E-Piphanies

Three Ways HTML 5 Is Transforming IT

By allowing the Web to become a universal operating system, and making mobile devices more powerful than low-end laptops, HTML 5 is transforming IT more profoundly than any development since the advent of the Internet. As HTML 5 becomes the widely-adopted standard for authoring on the Web, it will radically transform three critical markets in the IT landscape: device makers, application vendors, and wireless operators.

To read more, please see Three Ways HTML 5 Is Transforming IT on my BNET Technologies blog.

Can Government Mandate Innovation?

An influential technology lobby wants President Obama to create an Office of Innovation Policy (OIP) to help spur innovation in the U.S. It sounds like the making of a new alphabet soup, but the idea has some merit.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) often weighs in on technology issues awaiting governmental action (a recent example being the use of stimulus funds to extend broadband to under-served or unserved rural areas), so it certainly understands the perils and pitfalls of federal programs.

To read more, please see Can Government Mandate Innovation? on my Digital Life blog on InformationWeek.

Obama Plans Brighten IT Prospects

If all you've heard is business complain that increased taxes and government regulation is driving investment and innovation abroad or is otherwise bad for business, you haven't been listening to IT vendors.

The flip side of regulation is, of course, compliance, which drives an entire army of lawyers, auditors and enforcement types. But it also drives a legion of software and hardware vendors selling applications and devices to help business comply with new regulations.

To read more, please see Obama Plans Brighten IT Prospects on my Digital Life blog on InformationWeek.

Cutting Google Out Of Mobile

Two diametrically different companies — Fortune 100 IT vendor HP, and tiny Norwegian browser company Opera – have separately demonstrated how a subtle but important shift in the technology landscape could eat into the fabric of Google’s revenue tapestry.

According to HP’s Billy Hoffman, HTML 5 can be used to support temporary peer-to-peer networks running within browsers that exist only as long as those browsers are open. HTML 5 is key because it runs Javascript “orders of magnitude” more quickly, and improves memory allocation on devices, all of which means that multiple users can communicate and share documents without their files or conversations ever touching a physical server. While HP is still experimenting with this capability, Opera recently announced Opera Unite, a browser-based file-sharing application which Hoffman said “looks very interesting.”

To read more, please see Cutting Google Out Of Mobile on my BNET Technology blog.

Oracle Lying About SAP

Oracle is putting out the word that it’s gaining market share at the expense of SAP to distract attention from its declining revenues and profits, but the numbers put the lie to the spin. Oracle held its own in database and middleware revenues, where it doesn’t compete with SAP, but in applications, where it does go head to head with the business applications vendor, new license sales declined almost 20 percent and total applications, including support and license updates, declined by 9 percent. It was able to make up some of that ground thanks to twelve percent growth in license updates and product support for middleware and databases.

But Oracle president Charles Phillips boasted that, “We grew faster and took market share from SAP in every region around the world.” The funny thing is, when I spoke to SAP communications chief Bill Wohl back in May, he predicted that Oracle would try to spin its results this way. While granting that Oracle is the bigger company, and is growing in some areas, Wohl assured me that “in the space where we compete we’re doing very well, thank you.”

To read more, please see Oracle Lying About SAP on my BNET Technology blog.

Nokia Worse With Intel Inside

In a classic case of two big companies, each with its own set of dysfunctional business units and competing products, smashing into each other like particles in a Large Hadron Collider in the hopes of discovering the meaning of life, Nokia and Intel have decided to throw in their chips together.

In the feverish delusion of the executives who cooked up this Frankenstein’s supercomputing boondoggle, the planned partnership between their respective chip and wireless handheld device businesses is supposed to

marry the best features and capabilities of the computing and communications worlds and … transform the user experience, bringing incredible mobile applications and always on, always connected wireless Internet access in a user-friendly pocketable form factor.

In reality, though, there are more things wrong with this partnership than are dreamt of in Nintel’s (or is it Intokia’s) philosophy.

To read more, please see Nokia Worse With Intel Inside on my BNET Technology blog.

Apple, Google Won't Finish What They Started

Apple and Google have begun a revolution in mobile computing, but they won’t be the ones to finish it. They will have their part in the world to come, but the true masters of the mobile application space are unknown and probably manifold.

End users have already shown that they’re even ready to pay for mobile applications, in contrast to applications they download to their laptops. Social networking/dating site Flirtomatic, perhaps the poster child of frivolity, is stunning proof that consumers will pay — and pay and pay and pay. “Users on the mobile Internet have a propensity to pay that runs far in excess of what users on the standard Web are willing to pay,” Flirtomatic CEO Mark Curtis told me. Indeed, Flirtomatic sold five thousand virtual ice cubes (don’t ask what for) last week alone.

To read more, please see Apple, Google Won't Finish What They Started on my BNET Technology blog.

New York Best City To Lose A Smartphone

If once is a coincidence and twice is a trend, then I can confidently attest to the fact that if you're going to lose your Jesus Phone anywhere on earth, make it New York City.

A friend, despite being an investment banker from Boston, recently came to Yankee Stadium for a day game all dressed in his pinstriped suit and dapper shoes. His excuse for not having changed into something more appropriate? "I left my iPhone in a cab last night and this morning I got an email from the guy who found it. He was leaving on a business trip this afternoon, so my choice was change for the game or get my iPhone before he blew out of town."

Great story. One in a million, right?

To read more, please see New York Best City To Lose A Smartphone on my Digital Life blog at InformationWeek.

IBM Playing At The $100M Roulette Table

IBM’s $100 million investment in mobile applications is as safe a bet as covering both odd and even numbers on the roulette wheel.

Mobile applications are growing thanks to the popularity of social networks on mobile devices, improvements in Web-browsing technology, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that mobile enterprise applications have become critical to professional users. Apple, Research in Motion, Nokia and Palm have produced smartphones that are robust enough — and developer resources attractive enough — to elicit enormous interest among mobile application vendors.

To read more please see IBM Playing At The $100M Roulette Table on my BNET Technology blog.

An Unhealthy Obsession With Jobs

Apple says Steve Jobs will return to his position as CEO at the end of June. That ought to be enough to quiet rumors to the contrary. But ghoulish reporters, abetted at times by others shedding crocodile tears, are fixating on Jobs' ongoing health crisis like nobody's business.

And it's exactly that -- nobody's business.

Several respectable observers have argued that as CEO of a public company, Jobs' health is not a private matter, and I agree to a point. Rightly or not, Jobs is seen as the "causa prima" of Apple, and to many investors, his strategic importance to the company overshadows anything else the company might do.

To read more, please see An Unhealthy Obsession With Jobs on my Digital Life blog on InformationWeek.