The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘entire’

Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping students virtually access their academic information and create a roadmap tailored to their career goals.

To date, over 2 million students at 750 universities have used MyEdu to earn their degree. MyEdu’s suite of online products try to streamline the entire process of a college student’s lifecycle, from selecting a college through to earning a degree. The suite includes detailed course descriptions, grade distributions, official course evaluations, and student reviews to pick the right classes; and schedule Planner to build the best schedule that fits a student’s time constraints and goals.

MyEdu also includes a graduation and degree roadmap to help students build a plan and stay on course towards the degree they want in order to graduate. And the academic progress dashboard allows students to track their grades in a centralized place. MyEdu charges a $20 annual subscription for the entire academic suite.

The startup, which just raised $5.5 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, has a compelling model to help both students and parents participate in the college planning process. And as colleges are now rapidly adopting web technologies as a educational tool (i.e. Blackboard); it makes sense for universities to do the same for college advising.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the DMCA.

On the one hand, as an author, I like that it gives me a way to stop illegal copies of my work being distributed in the US, so ensuring that I can continue to make a living without having to get a proper job. On the other hand, as an occasional journalist, I hate that it can also be used by trigger-happy lawyers to prevent certain embarrassing documents entering the public domain.

Thus conflicted, it was with some trepidation that I received news from the old country that Gordon Brown’s government is getting ready to enact its very own version of the DMCA. Called the Digital Economy Bill (DEB), the new statute aims – amongst other things – to halt the rising tide of intellectual property theft on the Internet. But unlike the DMCA, its reach won’t be limited to national borders: any site anywhere in the world that’s accessible from the UK needs to obey the law or else it’s liable to find itself blocked from the entire country. I’m not kidding, this is China-level enforcement.

The bill originated in the House of Lords (our second law-making chamber) where it was been tweaked and plucked, with various clauses added and removed – before being sent to the Commons (our first chamber) for debate and a final vote. Here in a nut are the key clauses as it currently stands:

Firstly, if the law passes, ISPs will be obliged to keep track of all allegations of illegal file-sharing made by copyright owners. There complaints will be used to produce an list of “persistent offenders” (subscribers who had received more than, say, 50 complaints about them) which will be made available on request to the copyright owners. The list will be anonymised, with subscribers identified only by a reference number, but copyright owners can then apply to the British courts to subpoena the names and addresses of the subscribers involved. Copyright owners can then take legal action directly, claiming substantial damages for each violation. The government is also able to take action: demanding that ISPs cut off internet access from households identified as persistent offenders.

A second – and even more controversial – clause was bolted on by members of the House of Lords in response to the claim that over 35% of copyright breaches occur not through P2P sharing, but rather through media hosts like YouTube and file locker services like Rapidshare. The new amendment will give the courts the power to demand that British ISPs block access to any site that knowingly and unlawfully hosts copyright material. That’s not just sites hosted in the UK but any site anywhere in the world. As with the DMCA, the ISP won’t be liable until they are notified of the illegal content (the ’safe harbor’ defence) providing they then take immediate steps to block the sites hosting them. If, however, the ISPs refuse to act, they will be liable to the full legal costs of the copyright owner. But unlike the DMCA, the amended bill contains absolutely no penalties for copyright owners who file bogus or spurious claims. The effects are about as chilling as can be: it is in the copyright owners’ interests to make as many claims as they like, and in the ISP’s interests to immediately block every site they’re notified of in order to avoid potentially huge legal costs.

Opponents of the bill point out that most cases will never come to court as ISPs will roll over immediately, as they frequently do under DMCA in the US. But the opponents don’t stop there. Hell, they don’t really stop anywhere. Between the amended blocking clause which could, in theory, see sites like YouTube blocked from the UK – and the potential for having one’s entire house disconnected from the web, the DEB has come in from a veritable gale of criticism, much of it vented right here in the blogosphere. Who’d have thunk it?

TechCrunch’s own Devin Coldewey notes that the “persistent offenders” list won’t just affect domestic file-sharers. Internet cafes, hotels and anywhere else that offers public wi-fi access could find themselves taken offline if their customers are found to be swapping copyright files. If anything, these public access points are even more at risk as it doesn’t take many teenagers using your cafe to rack up 50 copyright violations: this despite there being no way for the establishments to police what their customers are doing online. As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow put it, almost entirely without hyperbole, “UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes“

In fact Doctorow is one of the bill’s harshest critics, writing numerous posts about its dangers. Not only is he vehemently opposed to the persistent offenders clause but he also rails against the site-blocking amendment, arguing that it will essentially ban file lockers from the UK, even when much of the content hosted on them is perfectly lawful. In response to Doctorow and his ilk, thousands of UK web users have signed petitions opposing the bill. Even members of parliament have come out to publicly attack the proposed measures – as Tom Watson MP told me on Twitter: “Enshrining net filtering at ISP level scares me half to death…. Law has to have a starting point. This isn’t it. Copyright reform for the internet age should be Step One. Rip it up. Start again.”

A clusterfuck, then. A total shit show, even more draconian than the DMCA and even more packed to the gills with chilling effects. There’s an election coming up in the UK and the government is apparently anxious that the law be pushed through before then, but to do so would be a travesty – instead the bill should be scrapped and revisited in the next parliament.

Or at least that was my first thought. Then I actually read the bill.

And, you know what, it’s actually not that bad.

For a start, the first point of contention – the compilation of a persistent offenders list, and the potential banning of them from accessing the Internet – isn’t quite as unfair as it sounds. Despite Doctorow’s claim that “your entire family [can] be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial”, there are actually multiple points at which evidence comes into play, and the accused file-swapper is given a chance to defend themselves. The bill requires the creation of an independent tribunal body to hear claims of unfairness arising from the new laws, and alleged infringers have not one but two rights of appeal to the tribunal. With each alleged breach, the new law demands that the ISP send a letter to the subscriber putting the allegations and the evidence to them.

Only once a significant number of  breaches have been alledged (the drafters of the bill suggest 50) will the subscriber be added to the persistent offenders list. Again, they will be notified. Only at this point can the copyright owner appeal to the court – using a law that has been around for 36 years – to get the name and address of the offender. Even then, though, they won’t be taken to court. Instead, the copyright owner has to send the subscriber yet another letter (this will be their 52nd) warning them that legal action is imminent if they don’t stop. It’s only then that legal action will be taken, leading to a possible fine and – only at the extreme end of the scale – their Internet access being disconnected.

The second point of contention – the blocking of file-sharing sites – is still pretty bad, but again it’s not quite what some commentators [*cough* Cory *cough*] suggest with headlines like “Lords seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, etc) in the UK“. Yes, the courts will have the power to require ISPs to block sites that egregiously host copyrighted files. But they can only do so if the site involved has refused to remove the copyrighted files – a last resort against foreign file lockers who ignore British court injunctions. More importantly it’s also a power that the British courts have had since the 2002 E-Commerce Directive Regulations (with ISP’s being similarly liable for inaction): the new legislation simply creates a DMCA-style process for making take-down requests easier to issue.

After several hours of reading – not just the proposed new law but also all of the existing copyright law, plus the current World Intellectual Property Organisation Treaty (the UK is a signatory) and also hundreds of pages of discussion around all of the above – a few things became clear…

For one thing, many of those opposing the bill don’t seem to be opposed to the bill itself so much as they’re opposed to the entire notion of copyright law, particularly when it’s used by “greedy record companies” or “rich recording artists”. As one commenter put it on the Guardian: “If you want to be solely a ‘recording artist’ and find you’ve been caught short – tough. No one owes you a living. You’ve been rendered obsolete by technology (not me) and you either adapt or fade away like so many other industries.” The only copyright law that people like that will accept is one that lets them steal whatever they like.

Far be it from me to suggest that Cory Doctorow has an anti-copyright agenda, but there’s no doubt he’s the world’s leading proponent of the ‘give everything away free and reap the tangential rewards’ model of intellectual property protection. Creative Commons might work perfectly for a man who makes his living writing and speaking about how he gives things away free, but it’s not always the answer for musicians, authors and filmmakers who don’t have that particular sideline. And I say that as an author who just gave his last book away under a Creative Commons license and who isn’t going to go broke any time soon.

Whatever Doctorow’s biases, headlines like “UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes” or “Leaked UK government plan to create ‘Pirate Finder General’ with power to appoint militias, create laws” do nothing to encourage rational debate. In fact, they’re curiously reminiscent of “Obamacare will kill grandma” claims from Republicans in the US. Why debate facts when you can drive people to your way of thinking through scary headlines?

And yet, shrill objections aside, it’s equally clear that the Digital Economy Bill has its fair share of potential problems. There’s not a huge amount of new law in the bill, but there are a whole bunch of new processes – new takedown notices, persistent offender lists etc – all of which will need to work properly from day one. In the British government’s haste to rush it through before the upcoming election, there’s a huge risk of passing a bad statute which will prove impossible to enforce.

Most clear of all though is that, beyond a general call to “scrap the bill and start again” (again: paging the Republicans), none of the opponents of the bill are suggesting a credible alternative. For all of our fears of “chilling effects” the fact is that the Internet is shitting all over the intellectual property rights of the UK creative industries (industries which account for 7.9% of the nation’s GDP). Existing law offers almost all of the protections required by copyright owners, but it’s too slow and costly to enforce in the face of widespread online infringement. A shake-up of the enforcement process is much needed – not just to protect fat cat record companies, but also to ensure the livelihoods of thousands of musicians, authors, filmmakers, photographers, artists and the rest who contribute to our cultural landscape. To those people, the effects of an online copyright free-for-all are just as chilling. If the DEB isn’t the right bill , then it is beholden on those attacking it to suggest an alternative.

Here’s mine:

1) My parents run a business that offers free wi-fi to their customers. I know it’s impossible for them to act as copyright police and so, alarmed by the proposed bill, they’ll likely choose to close down their wi-fi hotspots. To avoid that, the law needs to distinguish between domestic and business internet users when it comes to the persistent infringers clause. For domestic users, the 50-strikes and you’re out clause – and the disconnection threat – should stand: it’s a powerful deterrent, and there are plenty of points at which householders can appeal. For businesses and public wi-fi providers, the disconnection threat should be dropped entirely – it’s clearly a disproportionate punishment – but the fine should remain. In both cases, though, the burden should rest on the copyright owner to prove complicity in the infringement. Domestically, this is as simple as proving multiple breaches from the same IP address – there is a duty on the homeowner to lock down their wi-fi and to know what is happening under their roof, especially after receiving multiple notifications. For businesses, though, the copyright owner should face the (almost impossible) task of showing that the business owner is knowingly permitting copyright breaches on their premises. They’ll basically have to send private detectives round and catch the owner in the act – something only worth doing in extreme cases.

2) The current site-blocking amendment should be dropped entirely. Instead it should be replaced with a virtual carbon copy (quelle irony) of the DMCA’s takedown procedures, but with even more severe punishments for copyright owners who file spurious claims. If an alleged infringer files a counter-notice but the copyright owner decides not to then pursue legal action, the former should be immediately entitled to claim damages against the latter, set at a fixed amount (say £250 – a little under $400) for every day each affected file was offline. In the case of entire sites being blocked, these damages could be enormous. The result: copyright owners will have a costly disincentive against filing spurious claims.

3) Finally, and most importantly, the bill should be abandoned until the next parliament. Rushing through legislation is almost never a good idea – and it’s not like it’s going to be a vote winner, either for this government or the next one. With the full lobbying force of the creative industries behind a new law, there’s virtually no chance that it won’t be passed in the next twelve months so MPs should take the next few months to revise it, to consult with experts, to explain it to critics and generally to ensure that everything that can be done to make it fair has been done.

The UK’s creative industries generate £112.5 billion in revenue for the British economy. The Digital Economy Bill should be passed, and it should be passed soon. But more than all of that, it should be passed right.

Just a quick PSA: Aperture 3 is causing some Macs to write an enormous page file taking up the entire hard drive. If you were thinking of installing it and transferring over your collection, you might want to wait until they iron out this particular wrinkle

See original here: 
Aperture 3 is making Macs freak out – be careful out there, children

I’m still scratching my head at Mark Cuban’s comments about news aggregators being freeloading vampires that should be blocked by news sites.

As Danny Sullivan points out, Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which is an aggregator extraordinaire.

And in 2008 at the TechCrunch50 conference, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in news aggregator TechMeme. He says: “Gabe from TechMeme, I’ve been running after him for two years to try to let me do something with him because I think its a brilliant idea and I think I can add value…I try to stick to things that are strategic to me that I think are fun that I think are game changing.”

Cuban was mostly railing on Google News in his talk, but TechMeme has a similar model of linking to stories with a short excerpt. You can watch the entire interview here.

I’ve emailed Mark to get see if he wants to talk more about this, because I continue to be more than confused.

The only good thing about the deadline for this week’s TechCrunch round-up falling on Christmas Day is the absolute certain fact that you won’t be reading the results. After all, with the holiday season in full swing, no one in their right mind will be reading TechCrunch. I certainly won’t.

Safe in that knowledge, I can pretty claim anything I like. That this week’s top story was Mark Zuckerberg being eaten by zebras, for example, or Al Qaeda investing in Twitter. Hell, I could probably claim that Spotify is profitable and it would still pass entirely without remark. Who would know? Just me and Google’s spider.

But I’m a professional – which is why I only missed my Christmas Day deadline by 24 hours – and as such I take seriously my responsibility to bring you this week’s top stories, regardless of whether you care or not. Hell, I’ve even come up with a festive theme in a vain attempt to keep you reading. Even though I know you’re not.

Here we go then…

On the first day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you….

One billion dollar exits
Sarah rounded off her South American research trip by profiling Wences Casares and examining the difference between billion dollar exits and what it means to feel “success”.

On the second day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Two out of every ten companies suffering from “stealth disease”
Vivek tells stealth start-ups: Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets.

On the third day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Three years of Crunchies
The first tickets to the third annual Crunchies sold out very quickly, but there’s still plenty of time to vote for the winners across 18 categories before voting closes on January 6th.

On the fourth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Four screenings of Avatar
Or at least that’s how many Arrington has attended since the movie launched this week and he described it as ‘The iPhone Of Movies’.

On the fifth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Five hundred and fifty million dollars
Over half a billion dollars; the price that Yelp turned down when they walked away from selling to Google.

On the sixth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Six-ty thousand nooks will be shipped by Barnes & Noble this year
…despite issues with shipping pre-orders.

On the seventh day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Seven million more dollars raised by ChaCha
….despite issues with their entire business being a joke.

On the eighth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Eight million dollars raised by Livemocha
…in a round led by August Capital to allow the online language-learning community to build new partnership deals and work on product development.

On the ninth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Nine ‘rock-star’ names associated with WePay’s new group payments services
Levchin, McClure, Conway, Y Combinator…

On the tenth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Ten IPO Candidates for 2010
….and, from Europe, ten disappointing tech stories of 2009.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Eleven billion valuation for Facebook
Up from the company’s $10billion valuation earlier this year.

And finally. On the twelfth day of Christmas, TechCrunch gave to you…

Twelve (at least) religions that I’ve certainly offended by suggesting that the entire world stops for Christmas. I look forward to the comments. Not that I’ll be reading them – after all, it’s Christmas!

Have a good week!

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For any small business, there’s no question that efficient internal communication is key. That’s doubly true in today’s world, where many companies have team members scattered around the world. There are communication platforms out there that look to tackle this, but many of them are either time consuming to setup or aren’t really designed for your ‘everyman’ small business or organization. Enter HipChat, a startup that wants to be the communication platform that any business or organization can get up and running in a matter of minutes. The service launches today in private beta, and the first 100 people to enter “TECHCRUNCH” as their invite code will be able to start their own company networks (you only need one code to invite your entire company).

HipChat offers an Adobe AIR client (compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux) that lets you chat with your entire team at once, or hold more private discussions with select team members. It offers support for quick attachment sharing, notifications when you receive a message, and a searchable web archive for past messages. And perhaps most important: it’s very easy to get up and running, even for the most casual users. You don’t need your own company Email address, and the signup process takes all of three minutes.

The app itself is slick. It runs in AIR (which I’m not typically a fan of) but it looks very clean and doesn’t come with that distinctly unnative you often wind up with on AIR. Chats are broken into different rooms — along with your companywide chat, you can invite other team members to join you in smaller groups, and you can mark them private if you’d like to restrict access.

Now, businesses often have the same question about services like this: why not just use a group chat room on AIM or Skype? The answer is equally obvious. If that’s so practical, why aren’t you already doing it?

It’s hard to overstate how much these services can help. At TechCrunch we rely heavily on TC50 winner Yammer for much of our internal communication. It’s amazing how reliant we’ve become on the service in such a short time — if Yammer goes down, we wind up turning to mass Email messages, which are hardly ideal.

HipChat will be facing off with Yammer and, to some degree, Salesforce Chatter, but it’s tackling a different market. Yammer appeals to a huge variety of companies, but it requires that they have their own internal Email address (e.g. john@company.com). For small companies with limited tech resources, that’s a fairly high barrier to entry, which gives HipChat an opportunity. There’s also the potential to appeal to organizations like fraternities and clubs. HipChat also competes with Campfire by 37signals but Campfire is web-based rather than a desktop app.

HipChat does have a ways to go from a functionality perspective before it can really match Yammer’s offerings. For one, there’s currently no way to receive a SMS notification when someone mentions you in a message. There are also no mobile applications currently available. HipChat also lacks some of the security options offered by Yammer, like restricting access to specified IP ranges, but for most small businesses that probably isn’t much of an issue. The HipChat team says that they’ll consider any good ideas its users request, so don’t be surprised if we see some of these features roll out soon.

Users will be able to try the service free for thirty days, and then can step up to a paid plan, which range from $9 a month for 12 members and a restricted chat history to $100 a month for 100 members and unlimited chat history. More pricing details are here.

HipChat was founded by Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, who previously founded calendar startup HipCal, which was acquired by Plaxo in 2006. At Plaxo they helped build out Plaxo Pulse. They stayed at the company through its acquisition by Comcast in 2008, and left earlier this year to start HipChat.

You can get a feel for HipChat in the demo video below. Clearly the HipChat team had a good time making it — make sure to pay attention to the The Office inspired chats (this is especially funny because Salesforce used the exact same idea for their demo).

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Envision a web service that lets you record and share your entire life online: That’s the lofty goal LIFEmee wants to achieve. The eponymous Tokyo-based startup behind the service (which is available in both English and Japanese) relaunched its site today with a redesigned interface and a set of new features. (LIFEmee launched back in September this year as a TechCrunch50 DemoPit company.)

To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their “lifestream” (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.

LIFEmee is still loaded with too many buttons and icons, but the new site is much simpler to use than the TechCrunch50 version. The site’s co-founders say after having collected feedback from early users all around the world, they tried to make it more accessible, integrate it with existing social networks and redesign the entire layout. A Japanese version was added a few weeks after TechCrunch50, too (at the event, LIFEmee launched in English only).

In the new version, users don’t need to register on the site anymore but can log in via Facebook Connect. Status updates on LIFEmee can now be pushed to Facebook and Twitter profiles automatically. But what’s more interesting is that it’s now possible to scrape Facebook status updates and tweets and post them on LIFEmee where they will be (theoretically) stored forever and in one place.

Layout-wise, a few key elements were dropped from the splash page. You won’t find the “Last Will” button anymore, for example (early LIFEmee users deemed the option to upload a Last Will and Testament as “too dark”).

The central “MyLife” area was replaced with two distinct functions, DailyBoard and LifeBoard. Whereas DailyBoard operates similarly to Twitter (asking “How are you feeling now?”), the LifeBoard is the place to go for writing a diary, keeping track of your health condition or making future plans. For example, you can upload a picture of the dream house you plan to buy 5 years later on the LifeBoard and lay out which steps are to be made by which points in time to achieve that goal.

And LIFEmee added a number of other bells and whistles (i.e. a new search function that lets you search up comment and status update from LIFEmee, Twitter and Facebook at the same time, easier uploading of pictures and items, additional options to invite friends etc.) that make the service a bit more worthwhile. But the question is if we are already at the the stage where we are willing (and dedicated enough) to store our entire lives on the web.

LIFEmee is still in alpha, which means there are still a few kinks that need to be ironed out, but the site is ready for you to take at least a test run. LIFEmee competes with similar offerings like dandelife, thisMoment and Rseven on the mobile.

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Weird. I just got done blasting through the entire season of Storm Chasers (watched the final episode this morning). In just about every storm chaser’s vehicle, there’s a laptop set up with mapping software relaying GPS data along with an overlay of weather radar.

Read more:
Woot! Bushnell handheld GPS with NEXRAD weather data for $100

Cisco has confirmed that the next version of the Flip Video camera , everyones favorite tiny video camera, is getting Wi-Fi. The model is described as having “a large screen that slides to reveal the record and menu buttons underneath.” Pocket-lint is also reporting there won’t be a touchscreen

See original here:
The next Flip camera will have Wi-Fi

I’ve spent the last week throughly enjoying my new Droid, and while I’ve come across some problems, most of my issues have simply been with the fact that Android does things differently than the iPhone — the transition just takes some getting used to. But there’s one big issue that needs far more than a UI tweak: Android Market. If there was a theme common to nearly every Droid review, it was that Android’s app selection just doesn’t cut it compared to the iPhone. I think that consensus is only half the story. These reviewers are finding that Android has a weaker selection of applications than the iPhone not just because some of their favorite apps aren’t there, but because actually browsing the Market just isn’t as enjoyable as what Apple’s iTunes offers. If Android’s Market’s perception as a poor man’s App Store is going to change, this experience needs to improve.

Currently, all Android Market browsing and transactions are done through an application that comes with the phone. This mobile application used to be pretty bad (it didn’t even offer screenshots of the apps), but was finally overhauled in September to be more competitive with the iPhone’s mobile version of the App Store. The new version is a big improvement, but browsing the store from the phone isn’t exactly a good time — you can only see a few apps at once, so scrolling through various lists gets tedious.

Contrast that with the App Store that’s integrated into Apple’s iTunes. Using iTunes to download new applications isn’t just something people do when they need an app to accomplish a certain task. It’s something they do for fun. Clicking through various top apps exposes plenty of high quality games, apps from popular sites like Yelp, and even the occasional productivity tool. It’s all very fast too — you can easily download fifteen new apps in a single browsing session without breaking a sweat.

Android doesn’t have anything close to that. The official Android Market website (pictured below) is a total joke. It shows a list of some of the top apps from its Paid and Free sections, along with a handful of screenshots. It doesn’t even have a full listing of the apps available, or any kind of search feature (as an aside, the entire Android site looks terrible — type in “Android” into Google, and this homepage is the first result). Yes, there are more comprehensive third-party listings, but there’s no way to download apps to your device without looking them up from your phone.

There’s an answer to this, and it’s one that’s right up Google’s alley: Google should rework the Android Market site into a full-fledged AJAXy web app, hopefully with the input of some talented designers. From a functionality standpoint the new Market should be a fairly blatant ripoff of Apple’s App Store on iTunes, with Top App lists, search, ratings, and so on (though there’s plenty of room for Google to improve on application discovery). Users would log in using their Google accounts, and use Google Checkout for payments. Next to every app listing would be a ‘Download’ or ‘Buy’ button. Clicking that would then send a notification to your phone, alerting you that you had outstanding downloads that could be sent straight to your device at your leisure. Large applications would require a Wi-Fi connection to download. Your Android phone is already tied to your Google account anyway, so the entire experience would be seamless.

Of course, there’s the argument that most people don’t buy mobile apps from their desktop anyway — AdMob recently conducted a survey(PDF) that found that over 90% of users download their iPhone apps Over-The-Air (i.e. they’re downloaded directly to the phone) rather than through an iTunes sync. That number sounds high to me, but it’s one that Google shouldn’t pay much attention to for a few reasons. For one, syncing with iTunes is a pain. Yes, Apple has made the process about as easy as it could given the bevy of options it has to include, but between the backing up, nebulous ‘Syncing’ messages, lengthy transfers from PC to iPhone and vice versa, it’s just a lot easier to download straight to your phone.

A cloud based push solution wouldn’t have those syncing issues — you’d be able to purchase apps from just about any computer connected to the Internet, and the only downtime required would be the time needed to actually download the app from Google’s servers. And even if the bulk of purchases would still be done directly from handsets, that doesn’t make a full fledged Android Market experience on the desktop any less important. Android Market is still very much the underdog to Apple’s App Store, and consumers considering an Android handset are likely turning to the web to scope out the applications available on Android to see how they compare to the App Store. Right now, Android fails that test.

Done properly, this setup would likely see the number of apps downloaded increase, as would the number of paid purchases (entering a credit card number on a computer is far easier than on a phone). And that would bring more developers to the platform, boosting the number of quality apps available. Of course, Android has a few other problems to worry about — some developers complain about the inability to install applications on a phone’s SD card, and there’s always the problems involved with developing for multiple devices running different versions of the OS. But turning the Market into something users can actually browse from their PCs is a good start.

Oh, and don’t be surprised if Apple adopts their own web based store some time in the future — they’re already experimenting with ‘iTunes Preview’ for music and video content.

Image via GearDiary.

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