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Google is targeting mid-year 2009 for Mac and Linux.
Chrome uses the open-source WebKit engine — the same WebKit version as is used in Apple’s Safari 3.1. So there is a good chance they will make that release.
Up to date status reports here, where you can learn how to get the Mac Beta soon as it is available.
Here’s 9 tips for Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone. The voice recognition is very cool.
I like the slick interface, because all you have to do is start the app. When you want to do a search, just hold the iPhone to your ear. The iPhone’s accelerometer senses the movement and makes a “baBUM” noise to let you know when to talk. Then just say a query like [daffodil pictures] or whatever. It’s much smoother to experience than it is to write down. The net effect is as if you had some kind of Star Trek communicator device, except powered by Google instead of Spock and the rest of the crew.
…The last thing I like is subtle. This app has changed the way that I do queries. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a huge search geek. I’m hyperaware of when my query habits change, and I notice myself much more likely to do off-the-cuff queries such as [what's the average price per square foot for carpet?] or [how many miles per gallon do Audis get?] or [what is a softshell jacket?] or [what does the 11-99 foundation stand for?]. Marissa Mayer once kept a diary of all the searches she wanted to do during one day, and mentioned about 20 queries that came to mind. I feel like I had almost that many queries just driving into work. This app lowers the bar to doing searches. For a few days I was like a five-year-old just doing queries as they popped into my head. The easier/faster it is to search, the more I searched.
Not only have I started to do more queries, but I also say longer, more natural-language queries. Why? Because the more contextual clues I can give to the voice recognition engine, the better it will do. So a query like [mount everest elevation feet] might work, but [how high is mount everest] is more likely to be recognized (in my limited experience). The way you formulate queries is different when you’re speaking compared to when you type. I’m still pondering the implications of that.
Is the app perfect? Of course not. Right now it keeps a history of my last six queries. Personally, I’d like to keep all my queries so I can go back and find previous searches. And the voice recognition, while very solid, will continue to improve over time. I’d also love a way to add my own personal vocabulary of terms such as “PageRank” or “webspam” (which currently comes up as webcam). So the app will improve, but I still feel like I have K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider in my pocket a lot of the time.
The first time you hold a phone up to your ear and just say “18 percent of 33 dollars” and get a Google calculator answer back that it’s 5.94 dollars, it’s an epiphany. Now I don’t need a tip calculator application; I just talk to my phone and it tells me to leave a six dollar tip:
When our friend Davis told us about the new Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers iFund, my first thought was “another sign of too much VC money, too few quality deals”. On second thought — the iFund looks like a very efficient way for KPCB to put $100 million+ to work. The deal pipeline can share the due diligence effort, stimulate cross-developer component development, and Apple’s involvement will certainly help. Odds are Apple development will be influenced by what the iFund pipeline needs.
The iFund will also put KPCB in an advantageous position to build a network of iPhone innovators — a potential hothouse of innovation for follow on deals.
I wondered how KPCB will deal with the reality that many of the entrepreneurs won’t need much money. I.e., given the marketing boost provided by Apple’s App Store, I would expect angle investor size rounds to cover most of the startups. Well, the iFund will do deals from $100K up.
If you have an iPhone or iTouch innovation that needs some $$, start here. You can apply online.
KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund™ is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund™ will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.
“A revolutionary new platform is a rare and prized opportunity for entrepreneurs, and that’s exactly what Apple has created with iPhone and iPod touch,” said John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “We think several significant new companies will emerge as this new platform evolves, and the iFund™ will empower them to realize their full potential.”
I liked this paragraph in the FAQ
Q: How much will the iFund™ invest in each startup company?
A: The iFund™ will invest anywhere from $100K of seed capital to $15M of expansion capital in mobile application and services companies.
Well, duh…
…the new American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report …
Google was the number one brand among portals and search engines in terms of customer satisfaction, according to the index. It received a score of 86 out of 100, making it one of the highest rated service company in all of the ACSI. It rose 10 percent in the past year.
…Apple took the top brand in the personal computer category for the fifth straight year, as Tom Krazit of CNET notes. The company bucked the downward trend of the rest of the industry to rise to a score of 85, a new all-time high for the category.
…PC List (score out of 100):
Apple: 85
Dell: 75
HP: 73
Gateway: 72
Compaq: 70
Portal and Search Engine List:
Google: 86
Yahoo: 77
MSN: 75
Ask: 74
AOL: 69
More… [photo: flickr/william holtkamp]
Technorati Tags: Google
And then, on Saturday—well, knock me down with a feather. Apple performed a complete 180-degree reversal. The most opaque, uncommunicative tech company on the planet suddenly became transparent and informative.
At Steve Jobs’s direction, the company has launched a new blog that’s exclusively dedicated to the MobileMe mess.
In the first posting alone, Apple identifies the specific cause of the MobileMe problem (blockage from a bad mail server); what’s being done to solve it (24/7 coordinated efforts); current status (e-mail service restored, but e-mail older than Friday is still missing, and one-tenth of messages sent between July 16 and 18 may be forever lost); the severity of the original problem (70 bugs fixed); and estimated time of completion (end of the week).
More amazingly, the blog acknowledges, for the first time, the emotional toll of the experience. “It’s been a rocky road, and we know the pain some people have been suffering.”
I’ll bet good money that Apple has never before used the words “pain” and “suffering” to describe one of its products.
What made Apple change its stance? Was it the thousands of people on its support boards, clamoring for accountability? Did my column have anything to do with it? Or was it just Steve Jobs coming back from vacation?
There’s an RSS feed for the new Apple blog if you care to stay on top of progress.
Walt Mossblog outlines some temptations amongst the 800 new third-party iPhone applications that launched with the debut of Apple’s (AAPL) “App store.”
If Apple designed a car, it might be like the Gina — Autoblog has commentary, including the BMW Museum video and 84 intolerably cool hi-res photos of the Gina design study [each hi-res image is accessed via the "Hi-res" button at upper right].
The BMW GINA Light Visionary Model that was seen via video being installed in the BMW Museum in Munich last week has finally been revealed, and the futuristic design study shows how BMW designers are thinking outside of the box when it comes to the materials that make up a car and also how the car relates to the driver. GINA stands for “Geometry and Functions in ‘N’ Adaptations”, which basically means that designers from both BMW and BMW Group DesignworksUSA were allowed to throw out the rulebook….
More at 37signals, with excellent photos emphasizing how dynamic the fabric skin is. Thanks to Charles for the heads-up!
Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein Research: “The most important aspect of the new 3G iPhone is not its feature set, but Apple’s decision to change the iPhone’s business model,” abandoning carrier payments in exchange for more traditional upfront carrier subsidies. He thinks the switch likely reflects “widespread carrier unwillingness to move to Apple’s revenue share model.” He estimates Apple will sell the phone to carriers for between $350 to $700 depending on factors like carrier competition, exclusivity and ARPU. He notes that, in a move to prevent unlocking, the new phones will require in-store activation. Sacconaghi thinks the company can sell 10 million post-paid 3G iPhones in fiscal ‘09, but with profitability lower than the first generation device due to the business model switch. Sacconaghi also worries that in markets where they sell a pre-paid iPhone for $199, there could significant cannibalization of iPods.
…Richard Gardner, Citigroup: “We remain aggressive buyers of AAPL shares at current levels. Apple’s decision to move from a revenue share model to a traditional subsidy model for the 3G iPhone is a significant positive because Apple receives iPhone-related cash flow sooner. As a result, our free cash flow estimate increases by $2B for FY09 and our price target increases from $248 to $287.” His iPhone unit estimate for the second half of calendar 2008 goes to 12 million from 8 million. For calendar ‘09, he goes to 23 million from 16 million; for 2010 he goes to 28 million, from 20 million.
If Apple’s Grand Central really is a major advance, that will be a big deal for the computer industry. As it stands, Moore’s Law is kinda broken except for apps that have been painfully hand coded for parallel processors.
In describing the next version of the Mac OS X operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, Mr. Jobs said Apple would focus principally on technology for the next generation of the industry’s increasingly parallel computer processors.
Today the personal computer industry is going through a wrenching change in trying to find a way to keep up with the speed increases that were the hallmark of the PC business until about five years ago. At that point, companies like Intel, I.B.M. and AMD had simply lived off their continual ability to increase the clock speeds of their microprocessors. But the industry hit a wall as chips reached the melting point.
As a consequence, the industry shifted gears and began making lower-power processors that added multiple C.P.U.’s. The idea was to gain speed by breaking up problems into multiple pieces and computing the parts simultaneously.
The problem is that, having headed down that path, the industry is now admitting that it doesn’t know how to program the new parallel chips efficiently when the number of cores goes above a handful.
On Monday, Mr. Jobs claimed that Apple is coming to the rescue.
“We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” he said Monday in an interview after his presentation. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”
Instead, the company is going to focus on what he called “foundational features” that will be the basis for a future version of the operating system.
“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”
Apple, he claimed, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.
The other innovation Jobs mentioned is OpenCL (Open Computing Language) which is claimed to make it easy to exploit the parallel processing potential of the GPU (graphics processor). This has already become a poor-man’s path to a supercomputer, but again based on hand coding. If Apple makes this easy that is another Very Big Deal.
As NYT John Markoff closed his report
If Apple can use similar chips to power its future computers, it will change the computer industry.
Walt Mossberg has been testing Firefox 3.0 prerelease, and now thinks it beats Safari 3 on speed. So Walt declares Firefox “best on both platforms”.
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