Bencredible

A while ago I had a Dash GPS unit for review. The concept was simple: a GPS unit that had an anywhere, always-on Internet connection that allowed them to gather road conditions from all Dash users and route everyone based on that data. If I’m stuck in traffic Dash would know that and re-route other commuters based on my data. User generated road conditions. Alas the Dash device was large, expensive, buggy and never really did what users wanted. They were purchased by Nokia and seem to be all but gone.

Now we have Waze which does much the same thing. Based on your driving conditions you can get re-routed to your destination. But Waze takes this several steps further and in a much better direction (pun intended).

First off, Waze is free! That’s right, you can get a GPS routing system that has turn-by-turn directions for the low, low cost of zero. They are able to do this in part because Waze runs on your existing Smartphone such as an iPhone or Andoid phone. Which brings me to…

Second, Waze does not require special hardware. If you have your iPhone on you, then you have your GPS nav system with you too. This makes it far easier to make sure you always have available traffic data. Waze is available in the Apple App store right now and I believe you can get it for Android right now too. I think they are working on a Windows Mobile and Symbian version too, I guess we’ll see.

Third, Waze is more social. In addition to being able to mark points on maps, fix road issues and add traffic problems you can also add things such as hazards, police traps and pictures. Every time you add something be it driving the road or fixing part of the map you get points. These points then add up to… well I have no idea, but you get points. Makes it in to a bit of a competition and is a fun incentive to keep the app open when you’re just driving, even if you don’t need directions.

I should point out that this is an alpha stage project and as such has some issues.  In my testing the routing needed a lot of love, there are no voice prompts so you always have to look at the unit and the icons on the map are a bit confusing. What is the difference between the blue car, white ghost looking thing and green arrow?  I have no idea, but it would switch between these icons from time to time while I was driving. The awarded points don’t update in real time so you may have to wait a couple of days to see where you’re at. Small things like these.

Nevertheless, Waze is a very cool app that gets more and more powerful as additional users get on the Waze network. This was ultimately the main cause of the demise of Dash, they were never able to reach critical mass. When it comes to social road networks, the more cars on the network, the more valuable it will be. With the app being available on the iPhone for free, I think Waze can do what Dash was unable to: build an intelligent GPS navigation system that allows me to find the quickest and easiest path to my destination. I am excited to see where this service goes! Worth the download, even in the Alpha stage. Hopefully the bugs can be worked out and we’ll end up with what Dash originally promised, but bigger, badder, better and free-er.

Google has announced it will purchase On2 for $106 million. According to the e-mail I got from On2 this morning it was made pretty clear that they are purchasing ALL of On2 and not just the VP6 CODEC. My question is… why purchase any of it?

YouTube already uses h.264 for much of their compression. In fact you can even download these higher quality h.264 copies with a little bookmarklet hack for your browser. There are currently 4 quality settings for YouTube:

• fmt=0 which is the default low quality video and uses the Sorenson Spark CODEC
• fmt=6 which is a higher quality but still the Sorenson Spark CODEC
• fmt=18 which is the HQ h.264 version
• fmt=22 which is the HD h.264 version

Where is the On2 VP6 CODEC in that list?  As far as I can tell, they just skipped over VP6 and moved straight to h.264.

So I ask again, why did Google buy On2?  The only available product that I see they have which Google would be interested in would be VP6, so there are only three other reasons I can think of that Google would do this:

1. Google does not want to pay the h.264 royalties.  While better  than the MPEG-4 royalties (or at least less complex) they are still there.
2. On2 has a patent of sorts that Google needs access to, probably in relation to automatic compression of video in some form, or a next gen CODEC.
3. Google wants to piss off Adobe and lock VP6 out of the hands of many users forcing Adobe to dump the CODEC and move to something else within Flash.

Heck to Google $106 million is nothing, but this does not make sense.  Will On2 get put in to the Google closet of doom along with Dodgeball, Jaiku and Google Video?  Will Google utilize On2’s products to make a new killer online video app or addition to the Tube? Thoughts?

Monetizing online video is difficult.  Oh, I am very well versed in how hard it is.  While Spacevidcast has been growing and we had a stellar month in July for income, it is still a far cry from where we want to be.  If only there was an online company that could distribute, track and monetize my videos for me.  What’s that?  Blip has struck a partnership with, well, just about everyone? Well that sure does seem cool!

I know, it is an hour long video with something like 15 minutes up front of nothingness (just skip forward, oh wait it’s @^!#*%& LiveStream and they make that as complex as possible) but check out all the action packed announcements.  While the YouTube Partner Channel has brought in a good chunk of cash for Spacevidcast, I have a feeling that this could do even better.

I’m excited at the possibility of getting Spacevidcast not only distributed to many, many video sharing sites but also TiVo set top boxes, Roku set top boxes, AppleTV devices, iPhones, iPods and of course many video sharing sites. We’ll see how this all goes but it looks good as a first step.

The more we can make in advertising, the more content we can offer for free and outside of the Spacevidcats Pro walled garden (which is good, we want to give it all away for free if we can).

I think Apple had it right back in the iPhone 1.0 days: Apps are web sites. Conventional wisdom would say that I’m wrong, I mean look at the popularity of the App store. However, iPhone apps are just that: applications for the iPhone (and sometimes the iPod Touch.)  What about all the other devices out there?

In an ideal world I could develop an application for the web and have it deploy to any mobile device from an iPhone to a Blackberry to a Windows Mobile device. The web browsers in these devices are actually quite powerful. Take a look at Google Latitude to see what I mean.

The problem is that since we have native apps there is little to no reason to develop a standard to pull the device hardware forward to the web browser. If I want to develop an application that can utilize the tilt sensors in an iPhone and a Blackberry I would have to write different code for each. That’s not the ideal solution. Each device should be able to present its hardware to the browser in a standard way that anyone can take advantage of. And nearly all hardware should be available from the on-board sensors, GPS, phone, ambient light sensor, etc., etc.

Looking at 99% of the iPhone apps out there I see little to no work that could not be done in the browser should they be able to take advantage of all the hardware. The final piece of the puzzle is an offline mode for apps that require heavy animations for weather and whatnot that allow the app to run even when there is no bandwidth. A giant cache folder as it were.

This is a bit of an idealistic view of how things should run. Apple already tried it once and failed. I don’t think they were wrong, I just think they were early without enough tools. Hopefully someone will try again but this time make it a standard that will work on any device with a webkit browser at its core.

There is one aspect that I have not figured out how to run in a browser: 3d games.  I have yet to figure out a workaround for those.

What do you think?  Am I crazy or could this someday be the future of mobile computing?