Why Zynga was Right to Buy OMGPop and Words With Friends, And What it Means for SaaS
Zynga just keeps getting hammered. The latest was on preannouncing a big miss for Q3, and an almost complete write-off of its $183m acquisition of OMGPop, the guys behind briefly ultrapopular Draw Something. Next up may well be a complete write-down of the $200m+ for Words with Friends. The OMGPop acquisition was called “catastrophic“, for example, [...]
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Engine Yard Opens Up Platform Services
Engine Yard (previous CloudAve coverage), one of the earliest PaaS players, today announced the launch of Engine Yard Platform Services. This is a partner program with more than 40 cloud vendors offering their services for Engine Yard platform. This is more like an appstore for Engine Yard Platform customers so that they can easily use [...]
Beating Apples system Amazon introduces Cloud Reader
Is this one of the first chinks in Apples armor for eBooks? I have tried repeatedly to use the eBook development kit for Apple, and honestly from a user friendly and programmatic viewpoint it is probably the worst chunk of software pushed by Apple. If the eBook fits all specifications and everyone from Amazon to [...]
Four reasons enterprise software should skip native mobile apps
The desire to “consumerize” mobile apps for their own sake is stoking today’s outsized enthusiasm with device-specific enterprise mobile apps at a time when HTML5 is right there staring us all in the face. Tony Byrne, Enterprise 2.0 B.S. List: Term No. 1 Consumerization The runaway success of the iPhone app store has demonstrated that [...]
Do we need openness for our toaster?
There has been some interesting discussion about Apple and iPad being closed. In many cases for Apple, I’d buy this argument, but regarding iPad being closed, I have to disagree. As I talked earlier, iPad is a gadget for non-techies. People who have been scared about the complexity of computers will be able to use [...]
Siri brings their Virtual Personal Assistant’s smarts to the iPhone
Siri provoked a flurry of interest last summer, and presumably not just because CTO Tom Gruber took part in one of my podcasts. With their genesis inside a big DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project, their talk of emergent Virtual Personal Assistants and their slick iPhone-powered demonstrations, the company ticked more than enough of the right boxes [...]
Is the iPad a big iPod or is it the new Newton?
The first thing I’ve got to say is the title of this post was supplied in a tweet from Alan Patrick (@freecloud), but it perfectly encapsulates the controversy going on in the geek world around the new Apple tablet device announced on Wednesday. Is it going to be as successful and “game changing” like the [...]
