Competition across devices and platforms

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote an insightful post last week, noticing potentials from which web browser software and social networking services may evolve towards each other much closer than what we sense today. It is less surprising than it seems, because Facebook has been striving to become a single source of user identity and activity through projects such as Facebook Connect, while Mozilla is testing various methods to make it easier to organize one’s web browsing activities. As Kirkpatrick hypothesizes, if Mozilla integrates instant messaging, personal profiles and other networking functions to its Firefox web browser, it would directly compete with Facebook and other social networking services. Conversely, Facebook may come up with a proprietary client software which implements its social functionalities but still can be used as a web browser to surf other web sites (just more than eight months ago, no one could hardly predict that Google would build a web browser until Chrome took everyone by surprise, remember?).

As absurd as an idea might sound, there is another competitive front that spans across seemingly dissimilar markets. Only a couple of years ago, only a few would have foreseen that Apple would be a viable competitor to Nintendo; Microsoft and Sony were, apparently, but why would a computer and music player maker be any threat to the gaming console giant? Now we know, although both companies come from different backgrounds and hence divergent approaches to mobile gaming, but they do collide in the mobile gaming market more fiercely than ever.

Likewise, we would not know for sure, for now, whether web services like Facebook and web browser software like Mozilla Firefox may turn into direct competitors each seeking user participation instead of seperate products accommodating users in different levels. In a world in which PC manufacturer and mobile phone firm, movie studio and videogame publisher, or online service provider and productivity software developer become adversaries, competition heats up across various devices and platforms. Our implicit categories of products and services in these fields should be constantly revised, even fluidly reconnected to foster our own understanding of the development of such things.

R.I.P. 3D Realms

A few days ago, Shacknews reported that 3D Realms, a Texas videogame developer and publisher (the company’s official web site is no longer reachable the official web site has been updated with a good-bye message, although it is unknown until when the web site is going to last), has closed its doors. The company was infamous for being developing Duke Nukem Forever (DNF), the sequel to their 1996 hit shooter Duke Nukem 3D, for the past twelve years and failing to release it out the door. The delay was so ludicrous and notorious in the gaming world that it practically wiped away any positive image that 3D Realms had garnered over its history.

DNF had been under development for so many years (it was first announced on April 28, 1997) that it reigned the top spot on the Vaporware of the Year list written by Wired.com at the end of every year. They already gave it “the Lifetime Achievement Award” and retired it from the list in 2003, but brought it back on in 2005. Oh sure, even three or four years are like eternity in game development cycles. Yet, twelve years? Twelve years ago, we were still counting processor speeds somewhere along 233~300 MHz and did not even have a standard 56k modem (it was drafted in the following year), let alone any broadband Internet connection. Yes, DNF was the project born in those archaic times, but never done. We will never see it finished and shipped now.

There is a web site named The Duke Nukem Forever List that enumerates other videogame titles and movies released as well as major world events, scientific endeavors, sensations in pop cultures happened during the development years of DNF. Some notable facts include: more than 75 games based on the Megaman, and more than 50 games based on the Star Wars franchise have been released; Google and eBay did not exist at the time of DNF announcement; Stephen King has written sixteen novels; and even the Duke Nukem series itself has released ten “side projects” in between. It is an interesting list to go through, because we are not likely to see a videogame project drawing somewhat negative yet humorous attention in this form. Are we ever going to see another game that takes twelve years before having its own development studio shut down? I am skeptical.

If we look at the positive legacies of 3D Realms, we may notice that back in the 1990s, Apogee Software (the old name 3D Realms was known as back then) managed to establish the shareware business model, in which Apogee would distribute a portion of the videogame for free and ask the customer to pay for the full version if he or she liked it. It also nurtured some prominent videogame developers such as id Software and Remedy Entertainment in their early days, publishing some of their older games like Wolfenstein 3D and Death Rally. In spite of all the scorn it had received because of DNF, it still deserves to be remembered for its place in the history of gaming.

So, 3D Realms and its stillborn DNF is no more. Unless Take Two makes use of the Duke Nukem franchise in some form, it is very unlikely that we will ever see any sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. Probably, as indicated in the title, the promise of a sequel were not going to be fulfilled forever, after all. Rest in peace, 3D Realms.

Update: GOG.com posted a special editorial reflecting on 3D Realms’ place in the history of videogames. It is definitely worth a read.

Another update: 3D Realms issued a press release stating that it has neither closed its doors nor let go its ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise.

Platform owner is the new censorship?

Just hours ago I read this interesting article from Engadget. The official Nine Inch Nails application for iPhone/iPod Touch has been rejected by Apple because it provides a streaming version of “The Downward Spiral”, a 1994 song of the band which was deemed by Apple as “objectionable content”. The band’s frontman, Trent Reznor furiously wrote a post about the decision, according to Engadget. The notable part, as written on the Nine Inch Nails forum, is as follows (Warning: offensive language below):

Now, “The Downward Spiral” the album is not available anywhere in the iPhone app. The song “The Downward Spiral” I believe is in a podcast that can be streamed to the app.

Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem – as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid fucking standards?

And while we’re at it, I’ll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and “clean” versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart’s standards of decency – because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you’ll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any “indecent” material for sale – but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film “Scarface” completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can’t allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or CUNT? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!

Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck’s sake get your app approval scenario together.

Now, “The Downward Spiral” the album is not available anywhere in the iPhone app. The song “The Downward Spiral” I believe is in a podcast that can be streamed to the app.

Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem – as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid fucking standards?

And while we’re at it, I’ll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and “clean” versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart’s standards of decency – because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you’ll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any “indecent” material for sale – but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film “Scarface” completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can’t allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or CUNT? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!

Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck’s sake get your app approval scenario together.

Whew, it is a long citation indeed. It will not be necessary to repeat why Reznor was pissed off. Apple runs a music store for iPhone/iPod Touch which sells a digital copy of “The Downward Spiral” yet blocks an app for the same devices which streams the same song. It would be roughly equivalent to some governmental policy allowing sales of music with offensive content but prohibiting movies for mature audiences. The approval process administered by Apple, fortunately, is not yet established as a censorship system, largely because Apple’s mobile phones only occupy a portion of the market. You can always choose a different mobile phone should you be discontent with, say, Apple’s choice of “appropriate” apps on their products. Yet, for the overwhelming proportion of developers and consumers of mobile applications on iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple’s stringent yet inconsistent policy can function as if it is a censorship, after all. 

The Nine Inch Nails app rejection looks a bit more awkward because the streamed song is, allegedly, not even an integral part of the application. A similar situation, as noted by the Engadget article, has happened back in March, when Apple blocked Tweetie app on iPhone for showing offensive language on Twitter. In other words, if an application allows the user to even accidentally encounter some inappropriate content on the Internet, the application will be eradicated altogether. Oh, please. Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), a non-profit, self-regulatory body founded in 1994 to provide content ratings on videogames, actually set a prominent precedent in this area. If you have taken a look at or run a videogame lately, you may notice a descriptor which says, “Game Experience May Change During Online Play,” which stands for that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB. This means that ESRB has not rated and cannot rate all the possible speeches and contents that you and other humans may generate during your online interactions. Lewzr of Destructoid offers an even more “mature” translation of the descriptor (Another warning: potentially offensive language below):

I mean, if the game developers designed a game that was intended for Teen audiences, with Teen content, they shouldn’t be penalized just because a bunch of teens decide to use 4-letter-words when playing online because it makes them feel, you know, like they have a big penis or something.

Yes, and online bulletin boards, fora, blogs, likewise in online games, are filled with 4-letter-words indeed. And how can you penalize or block an application with contents which were not shipped with the application in the first place? That is precisely what has happened to Tweetie and the Nine Inch Nails app, especially when the so-called objectionable content can be accessed through Apple’s own shopping service as well. If these “glitches” or inconsistencies in Apple’s policies are not resolved, it may enfeeble the potentials of iPhones and iPods among the universe of mobile and web software.

If we spare a gaze at the other side, Apple is probably in jeopardy because it has very few precedents when it comes to rating software in overall. Sure, ESRB has been with us since 1994, but in our familiar world, an application was an application and a game was a game. No one felt obliged to, say, give a teen or mature rating to Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, because they are just programs without any significant content to give ratings for. Applications of iPhone/iPod Touch, by contrast, tend to draw very flexible boundaries between applications and entertainment, tools and contents, which warrant very delicate policies to consider and apply. Self-regulation is no evil and quite essential in many situations, but the last thing we need in today’s ecosystem, of all inhibitions, is a censorship.

Videogame as a storytelling medium

One day, when I was carrying out a few quests in the snow-covered region of Dragonblight in World of Warcraft (WoW), it somehow struck me as an odd experience in terms of storytelling. I have been enjoying this world built for the online videogame for months, and all of a sudden it felt as if it is an interesting, albeit imperfect, rendition of “multiverse”. Suppose for a moment that you are given a quest to slay some evil, undead dragon; you might be an influential mage who summons a number of friends to mercilessly strike down the abomination, or a lonesome crusader who struggles to dispose of the monster only with your sword, although the latter version may be a heck of a burden. There are literally thousands of quests like this available in WoW, some of which, at least, the players have to muddle through in order to empower their characters to the maximum level. Players of this online videogame may begin one of those tasks with the same settings (for instance, “we have this villain X hiding in the forest to the southeast…”) and outcomes (“we give you this reward Y for taking care of the X problem”), the means to achieve the results are largely up to each of the players. Each player is bound to have his or her version of experience with certain jobs (“I struck down the bastard with ease” vs. “it was so hard that I had to fight the same target five times”), which consequently results in thousands of different stories for each player.

It reminded me of the time when I read the Korean edition of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (the Korean translation can be found here) by Roberto Calasso a few years ago. What impressed me yet also what I did not completely understand back then was Calasso’s interpretation of ancient Greek mythology as a tree-like system of different versions of stories and anecdotes, rather than a canonical set of legends à la Thomas Bulfinch; there would be a lot of variants in how Zeus kidnapped Europa or how Theseus killed the Minotaure in Crete, yet all those variations are valid in each of themselves (for more detailed information on Calasso’s book, please read Ivar Hagendoorn’s review). This rings somewhat salient of what can be experienced in an online videogame like WoW. Perhaps, in the official, canonical lore which would be later filled in by Blizzard Entertainment (the developer of WoW) the evil monster A had been terminated by a valorous hero named B, but in your own experience, you may have killed A some time last week with a few of your friends, probably during a late weekday night session or a long weekend raid. It is not just you, though; thousands, possibly millions of other players have done the same job in each of their own ways. Maybe you or anyone else’s name will not be credited as the slayer of A next time Blizzard updates the background setting of the game, but it is significant that you have your own version of the story.

I am not stressing that WoW reaches some unprecedented pinnacle of storytelling in videogames, although it is an excellent entertainment title in its own merits. The level of storytelling, in terms of conveying deeper implications and themes through a sophiscated storyline, is better accomplished in more traditional, single-player videogames such as Planescape: Torment, Silent Hill, Grim Fandango, or BioShock. In fact, some single-player videogames like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto espouse an “open-ended gameplay” which allows their players to choose which tasks to do in order to follow the storyline that there may be little difference between those games and WoW.

There are apparent limitations to grant freedom within the in-game world though; even in the likes of Fallout, while the player is at liberty to choose the order of which quests to do, even skip some quests entirely, he or she is still obligated to follow the primary storyline which is fixed overall. You may choose to do a quest or not in WoW, but you cannot change the outcome of each episode; for instance, you cannot convince a villain to repent its wrongdoings or turn it to your own side, other than the given goal of simply killing it. Even midway through a quest, you would be confined to certain settings or availability of resources to do the job, so the rate of variation on a certain lore is kept at bay, likely to be caused less by designers’ intent on controlling the integrity of stories, but instead by the lack of resources to extend the boundaries of the in-game sandbox. However good an open-ended gameplay may deliver to videogame players, it would still be of little merit to enable them to modify even the most crucial elements of the videogame as it may break the basic structure and also be costly and time-consuming (for example, inserting different outcomes in each of the quests in WoW would require an almost infinite amount of budget).

Up to this point, I am thinking of another question that should be addressed in the videogame world, probably not now but some time in the future. As seen in titles such as Planescape: Torment or Silent Hill, the level of narratives in videogames these days was hardly imaginable in the days of Asteroids and Pong. We would witness more and more of storytelling, increasingly sophisticated, in videogames. Yet the notion of assorting a variety of those games, with or without stories, into a single category, a single concept would turn out to be misleading at some point. Strictly narrative-wise, treating Planescape: Torment the same as Pong and Tetris, because they are both “videogames”, would be equivalent to asserting that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series is on the same level with the earliest films of the Lumière brothers, because they are both ”movies.” I am not saying that Tetris or the Lumière films are inferior or of less production values. The history of motion pictures have progressed so far that the oldest films taken by the Lumière brothers, like a train incoming from far away or a group of workers walking out the factory door, would be considered as short “video clips” today rather than “movies.” You may play your favorite movie and your home video on the same DVD player, but usually you do not think that those two are the same, especially in terms of narratives or artistry. A similar notion can be applied to videogames as well. Some videogames have achieved a level of distinction on par with some movies and novels that they may not deserve the same nomenclature as other electronic entertainment titles, aside from the fact that all of them can be played on the same electronic equipment. Probably in near future videogames may start to differentiate themselves from one another, which I consider is necessary for some of them to be recognized as a legitimate medium akin to motion pictures, literature or music.

Optimal input methods on mobile phones?

I am writing this post via the WordPress application on an iPod Touch (Note: placing links had to be done on a PC afterwards). Typing on a virtual keyboard from iPhone/iPod Touch is somewhat easier and faster than on a twelve-key phone keypad (some might disagree) but harder than on a conventional PC keyboard. Still, a virtual keyboard is convenient enough to create writings longer than an SMS, although you are not likely to comfortable writing a book with this device.

Input methods on cellular phones and other portable gadgets are meeting a critical stage, because the phonewords standard (which assigns three or four alphabetic letters to a numerical key) is not feasible to yield an ergonomical experience to anyone who wants to do more than sending a few bytes of messages back and forth. Phonewords have been expedient to be used in a string of numbers like 800 toll-free numbers in the U.S. (e.g. 800-NEW-CARS), but meanwhile trying to write more than a sentence or two on phonewords turns out to be cumbersome because it is not an optimal way to input texts, after all. This has never been a problem at all before mobile phones became widespread, because no one needed to type a lot of things on wired telephones sitting at home (even FAX machines do not need a keyboard). If you carry around a mobile gadget that can run a number of applications other than simple voice conversation, however, we have a whole different situation to tackle.

So far the best way to settle this issue is to somehow emulate the computer keyboard on mobile phones, be it a virtual onscreen keyboard as in Apple iPhone, or a mini-sized keyboard as in RIM Blackberry. Although there are obvious differences between the two, the fundamental contribution that the two approaches made to the history of portable devices is that they liberated mobile phones from the legacy of traditional telephones in terms of form factor. Apple and RIM may not be the first to adopt touchscreen or mini-sized keyboard on cellular phones, but it should be acknowledged that they are the ones who made them mainstream. And nowadays, everyone else is mimicking either (or even both) of those two solutions on their smartphones.

Maybe, in a few years, the term smartphone itself may become obsolete, if every mobile phone gains capability to process various types of information akin to some kind of a portable computer. One of the aspects in this direction has been to expand the adoption of sophisticated operating systems onto mobile phones, including Nokia Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Google Android. Apart from software, the methods to interact with the device are another key area which requires further innovation on the road.  We may need more intuitive and easy-to-pick-up pathways than small editions of QWERTY keyboards to handle information on mobile phones, like voice control, which needs voice recognition technology with an array of different languages, so it would be very difficult to implement in practice. It is likely that standard telephone keypads will stay, but we may see less and less of it in the coming years. Time may tell.

Palm steps up to be Apple's rival

Ever since Palm announced Pre earlier this year, it managed to captivate people which was a genuine surprise considering its descent into irrelevance within the mobile phone market for past few years. It enjoyed its high times until, ironically, 3Com, its last parent company set it free as an independent company through IPO on March 2000, after which the stock price of the newly established Palm, Inc. plunged along with the dot-com bubble burst.

Whereas in late 1990s Palm’s products such as PalmPilot and Palm III series built almost an impregnable basis in the PDA market (thanks to an abundance of developers supplying a rich pool of applications for its Palm OS, arguably the most robust mobile OS back then), its smartphones like Treo and Centro since the early 2000s, by contrast, only met lukewarm, uneasy reception largely because they failed to stay on par with contemporary competitors. Palm’s golden days were when cellular phones were incredibly rare and managing schedule on non-Internet-connected PDAs was still a cool thing to do. It had been forgotten in the mobile phone world while newer smartphones like RIM Blackberry thrived, in almost the same way that Apple’s custom Mac OS X operating system on iPhone, upon its announcement in January 2007, immediately stole thunder from Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, which had been in the market for years.

Well, no longer, Palm declared, when it announced Pre and a brand new, Internet-oriented, mobile operating system named WebOS this January on which applications would be built with open, accessible standards and barriers for developers will be radically lowered. What has been rumored so far indicates that Palm will release Pre in June, almost at the same time when Apple is expected to unveil an upgraded edition of iPhone. It seems that Palm has also gained enough confidence to target value phones as well; it is going to extend its WebOS to the lower tier of its product portfolio–apparently a cheaper variant of Pre, named Eos, is upcoming.

Maybe it is overconfident to believe in its own success in reinvigorating itself to be a major player in the mobile devices market. For an average fan of such technological gadgets, however, it is nice to see someone finally stepping up to face Apple in its own turf: providing a convenient, seamless, Internet-capable experience on a mobile phone abounding with more than 25,000 applications available. It is yet unknown how Palm will set up a vibrant ecosystem circulating its Pre and Eos, but a challenger taking on the champion’s strengths is a pleasant news to be heard, at least. Add to that everyone else is jumping on the smartphone wagon, it is truly an exciting time to witness innovation on mobile phones. Let us wait and see if this alleged “iPhone killer” does its job right starting next month.

Use of Facebook linked to lower GPA?

Last month, a paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) was cited on various media as the latest discovery on the use of social networking services. It sounded a negative one since it claimed that it found a link between the use of Facebook and lower grade point averages (GPA) among college students. Eszter Hargittai, a communications studies professor at Northwestern University, uploaded a post immediately following the press coverage of the paper, casting skepticism on how the study had been conducted and whether the sample used in the study was representative or not. Furthermore, Hargittai, along with two other scholars, co-authored a rebuttal study on First Monday, a peer-reviewed Internet journal, constituting an alternative result that no correlation between Facebook use and students’ grades has been found (although there is a statistically significant, positive relationship between the two factors without any control variables from a nation-wide sample, the significant disappears when the controls are inserted).

Since danah boyd, a scholar working at Microsoft Research, provides an excellent summary on the academic responses to the alleged AERA study, it is unnecessary to replicate every detail that has been successfully collected elsewhere. Instead, it should be of importance to consider what boyd, Hargittai and her co-authors have to say:

Unfortunately for all of us, when scholars (or students) disseminate findings based on poor methodology that reinforce myths that the media wants to propagate, they get picked up even if they are patently untrue and can be disproved through multiple alternative data sets. (danah boyd)

As researchers, we have long known the importance of replication and peer review. Without these safeguards, an intriguing preliminary finding can enter the popular discourse as if it represents established fact. ……easily sensationalized results and a widely distributed press release positioned the findings on a path bound to spiral out of control. (Josh Pasek, eian more and Eszter Hargittai)

Well, so much for the newest discovery on the use of Internet. At least we know that the originally disseminated press release on the study cannot be used as a reasonable ground on which the use of Facebook should be discouraged. Perhaps the same level of doubt should be cast on so many academic studies reported on media almost daily. The press is not likely nor generally is it able to examine the validity and relevance of the claims made by the research papers they like to cite. The relationship between the use of Internet applications like Facebook, and various social factors including academic achievement, socioeconomic status, or group affiliation has been the subject of ongoing discussions still unresolved. It would be helpful for us to remind ourselves that many things that are on and we use from the Internet tend to change rapidly, and therefore while flat, drastic conclusions are easier to swallow, they are often misleading in shaping our convictions around the world.

Apple's next move

Forbes published an article on Apple’s usual moves lately. It picked up a semiconductor design firm named PA Semi last year, sought to employ (and eventually won) one of the prominent brains behind PowerPC (the architecture Apple employed on its Macs until its shift to Intel processors in 2005) and IBM’s former blade server division, and has just hired a high executive from AMD’s graphics division. Whatever Apple does may or may not be as significant as what its competitors such as HP or Dell do, but it is much more likely to turn out to be something more magnificent than a mere miscellaneous junk.

Of course, it should be acknowledged that not everything Apple does is endowed with some Midas touch; Newlaunches has once reflected on Apple’s history of less-than-satisfactory products. These flops include Macintosh Portable (Apple’s early jab at making computing carryable), Newton (pricey PDAs years before Palm Pilot caught on fire), Pippin (an attempt for a gaming console far too expensive with too few games) and even Cyberdog (Apple’s early suite of Internet applications). Looking back, some of these products are so lackluster that it is hard to believe that they come from the same company that introduced iPods, iPhones and MacBooks to the world.

Even with a considerable number of failures, however, Apple has been quick to satisfy it’s customers in its own aesthetically pleasing and technologically amusing ways. It was not the first company to monetize on hardware MP3 players, but its iPod line-up ended up triumphant; it is not the manufacturer that offers the most affordable laptops but its MacBooks and MacBook Pros turn out to be everyone’s dream notebooks. Apple has a history for the past decade liberating itself from the casket that it is only competent in selling computers to the education sector, graphics experts, and publishing industry; it transformed itself into a company that markets the coolest consumer electronics as well as a mediator of creative contents like music, movies, and TV shows. What is so formidable about Apple is not that its products are perfect in every aspect, but rather that they outshadow their critical shortcomings with much more obvious merits that outsmart their competing products. That is precisely why iPods and iPhones, neither of them the first MP3 player nor the first smartphone available, are considered as the main drivers of innovation in the relevant markets.

It is too hard to speculate on what Apple’s next move may be. Prior to the beginning of its last major product category, iPhone, there were an abundance of rumors surrounding a cellular phone from Apple, and of course, a load of skepticism on the prospect. Before the official announcement of the iPhone on January 2007, the furthest extent one could expect from an Apple mobile phone would have been a fixed version of Motorola ROKR, a mediocre-at-best phone which offered sync feature with iTunes but was too clunky to be lauded as everyone’s music phone (and who remembers ROKR these days?) What had been revealed and become history was an entirely new mobile phone possessing easier-than-smartphone capabilities and a lively market of mobile applications availble via a few taps on the touchscreen. Whatever Apple plans beyond the iPhone, as in the case of the iPhone, likewise, may be inconceivable to the average of us. A semiconductor design team working in unison with a blade server master and a graphics guru–I cannot tell what they are going to come up with, but I can say that I am excited to see the results.

Opera: fifteen years of stunning performance

Opera Software, a Norwegian company specializing in developing Internet software, is celebrating the fifteenth birthday of its flagship product, the Opera web browser. Opera’s history began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, Norway’s largest telecommunications company. This project would go independent the following year to establish today’s Opera Software. It has a longer history than the current incumbent on the web browser market, Microsoft Internet Explorer; the Opera project in Telenor had taken place on April 1994 while Microsoft’s web browser project commenced in summer of the same year. With the latest version at 9.64, Opera has come a long way since the early days of world wide web (and dial-up modems) to today’s gigabit Internet.

Although Opera possesses less than a percent of the web browser market on computers, it has seen more success in non-PC devices, including gaming consoles (like Nintendo DS/DSi and Wii), mobile phones, and set-top boxes for TVs. It has survived on the web with its share of healthy innovations on the way, including: in-browser email client, speed dial (ability to access favorite web sites with a single click), voice control, download manager (it even has a built-in BitTorrent client!), mouse gestures (other web browsers support it lately with plug-ins) and tabbed browsing (Opera was the first to support it since 1994). So while the majority of people are not likely to run Opera to access the Internet, but a fair load of convenient functions they use to surf the web owe a lot to what Opera has pioneered in its history of one-and-half-decade.

Still, Opera is an unfamiliar friend even to those who are enthusiastic on fiddling with new software and web applications, given its minuscule foothold in the PC software market. Even Google Chrome, a web browser that is less than a year old, ironically enjoys a larger user base than Opera. It may be argued that Google Chrome could garner so much market share in a short period of time thanks to Google’s enormous funds, but Mozilla Firefox, also a web browser, akin to Opera, constrained by scarce budgets, is threatening Microsoft with one fifth of the web browser market worldwide. Maybe it is the homework Opera should tackle onward: to translate its innovative attributes to a wider mass appeal. Last month, Vygantas Lipskas of FavBrowser.com listed six reasons why Opera web browser so far failed to secure a significant percentage of the PC web browser market; though I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, a few may be acknowledged: some functions not implemented despite community demand, failure to generate viral buzz on the browser, user interface more complicated than competing software, and so on. Opera Software may not need to heed all of it, but it should be reminded that innovation alone is not sufficient to be successful on the Internet.

That said, Opera is one of four browsers I install and use on my computers, next to Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (I usually use it only for shopping and banking purposes, thanks to ActiveX-heavy transaction modules prevalent in Korea) and Google Chrome (I am far away from developing a fondness for Apple Safari yet). It looks like a more terse, less sociable companion than its counterparts, but does its job successfully, even more admirably than others at times. As little Opera’s chance at procuring a much larger fandom seems to be, I commend it for staying on the forefront of the web, spearheading the innovation of web browsers, ahead of the pack.

Amazon.com may rule ebooks

This Monday Lexcycle, a year-old company which offers a free eBook viewing software named Stanza, has been acquired by Amazon.com, the world’s leading online bookstore as well as the latest leader in supplying ebooks through their gadget called Kindle. Stanza, according to Lexcycle’s official web site, is a free application for Apple’s iPhone (cellular phone) and iPod Touch (music/video player) that features more than 100,000 free and paid books. I, for one, have been enjoying reading The Invisible Man by Herbert George Wells through Stanza on my iPod Touch lately. While Stanza has a wide array of books for sale, it also hosts a large catalogue of books for free, most of which are classics. Amazon.com’s purchase of Lexcycle, and consequently, of Stanza, makes sense as it is a leading software for providing and selling electronic volumes on Apple’s emerging mobile platforms. Not only would this acquisition reinforce Amazon.com’s foothold in the ebook market for iPhone users, but also enable it to advance to other mobile platforms such as Nokia Symbian, RIM Blackberry or Microsoft Windows Mobile. 

Although the purchase of Lexcycle by Amazon.com is likely to receive a much smaller spotlight compared to the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle at $7.4 billion (arguably the biggest M&A in years) last week, the significance of the former may turn out to rival that of the latter some day. With Stanza added to its arsenal, Amazon.com procures a capability to deliver electronic versions of books on various mobile platforms, most notably cellular phones, which are drastically different from its own proprietary Kindle device. As David Rothman of TeleRead notes, Amazon.com now has potential to become a monopoly on ebooks, once it secures dominant market shares on various operating systems. Every book, in its electronic form, would have to be published through Amazon.com-owned Kindle or Stanza to be read as they become unavoidable gateways for ebooks. Even if Amazon.com fails to gain the majority in ebook market share any time soon, its acquisition of Lexcycle still makes it a lot harder for other companies to compete against it in the ebook business now.

Therefore in the coming years we may witness in the book industry, Amazon.com replicating Apple’s success with its iTunes platform in the music industry throughout the 2000s. Even though Jeff Bezos is no Steve Jobs and Amazon.com lacks a group of devout enthusiasts which Apple enjoys, it is more than eager to take the upcoming ebook market by storm. I would just hope that Stanza does not disappear and Amazon.com does not get to enforce DRM on every ebook on the globe. It’d be a tragedy if there is only one, Amazon.com-owned, consolidated standard in the ebook market after all.