patent No. 6,370,566: "Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device."
Posted by John K. Waters on October 4, 20105 comments
It was another hot Indian summer in the City by the Bay this week as codederos with a mobile-biz bent swarmed into San Francisco for the annual BlackBerry DevCon. And when I say "hot," I mean scorching sidewalks strewn with melted attendees caught between the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, where the sessions, labs and breakout sessions were held, and Moscone West, where the General Session and keynotes were presented. Not as bad as last week's Oracle OpenWorld-to-JavaOne slog, but with temps heading for triple digits, it was a bit tougher on those of us who are well-insulated and pigment-challenged.
The news from inside wasn't quite as sizzling from an enterprise developer perspective, but Research in Motion (RIM) execs offered attendees a range of toasty announcements, including new tools and platforms for building applications for their popular smartphones.
They also added "SuperApp" to our vocabulary, which RIM declared is a new class of mobile applications that offers "a seamless, integrated, contextualized, and efficient experience." Will it last? I say, no.
The headline-grabbing news, of course, was the unveiling of the company's first entry into the tablet PC market. With its 7-inch touch-screen and 9.7 mm depth, the BlackBerry PlayBook is smaller than Apple's iPad, but loaded for bear -- or rather, for business (rear- and front-facing HD cameras, 1080p HD video, HDMI and USB connectors, Bluetooth paring with your BlackBerry smartphone, enterprise server compatibility and freakin' Flash support).
RIM's prez and co-chief exec Michael Lazaridis showed off the device like a proud papa. "The first time you hold it, it just feels right, and you'll want to take it wherever you go," he told a packed auditorium.
Look, but don't touch.
RIM gets marketing points for avoiding the rumored and hideous "BlackBook" moniker. And the slogan "BlackBerry amplified" nicely preserves the business context of the device, and conveys rather accurately what you're getting with it.
Attendees were offered "hands-on time" with the devices, and many of us --lots and lots of us, in fact -- stood in a long, snaking, wrap-around line on the top floor of the conference center only to end up staring at a cluster of PlayBooks displayed under glass. We could look, but not touch. (I flashed back to my senior prom.) But what I saw, I liked.
Enterprise developers might want to pay attention to this little tablet. There are signs that the PlayBook might be the one to make the leap from consumer curiosity to serious business tool. Cisco Systems likes it. Steve Slattery, VP and GM of the company's Unified Communications group, said that he expects it to do well in the enterprise. And IDC analyst Al Hilwa told me that he sees the tablet as a competitive business offering, because it "leverages the Adobe Flash eco-system for an instant portfolio of rich Web sites and applications" that "makes a credible entry into corporate boardrooms with Blackberry's formidable enterprise assets."
Posted by John K. Waters on September 30, 20100 comments
I wasn't the only one complaining about the first JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship this week. I'll admit that my criticism of Big O's decision to hold the J1 portion of its hybrid, San Francisco-devouring, Tandem Conference Monster was probably exacerbated by my lack of cardiovascular fitness and what evolved into the hell of hauling my chubby self back and forth between Moscone and the Hilton. (I swear, I'm joining a gym tomorrow!) But other, fitter bloggers were just as cranky about this year's show.
John's boots weren't made for walkin'...
The Eclipse Foundation's Ian Skerrett was with me. In his post, "The New JavaOne; The New Java Community," Ian offers some cogent observations about J1 under Oracle. The Hilton, he says, was "the worst location for a conference I have ever experienced" (Yes!) He goes on to give Kurian credit (as just about everyone has) for a good keynote. Interesting conclusions. Also check out his "My JavaOne Wish List" post.
Sam Dean worries on the Ostatic blog post, "Oracle Still Shows Few Signs of Open Java Goals," that, "Many of [Oracle's EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian's] points made clear that Oracle will encourage lots of development around Java, but not many of them made clear that Oracle will retain the level of openness that Sun Microsystems always had toward Java." (Editor's note: Go here and here for more on what Kurian said at the show.)
Adam Bien gives a nice little post-mortem of his travels at the event in his blog "JavaOne 10 Afterglow." He actually concludes that "Considering the circumstances JavaOne was even great this year…" (Hmm… Not nearly as grumpy as me.) But keep scrolling down to get even more conference notes.
Dutch coder Geertjanoffered his "JavaOne 2010 Reflections" in a blog post focused on NetBeans. Nice coverage from a guy who works with the IDE, apparently, on a regular basis. He also thought it was a great JavaOne (Okay, now I'm feeling like a curmudgeon).
The Canoo Engineering's Rich Internet Applications Blog is also worth checking out. Lots of coverage by "Bruno."
David Thielen's Huffington Post blog, "JavaOne: Confessions of a Booth Babe," wasn't cranky, I guess, though not really as funny as the title implies. It does offer some nice observations about the show from the founder and CTO of Windward Studios, who worked a booth on the exhibit floor.
I have to add that, though I'm not happy about the juxtaposition of the two conferences, I did find the quality of JavaOne's content overall to be as useful as ever. Maybe what we should do is start now encouraging (or harassing, whichever works for you) Mr. Ellison and company to set aside a separate week for JavaOne 2011. Come on, guys, we know you can afford it. Show that you're really behind this technology -- and this community -- by giving them the space and spotlight they deserve!
What were your thoughts on this year's JavaOne? Did it live up to your expectations? Share your take with John/other readers by posting in the comments!
Posted by John K. Waters on September 24, 20103 comments
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison closed out the first combo Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne event in San Francisco on Wednesday, and I have to say, it was a vintage performance. He slammed his competitors, as usual, with digs aimed at SAP, IBM, and EMC. But he seemed to relish dissing his chief CRM rival, Salesforce.com, the most, describing the company's multi-tenancy architecture as "a horrible idea" that "commingles everyone's customer list in a single database."
"In the 21st century, the technology we use is called virtualization," he added. "Multi-tenancy is 15 years old."
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had cracked wise earlier about Oracle's new Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which Ellison unveiled at the show, calling it a "a cloud in a box."
"I have to chuckle a little at the phrase 'cloud in a box,'" Ellison said, "because the CEO of Salesforce.com said 'Larry doesn't get it, cloud doesn't just run on a box.' What does he think Salesforce.com runs on if not on a box? Salesforce.com runs on 1,500 Dell servers, which are boxes!"
The new Exalogic Elastic Cloud is Oracle's integrated hardware and software system designed to run Java and other applications with "extreme performance." It merges several components within a single chassis the size of a refrigerator, and it's designed to be used as the foundation for a cloud application infrastructure. Ellison declared that it would outperform anything his competitors have to offer.
Oracle's own-the-hardware-and-the-software strategy is reminiscent of the practices of Ellison's friend, Steve Jobs, and the exec was quick to give credit where credit was due. "[Jobs has] believed for a long time that if you engineer the hardware and software together, the overall user experience is better than if you just do a part of the solution," he said.
Ellison also delivered an elbow to SAP: "We think it's a mistake for SAP to have its on-premise and SaaS applications be a completely different code base," he said. "We think people will like to do their development on SaaS and migrate to on-premise or maybe take a hybrid approach with SaaS in a particular region and others hosted on our systems."
Ellison also promised a big rollout of Oracle's Fusion Apps, but offered no release specifics. He claimed that it would be the first system to run ERP applications on industry standard Java middleware, and he said that Fusion apps will be installable on-premise or as software as a service (SaaS).
He also told the crowd that Oracle is now building business intelligence (BI) into its applications -- which gave him a chance to thwack Big Blue: "IBM says business intelligence is one of its fastest-growing businesses," Ellison observed, "but we don't think of it as something separate. We think business intelligence should be everywhere."
Posted by John K. Waters on September 24, 20103 comments
Oracle's EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian took the stage last night at the JavaOne branch of the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco to talk about his company's plans for Java.
"I've been at JavaOne since 1997," Kurian said, "but this year is very special for us, because it's the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving."
There was some rah-rah in his presentation, but to his credit, Kurian offered attendees a fairly concrete roadmap. In fact, Kurian seemed to be on a mission to dispel the uncertainty that has fogged the Java landscape since Big O acquired Sun Microsystems earlier this year.
If the JCP approves it, Java SE 7 will be available in the Summer of 2011, and Java SE 8 should be available about a year later. Both will be based on OpenJDK, and they will serve as the basis for the Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 and JDK 8.
Oracle is proposing several features for these dev kits. In JKD 7, the company wants to see InvokeDynamic byte code and supporting features for dynamic languages; Fork/Join Framework and related concurrency and collections API enhancements; Small Language Enhancements (most of Project Coin); Session Description Protocol (SDP) and Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP) support; new I/O APIs, including a flexible filesystem API, and asynchronous I/O; support for updated standards, including Unicode, localization, security, cryptography, XML and JDBC; and JVM performance improvements.
For JDK 8, the company is proposing such features as Lambda expressions ("closures"); Small Language Enhancements (rest of Project Coin); a Java-native module system (Project Jigsaw); and JVM start-up time and ergonomics improvements.
Under Oracle, Java EE "will continue to evolve," with an emphasis on making application servers more modular and programming more efficient with improvements such as dependency injection and reduced configuration requirements.
Oracle is also planning a tight integration of JavaFX and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in two stages: the first in summer 2011; the next a year later.
"The programming model is to combine the power of Java with the ease of JavaFX," Kurian said. "Another aim is to eliminate anything that would prevent native interoperability between Java, JavaScript and HTML5."
The next release of JavaFX (Q3 of 2011) will introduce a new set of Java APIs designed to open JavaFX capabilities to all Java developers. The new Java APIs will, Oracle says, allow the use of such Java features as generics, annotations and multi-threading. They will make life easier for Web developers who want to use JavaFX with other dynamic scriptors (JRuby, Groovy and JavaScript).
Sun's Hotspot JVM will be integrated with the BEA JRockit JVM, the company says. The combined JVM will also be based on OpenJDK, and JRockit Mission Control will be available for the Hotspot JVM.
2011 will also see two new releases of the Glassfish open-source application server with several new features from WebLogic.
And to the surprise of many (including me), Oracle is planning for two new NetBeans releases in 2011.
"We are committed to making Java the world’s best programming language, the world’s most popular deployment platform with great graphics and other features embedded in Java," Kurian said.
Rah.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 21, 20100 comments
At last year's Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle co-president Charles Phillips promised that the annual JavaOne conference, a touchstone event for Java jocks around the world, would continue as a stand-alone conference, though it would be co-located with OpenWorld. A year later, here we are at the annual Oracle show, and I'd have to say that Big O's idea of "co-located" differs a bit from mine.
Renamed JavaOne/Oracle Develop, the event is underway this week in San Francisco, but instead of its traditional Moscone Center home, the show has been shifted to the Hilton San Francisco off of Union Square half a mile away.
I think Robert Mullins described the event and its implications aptly in his blog: "Holding a separate event at a different venue makes it seem like Oracle is seating JavaOne at the equivalent of the kids' table and could feed the concern of skeptics who wondered how well Oracle would support open source software that would be competition for its more profitable licensed software."
The Twitterstream was burbling with mixed reviews of Day One of the new JavaOne event.
John Rizzo of San Rafel, California wrote: "At JavaOne. Even though we have been pushed to a side show Oracle is still spending more on JavaOne then Sun has in a long time." But Palo Alto, California-based attendee Dion Almaer wrote: "JavaOne at the Hilton, not Moscone, is painful. At least it exists, but I will go Devoxx instead :)"
Organizers of the main event, Oracle OpenWorld, are claiming the largest turnout ever, with 41,000 attendees. The annual Oracle show is taking up all three wings of the Moscone Convention Center, not to mention Howard street between Moscone North and South.
Although none of the top Oracle execs will be speaking directly to JavaOne attendees -- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and co-president Safra Catz spoke Sunday night at Moscone, and new co-president Mark Hurd is scheduled to speak later this week -- Oracle EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian will be speaking at JavaOne later this afternoon (Monday). His topic: "Java Strategy and Directions." He's scheduled to "share Oracle's vision for strengthened investment and innovation in Java and describe how Java will continue to grow as the most powerful, scalable, secure, and open platform for the global developer community."
And the content planned for this year's JavaOne… I mean JavaOne/Oracle Develop… looks good. Lots of sessions on Java Enterprise Edition, the MySQL database, the GlassFish Server and other Java tech. And inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil will be giving a special JavaOne keynote on Thursday morning.
IDC analyst Al Hilwa, who's in San Francisco this week for the event, offered me some perspective on the combined conferences: " I think Oracle's strategy will evolve over time," he told me. "While it's not convenient to be in a separate location, there's just so much you can do at the Moscone. OOW was already the biggest thing happening here and way overstretched even before JavaOne, so it's clearly not an ideal situation. Oracle has to figure out how important for them it is to have these things at the same time. In my opinion, the developer audience deserves their own JavaOne developer events, however, it is clearly a tradeoff, because the atmosphere and energy generated by the scale of OOW is almost unique in the industry."
I get that the choice to hold JavaOne at the Hilton is probably about logistics. Both events are biguns and they can't occupy the same space without ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. But it still sucks a little.
More later. Stay tuned.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 20, 20100 comments
It was a busy week in the City by the Bay, with concurrent conferences filling up a couple of wings of the Moscone Center. While the venerable Intel Developer Forum (IDF), the giant chipmaker’s periodic conference for hardware and software developers, took over Moscone West, a bouncing baby tech show, the AppNation Conference, occupied Moscone North.
The inaugural, two-day AppNation event was billed as the first conference focused on the "app economy." The show featured a fairly impressive lineup of speakers and exhibitors for a newbie. The roster included Google, Fox, Zynga, Microsoft, The North Face, AT&T, GetJar, Mediabrands, Major League Baseball, General Electric, The Wall Street Journal, AKQA, Smule, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Symbian, PepsiCo, JP Morgan Chase, Ogilvy, Lima Sky (pause for big breath), and dozens of others.
In his opening remarks, Drew Ianni, chairman and founder of the event (and former chairman of a digital marketing conference called Ad:Tech), shared some AppNation research, which predicts that a million mobile apps will be available for download by 2012.
"It's this ecosystem and economy that's sort of sprung out of nowhere," Ianni said. "It's a huge potential market. It's also a revolution."
San Francisco's Mayor, Gavin Newsom, was on hand to welcome an estimated 1,200-plus attendees to the event. Among other things, the Mayor announced that he would be issuing a challenge to developers to make the official Gavin Newsom app for his campaign for Lieutenant Governor.
Some interesting stats came out of this show, as Jonathan Carson, CEO of the Nielsen Company's Telecom Practice (yup, the TV ratings guys), rolled out the results of an ongoing mobile computing study, dubbed "The Mobile Apps Playbook." The results reported at the show are based on an August survey of more than 4,000 mobile subscribers who reported downloading an app in the previous 30 days.
According to the study, 91 percent of respondents said they would be willing to pay for a game; 86 percent said they would be willing to pay for an "entertainment" app; 84 percent would pay for map or navigation apps; 82 percent would cough up for productivity apps; 77 percent for "food" apps (whatever those are); and 76 percent would pay for news apps.
"A year and a half ago, the conversation was mostly about iPhone apps and Facebook apps," Ianni said. "But businesses were being transformed by apps. They're turning into the new touch points for brands. And it's a new media distribution channel."
Hmm… And it's still kind of about iPhone and Facebook. According to the Nielsen survey, smartphone app downloaders currently have an average of 27 apps on their phones -- that's up from 22 app reported in December 2009. Unsurprisingly, users of Apple's iPhones have the largest number of apps on their devices; Android uses came in second and BlackBerry users third. And Facebook is the most popular individual application on all three.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 17, 20100 comments