Oct
31
Early Adopters *heart* Android!
According to WebTrends, the first analytics company to track Android, the G1 is a hit with early adopters hinting that Apple might have a real fight on its hands.
Oct
30
NeoMedia is in trouble, US Appeals Court Rejects Business Method Patents!
NeoMedia’s creditors (specifically YA Global Investments, L.P.) should be very concerned with the U.S. patent appeals court’s latest ruling. Turns out that business method patents such as NeoMedia’s scan to URL patents and Amazon’s one-click to buy goods patents can NOT be patented. This is big news for software makers, internet companies, investment firms and other businesses according to Reuters.
Oct
30
ShopSavvy Rollout Schedule
Today ShopSavvy and the G1 invades the United Kingdom. With little more than a week to build our UK-localized version; Rylan and Jason uploaded the new binary to the Android Market around 2PM CST yesterday and UK users should ONLY see results from UK-based online and local retailers (with prices in pounds). The British people LOVE their cell phones and we hope that they will adopt the G1 in droves. There are more than 60,000,000 people living in the UK, but there are more than 61,000,000 cell phones in use in the UK (compared to only 219,000,000 cell phones in the US, population 301,000,000).
Our partnership with T-Mobile has been simply amazing. I cannot stress how indebted we are to the T-Mobile team for their support throughout the launch of the G1. ShopSavvy was highlighted at their launch event in Manhattan last month, it has been incorporated in their television commercials and in each T-Mobile store in the United States. We are also working closely with T-Mobile to launch throughout the world next year. Here is the rollout list (subscriber numbers from Wikipedia):
- United States (launched 10/22/08) – 30.8 million subscribers
- United Kingdom (launched 10/30/08) – 17.1 million subscribers
- Germany (Q1 2009 launch) – 37.1 million subscribers
- Austria (Q1 2009 launch) – 2.2 million subscribers
- Croatia (Q1 2009 launch) – 2.5 million subscribers
- Czech Republic (Q1 2009 launch) – 5.3 million subscribers
- Hungary (Q1 2009 launch) – 4.9 million subscribers
- Macedonia (Q1 2009 launch) -1.1 million subscribers
- Montenegro (Q1 2009 launch) – 271,000 subscribers
- Netherlands (Q1 2009 launch) – 5.2 million subscribers
- Slovakia (Q1 2009 launch) – 2.3 million subscribers
Oct
29
ShopSavvy 2.7 Released Today!
In preparation for the UK launch tomorrow we have updated ShopSavvy to version 2.7 this afternoon. The Good News: ShopSavvy now has localization for the United Kingdom offering UK-only pricing for online and local retailers (all prices in pounds). Our UK coverage is not as extensive as the US, but it too will be growing rapidly over the coming months. The Bad News: due to a bug in the Android Market our application’s popularity and comment data has been removed. The Market thinks ShopSavvy is a brand new application and as a result it will appear (for a time) as the ‘newest’ application in the Market – but won’t appear as the second most popular. We have been assured by Google and T-Mobile that our ratings and comments will be restored early next week; we are keeping our fingers crossed.
Oct
27
Why open is better, but sometimes more painful!
Evidently a researcher found a vulnerability in Android. He was able to find it because the source code that powers Android is open source. Great news, within days of launch a simple patch buffer overrun exploit was found, reported and is currently being patched. Some are suggesting it is a black mark against Android, but I suggest it is exactly why open source software is so important. I am willing to bet there are at least as many ’security holes’ on the iPhone, but since the source is closed it takes researchers a lot longer to find them (if they ever find them). Of course it is harder for hackers too, but at the end of the day the real security threats are not the ones you know about or can find easily – the really bad ones are the ones you may never find. Closed source software makes it almost impossible for anyone but the bad guys to find all of the wholes.
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