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 stats: —Per […]

Those of you who follow Professor Zittrain’s work know that he’s been writing and thinking about ubiquitous human computing for the last several months. Another name for it might be distributed human computing: the phenomenon of disaggregating a task into component pieces and then parceling them out around the world. Perhaps the best-known example is […]

Most readers of this blog probably use several Google products; my rough count is that I use about 15. Privacy advocates have been understandably concerned about having so much information stored by one company. In partial response to these concerns, Google created the Google dashboard, a site that tells you which Google apps you use […]

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 […]

There are many reasons to worry about cloud computing.  Data stored in the cloud can be difficult to extract for you, yet all too easy to demand by government.  Applications running the cloud can mean new gatekeepers between you and code you might want to run. (And in discussing these issues, people don’t even agree […]