Take a moment to think about it. The mobile market - hardware, software, apps, services, infrastructure - is expanding to just about every corner of the wold. And as mobile connects the entire planet - linking billions of people in real-time from almost any place you can imagine - it is re-constructing how people everywhere engage in shopping, banking, entertainment, work, healthcare and learning. 

Mobile Is Everywhere

This isn't news, of course, mobile's momentum has been building for years. But when you consider some of the data released this year - and give it time to really sink in - the implications are staggering.

Figures published earlier this year from the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), for example, reveal the amazing spread of mobile connectivity. According to the ITU's "facts and figures" publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population - including an 89% penetration rate in "developing countries," which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

In other words, nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone - or will have one soon enough.

The ITU report also notes that "mobile broadband" subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 - when the iPhone was first introduced - to 2.1 billion in 2013 - an annual growth rate of 40%. 

While larger still in the developed world, since 2010, mobile broadband adoption has grown fastest in developing countries - with rates hitting 82% in Africa and 55% in the Arab states.

Cost Still Matters

One stumbling block to universal mobile penetration, of course, remains cost - at least with respect to data connectivity. The price of the phones and smartphones have dropped in price significantly. Consider that Nokia releases its Asha 501 next month - for $99 or less (without being subsidized by a contract). The Asha 501's specs are surprisingly robust, although the device is initially designed only for 2G networks.

Android smartphone prices could go even lower. There are already numerous Android phones available in the developing world for less than $100 (off-contract). And venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently told Bloomberg, expect $50 Android smartphones to be available this year.

Mobile broadband, though, is still relatively expensive in the developing world. As the ITU notes, whereas an "entry level mobile broadband plan" represents approximately 1-2% of per capita income in developed nations, in developing nations  the cost ranges from 11-25% of per capita income." That said, mobile broadband is often cheaper than wired-broadband in developing countries. 

Mary Meeker's Metrics

If the ITU's numbers aren't enough to convince you that mobile is eating the world, look back just a bit farther.

At the end of 2012, Mary Meeker, an analyst with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, offered data on global Internet trends and the stunning rise of mobile was plain. There are already, she noted, more than 1 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide. In addition, since the fourth quarter of 2010, smartphone and tablet sales have exceeded PC sales - and the growth trends continue to favor these newer devices. Mobile devices now account for 13% of global Internet traffic - and rising. 

If this keeps up, and all indications are that it's not going to stop any time soon, the global trend toward mobile will reach every corner of the globe and affect just about every aspect of our lives. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Dear Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, 

I write to you not as a know-it-all tech analysis pontificator or even a hardcore gamer. I'm just a guy who spent his childhood Saturday afternoons hunting for 8-bit Warp Whistles and Tanooki Suits in Super Mario Bros 3 for Nintendo. And I have a simple idea. 

As you know, Nintendo hasn't been doing so well lately. Your recently-revealed plans to bring smartphone-style apps to the Wii U represent a step in the right direction. If you want Nintendo to truly thrive in age of mobile computing, however, I'd suggest a willingness to go even further: bring Super Mario to my iPhone.

That is to say, Nintendo should let casual gamers like me have the option of downloading old NES and Super Nintendo games to our iOS and Android devices. Mario. Zelda. Kirby. Metroid. Charge us a few bucks for them. We'll pay. And you'll have our undivided attention on the devices to which we're already glued. Those of us who are semi-serious enough to consider buying stand-alone gaming consoles would be even more likely to do so. Just delight us. You see, competition for our collective attention span has never been more fierce. Now's your chance to grab a chunk of it. 

The Wii Is 7, And Nintendo Is Struggling

One year ago, your company posted its first-ever operating loss,  shedding $458 million due to lackluster hardware and game sales. Nintendo was fortunate enough to return to profitability this year, but sales of the new Wii U and 3DS consoles haven't been nearly as high as anticipated. 

It's a sharp contrast from 2006 when the first Wii launched. Much to my delight, my brother gave me one for Christmas only after hunting one down for weeks by going from store to store. Demand was huge and business was booming, you'll recall. These days, finding a Wii U is easy. The problem is that fewer of us want them.

Over time, sales of the original Wii naturally declined, as they will for the Wii U. Seemingly, the best conventional hope you have of driving those numbers north lies in slashing the price (which won't help profits) and releasing must-have games for the console and hoping that they're good — and well-publicized — enough to pique the interest of everyday consumers, whose attention is now firmly fixated elsewhere. 

Shortly after the original Wii's hugely successful launch, another sought-after piece of hardware was unveiled. When Steve Jobs first held up the iPhone on stage in 2007, it marked the beginning of a revolution in personal computing and a shift in how casual gamers discover and play video games. Many of the very same people enthralled by the mainstream appeal of the Wii were now unboxing iPhones and downloading Angry Birds. Apple has since sold more than 500 million iOS devices, a number that only continues to grow alongside similarly impressive figures from Android. 

Bring Mario And Luigi Into The Smartphone Age

As the the mobile age has unfolded, Mario and Luigi have been nowhere to be found, remaining stubbornly locked up in your company's proprietary hardware. Unless one jailbreaks the device and downloads an emulator, playing classic NES and Super Nintendo games on iOS is out the question. It's unfortunate for consumers and it seems like a huge missed opportunity for Nintendo. 

Since I bought my first iPhone in 2008, I've had this discussion with more people than I can count. If only you could buy the original Mario games, the Legend of Zelda and other NES classics on iOS, it would be so awesome. Yes, the other person and I always agree, we would pay for that. The more games, the more money we'd plunk down. It's not just gamers and geeks, either. People who have absolutely no discernible interest in video games generally still harbor a nostalgic attachment to the side scrolling adventures they grew up playing.  

Take Super Mario Brothers 3, which was released in the U.S. in 1990. Like most kids I knew at the time, I was positively addicted to that game. To this day, it remains the highest-grossing non-bundled video game in history. The only way to buy it now is by downloading it to the Wii or Wii U via Nintendo's online marketplace. That's great if you have a Wii, but not everyone is going to buy a gaming console, even one as mainstream-friendly as the Wii or Wii U.

Indeed, the original Wii has sold just shy of 100 million units since its launch. That's less than one-fifth of the number of iOS devices in the world. Meanwhile, Android is on track to hit 1 billion activations later this year.  That's a lot of potential customers, and Nintendo is ignoring them. 

Make It A Hardware Play 

I know what you're going to say, Mr. Iwata. We're Nintendo. That's just not how we do things. If people want to play our games, they have to use our hardware. End of story. 

I'm not proposing that Nintendo abandon its gaming hardware business or even open up its new games to alternative platforms. But the mobile ecosystems of today are too massive to sanely ignore. A company like Nintendo could find a healthy new revenue stream by making already-popular titles available in these enormous marketplaces, where millions — and before long, billions — of potential customers are waiting. 

Another obvious (and totally fair) objection is that these old school games aren't made for touch screens. And it's true. Playing Zelda on an iPhone could be a potentially annoying experience. Here's where another opportunity exists for Nintendo: Design a sleek, fold-out smartphone case that doubles as a vintage NES gamepad that works with Nintendo-developed apps. For tablets, sell us something similar that fits the form factor and makes gameplay a pleasure. Make it an attachable accessory or a wireless Nintendo-branded controller. Either way, we'll happily give you our money for it. 

Rake In New Cash — Maybe Even Console Buyers

Will mobile games and smartphone-compatible hardware rake in as much as $300 consoles and $50 games? Probably not. But such a strategy could add a potentially healthy revenue stream that could help supplement what Nintendo brings in from its own hardware sales without cannibalizing them.

In fact, by tapping into these ecosystems and making a play for our attention spans, Nintendo could reel in new customers, giving them a taste for its characters and gameplay (or reigniting their love of the Mushroom Kingdom). 

Such a move would represent a bold departure from Nintendo's well-established strategy of tying games exclusively to its own hardware, but it only has to be as radical as Nintendo wants. Start with a few NES titles for iOS and if the results are strong, expand to other titles and platforms. If not, let these iOS games bring in a few extra bucks while you focus on recapturing the living room. 

Bold, yes. But as plenty of other industries have learned, the proliferation of mobile devices has upended the way things used to be. Thriving sometimes requires rethinking old paradigms. Besides, if Super Mario Brothers 3 wouldn't skyrocket to the top of the App Store charts over night, I'd be totally shocked.  

Legacy enterprise IT vendors may be scrambling to spread the blame in the wake of earnings misses, but one mega-vendor is not, and it's the one open-source advocates have argued for years was doomed to imminent oblivion: Microsoft. For all its stumbles in mobile and online, Microsoft continues to soar in core enterprise infrastructure sales.

The reason? Microsoft pressures the Oracles and HPs of the world in much the same ways that open source and cloud do.

Low Cost, High Value

By most measures, Microsoft's Server and Tools business is booming:

• Product revenue up 11% (Multi-year licensing revenue up 20%)
• Enterprise Services revenue up 11%
• System Center revenue grew 22%
• SQL Server revenue grew 16%, outpacing the market

And while growth has slowed a bit in fiscal year 2013 compared to fiscal year 2012, it's still impressive growth, especially in light of the struggles other enterprise IT vendors have had recently.

Why is Microsoft different? Most obviously, because Microsoft tends to make complex infrastructure affordable and easy to use, while appealing to developers. This has long been Microsoft's recipe for success: lowering the bar to use complex software while also lowering costs.

In other words, Microsoft keeps chugging along in the enterprise because makes life easier for enterprise IT, similar to what cloud and open source do. Or as Apprenda vice president Rakesh Malhotra puts it, "it's less about licensing and more about the complexity/cost/value."

And while Microsoft persists with its proprietary license model, a model out-of-favor in a market trending toward open source and cloud, it still tends to be much cheaper than alternatives like Oracle in the database market. As BMO Capital Markets analyst  Karl Keirstead recently opined in a client note, "Countless customers have told us that the cost advantage of SQL Server is so compelling that their deployment of Microsoft SQL Server databases is ramping."

In short, Microsoft improves enterprise value and lower costs, relative to the other legacy IT vendors.

But What About Mobile?

Ironically, Microsoft has thus far failed in mobile precisely because it has taken the opposite strategy: while Apple and Google (Android) have essentially lowered the cost of mobile operating system licenses to $0.00, Microsoft has continued to try to impose license fees. When that hasn't worked, it has sued Android licensees to try to raise costs to match Microsoft's.

It hasn't worked.

Microsoft has a lot of work to do to catch up in mobile. But in core enterprise infrastructure? Microsoft may be the vendor to beat. 

Not Shrinking From The Cloud Fight

Not that Microsoft rests easily. After all, with trends shifting IT spending to mobile and cloud, Microsoft's traditional Server and Tools division stands to take a beating. According to a new Baird Equity Research Technology study, Amazon, in particular, is siphoning off dollars from the legacy IT pie:

We estimate that for every dollar spent on [Amazon Web Services], there is at least $3 to $4 not spent on traditional IT, and this ratio will likely expand further. In other words, AWS reaching $10 billion in revenues by 2016 translates into at least $30 to $40 billion lost from the traditional IT market. 

In this, however, Microsoft is playing a solid offense, and stands a good chance of succeeding. Among both enterprise developers and CIOs, Microsoft remains their go-to vendor, according to both Piper Jaffray and Evans Data surveys. More pertinently to Amazon, these same enterprises plan to expand their Microsoft Azure adoption significantly, according to Forrester:

Breathing Room...For Now

Amazon stands clear as the 800-pound cloud gorilla, but Microsoft is no slouch. By embracing the cloud early and by continuing to pressure its proprietary peers with low-cost, high-value infrastructure software like SQL Server, Microsoft has kept itself top of mind with CIOs. These same CIOs are therefore willing to give Microsoft breathing room as it transitions its business to the cloud.

This could get interesting.

The world of search is about to be flipped completely on its head. As part of that sea change, today's reactive Web-based searches are about to give way to proactive, geo-fenced answers that will pop up before you even frame the question.

In many cases, you won't be searching for content - content will be searching for you.

Putting The New Search In Context

Search, to date, has mostly worked something like this: You type a word or phrase into a search bar in a browser or mobile app and a search engine with a funny name returns a list of Web pages it deems related to your query.

In recent years, search has gotten a lot better in a number of ways. One key improvement takes location into account. If I type "Notre Dame" while I'm in my hometown, then it's very likely I will get results about the University. If I were located near Cleveland, though, I might get results about Notre Dame College. And if I were in France, surely my results would focus on this beautiful edifice. 

Location is part of what experts call "contextual search," which becomes even more important with the rise of mobile computing. Where we are and who we are makes a big difference in the search results we want, and contextually aware search engines are working to use that information to decide what results to return to us.

According to J Schwan, CEO of Solstice Mobile, there are four aspects of contextual searching that all have to work together:

• Where
• Relevance
• Push
• Security and privacy

First, there's the where - what Schwan refers to as geo-fencing. Where you are, as noted above, makes a difference in what search results are most appropriate.

Then there's relevance, which dictates results through explicit preferences that you have set, the results delivered to other users in a similar context and what is going on around you at that particular time (traffic, weather, business hours, etc.).

The third aspect Schwan highlighted is relatively new, but fast-becoming more important to contextual search: push. Rather than waiting for users to search and then reacting to that query, data providers and search engines are working on how to push data to users based on their context. Google Now does this now on Android and its Chrome browser extension: cards based on your search results, location and even email messages will appear that give you the traffic report to get home or inform you of the latest sports score.

The final aspect is the wrapper of security and privacy that has to work with all of this to ensure a user's data doesn't go where it's not supposed to.

Squinting For SEO

Contextual searching is perfect for mobile, because, well, mobile users are by definition moving around. But the mobile form factor also makes contextual search more important.

Many people may have honking big 27-inch monitors on their home PCs, but relatively tiny smartphone screens inherently limit the amount of information we can access. In that context, it's even more important for mobile users to get the right results near the top of the results screen.

This is even more true when adding natural interfaces to search, such as voice-activated searching using systems like Apple's Siri. Forget search strings, Siri has to process natural-language queries and either speak or display usable results on a small screen. 

For search-engine optimization (SEO), this is a huge challenge: With contextual search, it's no longer enough to get your business or product listed on the first Web page of results. On a mobile device, as well as in push situations, SEO is really effective only if you can push your results into the top position, or at least into the first few lines.

Wearable devices like Google Glass and the rumored iWatch could put even more pressure on search results. We don't yet know what their interfaces will look like, but it seems safe to assume that there may be even less real estate available to display search results. 

This is one reason why the search engines are working so hard to deliver knowledge rather than just Web page links in their results. Google and Bing both now feature "knowledge boxes" that try to encapsulate the pertinent information about a topic in one glance. This "knowledgization" of search results is conducive to mobile search because it parses data into easily displayed and digestible chunks - essential for the smaller screen.

We may already be seeing the early effects of this trend. Last Fall, Google reported its first-ever drop in search volume. Some of this decline is no doubt attributable to competition - such as Bing, Yahoo or even local searches through services like Yelp. But how much of it is due to pushed content and knowledge replacing what might have otherwise been searched for? If the information being received is of better quality, then perhaps we won't have to search as much in the future.

By incorporating context and working towards knowledge - useful information instead of just plain data - the next evolution of search will take advantage of new opportunities and cope with new demands and challenges.

Will that help us make better decisions? We can hope.

Lead image and Notre Dame images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Yahoo's new iOS app launched this morning, bringing to the table the results of its $30 million acquisition of news summary app Summly last month. It's basically a full overhaul of Yahoo's flagship app focused on providing news via algorithmic summaries that originated with Summly founder and 17-year-old tech wunderkind Nick D'Aloisio.

Bottom line: The app has a solid design, a barebones interface, and works very much as designed. Its simplicity, however, may limit its attractiveness relative to more established news readers that skillfully weave in social media. 

Even worse, Yahoo News is still too full of celebrity and viral trash to become anyone's foremost news hub. (Excepting those who live for celebrity and viral trash, that is.)

Yahoo Finally Catches Up In The Design Race

The app, simply dubbed "Yahoo!," is basic in the extreme. But that simplicity is consistent with Yahoo's new mobile approach, which aims for stripped down functionality that offers users the essentials and nothing but the essentials.

Designed much like its companion apps — Finance, Mail, Messenger, Sportacular, and Weather — the app has just one main screen that constantly updates at the top with new stories. There's also a sidebar that offers you Web search via Yahoo's search engine, which still ranks as the third most trafficked behind Bing and Google, and the ability to set preferences. Which gets a little complicated because it forces you to sign into Yahoo; more on that in a moment.

The remaining two thirds of the sidebar is dedicated to plugging the rest of Yahoo's mobile suite, as well as sharing and rating tools.

From a design standpoint, the simplicity is great. The app couldn't be easier to use, and doesn't require you to log in to use its most important functions. In true Summly fashion, the news summaries are no longer than four sentences and typically feature a full image with the text overlaid. Clicking through takes you to a full-page version of the article.  

Some Difficult Tradeoffs

There are a few less-than-happy tradeoffs, though. Switching between story categories remains buried in the sidebar under the "All Stories" tab. That certainly limits the app's versatility for news junkies looking for a quick and easy way to navigate trending tropics. On top of that, Yahoo's comment section, which in the browser can feature thousands of comments on any given story, is inaccessible from the app at the moment. 

Similarly, to tell the app which news topics you're most interested in, you not only have to sign into your Yahoo account, then you have to create a Yahoo Profile as well. If you haven't done so before, which happened to be the case for me, the process is easy, but it's all handled in a weird Web client within the app that is terribly slow.

Then, once you're signed in, you have to maneuver to the settings section to access preferences, which are now mysteriously called content preferences and not topic preferences. To make matters worse, clicking that forces you to link your account with Facebook — and that didn’t even work for me until I opened that page in my laptop’s browser. Apparently, any kind of preference over what kind of stories you’re seeing is all routed through this terribly clunky social media integration that you can't even set up within the app itself.

Banking On News Summaries, For Good Or Ill

The core of the app's usefulness lies in how effective Summly's summation algorithm can help users quickly digest Yahoo News stories. It's the main reason Yahoo reported shelled out $30 million for a company that barely had a million users and no monetization model, besides the 18-month contract it nabbed with D'Aloisio. 

It's worth noting that by buying Summly, Yahoo was primarily acquiring IP, code and technology from SRI International, a nonprofit research institute that has helped develop technologies in fields as varied as education systems and national defense. SRI purchased equity in Summly after D'Aloisio created the summation algorithm and basically evolved it into a valuable product by providing him "artificial intelligence expertise in machine learning and natural language processing," as Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson reported.

SRI also held equity in Siri Inc. before Apple bought it in 2010. Within Yahoo, Summly is even reportedly known as "Yahoo's Siri."

Gossip And Viral Videos

So it's easy to see how Yahoo is banking on summation technology as the future of mobile news consumption. But even with the smartest, leanest "organic" algorithms in the consumer tech industry, the company still faces a big problem: The sour reputation of Yahoo News, which covers as much celebrity gossip and viral Internet videos as it does hard news of substance.

Granted, Yahoo News generates enormous traffic, and a story on a subject of national interest, like the Boston bomber being charged, can generate more than 4,700 comments in a matter of hours. But right next to that in Yahoo's homepage pinwheel — and by extension below or above it in its new mobile app — is a story on Jennifer Lawrence's haircut or a piece titled "Surprise under woman's car."

That's some truly broad coverage, which doesn't necessarily bode well for users who might otherwise be interested in making Yahoo their one stop shop for news. That's especially the case on mobile, where huge news reading players like Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite have built intensive environments with social media integration and large numbers of curated categories.  

If Yahoo can leverage the effectiveness of the Summly algorithm to build a base around quick-and-easy mobile reading and flesh the app out a bit more to let users avoid all the trash, this mobile overhaul could be a huge win. For now, while it looks and reads great, it doesn't come close to besting the competition even with its news summaries. 

While much of the discussion around HTML5 and its ability to deliver compelling mobile applications centers on client-side performance, a potentially bigger problem resides on the network.  Two trends in technology are on a collision course and threaten to make the web experience a growing digital bog for users on their mobile devices. Websites and applications today are increasingly complex and large in size, and at the same time a growing number of people are accessing the web over wireless networks.

As a result, browsing through websites on your mobile device can be like slogging through a marsh.

Credit: Tracelytics Basically, bigger applications are being jammed down increasingly congested wireless networks for display on mobile devices. While telcos have scrambled to make more and faster pipe available - 4G, for example - they haven’t been able to keep up.

Something has to give. Until now, the user experience was sacrificed. And while it may seem like an insignificant First World Problem if users have to wait a few seconds for an app or web site to load, even a few seconds delay negatively impacts top-line revenue for web publishers and corporations that rely on the web, as Tracelytics has pointed out.

I recently spoke with Manav Mital, CEO of Instart Logic a stealth company founded by a team of big data engineers from Aster Data. I asked Mital to talk some more about Instart Logic and its plans. And while Mital wasn't yet ready to reveal details on how Instart Logic significantly improves web performance, he did give some insight into how the company has approached the problem.

ReadWrite: Your founders have Big Data analytics backgrounds. And since then you’ve hired some networking, virtualization, CDNs and large scale web services gurus from companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, VMware, Citrix, Akamai, Adobe and Mozilla. It’s an unusual, diverse team. What are you doing differently?

Mital: That wide variety of backgrounds is critical to helping us think differently about the "Last Mile Bottleneck." The basic challenge we gave ourselves was how do we radically speed up the Internet over the last mile without asking a publisher to change anything on their web infrastructure or an end user to change anything on their device? Could we not only dramatically improve user experiences for the current generation of rich web sites and applications, but also make possible an entirely new class of web experiences?

That’s what we are building at Instart Logic. We all saw the same problem and felt the need for a better solution, one that we could develop by drawing upon concepts from our different backgrounds and unifying those ideas. It's not a problem that any one approach could solve, be it CDN or Big Data or any other technology. We needed to start from scratch using shared learning from different technological approaches.

ReadWrite: What is this “Last Mile Bottleneck?” 

Mital: In the past, the delivery bottleneck existed between the servers hosting the web application and the access points on the edge of the Internet. Legacy approaches to speed up the web focused on solving this bottleneck in the core of the Internet. In the age of the mobile and wireless Internet, these legacy technologies fail to address the biggest source of problem today – the Last Mile, which is the part between the edge of the network and the user’s device. 

ReadWrite: So you’re saying the biggest bottleneck has shifted to the edge of the network. What happened?

Mital: Two converging trends are exacerbating the Last Mile Bottleneck. On one hand, web applications have grown more complex, more interactive and more data intensive. On the other hand, users are increasingly connecting to the Internet over some sort of a mobile or wireless network, causing a huge congestion in the last mile. 

How’d we get here? Publishers and companies have replaced static websites with complex web applications that provide immersive visual experiences and encourage higher levels of interactivity, oftentimes tapping into social media data sources to make sites more personalized. These applications have to be far more intelligent and context-aware. User identity, location, previous behavior, social graph, time of day, and probable intent are all now key components factored into what is displayed by sophisticated web applications. 

At the same time, more and more users are accessing web applications from tablets, smartphones and laptops through WiFi and wireless networks. Corporations, too, are moving hosted and on-premise software into the cloud. That means their workforces must access these applications via the public Internet. While carriers and providers of WiFi connectivity are moving quickly to expand the size of the wireless pipe (4G LTE is the most prominent example), they simply can’t keep up with the exploding volume of data coming over those pipes. 

So you have two trends – richer web applications that are bandwidth hogs, and a wireless pipe that is increasingly congested – that combine to increase application load times and diminish end-user experience on any device.

ReadWrite: So what have web publishers and companies done in the past to deal with the Last Mile problem?

Mital: Publishers and businesses tried to overcome the bottleneck by compressing images to reduce the data footprint of a web application. Too often, those images appear washed-out. Some publishers and businesses have reacted by dumbing down their mobile and tablet sites, stripping out complexity.

Neither of these approaches help get applications to the mobile device. Worse, they provide a much less engaging user experience.

Alternatively, companies have resorted to what I would call extreme measures. Often major online e-commerce sites actually keep 20 different versions of product images to better handle the huge variation in network conditions and devices accessing his site. 

We don’t think web publishers and companies should have to compromise on the user experience. That’s why we founded Instart Logic.

ReadWrite: Instart Logic has been in stealth. Do you have any customers actually using your product?

Mital: Yes. We've been running a private beta program for some time, and completed it in December 2012. The vast majority of Instart Logic's beta customers – including a Fortune 500 company – are now using our service in production for mission-critical applications. These are paid customers, and they're using our service to drive conversions and increase user engagement across a broad set of industries including retail, travel and hospitality, enterprise SaaS, online gaming, and media – sectors where immersive and interactive experiences are essential.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Google Glass just got a little bit more real. If you were worried that Google’s augmented reality glasses were a pie-in-the-sky concept that might not ever become a real product, you can relax. That is not going to happen to Google Glass.

Google released the tech details to Glass this week - along with everything that developers need to know to build apps for the specs. Called “Glassware,” the Google Mirror API is designed to let developers create innovative, useful and fun apps for the forthcoming Glasses.

What can you build and how do you build it? Let’s break it down.

Java Or Python

Google recommends two programming languages for building apps for Glassware: Java and Python. For Java, developers will need Java 1.6 capability, Apache Maven for part of the build process and the App Engine SDK for Java. Apps can then be built in Eclipse, an integrated developer environment (IDE) for app building. Developers will need to create an OAuth verification and tie their Google account to their Glasses and allow access to Google’s Glassware API and access the SDKs. 

It is essentially the same for Python, except you do not need Maven or Eclipse. Developers use the App Engine SDK for Python to start. 

Add A Cat: User Interaction

Users of Google Glass interact with apps on a timeline. These items, or “cards” display information to users (like weather, business information, search results and so forth). Glassware is accessed from the cloud, not locally on the device, and developers call upon a RESTful endpoint to carry out actions such as creating new cards, updating cards, receiving input or subscribing to Glass push notifications.

Google uses the example of a cat to show off examples of the Mirror API. For instance, a user could automatically composite a picture they have taken with a random picture of a cat accessed through the API. Here is a work chart from Google on how a developer could "add a cat to that.”

Since the user is so fond of cute little kitties, she might decide to find the nearest pet store after adding a cat to her most recent picture. Glass can do that as well. Glass will fetch the user's location, run the search and “pin” a card to the user’s interface as they move around in search of a pet store. 

Timeline + Cards

This timeline + card interaction is the primary method of building apps and functionality for Glass and for users to interact with the hardware. Timeline cards can be text, images, HTML or video. Essentially, anything you can create on the Web can be created as a timeline card in Glass. 

If you add the capabilities of Glass to what we know of the timeline cards, we begin to get a clearer picture of exactly what can be done with Glassware. The primary hardware features of Glass will be location ability, photos with a 5-megapixel camera, videos shot in 720p, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 12GB of usable memory synced with Google cloud storage (16GB Flash memory total) and a full-day battery for “typical use.”

So a user could take a picture, search the contents of it, save the picture to a Google+ profile. If a user subscribes to a service, that service can send push notifications through Glassware tied to location. Examples could go on and on. Thoughtful and innovative developers will have a field day with Glass capabilities, extending what a smartphone can do to a device specifically designed for augmented reality. 

Glass can be tied to a smartphone through an app called MyGlass. To enable GPS or SMS, Glass will need to be tethered to a smartphone through MyGlass.

Guidelines For Glass

Google has four primary guidelines for developing for Glass:

1. Design for Glass: Do not design for another device, like a smartphone, and import to Glass. Because Glass is unique in how users interact with it, Google suggests that you developer directly for it.
2. Don’t get in the way: Apps should be for users, not for developers. Don’t be pushy with notifications and other information.
3. Timely: The goal is to provide users with up-to-date information with Glass. Make sure your app responds with correct information in a timely manner.
4. Avoid the unexpected: Imagine walking down the street and Glass sends you an unexpected notification. This can be annoying or even dangerous. Make sure the user has given explicit permission to be notified in Glass.

What Google Won’t Let You Do

Google does not want developers placing their own advertising in their Glassware. Part of this is likely because Google wants the user interaction to be free from clutter and pleasing to the user. Another reason may be that Google would rather be the one monetizing the data collected from Glass through its own apps and services - like Google Now. 

Google prohibits developers from gathering data of any kind for advertising purposes and will not allow developers to charge fees or collect payments for downloaded apps. Developers may not tie payment to virtual goods or upgraded functionality.

Essentially, Google has made it impossible for developers to make money from Glassware apps. No ads, no in-app payments or “freemium” functions will be allowed. This should help protect the user experience, but may slow developer participation past a certain point. Why would developers bother to create Glassware timelines and cards if they can't make any money from it?

Are you going to build apps for Google Glass? Let us know your plans in the comments. 

Watching Coachella from your phone just got easier. At long last, iOS users can tap into YouTube's live video streams, thanks to an update pushed out to the app yesterday. 

It may seem like a minor thing, but the addition of livestreaming support to YouTube for iOS is a pretty nice touch, especially if you're getting your "TV" content from your tablet or smartphone. This is a win for cord cutters. 

As somebody who relies exclusively on Internet streaming boxes and mobile devices to fill their 48" HDTV screen with moving pictures, I've long wished YouTube's native app would give me access to the live-streamed stuff. In recent years, YouTube has been making live video feeds available for whatever major political and entertainment events they can get the rights to stream. This includes music festivals like Coachella, sporting events and just about every major televised event in the course of each presidential election. You know, exactly the kind of thing for which we tune into live TV.

Internet TV User Experience: It's Getting There...

The problem with relying on the Internet for TV content is that the user experience is unpolished. As exciting as all this new TV tech might seem, there's still something to be said for sitting in front of a television set, pressing a button and leaning back. You can't really do that with Internet TV, but the experience is getting there. 

Part of the equation is smart app design such as that found in iPad video apps like Frequency, ShowYou and Vodio.  YouTube's own four-month-old iPad app is the best the service has ever looked on Apple's market-leading tablet (it's naturally quite at home on Android as well).  Still, while a great mobile app UI is important, it's useless without the means to get it to the TV, which is where technologies like Apple's AirPlay come in. And of course, the most crucial part of all is the content itself. This update stands to make YouTube a much better source of that content. Meanwhile, if Aereo survives the TV industry's litigious onslaught, it will be, if you'll pardon the buzzword, a total game-changer for this type of TV-viewing experience. 

YouTube's Role In TV's Future

On the content front, YouTube has been ramping up its original, TV-style content for awhile now, even opening its own TV studio in Los Angeles. Like Hulu and Netflix, YouTube knows that people are going to be turning to the Internet for more and more  of their TV-viewing, and they want to stake out as big of a slice of that pie as possible. 

But while binging on Arrested Development on Netflix is great and all, certain shows and events are best enjoyed live. Trying to tune into those things via tablets and streaming boxes is a pretty clunky experience. As the interfaces mature and content selection widens, it's going to get better. YouTube is one of players that will be right at the heart of this evolution, which will lead to the future of what we now think of as "TV." Adding live streaming support inches us toward that future just enough that it's worth noting. 

This is not a blockbuster, life-altering feature for cord cutters - It's not like HBO just gave us all HBO Go access for free out of the kindness of their hearts - but it's an important step toward making mobile devices more suitable sources of television-style content. Combined with apps like Aereo and Hulu Plus, YouTube makes "TV" something that increasingly comes from the Internet, not from cable providers. 

The bar was empty as I waited. Outside it was snowing and dark, another typical evening of what seemed like of what was an endless blanket of snow. Or, as we call it, February in Boston. 

"Can I get you a drink?" the bartender asked.

"I am meeting someone," I said. "I will wait until ... the person I am supposed to meet shows up."

I glanced at my phone for the time. It was the same phone that set up this date. Why shouldn't it tell me the time? It was 5:08 ... she was late. I've been down this road before. Set up a date through an online dating site and get stood up. It is one of the perils of putting yourself out there: you are asking to be let down. 

This time, I hadn't actually used a dating "site" to meet somebody. It was actually an app. For more than a month, I threw myself into the world of mobile dating. At least, I tried to throw myself into the world of mobile dating. I used only mobile devices and apps to try and find dates and maybe, just maybe, find that special someone.

It became an exercise in patience and humility. 

No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

When I was younger, I thought I could reinvent my entire personality by moving to a new city. Meet new people that did not know my foibles, get a fresh start and be a completely different person. After a couple attempts to recreate myself in a different place, I came to a clichéd but (at the time) startling realization: no matter where you go, there you are.

Just because I changed my surroundings didn’t mean that I was fundamentally any different. And this is kind of how I now feel about dating apps.

(See also: Taking My Dating Life Mobile: A Social Experiment)

Before taking my dating life mobile, I had a long history with online dating. Between Match and eHarmony, OKCupid and others, I have kept a profile active for the sake of curiosity and serendipity. If someone happened to message me, great, I would do my due diligence and follow up. If not? Well, no skin off my back.

The problem comes when you put your eggs in the online dating basket. When you actively try to find a match on a dating site, such as Match, you are asking for frustration.

I sighed. The phone read 5:11. "This isn't the first time you've been stood up," I told myself. The bar had acquired two other patrons, a couple of guys sitting at the very end. The two bartenders leaned against the counter, very bored, watching the red carpet show ahead of the Oscars on TV. "Only thing to do is have a drink and then get going," I mumbled. I signalled one of the bartenders over. 

A momentary gust of wind swept the bar and everybody looked toward the door.

And there she was.

Here’s The Scenario

Note: this comes from a man’s perspective. I have heard several similar stories from women, but I don't claim that these experiences are universal.

Still, anybody who's spent much time in online dating likely knows this scenario. You browse a lot of profiles. Along the way you “wink” or “like” several of them. If you feel a particular connection, you send along a message. 

And wait.

And wait.

Many times you never hear anything back. If you are lucky, you get that ping where somebody has responded. This is your opening. You send a couple of messages back and forth. After an appropriate amount of time, you ask the person if they want to meet.

Silence. 

[See Also: Top Dating Apps For iPhone, iPad And Android]

Sometimes the conversation just peters out. You ask a question that never gets answered. You are left wondering what the hell just happened. 

This basic script is no different between online dating and mobile dating apps.

An hour drifted to two. What I had envisioned would be an hour of awkward get-to-know-you conversation and then fleeing the date turned into casual, witty banter between two people whose personalities may be bit comfortably askew.

I looked at her and sipped the last bit of my margarita.

"One more drink?" I asked.

"Sure," she said.

The Difference In Going Mobile

Notifications ... everywhere The basic human experience in digital dating may not be all that much different between the online world and the mobile world. The same neurotic habits of profile browsing and inefficient, unresponsive communication are present in both environments. 

Yet, there is one big difference when it comes to using mobile app: immediacy. This immediacy is created by three distinct mobile features – geolocation and push notifications and social media.

When you are sitting at your computer flipping through profiles, there is really no such thing as geolocation. You do not know if somebody is from where they say they are. People may say they live in Boston when they really live out in the suburbs. You do not really know until you start talking to them.

When you have your phone filled with dating apps, you know when people are close. Why? Because your smartphone will tell you. 

The typical message looks something like this:

“Hey, a potential date is nearby. Want to message her?”

This can create some odd moments. I live near a pub, and every time somebody with one of these dating apps was at the pub, I'd get a notification. This can be kind of cool, like vetting the dating pool at the pub before deciding to leave my apartment. On the other hand, it can be highly obtrusive. I don't know if women were seeing the same message coming from the app about me, though I have to assume they probably were.

Another problem? Driving.

One particular app called MeetMoi is especially aggressive in its push notifications. I was driving to New York City from Boston in early March, with a quick stop at Foxwoods Casino on the way. On I-395 in northern Connecticut, I was getting basically non-stop notifications. 

“Hey, a date is near. Message her?”

I suppose there are a lot of single women in northern Connecticut.

Now, there's something to be said for Serendipity. Maybe one of these days one of those push notifications is going to have the woman of my dreams. Most of the time they are just annoying. 

Social Profiles

The classic online dating sites highly encourage users to create in-depth profiles from a multitude of questions. Part of the reason for that is that they want to help you “find your perfect match.” The other reason is that they are just like any other website ever: they want to know as much about you as possible to help with advertising.

Mobile is a little different. Creating an in-depth profile through an app on a smartphone is a little bit more difficult. It is harder to type and not all touchscreens are created with the same type of responsiveness. It is much easier for the app developer to just hook your profile up through your Facebook profile and let you edit it from there.

Apps like location-based Tinder and Let’s Date do this. Both will also show you if a prospective mate has any Facebook friends in common. Sometimes you can click on their Facebook profile from the app. And yes, you are going to end up clicking on that link.

You might tell yourself that you are curious. And you are, no doubt about it. But, checking out a stranger’s Facebook profile is also kind of creepy and stalker-ish. If you use one of these apps, you are going to want to go into the settings and make sure that random people cannot click through to your profile. 

The red carpet festivities had started in earnest on the televisions above the bar. The sound was off so all we got were the pictures of pretty people in fancy clothes. We proceeded to go all Mystery Science Theater 3000, making up interview questions and responses, basically being giant dorks. 

It was fun. 

Another hour rolled along. The latest. We finished the last round of drinks and checked the time. It was past 8:00, pretty late for two working people on a Sunday night. We left the bar, into the thick snow of a Boston that seemed deserted.

"Can I give you a ride home," I asked.

She looked at me, perhaps a little sideways, and shrugged.

"Yes."

How’d That Story End?

You want to know how many different people I met, don’t you? It's OK. I get the voyeuristic nature of writing about online dating. I chatted with several women through a variety of apps. Just about all those conversations fizzled out.

Except for, well, one.

One.

That’s right. Through a full month of using dating apps all the time, everywhere I went, I met exactly one person for a date in the real world.

And that's all I'm going to tell you about that.

Images of couples courtesy of Shutterstock

If I can recommend a great local restaurant, leave a review for future patrons, alert my followers on Twitter, update my Facebook friends on my great new find - all in a few seconds - using only Yelp and my iPhone, why can't I similarly promote those businesses whose values I support?

Why is it so easy to tell thousands of people, literally, how awful a coffee shop's service is, for example, but I can't as easily steer people away from a store whose values I deplore? 

It seems to me there should be an app - or maybe lots of apps - that make it easy for me to find, check-in, rate, review and recommend those businesses whose values align with mine. Forget pet friendly - are they gay friendly, Earth friendly? Do they seek a massive reduction in the size of government, do they refuse to buy from China, will they never cross a union picket line and can I count on them to support a strong national defense?

With the Yelp app, for example, I can easily set various parameters for a restaurant search: proximity, price range, type of food and customer ranking. But values is not one of the choices. This seems like a rather significant gap within the mobile-social-local nexus. 

Values Equal Profits

There does not yet exist a robust analog for finding and supporting businesses I want to promote because of their values, and not simply their price, location or customer service. Why is that? In today's connected world - when anyone can get anything from anywhere, and always at the best price - values can become a core differentiator.

I don't want my money going to a business that is opposed to gay marriage. Perhaps that's exactly what you do want. Why not incorporate a "values" layer into Foursquare, for example and discover and share those businesses that have the very best lattes - and the strongest support for the values most important to me.

Foursquare users, for example, can "discover and learn about great places nearby, search for what you’re craving, and get deals and tips along the way." The app's 30 million users have checked in to various establishments more than 3 billion times. Consider the potential social good Foursquare could foster if values were made into a searchable variable. 

The Trust Issue

Can people be trusted to not list a business as, say, homophobic, just because they were angry over the price or a long line to check out? Is it possible to know if a business legitimately supports climate-change improvements, for example, or is really working to limit poverty? It may be hard for a business to lie about its prices but all too easy to claim social and political stances that it doesn't back up with actions.

Fortunately, with more than a hundred million smartphones in use in America - more than 1 billion worldwide - the aggregate numbers and big data "smoothing" of billions of values-based check-ins and reviews should mitigate any lies or mistakes. For example, Amazon product reviews can generally be relied upon as a valid barometer of popular sentiment, even though they're completely subjective.

A few websites already provide a limited form of "values-based" recommendations for businesses. For example, OutGrade, launched earlier this year, lets users "rate places by gay friendliness or homophobia." Users rate establishments on a scale from -5 to +5, and the site color codes businesses based on their overall score: red is homophobic, green is " gay friendly." The OutGrade site accepts ratings for any business: restaurant, dentist office, pub, hotel, etc. and in three months has garnered reviews on more than 3,500 businesses. 

OutGrade plans to release a mobile app "in the coming weeks." This is vital as it allows users to simply pull out their smartphones and find acceptable places in their immediate vicinity. While a website may offer a more robust experience, only an app can provide real-time location-based ratings and reviews, while boosting the reliability of recommendations by letting users initiate reviews on the spot.

One More Step

Why not an app that alerts me to a store's values as I walk inside? Or that alerts me to a product whose maker I want to support? For example, when I stare at that massive beer selection in the grocery store, perhaps my "values app" can remind me that Bud Light used social media to support gay marriage.

Plenty of apps and sites focus on a specific value or set of values, or utilize a top-down approach, where those who create the app set the rankings. This is a good start, but does not fully empower smartphone user to personally rate businesses by the values that matter to them. 

For example, the Good Guide site rates an array of products that are "healthy, green and socially responsible." While useful, the information covers only selected products and is rated by a "team of scientific and technology experts," not actual users.

The FishPhone app offers a similar service and provides the seafood ratings system for Whole Foods. Of course, Whole Foods' CEO was famously opposed to Obamacare. The app would never tell me that. 

This is a critical problem with single-focus and those not maintained not by the end users. For example, Ceres, "a network of over 130 investment funds, environmental organizations, unions and interest groups" promotes major companies that are making significant progress on sustainability goals. Ford was a recent winner. That's great, unless you believe that a large automobile manufacturer should never be included on a list of sustainability leaders.

Getting Comfortable With Controversial Topics

The issue preventing a user-driven values based shopping app is not a technical one. The larger issue is that too many of us are not yet comfortable with the very idea of values-based recommendations.

When it comes to choosing goods and services, we have spent our whole lives focused on price, quality and convenience. Values are fuzzy, harder to quantify - and can lead to difficult decisions. What if your friendly, neighborhood grocer, for example, turns out be a climate change denier - and you live in area prone to flooding? Once you learn the values of a business and determine you are in opposition, would you continue to shop there? Will supporting only businesses whose values align with yours merely serve to divide society instead of promoting the values in question?

The technology to make this possible already exists, so it's likely we'll have the answers soon enough.

iPhone image courtesy of Apple.

M$: Short for Microsoft, used to imply Microsoft cares more for money than it does for security, stability, and anything else that could make a good Operating System." - Urban Dictionary, 2004.

"Microsoft sucks." Too many times, the conversation stops there.

Yes, Microsoft gets plenty of criticism, much of it justified, on everything from its nasty attacks on Linux to the failings of its latest operating system. Along the way, Microsoft has helped write its own narrative as a money-grubbing monopolist - old, litigious, out of touch. For Pete's sake, it took years for Bill Gates to recognize the potential of the Internet.

But that's only part of the story. We too often overlook the many things that Microsoft does right: its philosophy of open research; its willingness to adopt and contribute to open source; even its willingness to admit when it's wrong. The case here is not necessarily what Microsoft does best, but what it does well, what it deserves to be recognized for, and what we generally overlook.

1. More Open Than You'd Think

Microsoft, open?! Really?

Of course not, if you're looking strictly at Microsoft's commercial products. There's no way that you'll ever see Windows released as open-source code, nor will true open-source advocates ever put Microsoft in the same camp as say, Red Hat.

But in 2006, Microsoft began changing its tune toward open-source software - forced by IBM and Red Hat, admittedly. The tide turned when Microsoft and Novell signed a cooperative agreement shielding themselves and non-commercial free software developers from being sued; by 2012, Microsoft had entered the list of the top 20 contributors to the Linux kernel. Linux never really cracked the desktop PC, but Microsoft seems content enabling Linux to run on virtual machines, and possibly even developing Office for Linux, too.

Basically, Microsoft has achieved detente with open-source software; acknowledging its role, using it to Microsoft's own advantage, competing with it on its merits and contributing back to the community, where warranted. Argue all you want how Microsoft arrived here - kicking and screaming, perhaps - but Microsoft's attitudes toward open-source software have significantly improved.

2. Open Research, Too

One of the few companies that opens the doors to its labs is Microsoft, with events like TechFest held each year in either its Redmond headquarters or in its Silicon Valley facilities.

Many companies host developer conferences to engage with partners and announce new products. The difference is that Microsoft seems to emphasize research and showing off the fruits of that research to the world at large. There seems to be a sense of pride there that only a few companies (Intel, for one) seem to share.

Finally, there's the discovery aspect. Google Scholar does a fine job of assisting searches for academic papers, but compare Google Scholar and Microsoft's Academic Search. Not only is Microsoft's tool arguably more interesting than what Google offers, it also allows you to search by organization. Compare Microsoft versus Google versus IBM in terms of citations and papers, and decide whether or not you believe Microsoft's numbers, which show Microsoft publishing much more research than Google.

3. Winning The Game (Console)

In little more than a decade, Microsoft has forced Nintendo, one of the pioneers of the modern video game console, into near irrelevancy. It hasn't managed to do the same with Sony, yet, but its Xbox has outsold Sony's PS3 for well over a year (at least in the United States). Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to innovate with its use of the Kinect peripheral, both as a camera and a form of gesture input. 

Both Sony and Microsoft have struggled to bundle their consoles with music, movie and app stores, in much the same way Apple has. But Microsoft has also kept its eyes open. If the reports of the "Stingray" Xbox are true, Microsoft may be smartly attacking on two fronts: developing a low-cost Xbox derivative to take on Roku and Boxee in the video streaming market, while maintaining its dominance in game consoles. 

4. A Sense of Vision... And Touch

In the last decade, Microsoft has either bought or developed products for productivity (Windows, Office), collaboration and connection (Skype, Lync, Windows Phone) and entertainment (Xbox) and embarked on an ambitious bid to tie them all together.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer now describes the company as a services-driven organization, but Microsoft is increasingly committed to pushing the boundaries of hardware, whether that be its gigantic Perceptive Pixel displays, its Kinect depth camera, the Xbox or Windows Phones, and its Surface tablet. Microsoft has built outwards from a formidable presence in Office and Windows, adding powerful communication tools in Lync and Skype, and tying together tablets, phones and console together via the cloud. There's no other company in the industry - no, not Google, not Apple - whose software and hardware ecosystem traverses as broad a spectrum as Microsoft.

Microsoft may have fallen short with Windows 8's touch interface, but Kinect is impressive in its own right, even if it was licensed from a startup, Primesense. (I don't know why Microsoft hasn't made a corresponding investment in speech recognition, which would fit so naturally alongside a touch-based interface.)

Microsoft is now the chief steward of the PC, responsible for pushing its boundaries. Tablets, phones and Chromebooks attract the ink these days, but preserving the future of 350 million PCs is no small task.

5. Microsoft Peripherals: So Good, We Forget About Them

Every day, we sit down at our laptop, PC, or other computing device, put our hands to our keyboard and type away. And, in general, many of the best of those keyboards and mice have said "Microsoft" somewhere on them. 

Set aside arty attempts like the Microsoft Arc Mouse. When you get right down to it, Microsoft's basic Comfort Desktop keyboards and basic mice have been under our fingers for years and years. Microsoft's keyboards are one of the reasons many people can't imagine typing on a tablet's sheet of glass for any length of time. 

  6. Investing In The Future

Few companies have the resources to invest in startups, whether that be a company or a teenager. Microsoft does both: efforts like BizSpark give out Microsoft software and assistance to startups, while efforts like the Kodu Cup help kids learn how to code. The Imagine Cup crosses borders to incentivize student innovators develop their own products and the business models to run them. And while Microsoft helps launch solar-powered broadband in Africa, it must know that it's not going to earn a front-page story.

Much of what Microsoft is simply doing here is a high-profile effort to seed Windows and its other products around the world, employing many of the same practices that other technology companies employ. But is "good" being done here? Certainly.

7. Windows Phone: Committed To Being Different

During the holiday season, comScore reported, Microsoft's Windows Phone actually lost market share. Ugh. It's hard to write positively about Windows Phone when consumers obviously aren't falling in love with it. But Windows Phone provides an attractive, easy-to-use alternative to the iOS/Android duopoly, forgoing dozens of static app icons for dynamic "Live" tiles that transform the phone's home screen into a dynamic mosaic of information. It's, well, iconic.

We all know Windows Phone's weakness: apps. What Microsoft hasn't done is convince application developers to embrace the platform, and that's a big reason consumers have shied away. But the Windows Phone OS itself has a lot to recommend it, and the hardware from Nokia and HTC isn't bad, either.

8. Still Owning The Enterprise

For all of its emphasis on consumer-facing technologies, Microsoft's empire was built on productivity and the enterprise. Microsoft's Server and Tools and the Business Division typically report both the highest profits and revenue of any divisions within the company. Microsoft has forged relationships with thousands of businesses, generating stable, consistent revenue streams especially with the creation of subscription models like Office 365.

While Google Apps continues to cut into the Word/Excel/PowerPoint triumvirate, Microsoft has made an end run around Google's services by making collaborative services like Lync the centerpiece of Office.

Does Microsoft need to own the enterprise via hardware like Surface? In the end, no. If Surface doesn't end up as the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) option for enterprise workers, the rumored Office for Android and iPad will likely serve instead. That's the end goal: capturing attention and generating revenue from enterprises, no matter the medium. As long as that keeps happening, Microsoft can afford to bet on riskier ventures like the Surface and Windows Phone.

9. Microsoft's Mea Culpas

I was honestly impressed by Microsoft's apology that it had fallen short of its commitment to provide "browser choice" to European customers in 2012, as part of a settlement agreement. Microsoft owned up to its mistake, described what had happened and what steps it would take, and again took responsibility for the error when the European Union slapped the company with a $731 million fine.

Google, by contrast, faces fines and a concerted EU investigation after allegedly ignoring requests to rework its privacy policy. Many expected Microsoft to have looked for excuses and appealed the EU's decision. It didn't.

Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft didn't screw up in the first place? Sure. Microsoft obviously regrets its bawdy song-and-dance routine at a Norway developer conference showed last year, or its "big boobs" gaffe a month later.  But even the world's largest companies make mistakes. A company's character is determined by how it deals with them.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

Failure interests us. Microsoft climbed to the top of the market, creating arguably the world's richest man in the process. Tech journalists remain eager to write the story of Microsoft's fall, me included. Some of Microsoft's tactics are still downright embarrassing: the Scroogled campaign, for example. Windows 8 might well end up as the second coming of Vista. There are still questions whether or not Microsoft can tie its software, services and hardware together into a cohesive whole.

But refusing to acknowledge the other side of Microsoft's story isn't right, either. There's some good work coming out of Microsoft, and ignoring that creates an incomplete, inaccurate picture.

All images courtesy of Microsoft, except Microsoft's Open Source Lab Room by Todd Ogasawara, Microsoft mouse image by Fredric Paul, and roses image courtesy of Shutterstock.

What These Bad Apps Glom Onto

Between last September and March, security vendor Bitdefender analyzed 130,000 popular Android apps on Google Play and found that roughly 13% collected your phone number without explicit notification, 12% stored your location data and 8% sucked up your email address. Included in those numbers are apps that siphoned off one or more of the three.

Many apps don't stop there. Other data they glom onto includes your browsing activity, your contact list, the unique identification number of your device and even your call registry.

These apps took all that information legally. Android apps display their privacy policies in seeking permission to gather personal data, and many developers bank on the fact that most people will just click through to the app.

(See also: Hey! iOS Apps Play Faster And Looser With Your Data Than Android)

All that data gathering typically starts when an app developer download an ad framework provided by more than 400 companies listed on the Ad Network Directory. Such frameworks makes it easy for developers to display ads in the app, and thus to get paid every time someone clicks on them.

Since free apps only make money for developers from such clicks (and, it turns out, the distribution of associated user data), very few pay attention to exactly what kind of information ad frameworks are gathering.

"Because they copy-paste the code, they don't really debug it; they don't really look through it and see what data it collects," Bitdefender researcher Liviu Arsene told me. "I bet they don't even care."

And It Doesn't Stop There

App privacy policies often stake out even more aggressive data-collection goals, presumably to pave the way for future updates to vacuum up more info and further erode user privacy.

Take, for instance, Airpush, the second-largest ad network for Android developers with 40,000 apps. Its privacy policy reads, in part:

[I]n accordance with the permissions you have granted, we may collect your device ID, device make and model, device IP address, mobile web browser type and version, mobile carrier, real-time location information, email address, phone number and a list of the mobile applications on your device.

The policy goes on to explain that Airpush might supply that information to third-party advertisers who are part of its ad platform and third-party vendors, consultants and other service providers. Because the data is available to so many organizations, it's virtually impossible to know who is using your personal data, and how, once it leaves the device.

Obviously, the possibilities for abuse here are legion. Suppose one of those third-party organizations is acquired by an outfit that is, shall we say, less reputable. Or that a third party company's computers are hacked, spilling your data into the hands of cybercriminals.

The Feds Agree: It's A Huge Problem

Federal regulators acknowledge that a huge problem exists. "Mobile technology provides unique privacy challenges," Jon Leibowitz, departing chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said in February, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. "Some would say it's a sort of Wild West."

The FTC wants the mobile industry to bolster privacy controls by allowing phone users to opt out of being tracked by ad networks. The commission also wants apps to prominently display the kind of data they're collecting, rather than burying it in fine print. Congress is also considering proposals to tighten privacy protections on mobile devices, though it's hard to say how such measures will fare given firm opposition from industry.

In the meantime, here's some free (!!) advice: Scrutinize your free mobile apps as if they're malware ready to wreak havoc on your personal information.

Apparently, native apps have won. We even said so right here on ReadWrite. After all, Facebook apparently likes native more. 

Unfortunately, CIOs missed the memo, and the dirty little secret is that most of the world's software, including apps, is written for use, not sale. That means that most of the world's software is not going to follow what Facebook's mobile strategy is, but rather what those stodgy enterprises do.

Those stodgy enterprises? They're all in on HTML5.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with a who's who of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in New York City, talking about Big Data, cloud and mobile. With the Facebook Phone in mind, I polled the group on its mobile applications. Every single executive - not one exception - was building hybrid HTML5 apps, meaning the bulk of the app is written in HTML5 with a native wrapper to improve performance, add camera access, etc.

Every. Single. One.

And not just a few such apps. The bulk of their apps were hybrid HTML5 apps, both for internal employees and for external customers. 

Going Native?

Sure, there were some native apps, though generally not yet written for Android. ("We can't figure out what to do about Android," said one executive of a major financial services firm.) But overall, the CIOs I talked to, and there were roughly 100 in the room, were basing their mobile app strategy on hybrid HTML5 apps.

The CIO needs are different from Zynga's, or those of other consumer app developers. Many of the apps they're building are informational in nature, or have such a stringent need for broad access that these enterprises simply can't afford to alienate a particular mobile device demographic. They need to support iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. And with the vast majority of mobile OSes now sporting HTML5-compatible browsers, the time is ripe for HTML5 apps.

Still Hiring For HTML5

The job numbers bear this out. While HTML5 can get pooh-poohed by consumer app developers like Facebook, it remains the hottest technology skill, as measured by jobs, more than holding its own with iOS and Android in absolute number of jobs:

And trouncing both iOS and Android in terms of relative job growth:

This corroborates Evans Data's finding in early 2012 that 75% of mobile developers were using or expecting to use HTML5, a number that seems to have moved from aspirational to actual in 2013. 

Hence, while the media will tend to focus on what it knows best - consumer apps - CIOs are working away on HTML5 strategies. Just ask Accenture. Yes, there are tradeoffs when going HTML5, just as there are tradeoffs when going native. For enterprise CIOs, however, broad, cross-platform access to employees and customers makes HTML5 a winning solution.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Microsoft may be a distant runner-up to iOS and Android in the smartphone race, and still lags Amazon EC2 in the cloud wars, but executives from the Windows Phone and Azure divisions aren't hurting for respect. In the past week, senior Microsoft executives have joined disruptive challengers in the mobile and cloud markets, suggesting that Microsoft's brainpower isn't lacking, even if its market share is.

The first executive departure was Charlie Kindel, the former Microsoft executive who managed developer outreach for Windows Phone, who actually left Microsoft nearly two years ago but just now found his way to Amazon. While it's still anyone's guess as to what Kindel will be doing at Amazon - given his past role with Windows Phone, some are mooting the possibility that he will be helping build out an Amazon phone - this is becoming a bit of a habit for Windows Phone executives to leave for Amazon.

After all, just last year Brandon Watson, also from the Windows Phone developer outreach team, left for Amazon. In his case, Watson joined Amazon to help on the Kindle cross-platform team.

Nor is it just the Windows Phone team that has been leaking.

Today Red Hat announced that it had snagged Radhesh Balakrishnan, Microsoft's Azure chief for Asia-Pacific, to run its virtualization efforts, including OpenShift, Red Hat's open-source PaaS offering. If Red Hat were to borrow from any competitor to steal a march on VMware in the virtualization market, or Amazon in the cloud market, Microsoft was a great place to look.

After all, Microsoft has been cutting into VMware's virtualization market share for years, and Azure has become a solid #2 to Amazon, as a recent Forrester survey indicates:

One way to look at this is that Microsoft is hemorrhaging talent and must be a sinking ship. But I think this would be an incorrect reading. After all, though Microsoft is late to both the cloud and mobile parties, it's making progress in both, and continues to own the affections of CIOs. 

No, I think the better interpretation is that for all Microsoft's execution issues, it continues to have a bevy of super-smart employees. Amazon and Red Hat certainly seem to think so. 

And for every Microsoft executive that leaves, there are many more who are choosing to stay. If anything, these departures say little about Microsoft's fortunes and instead simply indicate that Amazon and Red Hat may offer exciting options of their own. While it's tempting to assume that executive departures are a clear sign of a company's struggles, reading the tea leaves in this way would put Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, in serious jeopardy.

Most people would love to have that kind of "jeopardy."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook Home is something we've never seen before. It's far more than just an app and beyond just a skin, but something less than an operating system. It doesn't replace Google's Android. It's not a skin like Samsung's TouchWiz. But installing it will radically transform your Android phone — and not necessarily for the better.

What Home boils down to is this: if you're obsessed with Facebook, Home is for you. But if you'd like to use your Android phone for something else — like checking email, for example — you'll probably find Home more trouble than it's worth.

Facebook launched Home at a press event on Thursday. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, described it as a way to redesign the phone for "people first," rather than the apps that dominate the rest of the smartphone universe.

If you'd like to try out Home, you have two options: wait until April 12 and download it from Google Play, or buy the HTC First for $99, the first phone with Home embedded within it. If you choose to download, be aware that Home will only run on the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung's Galaxy S3 and Note 2, and the forthcoming HTC One and Galaxy S4, Facebook said.

Facebook allowed the press to look at both the HTC First as well as phones running the Home software following the press event. While many weren't allowed to touch the phone, product managers encouraged me to play around with the downloadable Home app running on a Galaxy S3. I also tested the First, albeit briefly.

Home Feels Like Home

Home interjects itself from the first moment you pick up your phone. On the unlock screen, Home displays the first entry in what Facebook calls its Cover Feed: full-screen, vertically-oriented photos with text from a status message overlaid. Swiping left and right brings up new entries.

You can think of Cover Feed as an Instapaper-like view of your News Feed, emphasizing photos and status messages. You won't see video, group posts, or even ads — yet. But Facebook promises almost monthly updates, so plan on additional features to be added in the future. Who wants to bet that ads will one day be one of those additions?

Hey! Apps! Nope, they're shortcuts.

Clearly, this "home" slice of "Home" is the easiest to use, and the most enjoyable. Even if you have a just a few seconds, you can quickly swipe left and right to bring up new updates, double-tap an image to Like it, and add a comment by clicking the icon at the bottom of the screen. Sliding from image to image was effortless, at least on both the First and the Note II.

Note that this is Facebook's domain: there are no widgets, no app shortcuts, and no Google search bar at the top of the screen. If you want those, you'll have to work for it.

Home also displays a small, circular icon at the bottom of the screen with an image of your face inside it, as a starting point for further navigation. If you want to launch a Web browser, swipe right; swipe left to launch Facebook Messenger, and swipe up to access your "apps".

Swiping right brings up the stock Web browser — no problems there. Swiping left brings up Messenger, where you can text and message your friends. If you're on a cellular connection, those Messages will be sent via SMS, which highlights them in blue. (Or so the product-demo person at the event told me. No, I don't see why it couldn't send Facebook messages via cellular data, either.)

But Facebook Home also includes both notifications and something called "Chat Heads," which can follow you from app to app. If you happen to be listening to Spotify, for example, and your friend pings you, their "head" — a circular icon with their picture — shows up and you can begin chatting. You can engage in multiple conversations with different friends via different "tabs," each keyed to a chat head.

Messenger looks the same.

Home also sends you notifications for friends who Like your posts, which will pop up on your screen. Home has a nifty trick for dismissing them all at once: just hold down your finger on the screen, and they'll converge like hungry fish. They then can be "thrown" off of the screen. 

"Chat Heads"

I suppose some may be nonplussed by chat and notification icons popping up randomly, but most Facebook addicts will probably love these features. It's when you bring apps into the equation that things get a little awkward.

You Can Log Off, But You Can (Almost) Never Leave

Why? Because accessing other apps implies that you want to look away from Facebook. Facebook doesn't want you to leave; part of the value Facebook ascribes to itself is its engagement with the user. When you swipe up to access apps, you don't really access "apps" — a small window of "shortcuts" to the apps themselves appear. And at the top of the window is the familiar "status" and "photo" shortcuts.

In other words, you haven't actually left Home; you're just in its antechamber.

Home does allow you to access your full list of apps, arranged alphabetically. At the very bottom is a "More" icon. Clicking that takes you back to your home screen — except this time, you're within the Android/TouchWiz/HTC Sense environment. Congratulations — you've escaped.

As you might have figured out, Home wants to monopolize your attention, so that any other function your phone wishes to perform — such as notifying you of an email, for example — gets treated as an intrusion.

Options screen.  

No E-Mail For You!

This is where experience on phones like the HTC First diverge from phones built around the Home app. The First notifies users of incoming emails (or Google Talk requests, as I saw) via notifications. On a phone which uses a Home app, the Android status bar at the top of the screen does the same thing, before being banished by Home. Functionally, it's almost the same thing. But inside Home, you tend to forget about the "outside world" of Android.

This, to me, feels like the "catch" of Facebook Home. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was asked whether he felt that Google would tolerate Home, since it essentially domnates the screen real estate that Google has traditionally regarded as its own.

It's "theoretically possible," Zuckerberg said, that Google would go back on its "promise of openness". Zuckerberg also described Apple as a partner, but iOS as a "very controlled environment" — the implication being that Home on top of iOS is a pipe dream.

Google representatives said that they consider Home to be a "launcher," a way of recasting Google's Android. Does it bury Google content to the point that it's hidden? I think so. So far, it doesn't matter: “The Android platform has spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices," Google said in a statement. "This latest device demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular.”

But it's significant, I think, that Facebook has already shown that its mobile apps can be downloaded outside the Google Play store. If in fact Google tries to ban Facebook, Facebook may be able to pursue alternative means of distribution. 

Should you download Home? Absolutely. You'll need to most recent updates to Facebook and Messenger to do so. But make sure that when you launch Home, you choose the option to run Home once, to try it out. Home will blow you away the first time you use it, but I think its appeal will wane for all but the most social users.

For baseball fans, it's an exciting time of year. For those who prefer to stream games online, however, the anticipation can be tinged with a bit of frustration. That's because baseball games are still easiest to find on traditional cable or satellite TV.

Fortunately for cord cutters, there are some options when it comes to tuning in online, some of them more, shall we say, up to legal snuff than others. 

First and foremost, there's MLB.tv. That's the official subscription streaming service of Major League Baseball in the U.S. For $20 per month, fans can live stream games in high definition from their browser with DVR-style control. For $25 per month, they can get access from iOS devices, Apple TV, Roku, Playstation 3, XBox 360 and more than 300 other devices.

For fans fanatic enough to throw $130 a year at a multi-device subscription service, MLB.tv looks like the way the go. But there's a catch — and it's a big one.

Hey! I Paid $130 And Can't Watch The Home Team?

Because cable companies and broadcast networks have a way of ruining things, MLB.tv only includes out-of-market games. That means that if I'm in Philadelphia, I can't stream the Phillies game from any of the MLB apps, because Comcast SportsNet is paying big bucks for the exclusive rights to those games.

MLB, in turn, wants to preserve that relationship by ensuring high-as-can-be ratings. As is so often the case, this arrangement works beautifully for the sports league and service providers, but sucks for viewers. 

One way to thwart this home team blackout is by using a VPN service like WiTopia, VyperVPN or StrongVPN to trick MLB into thinking you're located elsewhere. It might technically be dishonest, but it is, so far as I can tell, perfectly legal. 

A less legally straightforward option would be to tune into pirated streams from shady third party sites. Sites like firstrowsports.eu and vipbox.tv are neither the best designed or safest looking sites in the world, but for desperate fans who want to tune into games without paying, they certainly offer the goods. Sites that offer pirated streams typically do so via links to Flash-based video streams or require users to download a desktop app — at one's own risk, of course. 

Alternatively, some users prefer to use a Slingbox to remotely tune into games using their home's pay television service or broadcast hookup. 

Lead photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Television broadcasters are freaking out. Certain that the courts would see things their way, companies like CBS, Comcast and News Corp. instead found that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Aereo, an Internet TV service they've been trying to shut down for a year. 

With Aereo's second legal victory under its belt, it might be time for broadcasters to focus on Plan B: to start, y'know, innovating like crazy. 

So Aereo Is A Go. For Now

At issue is whether or not Aereo violates the broadcasters' copyrights by retransmitting local, over-the-air channels so its subscribers can access them from smartphones, tablets and an array of smart TVs and streaming set top boxes. When Aereo launched in New York last March, the broadcasters immediately asked a judge to shut it down via preliminary injunction, arguing that indeed, it violates copyright law by generating a legally forbidden "public performance" without paying compensation. 

In its defense, Aereo has argued that the way it's retransmitting broadcasts — using tiny, remote antennae rented by its customers — does not constitute a public performance, since its use by individual viewers was inherently private. Aereo won a first round in court last July. Today, in a 2-1 decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the earlier ruling. 

The networks will undoubtedly continue pushing their case, opening the prospect of a full trial and eventually, a possible Supreme Court ruling. Broadcasters, of course, have every right to pursue a legal case against Aereo. This is yet another example of how technology has evolved faster than the law can keep up and how we, as a society, need to figure this stuff out.

In the meantime, broadcasters should prepare themselves for the possibility that Aereo will win in court, allowing its expansion to continue.  

Why Aereo Exists

Aereo is a pretty attractive service, especially for the cord cutter set. And for those who haven't yet considered canceling their cable subscription, products like this make it more tempting. It remains to be seen how much overall demand there is for Aereo, but the fact that it exists at all is pretty telling.

The legal niceties aside (those will be decided by courts, not blogs), Aereo is doing something innovative that empowers media consumers in a way that wasn't previously possible. That's because nobody — least of all broadcasters — made it possible. Now somebody is.  

When the Internet rose to prominence, newspapers didn't have the luxury of suing its brains out. They had to deal with the ways in which their landscape was shifting, which was ultimately better for consumers. Similarly, broadcasts may not turn out to have that luxury with Aereo. Trying to sue them out of existence is not an unexpected response, but it may not succeed. They need a backup plan. 

Should broadcasters have come up with this idea? It's nice to talk about how industries should disrupt themselves, but that's rarely how things actually work. It would have been totally counterintuitive for broadcasters to band together and develop the type of functionality that Aereo is offering. Smart, yes, but not necessarily a sound business decision within the framework in which these people generally think. 

What Should Broadcasters Do? 

It's a fruitless debate anyway. Broadcasters didn't come up with Aereo. Aereo did. Now the Comcast and News Corps. of the world need to think about what they'll do in the event that the disruptive little startup prevails in court. 

Aereo has already filed four patents that cover the precise technology its using, so it's probably not feasible to recreate its functionality. But what does Aereo do for viewers? It provides cheap, multi-channel, high-definition access to broadcast TV from an array of devices and allows for DVR recording. It lets you do all of this without paying for a cable subscription. 

To their credit, cable companies are already working on ways to bring live TV to tablet and smartphone owners. Comcast's TV Everywhere initiative clearly anticipated trends in the way people watch programs that could threaten their core business model, so they moved on it.

But while services like TV Everywhere and XFinity Streampix are nice, they're add-ons to a cable subscriptions, which some people simply don't want to deal with in the first place. It's unlikely that Comcast or Verizon is going to come up with a worthwhile Internet TV offering that doesn't hinge on their existing models — and the sky-high fees that support them. 

Broadcast networks might not be able to rent out tiny antennae, but they don't need to, either: They already have much of the infrastructure in place to provide live Internet TV signals and make them available from mobile devices and connected TVs. If they band together and offer enough programming, they could charge a small subscription fee. Think Hulu for live broadcast TV. In fact, yes, just tack this onto Hulu for a couple extra bucks. Bingo. 

There may be sound business reasons why broadcasters wouldn't consider doing this. Their relationships with cable providers may not allow it. But that rigid, no-we-mustn't mentality is exactly what created the void that allowed Aereo to crop up in the first place. It might be time to change that mindset.

Lead photo by schmilblick

Facebook has big plans for something involving Android on April 4, according to an invitation to a press conference that the social giant sent on Thursday evening. "Come see our new home on Android," it reads — whatever that means.

This event seems unlikely to showcase a mere update to Facebook's Android app, as those typically warrant a blog post and not much more. Instead, Facebook seems likely to have bigger plans for Android.

TechCrunch's Josh Constine, who was dead right about Facebook's last announcement of its updated news feeds, believes that Facebook might be announcing a modified version of Android, specifically optimized for Facebook and designed for an HTC phone. That might well amount to the "Facebook phone" that so many people have been expecting for so long.

Of course, it would likely also present Google with another headache, should Facebook join Amazon in promoting a heavily modified -- i.e., "forked" — version of Android.

But On The Other Hand

Suppose that speculation is off-base, though, and Facebook is just going to a lot of trouble to unveil an updated Android app. It could still have a few tricks up its sleeves.

Earlier this month, my phone asked me to update the Facebook app with the same message as AllFacebook described, offering to upgrade the app to a new version (2.2.1-g12, in AllFacebook's case). The version number now sits at version 2.3. However, one of the permissions that the Facebook app asked for was to "download files without notification."

That could herald a divorce with the Google Play market, as Facebook would then presumably be free to launch silent updates to Android phones without permission. In the most extreme case, that permission could conceivably allow it to modify Android on-the-fly for users. (Whether users would welcome that is another question entirely.)

One possible feature that Facebook could add, of course, would be to update the mobile app with the multiple News Feeds that it added to the desktop version just a few weeks ago. Those feeds segmented out Photos, games, music, and subscribed Pages, de-cluttering the main News Feed and giving photos more prominence.

That update, however, lifted the left-hand nav bar from within the mobile application and added it to the desktop version of the site, possibly meaning that the mobile interface will continue to drive Facebook's design going forward. If true, then that means that we should expect future enhancements first within the mobile app, and only later on the desktop.

On Wednesday, Facebook also implemented an improved version of mobile ads. With these new capabilities, developer can reach specific versions of Android and iOS mobile operating systems and devices on Wi-Fi only connections, developer Calvin Grunewald wrote in a post. "For example, now you can reach Jelly Bean 4.2 or iOS 5.0 and greater with a different message based on what is most relevant to the people using those devices."

Developers can now create and buy mobile app install ads through Facebook's Ads Create Tool, the company added.

Thorsten Heins was supposed to be the steward that oversaw the final collapse of one of the great technology companies of the last 30 years. When Heins took over Research In Motion in early 2012, not many people gave him a lot of hope. “Thorsten Heins Is A Patsy Set Up To Fail” was my take here on ReadWrite.

At the time, Research In Motion (now BlackBerry) was grasping for straws. It had just reported half a billion dollars in quarterly, losses and co-founders and co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were getting ousted by the RIM board — a panel they ostensibly controlled for more than a decade. At the time, Heins was seen as a front guy while Balsillie and Lazaridis pulled his strings from behind the curtain. Heins was supposed to be Norville Barnes. 

So long, Mike Lazaridis Heins Comes Into His Own

Fast forward to today. BlackBerry has a new name, a new series of good smartphones in its BlackBerry Z10 and coming Q10 devices and a streamlined and more efficient business that has renewed focus on services and applications. In its latest quarterly earnings report, BlackBerry announced $94 million in profit and said it sold a million BlackBerry Z10 devices in a little over a month, with strong channel sales likely to come. 

“Our financial transformation over the past 12 months has been outstanding,” Heins said on the company’s earnings call. “To say that it was a very challenging environment to deliver improved financial results could well be the understatement of the year. In the face of numerous challenges this past year, BlackBerry has gone from a significant operating loss in the first quarter of the year to an operating profit in the fourth quarter.”

Heins, who is prone to over enthusiasm and exaggeration, wasn't lying. The company swung to profit from a GAAP loss of $518 million and an operating loss of $118 million. In that time, BlackBerry’s liquid cash hoard rose from $2.1 billion to $2.9 billion despite losing market share to the like of Android and Apple.

Balsillie is gone. Lazaridis is retiring at the beginning of May. It appears that Heins has taken hold of BlackBerry and made it his without the puppeteers manipulating from the background.

Remaking BlackBerry In His Own Image

"Thorsten has been doing a good job at the helm, in my opinion. He got the devices to market (although a bit later than expected),” mobile analyst Jack Gold, principal at J. Gold Associates, wrote me in an email. “He’s effectively managing the bottom line (still not done but he’s on his way), and he’s made a number of management changes. The restructuring isn’t totally done yet, but he does seem to be remaking BB in his image of what it needs to be.”

Heins & Alicia Keys at BlackBerry 10 Launch

BlackBerry and Heins had a baptism by fire in 2012. The new BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system was delayed. Then it was delayed again. BlackBerry completely missed the holiday shopping season, eventually launching its new devices on Jan. 30. at an event in New York City. Between the time that Heins took over and the launch of BlackBerry 10, the company was forced to lay off thousands of workers. It got so bad that BlackBerry hired powerful Wall Street groups J.P Morgan and RBC Capital to perform a strategic review, something that pointed to a potential sale of the company.

Instead of a sale, it seems that the strategic review has led to a leaner, meaner BlackBerry. The company saw a billion dollars in savings from operating income a year before it expected to. That has led to profitability, even though BlackBerry technically lost 3 million subscribers (from 79 million to 76 million) in the most recent quarter. 

Just The Beginning

BlackBerry is not done though. Heins called the profitable quarter and launch of BlackBerry 10 just the beginning. It has yet to launch the BlackBerry Q10, which like BlackBerrys of old features a physical keyboard, though it has been testing the device on 40 carriers in 20 countries. In 2013, more BlackBerry 10 devices will be released at lower price points to take advantage of emerging markets where BlackBerry plays particularly well, like the Middle East and Africa. 

BlackBerry Z10

“Everyone at BlackBerry understands that there is more work to do. Delivering BlackBerry 10 and a profitable quarter is just the starting line, not the finish line,” Heins said.

Through it all, Heins comes out looking like a hero. Instead of a patsy, he has superseded both Balsillie and Lazaridis and given the BlackBerry tangible hope for a profitable future. It may only be the beginning, but Heins’s first year of hardship is over. 

“Of course, the next two-to-four quarters will give us a better understanding of how successful he’s been, but so far I give him a pretty good grade,” Gold said.

Lazaridis photo courtesy of Wikipedia 

In June 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone, marking a new era in corporate mobility. Before the fashionable mini-computer, people used smartphones for voice, texting and email. With the iPhone and its remarkable touchscreen users could also be entertained with music, video and games. Corporate executives became so attached to their hip device, they wanted to use it for business, so they bullied IT departments into providing access to email and corporate data. Employees soon joined their bosses and the bring-your-own-device trend began.

Six years later, what started out with one smartphone has grown into an army - far too much for the Wild West atmosphere of BYOD to continue as it has been. Many companies that have allowed BYOD will soon be pulling back on such freedoms. While BYOD may not die altogether, it will carry stricter restrictions meant to finally get this trend under control.

The Fate Of BYOD

"BYOD is clearly an important trend, but we expect it to plateau in the coming one to two years as enterprises decide that the cost and security issues associated with unlimited BYOD do not warrant the anarchy and increased support costs it has often caused," a recent report from tech analyst J.Gold Associates said.

Where the iPhone use to be in a class by itself, the smartphone now competes with Android phones from Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony and 10 other vendors.  In addition, there is the BlackBerry and multiple devices running Microsoft's Windows Phone.

In 2010, Apple added the iPad to the chaos, creating a whole new market for tablet computers that brought lots of competitors from manufacturers in the Android camp.

From the beginning, BYOD was a challenge for IT departments, which had to wrestle with data security, device manageability, support and app control. Nevertheless, enterprises went along with the trend and the majority allowed at least some workers to use their personal devices for business.

But configuration, workflow and security issues were always making things difficult for IT. For instance, cyber-criminals saw an easy target in Android - with so many devices running older versions of the OS, hackers could target known vulnerabilities that were left unpatched by manufacturers and wireless carriers.

BYOD Limits

A survey of enterprises that allow employees to use their own notebooks, smartphones and tablets found that nearly half had experienced a security breach. As a result, more than 40% of the companies either restricted mobile data access or installed security software, according to the poll of more than 400 IT professionals and chief executives conducted by Decisive Analytics and released in August 2012.

Despite the breaches, only 12% of companies outright cancelled BYOD programs, an indication that most remained committed to providing flexibility to employees, while moving toward imposing rules.

Indeed, Gold found that companies are realizing "the current mostly wide-open, laissez fare approach to BYOD is not sustainable longer term, and that more controls and better strategy are needed."

As companies clamp down on BYOD, employees will likely find they will have to surrender their devices in order for IT departments to install technology to protect corporate data and communications. At the same time, manufacturers are providing more enterprise features in order to ensure their products get approved for work and play.

Samsung recently launched technology called SAFE that the vendor boasts brings enterprise-class security to selected devices. People who buy the Galaxy S III or S 4 smartphones, the Galaxy Note II smartphone/tablet hybrid or the Note 10.1 tablet have the option of including SAFE, which provides a container for corporate data and email in order to separate it from personal applications.

BlackBerry, which has always been considered the gold standard in device security, has added similar data-separating technology in the new Z10.

In time, enterprises are likely to give the nod to those devices that can meet the demands of consumers and businesses and shun those that don't. So instead of BYOD, the policy of the future will be BYODA, or bring-your-own-device-for-approval.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.