Professor Zittrain has spent time on this blog and elsewhere discussing the future of cloud computing. One of his frequent suggestions is that it should be easier to move data within the cloud, so we don’t all get locked into a certain photo storage system, or spreadsheet provider, or what have you. It seems that […]

Thanks for all the great comments (here, and in replies directly to JZ on FB and Twitter) on why Facebook apps haven’t taken off the way, say, iPhone apps have. I thought I’d try to summarize some of the dominant themes to think about whether the problem is inherent or created by Facebook itself. 1. […]

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; more […]

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 […]

If this story is true, I think it’s a real misjudgment on Apple’s part. Floatopian, a Virginia and Palo Alto-based developer, created an app called iSinglePayer designed to advocate for single-payer healthcare in the US. Per Floatopian’s open letter, the free app contained charts and information about health care reform; it could also calculate the […]