This is what a real patent looks like

Mid Hudson Valley Android Hack-a-thon

Last night we did the first, of what I hope will be many, MHV Android Hack-a-thons.  The basic idea was to get folks together that are interested in doing android mobile development, and having others around they could bounce questions off of.  We did it at Panera because they have food and wireless, though future sessions probably have to move elsewhere, like Barnes & Noble, because the 9pm closing time came a bit too early.

Turnout was promissing.  Frank, Kershaw, and Muller all showed with their android phones and laptops, plus we got 3 other folks that just wanted to see what an android phone looks like.  Frank and Kershaw both had the Droid, Muller has a google issued G1, and I’ve got my Hero.  It was definitely interesting to see the differences across all of them, and supports my theory that there isn’t a straight road when it comes to android base platforms.  The Droid did some things the Hero didn’t, the Hero did some things the Droid didn’t.  A big reason for these differences is how modular Android is.  You legitimately can replace any part of the core interface with your own code.  HTC Sense, for instance, is a Home replacement.  You can write your own.  HTC also replaced the default mail, sms, contacts, and a few other things.  Some for good (mail, contacts), some for worse (messaging power bug).  But as a user you are empowered to replace the SMS system with a 3rd party app, which I did.

The evening started off with “oh, have you seen this yet?” which got a lot of knowledge cross shared.  Frank’s starting a wiki page to try to keep track of that.  I got out my laptop early and started working through the Sudoku example application in Hello Android.  It’s a pretty good example that includes many of the widget systems as well as the 2D graphics API.  I’m pretty impressed with the book so far.  Frank and Kershaw spent some time getting the SDK installed and poking it, and Muller was focused on the Android Scripting Environment to do some python on the phone.

All of use except Muller are still a bit in the “ooo shiney” stage, as I’ve had my phone for a whole month now, and Frank and Kershaw have had theirs for less than a week.  I suspect that future hack-a-thons will actually start generating a bit more code.  I continue to be impressed by the API model for Android, and really look forward to working on applications on it.  Yes, Java is not as nice and terse as Ruby, but at least I won’t have to write widget packing code.  And that makes me a happy camper.

iTunes will not be the savior of the news media

I was listening to Fresh Air last night on the author of new book on google.  It started with a nice lay person description of a lot of what Google has been working on, and how the company evolved into the worlds biggest advertising firm.  When the laundry list of Google properties got to Google News, the interviewy made the following statement:

On the other hand, there is evidence that it can be done, and
Apple’s iTunes is a classic piece of evidence in this regard. I mean,
the idea that music – I mean, just think about five years ago, the
music companies were suing their customers on college campuses for what
they called illegally downloading their music. And it was illegal, by
the way. You know, they were breaking the law to do that, but it was so
commonplace that no one thought it was against the law to do it.

Well,
Apple comes along and they said we’ll charge you only $.99 and you can
pick the music you want. You could listen to a little segment of it
before you buy it, and you could buy individual songs. You don’t have
to get stuck with buying an entire CD for X many more dollars. And it
took off like gangbusters, and it’s been a great success for Apple and
something the customers who were used to free music have accepted. So
there are some models that suggest it can be done, but it won’t be
easy.

When looking for a general purpose solution to the fall off of newspapers, there are 3 models that are always put out there which “prove” that paywalls will work: The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and iTunes.  And they are all wrong, and present an over simplification.  The issue is, none of these things apply generally to the local newspaper model.  Clay Shirky does a better job of explaining why than I, but I will take a stab at the iTunes front.

When you buy (if you buy) music, you are buying a durable good.  It’s something that in 2 years, you’ll still probably be listening to, and yes, in this disposable age, that’s considered durable .  It’s something you listen to dozens if not hundreds of times.  For this pattern, $0.99 seems like a fair trade off.  But even for that low low price, studies show that the people that buy the most music, as the ones that download the most first.  You can charge for music because it’s not ephemeral.  News paper articles aren’t like this.  When was the last time you reread a news article from your local paper 10 times.

I heard a great statement recently when listening to The Media Project, which looked at the Titanic.  This issue with the Titanic wasn’t that it was too big, or going too fast, or not enough life boats.  The issue was that 15 years prior the wright brothers invented the airplane.  Even if the Titanic hadn’t sunk, the company would have gone out of business in a decade anyway, because they were in the wrong line of business.

What this means for local news is sort of scary, but as Clay Shirky is found of saying: “A revolution doesn’t go from point A to B… it goes from point A to chaos, then after a long time someone figures out what B is.”