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The future of video journalism: What will audiences be watching?

16 May

Journalism.co.uk
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Still from 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera
en:Dziga Vertov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I was asked to give a talk to a BBC Global Video away-day on the future of video, looking at what their audiences will be watching in the coming years.

The Global Video department was launched last year and makes video to run cross-platform in multiple languages on all the BBC’s Global News outlets: World News, BBC.com and 27 World Service language services. The team never makes a video just for one language or site, changing the voiceover and translating the film into two or more languages.

The future of video journalism

View more presentations from SarahMarshall3

Below is an outline of the talk I gave on the day:

What will audiences be watching?

There are countless examples of innovations in video journalism, including many from the 40 videos a week produced by Global Video.

Here are a few examples of trends in online video journalism and innovations using emerging technologies.

Documentary: Just as long-form journalism has a place in the digital sphere, so too do long-form video documentaries using TV and cinema conventions of storytelling.

For example, here is the Guardian’s 32 minute ‘I will never be cut’: Kenyan girls fight back against genital mutilation, which recently won a Webby award.

Web native: As online video has developed, it has found its own style and some filmmakers are telling stories using a new set of rules. Multimedia producer Adam Westbrook has written many articles arguing for online video to encourage subjects to look directly at the camera, abandon the “noddy” (the way video often hides an edit by showing a clip of the interviewer nodding) and instead add a flash to white or black, acknowledging the edit to the viewer.

Storytelling: With the advent of online came new storytelling techniques such as audio slideshows, graphics and ways of visualising data. The BBC Global Video unit has its own fantastic examples, including this video made by Tom Hannen using Adobe After Effects and brilliantly telling the story of blood doping.

The Economist too is experimenting with storytelling in words. Here is an example.

Videos filmed on small, cheap cameras: The Global Video unit itself is equipping its journalists in the field with video news gathering skills. Elise Wicker from the department has written about how she has been training staff overseas to use Kodak cameras to capture footage.

Here is an example of an Al Jazeera documentary filmed entirely on an iPhone. Syria: Songs of defiance is a first-person film made by a journalist who spent many months in Syria but could not risk being seen with a video camera. This film, complete with time lapses shows how a great film can be made in the process of the edit.

Contextual video: Advances in web browsers allow new possibilities. Here are three examples made using Popcorn JS, a JavaScript open-source library from Mozilla allowing video to link to real-time web content such as tweets, Google Maps and Wikipedia entries.

History in the Streets is an audio recording uploaded to SoundCloud with locations linked so that when the audio refers to a place, the viewer is taken to that location on Google Street View and can navigate and explore.

Open Images, Open Data is a Dutch film showing a video surrounded by real-time links to content from several sites, including Wikipedia.

This example of a film about freedom of the press in France links to the source documents, demonstrating how journalists can link to data or research to back up a claim.

Development of Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker tool could allow video journalists without coding skills to produce similar video.

How will audiences be finding and sharing content?

Social sharing is key to the future of video and the format lends itself to a social experience with YouTube demonstrating how videos can go viral.

Social is overtaking search as a way to discover content. Facebook overtook Google in March as a traffic driver to the Guardian, largely down to the news outlet’s “frictionless sharing” Facebook app.

New audiences will be finding and frequently watching video on social networks, whether they be Facebook, Twitter, or Chinese site Renren.

Video is often a component of a wider narrative too. Storify is a free tool allowing anyone to curate a story by dragging in tweets, Flickr photos, SoundCloud audio and video from YouTube and Vimeo.

And platforms such as Storify, YouTube, Vimeo, Bambuser, and many more have their own communities and networks too.

Here is an example of what Mark Boas, one of the Knight-Mozilla Fellows, is doing. He is embedded within the newsroom of Al Jazeera and looking at how you can socially share content without detracting from the experience of viewing a video.

Boas told me that part of what is driving this is social, partly the second screen, partly web-enabled TV, partly browser technologies.

He is experimenting with social sharing text from within The fight for Amazonia. Content is pulled live from a Google Doc, he explained.

Writing on his blog, Boas describes the possibilities of social.

Technology is available now to allow people to chat and comment over the web. Certainly this is an experience we could build in. Imagine if you could see all the people currently watching the same programme as you and interact with them.

Boas believes this social layer is key but that it should not “significantly distract from the main content”.

He thinks the social experience benefits from integrating existing social networks and will “perhaps create new ones surrounding the video medium”.

People like to share their experiences in general and this certainly seems to hold true of video and media in general.

He has ideas for future implementations, including “the use of word accurate hyperlinked transcripts, full support for mobile devices and second-screen synchronisation.”

In an email Boas told me:

I think many like me are experimenting just now. I myself am very interested in making experiences that don’t distract too much from the principle act of watching video but I feel that the challenge here is to allow the viewer to choose the level of interactivity and make that choice as plain as obvious and seamless as possible.

3. What will people be watching video on?

Web-enabled TV: Web technologies and television are converging with the advent of web-enabled TV.

The New York Times earlier this month asked “Why can’t TV navigation be more like a tablet?” That looks likely with the next generation of viewing options, including video on demand available on games consoles and an increasing number of TV apps.

Web-enabled TV is expected to offer users an experience more like navigating using a tablet, with viewers able to control the screen by a series of touch screen gestures and swipes.

If rumours of the new Apple TV are to be believed, this may take the form of a Siri voice-activated TV made by Apple (a later development than Apple TV, a box which is plugged into a regular TV to stream iTunes content).

It is also reported that set-top manufacturer LG will be offering televisions with Google TV later this month, with features including voice activation, the ability for viewers to watch video-on-demand content and web videos and control of content by touch screen and swipes.

Google TV will also allow friends or contacts in different locations to watch video together as it will incorporate Google Hangouts, the Skype-like video option from Google Plus.

Desktops/laptops: BBC Global Video’s audience may access content on different connections than those that spring to mind when you first think of web video.

The number of home broadband connections are low in some of the countries covered by the 27 language services, with large proportions of audiences connecting with dongles and other 3G connections in some countries. Video may be easier to stream on a 3G connection at certain times of the day, and impossible at busier times.

Audiences may also use proxies to circumvent internet restrictions in countries such as China, which can give a slow connection.

Tablets: Tablets are increasingly popular in some of the countries served by BBC Global Video, and take-up is low in other countries.

Whether they become an important platform in poorer countries remains to be seen but there is no doubt that they have already become important for more affluent audiences.

And tablets can provide a beautifully tactile viewing experience, with readers encouraged to use the touch screen to play a video embedded within a news story.

Mobile: The popularity of mobile and likelihood of possibilities for video viewing should not be ignored.

It is worth noting that 87 per cent of the world population has a mobile phone, compared with just 8.5 per cent having fixed broadband. According to stats on Mobithinking, there are 5.9 billion phones compared with half a billion fixed broadband connections.

In Jordan the number of mobiles exceeds the population with 6.2 million phones to 6 million people, according to Ayman Salah, a technology expert based in the Middle East.

In Egypt there are 74 million mobiles for a population of 84 million, Salah said, with mobiles being introduced commercially in 1997. That compares with 11 million landlines, first introduced almost 100 years ago in 1920.

The BBC World Service sites and BBC.com are well served by mobile sites that recognise the phone type and format video accordingly.

But of course mobiles are not all Androids, BlackBerrys and iPhones. Smartphones are less common in poorer countries, and different brands dominate. According to the Economist, Nokia ranks with Coca-Cola as Africa’s most recognised brand.

So what is the future of video in Africa if smartphone penetration is low? I asked mobile expert Peter Paul Koch (also known as PPK online).

“Don’t focus too much on smartphones,” he warned.

Today’s feature phones are getting more and more functionality, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they add video in the near future. The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring, and pretty soon we’ll see “feature phones” (as in cheap) with “smartphone” functionality.

And video is growing on mobile. Cisco predicts that two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016.

Mobile video will increase 25-fold between 2011 and 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.

Mobile is intimate. It is in your pocket, it is personal and is there when you have a spare five minutes to watch a web video.

What is the future of video? With a growing trend in social sharing, an ever-expanding range of devices and internet connections, including to mobile, the future is bright.
Similar Posts:
Read more over at www.journalism.co.uk
Gary Marshall: Why Chrome for iOS is a waste of Google's time

16 May

TechRadar

Look out! The browser wars are back! That's what analysts at Macquarie Capital reckon, anyway: in a note titled "The Browser Wars Part Deux" they suggest that "Google Chrome Browser for iOS is Coming".
It may well be. Will anyone bar a few Google fans care?
My guess is no.
Macquarie makes several arguments for Chrome on iOS, and I reckon one of them is right and the rest are wrong. I'll start with the right one first: a Chrome browser on iOS could reduce the amount of cash Google has to give Apple for all those Mobile Safari search queries. That's true, but the other arguments - that Chrome did well on PC so it can do well on iOS, and that Chrome ads really shifted copies on PC so they'll do the same on iOS, that reviews of Chrome on Android are quite positive - don't spell Safari Killer to me.
Macquarie rightly says that Chrome on the desktop has done very well and reduced the money Google pays out to other browser makers for searches, which is significant: Firefox only lives because of Google search money. However, iOS isn't the same as 1990s-era Windows, and when Macquarie says that "there are many parallels to the browser wars of the late 1990s" I think they're wrong.
That was then, this is now
People jumped from Netscape to Internet Explorer (and back again) for all kinds of reasons, but the main reason Internet Explorer triumphed in the first browser war was because Microsoft stuck it into every copy of Windows. If history's repeating, then Google is on the losing side here: it's trying to get a foothold on somebody else's OS, an OS that already ships with a perfectly good browser.
Even if you can get iOS users to download the app, it won't work properly. As Kevin Tofel rightly says on GigaOM, with rival browsers "none of them can be set as the default browser, meaning all links in emails, texts or other apps will always open in Safari, regardless of what other browsers are installed."
Unlike the late 1990s, we're also dealing with relatively mature web technologies nowadays. Firms aren't sticking new features into their browsers and letting a million "best viewed with" icons bloom; today's battlegrounds are standards support and JavaScript performance.
I'm not convinced Google can beat Apple in the speed stakes, and the features Chrome on Android has that Safari doesn't - bookmark and tab syncing, a combined address and search bar and easy private browsing - are hardly earth-shattering or hard to duplicate.
Browsers become popular because other browsers fall out of favour. Internet Explorer was overtaken by Firefox because Microsoft effectively stopped developing it, leaving plenty of room for a better browser; Firefox was overtaken by Chrome because it was getting slow and old while Chrome was blisteringly fast. For Chrome to do well on iOS it really needs Apple to really mess up Safari. How likely is that?

Read more over at www.techradar.com
Does your Facebook mobile app suck? Here’s why

15 May

GigaOM
For the past year or so, I’ve noticed that my Facebook mobile apps have slowed down with each screen tap. I used to tap the screen and see the latest posts or photos fairly quickly. Now I see the “Loading” message more than anything else. Even worse: I’m constantly pulling the screen down to refresh the data, even when tapping a Facebook notification takes me to a supposedly updated post. I’m not sure when that behavior started, but it’s quite annoying and happens on both my Android and iOS devices.
I long suspected these problems had much to do with Facebook’s use of various Web technologies, since much of the mobile platform was built with web standards and technologies such as HTML5, surrounded by a native wrapper for Android or iOS. But I’m not a developer, so I couldn’t be sure. Now I am, thanks to Dirk de Kok’s detailed post at Mobtest, which tests mobile applications.
The gist of the problem, at least for iOS (and likely for Android as well, at least partially) is two-fold. One problem concerns HTML use with UIWebViews but without support for Nitro, which is Apple’s JavaScript engine. The second happens because the app makes different data calls for similar, but out-of-sync information. Here’s a pair of excerpts to explain:
“For a starter, caching of unchanged content cannot be controlled by the developer. The FB app downloads the whole timeline HTML every time, and it is up to the UIWebView to determine whether it needs to download images, stylesheets etc again…. Also, to communicate from the UIWebView to the native app, a Javascript bridge is needed. This is tricky stuff, slow and not really thread safe.”
“For notifications, messages and friend requests regular REST calls are done, returning XML data. First check is to see what number of new notifications are there, then the actual content is retrieved in a separate call. As far as I can tell, the Facebook service calls return inconsistent information. When you check too fast what new notifications are awaiting you, you don’t get the new information.”
I recommend reading de Kok’s entire analysis because he explains in further detail how all these moving parts are working together in a less than optimal way, illustrating the exact behaviors I’ve seen in the Facebook mobile app. I think it’s great that Facebook is adding new features and improvements on a regular basis and I understand that by using Web technologies, it can make these changes on the server side; you don’t have to update your Facebook app as a result.
But for the time being, I’m going to switch to m.facebook.com in my smartphone browser. I did some testing this afternoon and the experience is far faster, up to date and generally offers the same features as the native mobile app.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Read more over at gigaom.com
[Infographic] Taking HTML5 to the Next Level for Mobile

15 May

ReadWriteWeb
By 2013, there will be more than 1 billion HTML5-capable browsers in use throughout the world. Applications for those HTML5 browsers will be created by 2 million HTML Web developers, according to research from IDC. There is no question that HTML5 is going to be a major factor in mobile development during the next five to 10 years. The rise of HTML5 does not mean the death of native applications, but as the standard progresses, many developers will begin to incorporate more HTML5 into their apps than native code.

By 2015, IDC predicts that 80% of all mobile apps will be based wholly or in part on HTML5. It makes sense: As HTML5 evolves, it gains access to many features that were once the sole domain of native code. Audio and video playback have been problems that are now beginning to improve, and several companies including Sencha, appMobi and Mozilla are working on ways to give HTML5 better device access to objects such as a device’s camera and accelerometer.
It takes a village to raise a child - or, in this case, HTML5. During February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a group of companies banded together to create the Core Mobile Web Platform Community (Coremob), a forum for “the global mobile developer and IT community to focus and accelerate the evolution of the mobile Web as a compelling platform for mobile applications.” Coremob includes several giants in the development and mobile worlds, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, AT&T, Red Hat and Qualcomm’s Innovation Center (among many more; see infographic below). Like the browser wars and the Web before it, the mobile Web is not going to be completely developed by one company. For HTML5 to truly become a viable set of standards, the technology community at large will need to work together to share resources to make that possible.
But the mobile universe is not quite ready for a full-fledged HTML5 ecosystem yet. This comes down to the status of mobile browsers. Applications that run in browsers do not have the capabilities that native apps have. You thought Android was fragmented? Ever since Microsoft trounced Netscape with Internet Explorer, browsers have been, almost by definition, the most fragmented aspect of Web technology during the past 15 years. That is no different for mobile browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Google’s stock Android browser or its mobile Chrome Beta, Firefox Fennec, Opera Mini, Dolphin, Skyfire, Internet Explorer for Windows Phone or BlackBerry. HTML5 is supposed to be able to cut through the differences of all these browsers, but they are not all created equal.
This is where Ringmark comes in. Designed as an open source tool by Facebook for the Coremob community, Ringmark is a browser-testing suite that determines how well different browsers implement app functionalities. Ringmark determines what “ring” a browser is in and what type of capabilities an app can perform in that browser. For example, browsers that pass “Ring 0” can run “Level 0” apps, Ring 1 can run Level 1 apps, and so on. The infographic from IDC below shows an example of the capabilities in each ring, and which apps can run on which levels.
We did a couple of Ringmark tests by visiting Rng.io on mobile browsers to see how well they stack up. Ring 0 has 97 different capabilities, which most of the browsers we tested passed. There are between 137-160 capabilities in Ring 1, which none of the browsers we tested passed. If a browser does not pass all the capabilities of a Ring, then it does not test the next Ring. (As browser versions advance and begin to pass Ring 1, Ringmark's developers will build out more rings to allow for further advances in expected browser capabilities.)
Rng.io test of Chrome Beta for Android Here are the results:
Opera Mini
- Android -- R.0: 7 failed, 90 passed
- iOS -- R.0: 32 failed, 52 passed
Dolphin HD
- Android -- R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 44 failed, 93 passes
- iOS R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 33 failed, 106 passed
iOS Safari
- R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 34 failed, 106 passed
Stock Android Browser
- R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 44 failed, 93 passed
Android Chrome Beta
- R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 17 failed, 143 passed
Windows Phone Internet Explorer
- R.0: 11 failed, 86 passed
Amazon Kindle Fire Silk
- R.0: 4 failed, 93 passed
BlackBerry 6
- R.0: 97 passed -- R.1: 58 failed, 80 passed
It appears that the browser with the most HTML5 capabilities at this point is Chrome Beta on Android. We noted when Chrome Beta was announced that it would be a good browser for HTML5 development. Yet, Chrome Beta’s performance does not help the bulk of the Android ecosystem. First, it is only available on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich devices, which make up only 4.9% of all Android devices as of May 1. Second, when a mobile Web app runs an application through Android, it will choose the default browser of the device, which will be the stock Android browser, not Chrome Beta.
Take a look at the infographic below and let us know what you think about the future of browser development for HTML5 functionality in the comments.
Note: Thank you to Evan Davis of Isobar in Boston for testing Windows Phone and BlackBerry 6 for us.
Click here for a larger version of the infographic
Read more over at www.readwriteweb.com
Building A Great Work Culture (Inspire, Empower And Collaborate)

14 May

Women 2.0
There are three key ingredients to a great culture boosting activity.
By Pam Selle (Developer, Paperless Post)
One of the things I like most about my current workplace is the culture. In an aggressive tech hiring environment, buffing up on how to build a great culture is definitely worth the time. At Paperless Post, we recently had a Hack Day (or, per the company mascot, “Stampy Day”).
Here’s what it was, why it was fun, and why you should probably bring it to your company too – but more than that, how the underlying culture and ethic is great for any company.

Planning For Greatness: Encouraging Creativity
There are three key ingredients to a great culture boosting activity – that the activity inspires employees concerning their work, empowers them to take ownership and control of part of the product, and that the activity allows company members to collaborate, communicate, and otherwise work together toward a goal.
Encourage And Empower: Hack Day
Hack Day is an example of a culture boosting activity – a day taken off from the regular run of the business to focus on other “hacks” or projects brought by the team. These can be dreamed up features, new design items, brainstorming new approaches… a company Hack Day is related to the company, but that can include writing a company chatbot or designing costumes for the company mascot. It can be adding a new feature that saves 10 people 5 hours a week… each. The project can be as big, small, ambitious, or fun as team members want it to be.
The very nature of Hack Day encourages creativity and ownership of a project, both inspiring employees to dream up something for the business and empowering them to be in control of the outcome.
Empower And Collaborate: Who should participate in your Hack Day
Everyone. One of the best, most fun features of our company Hack Day was that it included everyone. Now, not all companies are small enough to be able to do this. But think about spreading Hack Day beyond the scope of your dev team. Can you involve Product? The Designers? Support? More ideas makes it more fun.
Encourage project members to take ownership of their project, give them free reign to do what they like, and see who matches up across teams.
Put It Together: How does Hack Day work?
Show up. Let people find people to work with. Work on things. Repeat.
This is the fun part, and there’s not really a wrong way to do it, except by being too uptight about it.
Afterburn: What do you do afterwards?
Have a celebration the next work day to talk about each other’s projects over lunch. Another great thing about Hack Day is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t finish. Remember, it’s Hack Day! Low stress. It’s all about fun and creativity.
Eeveryone talks about what they worked on, shows off what they did do, talks about the hurdles and what they learned. And everyone listening gets to see the smart, talented people they work with show off their stuff.
ROI: How does it help?
The three key components of Hack Day, or any company culture booster, are that it is inspiring, empowering, and encourages collaboration. When these three ingredients come together, it results in something that at the end of the day will make your employees say “I’m glad I work here.”
Editor’s note: Got a question for our guest blogger? Leave a message in the comments below.
About the guest blogger: Pam Selle is a developer at Paperless Post, bringing beautiful online stationery to users. She is involved in the Ruby, Python, and open source communities. A teacher at GirlDevelopIt and PyStarPhilly, she is passionate about opening web technologies to all and generally making the world a more fun place to live and work. Follow her on Twitter at @pamasaur.
Related articles from Women 2.0
Read more over at www.women2.org
Facebook Permeates Everything; App Center Will Be Its Mobile Extension

11 May

ReadWriteWeb

Facebook will soon have an application store...well, not exactly. Facebook will soon have an application repository. A display showcase. Those are probably more apt descriptions of what the social giant will unveil with App Center. Essentially, Facebook will turn itself into an application hub - a traffic director for social apps and games across any device and any platform. This is not the rumored “end-run around Apple’s App Store” that many talk about; rather, App Center is a unique proposition, and one that is 100% Facebook.

To understand where Facebook is coming from with App Center, it helps to know the company’s modus operandi to this point in its history. Facebook is built around two central principles: the browser and sharing. The browser is what Facebook is built upon, even for its native (hybrid) apps. Sharing is the core philosophy of Facebook, as everything it does has to be social in one way or another. The concept of the “social graph” on the Web existed before Facebook, but the company has taken the idea to a whole new level.
In many ways, the App Center was destined to be built one way or another since 2007. When we look back 20 or 40 years from now, we will note that 2007 was the year in which two very big things happened: Facebook opened its platform to be built upon, and Apple released the iPhone.
Our current era of Web technology and innovation is built upon three principles: the cloud, social sharing and smart mobile devices. While we cannot point to one distinct event that signifies the rise of the cloud (an old concept that has taken on new meaning in the last several years), the iPhone and the Facebook platform are seminal moments that point to the kind of software that is being built today.
What App Center does is aggregate the mobile and social applications that are the result of those trends that were started in 2007. For Facebook, it hinges on the ability to tie mobile applications and websites to its platform. That is a key concept for Facebook. App Center is not just some application repository for any app that can be found on iOS, Android, Facebook or the mobile Web. Facebook is aggregating its own ecosystem into a destination that is (in theory) easy to use and easy to find.
That is why we see some strict guidelines in what will be found in the App Center. Any iOS, Android or Web app that is listed in Facebook’s repository must use Facebook as its login credential and have a Facebook Page specifically designed for App Center. Facebook will review any app submitted to App Center for quality - but also to measure how social the app is. This is not like Apple’s review process for apps submitted to its App Store. Apple is looking to make sure apps have appropriate content, do not contain malware and meet the company’s (sometime absurd) policies. Facebook is looking to showcase apps that highlight Facebook.
Facebook has permeated itself as one of the backbones of the Web. The social graph and its new Open Graph are embedded into hundreds of millions of websites for users to like, recommend and share. By doing this, Facebook has successfully infiltrated the plumbing that supports the Web that people see everyday. It is the same with mobile; Facebook apps are not contained just to the Facebook platform. Social apps are tied to the platform but also reside within every app store that serves mobile devices, from Apple’s App Store, Android’s Google Play, the Windows Phone Marketplace, BlackBerry App World, Getjar or the Amazon Appstore. As a result, Facebook is ever-present, both on the Web and on mobile.

And that is why App Center will work. Facebook does not need to create an app store where it sells only mobile Web apps that work on its platform. App Center is more of a display showcase than a store. It redirects users to whatever app store or mobile Web application they may want. Some might think it is counterintuitive for Facebook to send traffic away from its own website, but the fact of the matter is that nobody ever leaves Facebook. It goes with the user wherever they are. By sending traffic to the App Store and Google Play, Facebook is guaranteeing that users will still, in one form or another, be tied to Facebook.
We will see how this works when App Center is rolled out to Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users. Down the road, Facebook could eventually decide that App Center is better suited not sending users to the App Store and Google Play and creating a marketplace that is only for HTML5-based Web apps tied to Facebook’s platform. While that would help centralize and define Facebook’s mobile presence, that would be counter to Facebook’s longtime approach of being everywhere, all the time.

Read more over at www.readwriteweb.com
How Cloud Platforms Change Everything, And Which Ones Matter Most

11 May

ReadWriteWeb
If your business is producing Web sites, then it's all too easy to assume that the way you innovate is by producing bigger, broader, more content. When you consider the platform as something that exists only on the client side - where the customer determines the scheme and not you - any functionality you create becomes a slave to the browser, the runtime and the operating system. And your business model maintains its 1995 profile. Standards attempt to ameliorate this dilemma, but as the HTML5 process demonstrates, such attempts may last decades.
If you're an applications developer, then your business is to deliver service. In that case, you have a life-altering choice to make: Do you deliver all your functionality to your client and count on it to be executed there in its entirety, or do you let some or all of it be executed on a server in what your customers are calling the "cloud"?

What the Cloud Is, For Real
The reasons why the tablet form factor has taken the world by storm now, when it failed to do so in 2007, 2002, 1997 and 1992, are both obvious and harder to explain. The obvious reason is Apple's runaway success in design, distribution and marketing. But a less obvious but no less important reason is that the cost of bandwidth has dropped and the availability of it has risen, making it possible to deliver a greater level of functionality than can be provided by the device's processor alone.
That has fundamentally changed computing's value proposition. Just a few days ago, I visited a Staples outlet where, inside the big bargain can in the center of the store, I found a multi-disk 2000s-era U.S./Canada street mapping program that once sold in the triple digits. It was selling for five bucks. To make it even more poignant, I had seen the exact same box, with the very same Post-It note listing the same discount price, in the same bargain can three years ago. Imagine how many hundreds of customers rejected this poor box as a relic from another era (like a rainbow leg-warmer or a moderate Republican).
The way we use functionality has changed so fundamentally, so swiftly and cleanly, that it takes a $5 box of outmoded DVDs that are three years old to drive the point home: The Internet is becoming a network of terminals, just as engineers dreamed in the mid-1960s. Web technology is making those terminals portable and transferrable between devices. So your entitlement to functionality or apps may no longer depend upon your browser, runtime or operating system. The statements consumers make today about the diminishing differences between a Mac and a PC will soon be made about the differences between Android, iOS and Windows Phones. The apps will become portable and adaptable between them. When that happens, much of the subject matter that constitutes today's "tech news" will cease to be relevant.
What will remain relevant is how you get your functionality. People still tend to think of applications, or apps, in the context of their client-side profile. For example, you've probably seen the debates over so-called "native apps" versus "Web apps," which are centered around the differences between designing a program specifically for one class of device (e.g., iOS apps purchased through iTunes or Android apps acquired via Google Play) versus designing it using HTML5 to be more device-agnostic. While the latter is often associated with a more open-minded, politically correct stance, as more applications are delivered as cloud-based services, the distinctions become less relevant. If a Windows 8 user in 2013 installs an app on her Start screen and the same app on her Android phone, as long as that app does its job, the identity or ownership of the language it's written in may not matter a hill of beans to the consumer.
However, if that app fails to do its job on all devices, the consumer may blame the cloud platform that delivers it instead of her phone. This is why we need to take stock of the emerging landscape of server-driven computing, which is transcending and sublimating the Web.
Can't tell the players without a scorecard
Again, what qualifies an app as a "cloud app" is the fact that it performs its job on the server and delivers results to the client - as opposed to producing a program for the key functionality that the client then executes. Apple's Siri is a prime example of a cloud app - your iPhone doesn't process your verbal commands, Apple's servers do. Apple doesn't sell Siri as a "SaaS application" or a "cloud service platform," because it doesn't need to. It's a feature of iPhones, and that's good enough.
A "cloud platform" is a broader concept. Just as the inventors of the BASIC programming language conceived a half-century ago, cloud platforms (sometimes called "PaaS, or Platform as a Service," because developers simply cannot become cool to save their lives) process language code on behalf of clients and deliver results to them through the network. Because this business is so new and evolving so quickly, it's impossible to use conventional metrics to say who's the leader in this field just yet. But there are many prominent players, some of whom you've heard of, some of whom you haven't.
The reason cloud platforms are growing in importance is because they are highly fertile ecosystems for creating, distributing and selling functionality - apps that customers install and that have explicit functions. Each platform has the potential for skyrocketing performance - for joining iTunes in the stratosphere.
Among the central players of all sizes making sizable waves in this new and critical market are these (in order of alphabet, not importance):
- CloudBees is a deployment platform specifically for Java apps, whose principal value proposition comes from the inclusion of management services. For example, CloudBees has tools for large development groups to manage the creation process; then post-deployment, the company offers Jenkins-branded maintenance services, such as helpdesks for customers.
- Cloud Foundry is an innovative, multi-language platform that is officially open source, but whose caretaker is virtualization leader VMware. Development takes place in Java (with Spring and Grails frameworks), Ruby (with the Rails framework), Node.js, or Scala (a highly scalable, statically typed derivative of Java), all on a VMware "micro" virtual machine hosted locally. Deployment becomes an automated matter of moving the apps from the local VM to a cloud-based VM. One of Cloud Foundry's key value points is that the form of the application is not tied to the platform, so developers have the freedom of moving it to other platforms, including those they may host themselves.
- DotCloud is an independent, multi-language platform that boasts simple, command-line-based deployment of apps and databases using Amazon's AWS cloud. Its value proposition includes flat monthly fees instead of consumption-based metering.
- Elastic Beanstalk is operated by Amazon Web Services, the undisputed cloud infrastructure leader. It's essentially an automated deployment system for .NET, Java and PHP apps to be deployed on Amazon's EC2 cloud servers.
- Engine Yard offers managed deployments of apps using Ruby on Rails and PHP (through its subdivision brand Orchestra) on Amazon's AWS infrastructure. Its value-add includes self-service configuration and capacity management tools.
- Force.com is the proprietary cloud platform from Salesforce.com. It uses its own language and constructs and is geared primarily for the exchange of data and services between customer-centric applications. Salesforce is now deploying Force.com on separate platforms, including one exclusively built for public-sector customers, including governments.
- Google App Engine is a simplified, but also inexpensive, deployment platform for applications in Java, Python or the open-source language Go. The benefit here is that Google offers some open APIs that present handles to Google services, one of the most important being user authentication through Google Accounts.
- Heroku is Salesforce's platform for non-proprietary technologies. Its value proposition (aside from what many perceive to be its relatively high performance) is its deployment of a wide variety of languages - typically those preferred by the open-source community, such as Clojure and Node.js, but also including experimental concepts like Scala.
- Longjump is one of the first cloud platforms in the field (as early as 2008!) and includes a model/view/controller (MVC) implementation of Java designed to let developers build componentized apps around their existing data. Since its inception, Longjump has been building out pre-configured, adaptable business services more along the lines of Force.com, such as enterprise collaboration.
- OpenShift is now operated by Red Hat and supports the Web's principal server-side languages: PHP, Perl, Ruby (with the Rails framework), Node.js (server-side JavaScript) and Python. Borrowing one approach from Cloud Foundry, its open-source release enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to host their own OpenShift platforms on their servers, as an alternative to being hosted on Red Hat's servers.
- SmartCloud is a relatively recent entry from IBM, enabling Java, Ruby, PHP and .NET-based languages along with hosted applications such as SAP and Siebel. In recent months, IBM has been adding business services to its value proposition.
- Windows Azure (or as folks refer to it nowadays, "Azure") was orignally created by Microsoft in 2008 as the ".NET Framework in the cloud." Since then, Microsoft has seen the light and has broadened Azure's repertoire, to include Java and other non-Microsoft technologies like Node.js.
The wealth of options and the wide (and growing) variety of players suggest a market-driven evolutionary path for cloud platforms. With the Web, standards organizations sought to settle upon a single method for accomplishing fundamental tasks, and when private interests sought their own workarounds, it was usually with the aim of cornering the market. But in the competitive and healthy cloud platform market, players innovate by offering options. Those options lead to architectural alternatives and new pathways that could never have been enabled by standards alone.
Stock images by Shutterstock
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The Great Ars Cloud office suite shootout

10 May

Ars Technica

Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

As cloud computing gains steam in the enterprise, many IT shops are looking for ways to move stuff out of their own server rooms and into someone else's. This has given rise to services like Google Apps and Office 365, which offer e-mail, calendaring, and other Web-based services that completely replace not just software running on your company's servers, but also software running on your company's desktops.
One of those software products is the venerable Microsoft Office, which is ubiquitous in most offices. In this, the first in a series of articles comparing different cloud office solutions, we'll be looking at productivity apps from Google, Microsoft, Zoho, and ThinkFree to compare not just their features and interfaces, but also their ability to integrate with existing systems and work with Microsoft Office documents.
Productivity software has some important considerations not necessarily found with other applications. Switching to a new cloud-based e-mail or CRM system, for example, may cause some short-term complications, but these systems are essentially isolated (or at least, they communicate with the outside world using relatively simple, well-known protocols).
Productivity software is different, thanks to Microsoft Office. Most businesses will have to be able to read Office documents, and likely produce them too. Without these interoperability constraints, most of the products here could stand on their own as productivity apps. But Office compatibility is too important to ignore.
To that end, I spent some time testing out each product's Microsoft Office document converters. It's not going to be possible to track down every oddity or inaccuracy, but I wanted to get a feel for the kinds of things that each product would catch, miss, or mangle. I created and uploaded a mix of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, some that I put together myself and some that were created using templates included with Office.
Google Docs
The Google Drive Web client

Google Docs began with a pair of acquisitions in the mid-2000s: the word processor was once a product called Writely, created by a company called Upstartle, and the spreadsheet editor was once 2Web Technologies' XL2Web. Since then, Google Docs has been developed continuously, adding a presentation piece, collaborative editing features, and others until being merged with Google Drive just this month.
You can get to Google Docs in one of several ways: you can access it for free when you sign up for a Google account, or you can get it as a part of the Google Apps package, a branded version of Google's products with a personalized domain. Pricing for Google Apps, which also includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Sites, and a host of other services, is variable: more limited, ten-user Apps subscriptions are available for free; Google Apps for Business adds more apps, 25GB of e-mail storage per user, BlackBerry and Outlook functionality, uptime assurances, and support for $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year; and Google Apps for Education offers all of the perks in the Business version for free to educational institutions. There are also discounts available for nonprofits.
Once you've set up an Apps account, you can either choose to create user accounts from Google's administrative console or use the Google Apps Directory Sync tool to import them from Active Directory or an LDAP server.
Regardless of the domain name associated with it, Google Docs is always hosted on Google's servers via Google Drive, where each user is given 5GB of storage space (which is expandable to up to 16TB for a price). The core of Docs is the word processor/spreadsheet/presentation software trifecta, though there are also apps for creating forms, word art and shapes, tables, and other files via apps installed from the Chrome Web Store. Microsoft Office documents, when uploaded, can either be converted to Google Docs-format files or left in their native format when uploaded—if you want to edit the document in Google Docs, you'll need to convert your files, but you can leave them in their original format if the user on the other end is just going to download the document and edit it in Office. In the same vein, you can also upload PDF and ZIP files, photos and music, and other files that conform to Google's size limits.
Editing a Google Doc

Google Docs' interface is minimalist but functional, with standard menus displayed over a formatting toolbar. While you might not be able to do fancy document formatting, the no-frills style and the options you get are at least good enough for most papers, documentation, note taking, budget spreadsheets, basic presentations, and other tasks.
My biggest gripe with Drive's Web client is its organization—while it does let you put things in folders, those folders function more like e-mail labels. Clicking a collection will display everything that's in that collection, but you can still see all of the individual files at the top level, meaning it's a bit of a mess. As in Gmail, Google expects you to use the search box to filter your documents and find what you're looking for, but I find that approach does not work as well with files as it does with e-mail messages. Files that you can view and edit but do not own are stored under a separate "Shared with me" header, which is a slight improvement over pre-Drive Docs, which just dumped those shared documents at the top level right along with everything else.
While it's mostly serviceable as an office suite, Google Docs' main advantage is its collaboration features, which enable real-time editing of documents for multiple users at a time. Users can see each others' positions in the document, represented by color-coded cursors, and can chat with each other in a separate pane in the window. Robust versioning allows you to pull up a document's history and revert it to any previous state, and includes color-coded text to show you who changed what in a shared document. Users can choose to share either individual documents or an entire folder full of documents, giving out read-only access to anyone with an e-mail address, or edit access to anyone with a Google account (either from Google or from your Google Apps domain). Google also offers a plugin called Google Cloud Connect that adds basic collaboration features to Office 2003, 2007, and 2010 (but not for the OS X versions of Office). We tested Cloud Connect a year ago and found it to be not entirely reliable, however, so users interested in collaborative editing might be better off sticking with the Web apps.

Read more over at arstechnica.com
Celebrating our super-mom users

10 May

The Official Google Blog

These days, moms use technology in a ton of creative and resourceful ways to keep their families running smoothly. As a working mom myself, I use Google Calendar to keep track of our three busy kids and all their different activities, sports and schools. Technology also keeps us connected—I’m always amazed at how a Google+ Hangout between my kids in California and their grandparents in France can make the distance between them feel so small.

In celebration of Mother’s Day this weekend, we thought we’d applaud the many tech-savvy super-moms out there by sharing a few of their stories.

Heather Fay, using Google+ to make her dream a reality
Heather, from New Haven, Conn., is a stay-at-home mom of two who has always had a passion for music and performing. Until recently, her music career took a backseat to her responsibilities at home, but when she signed up for Google+ in 2011, she realized she could find an audience using Hangouts—without stepping foot outside of her home. Now Heather can sing and play her guitar for people, no matter where they live in the world. Between changing diapers and cleaning up spilled cereal, she’s on Google+ engaging with more than 13,000 fans, collaborating with other musicians on an epic live concert and sharing the occasional mommy woes. You can find out more about her music on Google Play, where you can also hear a tribute to her daughter called “Ruby’s Song.”

Sarah Stocker, bringing robots to life with Chrome
Sarah, from San Francisco, is the co-founder of My Robot Nation, a Chrome web app that lets you create a unique robot online, then have it printed in full-color 3D and mailed to your door. When developing My Robot Nation, Sarah employed some of the most advanced web technologies, such as WebGL, to bring the 3D experience to the browser; however, making the app easy for people to use was paramount. Enter Sarah’s 10-year-old son Max. He designed the first robot and was My Robot Nation’s first “customer.” The fact that Max could create something online and then hold it in his hands made Sarah feel like the coolest mom ever—and he’s already told her that he wants to be an inventor, just like her.

Carol Galland Wildey and Danielle Yates, founders of Headcovers Unlimited
Almost 25 years ago, at the age of 40, Carol was diagnosed with breast cancer. After losing her hair due to chemotherapy treatments, she and her daughter Danielle realized how few options there were to help cancer patients look and feel like themselves throughout their treatment. In 1994, she and Danielle started Headcovers Unlimited, selling hats, wigs and scarves for patients with hair loss. Danielle helped take the business online in 1995, launching www.headcovers.com. Based in League City, Tex., the Internet helps them reach women in more than 60 countries; and more than half their customers have come through online advertising with AdWords.

Betty Givan, preserving family recipes with YouTube
For years, Betty has been cataloguing and saving family recipes to pass along to her own daughter. At first, she used a scrapbook of recipe cards, but one day, while making nachos for a football game, she decided to make a video of the process and asked her daughter to film it. Soon, she was filming and posting her favorites on a YouTube channel and today, it’s become her full-time business from her Richmond, Ky. home. With more than 1,100 videos of her southern cooking recipes and 16 million video views, Betty has become a mom to people all around the world.

Karen Castelletti, Googler reunited with her birth mother using Google Search
Not only can search help you find what you’re looking for, it can also help you reconnect with the people you care about. Karen grew up knowing she was adopted, and always thought it would be too difficult to find and connect with her birth parents. Then, when she was 22, she received a message from her birth mom, Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen found Karen's name through public birth records, and used Google Search to find one of Karen's social networking profiles. They reconnected in time for Mary Ellen to watch Karen graduate from college alongside her adoptive parents, and today they speak regularly.

I hope the stories of these super-moms have inspired you to use technology in ways that keep you connected, organized and creative, so you can spend more time doing the things that matter—having fun with your kids!

Posted by Francoise Brougher, Vice President of SMB Sales and Operations and proud mom of three young boys

Read more over at googleblog.blogspot.com