June 2009 Archives

Last week HTC launched their latest Android device, dubbed the Hero. In addition to supporting multi-touch Flash Player 10 content, the Hero has a new UI layer called "HTC Sense." Among other things, it allows the use of widgets to bring information up the UI stack, like Twitter or other applications. It has similar behavior to the Palm Pre in this respect, allowing more end user customization. From a business perspective, it is strategically valuable to separate the user experience from the underlying operating system. That way, HTC can choose to change out Android for Windows Mobile and HTC Sense will still look the same. However this begins the fragmentation of open source code that could disrupt a fledgling ecosystem. For one thing, users would need to wait for HTC and the carrier to release updates. Google Android has made strides last year at the expense of the more prolific mobile OS, J2ME. Both Windows Mobile and J2ME variants suffer from a high degree of code fragmentation. J2ME is slowly dying and MIDP3 is way too late to make an impact. Apple got it right because they control the device and the OS, not to mention making app discovery and payment seamless and carrier independent. Developers will still need to maintain multiple versions of popular applications for Smartphones. We need a stable Android in order to achieve break-through market traction and avoid the developer frustration experienced with J2ME.

The Apache Hadoop Core is an open source platform enabling developers to write and run applications across clusters of commodity computers and process vast amounts of data. As a primary investor and developer of Hadoop, today Yahoo released their own tested distribution of the code that powers their search engines, ad systems and webmail services. There is a growing move toward design patterns that leverage the parallelism inherent in distributed systems such as Hadoop and Google's MapReduce. Applications can be developed on single servers then deployed on massively distributed cloud infrastructure without knowing the details of such distribution. Once these applications are deployed they can act as their own service provider to other systems. Indeed we see that scenario with Amazon's EC2 (with native Hadoop support), IBM's Blue Cloud Initiative and Google today. This type of database is not a relational engine like Oracle or SQL Server. Hadoop enables large scale data mining for useful applications such as fraud detection and rich media indexing. I think this release is significant because it allows developers to take advantage of all the work put in to improve Hadoop over the years. Yahoo's change log file has over 8,400 lines and contains a wealth of knowledge gained by real production experience. Can Yahoo gain cloud credibility by giving it away? I think so; it gives everyone a living benchmark.