“We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5,” Scribd CTO Jared Friedman told TechCrunch, “because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”
In addition, video-sharing site Wistia reports a high demand for HTML5 support from clients. The company plans to announce video analytics for HTML5 video on iPads on Thursday.
HTML5 is the emerging browser-based standard for highly interactive Web content. Google, Apple, and many other companies have pushed to make HTML5 a replacement for Adobe’s proprietary Flash technology, which has a large, impossible-to-avoid presence among interactive Web sites, especially those that play music or video.
But for Scribd’s function of hosting large text and multimedia documents in the middle of Webpages, Friedman said, Flash is disappointing because “the document is in a box,” just as the video in a YouTube clip is contained within its player. Scribd’s pending HTML5 replacement for its Flash-based document containers will allow users to interact with the content of documents as easily and broadly as if the documents themselves were Web pages.
Scribd’s project pre-dates Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ high-profile dismissal of Flash from the company’s new iPad tablet. Friedman told TechCrunch he had been “secretly on this project for the last six months.” He said that Scribd estimates 97 percent of the Web browsers currently on computers and mobile gadgets now will support the new HTML5-based format. That’s because the parts of the HTML5 specifications used to lay out text and still images are years older than the still-emerging standards for video.
Wistia CEO Chris Savage emailed VentureBeat to say, “As for the Flash vs. HTML5 debate, we were surprised by just how many customers have been demanding HTML5 support… and that’s saying something because most of our customers are not early adopters and many of them use wistia only for sharing with small groups.”
It’s pretty much impossible that Flash will disappear from the Internet overnight, because HTML5 video is still in its early stages. Nor will Scribd and Wistia drop support for Flash, because of the large base of installed-and-working Flash content, and because of customers who don’t want to switch. But technologists seem to be hedging their bets after Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ high-profile attacks on Flash during the iPad’s launch period.
TechCrunch obtained a screenshot of a Scribd HTML5 document displaying advanced text layout on an iPad.
Companies: Scribd
People: Jared Friedman
Which Camera is Better? is a post from Chris Pirillo
Over on Geeks, someone was wondering which camera is the best. The first thought that came to my mind was what the bot in our chat room will tell you if you ask “what is better.”
“Chris recommends you use what you want to use, download what you want to download, try what you want to try, buy what you want to buy. These choices are all personal in nature, so it’s always difficult to answer the question of “which is better” (so don’t be surprised if Chris doesn’t answer your impossible question).”
No one can answer this question for you. It’s one thing to ask which cameras (or whatever it is you’re looking for) someone uses, why they prefer it, and whether they’ve had any issues with it. That is called information gathering, and is an important part of the research you should be doing before buying anything new. Always ask questions of others. Find out what their experiences have been with their devices. Read reviews online. Ask for recommendations.
Don’t ask ME what the best is, or you’ll likely get a reply much like the one above from the Pixie bot. What’s best for me may not be what works the best for you.
I DO know that what’s best for your computer is to keep it updated with the latest and greatest software we can find!
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As you can see, pretty well! Google has only missed EPS estimates three times in the last four years, with the last miss coming a year and a half ago.
To beat the street later this week, Google's EPS will have to be higher than $6.58. (Which it did at $6.76.)
When last we looked Amazon was running away with retail sales compared to competitors. Today, it's sprinting away with it.
We used the first quarter of 2003 as our base, then took a look at the growth in sales from Amazon, E-Commerce, and offline retail sales.
"Even though I've been saying for years that social networking will one day usurp email, it's a bit shocking to see that it has.
There are some caveats. My kids use Facebook as their primary inbox (they also use gmail). So some of what they do on Facebook is actually email.
But even so, it looks like email's reign as the king of communication is ending and social networking is now supreme."
She built the chart below comparing it to other gadgets that have been released in last few years. Katy isn't expecting the iPad to blow the doors off. She sees it selling less than the iPhone, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
Katy estimates Apple sells 7 million iPads in its first 12 months, and 16.5 million in the first 24 months. Based on the sales of other gadgets, her estimates actually seem conservative.
ATG surveyed 1,054 people asking them how they browse and research products, as well as how they make purchases. As you can see in the chart below, people aren't yet using mobile phones for either researching or buying products.
This is the result of just a few people using the mobile web still. While smartphones are growing, they're still a tiny part of the market's handsets overall (~21% now.)
Regardless, it's important to keep this in mind when thinking about the mobile ad market. Purchasing intent is one of the key drivers of advertising. If people aren't using mobile phones when thinking about buying things, there's no reason to advertise. The US mobile ad market was only worth $416 million in 2009, according to eMarketer.
Image: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-unique-visitors-social-networking-sites-2010-4
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Battery Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Mobile Computing http://bit.ly/c2qozb
Researchers at Stanford University have just made a major breakthrough that may impact the technology industry for years to come: they've built a better battery. The project, an attempt to use lithium-sulfur in place of the lithium-ion technology such as is used in batteries today, has been in development since 2007. Recently, the scientists' efforts were rewarded when they created a battery that lasts four times as long as its lithium-ion counterparts while also having the benefit of being "significantly safer" than today's batteries which occasionally explode after short-circuiting.
The new battery technology represents the final step in our quest for always-on connectivity to the mobile web. We already have Wi-Fi hotspots, 3G and 4G networks for Internet everywhere and a host of mobile gadgets from netbooks to iPads and mobile phones to notebook computers. But what we haven't had yet is a way to keep our gadgets powered up for more than a day or so without a charge. That may be soon about to change.
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Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.
With these sorts of improvements, lithium-ion batteries could lead the way in the next phase of the mobile revolution. They could allow us to fully enjoy the web from anywhere in the world, without having to worry about dying batteries, access to power outlets or having to carry around battery replacements when planning long-lasting mobile computing sessions.
Far more than just a convenience, better battery technology would impact how our mobile devices are designed and how they behave. For example, Apple currently imposes numerous restrictions on members of their mobile device lineup for the sake of battery performance. On Apple iPhones, iPod Touches and the forthcoming iPad, applications aren't permitted to run in the background and Adobe Flash technology has been banned altogether, supposedly for its CPU usage which rapidly drains battery juice. Other mobile smartphone makers, while not necessarily as restrictive as Apple, still have to weigh the benefits of providing these same types of features with the performance hit their gadgets will take if they do so. And as anyone who regularly fires up their smartphone web browser knows, too much Internet surfing during the day means a phone that dies out before nightfall.
Another example: today, if you want to pack your Kindle or Nook e-Reader to take with you on vacation, you still have to go through the thought process: how long will I be gone? Will my battery last? Should I pack the cord? Now imagine that you could just throw your e-Reader into your bag without a second thought, just as if you were packing the paperback novel or newspaper these sorts of gadgets hope to replace. Would that encourage more people to make the switch from the analog formats to digital?
What if, in the future, concerns like these were no longer a worry? What if phones, netbooks, e-Readers and other mobile devices could be used for days on end without the need for a charge? That would radically impact the way we think about and use our mobile devices.
There are a million other use cases that could benefit from this technology change, too, including sensor networks, computing from remote areas, faster news dissemination from areas impacted by disasters (either natural or man-made) where power outages have occurred, gadgets for hikers, campers and other explorers who spend weeks away from civilization and, therefore, away from electricity, mobile location-based services that run in the background on smartphones and other personal mobile gadgets and - OK, we'll admit it - the ability to Twitter all day long without a recharge.
For the nitty gritty technical details about this new battery technology, MIT's Technology Review explains everything from the cathodes to the conductivity as well as the challenges still ahead for this breakthrough technology. Most notably, the scientists still need to figure out how to maintain capacity. After five discharge/recharge cycles, the batteries lost one-third of their initial storage capacity and after 40 to 50 cycles, they ceased to function altogether. However, if the researchers can overcome that final hurdle and a few others, the new technology could one day become commercially viable. It's too soon to know if that will actually occur, but as gadget lovers ourselves, we're hopeful.
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Battery Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Mobile Computing
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