Posts tagged history
[Infographic] History of Mobile App Stores
Feb 7th
The rise of the app store has fundamentally changed the concept of software delivery. Gone are the days when zealous software companies sent users discs in the mail (oh, AOL, we remember you well) that ended up making better coasters than programs. Many computers these days do not even ship with a CD-ROM drive and smartphones have never seen any type of physical downloads. The delivery mechanism of the application store is an often-overlooked revolution of the mobile era.
A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple’s App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.
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The Apple App Store launched in July 2008, a year after the first iPhone was released. It had 500 apps and, to many, was a revelation. It also marked the beginning of the dominance of the native mobile application. 10 million applications were downloaded in the first weekend.
The Android Market launched a couple months later in October and had 50 apps to start.
Research In Motion was not far behind, announcing its BlackBerry App World at its developers’ conference in October 2008 and accepting submissions from developers in early 2009. Nokia’s Ovi Store opened in 2009 starting its short-lived run as the No. 2 global app store behind Apple’s trailblazer.
The Windows Phone Marketplace launched in late October 2010. By July 2011 it had nearly 30,000 apps. As of Jan. 2012, it has almost 50,000. The BlackBerry App World had about 37,000 at the end of July 2011.
Apple reached the 100,000 app mark first, a little more than a year after launch, in November 2009. Skipping ahead, the Android Market hit 200,000 in early 2011 and nearly doubled its developer output through the remainder of the year. As of now, the Market has about 400,000 apps available while iOS has nearly 550,000.
Check out the timeline below. It ends in Aug. 2011 but we know the history since. The Ovi Store is in decline as Nokia gradually phases out the Symbian series, BlackBerry is in flux and awaiting new devices and trying to spur developers in to creating apps for the platform again while iOS and Android maintain exponential growth.
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Facebook Could be the Biggest Tech IPO in History
Jan 27th
People familiar with the matter say that Facebook could file for its initial public offering as soon as next week, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal. The source also says that Facebook is close to picking Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter. The filing could happen next Wednesday, and the company is aiming for a $75-$100 billion valuation. It is looking to raise $10 billion in stock.
Facebook started in 2004 as a college-only social network. It opened to the public in September 2006, dropping the minimum age requirement from 18-years-old to 13-years-old. In little over seven years, it has grown to a userbase of 800 million people across the globe.
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Reports say that the IPO will have two active managers; Goldman Sachs Group will most likely play an important role.
Morgan Stanley was a lead underwriter for both the 2011 Zynga and Groupon IPOs last year. To put this in perspective, Groupon went public with a $12.7 billion valuation, the highest tech valuation since Google’s $23.1 billion. Google sold $1.7 billion in stock.
Facebook will go public under the symbol “FB,” according to reports from BusinessInsider. Right now it’s unclear whether Facebook will list on NYSE or Nasdaq.
Facebook has been on a roll these past few weeks, pushing out Timeline to all of its users, releasing 60 new social apps. It also halted its trading on secondary markets for three days earlier this week, hinting at an IPO.
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A Brief History of the BlackBerry
Jan 23rd
Back in the early 1990s, we didn’t have BlackBerries or any kind of wireless data devices. Phones weren’t very Smart, and dial up still ruled the land. Then a trio of companies came together to invent the Viking Express which was a combination of an Ericsson Mobidem wireless data modem that was the size of a small brick, an HP 100 pocket-sized computer that looked more like a big calculator, and software from a company called Radiomail that ran on the DOS operating system of the HP. The world of wireless hasn’t been the same since.
I remember sending an email from my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, pulling over after I passed through one of the toll barriers. A cop came along and wanted to know what I was doing. It was probably the first time he had seen such an assemblage of devices. 
The evolution of the BlackBerry came from three key elements: a network, a device, and special secret software sauce that connected the two. Let’s talk about each of these and see how they contributed to the little smartphone that we all now love.
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The Network: Mobitex
The Mobidem was so called because it ran on a specialized data-only wireless network called Mobitex that stared in Sweden and spread to North America. At the time, the cellular networks didn’t do data: saying that now is somewhat odd since data plans are so ingrained into our consciousness (or at least our monthly bills). But back in the 1990s there were competing data-only networks that were vying for contention. Mobitex was run in the US by BellSouth, which eventually became part of the present AT&T Wireless network. Motorola backed another network for its data paging service called ARDIS, and there was a third network that AT&T was betting on called Cellular Digital Packet Data or CDPD.
Back in the mid-1990′s, if you had a wireless device it had to run one of these three networks. The competition was fierce among the trio, and unlike today where you have multiple-band radios in most phones, no one was going to make devices for more than one network, just because the radios were huge and power-hungry.
The beginnings of the end of the separate data-only networks were when United Parcel Service introduced its own wireless signature pad tracking devices. They needed a device that could connect anywhere, and while the data-only networks had decent coverage, the cellular voice networks had better coverage. That was one of the first big sales of wireless data. The other spike that killed off data-only networks were that the cellular voice networks got lots of capital improvements and got faster throughputs to handle data conversations.
But it’s the software
The parade of various hardware devices is nice, but really what lies at the heart and soul of RIM is its software. This software has two important pieces: what runs on the device and what runs across the network. Both were innovations that drew on many different contributions.
Radiomail was one of the first to understand how to push emails to wireless devices. But its innovations were never patented due to the philosophy of its founder, Geoff Goodfellow. Ironically, RIM went on to become one of the more litigious computer vendors, and they had to pay $615 million to obtain the rights for patents for the process in the end.
The other piece was actually quite clever for its time, in the late 1990′s: the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The idea was to have this run on a Windows PC that would be located in your data center, next to a Microsoft Exchange server. Emails would be sent out over the network and pushed to the individual Blackberry devices registered to a user’s email account. Before this invention, you didn’t have any simple way of synchronizing your emails between device and desktop.
RIM also used end-to-end encryption for its mail stream, which was possible because it owned all the pieces of the network, software and device. This would prove to be both a blessing and a curse, as recently several countries have temporarily blocked BlackBerry usage because the emails couldn’t be decrypted.
The hardware
Once the network and software were in place, RIM proceeded to produce a series of devices that could be carried around. The precursors to the BlackBerries were actually called something else entirely, and were a big bigger than the average alphanumeric pagers, which they were based on. RIM’s first devices in 1994 were called the Inter@ctive Pager 850 and 900. Each had a four line character-only screen and a keyboard with tiny keys, that latter still something the current BlackBerries have in common. At the time, these sold for $400 plus $40 a month for unlimited data usage (some things don’t change, although the definition of “unlimited usage” sure has). They had a single AA battery that would last up to three days. Remember, these didn’t have any voice capabilities, and were just used for email purposes.
Then in 1999, RIM launched a revolution. The first actual BlackBerry models were smaller than the clamshell design of the 850/900 but still used the same character-mode text displays.
From that point on, we started to see BlackBerries everywhere: first came phone features, then the ability to surf the Web, then full color graphical UIs that we have today. Here is a review of some of the older models.
RIM has certainly come a long way since the early days. But this is the first time in its history that both co-CEOs aren’t running the company, as we mention in our article earlier today. Perhaps this is a good thing, but as Rowinski says in his post, it will be a tough road ahead.
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Never Worry About an Algorithm Update Again, a History – SEOmoz (blog)
Jan 19th
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Never Worry About an Algorithm Update Again, a History
SEOmoz (blog) The hard part is that almost every SEO I know who has a natural focus on scale has burned a more than their fair share of sites or clients in their career. There is just a mentality that comes along with the "scalable SEO", and it brings risks and … SEO Services Los Angeles Now Offers Off and On Site SEO Services |
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The History Of Google Places, All On One Page
Jan 10th
Maybe it’s my bias as a longtime fan/practitioner of local search and SEO. Or maybe it’s because I’m mentioned as one of the sources/contributors. But more likely it’s just that this is an important search reference document, and that’s why I think that anyone…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Norad Santa Tracker : The History of NORAD, Google & Santa [Infographic]
Dec 22nd
Embed this on your siteSource: Norad Santa Tracker : The History of NORAD, Google & Santa [Infographic]Christmas Eve is only 1 days away and that means that Santa Claus is getting his reindeer and sleigh prepped to bring presents to boys and girls all around the world. Every year around this time, NORAD launches its Santa [...]
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Fusion Garage and the JooJoo: An Unremarkable Footnote in History
Dec 19th
Tablet maker Fusion Garage is on the ropes. One of the first companies to try and make tablet computing commercially viable, has been embroiled in a legal battle with its partners and this weekend lost its legal council after it failed to pay him. The JooJoo, once called the CrunchPad, could have been exciting. Now, it is likely to go down as an unremarkable footnote in history.
Fusion Garage is also the maker of the Grid 10 tablet, an Android slate that was released to terrible reviews and poor sales. As of Monday morning, a Grid 10 tablet was not available through the company’s website. Fusion Garage appears to be on its way to a shallow grave, its path to demise lined with broken promises and bad products.
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The impending doom for Fusion Garage reminds me of a line in the movie Tommy Boy where auto parts conglomerate Zalinsky, played by Dan Aykroyd, says, “We have to have the courage to take a few companies, tie them to a tree and bash their head’s in with a shovel. That’s progress.”
Make no mistake, Fusion Garage’s woes are progress. The tablet market can only withstand so many suppliers and the low end of the ecosystem already has established bottom feeders Acer and Asus cranking out cheap slates that most consumers will pass over.
With the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook providing cheap tablets that consumers actually want to buy, the squeeze is being put on the rest of the Android tablet market (or, really, the non-iPad market). The weak companies are going to start to die off or rearranged their priorities towards a strategy that actually makes money. In that regard, Hewlett-Packard was probably smart to discontinue the HP TouchPad. Get out of the market before it collapses entirely and new products make your efforts look poor in comparison.
There is also the fact that Fusion Garage was never seen as playing fair. TechCrunch founder and now venture capitalist Michael Arrington has had a very public feud over the tablet that become the JooJoo. The project was originally supposed to be called the CrunchPad and would have pre-dated the release of the first iPad by months. Fusion Garage eventually cut ties with Arrington, released the JooJoo independently and were subsequently sued for fraud and breach of contract. That case is still ongoing, with AOL now representing TechCrunch’s interests. Arrington posted to his personal blog this weekend that Fusion Garage’s attorney has filed to be taken off the case because the company has not paid him and the relationship had become strained beyond repair.
Fusion Garage public relations company, McGrath/Power, dropped Fusion Garage earlier this year.
The signs are pretty clear: everybody involved with Fusion Garage is running away, the company is embroiled in lawsuits, the brand name is tarnished beyond repair and the one thing that could save it, the product, is insufficient.
The old guard of TechCrunch employees are reveling in Fusion Garage’s woes. Arrington said, “Fusion Garage finally destroying itself certainly makes me happy. The fact that Quinn Emanuel and PR firm McGrath Power, who advised Fusion Garage on the right way to execute on the fraud, are left with unpaid bills also makes me happy. I’m sorry to the customers who tried to pre-order these things and may never see their money again. But, really, what were you thinking?”
At this point, there is probably that Fusion Garage can do to avoid the inevitable collapse. Call it progress, call it revenge, call it whatever you like. In 10 years, Fusion Garage, the CrunchPad/JooJoo/Grid 10 will be the answer to a trivia question that only a select group of geeks will be able to answer.
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A History of Online Patent Search
Dec 12th
Last week IBM announced that it has taken chemical data from various patents and made this information available to researchers online. It is just the latest in an ever widening of publically available information concerning patents and intellectual property. But online patent access has had an interesting history, and even though it dates to the early days of the Web, it was a difficult path and an interesting story in public access to information.
In collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000. IBM Research developed it in collaboration with these private companies over the past six years. It includes patents from a variety of sources outside of the US. The data will be incorporated into the PubChem archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health.
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The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) receives hundreds of thousands of applications each year and now posts the ones it approves on its own online patent database here. But that wasn’t always the case.
Before the Web, patent searches were long, tedious, and expensive, and province of a select group of private entities. Finding “prior art” (as it is called) was a very specialized field. This started changing, when back in January 1994 Carl Malamud began a project to put patents and other government data online. Malamud has been a tireless advocate for posting more data online by various private and public entities and has been rewarded for his efforts by various awards and funding from Google and numerous foundations started by early Internet pioneers. By 1995 his system was serving up a million files via FTP, Gopher and Web access. (Remember, back then graphical browsers were still somewhat new, and many websites were predominately text-based.)
Sadly, the PTO turned off this access for several years. Malamud lobbied PTO but to no avail, and IBM posted the patent data online until PTO could offer their own service in 1998. Since then, they and others including Google, FreePatentsOnline. Cambia’s PatentLens and LegalZoom (the latter for a fee) offer patent searches.
Malamud told me that “The patent database is pretty much liberated at this point. Jon Orwant at Google did all the heavy lifting, deserves the credit for making this a reality.” You can read a copy of his letter to Al Gore back in 1998 here to get some additional perspective.
(Above you can see Doug Engelbart’s diagram in his 1970 patent for a computer mouse.)
What about non-US patent access? In addition to some of the free sites mentioned above, the European patent office can be searched here using its Espacenet service, which was started in 1998 with bare-bones features. Search was enhanced earlier this year, and you can now export results to Excel, setup RSS feeds, and keep a query history as part of its free service. You can search in English, French and German.
And the World IP Organization maintains its patent search here with its PatentScope service, which also has been expanded and improved.
Patent applications have been growing steadily for the most part, and IBM is the most prolific: each day it is granted about 20 patent applications. Samsung and Microsoft get about half that. That is each calendar day. Apple gets about 500 patents a year, and Google and Motorola less than that. We’re glad to see that more information is entering the public domain, and hope that this trend continues.
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SEO Positive Reviews Google’s Official History of Search Video – PR Web (press release)
Dec 9th
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SEO Positive Reviews Google's Official History of Search Video
PR Web (press release) SEO Positive reviews the key ideas discussed in the release. Alongside the video, Google has released a concise timeline that highlights the main points raised in the production. Those involved in any sector of the web market will understand the … |
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Cyber Monday 2011 Marks Biggest U.S. Online Spending Day in History
Nov 30th
Cyber Monday 2011 was the heaviest U.S. online spending day in history, with the holiday season as a whole up 15 percent YoY to $15 billion this season-to-date. Average order values increased 2.6 percent and mobile traffic to retail sites are up 3…
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