iPhone or Android? Place your bets!

Apple just bought Placebase, the private label mapping company behind Policy Maps. This is yet another indication that Apple and Google, once united against Microsoft, have begun to creep apart.

As a small team of fledgling iPhone app developers, this leads me to wonder whether to bet on Apple's iPhone or Google's Android as the main platform for our wares. Google is ultra-capitalized, but Apple knows hardware, and the company has been around almost as long as Microsoft. While the iPhone owns the smart-phone mindshare now, Google is making steady, quiet inroads, just as it has always done- with search, with advertising, with Gmail, with Google Maps, with Google Docs, and more. It's hard to bet against either one.

The futurist in me wants to bet on Google. But the iPhone is just so damn sexy! How can anyone resist it? *sigh...* I'm going with Apple, for now.

Any takers?

Google introduces Fast Flip

I sound like a broken record, but Google is The Great Disintermediator, and their latest application, called Fast Flip, is another example. Google is the *ultimate* long-tail aggregator.

5 years from now, people won't go to Amazon to search for millions of books, or Netflix to search for millions of movies, or iTunes Store to search for millions of songs; they will just go to Google to search for anything, and Google will present the content, hosted elsewhere, in a standardized fashion- a search engine. Perhaps later they will add cool community review and ratings features like eBay, Amazon, and iTunes.

[Thanks to my buddy Kai Dupe for the heads-up on this.]

More Kindle competition

My buddy Barton just sent me this link. Seems like Plastic Logic, powered by a Barnes & Noble bookstore back-end, is the Kindle's latest competition.

Watch the demo videos, and observe the graphic goodness and touch screen awesomeness.

Oh, yeah, baby!!!!

Get some.

How to compete with Facebook

I resisted Facebook for a long time. When I finally joined, I was pleasantly surprised by how many old and new friends I connected with. But I was equally disappointed with the amount of spam and "noise" that clamors for my attention on the site, like being stung by 1,000 mosquitoes.

When I started the Texas Film Scene, it seemed like we were in direct competition with Facebook. In fact, I even started a "Facebook Group" for Texas Film Scene, in an effort to lure people to our Texas Film Scene site, which offers many more features and community engagement. I told folks, it's like "Facebook for Filmmakers, but without the noise."

Lots of other community sites are doing the same thing. Facebook is the Mother of All Social Networks, despite being Johnny-come-lately to MySpace. But that all things to all people ethos is what stops it from being really useful. It doesn't provide the tools that specific groups of people, like Texas filmmakers, need.

Philip Greenspun discovered this way back in 1992, and his predictions have been spot-on.

Teens don't Tweet

Ain't this a b&$^@?

Seems the tech community has been broadcasting in an echo chamber. For all the talk of how the new microblogs help us oldsters connect with the young 'uns, turns out the kids don't much Tweet. At least not according to a recent study of 25,000 Nielsen Company survey respondents.

In fact, the main users of Twitter are 25-54 year olds. Which is not a bad thing to know, because sometimes you want to talk with someone who doesn't answer to "What's your major?" But it definitely will cause a lot of companies who thought they were being clever to rethink their spam-tweet campaigns.

Too clever by half, it seems.

It's ON!

Steel cage death match! Google Android vs. Apple iPhone! Only one winner: YOU, the consumer! Er, sorry. Flashed back to watching wrestling in the 1970s with my Grandpa Whaley.

My friend Kai Dupe sent me this Fast Company editorial about the iPhone. Now, it is just one person's opinion, but these are some pretty tech-savvy opinion makers who are loudly touting the virtues of Android on HTC phones. The ones at Gizmodo, it should be noted, have a different opinion.

Whatever. It doesn't matter which is better. What matters is that they are both great phones, with more to come. More competition means more consumer choice, and more bang for the buck. And with Microsoft's $65 billion clawing it's way back in the game, things will only get better. Oh, yeah- and Pre.