What's "King" These Days?

People always can reasons to debate whether "content," "distribution" or "context" is king. Perhaps nobody yet is seriously arguing that "location" or "presence" or "social connections" or "mobility" is king, but one can predict that somebody will make those arguments.

One of the debates which slowly is growing, though, is over "openness" and "curated" approaches to end user experience. It would be too easy to say Apple is the foremost proponent of curation ("closed") while Android, Chrome and Firefox are examples of openness.

It might be more accurate to say the trend to curation is growing, across all platforms. You might think of curation as a culling, optimizing or editing process, where apps and software are optimized and filtered. Apple always has done this to optimize end user experience. But app stores, both mobile and soon Web app stores, also are curated environments, to a greater or lesser extent.

In Mozilla's view, for example, the open Web is the way to create rich applications, while Apple takes the opposite approach. In Apple's case, the company plans to create a new Mac Apps Store containing software expressly optimized for Apple devices and the Mac OS X operating system.

Apple plans to curate significantly, rejecting buggy apps, betas, apps built with Java, apps with Easter eggs, apps that aggregate content, apps that duplicate Apple's own apps, apps that contain pornography, violence, promote drinking and drugs, for example.

Mozilla Foundation is taking an entirely different approach for its new "OPen Web Apps" store. Designed around a "use any browser" approach, the idea is create a store that allows creation of Web apps that work in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile).

Consider the Mozilla initiative an example of the "write once, run many" approach to software. In Mozilla's vision, apps are designed to run independently of operating system or hardware. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/10/19/prototype-of-an-open-web-app-ecosystem/ for more detail.

Open Web Apps will use HTML, CSS and JavaScript and will supoprt installation to a mobile or desktop Web browser, or to a native OS desktop or mobile home screen.

Open Web Apps will use existing identity systems like OpenID and support portable purchases, meaning that an app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase. Think iTunes and you have an example of the difference between the Mozilla and Apple approaches.

Open Web Apps will support access to one or more advanced or privacy-sensitive capabilities such as geolocation on a user opt-in basis.

In Mozilla's view, apps must be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and available through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.

Open Web Apps will be able to receive notifications from the cloud, and support deep search across apps. In other words, apps can implement an interface that enables the app container (generally the Web browser) to provide the user with a cross-app search experience that links deeply into any app that can satisfy the search.

In essence, the debate over curated and open approaches is a preference for, or against, gatekeepers. But the emergence of new app stores, already announced by Google, Apple and Mozilla, should change the software development business in some key ways. Web apps should grow in popularity, and make more rapid development of lower-cost apps and lower-volume apps available in substantial quantity, as app store publishing will cost a lot less than traditional shrink-wrapped apps store in physical and online retail stores. See http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/10/web-app-stores-how-they-compar.php for more detail.

About the only safe statement is that all the traditional arguments about openness and curated approaches, including the issue of gatekeepers, are going to heat up again as the web app store trend gets established.

Watch a Mozilla video about the new Web Apps Store here: http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/labs/openwebapps/openwebapps.webm

A Look at Google TV

A look at Google TV. using the Logitech set-top.

Startups: When Desperation Leads to Success

Angel investor Mike Maples talks in this video about "pivots," those gut-wrenching, desperate changes in business model that entrepreneurs sometimes make when things really aren't going well. Sometimes a beloved idea has to be abandoned or modified in serious ways to get to a larger business.

Pivots are really hard and painful to do, without a doubt. They aren't planned, they weren't intended or foreseen. But sometimes it is the difference between huge success and middling along. Pivots also are risky. They are emotionally hard to do, since it often means abandoning a dream.

Mike Maples: “You Have to Be Willing to Throw it all away”

New Android "Gingerbread" Coming Relatively Soon?

The video apparently means a new version of Android is coming in perhaps several weeks.

How Big a Market for 3D TV?

There's always a chicken-and-egg problem when new video devices, supporting new video formats, are introduced.

Devices are useful when there is lots of content available, but lots of content isn't made available until there is a large installed base of terminals.

That isn't going to be any different with 3D television. DisplaySearch thinks those problems will be overcome over time, and they have been in the past for new content formats.

The firm forecasts that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010, with growth to over 90 million in 2014. Based on this forecast, 3D will grow from two percent of all flat panel TVs shipped in 2010, to 41 percent in 2014.

Some of us wouldn't be surprised if those forecasts fell short, though. The 3D experience imposes new conditions on television viewing, which is among the easiest of all consumer content experiences. There is value, at least for some viewers. The issue is how much new value, compared to the higher cost.

If I had to guess, right now, I'd say the adoption forecast is too steep. 

3D TV Not Growing as Fast as TV Makers Expected in 2010, but Will Become Mainstream by 2014, with 90 Million Shipments - DisplaySearch

What is Hulu Worth?

Finding the right price for a monthly video service is tough because it depends on three things: 1) the range of content available, 2) the availability of substitutes for that content, and 3) how convenient the experience is.

Pricing Hulu at $10 assumes that the value of number one can overcome the issues raised by number two and three. Does it?

Among the Hulu Plus substitutes is Hulu itself, since most of the Hulu Plus content is available on Hulu itself for free.

The additional content a user can get from Hulu Plus arguably does not provide enough additional value, and the ads tend to degrade the "convenience."

Hulu's big draw remains its first-run TV shows. But $10 will buy an awful lot of Netflix movie content, sometime soon.

Why Slashing The Price of Hulu Plus Is The Right Thing To Do

Brand Management in the Social Era

Forrester Research believes that online experiences of the future will be "customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of us, relevant to the device and to the moment, and social as a rule."

All of that has implications for brands, not the least of which is that brands increasingly are experienced on a screen, ranging from smartphone to tablet to PC to TV.

Customized, aggregated, relevant and social also means it will be increasingly easy for the brand experience to include third-party information such as comparative prices, user reviews and other information that can reinforce or weaken a brand promise.

And that sort of thing is difficult to shape and control over the full range of social mechanisms that already exist, not to mention what will increasingly exist in the future. All of that is just a way of noting that brands genuinely have lost control of their brands.

It used to be that a firm could shape and control its end user and prospect touch points. These days, those touch points include comments shared by customers all over the Web. Brand management therefore has to actively include all the major ways people talk to each other on the Web.

That is every bit as hard as it sounds.