The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential [...]

Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about [...]

Our worries about ubiquitous human computing*—summarized in this earlier post—fall into two broad categories. First, there are potential bad effects on the workers, since traditional labor-law protections may not apply in cyberspace. Second, there are potential bad effects on the world. One example that JZ has given in talks is that lobbyists [...]

As Phones Do More, They Become Targets of Hacking. The NY Times observes that as computing — and especially commerce — moves onto mobile devices, security threats are growing. “It feels a lot like it did in 1999 in desktop security … People are using the mobile Web and downloading applications more than ever [...]

Apple’s Game-Changer, Downloading Now. Long NY Times article on Apple’s App Store and how it’s changed the model of what a smartphone should be. The good parts of the article: interesting data (100K apps for the iPhone, 14K for Android, 500 (!) for PalmOS; $1B a year in iPhone app sales), some valuable [...]

Here’s a roundup of some interesting stories published recently on generativity, tethered devices, and as always, the iPhone.
Generative Irrelevancy. Tim Sturgill considers Google’s video touting Chrome OS. He worries that it may be the “final nail…in the generative coffin,” but he also sees the virtue of moving beyond traditional OSes. See also JZ’s take [...]

Newsweek recently carried a story noting that the App Store isn’t the fount of instant riches that Apple, and occasionally the media, sometimes suggest. The story follows some developers who created very popular applications, but found themselves just barely profitable, or sometimes losing money. It’s a good read, and has some particularly interesting [...]

This blog and JZ’s book have both taken issue with Steve Jobs’ introduction to the iPhone:
We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a [...]

A little behind the times, but here’s the update on the Google Voice story. Apple and Google both responded to the FCC’s letter; Apple’s reply is here and Google’s is here.
So what did we learn? On the upside, we learned a lot about the approval processes for both the iPhone and Android phones; [...]

As promised, here’s some of what we learned about the app approval process from Google and Apple’s letters to the FCC. There’s nothing ground-shaking, but a few details of interest to smartphone obsessives.
Apple:
Apple says a staff member tests every submission for technical issues like bugs and unauthorized protocols. More holistically, they look for signs that [...]