Andy Volk

As I begin full-scale development on a couple of new products, I’ve been casting an eye down the road towards potential funding sources. The biggest question from the angel community was “Where’s your technical co-founder?”

I’m a reasonably technical person, and I’ve scratched out some perl scripts, java, javascript, css, and html5 code in the past, but i hadn’t considered myself a “developer”.

But I’d seen that having a technical co-founder was a blocking issue, so I’ve decided to be my own technical co-founder for the time being.

For my fellow entrepreneurs looking at making the same transition, let me give you my development stack information. This material is targeted for people building Ruby web apps on OS X Snow Leopard:

Andy’s Simple Ruby Web Application Toolkit

1. Install the latest version of XCode (free) from http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/xcode.html
2. Install TextMate (free trial, $57 to buy) from http://macromates.com/
3. Setup Ruby and Rubygems as per the instructions on Hivelogic
4. Create a “Development” folder, like in your home directory, to have your projects live in.
5. I’m going to assume you want to start with simple projects, so go ahead and install the Sinatra framework with “gem install sinatra”.
6. Create an account on Heroku to deploy your new applications on, and install the heroku gem.
7. Install Homebrew as per their instructions.
8. Install git and any other unix goodies you want with the “brew install” command. at least load git with “brew install git”
9. You’re ready to build! Go knock out a simple Sintra app by following their 4-line “Hello World” exercise.
10. Now that you’ve got a working app, deploy it on Heroku using Heroku’s instructions for deploying Sinatra apps.

And you’re done! You’re building Ruby apps in Sinatra, staging them locally, and deploying them to the web via Heroku. Rock on, new developer and future technical co-founder!

iPhone N.B.: As I get more into iPhone development using languages that I already know, such as JavaScript, I’ll be giving more coverage to PhoneGap which is a really neat-looking solution for building iPhone apps in JavaScript and being able to compile for several other smartphone platforms as well. (And if you’re looking to get started with them before I have a chance to write that post, make the jump over to their setup instructions and get started!)

I’ve been making some changes at Downtempo lately, and one of those was moving out our office over at 1890 Bryant and into the new I/O Ventures space on Valencia Street in the Mission.

Why did we leave our cushy office space on Bryant Street? To focus down on building the next big thing in consumer products. I’ve discovered that “20% time” wasn’t enough to really focus on building a great new independent product, although I’ve been happy with the results we’ve gotten with Is It Safe to Visit? and NiceTips.

By entering a community of people focused on building products, I/O Ventures has a great ecosystem and set of teams for us to exchange inspiration with. (and of course, having The Summit cafe in our building doesn’t hurt either!)

So it’s back to the serious basics: smart people, big ideas, lots of computers, and plenty of space to work in. Time to go build some products.

One of the things that i love to do is travel, and that usually ends up getting mixed with work in all kinds of delightful ways.

Whether it’s spending time on the mobyboat with Mathys from Mobypicture, building NiceTips with Kareem Mayan in one sunny Budapest week, or attending the Geekretreat in South Africa, I’ve been lucky enough to engage with works in ways ranging from an afternoon cup of coffee, to a weekend of looking at using technology to address social issues, to building a new product fro the ground up.

Just wanted to share some of those experiences with you. While it’s not always clear where these interactions are headed when they start, i’ve never regretted any of the connections I’ve made. (and yes, i’ll be glad to see my fellow American entrepreneurs and friends in San Francisco when i return home later this week!)

And for those of you visiting the Bay Area and San Francisco from other countries, feel free to drop me a line and see if we can meet up! I always enjoy sharing stories from the SF / Silicon Valley tech scene, and getting new perspectives on technology and entrepreneurial projects the world over.

As software increasingly moves into the cloud, we’ve gotten used to upgrades being rolled out invisibly on our favorite web-based applications ranging from Gmail to the New York Times, and receiving notifications after the fact of functionality which has been added or changed.

If this approach works, then why is so much of our time still being wasted on manually installing or confirming updates on my laptop computer, smartphone, and blog software?

Why not have all our application upgrades installed silently in the background one week after release (or whatever point the app can be reasonably declared “stable”). Have a user preference setting to opt out of the upgrades for people that need to have a static operating environment, and allow early adopters to upgrade instantly for every new release. Otherwise, no notifications, questions, prompting, or anything else. Just update the application when the user quits out of it, or the system finds a quiet time to run the update.

In other words, take software updates from from a 1+ click process to a zero-click process.

Just think of the amount of productive time reclaimed globally, in addition to the reduction in calls to tech support along the lines of “An upgrade dialog box appeared. What do I do? Is it malware or real?”. (And the security advantage of not having users getting fooled by malicious/fake software update dialog boxes)

In addition, there’s a tremendous opportunity for Apple to have a simple, centralized Software Update manager in OS X that developers could use to push their updates through, so you wouldn’t need each application to individually check for updates through their own solution.

Let’s look at a few of the painful software update “user experiences” that we have today in OS X and iPhone:

1.) Apple Software Update: A multi-step process, complete with admin password requests, system restarts, and multiple update “scans”.

2.) iPhone App Updates: A two-click process involving entering my iTunes password (and why am I entering my password to download free software?)

3.) WordPress updates, both for the CMS system itself and its many plugins.

4.) Firefox’s update process, both for the application and keeping its many extensions current. (I appreciate Mike Morgan’s drive to simplify the update process in Firefox)

5.) Adobe Flash’s update process, which on OS X with Chrome still involves mounting a disk image and running an installer app. For EVERY release.

While a software update process that silently updates your computer’s software in the background has its own potential issues, I’d posit that it beats all of the experiences listed above. (With the caveat that iPhone firmware updates and similar major changes should get user approval before they occur.)

It seems like Google has already taken this lesson to heart with their Chrome web browser. Their concept of “channels” for stable versus beta releases, and their automatic update system within the browser, has that “just works” feeling which is the hallmark of a great user experience.

For the rest of the apps out there, I’d love to use a stopwatch to time exactly how many minutes of my time in a month is spent on the feeling of false productivity that comes with your software updates. If you multiply that time by the number of members of a user community, say OS X and iPhone users in the US, and you’d see some serious potential time gains.

I’ve been happily using MacPorts for many years here at Downtempo for our package management system on our OS X development machines. It’s easy, the defacto standard when I moved to OS X several years ago, and reminds me of the FreeBSD ports tree enough that using it was already second nature from my FreeBSD admin days.

However, I’d been hearing an increasing amount of comments about the ease of use of the brew package management system (including this ebullient article from Engine Yard), so I decided to try out brew instead of MacPorts on a new OS X machine I was setting up.

Bam. It took all of 5 minutes before I was completely sold on it, and about a day before I started converting my other machines over to brew instead of MacPorts as well. Besides the slightly quirky setup process with permissions (although it looks like their latest installation instructions have resolved this), it was ridiculously fast, took up far less space than the MacPorts tree, and gave me all the packages I needed to get things done.

If you’re on OS X and haven’t tried brew yet, check it out. MacPorts, it’s been a wonderful 3-year affair, but I’ve switched my loyalty over to brew.

We have recently got our app, Diary Mobile, approved by Apple. It was under review for 6 days and it took one more day until we were in the App Store. We actually used PhoneGap to replace a previously built native app developed by a third party and decided to bring development in house for agility.

We wanted to share and give confidence that PhoneGap apps are getting approved by Apple. We were pretty anxious. Some points I am sure you will all ask is what we used and how it was. The app was built with PhoneGap 0.9.2 and Sencha Touch 1.0.1a, it uses Flurry for analytics via a PhoneGap plugin. We’ve upgraded both PhoneGap and Sencha Touch to the latest and greatest for a future release, currently on a development branch.

Some points of interest…

• We built a Flurry API PhoneGap plugin for iOS (to be released open source in the near future). It goes to show that PhoneGap makes it very easy for us to extend the code if something is missing. Especially if the Objective-C only native option is open source. Even if you have no knowledge of Objective-C, there are plenty of examples of PhoneGap plugins over at PhoneGap’s Github page to get you started.
• We also built another PhoneGap plugin to use the Local Notifications on iOS (also to be open sourced soon).
• We are looking at using the core codebase to create an Android version for the next release, then Blackberry.
• Performance was the biggest challenge, Sencha Touch is quite a beast and we’ve had to patch quite a lot of it to make it more performant and apply bug fixes.
• The app uses a lot of Ajax calls and stores everything in HTML5 Local Storage.
• We built an entirely REST API for which the app communicates with to make it as efficient and fast as possible.

When we were first building this App, we were always looking for affirmation of what to build it with (rejection worries,etc). So we hope this post helps relieving some of those worries and prove a combination of a Javascript Framework with PhoneGap works well.

We have to say it wasn’t easy, performance was tricky at times. Here are some tips…

• Initialize variables outside of FOR loops.
• For Sencha Touch, actually look at the source code, it’s a lot more readable than it seems.
• Cache using Global variables.
• Keep Ajax calls efficient and minimize starting of asynchronous calls all at once by making them to be action based. Similar to techniques when caching a normal website.
• It’s javascript, you will need to get your hands dirty using hacks with setTimeout() once in a while.

The App is free but needs you to sign up as it compliments our web application at Diary.com. You can download the app at http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/diary-mobile/id357481953?mt=8

We hope to share more of our journey and battles as our app grows. Good luck with your PhoneGap development!

- Kenneth Lee (CTO at Diary.com)

William Morris was an important figure in my house growing up. Mostly because he was one of my grandmother’s muses (growing up as she did in Southern California surrounded by the work he inspired in the California Craftsmen, e.g. the sublime Gamble House). And we had the best picture books of his works lying around the house. (the fact that he was also a socialist and anarchist as well as a successful aesthetic theoretician and artist helped later)

Which is all apropos of very little except my thinking about why I’m so sympathetic to the design philosophy of what I call “flourishes.” Flourishes, as I think of them, are the elements you add to a design not because they are necessary or straightforward, but because they’re often hard and interesting, and their inclusion speaks of a better world than the one we live in. That’s core to my personal definition of craftsmanship.

Which again is apropos of nearly nothing, except it’s on my mind as I think about this blog post, which is mostly about dates and Flickr. (and to a lesser extent craftsmanship)

I like shoeboxes

I think dates are important. I think history is important too. I’m a self described calendar dork. And I fret about the warm bath of now-ness we seem to be currently living in; real time a synonym for ephemerality and disposability. If there is anything this culture needs less of, it is disposability. I some times claim this will be the great era of forgetting, an entire generations learnings/thoughts/beliefs as if writ in water. Which is suppose why I twitched a bit about Jason’s perfectly valid critique of the current state of sociality on Flickr, namely that it’s stagnated.

So I wanted to talk a bit about the date handling flourishes in Flickr. (I worked on nearly none of this, and much of it was already in place by the time I joined.)

Upload dates vs Taken dates

The date you uploaded a photo to Flickr is stored in epoch seconds, and can’t be earlier then the date you joined Flickr.

The date your photos was taken is stored in a MySQL datetime technically giving you the ability to label your photo as being taken solidly 800+ years before anything most of us would describe as the invention of photography. Which is a little silly. But I do love this photo of the Blue grotto, Capri Island, Italy taken in 1890. (in fact you can see all your favorite photos taken before 1900, I have four)

Fundamentally this split between system activity time, and human editable creation date models a world where the people who use your software do something other than use your software. You have to decide how you feel about admitting that possibility.

Circa dates, and date granularity

If you visit most photo pages the date does the semi-standard human friendly date thing aka if the photo was taken recently it will say “taken 18 minutes ago”, otherwise it will say “taken on August 10, 2008″.

But if you visited that Blue Grotto photo you’ll notice the date is listed as “This photo was taken some time in 1890.” That’s date granularity. Flickr taken dates come in 4 levels of granularity, exact, year-month, year, and circa.

What’s circa? Circa is a flourish. Circa is the sort of feature you only get when you care about the craftsmanship. You can checkout the George Eastman House archives, circa 1860. Those photos were all taken in 1860 plus or minus 5 years.

Computers demand exactitudes by default, but it’s a laziness of which we are collectively guiltily that we’ve traded a few programmer and compute cycles for a rich and nuanced societal understanding of time.

Archives

It should probably go without saying, but if you want to understand the story arch of someone’s life (not just the this week’s episode), having access to browsable archives is pretty key. The photos from friend page probably is the most neglected page based on it’s level importance, but the archive pages are the most neglected page on Flickr. Still they do the job.

(there’s a comparable page for places places, instead of dates, that never quite got launched, but you can sort of fake it with the personal map page)

Also, you know, just being able to jump back to a arbitrary page in history in the stream.

Date ranges on sets

This is another flourish feature. One of my favorite.

Last Summer, Jazz and I made a 2400 mile loop up through Nova Scotia. On that page in a small grey font you’ll see a note telling you the photos are “from between 04 Jul 2010 & 12 Jul 2010.” That tells a story. Immediate nostalgia. For me at least. Probably doesn’t do much for you. But that right there is my second favorite feature on Flickr. (the “You + X” pages, being my first, or really just this page of Jazz and me )

However on a more substantial set, like Steve Ford’s First Cups set, with 2036 pictures of his first cup of coffee each day for 6 years, the between dates allow you to jump around within the set and provide quick orientation.

This is a time linear navigation model, but date way markers are at least surfaced. (also this is in many ways a post-facto rationalization of the fact that sets weren’t originally paginated)

Trending Tags

This is most hidden, and probably most experimental (that actually got launched). If you go to the global map, and click the House icon, you’ll be presented with a map of geolocalized trending topics (today’s include “folklife” in Seattle, and “marchadaliberdade” in Sao Paulo, BR).

Search + Dates

Just having real search is considering something of a craftsman’s flourish these days, but assuming we’re executing at a level of competence that allows for search, adding dates as first class selectors to your search make it possible to have a page like all the photos from your contacts taken between 1980-1990.

In conclusion

No conclusion. Just some design notes, in case you get inspired, you know, for next time.

(nota bene: depending on how active you are on Flickr many of these search links might come up blank for you, I tend to use Flickr’s ability to scope searches to only things that are personally relevant to me, my favorites, my contacts, my photos, etc, your view of these links will be scoped to your personal world view. Whether or not I should be able to share my personalized view of the world publicly ala Twitter’s recently revived “With Friends” feature was heavily debated, but eventually was sacrificed on the altar of performance concerns in a system with rich privacy settings)

4G is barely in its infancy and it has already been through so much. First it was fake, and then some solid lobbying on carriers’ parts convinced the International Telecommunication Union to sing a new tune that would allow telcos to call LTE, WiMAX and even certain 3G technologies “4G” without blatantly lying. Though 4G’s definition is now anything but clear, carrier marketing soon could be — new legislation currently in hands of the U.S. House of Representatives could potentially require U.S. wireless service providers to define guaranteed minimum data speeds that customers can expect of their networks. Since two tin cans and a piece of string can basically be called a 4G network according to the ITU’s loose guidelines, this bill — dubbed the Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act — would be a big step toward weaving through marketing tomfoolery and letting customers know just how 4G their 4G network really is. While the benefits to subscribers are fairly obvious, whether or not the proposition might become law depends largely on how much lobbying carriers are prepared to do.

[Via Macworld]

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I’ve really enjoyed this semester’s web architecture class taught by seasoned web geek, Erik Wilde. With lectures and assignments on everything from geolocation in html5, to the possibilities offered by offline storage, to security and privacy on the web, it’s been really interesting to get this big picture perspective on the web as a whole.

Erik recently pointed to two examples of Internet navel-gazing by Wired – once in 1997 in an article entitled ‘Push!‘ and more recently, ‘The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet!‘ from September this year. The 1997 article told us to ‘kiss (our) browser goodbye!’ declaring that ‘The Net has begun offering things you simply can’t browse.’ The basis for their reasoning? The web doesn’t (didn’t) work anymore.

If the Web were working perfectly for everyone, we might not need to contemplate subtle new variations. But strong forces are dislodging the browser from its throne:

First is the little-uttered secret that many Web users suffer a sense of being lost and overwhelmed. That’s why 50 percent of regular users in one recent survey report that they simply don’t surf anymore – they hit the same sites every time they log on. The best part of the Web is its worst: it’s a web. You don’t know where the good stuff is, and when you land there, the signal is camouflaged by all the noise. Clicking becomes Russian roulette. Yeah, rolling your own is very rewarding, but often we’d like someone else to slip us a ready-made. Even though it may not be as nifty as the one we made. Or maybe because it is niftier and better made. As it is now, there is an audience of millions with high expectations, and they aren’t being satisfied.

I agree that the Web became (is?) huge and overwhelming, but when Kevin Kelly and Gavin Wolf said that that would drive us away to the comforting arms of big (television-type) media producers where we would once again sink into the couch to have our content delivered (pushed) to us. What actually happened was that the companies who rose up were the ones who helped us find the good stuff. Google pushed out other competitors because it analyzed human-generated links to web pages (assuming web pages linked from many important pages are themselves likely to be important) rather than looking at individual sites say about themselves. Twitter enables us to tell one another what we’re reading – taking us places we’ve never been to before. Rather than “going back” to big media producers to show us what’s good (I, for one, never left for what it’s worth), we’ve found better ways of asking trusted individuals and communities where to find quality information.

It’s 2010 and the browser (and the www for that matter) are both still looking pretty healthy despite Wired’s doomsday predictions. But Wired (now from the perspective of Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff) are sticking to their guns and making the ‘push vs pull’ argument yet again. People want content to be pushed to them, says Wired. Take a look at APIs, apps and the smartphone. ‘Tens of millions of consumers (are) already voting with their wallets for an app-led experience,’ they say.

And the Web of YouTube, Twitter and weblogs? Ah, say Anderson and Wolff: that’s still going to be there — don’t you worry. Actually it turns out that they’re only talking about the ‘commercial content side of the digital economy’ (my emphasis) when they say that the ‘Web is dead’:

‘(T)he great virtue of today’s Web is that so much of it is noncommercial. The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.’

So basically what they are telling us is that the Web is only dead for companies? We’re off on the Web sharing videos on YouTube and pointing friends to new blogposts we’ve found on newsworthy topics and the companies are off there in the apps delivering that same content back to us in app format? Anderson seems to think that, because it’s just the companies who are moving off the Web, we don’t have to worry about the decline of open standards:

(Jonathan) Zittrain argues that the demise of the all-encompassing, wide-open Web is a dangerous thing, a loss of open standards and services that are “generative” — that allow people to find new uses for them. “The prospect of tethered appliances and software as service,” he warns, “permits major regulatory intrusions to be implemented as minor technical adjustments to code or requests to service providers.”
But what is actually emerging is not quite the bleak future of the Internet that Zittrain envisioned. It is only the future of the commercial content side of the digital economy.

Is Anderson saying that it’s ok for commercial services to be closed simply because we can go off and do all this ‘noncommercial’ stuff on the Web where, presumably, such closed systems are not going to be in place?

I get the Netflix example, but I really don’t understand how this will play out in the so-called user-generated content space. And I’d give my left kidney (maybe) to know what would happen to Facebook if they started charging for their service in app-format.

I just can’t see it happening but that’s the funny thing about the future…

HTML5 and the future are coming to a mobile browser near you and faster than we may have expected. Over on Maximiliano Firtman’s blog he talks in detail about some of the new features available in Safari in iOS 4.2.

*Accelerometer
*Gyroscope support through the DeviceOrientation API
*WebSockets API from HTML5
*Updated HTML5 Form Support
*Partial XHR-2 Support
*Print Support
*New JavaScript data types
*New DOM events
*Enhanced SVG and Canvas support

via Safari on iPhone & iPad 4.2: Accelerometer, WebSockets & better HTML5 support | Mobile Web Programming.

Here’s a demo of the Accelerometer working on an iPhone in Safari that I found on the ReadWriteWeb’s write up on the new HTML5 features.

See from a 4.2 iOS device here

Obviously since PhoneGap leverages webkit on the device your PhoneGap based apps will get acces to these great new features too. Quit doubting web technologies and start thinking cross platform!

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Fred Wilson a very well respected investor just came to a realization about HTML5 apps that is going to send fan boys screaming!

I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.

via A VC: HTML5 Mobile Apps. So how much money is Fred going to be putting in companies building multiple native apps per platform? This is going to be more an more the case as HTML/JS technologies evolve and devices get faster. Fred’s not even talking about PhoneGap apps which could give you even more features that makes you HTML5 equal to a native app, yet cross platform. Although a large number of technologists have understand this for a long time it’s nice to see non tech focused folks starting to realize that HTML5 can be on par with native apps…so don’t through your money away!

For insights from Fred I’d have a look at the recent interview from Fred at O’reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit. Fred calls it like he sees it and doesn’t get wrapped up in hype that other folks in the echo chamber might.

FYI. Fred’s an investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and others you may have heard of via Union Square Ventures.

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Earlier this month, I got this email from a friend:

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this site? This is exactly what I was trying to create and just spent the last few weeks pulling people together to build me a site. Do you know how they are doing? They never once came up through my competitive intelligence and I just learned about them. Would like to know before I dump anymore money in my venture.”

This was my response:

“I can’t give you any insider information on any of these companies. I know the founders of all of them. It doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with you. It’s good to know the market but the competition is irrelevant. The market is big. Winning comes by knowing the customer better, executing better, and continuing to work on the problem after sane people have cashed out. If a competitor is going to scare you, you shouldn’t have started a business in the first place. Every big market or successful business will attract competitors anyway. Always assume competition.”

This was originally published on Quora. See my original post and the comments here.

This is a golden age for web browsers — healthy competition with four major players and several notable minor players.

Interesting design analysis by Justin O’Beirne, regarding why city labels are more legible and easier to scan on Google Maps than on Bing or Yahoo Maps.

There have been mumblings about this in the past, but The Guardian is now claiming the project is almost ready, and it could even be unveiled later this month. The iPad-only newspaper will be called The Daily and is said to be available exclusively on iPad tablets. It’s price? $0.99/week. There are reportedly over 100 journalists assigned to managing The Daily with them all working out of the 26th floor of the News Corp offices in New York. Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp., has been saying that this is the future of online news content, and that “consumers are willing to pay for high-quality, original content.” On the flip side, Apple engineers have reportedly been working on the launch of The Daily by making sure the technical back end system is in place for a newspaper subscription service. This will be extremely interesting to see play out…

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If you’re a Verizon FiOS residential broadband customer, with a need for Internet speed, listen up. Big Red has just announced a new plan that boasts some ridiculously fast, lust-worthy uplink and downlink speeds. How fast you ask? How about 150Mbps down and 35Mbps up.

“With a downstream speed of 150 Mbps, consumers can download a two-hour, standard-definition movie (1.5 gigabytes) in less than 80 seconds, and a two-hour HD movie (5 GB) in less than four and a half minutes,” quips the press release.

“The 150/35 Mbps residential offer will be available to the majority of FiOS-eligible households, and sold as a stand-alone service starting at $194.99 a month when purchased with a one-year service agreement and Verizon wireline voice service.”

As you can see, the new service does not come cheap, but if you can afford, justify, or write-off the new hotness, we recommend giving Verizon a call and ordering the high-test connection. The press release is awaiting your scrutiny after the break.

New Verizon FiOS Internet 150/35 Mbps Offer Launches Consumers Into Broadband’s Fastest Lane

NEW YORK – November 22, 2010 – Verizon is launching 150/35 megabits per second (Mbps) Internet service – the fastest mass-market broadband service in the nation – over the company’s all-fiber-optic FiOS network.  The company has begun to roll out the ultra-high-speed service to the majority of the more than 12.5 million homes that the FiOS network passes, and will make the service available to Verizon FiOS small-business customers by the end of the year.

Verizon’s new Internet service surpasses competitors’ offers by pumping three times the downstream speed previously available to FiOS customers.

“By offering the fastest mass-market Internet service in the nation, we’re supporting the immediate and future speed needs of bandwidth-hungry consumers,” said Eric Bruno, Verizon vice president of product management. “The new 150/35 Mbps FiOS Internet offer establishes a new benchmark for high-speed Internet in America, and paves the way for a flurry of emerging bandwidth-intensive applications to reach mainstream status.”

The Difference for Customers

With a downstream speed of 150 Mbps, consumers can download a two-hour, standard-definition movie (1.5 gigabytes) in less than 80 seconds, and a two-hour HD movie (5 GB) in less than four and a half minutes.

Downloading 20 high-resolution photographs (100 megabytes) would take less than five and a half seconds using the 150/35 Mbps service.  With the 35 Mbps upstream speed, consumers can upload those same 20 high-resolution photos in less than 23 seconds.*

The 150/35 Mbps residential offer will be available to the majority of FiOS-eligible households, and sold as a stand-alone service starting at $194.99 a month when purchased with a one-year service agreement and Verizon wireline voice service.

Verizon will continue to offer on a stand-alone basis its next-fastest FiOS Internet speed of 50/20 Mbps, as well as its 25/25 and 15/5 speed tiers.  FiOS Internet speeds of 35/35 Mbps, 25/25 Mbps and 15/5 Mbps will continue to be available in double-, triple- and quadruple-playbundles matched with FiOS TV, FiOS Digital Voice and Verizon Wireless service.

Bruno said the 150/35 Mbps tier takes advantage of Verizon’s robust all-digital, all-fiber-optic network, which extends directly to consumers’ homes and  will ultimately serve 18 million households.  The new speed tier will provide immediate value to consumers already using applications that require high downstream and upstream bandwidth.

“Our new 150/35 Mbps offer will also support burgeoning bandwidth-intensive applications such as Internet video to TV and PC, 3D TV and movie downloads, high-definition and real-time video conferencing, and online data backup,” said Bruno.

Amy Lind, broadband research manager for the global technology market intelligence firm IDC, said: “This is about more than Verizon zooming to the top of the broadband speed chart.  It’s a reflection of Verizon’s vision. Verizon understands that this kind of bandwidth will fuel new product and service development down the road and is poised to allow its customers to reap the benefits of those innovations in the future.”

Introduction of the new 150/35 Mbps FiOS Internet service follows recent Verizon field trials that achieved connection speeds of nearly 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), both downstream and upstream.  When a more advanced XG-PON2 technology was connected to the network several weeks later, connection speeds of 10 Gbps were reached on Verizon’s fiber-optic network.

Once service is connected, Verizon FiOS Internet customers have access to the Verizon In-Home Agent, a free application that gives them valuable tools to set up services.  In-Home Agent will help customers configure Wi-Fi links, set up and manage voice mail, auto-fix video problems, and trouble-shoot and correct Internet issues – all with the simple click of a mouse.

* Upload and download time estimates based on maximum connection speeds. Actual throughput speeds will vary.

Every few weeks or so, I reiterate my wish for an Android analog to the iPod Touch — something more or less comparable to state-of-the-art Android phones in terms of performance, software, and quality, but costing, say, $250 (or less) with no contract.

There are some maybes out there already, I know.¹ But why do I even care? Basically it’s that I’d like to stay up to date on Android, and on Android apps. Sort of like how if my primary interest were console video games, I’d almost certainly own both a PS3 and an XBox 360. I have this notion in my gut that if I want to stay current on mobile app platforms, I should have at least one Android device to go along with my iPhone and iPad.

But, the thing I’ve noticed, eight months after returning a Nexus One I borrowed for six weeks from a friend, is that, well, I don’t seem to be missing much.

I’ve complained, numerous times, about the “how many total apps are in your store?” metric — the idea that Apple is “winning” because there are more iOS apps than there are apps for any other mobile platform. If quantity of app titles were all that mattered, we’d all be using Windows, not Mac OS X, right? Having the most apps matters, but having the best apps matters too. The sweet spot for a platform is to do well in both regards.

Quantity of titles is, in some way, a measure of a platform’s strength. But what I care about are the great apps. Where are the great, or even good, exclusive third-party apps for Android?

Let’s sort all Android apps into the following categories:

1. Apps from Google.
2. Third-party apps that also exist on iOS.
3. Third-party apps that are exclusive to Android.

From my time spent with the Nexus One early this year, I know that Google’s Android apps are pretty good. These include both the core system apps, and the closed-source “Google Experience” apps like the dedicated Gmail client and Google Maps.

There are definitely a fair number of apps in the second category — those ported to both iOS and Android. Examples: Amazon’s Kindle client, Pandora, and a few popular games, such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump.

But what I find striking is that the apps in the third category — those exclusive to Android — are almost entirely unappealing or irrelevant to iOS users.

That’s not to say there’s nothing in Android, as a system, that appeals to iPhone owners. Built-in turn-by-turn navigation on certain models. A system-wide notification system. Widgets on the homescreen. Over-the-air system updates. Unrestricted background processing for third-party apps, battery-life be damned. But those are things that are built into the system itself, or which otherwise come from Google. What I’m questioning is the strength and depth of Android’s third-party developer support.

Which are the apps, from developers other than Google, that I should feel like I’m missing out on because I don’t have an Android device? Where are the killer apps for Android?

Turn the table and we could be here all day running down the list of high-quality, interesting apps which are exclusive to iOS.

Given the explosive sales growth of Android — that it’s now the best-selling smartphone OS in the U.S., and selling very well worldwide — isn’t this unusual? Or at least unexpected?

Popular third-party Android apps clearly tend to be of a decidedly lower design quality than popular iOS apps. (The key word in that sentence is popular — let’s concede that the majority of all apps, at the unpopular end of the long tail both in the iTunes App Store and Android Market, are junk.)

Not all popular third-party Android apps are sub-par, design-wise. But those that are well-designed, in most cases, are the ones which are not exclusive to Android. And the ones that are both exclusive to Android and well-designed, from what I’ve seen, seem to be apps that only make sense on Android, insofar as they wouldn’t be allowed in the App Store.

One example is Slide Screen, from Larva Labs. It’s a home screen replacement that shows a very attractive list of status information and notifications. Looking at a screenshot, most people would guess it’s an iOS app, not an Android app. (Larva Labs even took the trouble to embed a real version of Helvetica in the app, rather than use the low-brow fonts that ship with Android.) Another home screen replacement for Android that looks good is LauncherPro. Swype, a gesture-based third-party keyboard, is another. But none of these apps could exist for the iOS App Store, because iOS doesn’t support things like third-party home screen replacements.

At this point, I’m guessing, Android fans are ready to exclaim that the fact that Android supports things like home screen replacements (or other system-level tools, such as touchscreen keyboard replacements) — and that iOS does not — is precisely why they prefer Android, and/or consider iOS to be an unacceptable toy, or what have you. But, again, that’s not the argument I’m making. I’m talking about third-party developer exclusives — and the only ones Android has are ones that Apple doesn’t want.

Android’s Top Apps

Two weeks ago, TechCrunch ran a feature by Alex Ahlund: “Top 30 Android Apps of All Time”. (Ahlund seems well-credentialed to assemble such a list; he ran the Android app directory AndroidApps.) It’s really three separate top 10 lists: free apps, paid apps, and games.

In the free list, the top five apps are all available for iOS,² or, in the case of #5, Barcode Scanner, have equivalent if not superior iOS alternatives. The first app in the list that’s exclusive to Android is #6, Lookout — an anti-virus app.

In the paid list, Android exclusives include Root Explorer (a file system manager), Advanced Task Manager (a process monitor/killer), a collection of home screen widgets, SetCPU for Root Users (a hack for overclocking your device’s CPU), and CacheMate for Root Users (for manually managing system caches). Spot a trend?

And then we get to the games.

Three of them are also available for iOS: Fruit Ninja, Zenonia, and Angry Birds. One is WOW Keyboard, which isn’t itself a game, but rather a remote control for playing World of Warcraft on your Windows PC. Topping the list is Robo Defense, a tower defense game that I’m tempted to say is the Hydrox to Fieldrunners’s Oreos, but I fear that’s an insult to Hydrox. Abduction is an avowed clone of Doodle Jump, the promotional video for which doesn’t even show the game in action. The only exclusive Android game on the list that strikes me as appealing is SNESoid, a Super Nintendo emulator. I.e., the best games exclusive to Android were written for a mid-’90s console system from Nintendo.

Compare and contrast with the library of exclusive games for iOS. Just in the past few days alone, I’ve bought three new exclusive iOS games, any one of which would surely beat any of the exclusive Android games on Ahlund’s list of all-time best ones: Astronut from The Iconfactory, Rage HD from Id Software, and Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner from LucasArts. (Total cost for all three games: $9.) That games of this caliber are all exclusive to iOS is, arguably, the biggest hole in the argument that Android is to iOS what Windows was to the Mac. Say what you want about the quality edge that Mac software holds over Windows, but Windows has always had the games.

The App Console

It’s actually not true that SNES emulation is exclusive to Android. Rather, it’s exclusive to the copyright-violation free-for-all Android Market when compared to the iOS App Store. Cydia, though, has a bunch of emulators available for jailbreak iOS users, including SNES.

In fact, the Android Market, as a whole, bears a lot more resemblance to the Cydia app store than it does to Apple’s official App Store. This is both in terms of content (system hacks, geek utilities, lower-quality UI design) and audience (the sort of users who put “task killers” and home screen replacements at the top of their favorite app lists). Browse the Android Market apps listed at sites like DoubleTwist and AppBrain, particularly the most popular lists. Then browse the listings in the Cydia app store, and tell me there isn’t a strong similarity.

I’m not saying Android is in trouble. The opposite, in fact: I think it’s going to continue growing — in terms of handset sales — despite this. And maybe as Android handset sales grow, this situation will change, and developers will start creating exclusive killer apps for the platform, drawn by the size of the market.

But I am saying that Android, today, is thriving despite the fact that its third-party software library is very weak compared to iOS’s. It’s not that most top-notch mobile apps are written for iOS. It’s that almost all of them are, despite the fact that Android, by most accounts, has surpassed iOS in phone sales and perhaps drawn even in unit sales overall. Android developer support has grown over the past year, but at nowhere near a rate that’s commensurate with the growth in Android handset sales.

So: Why?

When you think about competition between platforms in other fields, like game consoles — Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo — there’s a strong correlation between device sales, developer support for the platform, and software sales. In mobile computing, it’s not so much that there’s no correlation between hardware sales and the app market, but that there really is only one console-like app market: Apple’s. Keep in mind that Symbian is still the best-selling “smartphone” platform worldwide, and that BlackBerry has a larger installed base than Android. I’ve premised this piece on a comparison between only iOS and Android because Android is the one platform that, technically, seems most capable of supporting exactly the same sort of apps that iOS does. But no one has a console-like success story like Apple’s App Store.

My hypothesis hinges on three factors:

1. Apple has carefully constructed iOS and the iTunes App Store to support this “app console” model.

2. Developers, large and small, have swarmed to Apple’s app console model, with consumer-friendly apps, design, presentation, and pricing.

3. iOS users understand the app console model and have embraced it — both in terms of a willingness to look for and install apps, and a willingness to pay for them.

None of those three things are true for Android.

Android, perhaps, could be an app console, technically, but it doesn’t seem like that’s how it’s being used in practice. Google doesn’t treat it that way, developers don’t treat it that way, and Android users don’t see it that way. In fact, many of the most popular third-party Android apps are ones which treat Android like a PC rather than a console — background apps, task killers, system home screen replacements, alternative keyboards, and the like.

The mere existence of things like task killers and anti-virus apps for Android — let alone that such utilities are popular — erodes consumer trust. Inherent to the console model is that third-party software can’t — not shouldn’t but can’t — damage or gum up the system.

Developers complain, not without merit, that the iTunes App Store is rigged toward low-priced apps. But the Android Market seems rigged toward no-price apps. Apple is making a high-profile foray into mobile advertising, yes, but it doesn’t seem to be displacing the market for paid apps. On Android, on the other hand, advertising seems to be the only way for developers to generate significant revenue. Paid Android apps don’t seem to sell well. Are ads a good revenue model for mobile games?

I spoke to a source at a very successful iOS game development shop earlier this week, regarding the company’s plans for Android. According to my source, the company is investigating skipping the Android Market entirely, and working out exclusivity deals with handset makers to bundle games on Android phones. In addition to solving the revenue problem, such deals would also alleviate the technical fragmentation issues. Rather than try to make a game that runs on all or even most Android phones, they’d just have to support a limited numbers of specific handsets. Such deals may well prove profitable, but they would take Android even further away from the app console model that’s at the heart of Apple’s iOS success.

Things may change, especially if Android unit sales growth continues to outpace the industry. But as it stands, Android is a success mostly as a mobile phone — voice and text messaging — and as a client device for Google’s services and the mobile web. Millions of people have bought Android phones, and many millions more will. But iOS is a roaring success even if you take away the iPhone, and consider only the iPod Touch and iPad.

Put another way, the iPhone is clearly in close competition against Android handsets in the mobile phone market. But iOS, as a platform, almost completely dominates the mobile app console market. In the history of epic tech industry rivalries, I don’t think this situation is similar to anything prior.

A final thought, regarding Android’s relative weakness as a software platform. iOS’s exclusivity for a bunch of big-name mobile games — Need for Speed Undercover, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, Monopoly, Tetris, The Sims, Assassin’s Creed — has been broken. Not by Android, where none of these games exist, but by Windows Phone 7, a one-month-old platform.

An honest — and, to my eyes, very astute — analysis from Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund. Sometimes being good isn’t enough — you have to be the best to survive.

Greg Peters from Netflix, on why Netflix already supports Windows Phone 7, but still doesn’t support Android:

Although we don’t have a common platform security mechanism and DRM, we are able to work with individual handset manufacturers to add content protection to their devices. Unfortunately, this is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t. This clearly is not the preferred solution, and we regret the confusion it might create for consumers. However, we believe that providing the service for some Android device owners is better than denying it to everyone.

More and more, I’m convinced that Android isn’t a single platform. It’s a meta-platform upon which handset makers build their own platforms.

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Cool -- PhoneGap in the cloud. No more having to install & keep 3+ mobile SDKs updated!

We’re pleased to announce the launch of PhoneGap Build. You can visit the site to sign up for the beta–we’re distributing them in handfuls each week. Here are the details via our launch announcement:

Nitobi Inc., the creators of the PhoneGap mobile application development framework, today announces the beta release of PhoneGap Build (http://build.phonegap.com). The new service makes it easy to deploy mobile applications across multiple platforms, including Google Android, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry and more.

PhoneGap Build takes the pain out of building mobile apps for multiple platforms by compiling mobile applications in the cloud, eliminating the need for SDKs, compilers and hardware. Developers simply write apps using ubiquitous Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, upload their apps to PhoneGap Build, and get back applications for a variety of platforms. PhoneGap Build supports Google Android, Palm, Symbian and BlackBerry with support for iOS, Windows Mobile and others coming soon.

“With PhoneGap Build developers can write HTML, JavaScript and CSS, compile it in our cloud and run it natively on any mobile platform,” said Andre Charland, Nitobi CEO. “It’s a continuation of our work with PhoneGap and demonstrates our dedication to providing Web developers with a way to build mobile apps using open standards and technologies they already know and love.”

“Smart software development shops are using the cloud for test and deployment, avoiding on-premise hardware and configuration hassles,” said James Governor, analyst and co-founder, at Redmonk. “PhoneGap Build now takes the same approach with Nitobi’s open source compilation framework for turning standards-based web apps into native phone apps ready for app stores.”

PhoneGap Build is an extension of PhoneGap.com. Since winning the Web 2.0 Expo LaunchPad competition in 2009, PhoneGap has been widely recognized as a game-changer for mobile app development. The open source code has been downloaded more than 350,000 times and thousands of apps built using PhoneGap are available in app stores and directories.

To sign up for the PhoneGap Build Beta program, visit http://build.phonegap.com. Nitobi will invite new beta users each week until general release. PhoneGap Build is free during the beta period and will remain free for open source projects.

Before the invention of the internets, information was a hot commodity. If you needed to acquire information on an unknown or obscure topic there were several options at your disposal: the public library, that eccentric uncle who always knew the strangest things, and… encyclopedias. Hell, if you’re old enough you might even remember encyclopedia salesman going door-to-door hawking the novels of knowledge to you or your parents. Well, if you’re a shade too old for the days of the encyclopedia salesman, and Wikipedia wasn’t around when you were an undergrad, you’re definitely a going to remember Microsoft Encarta...

Microsoft Encarta was first launched in 1993 by the Redmond software giant after purchasing the rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. The digital reference set — which was bundled on CDs and later DVDs — contained tens of thousands of articles, was easy to search, and required zero shelf-space in one’s abode. Encarta gained tremendous popularity throughout the 90′s as it was frequently bundled with new computer systems free of charge. In 1998, Microsoft bought Collier’s Encyclopedia along with New Merit Scholar’s Encyclopedia to further supplement their digital reference set, and, at its peak, Encarta had over 62,000 articles. Microsoft’s Encarta software is often credited as the force behind the destruction of companies such as World Book, who had previously dominated the encyclopedia market for nearly 100 years.

However, just as the dominance of print encyclopedias was brought to an end by the personal-computer revolution, so to was the age of Encarta by the internet revolution. As the 21st-century moved forward, more and more knowledge-seekers made “online” their go-to reference source. Search engines such as Google and free, collaborative encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia led to the software’s dethroning. Eventually, after a sixteen year existence, Microsoft shutdown Encarta in 2009.

There you have it, this week’s stroll down memory lane. We’re interested to hear about your Encarta memories… and curious to know if anyone has a complete, print, encyclopedia-set older than Andrew.

Thanks to Zara for this week’s Throwback Thursday suggestion!

BGR’s Throwback Thursday is a weekly series covering our (and your) favorite gadgets, games, and software of yesterday and yesteryear.