Ubuntu's Quixotic Mobile War: HTML5 - Not Linux - Is The Key

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has never been one to think small. Walking down Oxford Street in London a few years back, he told me that one thing his money gives him is the ability to "see into the future a few years," buying things today (his example was blisteringly fast Internet service) that will be commonplace tomorrow. Not content to simply see the future, however, Shuttleworth is now trying to invent the future, elevating Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution from the sexiest nun in the Linux desktop convent to the dominant operating system for mobile devices.

It's a big goal. But is it a reasonable one?

Shuttleworth declares that "Unity [Ubuntu's user interface] in 2013 will be all about mobile ' bringing Ubuntu to phones and tablets." He makes a compelling case in a slick video. But in this, as ReadWrite's Dan Rowinski has pointed out, Canonical is already several years too late. The opportune time for an open-source alternative to Apple's heavily controlled iOS would have been at Apple's apex of dominance... which is precisely when Android staked its claim. But Ubuntu wasn't there, instead focusing on yesterday's desktop market.

Fighting Android And iOS - And Microsoft

Now Canonical must swim upstream against entrenched, premium iOS and entrenched, commodity Android, which competes well at the high end while eviscerating Apple at the low end. Add to this developer inertia, whereby mobile developers balk at even the fragmentation within these two platforms, and Canonical has entered a market that it has no reasonable chance to win.

Knowing Shuttleworth, this won't deter him in the least. I suspect it energizes him.

No matter that Microsoft, far better financed and with dramatically more industry support, appears to be failing in its attempt to dislodge either iOS or Android, despite a reasonably compelling offering for the same high-end enterprise market Canonical is targeting, in addition to the low-end feature phone market.  By most accounts, Windows Phone 8 is an exceptional mobile operating system, with stunning innovations like social integration into one's address book.  And yet it has failed to make any sort of dent in the market, leading one prominent analyst, Roger Kay, to deride Microsoft as having "reached an Orwellian impasse, in which it cannot tell the truth - even to itself" about how the market operates and its fortunes within the market.

Can Canonical hope to do better than Microsoft?

This isn't a question of intelligence. Nor is a suggestion that Shuttleworth lacks Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's flair for developer dances. It turns out that mobile is incredibly, brutally hard. I spent a year at Canonical and worked amongst exceptionally talented people. If Ubuntu on smartphones fails, it's not because the people building it are weak. It's because mobile is a terribly tough market to crack.  

Frankly, I don't think Shuttleworth's convergence argument is the right way to win. I don't want the same OS to run across my disparate devices. Or, rather, I don't want the same experience across those devices. I actually want my apps to span different devices, but that isn't really a platform problem. It's a billing issue, and not one that goes away until we escape the app stores that lock our apps to a particular store, rather than being connected to the developer.

Nor do I think developers really believe that they can write once and have their applications run anywhere. That hasn't worked on iOS or Android, and Ubuntu isn't going to be much different. It's fiction that writing an app on Ubuntu for smartphones will carry over to Ubuntu for in-car entertainment systems. Technically, that might be possible, but the user experience in those disparate systems requires a different application. I just can't see developers getting much of a reprieve by having "one OS to rule them all," even if it works as advertised.

The Internet And HTML5 Offer The Only Way In

But if we step back a moment, there is actually one OS that spans wildly different devices. It's called the Internet. And Ubuntu, as much as any other hardware-bound OS, gets it right.

In Shuttleworth's video announcement of Ubuntu mobile, he says something that could well prove the key to Ubuntu's success:

[In Ubuntu] Web applications are now first-class citizens in your launcher and switcher instead of being trapped in a browser.  Nobody else brings desktop apps and web apps together so seamlessly.

Google beat iOS in smartphones, as it's threatening to do in tablets, by offering developers and users a different experience, one built on lower costs and openness (not to mention heavy subsidies). To pit itself against Android, as Canonical is doing with Ubuntu, Canonical needs to offer something better, and not merely a better user interface, which Unity may well be. That didn't work for Microsoft, and it's unlikely to work for Canonical, because it's not enough of a differentiator for developers and consumers to really pay attention. Shuttleworth is also correct that emulating Android is likely a losing strategy.

But making the Web a first-class citizen on mobile devices? That would be a Very Big Deal, and it's one that Canonical has already started to deliver on, as Shuttleworth rightly notes. It's a potentially winning strategy because it's disruptive.

Shuttleworth stresses that being late to the mobile party is a virtue, but I can't agree. Except...he might be right insofar as HTML5 is concerned. Ubuntu's tardiness has allowed HTML5 to mature. For the first time, HTML5 job postings, which look to bloom beyond Android and iOS jobs, are about to surpass Flash developer job postings, as Indeed.com data shows:

Eliminating The Barriers Between Native And Web

This could be the perfect storm for Ubuntu to make its mark on mobile. By eliminating the sometimes silly distinction between "native" and "Web." By making the Ubuntu experience about what happens beyond any single device - about what happens in the HTML that spans different devices.  

This is, of course, precisely what Mozilla is hoping to do with Firefox OS. In an ideal world, the two open-source giants would work together, as there is far more to be gained by collaborating on making the Web a first-class mobile citizen than there is to be lost.

Regardless, launching a full-frontal attack on Apple and Google is a losing strategy. But going in through the Web's back-door, one whose mobile capabilities are already good enough and keep getting better? That strikes me as something that Canonical is well-positioned to deliver, and just the sort of industry-changing disruption Mark Shuttleworth could sink his teeth into.

CES 2013: 5 Things That You Won't See

2013 is shaping up to be a strange year for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the annual tech fête that invades Las Vegas for one grueling week every January. In 2011, tablets were kings of the desert, as manufacturers scrambled to get viable iPad competitors on the scene after Apple went and dreamed up a whole new category of device. Last year wasn't quite as flashy - previews of Windows 8 trickled out, and we all pretended that ultrabooks were the hot new thing for the better part of a week. 

In 2013, it's looking like a free-for-all. It's anyone's guess what new devices will capture the hearts and minds of CES attendees.

To find out, ReadWrite will be right there on the show floor all week with our finger on the pulse. And while we don't know yet what devices will capture the attention of the more than 100,000 attendees and worldwide press, we can already tell a few things that won't be grabbing the headlines in 2013:

1. Tablets 

Following the launch of the original iPad, companies were desperate to get a proper rival in the game - and at CES 2011, it showed. Nobody had quite figured it out yet, but suddenly there were literally 80 tablets floating around, most of them running Android. But by 2012, the tablet frenzy had slowed to a crawl, with Ultrabooks taking the lion's share of the spotlight. With Amazon and Google driving small tablet prices to the absolute rock bottom, don't expect other companies to waste much time on tablets this year.

2. Microsoft 

Microsoft announced that 2012 would be its last year at CES - for a while, at least. The company traditionally delivered a big CES keynote early in the week, but Steve Ballmer's appearance on stage in 2012 was the company's last - bizarre - hurrah. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumers Electronics Association (CEA), the group that puts on the show, claims that the lapse is just a pause in the shared trajectory of Microsoft and CES, a relationship that dates back into Bill Gates's tenure at Microsoft's helm. We'll see. For now, the company has pulled its booth too, so Microsoft won't have a presence on the show floor either.

3. The Hottest New Smartphones

Smartphone makers are increasingly keeping their mobile secrets hidden at CES. With the Mobile World Congress show just around the corner, HTC, Motorola and the rest generally launch some new mid-level devices in Vegas, but don't reveal the most earth-shattering stuff until they get to Barcelona.  

4. TVs Anyone Would Ever Actually Buy 

CES is always jam-packed with TVs, but they're getting better - and vaguely affordable - at a snail's pace. Companies will continue jockeying for title of the biggest, more pixel-dense displays around, but the impact on consumers in 2013 will be negligible. Ultra HDTV is miles from affordable (who has $25,000 to blow on a TV set?), consumers still don't really care about 3D and awful proprietary software continues to hamstring most of the ballyhooed set-top devices designed to take over your living room. 

5. Apple (Duh)

If you're at all familiar with CES, Apple's absence is a no-brainer. Content to do things on its own terms, the company that's defined the cutting edge of consumer electronics routinely opts out of the biggest CE event of the year. (Heck, Apple doesn't even go to Macworld/iWorld any more!) The Las Vegas convention halls will be generously slathered with iPhone and iPad accessories, but CES just isn't the Cupertino company's style. Apple does sometimes casually announce news during the event, but it doesn't bother to visit the desert. 

Don't call us cynical, though. We actually are looking forward to some CES innovations. It's just that we expect to dig up the really cool stuff in unlikely places, from smart homes and car tech to things we haven't thought of yet.

You never know what to expect when geeks invade Vegas, so stay tuned for plenty of highlights next week.  

Surprise! Digital Music Just Had Its Best Week Ever

After more than a decade of hand-wringing over the music industry's tumultuous decline, there's a glimmer of hope. Last week, more people paid for digital music than during any week-long period in history, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

In the week ending December 30, 55.74 million digital songs were purchased. The week following Christmas is typically a prosperous time for digital media and mobile platforms, as gadgets and gift cards are exchanged during the holidays. This year's spike was the biggest since the same week in 2008, when consumers bought 47.73 million songs.

These new numbers show that, when given a way to easily and conveniently do so, many, many people will pay for digital music. In this case, the growth appears to have been fueled by the exchange of holiday gift cards to services like iTunes and Amazon.

Digital Music Challenges Remain

Things started looking up in 2011. That's when IFPI reported that the industry saw its first year-over-year growth in music sales since it started tracking the business in 2004. That growth was only a measly 1.4%, but it sure beat the 13% decline seen in 2010. As 2012 unfolded, the outlook for digital music sales continued to brighten. 

But although the bleeding appears to have stopped, the music industry remains a long way from recapturing its former prosperity. From 1999 to 2009, music industry revenues imploded by 56%. Even with the more recent promising trends, nobody expects the music business to return to its heyday any time soon. 

Contrary to popular perception, though, compared to other traditional media industries disrupted by the Internet, music has fared relatively well in the digital age. According to the IFPI (which, somewhat ironically, stands for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) 32% of music industry revenue came from digital in 2011 (a number most expect to have increased in 2012). For newspapers, that number is closer to 5%. The digital transition for book publishers is similarly slow and precarious. 

Why Digital Music Is Growing

So why is music growing? Services like iTunes have been aggressive about expanding globally. The biggest digital music services more than doubled their global reach in 2011, with iTunes alone launching in 16 Latin American countries.

The proliferation of connected music devices have also helped drive music revenues. As consumers snatch up millions of smartphones and tablets, many are heading straight for the digital storefronts of Google, Apple and Amazon to load them up with their favorite songs. Meanwhile, streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio and Deezer (which is aiming for a U.S. launch in 2013) are also exploding, with mobile access being the key selling point for their premium subscriptions. While it's perfectly feasible to pirate the latest albums and load them onto your tablet or phone, it's finally becoming easier to just type in a credit card number. 

The global fight against piracy also appears to have had an effect. Draconian anti-piracy laws like SOPA and PIPA may have failed in the U.S. Congress, but other initiatives have succeeded in driving down piracy. For one, Google has grown more accommodating to copyright owners, nixing piracy-related terms from auto-suggested search terms and making DMCA takedown requests easier (some would say too easy). 

There's also early evidence that the availability of legitimate music services can help reduce the rate of piracy. Sweden saw a 25% drop in illegal filesharing after the public launch of Spotify, according to one study. There are now 500 legitimate music services available worldwide, according to the IFPI. As streaming services and MP3 marketplaces expand across the globe, it shouldn't be surprising that people feel less inclined to download music without paying for it.

A Smaller Industry, But A More Level Playing Field

The music industry may never return to what it looked like 15 years ago. But maybe that's okay. Today's playing field is far more level and the tools to create and distribute music are cheaper and easier to use than ever before. Artists still face major challenges, but the Internet has loosened the grip of the record labels and opened up new possibilities in terms of financing the creation of music projects - including crowdfunding and selling music directly to fans via platforms like Bandcamp or via digital distribution platforms like TuneCore and CDBaby.

Maybe the Internet isn't killing the music industry after all. Sure, the Net upended the old business model and irreversibly changed how music gets distributed to consumers. But clearly all is not lost. 

 

Lead image courtesy of Don O'Brien.

The CEO's Social Media Strategy: Ignore It [Infographic]

Zeno Group's 2012 Digital Readiness Survey revealed a striking truth: businesses are burned out on social media, too.

For all the lip service paid to social media marketing and all the "New Media Marketing" hires on LinkedIn, it seems that a lot of businesses are coming around to the idea that social media actually might not be very important. Generally, the survey found that smaller businesses (those with fewer than 10,000 employees) and business-to-business (B2B) companies were less likely to engage with their customers via social media. In fact, 43% of B2B companies admitted that their CEO ignores online reputations altogether.

On its face, the survey makes a certain amount of sense. If you sell to other businesses, you probably have fewer customers and a direct sales force, so you can just pick up the phone to reach them. Likewise, smaller companies probably have fewer resources to dedicate to a social campaign - and less ability to make a splash.

But the one-to-many push of social marketing is comparatively cheap, and there's no reason to make your sales force perform damage control when they should be selling. Sure Facebook fatigue seems to be catching these days, but it seems like many businesses are missing an opportunity.

For all the details, check out Zeno Group's infographic below:

Leap Motion Raises Money, Strikes Deal, Gains Momentum

Things keep getting better for Leap Motion, the little startup whose 3D motion controller gizmo could be one of the hottest products of 2013.

The San Francisco-based company has struck a deal with Asus, which will bundle the Leap Motion controller with laptops and all-in-one PCs. Also, Leap Motion has raised a third round of venture capital, this one worth $30 million, from existing investors, including Founders Fund and Highland Capital.

'Our investors really love the progress we've made over the last six to seven months,' says Andy Miller, president and chief operating officer at Leap Motion. 'And the bundling of our controller with mainstream laptops and computers is really good validation that this is the year of the changing user interface, and Leap is right in the middle of that trend.'

The Leap Motion controller lets you control a computer using hand gestures in the air. It's a bit like the Microsoft Kinect controller but far more accurate. You'll be able to check it out in person next week at CES, where Asus will be demonstrating the device.

Or you can check it out in this video:

More Deals Are Coming Soon

Miller, a former top executive at Apple, joined Leap Motion last year. He says more deals like the one with Asus will be announced later this year. Better yet, some PC makers are going a step further and will embed the Leap Motion controller right into their machines, so you won't need an external controller. (For now you need to hook up the little 1-inch-by-3-inch controller via USB cable.)

Leap Motion will start shipping the controller sometime early this year, priced at $69.99. The company has already received pre-orders worth tens of millions of dollars, Miller says.

Leap Motion is encouraging developers to create special apps that take advantage of 3D motion gestures, and will sell those in a special app store. So far more than 40,000 developers have applied to get a software development kit for the Leap Motion controller.

Possible uses go way beyond computers. Miller says Leap Motion has been contacted by thousands of businesses with all sorts of ideas for how to use this technology. 'We're going to have announcements about deals in medical and automotive pretty soon,' he says.

Photo Finishing Your Memories Old and New

The New Year often reminds us of things we have meant to do all year. Many New Year's resolutions often fail, but setting one revolving around a digital solution can sometimes work its way into your routine with less pain than a daily trip to the health club. Organizing our family's photos is one of the things that became part of my routine after making a resolution a few years ago.

If your parents are still alive, you could be faced with shoe boxes full of old photos to add to your own collections. Such pictures might be important peeks into your family's history and are worth preserving. If you add to those boxes your own collection of pictures and the digital photos that are scattered over your various devices, you can be looking at a huge challenge.

The best solution is a routine that takes care of the present and starts nibbling away at the past. With a history of storing photos in the cloud for years, I have put a lot of thought into organizing and protecting our photos. Others might have different ideas, but this is what works for me.

My solutions are not operating-system specific. It will work on a Mac or a Windows machine, or you can accomplish the same thing with a computer running Linux.

I'm going to suggest that photos you are going to archive deserve to be cropped and adjusted before you save them. You will be surprised how pleased you will be in the future with your handiwork. There are a number of photo editing programs out there, but I've been using Picasa and iPhoto for years. Picasa is free and iPhoto still comes free if you buy a new Mac. Picasa is one of the first applications that I load on a new computer. I have even been running it on Windows 8 since early December 2012 without any problems. Picasa also runs on any Intel-based Mac. There are a number of Linux photo solutions though the one I prefer on my Ubuntu system is Shotwell Photo Manager.

Dealing With The Present

When working with present-day shots, I never let my photos age on the camera's memory cards. When I come in from my morning or evening walk, I immediately import my photos to my Windows laptop. A quick scan will usually reveal six or seven that I like. I mark them with Picasa's "star" tool, then crop and adjust the lighting and color. My goal is always to tune the image to look the way I remember the scene looking to my eye when I snapped the photo. If I wait even a few hours to do this, it is much harder to recall the setting for the picture.

Once I am happy with the photos, I export the starred ones to my Google Drive in the cloud. You could just as easily use DropBox or Microsoft's SkyDrive for this step. On Linux Google Drive is not officially working yet, so I would use DropBox. My photos go in a folder automatically given today's date. The next thing I do is "share" my edited photos to a chosen album in the cloud on my Picasa web album account. Basic Picasa web album accounts are free and tied to your Gmail address. Once in Picasa web albums, my chosen photos are already in the cloud at two different places.

Some reviews of photo archiving software complain that Google has made using Picasa for this purpose more difficult, given Google's effort to push sharing through Google+. There is a simple secret to solving this. I have two Gmail accounts and one of them is not tied to a Google+ identity. I use the one disconnected from the Google+ identity for photos because I can send my photos directly to Picasa web albums without having to first share through Google+. However, sharing a set of photos through Google+ does automatically creates a Picasa web album, so if you have no problems sharing in two places, you'll still get your Picasa album.

Typically, I also set up albums for special trips or events. I always have a bucket album which covers photos for a three month period like "Fall of 2012."

Google has made it very easy to add photos to your Picasa web albums even if you don't use the desktop application Picasa on your computer. Once you access one of your Picasa web albums via web browser, you can select the action "add photos" and then just select photos on your Google drive or computer and drag them to the browser window. Once the photos are on the web, it is easy to re-order them, add captions or even select the cover photo for the album. You can also share links with others to an individual photo or an album. If your photos have GIS information, you will also see that in Picasa web albums.

I go one step further with my photos. I carry the same photo memory card upstairs to my office and import the photos once again to iPhoto. Often seeing photos on a different computer screen with different software will have me choosing a few more that I want to keep. On the Mac it is easy enough to "flag" the photos that I like and have tuned up and then upload them to the same daily folder on my Google Drive. I then repeat the process of adding the additional photos to the cloud-based Picasa web album I have chosen. At the end of the process, I have my preferred photos in the cloud in two places, and on two different computers that are backed up regularly. Only then do I sometimes share general-interest photos on Facebook or Twitter, and special ones on Pinterest.

Photos taken on my smartphone get automatically uploaded to my DropBox account where it is easy to import them. It is also easy to share a photo taken by my smartphone using Bluetooth sharing to my Windows laptop.

Archiving The Past

For the last few years, I've been tackling boxes of photos, albums and slides from the past. I usually manage to find some down time in December to do that. Scanning photos is a good way to escape holiday insanity.

Last summer, as we were moving from our home of over twenty years, I actually finished up all the photos we've collected over the years. After I threw away photos that no one could identify or were of poor quality, I handed the boxes of photos and slides over to my oldest daughter to see if she wanted to comb through them one more time.

When tackling boxes of real prints and slides, I use an Epson Perfection V500 scanner. I chose it because the software works well on Macs and Windows computers and it was fast. I can scan each photo in less than a minute. Slides take a little more time, but because you can load a few slides at one time, it is not a lengthy process.

As I get a number of photos scanned, I will import them into iPhoto or Picasa and then move them into an album on Picasa web albums. I usually tempt the other family members to add their own by sending them a few photos or a link to the album of recently scanned photos.

I could have done the same thing on Flickr, but I find the sharing and privacy options a little more to my liking on Picasa web albums. My extra 25 GBs of Google storage costs me $2.49 per month. Even with my huge collection of photos and email, I have only used 41% of my storage.

Regardless of which services you use, or how you want to organize your photos, the important thing is to establish a pattern that will make your photo organization less of a chore and more of a part of your daily routine.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Hey, E-Commerce Entrepreneurs! Aren't You Forgetting Someone?

Guest author Rudy DeFelice is CEO of Bizinate.com, a consulting firm that helps young firms get their social-media sea legs.

Over 20,000 e-commerce stores are opened every week in the United States. Most of them will fail. And most of those that crash will have one thing in common ' they neglected to tap their best audience.

Turns out that it's not what they are selling, but to whom they are selling, that matters most.

Finding Your Best Audience

It has long been understood that social phenomena ' fashion, a new band, a viral video ' spread through relationships. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell talked about influencers in his seminal book, The Tipping Point. Influencers spot and adopt trends and through their adoption influence others in their social sphere to do the same. (Further schooling about the spread of ideas through early adopters can be found in Geoffrey Moore's Crossing The Chasm.)

The common thread in these teachings is that ideas are best cultivated by planting a few seeds in the right fields. Only certain fields are receptive to a given seed, with the exception of weeds, which no one wants. So you can't just scatter seeds to the wind and expect them to take.

What does that mean for the 20,000 e-commerce stores that open each week? It means the first, most important, markets are their own social circles. These are the fields in which they should plant their first seeds.

People who know you ' who trust your judgment and care about your success ' are your early adopters. These may be friends, family, your broader personal network or professional acquaintances. But you should have a strategy devoted to tapping this market and enabling them to spread your message.

Why Is Your Social Network So Critical?

Today, it is so easy to buy almost anything. Search for your product or service and you're likely to find millions of results. How do you cut through the clutter?

A primary differentiator in a purchase decision is the customer's feelings toward the merchant or brand. When you can buy anything anywhere, the relationship with the merchant matters.

Major brands spend millions of dollars to simulate a relationship with consumers. But with your own social and business networks, you already have an authentic relationship.

It's an important asset, so taking advantage of that authentic relationship is the most powerful first step to success in your own e-commerce business.

Of course, you can simply open your store and hope that people find you. That's what everyone else does. And that's the problem ' you'll be lost in the great mass of options. 

Instead, you should have an affirmative market strategy, one in which you're reaching out to a core group of people that know you, and trying to set a viral chain in motion. If you make those people happy, they'll spread the word to their networks and you'll be on your way.

How To Reach Your Best Market

Fortunately, it's never been easier to reach your best market. As the wide variety of choices has made connection between a buyer and seller increasingly more important, various social-media tools and social behavior have made it much easier to reach people and tap that connection.

Consequently, a couple simple steps can get you in touch with this important market and should be part of your strategy.

1. Get Personal With Social-Media Tools. There have been few areas in marketing that have created more confusion than how to use social-media tools. There are certainly benefits to blogging and accumulating Facebook fans, but those are very hard to trace, and if they lead to transactions at all, it is usually over a long time.

Still, the tools are quite valuable for reaching large numbers of people you know. In a few strokes you can reach a whole network. The average Facebook member has 256 friends. That means your message can be in front of 256 people, and depending upon their response, their friends, almost instantly.

2. Say Something New. It is said in retail that the product stays the same, so the audience must change. Unless the audience stays the same, in which case the product must change.

In tapping your social network, a relatively constant audience, you'll need to continually change the product. That can be an actual change of the product ' let's say you expanded your inventory by adding new products or added some products that complement your services business (an IT-service company that is now selling electronics, perhaps).

Alternatively, perhaps there is something new to say about your existing products ' an upcoming holiday or change of seasons makes an existing product relevant in new ways. The important thing is, when you're tapping a constant audience over time, you must say something new and of value to that audience.

Your goal is to build awareness first from people who know you, trust you and have an interest in your success. Leveraging your broader social network and tap your best source of customers. If you live up to your promise with this group, they will help you spread your message to the rest of the world.

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.