Habits Are The New Viral: Why Startups Must Be Behavior Experts. Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal, a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators.
Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com. Face it; you’re hooked. It’s your uncontrollable urge to check for email notifications on your phone. It’s your compulsion to visit Facebook or Twitter for just a few minutes, but somehow find yourself still scrolling after an hour. HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship.
HTML5 versus native apps.
It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 is good and native is bad. Native is what we have to deal with as we wait for HTML5 to prevail. But what if that never happens? Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. Developers often state their love of HTML5 and their commitment to it going forward. These days, if you’re going to do native apps, you at least have to support iOS and Android. Talking to developers, this is the single biggest pain point on the mobile side of things. 16 Disruptive Technologies. Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In A Web Of Flow. A pilcrow is a typographic term for the paragraph marker that many publishers use, such as the New York Times.
It looks like this: ‘¶’. This has come into recent prominence since the NY Times has implemented anchors on every paragraph of its news stories, so that every paragraph has a distinct URL. To access the URL you can double tap the shift key when viewing a NY Times page in a browser, and pilcrows appear at the head of every paragraph, serving as the place to copy the paragraph specific URL. This allows a simple way to direct someone to a specific paragraph in a news story, instead of qualifying a URL to the story’s page by saying ‘3/4ths down the page, he writes…’. Deep Packet Inspection Circles Back for a Second Look: Tech News « Deep packet inspection, a creepy and invasive targeting technology, is looking to make a comeback, this time armed with opt-in consent and incentives for users.
The technology, which involves scanning data packets for information on where they come from and what they contain, fell out of favor a few years ago following consumer uproar and congressional hearings, after ISPs tried to use it to target subscribers with ads based on where consumers surfed online. But the Wall Street Journal says two major operators – Kindsight and Phorm – are ramping up their efforts, working with Internet service providers to deploy the technology.
Kindsight, which is owned by Alcatel-Lucent SA, said six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe are testing its service though no ad targeting is underway. The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough. The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up. By Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap.
We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web. Today, new services can easily be composed out of existing components and run on a common platform – the browser. We are entering an age where the creation of a new mobile service – taking advantage of such features as the user’s location, social network, personal data, and even phone-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer – can be mashed-up and put on-line just as easily as Web 2.0 services have been for several years already. The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile.
Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures.
You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) And raw computing power is taken for granted.
What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Ma. There are few people who know the ins and outs of the web as well as Joe Hewitt.
For the past decade, he’s had his hands deep in everything from Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox, to Facebook (where he currently works). Hewitt also knows a thing or two about the iPhone. He’s the one who first built Facebook’s excellent iPhone web app (before there were native apps on the iPhone), and then the native app — which is one of the best apps on the platform. How JavaScript will lead the way to open video. Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation.
Shay David is the vice president of business and community development at Kaltura, a company offering video tools for publishers. The “open Web”, a vision for the future of the Internet that is participatory, collaborative, and free from vendor lock-in is finally coming to fruition. Following Mozilla Firefox’s successful wedge of open Web standards into the browser platform, today we see every browser vendor and every web-enabled device gravitating towards supporting a vendor-neutral platform for rich media web experiences.
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators. The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010 - Smashing Magazine. Web design is a fickle industry.
Kickstarted: How one company is revolutionizing product development. 172inShare Jump To Close Kickstarter is funding an era of product development uncompromised by focus groups and committees The million dollar idea.
A TC Teardown: What Makes Groupon Tick. Editor’s note: Group buying sites are growing like mushrooms. Chris dixon's blog / The problem with online “local” businesses. One of the most popular areas for startups today is “local.” I probably see a couple of business plans a week that involve local search, local news, local online advertising, etc. Here’s the biggest challenge with local.