Edgios, a little-known search start-up, may be about to come out of its self-imposed shell.
The company, which has offices in the United States and Serbia, has received extensive advance coverage--especially on Serbian developer discussion boards prior to its official launch.
Edgios: Dropping a big hint?
(Credit: Edgios)Edgios has been alpha testing its software since the fall. However, Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the company's major venture backers, today dropped a broad hint that the coming-out party may be near.
In a presentation he delivered on the history of technology innovation at the Global Technology Symposium on Thursday, Jurvetson said there would be a big announcement from Edgios "in the next week or two." He spiced up that tease by saying that Edgios believes it can "reinvent search." When I caught up with him later on, Jurvetson declined to amplify on his comments.
From the little that is known--or at least speculated upon--Edgios is thought to be a search engine based upon a peer-to-peer technology. That may be a plausible assumption. Jurvetson said Edgios would not need a massive data center or infrastructure build-out. What's more, Edgios' founder, Borislav Agapiev, has previously written about the advantages of P2P and a distributed approach to search, which likely will feature a cloud component.
But Agapiev, too, hasn't disclosed much to clarify the guesswork. For what it's worth, here's the company tease:
"Edgios is bringing you the future of search. This doesn't just involve a bigger index. And it's not just a way for us to deliver you the same old results more cheaply. We're re-inventing web search, opening up the entire process, fundamentally democratizing the discovery of information. Do any of the big search engines let you control what goes into the search index? Do they rank search results according to what real people want? No, they don't. But Edgios does."
Such it is with marketing statements, that could describe anything and everything under the sun.
OK, it's California. So we are quite used to the rest of the country rolling their eyes in knowing exasperation at our fads. But often, they turn out to be harbingers of national trends. And so the question: Will AB-255 number among them as well?
California Assemblyman Joel Anderson (R-El Cajon)
Last month California Assemblyman, Joel Anderson, introduced a bill to limit the amount of detail someone could see on screen using online mapping tools. It also calls for fines of up to $250,000 per day for violating what Anderson describes "as the same level of protections that foreign governments extend to their own citizens."
Considering the strength of California's high-tech industry, he may be tilting at windmills. However, this isn't the first time that Anderson, a Republican from the San Diego area, has courted controversy. In 2007, he pushed through a state bill that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed, requiring the state's huge pension funds to stop investing in companies that do business with Iran.
Here are the clauses from AB-255 sure to raise hackles in Silicon Valley:
"(a)An operator of a commercial Internet Web site or online service that makes a virtual globe browser available to members of the public shall not provide aerial or satellite photographs or imagery of a building or facility in this state that is identified on the Internet Web site by the operator as a school or place of worship, or a government or medical building or facility, unless those photographs or images have been blurred.
"(b)An operator of a commercial Internet Web site or online service that makes a virtual globe browser available to members of the public shall not provide street view photographs or images of the buildings and facilities described in subdivision (a)."
Anderson argues that he's part of a larger global trend where interests of state are being pressed by domestic politicians worried about the security implications of online mapping. The latest instance came on Tuesday, when the minister of State for Home in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Naseem Khan, said that he wants to stop Google Earth from showing sensitive locations because of terrorism concerns. "We want Google Earth censored," he said. "We shall submit a proposal to the center and other concerned agencies to implement it as soon as possible."
Anderson, who says he is asking only what India and some other foreign governments are demanding for their citizens. I spoke with Anderson late Tuesday to find out why he was so keen to promote the bill.
Question: When is the bill expected to go into committee?
Anderson: I'm thinking that it will be in committee within a week. That's not official. Right now, everything is fluid. The majority party sets the pace but we were told to expect it to happen about a week from now.
Q: Your bill would ban online providers from showing detailed satellite images of schools, places of worship, government buildings, and medical facilities, unless they were first blurred out. How did you arrive at that list?
Anderson: Well, I looked at where we've had security issues in the past and potentially, might have issues in the future. Churches and synagogues have been bombed. So have federal buildings and then, of course, 9/11. So, the threats are out there and as a state legislator, public safety is my No. 1 job. To ignore that fact would be irresponsible.
Q: Still, the wording of the proposed bill is not going to go down well with a lot of people.
Anderson: The bill is fraught with undefined items and it has to be honed down and clarified. What you're looking at is not the finished product. But the concept of the bill will remain. After the Mumbai attacks, the Indian government found that the lone surviving terrorist used Google's online maps and the level of detail it offered made them effective. What's interesting is that what they're doing in India now is exactly what I'm suggesting we do. If you go throughout the world, many countries are trying to shut down Google mapping--it's not just Google. My bill would address all online mapping.
Q: Isn't the real threat here the motivation of people who look to commit heinous acts, rather than the technology they use?
Anderson: I'm not against the technology; it's fantastic. But we're in an evolving world and we have to change our course as it changes. I'm all for online mapping, but knowing where the air ducts are in an air shaft is not necessary for me to navigate in the city. Who wants to know that level of detail? Bad people do.
Q: But could not a terrorist just as easily plan out their attacks by using a map of a city like Mumbai? They don't need to go up online to locate their targets.
Anderson: The level of detail is not on the maps. With a map, you cant count the number of bricks in a building, or see the elevator shafts. With this level of detail (afforded by online maps,) you can. I hear the argument that, "Yeah, I want to also ban cars because cars are used in robberies." Look, cars have other commercial uses. There are no other uses for knowing on a map where there are air shafts. These are all red herring arguments. The fact is that I would be remiss in my job if I didn't take this seriously. I'm not interested in censoring Google or the others, but now that we know there's a threat, how could we not address this?
Q: But that's where it becomes more complicated. A colleague here at CNET pointed out that the way the bill is worded, government agencies that use Google Earth, for instance, to help the public find their buildings could conceivably be in violation as well.
Anderson: The wording of the law would change. But companies would still back off the level of detail. The only concern people have had that's been put to me is whether they'll still be able to use the online maps and my answer is that, absolutely, they will. I'm not against technology.
Q: Do you believe you have the votes to pass your proposal?
Anderson: I'm working on that. And I believe that other people from other states will follow suit and do something similar.
Q: If AB-255 does pass, why do you believe it would stand up to a court challenge?
Anderson: That's their option. They can take it to court. But since when do you have a First Amendment right to yell fire? This falls under the same category.
Q: So have you been in touch with software companies to talk about your bill?
Anderson: Microsoft spent two hours with me last week. I want to hone it down and work out something that works for them as well as for me. I also spoke with the lobbyist from Google. My door is open. I do want to work with them in good faith. The bill will be cleaned up and I have a pretty good idea of where it should go, but as we got through the vetting process, I'm open to what my colleagues have to say or what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Mapquest have to say. But the concept of the bill will stay intact. This is the trend that's going around the world. let's not wait until an American has to die in order to do the right thing.
A big outage at Google Tuesday. Things go dark early while most of the U.S. is sleeping. Still, the Internet is without borders and so the glitch leaves millions of people who use Google Web mail and Google Apps, high and dry.
It was mild melodrama for a few hours but things returned to normal after a few hours. It's still unclear what happened, though Google says it's investigating the problem.
Truth be told, the walls of Jericho did not crumble, though the outage nonetheless triggered the (now thoroughly predictable) hand-wringing and bloviating from the usual cast of characters. Amusing to watch, but after this incident, there's also the wider context to consider.
Any outages are embarrassing. But while Gmail did crash a few times in 2008, this is the first time the service has gone down in quite a while. (As my colleague Stephen Shankland noted, Google extends a guarantee to corporate customers paying for any of its business Apps services, which rely on the cloud. The promise: they will be able to access Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time every month. If not, Google pays them a penalty fee. So far Google says it hasn't fallen below that mark.)
If these sorts of outages occurred with more regularity, I suppose that would seriously retard cloud computing's growth. Google and Salesforce.com and Amazon and any other purveyors of cloud-based services obviously cringe when their connections fail. Not to underplay the anguish customers and vendors find themselves dealing with, but the real news here is how rare these cloud-computing outages have become.
A few years ago it seemed that eBay's Web site was seizing up all of the time. The reality was less severe but merchants and bidders would scream bloody murder. At the same time, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Buy.com were dealing with repeated denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Things got so bad that some even feared for the future of e-commerce.
We now know how the story turned out. Fact is that there are no 100 percent guarantees anymore, not in a world in which applications increasingly get hosted on the Internet. When things go bump in the night, as they inevitably will, there is going to be a commotion, albeit a temporary one. Get over it, already.
This is computing, after all.
Adweek is hyperventilating about the results of a new Forrester Research report, leading with the headline, "There's Still Room for Google Killers, study says."
Actually, it says no such thing. If you don't believe me, check with the analyst who wrote the report. (I did.)
"Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to say that the 'nascent search field is wide open,'" Shar VanBoskirk told me in an e-mail. "I do agree that the search field is young and still growing, but Google has a far, far lead over others, in terms of both consumer search use and search-advertising spend."
(Credit:
Forrester Research)
The point of her research was to demonstrate to marketers that they should be advertising on more than just Google and that they can actually target specific users on different types of search engines, she added.
Fair enough, but that's a world removed from what Adweek reports.
Not surprisingly, Google is quite content with the impression being left on a too easily impressed press. Little wonder about that. The last thing the search giant wants is anything that fosters the impression of a so-called Google monoculture on the Internet. Last Saturday's malware glitch, however brief, only fed into the meme that Google's too big and pervasive.
Not that Google expects antitrust headaches. CEO Eric Schmidt, who informally counseled Barack Obama on tech policy, also was on the presidential transitional advisory board prior to Inauguration Day.
Besides, from a technology perspective, what's the cost of switching from one Internet browser to another? Google has also made it relatively painless to port data to rival services. But with a new administration looking for dragons to slay, who needs conspiracy theorists taking to the cyberbarricades, screaming about monopoly power? So it is that Google must have especially welcomed the Adweek (mis)report.
VanBoskirk's larger point about the fickleness of search loyalty is correct. Other sites may be better at finding certain things. However, she is not claiming that Google's domination of U.S. Internet search is in imminent trouble. Here's what she actually concluded:
- Consumers are still not loyal to a single engine. But Google still enjoys the most exclusivity--20 percent of all searchers use only Google on a weekly basis.
- Google's lead has grown from 41 percent three years ago to 59 percent.
- Twenty-one percent of consumers use Yahoo as their primary search engine. But consider this: while 53 percent of consumers who set Yahoo as their home page most frequently select Yahoo for search, 91 percent of consumers who set Google as their home page most frequently use Google for search.
- MSN remains a distant No. 3, with 3 percent of consumers using the service as their primary search engine.
Draw your own conclusion from the evidence. But "Google killers?" I don't think so.
Steve Ballmer, who just announced to the troops that Microsoft was firing 5,000 employees due to the recession, might be excused for wanting to slam his head against the wall at this point.
After reporting quarterly earnings, Google finished Friday up more than $18. So at this point, at least, it's still Google 1, Recession 0. The cool kids have the upper hand--at least for the time being.
I'm the last to suggest that Google is immune to the drag of an economic slowdown. Everyone these days is obviously tightening their belts, and Google is no exception. The company let go of 100 contractors and recently ordered three projects shut down as cost-savings measures. (How long before more money losers get dumped?)
In the meantime, however, Google's advertising business held up remarkably well in the fourth quarter, all things considered. Even though the economy headed south, Google's paid clicks increased 18 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the same period a year earlier.
But if you're a glass-half-empty type, is this a harbinger of trouble? Revenue growth slowed to an 18 percent annual rate, compared with 31 percent in the third quarter. Listening to Eric Schmidt's team handle Wall Street's questions on the company's conference call Thursday afternoon, you realize that the folks running Google are too experienced to believe they can defy history.
At best, they may be able to slow it down through a combination of managing smartly and prudent cost-cutting. Apropos, here's what Google's CFO, Patrick Pichette, had to say:
Focused. But that's not the same as arguing the keyword search business is recession-proof. With more businesses and consumers reducing spending, how long before advertisers have to lower their keyword bids?"I think the management team is really working with two agendas always. One is, manage our resources prudently. I think Eric was right in saying in some ways the easy part was done in Q4. In that sense, this is a worldwide recession with a lot of visibility about what's going to happen. We just have to be prudent, and therefore, we're focused."
Business was so bad for so many companies in the fourth quarter that many retailers were offering distress sales in a rush to clear inventory. And that affected search patterns during the last couple of months of 2008. Here's what Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president of product management, had to say about the anomaly:
"Interestingly, what we saw in November and December was consumers searching much more disproportionately for two-for-one, for sales, for coupons, and advertisers really trying to make sure that they were able to sell the inventory which they purchased when they were anticipating a better economic situation."
"So, one of the things we have to ask ourselves now is how much of that inventory has actually flowed through the system...Obviously, we would be adversely impacted if there were less total commerce moving forward. So that's really the wildcard from a user standpoint that we need to watch."
He's quite right about that. Nobody knows the sort of hand Google's likely to get dealt. Anybody who tells you otherwise is simply a pumper or a dumper. Or maybe they just work for CNBC.
The rap against Google is that it's just a glorified one-trick pony. When I hear that refrain (usually, from Microsoft folks,) I nod and add, "Yeah...and that's still one helluva pony."
But here's the rub: if advertising comes under more pressure during the next 12 months, does Google have the chops to come up with another big idea to compensate for any financial shortfall? Google's page-ranking technology was a breakthrough and a huge moneymaker. Even Google's biggest fans have acknowledged that nothing remotely similar has since made its way off the drawing board.
And who knows? If stuff like Google Scholar is the best that Google can muster, maybe Ballmer won't have to slam his head for much longer. To be continued...
After Google beat analysts estimates in its October 2007 quarter, CEO Eric Schmidt had this to say:
When we look at it, revenue growth of course very healthy, both in Google.com and also in our AdSense businesses. And the seasonal weakness in traffic was milder than we expected on Google.com, which was a very pleasant surprise from our perspective. It is obvious to us that the search quality investments that we are making are paying off, particularly internationally, as we do better and better in almost every country.
This was boilerplate CEO-speak coming from management. But that was enough to send the lemmings on Wall Street into an unprecedented frenzy. I don't know if some of these guys made a habit of sitting in front of their computers with a pound of weed and a bottle of tequila at the ready, but they soon let loose with a round of jaw-dropping stock price predictions. Here's a partial list of the revisions:
• Anthony Noto, Goldman Sachs: To $800 from $620
• Jeffrey Lindsay, Bernstein Research: To $720 from $625
• Jordan Rohan, RBC: To $725 from $690
• Mark Mahaney, Citigroup: To $775 from $600
• Heath Terry, Credit Suisse: To $800 from $600
• Jason Helfstein, CIBC: To $700 from $690
(The crazy thing is that three of the predictions actually materialized shortly thereafter. Shares of Google touched $741.13 on November 7, 2007.)
But Dinosaur Securities analyst David Garrity, deserves special mention with his $985 price target. Thinking of posterity, he was considerate enough to include the following, um, analysis to back up his prognostication:
To the extent that advertising media distribution channels are being transformed by emerging technologies with the possibility that mobile advertising may ultimately become more significant than the current broadcast channel in spending terms," he writes, "GOOG in effectively penetrating the walled garden that wireless communications services have been until now is securing a strategic technology provider role that will allow it to meaningfully shape the progression of development in the space."
Rereading that paragraph, I'm tempted to slam my head repeatedly against the wall until everything goes black. But let's wait because there's more. The hands-down winner in the Can You Top This? sweepstakes is none other than "Infectious Greed's" own Paul Kedrosky, who came up with a $1,000 price target on Google:
People are increasingly screwy about Google's (GOOG) near-$1,000 share price. The latest example: The hoo-ha over a Bernstein analyst upping his target on the stock from $720 to $850. Sure, $850 is a big number, but it's not that much of a deal to go from $720 to $850, an 18% increase on a stock that has run twice that much over the last few months. Further, GOOG had already pretty much hit the lower target, and, like the rest of the street, the Bernstein is essentially playing catchup....And me? I'm sticking to my $1,000 GOOG price target, posited months ago--to much scoffing--on one of my CNBC appearances.
So it is that Google closed at $318.78 Monday, slightly above its previous 52-week low of $309.44.
So it goes in the Age of Cramerica. Got a crystal ball and an itch to yammer in front of a television camera? Boy, do we have the job for you. Become a Google analyst! Unfortunately, the few folks with foresight, such as the brilliantly prescient Nouriel Roubini, got drowned out by the hucksters and perma-bulls. Didn't we see much the same thing, circa 1998 and 1999? Unfortunately, history does have a way of repeating itself.
YouTube may be a loss leader for Google, though with some 80 million viewers, that's still one hell of a loss leader.
On the strength of the thousands of short-form content uploaded by members, YouTube has grown exponentially since its 2006 acquisition by Google. But how much of a business is there in dumb cat videos? As always, the challenge for management has been how to make YouTube's $1.65 billion purchase price pay for itself.
(Credit:
CNET News)
Now Google is considering a different tack to answer at least part of that question. As my colleague Greg Sandoval reported earlier Thursday, YouTube will begin offering feature films produced by at least one of the biggest Hollywood movie studios, possibly as early as next month.
"For months, Google, YouTube's parent company, has been talking to the major film companies about launching an ad-supported, streaming movie service, two execs with knowledge of the negotiations told CNET News. "It's not imminent," said one of the executives. "But it's going to happen. I would say you can expect to see it, if all goes well, sometime within the next 30 to 90 days."
Among other things, this would put YouTube on a more competitive footing in long-form video versus Hulu, the joint video venture formed by NBC Universal and News Corp. The shift also underscores a recognition that the big spenders increasingly are getting picky. Despite the viral growth in user-generated content, advertisers would much rather spend their money on the professionally created stuff.
That's hardly an epiphany. What's surprising is that it took management so long to reach this conclusion. I'm not going to nitpick but what's more surprising is that even with an improved wide-screen video player, YouTube still lags Hulu in terms of picture quality. Maybe that doesn't matter for wonder-of-me moments shot with my home video recorder. It matters a lot when you're sitting down with prospective advertisers, freaked out by a disastrous economy, about where to put their money.
So it is that MG Siegler of VentureBeat correctly asks whether any of Google's exertions to date are enough to really matter.
Of course, there is still no real proof that Google has figured out an effective way to monetize these or any other videos on YouTube. So a large question would have to be if feature film content would be any different? Another question is if users will be willing to watch feature films in YouTube's often less-than-stellar video quality. It's one thing to watch short clips in low resolution, but sitting through an entire 90-minute to 2-hour feature may be a bit much to ask.
Technically, that doesn't sound like a very tall order. But the longer Google takes to figure out a fix, the more YouTube risks losing its status as a pop culture phenom.
Is this the face of Yahoo's next boss?
OK, Jerry, so now what?
Don't you know that Jerry Yang would grab Microsoft's original $31 a share buyout bid if he could turn back the clock. Of course, that ain't about to happen, so mark November 5, 2008 as the start of the Great Countdown until the company's fate gets decided by Microsoft, or some still unknown third party. From this point on, its CEO has run out of options.
Google announced Wednesday that it was backing out of its proposed search ad partnership because it didn't have the stomach for a fight with Uncle Sam's antitrust lawyers. From a Google perspective, that's a perfectly understandable tactical retreat. In the near-term, the deal would have helped Yahoo more than Google anyway. (Yahoo expected the deal would have raised its revenue by $800 million in its first year, adding an additional $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow.)
It's hard to believe Microsoft won't go after Yahoo again. At a sharply discounted price to its original offer, why wouldn't it? Yahoo still possesses a coveted franchise, but this economy is a world removed from what it was in late winter when Microsoft was hot to do an acquisition. Back then, Yang could plausibly argue to his board and shareholders the logic of holding out for a higher price or negotiating a partnership with Google.
He gambled and lost.
Yang may still object to a Microsoft sale, but with the stock stuck near its all-time lows, Yahoo's shareholders won't care what he thinks. They've been badly hosed by being too patient.
The Federal Communications Commission is going to vote on rules governing these airwaves at its November 4 meeting. This is going to be quite a big deal. Commission Chairman Kevin Martin supports the idea, but it faces opposition from broadcasters, who are pushing for a delay. Mike Masnick of TechDiret summarizes the history here.
"Basically, the FCC handed out a ton of spectrum (for free, mind you) to TV broadcasters years ago. In order to prevent against interference, there's always been a requirement for some "buffer" space. However, as technology has improved, the need for this buffer space has decreased, and plenty of tech companies would be interested in making use of some of that basically unused spectrum by having it set aside as open spectrum. Earlier this year, some of those companies, led by Microsoft and Google, delivered a device to the FCC to test. Unfortunately, the device had some problems. However, the concept is sound -- and with some tweaking, it's quite reasonable that such a device could work without interfering with TV signals. But you wouldn't know that from broadcasters, who love to hoard their spectrum."
The fact that Whitt lobbied on behalf of his company's cause is hardly surprising. What's more interesting is that Google's executives are as comfortable as they are when it comes to drawing lines in the political sand.
Does this man Google?
(Credit: Obama for President Web site)High-profile companies try to avoid controversy. Wading into public policy, there's always the risk of alienating customers or partners. That's why PR handlers at Google-scale organizations council their executives be be boring to the point of soporific when it comes to any subject remotely bordering on the political.
But that did not stop CEO Eric Schmidt from endorsing Barack Obama. Ditto for Vint Cerf the company's vice president and "Chief Internet Evangelist," who put a video on YouTube where he explained his decision to vote for Obama.
(Officially, Google doesn't have a horse in this race and companies are prohibited from making campaign contributions. You can find Obama contributors who listed their employer as Google on a list compiled by Opensecrets.org. But that doesn't reveal much other than that people have opinions. What a shocker. You can find much the same thing about Microsoft, Yahoo, or any other high-profile technology company, for that matter.)
The anti-Schmidt blowback in the online talkback forums was predictable. One reader with the handle "Gerry S" left this message:
"What kind of an idiot would support the likes of these people in any way? Attention stockholders, if this is the business mentality of certain business leaders, then you might want use their judgment to assess their leadership skills."
That's to be expected, but I found the decision by Schmidt and Cerf to go public quite refreshing. Last month, company co-founder Sergey Brin announced Google's opposition to Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would prevent same-sex couples from marrying.
Even though the tech firmament is comprised of a lot of very smart people, they don't like to stick out their necks. With rare exception--aside from Steve Ballmer's "heck with Janet Reno" quip--the only technology leader who has consistently been willing to stake out public positions on policy questions is T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor.
Or they discover their lungs after retiring.
Judy Estrin, one of tech's most successful entrepreneurs, recently authored a book, Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy. The book is a marvelous, albeit depressing read. Nothing was out of bounds--from the politicization of science and the neglect of the nation's research community to the need for new political leadership. But might Estrin just as easily have offered the same critique when she was still a working stiff? I'm not so sure. We're all so careful these days to tiptoe around the obvious that the frank talk most often takes place behind closed doors.
Too bad. With the nation facing both an economic recession as well as a vexing energy challenge, is now really the best time to be talking in hushed tones?
The battle for the hearts and minds of smartphone developers is on.
Earlier Wednesday, Google unveiled its Android Market which will allow anyone buying T-Mobile's G1 to download apps for the smartphone. Here's what Google had to say:
"If you're a developer, you will be able to register and upload your applications starting next Monday, 2008-10-27, when we've wrapped up a few final details. In order to make sure that each developer is authenticated and responsible for their apps, you will need to register and pay a one time $25 application fee. Once registered, your apps can be made available to users without further validation or approval."
Starting in early Q1, developers will also be able to distribute paid apps in addition to free apps. Developers will get 70% of the revenue from each purchase; the remaining amount goes to carriers and billing settlement fees--Google does not take a percentage. We believe this revenue model creates a fair and positive experience for users, developers, and carriers.
The timing obviously was coincidental but it follows by just a day Apple's earnings report where we learned that the company shipped 6.9 million iPhones in the third quarter. Meanwhile, Research In Motion announced that its long-delayed Blackberry, the Bold 9000, will go on sale early next month.
Each company will win fans who become enamored of this or that feature. But the fanboys, whose tether with reality got cut long ago, matter less than the developers.
Competing head to head, Apple, Google, and RIM will present themselves as the developer's best friend. Whoever makes good on that promise will score big. The iPhone is out ahead of the pack but nothing's set in concrete. In fact, Apple has had, at best, an uneven relationship with iPhone developers, and each side still is not sure whether it can trust the other.
As my colleague Stephen Shankland notes, the iPhone is about as locked down as possible.
"The App Store, while thriving, is a walled garden compared to the user-ranked, self-governing free-for-all that Google aspires to build with its Android Market download site. Google launched its Android software developer kit before launching Android to encourage people to write applications for the phones, whereas Apple only released its SDK much later and, only recently, partly lifted a nondisclosure agreement that muzzled developers from so much as sharing programming tips. And perhaps most clearly, the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 built by HTC, comes with a USB debugging mode to let programmers peer into its inner workings."
If RIM and Google roll out the welcome mat, a lot of third-party developers will take notice. For more about this as well as an initial appraisal of the G1, I spoke with CNET Reviews' Kent German earlier Wednesday on the Daily Debrief.
