Anthony De Rosa

Will a change in leadership at Research In Motion help change the prospects of this floundering company? The prospects do not appear good. Here’s my video report on location from Davos, Switzerland.

The very platform this post is appearing on is undergoing a bit of a revolution. The rise of blogs over the past decade has begun to give way to microblogging platforms, such as Twitter and Tumblr. The difference between the two is that microblogs tend to rely heavily on short bursts of information: links, photos, videos and brief messages. Blogger fatigue gave way to sharing smaller, less labor intensive bits of content.

The short timely updates have not gone unnoticed. Twitter has become something of a wire that provides up to the second reports about breaking news from around the world, used by both large traditional news outlets and freelance reporters. Tumblr is used by ABC journalist Matthew Keys for, among other topics, coverage of the Japan earthquake, which was recognized with a nomination by the Online News Association for the best breaking news by a small site. Until recently, Keys was a freelancer, but his online reporting on microblogging platforms drew attention and led to his recent hire by ABC.

While Twitter’s membership rate grew 26% over the past year, according to Search Engine Journal, Tumblr’s rate has been equally, if not more impressive. According to ComScore, Tumblr attracted 13.4 million visitors in July 2011, up 218% from a year ago (4.2 million in July 2010) along with a staggering 2.5 billion page views per month. 12.5 billion page views per month (according to Quantcast) With tremendous growth comes growing pains, as Twitter once experienced with their own pre-2008 downtime issues.

Now, Tumblr is starting to recover. So I sat down with Tumblr’s founder David Karp, pictured above, last week to discuss how the company has improved. It was readily apparent that the number of hires they’ve made since the last time I visited the office had increased significantly. Karp told me they added 20 engineers in the past year: “Infrastructure is much further along now. We’ve paid down many technical debts to allow ourselves to scale. We’ve created a more distributed, resilient infrastructure.”

As a long-time Tumblr member, I experienced the infrastructure buckling under the demand firsthand. Out of frustration, I vowed to scale back my use of the service until it became more stable. Stability has been one issue with Tumblr, but other issues have crept up as well. Several brands have publicly aired their displeasure with how the company has handled partnership opportunities. One reason that may be the case is because there is no formal process yet for partnerships. Says Karp:

We have no special products available for brands today, though we have several experiments running. Rich [Tong, Tumblr's Fashion Director] and our Outreach team have made it a point to continuously overhaul and reimagine these efforts in the interest of building the best products we can for our community and partners. That includes constantly working with different mixes of partners.

They’ve had some successes, though, with media brands such as Newsweek, NBC News, and ProPublica. Fashion brands, on the other hand, have had mixed reviews. Karp said the following about their efforts thus far:

Although we’re incredibly excited about the early success we’ve had with our partners so far, they’ve overwhelmingly appreciated that these are alpha products with only a basic underlying support infrastructure. That is, of course, the price of the bleeding edge, and we’ve been ecstatic to find so many extraordinary companies as excited about these new experiments as we are.

Krista Freibaum at a PR agency responsible for the Tumblr efforts of AOL StyleList and Edun (part of LVHM), said that Tumblr was extremely helpful to brands from 2007 to 2010, but things changed around the time Tong was hired to manage the relationships Tumblr had with fashion brands. Freibaum recalls that time:

It was at this time when all the cool stuff brands had been working on with Tumblr was essentially lost. Relationships were forgotten. People were left in the dark. Literally, emails stopped being returned. Specifically, when we saw that brands and editorial outlets had been brought in to participate in the last NYFW we were shocked that nobody had even reached out to us or our clients.

In place of AOL StyleList, other brands were included instead, such as Elle.com, Glamour, and The Cut. Freibaum reached out to Tong about the snub to which she said he responded, “‘Thanks, but no thanks. You can do business the way you see fit, and we’ll do the same.’”

In addition to dealing with disgruntled brands, Tumblr has felt some backlash from how they’ve dealt with a browser extension created by developer Jeremey Cutler, called “missing-e” which layers in functions not available within the normal Tumblr experience. Some of these features includes ways to customize the visual display of the “Dashboard” which is the interface where Tumblr users post and “reblog” content from the people they’re following. Tumblr has obviously been paying attention to the “missing-e” since they’ve integrated some of the features offered by the extension since its release, such as carrying over tags from posts that were reblogged.

But Tumblr has not made any public statements regarding their apprehension about browser extensions such as the “missing-e”. Instead their displeasure with the extension has come through Cutler’s own dispatches of interactions with the company on his Tumblr.

In his last interaction with the company, despite removing any API requests with the service and simply providing an extension that interacts with Tumblr after pages are already rendered in the browser, they were unsatisfied. Cutler writes, “They informed me that they consulted their legal counsel, who feels comfortable interpreting the license agreement in the way that they have stated. I have requested information on those grounds, but do not believe much will come of it. I believe that Tumblr has no desire to clarify their position. That’s their prerogative, I’m sure.”

Cutler goes on to state that if he doesn’t comply with their requests, Tumblr would see it fit to stop allowing him to use their service altogether. “Whether or not I have grounds to justly disagree with them on this, the fact remains that under the Tumblr Terms of Service, they are well within their rights to delete my Tumblr blogs as a punitive action should I continue to distribute the extension. They have informed me that this is the course of action they will take should I not acquiesce to their demands.”

When I asked Karp about this and told him that I find “missing-e” to be a useful product that enhances my experience with Tumblr, he told me that people using the extension assume that the issues that creep up are not from the extension but are caused by Tumblr, adding unnecessary burden to their support staff. According to Karp, the “missing-e” is one of many extensions, and not even the most popular one, that Tumblr is forced to support.

I asked why the company has not been more forthcoming with their position, and Karp said that they’re focused on the wider base of users, and responding to an issue that is known to only a subset of their community would only cause confusion.

I told Karp I still think the company could be more transparent and forthcoming about the decisions they make and that he underestimates how that could change the perception some detractors may have. Karp conceded that he wasn’t entirely sure they’ve always taken the right approach when it comes to communication and that they’re working on ways to educate and inform users on a more regular basis:

I’m generally really proud of how we communicate as a company. It’s not particularly easy when there are so many subsets of the community with dramatically different interests and questions. But we respond to more than 11,000 emails each week, go into great technical detail on our Engineering blog, tweet within minutes of any service interruptions, spend lots of one-on-one time with our community (through our Outreach team), and feature our users’ amazing work across Radar, Spotlight, and Tumblr Tuesday. I also love that everyone on our team contributes to our Staff blog — a blog we’re not afraid to curse on — and that we’re quite disciplined in staying out of the fray when incendiary people lie about us.

Karp believes that the company is best served by focusing on execution:

Although we’ve had the occasional communication breakdown that we work hard not to repeat, I think we’ve done a good job of being honest, accessible, and thoughtful over the last 4 years. What I’m eager to improve, like most of what I’m focused on these days, is centered around scale and efficiency. How does our editorial team grow to curate and feature content in more languages? How do we scale our outreach team (currently four people) to cover all of the interests and communities on Tumblr? What’s the most efficient path to get the clearest status message from our ops team, to our support team, to Twitter –– at 4am? Etc.

Tumblr is entirely within their rights to choose who they do business with, whom they focus their attention on when it comes to partnerships, and how they deal with developers such as Cutler. I walked away from my conversation with Karp feeling like they want to operate similar to the way Apple does, protecting their vision for how their product looks and choosing who gets to appear “in their store”. Apple has managed to make that aspect part of what makes their products great; it remains to be seen if this approach will work for Tumblr as well.

I spoke with John Abell, New York Bureau Chief for Wired Magazine, about how Apple might turn out over the next few years without Steve Jobs at the helm. John tells us what we might expect and how Apple is a much different company than the one Jobs returned to after his brief exile.

The biggest takeaway from today’s Apple announcements at their annual worldwide developers conference was how many companies they’ve just disrupted.

Hey Blackberry, you know that your BBM that many find to be the sole reason they stick by your side instead of bolting for a shiny new iPhone. Say hello to iMessage. Start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your iPad. If you still want to talk to your friends tied to their Blackberries, there’s always What’s App.

So Dropbox, you’ve been one of the most useful apps I’ve come across in quite some time. My files auto-synced in the cloud, I barely have to think about it. I move effortlessly from one machine to another and my stuff is right there, a click away. Welp, I’ve got some bad news for you. iCloud. 5 gigs of storage and get this, it’s free. Well, unless you’ve got some non-iTunes music you wanna sync. That’s gonna set you back $25 a year. Cmon, that’s a fraction of the money you’ve stolen from artists and those poor multi-millionaire music executives (if any of them still exist anymore.)

What else? Instapaper, a brilliant app by former lead developer for Tumblr, Marco Arment was just replaced by a feature in Apple’s Safari browser, called “Reading List” which stores what you’re browsing for offline reading later, and syncs it across both your iOS devices and your Mac. Poor guy. His reaction on Twitter was priceless.

If Larry David is a social assassin, what does this make Steve Jobs?

Some companies were disrupted in a positive way. Today was Twitter’s lucky day. Apple just built in Twitter integration at the base level of iOS5. Enter your Twitter credentials in your iOS device settings and you’re set. No need to log into Twitter again for most of the apps you regularly use.  Shoot something with your iPhone or iPad camera? Bam, send it to Twitter. Tired of having to keep logging into Twitter on  Safari? No longer. Same goes for YouTube,  Maps, and your contacts.

Remember all those times you had to fumble with the lock on your iPhone to shoot a photo? No more, you’ll be able to have a one click shortcut on the lock screen to get right to shooting. If you hate using the on screen button to shoot images as much as I do, you’re in luck. You can make the volume button a camera shutter.

The news and magazine business even got a little disrupted, with a new feature called Newsstand, which will be a place for all your newspapers and magazines. Don’t really see the value-add here, since you already download them in the app store. Better organization and background downloading seem to be the benefit.

You know how Android phones have these really cool notification pages that tell you all sorts of things like how your stocks are doing, what the weather this weekend will be, who just emailed you, and what your significant other just posted to their Facebook wall? It’s finally come to your iPhone and iPad. Customize it for what you want to see. Much more useful and informative than that boring screen-saver you’ve been staring at.

That covers your iOS devices, but what did Apple present for the Mac? Lion is the new OS, and it’s only going to be available as an Apple App Store download for $30. A lot of what is coming here morphs it closer to an iPad experience. Full screen apps, all sorts of gesture based features like swipe to change apps or go back and forth between webpages. Mission control lets you manage your documents like you’re grabbing them and moving them around physically.

The most blatantly iPad-esque feature is Launchpad which literally looks like the way your apps are presented in grid format on your iPad, but on a Mac. Apple’s newest mouse supports gestures but you’re going to get a lot more out of this if you’re using a trackpad or laptop. Even the mouse is getting disrupted. No-one is safe.

Perhaps the most life-altering feature here is Resume, which has two parts: auto-save and versions. This is something that is long overdue for the entire software industry. The OS will automatically save where you are in any app in short increments, so if you happen to lose power or just boneheadedly close your app while working on it, you’ll get back the documents and everything else exactly how you left it. If you want to go back to where you were at some point in time, Versions has you covered.

So in summation: Blackberry, Dropbox, Instapaper, GroupMe, and heck even AT&T and Verizon took a bit of a beating today from Apple. Twitter comes out on top. Unfortunately for Anthony Weiner, there was no “one more thing” in the form of a Time Machine.

A decade ago, we wondered what happened to the product that Google just announced. The Chromebook, Google’s version of a netbook, finally has the ecosystem and infrastructure to support it. Many have declared the PC age on its deathbed, with mobile on the verge of overtaking its marketshare. Google simply believes the PC will evolve, into the cloud and beyond local based storage.

Google will make their notebooks, running entirely on their Chrome OS, available in June, partnering with Acer and Samsung for the hardware and Verizon for connectivity. Samsung will charge $425 for a Wifi only version and $499 for one that includes 100MB data service. Acer’s version will cost “$349 and up.”

The notebook has virtually zero boot time — hit power and you’re on. The battery is said to last an entire day. Your files, entirely in the cloud and accessible anywhere, have built-in security. Updates to software, purchased in the Chrome App Store, will be automatic.

Some of Google’s strongest and most widely used apps: Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, will be available online and off, within the Chrome OS. This is where Google will attempt to eat into Microsoft’s bread and butter: Outlook and Office. While many large corporations use Outlook for their email, and Office for their documents, the flexibility that Google’s free versions of these applications, which don’t require a download and can be accessed anywhere, are an attractive alternative.

These Google applications are, however, already readily available on existing hardware like your laptop or work computer. In order for Google’s post-PC device to succeed, it will need to attract a market that cannot or does not want a fully functional notebook computer, and have been unimpressed with the netbooks that have come before it. What exactly will the Chromebook bring to the table that isn’t already available over the web with existing netbooks, at virtually the same price?

Perhaps they simply want to play Angry Birds on a bigger screen.

The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.

Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.

The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.

The reasoning, however, provided in a rather unimpressive press conference by the awkward and uninspiring Steve Ballmer, was to bring new customers to Windows and Office. I can tell you with some degree of experience, business users want screen sharing but they don’t have a great need for videoconferencing. It isn’t a tremendous business advantage or productivity tool.

If, instead, Microsoft predictably turns Skype into Windows Messenger Live Video Vista Professional Edition, then we will have watched one of the most exciting products developed in the last century killed off in the interest of its shareholders.

• Twitter in negotiations to bring back Jack Dorsey as chief product officer – Business Insider
• CNN moves past MSNBC in primetime viewers for the first time in over a year – Forbes
• Magazines can now count iPad and other digital edition sales toward paid-circulation – Ad Age
• Up-to-the-minute updates on aircraft maintaining the no-fly zone over Libya – Guardian
• Chris Tenant out at Vanity Fair after 5 weeks on the job (2nd item down) – NY Daily News
• Flipboard raising capital at a $200 million valuation – BoomTown
• Google exec : We are not at war with Apple – Telegraph

The biggest surprise at today’s Apple iPad 2 event was the fact that Steve Jobs was there to present it. Jobs walked out to a thunderous standing ovation and stated, “We’ve been working on this product for awhile, and I didn’t want to miss it.”

The iPad 2 is very much a video device. The resolution is the same, the price is the same and the battery life is the same. The new feature is a front and back facing camera which was not available on the original iPad.

The new device can also wirelessly stream video from any app to an Apple TV device (and vice versa), which makes the iPad an even more powerful convergence device than Apple TV.

Additionally, iMovie is now available on the iPad 2, and is specially designed to make it easy to edit videos on a tablet format. Facetime, which has been available since the launch of the iPhone 4, is now available on the iPad 2, too, and can perform videoconferencing between both iPhone and iPad 4 devices. Garageband for the new iPad will allow you to plug in instruments, add effects and record up to 8 tracks.

The device itself is 1/3 thinner, available in white  — they promise white will be available on day one (remember when the promised white iPhone never surfaced?) — and boasts a much faster 1 ghz A5 dual core processor. Apple claims the CPU is twice as fast and graphics are nine times faster and with all of that the battery life is still miraculously the same.

Apple also unveiled a new cover that snaps onto the device using built-in magnets on the iPad2. The cover rolls back and acts as a stand for watching video and to allow for easier tapping. The cover also has a microfiber surface on the inside that helps keep the iPad 2 surface cleaner.

The iPad 2 will be available on March 11th, the same day South by Southwest, spring break for tech geeks, begins so expect the Apple store in Austin to be a mob scene.