The Web is singing this morning. The coming death of Flash on mobile devices has made a lot of tech pundits and developers very happy. There is a big fat "I told you so" coming from all corners the of Internet while all Adobe can do is quietly sit back and rue the day the original iPhone was announced.
There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.
Alt title: A Win for the Web.
Sources close to the news have told ZDNet reporter Jason Perlow tonight that Adobe will announce soon that it has given up on the development of mobile flash and will increase its investment in supporting HTML5. The company will say, according to an email published by Perlow, that it will encourage app developers to work with the cross-platform Adobe AIR platform to be distributed across mobile app stores, a caveat that could mean the news is less dramatic than it might seem. Rather than building with AIR for mobile, though, it seems likely that more developers will focus on HTML5 instead.
Feisty Twitter user Counternotions quotes Adobe's CEO from 2010 "Technology problems [w/ Flash] Mr. Jobs mentions...are 'really a smokescreen.'" Apple's refusal to go with the glitchy, gloppy proprietary protocol that performs poorly on Apple devices had to be a big part of what turned the tide.
If you happen to be in Manhattan in the near future, head over to 34th Street Herald Square and take note of the giant Windows Phone that has taken up residence there. It is huge. It is also a perfect representative of what Microsoft is willing to do to push Windows Phone on the public.
There have been concerts, shows and even a marriage proposal in the six-story Windows Phone in the middle of Manhattan. It is gaudy Microsoft marketing at its best (anybody remember the ProjectNatal/Kinect announcement?) and will be one of the first signs of wave of marketing coming from both Microsoft and Nokia. How will much will this matter for Windows Phone going forward?
PayPal today issued an update to its Android app that will enable people to make payments to each other via near field communications enabled smartphones. This does not include consumer to merchant payments but rather is a widget geared towards making payments with friends or other PayPal using people that happen to have NFC on their devices.
PayPal has shunned NFC to this point in its mobile payments push. The company's stance has been "it will not be a hard thing for us to implement if we find that it gains popularity." Really, this new NFC sharing widget for Android does not change that stance at all. Peer-to-peer payments in PayPal are a service, not a business vertical. Essentially, this update for PayPal does not affect how the company will approach mobile payments.
In theory, security researcher Charlie Miller was just trying to help. Apple's iOS is probed by malicious hackers constantly. They want a way in. To this point, Apple has been successful in keeping them out. It is one of the values of its iron fist rule over the App Store and the iOS user experience. Miller found a way in and planted a sleeper app in the App Store that he was going to use to present the security flaw at a conference in the coming weeks.
In planting the malicious app, Miller violated Apple terms of service and has been suspended from the iOS developer program for a year and his app has been removed. What the app did was get around the code signature requirement for iOS apps and allowed the app to connect to a command-and-control server to download additional code to the application.
PayPal and eBay really want you to know that it is a player in the mobile payments realm. Especially with the holidays coming up and more consumers than ever expected to make purchases from mobile devices. PayPal believes there is a lot of horizontal movement to be made in the mobile payments space and with the power of eBay behind it, the company thinks it will be the leader in the ecosystem for years to come.
PayPal and eBay have come out with new infographics today to show just how well the companies are doing in the mobile realm. It is really kind of ostentatious actually. PayPal specifically realizes that it has lost a lot of the consumer mindshare in mobile payments with everybody talking about how NFC may or may not change how payments fundamentally work. Check out the stats and infographics below.
Where is the mobile payments capital of the United States? Salt Lake City has groundswell as a test city of a variety of platforms. The big cities and tech hubs like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston and Portland, Ore. have a growing interest by brands and retailers. Yet, what if we told you that Des Moines, Iowa may be the U.S. leader in mobile payments? It may be true.
Des Moines is the home of mobile payments platform Dwolla. It is an interesting case study - local startup creating buzz within the community and getting retailers and consumers to actually use the platform. Dwolla has created a mobile payments ecosystem from the bottom up. Could this be a model that the top-down brands like the financial institutions, tech giants and payments experts could follow to success?
Barnes and Noble today unveiled their answer to Amazon's forthcoming Kindle Fire. The Nook Tablet is a full-color, 7-inch touchscreen media tablet that has much in common with the Kindle Fire. Both devices start shipping in just over a week.
Whereas Amazon launched a completely new product when it revealed the Fire, Barnes and Noble is really just upgrading its existing Nook Color and finally adding the word "tablet" to its name. In the launch presentation, CEO William Lynch Jr could hardly have made it more obvious who the company is gunning for here. He made several direct references to Amazon and the Kindle Fire, which he unsurprisingly dismissed as an inferior product.
Urban Airship, a Portland, Oregon mobile infrastructure company focused on push notifications and in-app sales as a service, has quadrupled its war-chest with a $15.1 million Series C round of funding, the company is announcing tonight. New investors Salesforce and Verizon join existing investors True Ventures and Foundry Group as participants in the latest round.
Airship has now raised more than $20 million in financing. Last week the company announced it has acquired geolocation data provider SimpleGeo in an all-stock deal reportedly worth $3.5 million. Those two companies together, along with their new backers Verizon and Salesforce, plus the forward-looking portfolios of True and Foundry, point toward a future based on mobile user engagement, analytics, rich geolocation data, marketing, sales, lead generation, CRM, network services, developer services and probably some other crazy things.
Apple had a great month in the new app department, mostly spurred by the release of the iPhone 4S and all the iOS5-based applications that developers have been working on throughout the summer. Android also had an interesting month for new apps but the real intriguing flood will come whenever Ice Cream Sandwich becomes widely adopted and, finally, we can start adding real Android tablets apps to our apps of the month column. Check out the selections for October 2011 below. We again brought back the updates portion of the column, with a list at the bottom of important app updates users should be aware of. Check it out below.
The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.
