The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘timeline’

Apple has set the standard that once every year they will release a new version of the iPhone. It stands to reason that this year will be no different, with a new model likely coming sometime this summer. But arguably just as important as Apple’s hardware refresh is the accompanying software refresh that comes with it as well. And that’s why it shouldn’t be surprising at all that whispers of iPhone OS 4.0 are starting to grow. But this year, the timeline appears a bit off.

As AppleInsider reported today, iPhone OS 4.0 is likely to deliver multitasking support. If true, that will make it perhaps the most important OS upgrade for the platform yet. However, in reporting the news, AppleInsider also notes that the software, “remains under development and reportedly has a quite ‘way to go’ before it’s ready for prime time.” Looking back at the iPhone OS SDK history you’ll notice a constant: Apple has released the beta builds in March the past two years. We’re already well into March this year, and so far, no word about Apple being close to doing the same.

In fact, last year, Apple held its iPhone OS 3.0 preview event (where it first made a beta available) on March 17. I remember this well because I was unable to attend as I was at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. I also remember when Apple sent out the invites to that event, March 12, because I wrote up the report about it on my way to the airport to leave for Austin. But the difference last year is that there were whispers leading up to that announcement that there would be some kind of event in March for the iPhone OS. This year, so far, nothing.

Now, it’s possible that some of the speculation about the new iPhone OS release has been muted because of the recent iPad unveiling, and it’s upcoming launch on April 3. But that very launch also adds fuel to the fire that we won’t be seeing an iPhone 4.0 OS anytime soon. After all, Apple is currently in the process of rolling out the beta builds of iPhone OS 3.2 (currently on beta 4), which is the OS the iPad will apparently ship with.

The launch of the SDK is important because it gives developers time to get their apps ready for any big changes coming. And multitasking seems like it would be a pretty huge change, though it’s not entirely clear if most of the work would be done through the OS itself to optimize how app resources are managed, rather than apps having to do that themselves to be deemed “multitasking ready.” Hell, it’s not even clear if any iPhone beyond the inevitable new one will be allowed to let third-party apps run at the same time as the new hardware will undoubtedly have a faster processor (possibly the A4 found in the iPad), more RAM, and maybe even a better battery — all of which will be crucial to multitasking.

I’ve spoken with a few developers and none have yet seen any part of the iPhone 4.0 OS. A few have gotten word from the company that it is indeed coming, and that big changes are in store (which had led me to speculate about background running in the past) but have no idea when that will be. Apple, meanwhile, has been thinking about how best to let third-party applications run in the background on the iPhone for about a year now.

It seems unlikely that Apple would launch a new iPhone OS without giving developers plenty of time to play around with it. And since there is no word about the 4.0 SDK coming anytime soon, that could well mean a push from the usual June/July timeframe for a new (final build) iPhone OS launch. Might we see new iPhone hardware that launches with OS 3.2? And then iPhone OS 4.0 would be released as a free upgrade closer to the Fall timeframe? It certainly seems possible.

Many of us take the disaster readiness of servers and data centers for granted. But for IT admins from both small and large companies, being prepared for disaster and emergency situations is complicated and expensive issue. Google has made an announcement today for any enterprise users of Google Apps; assuring IT admins that the suite is now fully prepared for disaster recovery. Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps, tells us that as of recently, Google is prepared for disaster recovery for all of its products in the Google Apps suite, which include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video.

Google’s secret sauce is live and synchronous replication. So every action you take in Gmail is immediately replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, Google will transfer data over to the other one. Traditionally, Google says, synchronous replication can be very expensive for companies. For example, the cost to back up 25GB of data with synchronous replication can range from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs per employee. Google says that exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. Of course, Google replicates all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. And data from Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video, which encompass most of the applications in Google Apps, is also synchronously replicated for free.

The reason that Google can offer these services for free is because the tech giant already operates large data centers simultaneously for millions of users and also balances loads between data centers as needed. Google also claims that its high speed connections between data centers allows the company to replicate and transfer large amounts of data quickly from one server to another.

Google says synchronous replication is a more attractive option than the common practice that many small businesses take by backing up email by copying the data to a tape on a weekly or daily basis, which seems to be an arduous task. Larger companies opt for a storage area network (SAN) to back up data, which Google says is an expensive process.

Sheth declined to identify the timeline of when each app began to use the backup solution. Sheth did say that bringing all the apps together into replication was a complex process. Google Apps is currently being used by 2 million businesses with 20 million active users.

Photo Credit/Flickr/ClayIrving

One of the biggest complaints about Twitter’s new Retweet feature is that people don’t like that it appears to inject random tweets into their tweet stream. Of course, those aren’t random tweets, they are tweets that are being retweeted by someone they actually follow. But for the past few days, Twitter has actually been placing random tweets in many users tweet streams, and because of the Retweet issue, some might not even be noticing it.

Since recovering from its last bit of downtime a few days ago, reports of random tweets showing up in users stream have been popping up all over Twitter. I actually noticed the problem a couple of times over the past few days myself. Today, Twitter has acknowledged the issue and says it’s working on a fix. It also points to this page for more information about it. What’s funny is that the page first and foremost asks you to make sure the tweet you’re seeing is not actually a new-style retweet (not an issue) and that it is just a random tweet showing up in your timeline (an issue). Quite a few users still seem confused about what the difference is, and it’s hard to blame them. And 10 pages worth of comments with specific examples suggest this issue is pretty widespread.

While random tweets in your stream is definitely an annoying problem, much worse is that others are reporting not only this issue but that they’re receiving text message alerts for these random tweets. Plenty of Twitter users have the service set up with SMS to send a message every time people that they choose tweet, but apparently this random tweet problem is also triggering SMS messages for many of them. It’s hard to think of something much more annoying then your phone getting pinged every time a random person tweets. Others still are reporting getting SMS messages from people they do actually follow, but don’t have that feature turned on for.

Another major problem with this is that many of these random tweet injections are coming from users with protected accounts. With a protected account, you are able to control which users can see your tweets. This new bug apparently destroys that security.

Let’s hope Twitter fixes this issue quickly, but again, it has been a number of days already. Twitter, it seems, has some leaky pipes right now.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Forget the on stage interview at Le Web today – we ask the tough (not really) questions of YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley backstage afterwards.

What does one do when the company you’ve cofounded sells to Google for $1.65 billion? You have fun, that’s what. In addition to his full schedule at YouTube, Hurley has invested in a Formula 1 racing team and cofounded a fashion site called Hlaska.

My main question is what Hurley’s going to do next: “Once you’ve blown all the money from YouTube on the race cars and the fashion company what will you do for your next startup to make it all back again?” His answer? Skip to the 1:40 mark.

Off camera I asked Hurley about the whole tattoo thing in Israel. He didn’t have too much too say other than “it was sort of cool,” or something similar.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It seems that every day there’s a new travel site looking to streamline the process of planning out your itinerary. And for good reason: trips, even the fun ones, are usually a total pain to plan. Those problems are only magnified when you’re trying to plan a trip with more than one person. Duffel is a startup that launched from TechCrunch50’s demo pit that’s looking to help. It’s giving users a straightforward, visual way to plan out their trips using a tool that’s long since proved its utility: a bulletin board.

Of course, as an online service Duffel’s bulletin board is virtual, but many of the concepts stay the same. To get started, first you tell Duffel what city you’re going to be traveling to. The site presents you with a virtual bulletin board populated with a handful of suggested activities and places to stay, each represented by a small note card. From there, you can add your own ideas manually (you enter a title, notes, and URL) or you can use the site’s bookmarklet to quickly save things from across the web to your Duffel.

The bulletin board is meant to serve as a central pool of all of the activities, restaurants, and modes of transportation that you’re considering. You can invite friends to brainstorm their own ideas and add them to the board. Then, when it’s time to actually plan out your trip, you can drag and drop each activity onto the timeline at the left side of the screen. To help plan out your activities, Duffel will automatically plot their location on a Google Map so you can see which items are closest. And when you’re ready to embark on your journey, you can print out an itinerary, which is automatically populated with information about the places you’re visiting. If you think your trip is particularly good, you can share it with the public. Likewise, if you can’t seem to find anything you want to do, you can browse the directory of trips shared by other users.

The site is well done, with a clean design and refreshing simplicity. But there are some features it lacks that competitors do have, like the ability to generate an itinerary with an hourly schedule (on Duffel everything is just listed by day, though some people may prefer it that way). More importantly it’s in a very crowded space — there are many travel sites out there, and even sites that help generate an itinerary for you aren’t very novel. Competitors include Nile Guide, GoPlanIt, Offbeat Guides, TripWolf and a host of others. Granted, there’s room for more than one player here to succeed, but Duffel is going to need to find a way to rise above the crowd.

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Next Big Sound, a TechStars 2009 company that tracks the growth and popularity of music groups across major web properties like MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and others, has raised a seed round in the $1 million range. The company would not reveal the exact amount, but did confirm that they had recently raised the funding.

As Robin described it in August, Next Big Sound is a statistics and comparison engine à la Alexa or Compete, but for music artists and industry professionals. Next Big Sound measures number of fans, number of plays, and comments for bands.

According to an SEC filing, Next Big Sound filed a Form D for their seed round that stated they had raised ~$100k, though they have in fact raised significantly more. Foundry Group led the round, with Jason Mendelson taking a board spot. Also participating were SoftTech VC, Alsop Louie Partners, Professor Troy Henikoff from Northwestern University and TechStars Executive Director David Cohen.

Next Big Sound has been tracking over 500 million fan interactions and almost 500,000 artists since launch. Next Big Sound launched in August at the TechStars Investor Day in Boulder.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Who says Twitter isn’t mainstream? Vogue Italia has just dedicated an issue to the microblogging network. The magazine’s December cover features a montage of TwitPics of some of the world’s most famous models, including Gisele Bundchen, Christy Turlington, and Natalia Vodianova.

In the collage, models are taking pictures of themselves via popular Twitter photo sharing app TwitPic. And the layout of the editorial feature is also an ode to Twitter.

This isn’t the first time Vogue Italia has shown a little technology love. In 2007, the fashion-forward magazine devoted a cover to the rise of YouTube and webcams. While the Twitter-focused issue may take some by surprise, it’s not irrelevant to the fashion community. As Twitter becomes more of a platform for designers and consumers to converse about fashion, the platform becomes a key mechanism for both news and new styles.

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Here’s a look at what happened on CrunchGear this week:

The real life Burger King Windows 7 Whopper is a disgusting joke to humanity
Quick Look: 13.3-inch Acer Timeline
Orchestral movements by LCD light

I know everybody is excited to start their weekend but the bell doesn’t dismiss you, I dismiss you. So before you go, I’m gonna tell you about this new 3.5-pound Acer Timeline ultraportable that just came out yesterday.

Read the original:
Quick Look: 13.3-inch Acer Timeline

In its developer Google Group, Twitter has just made the announcement that it is releasing an early preview of a brand new API: The retweeting API. And that’s not all, Twitter is in the process of completely revamping its retweet functionality.

From the looks of it, this could mean some pretty big changes on Twitter. As you can see in the mock-ups above and below, the retweet (written as “RT” in most tweets) is no longer a part of the actual tweet itself, but rather is a link below the tweet. While that certainly is a cleaner way of doing things, it will be interesting to see if this makes retweeting less or more enticing. And it could potentially help users find new people to follow (more on that below).

But as co-founder Biz Stone notes on the Twitter blog, the current method of retweeting on twitter.com is a cumbersome process of copying and pasting. They want to change that. He calls this “Phase One” of “Project Retweet,” and notes that it is going out to developers first so they can be ready for the change, and indicates that it’s not quite ready for prime-time:

We are still sketching out exactly how this feature and its API counterpart works. Sharing our thoughts before launching means developers will have the opportunity to prepare their applications. In a few weeks or so we’ll launch the feature on our web site and because app developers had a chance to prepare, it should become available across most of the Twitter ecosystem about the same time. This way, we can all enjoy retweeting—however we choose to access Twitter.

And the ramifications of this are potentially even larger. With the new method, all of your friends will see the original tweet you’re retweeting in their timeline (unless they have this option turned off). So if I’m not following @ev (Twitter co-founder Evan Williams) in the example that Stone drew to the right, I will still see his tweet in my stream because Stone retweeted it. This seems like a great idea for new follower discovery.

Stone notes that the new retweet look will launch to a limited group of users first for a set period of time so the team can test how it will work on the system. It will then get a wider roll-out in a few weeks.

Writes Twitter developer Marcel Molina in the Twitter developer Google Group about the new API:

Retweeting has become one of the cultural conventions of the Twitter experience. It’s yet another example of Twitter’s users discovering innovative ways to use the service. We dig it. So soon it’s going to become a natively supported feature on twitter.com. It’s looking like we’re only weeks away from being ready to launch it on our end. We wanted to show the community of platform developers the API we’ve cooked up for retweeting so those who want to support it in their applications would have enough time to have it ready by launch day. We were planning on exposing a way for developers to create a retweet, recognize retweets in your timeline and display them distinctively amongst other tweets. We’ve also got APIs for several retweet timelines: retweets you’ve created, retweets the users you’re following have created, and your tweets that have been retweeted by others.

Below find some screenshot mockups of what this will look like.

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