You might have heard about Google’s announcement to purchase Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion. On the surface this would seem to be a move to solidify the Android ecosystem and cult by starting to build and distribute their own mobile hardware (cell phones and tablets).

That’s part of it. Apple has demonstrated the market power and profitability that a proper cult following can generate and continues to demonstrate this commitment by practically giving away their newest operating system, Lion ($29), and actually giving away their upcoming iCloud service to all Lion users. Not a bad way to get people to buy the latest and greatest.

Not too far beneath Google’s surface brews a tempest that has significant implications for all mobile technology innovation in the years to come. Google’s main interest in Motorola is 17,000-plus patents that allow them to enter the patent wars currently underway. In this war, patents are conglomerated legal cards to be played as part of an ongoing legal strategy for each company vying for market share.

Patents were designed to fuel innovation by rewarding someone’s original idea, allowing him or her a specific period of time to capitalize monetarily on that idea. Technology moves much faster than the law, and we’re quickly seeing the limitations of copyright, trademark, and patent law as they currently stand.

On the heels of reports saying Android phones occupy nearly half the market, one might wonder how such a deal could get through anti-trust court. To Google’s credit, this does represent a new business sector for them as they wisely licensed the Android OS (classic Microsoft strategy) rather than building hardware (Apple). Now how do you think those dozens of hardware manufactures feel about competing directly with a company owned by their licensor?

While Larry Page states that the deal will “enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences,” I’m not convinced. The little guy doesn’t have the legal muscle to enter the patent wars, and is often only brought in unknowingly after he’s had some success.

Certainly Google has offered much innovation to the world, and some see as a defensive move. I have a limited amount of trust for any large corporation, and these days that includes Google and even Apple. If you’ve been watching this game awhile, it may seem somewhat ironic to see Apple and Microsoft banding together to sue Google. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

This situation makes me squirm the way much of our stock market does. What was created as an institution to allow anyone to invest in a company, hitching his or her star to the success and failure of that company, has become an abstraction that allows people to place bets on the success or failure of anything or nothing. We’ve seen how well that played out in recent years.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Technology

It’s funny, I started writing this a week ago when this was just a rumor, but now that’s it’s official I can use facts.

On Tuesday, Apple announced a variety of things around the corner. The most notable is iCloud, which is a set of fully integrated apps that tie all your Apple devices together. This replaces the MobileMe service and makes it free, which is a welcome change as I was never thrilled with the performance of that service versus the promise.

Check out Gizmodo’s great 8-minute version of the keynote if you don’t want to spend two hours of your life watching the whole thing.

The word “cloud” has been tossed around a lot in the past couple of years. If you’re not sure exactly what that means, here’s how I see it:

Technically, a cloud is a bunch of computers linked together to distribute the workload they’re given. Much in the same way that a single computer may have two or more processors to distribute the task load, you can think of a cloud as any number of computers working in harmony to get the job done.

Philosophically, a cloud allows you to store any amount of data or serve any number of applications. Most importantly, it allows you to access data and applications from any device or location. Anytime, anywhere, anyhow. The goal is true ubiquity of personal data for you.

Competition exists with companies wanting you to use their cloud versus the cloud next door. Ideally, all devices would work with all clouds and we’d all just be able to access our information from any terminal, regardless or brand or creed.

Apple is making a significant play here to unify their tight ecosystem of devices and software. They are in the best position to do this, as they have the most control over their ecosystem, delivering software, hardware, and networks that tie together.

Similar things exist on Android and other platforms, but like many things in the “Wild Wild West,” they may offer more or different capabilities but they’ll likely take more tinkering to get going. Apple tends to “just work.”

I recently presented at the SIPA 2011 Publishing Conference in D.C. on mobile (about 4 hours after this announcement) and one of the hot topics on people’s mind was the huge gap between how great the iPad is and how limited it seems to be when it comes to full-on productivity.

The iPad is here to stay through 2015 at least, as the following chart clearly indicates. Android tablet growth will be much slower than the phones since Google’s decided to license its Honeycomb tablet OS. This will be good for quality and consistency of apps, but creates a barrier for developers that will slow growth.

While Microsoft is late to this game (again), their advantage is the embedded standardization of MS Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Getting these staple apps fully useable on the iPad and other tablets is essential for sales teams and other professionals, giving Microsoft a shot at this volatile market.

I’ve heard creative approaches such as running MS apps on a server and using the iPad as a thin client or dumb terminal. In this usage, the iPad is just used as a remote screen for a computer somewhere in the cloud. This grants full software capability, but the dependence on a constant Internet connection is a deal breaker for some.

This led me to Documents to Go, which is a native iPhone/iPad app that allows me to edit MS Office files directly on the device. I’m still getting used to it, and formatting retention isn’t 100%, but it seems to solve the issue of office productivity for many issues. Perhaps some day apps like this will exist in the cloud, but no matter how good the server infrastructure is, full adoption will always depend on local bandwidth for the user, which is far from perfect.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Technology

You may have noticed a new kind of square barcode popping up all over the place, which are most likely QR codes. Actually there are a few different kinds of barcodes, but they all have the same basic purpose – using your smartphone’s camera to access information encoded on anything in the physical world.

I think of this as putting hyperlinks on any surface you see – anywhere. This is huge.

It’s the best thing I’ve seen bridging the real world of signs and paper to the virtual world of Web and mobile. With the right app you can transfer information such as contact data from a name tag or view the trailer for the movie review you’re reading. The possibilities are endless and they aren’t limited to scanning the physical world since you can scan a code on an LCD monitor and take the information with you.

Earlier this week I noticed an otherwise unmarked white cargo truck with QR codes on the back and sides. I didn’t get a chance to scan the code to see if it was a subtle marketing experiment or used for logistics tracking, but I did get the picture below.

In addition to seeing these pop up in magazines recently, I saw one Tuesday night on a Dance Flight program by DanceWorks Chicago, who recently became an Astek client. The link goes to an extended program with videos and other multimedia material you can’t get on paper.

Try scanning the QR code above. I use QuickMark on my iPhone, which works quite well scanning screens and paper. You can download QuickMark here.

Social media writer and consultant Rachel Yeomans recently posted an article spotting a QR code on Facebook for Net-a-Porter’s new mobile site:

For an example of the Microsoft Tag, which I think is a bit too colorful to be practically incorporated into most branding, I scanned an ad from the current issue of Entertainment Weekly (yes, someone else in the office has a guilty pleasure). Scan the code below to view a YouTube trailer for The Green Hornet on your mobile device. You’ll need to download a tag reader free from Microsoft.

If you’re envisioning a world in which we all wander around scanning each other for information, well, you’re probably not too far off. But this is all an interim step until the technology becomes so ubiquitous that we don’t even need our phones to do the scanning. At that point privacy and social concerns will take over the conversation from technology.

You can generate your own QR code to try out the technology. Post a comment if you’ve seen some interesting QR codes out there or think of any great uses for this technology.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Real time search is getting to be a quite the buzzphrase in recent months. But what is it really?  The simplest and most familiar example is Twitter’s search feature, which provides almost instantaneous access to anyone’s tweets.  But given the recent implementations by the major search players, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points. This article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land analyzes the concept in a really nice way that I tend to agree with. It also delves into a lot of other specialized tools for real time search, but I’ll stick to the big names here (Twitter, Google, and Bing). Sullivan maintains that real time search is only truly “real time” when its sources come from microblogging services that provide a real time feed of the activity on their networks. For the most part right now, that means Twitter. There is just no single place for search engines to constantly look for updates from news sites or long-format blogs. So they have to depend on being alerted to updates by such sites, or actively crawling around the entire internet looking for new content. Neither of which is reliably real time in the up-to-the-second way that Twitter is.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Social Media, Technology, Web

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I don’t have much to add to them, but I thought I’d put up some recent finds from around the web that have been really helpful in solving some of the many technical issues I encounter.

• Get WordPress Permalinks Working with Windows, IIS, and ISAPI Rewrite Got WordPress running on a Windows server? Then you should have ISAPI Rewrite and the configuration described in this article to get your blog’s permalinks in a much more search engine (and human) friendly format. We also have ISAPI Rewrite working on our server to get pretty URLs working in Drupal.
• “301” Permanent Redirects Another link in the search engine optimization domain, this guide will show you how to set up these redirects in many different types of server technologies. If you host a site and are making changes to it that make certain URLs obsolete (porting the site to a new CMS, say), then it is really worth your while to set these redirects up for the old pages. Otherwise your search engine ranking could suffer.
• Preparing Your Website for Internet Explorer 8 IE8 came out at the beginning of this year and is gaining some traction. It is way more standards-compliant than previous versions of IE, which is great. However, most sites have IE-specific workarounds (read: hacks) which now pose problems for this new version. This concise guide breaks down everything you need to know about making your sites now work with IE8.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology, Web

The best thing a customer can do for your business is give you feedback — good or bad. The reality is that bad feedback greatly outnumbers good feedback. It’s just human nature. We love to complain when something doesn’t go right, and are often too busy to go to the effort to tell someone that something does go right. Even when complaints are justified, the business sometimes never hears them because the customer voiced his or her opinion in a private medium, such as telling a friend how awful the service in the restaurant was, and never giving the business a change to make it right. Word of mouth works for negative feedback even more powerfully than positive.

Mistakes happen. But even beyond mistakes, customers are a business owner’s objective barometer for knowing how well products and services are received. I’ve developed a mantra lately to help me remember this: you can’t argue with perception.

Social media provides unprecedented opportunities to listen in on some of those private complaints from customers that otherwise would never make it back to the business. You should make an effort to respond quickly to a complaint and do so publicly so that others reading the complaint can also benefit from your response. Think of it this way: the complaint will be out there whether or not you respond, so you’d better do something about it.

For large companies, the major cultural shift needed to effectively and genuinely reach customers through these channels may be more difficult than a small company who can do it with one or two people. The rules are the same in either case:

1. Engage people on their own turf. They’ll be impressed when you show up unexpectedly to help them solve their problem.
2. As with all customer service, keep your cool and “take the high road” whenever you can. Don’t get sucked into meaningless and unrelated tirades.
3. Remember how hard it is to control tone through text-based mediums such as email. Lean on the side of being extra nice.
4. Try to put a positive spin on the problem, so long as it’s genuine. Talk about future plans to remedy it.
5. Don’t discount suggestions, but also don’t over-commit to adding everything people request.

A few years ago Microsoft was getting a lot of public flak about its open source software initiatives. They stayed strong, responding to the comments on their blogs and others, and over a period of several months began to sway the tone of the comments. Eventually the community actually started sticking up for them. This took a lot of time and effort, but it helped to “humanize” Microsoft.

Comparing social media campaigns from Target and Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart failed so miserably that they chose to bow out not-so-gracefully in the face of hundreds of negative comments from students looking for roommates. If they’d stuck it out, I imagine they might have been able to turn it around or save face. Target got their campaign right from the start, creating a “party” for discussing dorm survival, which speaks to the culture and brand perception of the companies going into the campaigns.

The bottom line is to be true to your brand, your service, your customers, and your mistakes. The customer is not always right, but they always have the right to complain. Listening and responding will save you a lot of trouble down the road and probably lead to more business in the short term.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Web

OK well I only have two hacks actually, but i wanted to use this cool lasso dude image. Hence roundup. And notice how this text is wrapping around it? Well that’s hack #1. A client wanted to know if/how they could achieve this effect in their blog posts, and it actually took a little bit of doing. This WordPress support page deals with the issue. From there I got the CSS code (see below) I needed to add to my theme’s style.css file in order to make it work. Newer themes might already have it.

In any case, once it’s there you can set the text wrapping in your blog’s web console. When editing your post there, click an image, then the little picture icon that shows up in the upper left, and set the alignment as desired. I draft and publish my posts via MacJournal, and unfortunately as far as I can tell I still have to go into the web console to set text wrapping for an image.

Here’s the CSS code needed to make text wrapping on images work:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}

img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}

img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}

a img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}

a img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

Now, hack #2. We run on Windows web servers, which for WordPress is not entirely straightforward. But it seems to work just fine with a little tweaking. Still, I had a problem with auto upgrades and theme editing from the web console. And I put off looking into since it was just an annoyance. This support topic describes the problem’s symptoms and solution. Indeed, granting the Network group write permissions on the blog directory made auto upgrades and theme editing work.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web

Another Microsoft headscratcher solved, thanks to another blog. But I only got past my sticking point with the help of a comment about halfway down a slew of comments on the post. So hopefully highlighting that helps someone else. Or if you’re still stuck, pour over the rest of the comments. Problems like these rarely have one neat solution for everybody. Here’s the text of the post reproduced:

Ever seen this error when debugging a web app in the VS.NET IDE:

Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. You do not have permissions to debug. Verify that you are a member of the ‘Debugger Users’ group on the sever.

Well, search the net and you’ll get 100s of hits talking about .NET debugging options, IIS configurations, permissions, admin access, etc…. In my case everything checked out and still no luck. Well here’s another cause of this error: adding http://localhost to your Trusted Sites list…. Yup that’s right. Sounds simple, but that’s what did it in my case….

And the comment which got me debugging again:

Just wanted to share an additional tidbit. After trying everything listed here without success, I tried moving localhost from the IE “trusted sites” zone to the “local intranet” zone – and voila! Not sure what the difference is, but it worked.

Note the remarkable similarity, yet frustratingly subtle difference between the solution to this problem, and the one I posted about here.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

Here’s a couple quick tips for things I recently figured out in IIS 6. Sidenote – I just saw whatever IIS version Vista has, and it’s TOTALLY different. Not sure what’s in Microsoft’s latest server OS, but if it’s along the same lines I hope all the differences add up to improvements and are relatively easy to figure out. Wouldn’t hold my breath about that. Anyway, here are my version 6 nuggets:

1. By default, the referrer log data type is not selected. So your logs won’t include that unless you specifically enable it. Seems like you would almost always want to know that.
2. In order to get those kinds of settings applied by default to newly created sites, set them on the properties of the folder in which your sites are created in IIS.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology, Web

I needed to create a service with Visual Studio 2005. I had done this with 03, and apparently there’s some new stuff in 05 that’s not entirely intuitive. I had some significant head scratching and googling until I finally saw my new service show up in the Windows service control view. In my research this blog post turned out to be the most complete and helpful set of instructions on how to actually get a service installed:

http://www.grinn.net/blog/dev/2008/02/windows-services-in-c-part-2-adding.html

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology