Palm Releases Its Own App Store

In the year since Palm released the Centro as an attempt to revive its lagging business, I've barely heard a whisper about new applications or energy for the Treo and Centro lines. Yet late Monday night, the device maker released its own app store download for Centro and Treo users to more easily access the applications.

The arrival of Palm's free app store--for both Windows Mobile and Palm operating systems--was undoubtedly spurred on by the success of Apple's iPhone App Store, Google's Android Market, and the upcoming BlackBerry app store that's slated to debut in March.

Palm's nexus of downloads includes over 5,000 applications, about a fifth of them freebies. Yet with the exception of Facebook, few appear to be the fresh takes on multimedia and social networking that have defined modern applications. A press release trumpets Nursing Central, Encyclopedia Britannica, Pac-Man, Tetris, and Fish Tycoon as its hot apps.

While Palm may hope its storefront will coax developers to submit variations of their innovative iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps to the store, the offering so far adds little strength to Palm's lagging market position.

Still, getting an app store out before BlackBerry does provide some credibility. More importantly, it will undoubtedly please existing Palm users, the most important ingredient for Palm's continued existence in the vicious and volatile mobile marketplace.

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What Gmail Does Better Than Its Competitors

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time wading through e-mails, finding the best e-mail service is paramount in my life.

Realizing that, I've done my fair share of shuffling from one e-mail program to the next--trying to find the best service that not only offers speed and stability, but also reliability and spam control. And although e-mail services are getting better, it's abundantly clear that few offer the kind of experience I'm really looking for in an e-mail client. But Google's Gmail app is different. It's better than its competition on a number of levels and provides the kind of e-mail experience that's simply unrivaled online.

Spam, Spam, Spam

I've used practically every e-mail service on the Web and I can say, without a doubt, that Gmail blocks the most spam. To those who open a new account, spam may not be a serious concern. Your spam folder will likely remain empty for a while until your new e-mail address makes its way into the wild. But for my e-mail address, which is widely available and easily attainable, spam is a constant headache.

On services like Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail, the spam blocker tried but failed on too many occasions. In fact, dealing with spam in my already bloated in-box was a daily occurrence that got worse as more messages piled up. But Gmail is different. Right now, I have thousands of messages sitting in my spam folder that never made their way to my in-box. Even better, I can say with all honesty that I only see about two or three spam messages per day in my in-box--not perfect, but much better than anything the competition is offering.

Google Apps

Maybe it's not fair to compare e-mail clients on the basis of additional apps, but I'll do it anyway. After all, Google is competing with the likes of Yahoo and AOL--two major Web companies--and I don't see why these two can't release apps that provide an even greater value proposition to users.

There's something so appealing about receiving an e-mail from someone who attached a Word document or Excel spreadsheet and being given the option to open that attachment in Google Docs. And being able to switch to Google Calendar and Reader from Gmail cuts down on time spent on managing my day. Maybe that functionality appeals to me because I prefer using apps like Google Calendar and Reader to keep me organized and "in the know", but I honestly can't see myself using another e-mail client knowing how invested I am in other Google apps. Suffice to say that my affinity for Gmail stretches beyond e-mail.

Filters

Gmail's filter feature is the best in the business. Period. Unlike its competitors, which try to provide a filter tool that simply re-routes incoming messages, Gmail delivers a power user's dream. In a matter of seconds, you can create a filter that searches through all incoming mail looking for specific people or keywords and once found, immediately categorizes it into a specific folder, forwards it on to someone else, or moves it to the trash, to name just a few functions.

With the help of Filters, using Gmail becomes an even more rewarding experience. Gone are the days of spending big chunks of your time attempting to find just one e-mail that's lost in a collection of thousands. Other e-mail services try desperately to provide the same kind of filter features, but they fall flat. In my experience, messages are either missed, the filter has performs the wrong function, or simply not ends up not working. In fact, Yahoo Mail's filter feature works only in its Classic e-mail app and according to the company, won't be available in the new interface until it's done "tweaking the Yahoo! Mail Filters option." Yikes.

Annoying ads

Anyone who has used Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, or Windows Live Hotmail knows all too well that the annoying ads are in abundance. But when you load up Gmail, it's an entirely different story.

Sure, there are ads on Gmail, but unlike the other services, they're not intrusive in any way. I never notice them when I'm working with the program, but when I load up Yahoo Mail or try out Hotmail, I'm inundated with ugly display ads that reduce the service's screen real estate and generally take away from the experience. Granted, ads don't have any impact on the viability of an e-mail service, but doesn't it stand to reason that if you're not forced to look at blinking ads while working in your e-mail, you'll be a happier user?

I certainly think so.

Conversation Displays

I realize there are many people out there who enjoy the "classic" style of displaying e-mails based on their arrival, but I'm not one of them. I like that Gmail groups an entire e-mail conversation into one and forgoes the use of individual strands. The latter strikes me as outdated and useless today in a world of constant e-mail communication.

That said, I realize my opinion isn't the most popular. Yahoo and AOL Mail are more popular than Gmail and each employs the "old" display style, suggesting that users prefer that over Gmail's style. But I think that's more of a reaction to what users know than to what they would like. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if those people were forced to use Gmail for a week, the vast majority would dump Yahoo or AOL in favor of Google's client as soon as a flurry of e-mails between two parties broke out and they needed to go back to find a particular message. Finding that message couldn't be easier in Gmail.

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Adobe Squeezes AIR Out of Beta for Linux Users

Adobe Systems on Wednesday is taking the Linux version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) product out of beta, and bringing it up to speed with the versions available for Windows and Mac users.

The new version differs from previous beta versions of AIR for Linux by fully supporting Flash 10 which includes such niceties as 3-D effects, high resolution text rendering, custom filters, and support for digital rights management (DRM). These features are important for media intensive applications like photo and video editing tools, and applications like Adobe's AIR-based media player software, which make use of the DRM support to serve up protected content.

The update is also an important step toward unifying AIR across all three major computing platforms. The Windows and Mac versions of AIR were able to take advantage of certain features that the Linux version could not--it fragmented which apps Linux users were able to run. Most recently this happened with the popular Twitter client Twhirl, which became unusable for Linux users after requiring the latest spec of AIR to run special Flash 10 features.

Adrian Ludwig, Adobe's product manager for platform, says his company intends to keep all three versions up to date, and roll out future updates at the same time. In practice this will let developers write an application that does not require any special coding to get it to run on all the platforms. More importantly, it would keep situations like the one with Twirl from ever happening again.

Additionally Ludwig says one of the hurdles of developing for Linux has been compatibility. "Less than 2 percent of clients are using Linux," he said. "It's challenging to deliver applications to such a small market." Ludwig says he thinks that having such a platform that offers cross compatibility like AIR offers will bring in new developers that might have previously never thought of building their applications for something other than Windows.

Ludwig says the next frontier for AIR is getting it into handheld devices, starting with "mid-mobile" devices, something that was outlined at last month's Adobe Max Conference. Also worth noting is that this new Linux version is only compatible with three variants of the operating system including Ubuntu 7.1 and higher, Fedora 8.1 and higher, and Open SUSE 10.3 and higher.

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Nebulous Cloud Computing

When discussing cloud computing, I often think of Joni Mitchell's haunting lyrics from the song, Both Sides Now. In Mitchell's world, clouds can be wonderful "ice cream castles in the air" or annoying disturbances that "only block the sun." This duality prompts Mitchell to declare, "It's clouds illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all."

Joni's cloud confusion mirrors current industry bewilderment over cloud computing. Like many other industry initiatives, cloud computing has a number of meanings. Here are a few:

1. Cloud processing. To me, this is the foundational notion of cloud computing where businesses can rent MIPS (millions of instructions per second)-- a measure of computing capacity-- for computationally intense processing tasks. This is very attractive for basic research and should appeal to universities and small companies that can't afford supercomputers. Nevertheless, this will remain a niche market. On another note, didn't we call this grid computing a few years ago?
2. Cloud infrastructure. Remember Exodus and Storage Networks? Cloud infrastructure is a more modern version of these Internet boom icons. AboveNet, Rackspace, and Savvis have been making money on basic hosting services for years, but most large companies still want control of their IT assets and are willing to over-provision to maintain control. Cloud infrastructure also brings up tons of privacy concerns, just ask computing godfather Richard Stallman. This area will also remain small.
3. Internal clouds. The idea here is to set up an IT service and then chargeback for usage. While the cloud folks equate this to a utility services (i.e. simply plug and receive compute and storage capacity) this too is nothing new. Remember IBM's "autonomous computing" initiative? We are still a long way away from this type of simplicity.
4. Software as a service. Everyone points to Salesforce.com as a model of success and it truly is. Beyond CRM, there are also plenty of successful SaaS offerings for e-mail, security, payroll, etc. Ten years ago, we called these folks ASPs and MSPs. Some, like Salesforce.com, were wildly successful, but most, like Jamcracker, are either ancient history or barely hanging on. This will be where the action is. Why dedicate capital budget dollars toward on-site e-mail security appliances when Google, Symantec, and Trend Micro can provide this as an operational service?

Small businesses that lack capital or human resources are extremely likely to purchase cloud services. I certainly see this in the security market where the volume and sophistication of attacks are far too difficult for overwhelmed IT generalists lacking deep security skills. That said however, we've been throwing the utility "plug-in-the-wall" analogy around for 15 years. Yes, we've made progress toward this goal but the technology and regulatory landscape has also grown more complex in the interim. Are we any closer to this utility nirvana?

Oracle's Larry Ellison recently scoffed at cloud computing by saying that technology vendors were as fashion conscious as the women's garment industry. I couldn't agree more and have no idea why VCs are funding so many fly-by-night cloud companies. Based on my IT industry experience, IT tends to seek help in two areas: tactical high cost operations (think desktop outsourcing), or tasks that demand specialized skills (think security, Web 2.0 expertise, ITIL, etc.). Cloud computing changes the way these services are delivered but little else.

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